Biowars, spycraft, Star Trek, alien life forms, existential threats. The CGs are fearless. I like Neil deGrassie Tyson’s comment that we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees and can barely communicate with them. Imagine the barriers to communication with life advanced enough to get here. It’s possible they have come and decided there is no intelligent life here.
I so enjoyed your recent issue on biotech safety and pandemics. I have been tuned in to Dr. Bret Weinstein (“wine-stine”) since 2018. He was an early adapter to the lab leak hypotheses in early 2020 and at present he suggests the Wuhan Covid lab be relocated to a ship in the ocean- where a leak wouldn’t encounter necessary human hosts beyond the ship.
Claire, another masterpiece; really informative and well-researched.
Not to go all Fox Mulder on you, but there’s another bio threat worth reflecting on; the deliberate release of engineered organisms for the best of reasons that goes spectacularly wrong.
To be clear, I’m not talking about genetically engineered crops; that’s a remarkably safe endeavor where the risk is remote but the rewards are enormous.
To give you an example of what I am talking about, consider the example of the Florida Keys.
The Aedes aegypti family of mosquitos makes up only 4 percent of the mosquito population in the Keys but account for almost all of the mosquito borne illness impacting the area. Selectively eradicating these mosquitos would be a boon.
A company called Oxitech just released a genetically altered male mosquito which passes on a gene to its female offspring that kills them in the larval stage. Over time, the Company hopes that it will be a great way to exterminate this very harmful mosquito family. Consider it Aedes aegypti genocide.
This particular experiment is unlikely to go wrong. But remember, insects, especially mosquitos and ticks, are ideal vectors for diseases that afflict humans. Malaria kills an enormous number of Africans; developing a vaccine for it has turned out to be extremely challenging. Lyme disease has become a major league headache in the Northeast of the United States. Ironically, investigators at Yale developed a safe and highly effective vaccine against Lyme Disease many years ago. It was marketed by Glaxo SmithKline. After 3 shots, it offered close to 80 percent protection.
Things went well until the anti-Vaxers got hold of it. After a series of frivolous lawsuits facilitated by ridiculous American tort law, GSK pulled the vaccine from the market in 2002. The resultant unnecessary human suffering is hard to fathom.
Anyway, while genetically engineering mosquitoes to kill them sounds great, the more we learn about how to modify these insects, the more likely it will be that someone will figure out how to turn the insects into a lethal weapon. Things could go very wrong very fast. See,
Claire, I wonder whether Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are getting a bad rap on funding WIV. NIH provided $600 thousand to the Institute; other American organizations provided far more.
It’s very hard to believe that the Chinese bioweapons program did not work very cooperatively with the WIV. It seems likely to me that in light of that fact, American intelligence operatives must have tried to penetrate the the place. American funding might have provided cover to do precisely that. Perhaps American funding gain of function experiments at WIV provided insight into work that Chinese bioweapons experts might have been conducting. Maybe Fauci and Collins encouraged the NIH funding because they were implored by the American intelligence community to do so. It seems to me that we would be negligent as a nation not to try and penetrate that lab.
Most of the real work in American laboratories conducting biomedical research is done by postdocs (budding scientists who achieved the PhD but are a few years away from getting a faculty appointment). Without postdocs and graduate students senior scientists don’t have a viable lab and will never obtain NIH funding.
Here’s a secret that experienced investigators share amongst themselves but would never admit out loud; they all want Chinese postdocs. Japanese, Israeli and Russian postdocs are also in big demand but there are just fewer of them than Chinese postdocs who’ve recently moved to the United States to work in American labs. Why are they in such high demand? It’s mostly because they work much harder than postdocs from the United States and Europe.
Obviously this is a generalization so it won’t be true every time, but there’s nothing unusual about a Chinese postdoc practically living in the lab. 20 hour days are not unusual; long after the Americans have left for the pub, postdocs from China and the other countries listed above can be found burning the midnight oil.
Much of what goes on in research labs can be used for fair or foul. Anyone who thinks that Chinese intelligence operatives haven’t penetrated American university labs is just being naive. But that’s not the most common problem. The really vexing problem is what use is put to the techniques Chinese postdocs learn when they return to China.
Give it a decade or so; this could all really work out very poorly.
