Students of computer history know mathematician John von Neumann was key in the development of early digital computers and algorithms. Students of atomic history know von Neumann was involved with the Manhattan Project. Students of both science and science fiction history know he developed the theory of the self-replicating machine (also known as the universal constructor) which makes exact copies of itself which then make exact copies of themselves ad infinitum, or at least until the raw materials give out. John von Neumann died in 1957, but his work lives on today, as evidenced by a new paper which claims that the reason why we don’t see self-replicating interstellar probes from advanced alien civilizations – an idea many Earthlings also believe is the best way to explore space – is because their algorithms develop flaws that eventually turn them into predatory cannibals that cause their own extinction. Really? Would Von Neumann agree? How about Fermi? Asimov?

John von Neumann

“The concept of a rapid spread of self-replicating interstellar probes (SRPs) throughout the Milky Way adds considerable strength to Fermi’s Paradox. A single civilisation creating a single SRP is sufficient for a fleet of SRPs to grow and explore the entire Galaxy on timescales much shorter than the age of the Earth – so why do we see no signs of such probes? One solution to this Paradox suggests that self-replicating probes eventually undergo replication errors and evolve into predator-prey populations, reducing the total number of probes and removing them from our view.”

Duncan H. Forgan invokes both John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi in his new study, “Predator-Prey Behaviour in Self-Replicating Interstellar Probes” which will be published soon in the International Journal of Astrobiology and was recently reviewed in Cosmos magazine. Forgan, a research fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, starts with the Fermi paradox (if there are billions of stars offering the possibility of billions of civilizations, why haven’t we seen a single one?) and applies it to von Neumann-style self-replicating space probes.

“Such a probe would be able to produce a copy every time it visits a new star system. As each copy makes copies, the number of self-replicating probes (SRPs) grows exponentially, and every star in the Milky Way is explored on a timescale much, much shorter than its age. Estimates for this exploration timescale vary, but are as short as ten million years (Nicholson & Forgan, 2013), and perhaps shorter still. Given that this timescale is much shorter than the age of the Earth, and only one ETI constructing SRPs is sufficient to produce this scenario, on balance we should expect to see an interstellar probe orbiting the Sun. And yet, we do not. How can this be resolved?”

Yeah, how? Forgan’s answer starts with the potential for encoding errors by the probes’ creators which, over time, could cause the breakdown of the probes and end their trips. A more interesting (and better for a sci-fi movie) scenario is that the error causes the probes to notice that it would be far easier and faster to gather parts from its own copies. As the clones become both self-predators and self-prey, they could eventually self-cannibalize themselves into self-extinction with nothing left to show for their existence but selfies.

Mmmm … dinner.

Forgan’s theory assumes that the advanced civilization which created the von Neumann machines was not sharp enough to make them perfect and not moral enough to ponder the negative consequences of sending them out into space to potentially attack other civilizations for cloning materials and decide it wasn’t worth the negative galactic publicity and cancel their creation. It also assumes that the last replicator standing wouldn’t find raw materials on a planet or asteroid, build more clones and start the process again. He does admit that some cloned replicating probes could escape before being eaten, but they would have the error in their software and would eventually succumb to cannibalism and self-destruction.

Does this explain why we’ve never seen any von Neumann-style self-replicating probes from other civilizations? That was one of the many theories bounced around when ‘Oumuamua passed through the solar system, but it didn’t stay and didn’t seem to make any copies. Or did it? If its program is flawed, how would we know?

Sic-fi movie plot or plausible explanation for the machine version of the Fermi paradox. Whatever you decide, don’t blame von Neumann.

Remember in those literally dozens of science fiction stories where AI turned against its human creators after being armed with the most cutting edge weapons humanity possesses? Even Frankenstein, one of the most well-known horror stories of all time, is in many ways about humans reaching too high with our creation. Well, it seems nobody at the Air Force has seen or read a single one of them, because it turns out the Air Force wants to do exactly what so many tales have warned against for centuries: arm the robots.

YOUTUBE

The Pentagon is building a pilot's little helper.

According to a report published by Military.com, the Air Force is training AI to fly its most advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and potentially serve as assistants to human pilots in other aircraft. The system is called Skyborg, of course, and is being developed by the Air Force Research Lab to fly the XQ-58A Valkyrie stealth drone as well as the QF-16, a full-scale unmanned version of the F-16. Ultimately, the goal is to have a fully-capable AI assistant in the cockpit that can respond to natural language and even control various aircraft if Air Force pilots ever needed it to.

Skyborg version 1.0 didn’t impress Air Force brass quite like the engineers had hoped.

The Air Force wants Skyborg to work across multiple aircraft platforms and essentially be a ‘hive mind’ which can access and share the collected knowledge and data of the entire Air Force. Yeah, I know, I remember that awful movie too, and that was way back in 2005. Just think of how more advanced and terrifying the AI of today is.