I am going to admit something which is probably difficult for a lot of people to admit but I was a Star Trek fan or Trekker when I was a kid in the 1990s and still watch an episode or two on occasion. What I find interesting about the Star Trek franchise are not totally unrealistic premises of how we get from today to the future not just technology wise but also politically wise. In the later iterations of the Star Trek when it changes from a solely American centric franchise to one with a more global following the writer's make an implicit argument that the United Earth and later the United Federations of Planet take on the values of we would associate today with the United States and the European Union in part as other societies on earth like Russia and China when extraterrestrial life is discovered are essentially unable to deal with the implication for the human race and force to cede political leadership in uniting the peoples' of earth into a single political entity to the United States and Europe who are more open-minded and able to cope with implications(Not a totally outrageous thought if say we discovered extraterritorial life next week)
The second interesting argument of Star Trek canon especially as time has disproved some of the premises of the original 1960s TV series is that not just Earth has been visited multiple times in secret by alien lifeforms but that humans from the future have also traveled backward in time on multiple occasions and changed some of the supposed events of the late 20th century that were in the timeline of the original 1960s series(such as World War 3). Transparent aluminum which is a real thing and was even conceptually something the writers knew was possible in 1986 when they wrote "Scotty" having brough and introduced the technology to late 20th century Earth.
The third comment I will make is I find interesting that writers of Star Trek also assumed that while the future discovery of extraterritorial life politically unites Earth into a single political entity it also quickly creates an intergalactic version of 18th and 19th century European imperialism as the Earth led United Federation of Planets faces off against extraterrestrial "imperial" rivalristic "great" powers like the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians in the Star Trek series. Perhaps this is how you get people to watch the tv show and buy tickets to the movies but it is also a somewhat dour view of how contact with other alien species might like look like. Obviously the humans and earth have "allies" in the show but the tend to be "weaker" planets and races like Bajor and the Bajorans(which the writers in the early 1990s modeled off of the newly independent post Soviet states in Eastern Europe) The big premise of Star Trek Deep Space is the journey of the Bajorans to join the United Federation of Planets(akin to Eastern Europe wanting to join NATO and the EU). I have a feeling the DS9 writers were basically writing stories coming out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s news reports right into the show(Right down to famed "villainous" character actor Frank Langella playing a Viktor Yanukovych/Alexander Lukashenko like figure).
Ms. Berlinski, I agree with your assertion that most of us are not scared enough of the array of possible civilization ending catastrophes that may await us. But regarding the Fermi Paradox, there is actually plenty of eyewitness evidence, and possibly some hard evidence, that other civilizations are visiting us. That they haven’t announced themselves by landing on the White House lawn seems reasonable. After all, when viewing an ant colony, we don’t look for the queen with the idea of introducing ourselves to her.
"Is our species wise enough to survive the technologies we have invented?"
Is our species smart enough, let alone wise enough, to survive without our technologies?
Drake's equation also makes a number of heroic assumptions. A few of them are:
-communications: aliens think enough like we do to have communications media we'd detect
-communications: aliens think enough like we do to communicate in a way we'd recognize, even given a possible detection
-communications: aliens would recognize us as a life form, or as a life form worth the effort of talking with
-communication: is two-way. Our present understanding of physics suggests that communication with aliens is either a years-long (assuming something communicable exists in nearby systems like Centauri) or thousands of years long, just for a single exchange. More likely, what we're not detecting is a one-way, general purposes blat--which from a security standpoint would be pretty dumb to put out. The ordinary noise of alien radio or TV could easily be beyond our receivers' capability. See, also, whether we'd recognize what we'd hear.
Which brings me to a short list of questions that also bear on Drake's equation, along with my answers:
Do we understand what life is? No
Do we understand what communication is? No
Do we understand even what language is? No
Those are all homocentric concepts, so far. And still enormously hazy.
Do we understand physics? No. It's entirely possible that the aliens have figured out communications that is FTL--in which case we'd not detect their calls because we don't have that tech. We may be getting to that point, though; we're aware of tachyons.
"There are two possible explanations for the Great Silence. "
There's a third possible explanation. All the aliens extant in our neck of the time woods are inside the Dyson spheres they built to capture their sun's energy. In which case nothing about them would be detectable. At least by our current technology.
The Great Filter is the smartphone.
Biowars, spycraft, Star Trek, alien life forms, existential threats. The CGs are fearless. I like Neil deGrassie Tyson’s comment that we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees and can barely communicate with them. Imagine the barriers to communication with life advanced enough to get here. It’s possible they have come and decided there is no intelligent life here.
I so enjoyed your recent issue on biotech safety and pandemics. I have been tuned in to Dr. Bret Weinstein (“wine-stine”) since 2018. He was an early adapter to the lab leak hypotheses in early 2020 and at present he suggests the Wuhan Covid lab be relocated to a ship in the ocean- where a leak wouldn’t encounter necessary human hosts beyond the ship.
Claire, another masterpiece; really informative and well-researched.
Not to go all Fox Mulder on you, but there’s another bio threat worth reflecting on; the deliberate release of engineered organisms for the best of reasons that goes spectacularly wrong.
To be clear, I’m not talking about genetically engineered crops; that’s a remarkably safe endeavor where the risk is remote but the rewards are enormous.
To give you an example of what I am talking about, consider the example of the Florida Keys.
The Aedes aegypti family of mosquitos makes up only 4 percent of the mosquito population in the Keys but account for almost all of the mosquito borne illness impacting the area. Selectively eradicating these mosquitos would be a boon.
A company called Oxitech just released a genetically altered male mosquito which passes on a gene to its female offspring that kills them in the larval stage. Over time, the Company hopes that it will be a great way to exterminate this very harmful mosquito family. Consider it Aedes aegypti genocide.
This particular experiment is unlikely to go wrong. But remember, insects, especially mosquitos and ticks, are ideal vectors for diseases that afflict humans. Malaria kills an enormous number of Africans; developing a vaccine for it has turned out to be extremely challenging. Lyme disease has become a major league headache in the Northeast of the United States. Ironically, investigators at Yale developed a safe and highly effective vaccine against Lyme Disease many years ago. It was marketed by Glaxo SmithKline. After 3 shots, it offered close to 80 percent protection.
Things went well until the anti-Vaxers got hold of it. After a series of frivolous lawsuits facilitated by ridiculous American tort law, GSK pulled the vaccine from the market in 2002. The resultant unnecessary human suffering is hard to fathom.
Anyway, while genetically engineering mosquitoes to kill them sounds great, the more we learn about how to modify these insects, the more likely it will be that someone will figure out how to turn the insects into a lethal weapon. Things could go very wrong very fast. See,
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01186-6
Claire, I wonder whether Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are getting a bad rap on funding WIV. NIH provided $600 thousand to the Institute; other American organizations provided far more.
It’s very hard to believe that the Chinese bioweapons program did not work very cooperatively with the WIV. It seems likely to me that in light of that fact, American intelligence operatives must have tried to penetrate the the place. American funding might have provided cover to do precisely that. Perhaps American funding gain of function experiments at WIV provided insight into work that Chinese bioweapons experts might have been conducting. Maybe Fauci and Collins encouraged the NIH funding because they were implored by the American intelligence community to do so. It seems to me that we would be negligent as a nation not to try and penetrate that lab.
Most of the real work in American laboratories conducting biomedical research is done by postdocs (budding scientists who achieved the PhD but are a few years away from getting a faculty appointment). Without postdocs and graduate students senior scientists don’t have a viable lab and will never obtain NIH funding.
Here’s a secret that experienced investigators share amongst themselves but would never admit out loud; they all want Chinese postdocs. Japanese, Israeli and Russian postdocs are also in big demand but there are just fewer of them than Chinese postdocs who’ve recently moved to the United States to work in American labs. Why are they in such high demand? It’s mostly because they work much harder than postdocs from the United States and Europe.
Obviously this is a generalization so it won’t be true every time, but there’s nothing unusual about a Chinese postdoc practically living in the lab. 20 hour days are not unusual; long after the Americans have left for the pub, postdocs from China and the other countries listed above can be found burning the midnight oil.
Much of what goes on in research labs can be used for fair or foul. Anyone who thinks that Chinese intelligence operatives haven’t penetrated American university labs is just being naive. But that’s not the most common problem. The really vexing problem is what use is put to the techniques Chinese postdocs learn when they return to China.
Give it a decade or so; this could all really work out very poorly.