Dr. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, says the Skyborg program is all about maintaining that coveted American air superiority in the age of AI. Skyborg-equipped aircraft could theoretically react to changing battlefield conditions more quickly than a human can, deploying weapons or executing aerial maneuvers almost instantly. “Imagine having trained person after person, generation after generation … what if, once you get on the curve, what if it’s exponential? And whoever gets on it first has an advantage forever?” Roper says. “I don’t want China on that curve, I want us on that curve, and us accelerating ahead of the pack.”

An unmanned QF-16 used for target practice.

Roper then actually added “you can’t spell Air Force without A [and] I,” and presumably threw up in his own mouth from the stress of holding that joke in throughout the entire interview. He’s probably been carrying that one around inside for weeks.

Will Skyborg inevitably become Skynet, or will this pan out to be merely the Air Force’s equivalent of Alexa for the cockpit?

A disturbing new report indicates a U.S. Government agency’s involvement in a bizarre array of tests, which were conducted on cats and dogs purchased from what the story calls “Asian meat markets.”

According to the NBC report, the remains of hundreds of dogs and cats were purchased by the U.S. Government, for use with experiments that occurred in Maryland at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab. Part of the testing included “feeding dog remains to cats and injecting cat remains into mice,” the report states.

The investigation was carried out by the White Coat Waste Project, a group who describes itself as “a taxpayer watchdog group representing more than 2 million liberty-lovers and animal-lovers who all agree: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay over $15 billion every year for wasteful and cruel experiments on dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals.”

Although the Department of Agriculture research only recently became public knowledge following an NBC story based on White Coast Waste’s report, the testing appears to have occurred between 2003 and 2015, and was aimed at attempting to study the parasite behind toxoplasmosis, a food-borne illness.

However, the new revelations are particularly concerning since some of the animals acquired for tests carried out in the recent Department of Agriculture studies came from markets condemned by Congress in a 2018 House Resolution, according to the White Coat Waste report.

Several U.S. politicians spoke out in condemnation of the tests. “We can advance scientific discovery while treating animals humanely, and American taxpayers have every right to expect our government will meet that standard,” said Jeff Merkley, a Democratic Senator in Oregon.

Sadly, the explosive White Coat Waste report is not the only one of its kind which indicates such concerning behavior by government agencies. Over the course of the last several decades, there have been numerous examples of bizarre testing carried out on animals which raised ethical questions. Too many to name, in fact… although a few noteworthy examples (which might at least be on par with the “cat cannibalism” discussed in the recent NBC report) do exist.

The well-known and oft-cited tale of “acoustic kitty” is high on the list of wasteful government spending projects that also involved questionable treatment of animals. This incident, which I recounted previously here at MU, involved a Cold War-era CIA project that produced a bizarre surveillance system that was built into a house cat, which included antennae fittings within the creature’s tail, as well as hidden battery compartments and microphones. The cat was released outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., where it was deployed to monitor a conversation taking place in a park nearby. The cat was struck by a car and killed within minutes of being released; additional attempts at field testing “acoustic kitties” were not carried out.

There are still some varieties of “militarized” animal testing that occur today, although in far less ethically questionable forms. Just last year, a report revealed that DARPA hoped to find ways of genetically engineering various aquatic species for use in future surveillance programs. Much like the recent White Coat Waste project report, questions have been raised about the long term concerns pertaining to genetically modified organisms, as well as the fact that taxpayer money has been used to support such programs.

It is believed that an estimated 4000 cats may have been killed over the course of the 12 years the Department of Agriculture’s studies were undertaken. Based on previous statements made by the USDA, the agency has apparently defended the studies as “life-saving research,” although White Coat Waste argues that it was unnecessary and wasteful spending of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Herodotus, the man referred to by the Roman orator Cicero as “The Father of History”(and who are we to argue with Cicero?), wrote in 440 BCE what is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature — The Histories. In that book, Herodotus mentions a strange and mysterious river boat he saw in Egypt called a “baris” – strange because the extremely long boat had one rudder that passed through a hole in the keel, and mysterious because no one else in recorded history has ever seen one since … until now. Underwater archeologists excavating the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion in Abu Qir Bay near Alexandria have discovered the wreck of a long boat that meets the description by Herodotus, restoring faith in the writings of the historian and the endorsement by Cicero.

“(The builders) cut planks two cubits long [100 cm or 40 inches] and arrange them like bricks. On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus…”

Title page of Herodotus’ The Histories

With that excellent account of the building of one of these 92 foot (28 meters) barges, archaeologists have long known what to look for … they just never found an Egyptian baris, whole or wrecked. Their luck changed in 2000 with the discovery by French archaeologist Franck Goddio of the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion (the former is its Egyptian name, the latter Roman) in the bay of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile, 2.5 miles off the coast. Since then, over 70 ships have been found in the area and given numbers. Archeologists noticed that Ship 17, with over 70 % of its original hull intact, had an unusual arrangement of planks that no one had ever seen before.

“Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant. … That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then, we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”

Damian Robinson, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, said this in an interview with The Guardian about the recent release of a paper by Alexander Belov, an archaeologist and shipwreck specialist who worked with Franck Goddio, entitled “Ship 17: A Baris From Thonis-Heracleion.” Robinson believes the baris was used on the Nile to move imports from Greece and Persia and Egyptian exports of grain and salt.