I am going to admit something which is probably difficult for a lot of people to admit but I was a Star Trek fan or Trekker when I was a kid in the 1990s and still watch an episode or two on occasion. What I find interesting about the Star Trek franchise are not totally unrealistic premises of how we get from today to the future not just technology wise but also politically wise. In the later iterations of the Star Trek when it changes from a solely American centric franchise to one with a more global following the writer's make an implicit argument that the United Earth and later the United Federations of Planet take on the values of we would associate today with the United States and the European Union in part as other societies on earth like Russia and China when extraterrestrial life is discovered are essentially unable to deal with the implication for the human race and force to cede political leadership in uniting the peoples' of earth into a single political entity to the United States and Europe who are more open-minded and able to cope with implications(Not a totally outrageous thought if say we discovered extraterritorial life next week)
The second interesting argument of Star Trek canon especially as time has disproved some of the premises of the original 1960s TV series is that not just Earth has been visited multiple times in secret by alien lifeforms but that humans from the future have also traveled backward in time on multiple occasions and changed some of the supposed events of the late 20th century that were in the timeline of the original 1960s series(such as World War 3). Transparent aluminum which is a real thing and was even conceptually something the writers knew was possible in 1986 when they wrote "Scotty" having brough and introduced the technology to late 20th century Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xim81k3DvCc
The third comment I will make is I find interesting that writers of Star Trek also assumed that while the future discovery of extraterritorial life politically unites Earth into a single political entity it also quickly creates an intergalactic version of 18th and 19th century European imperialism as the Earth led United Federation of Planets faces off against extraterrestrial "imperial" rivalristic "great" powers like the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians in the Star Trek series. Perhaps this is how you get people to watch the tv show and buy tickets to the movies but it is also a somewhat dour view of how contact with other alien species might like look like. Obviously the humans and earth have "allies" in the show but the tend to be "weaker" planets and races like Bajor and the Bajorans(which the writers in the early 1990s modeled off of the newly independent post Soviet states in Eastern Europe) The big premise of Star Trek Deep Space is the journey of the Bajorans to join the United Federation of Planets(akin to Eastern Europe wanting to join NATO and the EU). I have a feeling the DS9 writers were basically writing stories coming out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s news reports right into the show(Right down to famed "villainous" character actor Frank Langella playing a Viktor Yanukovych/Alexander Lukashenko like figure).
Anyways enough of my Star Trek analogies.
Ms. Berlinski, I agree with your assertion that most of us are not scared enough of the array of possible civilization ending catastrophes that may await us. But regarding the Fermi Paradox, there is actually plenty of eyewitness evidence, and possibly some hard evidence, that other civilizations are visiting us. That they haven’t announced themselves by landing on the White House lawn seems reasonable. After all, when viewing an ant colony, we don’t look for the queen with the idea of introducing ourselves to her.
"Is our species wise enough to survive the technologies we have invented?"
Is our species smart enough, let alone wise enough, to survive without our technologies?
Drake's equation also makes a number of heroic assumptions. A few of them are:
-communications: aliens think enough like we do to have communications media we'd detect
-communications: aliens think enough like we do to communicate in a way we'd recognize, even given a possible detection
-communications: aliens would recognize us as a life form, or as a life form worth the effort of talking with
-communication: is two-way. Our present understanding of physics suggests that communication with aliens is either a years-long (assuming something communicable exists in nearby systems like Centauri) or thousands of years long, just for a single exchange. More likely, what we're not detecting is a one-way, general purposes blat--which from a security standpoint would be pretty dumb to put out. The ordinary noise of alien radio or TV could easily be beyond our receivers' capability. See, also, whether we'd recognize what we'd hear.
Which brings me to a short list of questions that also bear on Drake's equation, along with my answers:
Do we understand what life is? No
Do we understand what communication is? No
Do we understand even what language is? No
Those are all homocentric concepts, so far. And still enormously hazy.
Do we understand physics? No. It's entirely possible that the aliens have figured out communications that is FTL--in which case we'd not detect their calls because we don't have that tech. We may be getting to that point, though; we're aware of tachyons.
"There are two possible explanations for the Great Silence. "
There's a third possible explanation. All the aliens extant in our neck of the time woods are inside the Dyson spheres they built to capture their sun's energy. In which case nothing about them would be detectable. At least by our current technology.
Eric Hines