Even though his writings have generally been proven to be historically accurate, Herodotus has often been criticized as being just an entertaining but not always factual historian. This discovery helps his reputation and also gives a little vindication to his promoter Cicero, who was killed, beheaded, mutilated and disparaged for his opposition to Mark Antony.

We’re here to help.

Anjouan is a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean that’s making headlines for being the location of one of the biggest geological mysteries of all time. The small island, which is located between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is 163 square miles, has lots of vegetation and has a population of approximately 277,000 people. Anjouan, which is one of the Comoro Islands, was created 4 million years ago from undersea volcanoes and has steep, mountainous terrain as well as beaches containing black sand.

Since the island was formed by volcanoes, it consists of a lava-derived rock called basalt, but that’s not all. There are sedimentary rocks which are lighter in color that are found all over the island and should not be there as they aren’t part of the volcanic rock that formed this island millions of years ago. The rocks are made from a type of sandstone called quartzite.

Cornelia Class, who is a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said, “It doesn’t look like anything that could have formed on an island like that,” adding, “There is nothing there that could form a quartzite.”

Quartzite

Class led an expedition to the island in order to further research the rocks and found that there was much more quartzite than expected as it made up nearly half of a mountain. The scientists searched around the town of Tsembehou and found large boulders of quartzite. Then they climbed up a ridge called Habakari N’gani and found that the top was made almost entirely of the substance. Some locals use the quartzite to sharpen knives, as pieces of it have made their way to the villages by travelling down rivers and stream beds.

Sometimes crust ends up in the ocean after breaking off of a continent, and since quartzite comes from continental crust, it somehow must have made its way into the ocean basin and was lifted up with the volcanic rock to form the island.

There is still much more research that needs to be done in order to explain how the quartzite ended up on a volcanically made island. First, the researchers need to find out how old the quartzite is and find out where exactly it originated from. While Class thinks that it originated from Madagascar or East Africa, the substance needs to be studied much more thoroughly to find out for sure. She also said that additional geochemical measurements of the volcanic rocks need to be conducted in hopes of figuring out the geological history of the island.

Anjouan Island

This is definitely an interesting and mysterious find, “This is what nature presents, sometimes,” Class stated, “It’s something we consider impossible, but then we find it, and once we find it, we have to explain it.”

The stakes in the looming war in space keep getting higher and higher. This week, budget documents released by the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA show that the usual suspects in spooky weapons research are hard at work turning science fiction into reality by aiming to put a directed energy weapon in orbit. According to the proposed budget, the MDA wants the Pentagon to grant it $380 million in order to get a working “ Neutral Particle Beam” directed energy weapon in space by 2022. Why does the Pentagon want to put a particle beam in space?

For now, the beam’s intended purpose on paper is to shoot down enemy missiles. The Defense Department released documents this week outlining the Neutral Particle Beam’s budget along with the program’s aims. The documents state the Neutral Particle Beam is “a new directed energy capability to defeat the emerging threat” of ballistic missiles and is “a game changing space-based directed energy capability for strategic and regional missile defense.”  

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office, Department of Energy, and the Air Force are all working collaboratively on the research and development of this new directed energy weapon. The ultimate plan is to “execute a directed energy kill chain; acquisition, tracking and lethality” using the Neutral Particle Beam.

I guess we may be in the future after all: the U.S. military industrial complex is working on putting a giant particle beam in space. While it’s objectively awesome, it’s pretty terrifying as well. The MDA’s request for a particle beam weapon comes just a few months after Chinese scientists announced plans for an allegedly peaceful solar-powered microwave energy beam in orbit. While that beam could theoretically be aimed at a collector below and converted into electricity, it could also likely melt other nation’s satellites or missiles in the process. Why not? Could it be used to burn whole swaths of the Earth at a time like a Bond villain’s superweapon? Is the Pentagon’s Neutral Particle Beam an effort to keep up with the Chinese and not allow a particle beam gap?

The whole document is worth a read and shows just what kind of threats these research agencies have to plan for each day. I found it interesting that in the MDA’s Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Estimate Overview section, the document states of course that the Neutral Particle Beam is only one of the new capabilities being tested for ballistic missile defense systems. Included in the MDA’s research are programs looking into “hypersonic defense technology” and “high-powered lasers” and as part of this research, the MDA is “conducting ground, airborne, and space-based technology experiments to track representative hypersonic threats.” Anyone who’s followed my research into mystery booms knows that I’ve been saying for years now that a large number of the booms are likely caused by military testing of new hypersonic aerospace and defense technologies. Could this tiny section of the MDA’s overview be in any way related to the mystery boom phenomenon?

The war for space weapon supremacy has been heating up in the last few years, and each of the world’s major space-faring superpowers has some form of ‘killer’ satellite in orbit. It’s believed the Russians may have even put secret killer satellites in orbit by ‘birthing’ them Matryoshka doll style because of course they would: they’re Russian. With so many mysterious launches worldwide lately, there’s no telling what’s up there at this point. Will the Neutral Particle Beam be able to save us in time?