The Idealist 005 - The Cosmos 🌖
The Idealist 005 - The Cosmos 🌖
[me]: Hey Google, remind me to go to space in fifteen years.
[Google]: Okay, reminder for “Go to space” for 15th October, 2032 saved.
That’s how my most recent obsession hit its peak.
I can trace an arc, over the last two months, from picking up a book on a whim to the point where I’m absent-mindedly considering packing in this whole startup marketing malarkey, getting a PhD and teaching astrophysics. It’s either that or training to be an astronaut and putting my name on the list for the one-way trip to Mars and I’m not sure even my obsession can go that extreme.
Obsessions are okay. Especially when they’re (mostly) harmless, as my information addiction can tend to be. My dopamine has to be put to use somehow*.
And so it goes.... I’ve spent many hours recently, obsessed with astrophysics and the cosmos. I won’t pretend to understand it all but I am fascinated, in a childlike way. In an attempt to make that infectious, here are some of the most interesting things I’ve seen....
- ☄️ Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Neutron stars collided billions of kilometers away and astronomers caught it on camera (well, on insanely high-powered telescopes), capturing gravitational waves alongside electromagnetic observations from across the entire spectrum. We now have confirmed answers to the origins of many base elements and more insight into the physics of massive objects and the fuzzy edges of spacetime. (If you prefer to see the celestial cloud instead of the silver lining, read this piece and worry about whether this can happen within our interplanetary ‘splash zone’).
- 🌠 Away from distant galaxies and back to our own… where we recently had a guest from another solar system. This little guy has flown by, popped by the sun, swung a cool 24m km from earth and is on its way back out whence it came. This marks the first time another object (this one classified as a comet) has ever passed noticeably to our solar system from another.
- 👽 Speaking of visitors, my current book is Aliens (edited by Jim Al-Khalili) which takes a particularly scientific (and in no way speculative) approach to exploring the origins of life on Earth and how we might identify that in other parts of the universe (via an analysis of the consciousness of an octopus). In short: we’re either alone in the cosmos and that’s mind-boggling or we’re not and that’s mind-boggling. Choose your boggle until it chooses you.
- 🔮 These universes are pretty cool and all, but wouldn’t it be even cooler if we could, y’know, make one of our own? And would that make us Gods? (rubs hands together like Mr Burns). And if it’s possible, isn’t it highly likely it’s already happened…? These are some of the questions asked in this article about creating a Cosmos in a test tube. Choice quote:
Quantum rules could also enable a minuscule bubble of space itself to burst into being from nothing, with the impetus to then inflate to astronomical scales. Our cosmos could thus have been burped into being by the laws of physics alone.
- 🏹 Mixing together the micro- and the macro- of quantum theory, Chinese researchers have used quantum entanglement to teleport photons into space. Can’t wait to beam myself to Mexico for tacos in the evening…
- 🐤 Want bite-size ways to dive into some of these topics? Try the amazing animated videos from Kurzgesagt as they this explain the science and philosophy in a -nut- birdshell. Filing this one under the I wish I had YouTube as a kid section.
- 🛰 While we’re on the YouTube topic, here’s a half-an-hour video, giving insight into how the International Space Station functions.
- 🖇 And finally, instead of just sitting here being wowed by the universe, I decided to put it to good use in search of the ultimate goal: Paperclips! AI observers amongst you will be aware of the Paperclip Maximizer, a thought experiment first posited by Nick Bostrom, where seemingly innocuous but poorly programmed AI can go from maximising paperclip production to reusing all of the material in the universe to further its goals. Well, someone decided that would make a good topic for a computer game. The graphics may be basic but the philosophical questions are not and neither are the game dynamics behind it. In a matter of a few (dubiously spent) hours, I had destroyed the human race and started my path to universal domination. Read the story behind it and the cheat codes if you want to go dangerously deep…
And that’s it. Next up: booking my flight on Virgin Galactic (as soon as I have a cool $250k) and checking out Cosmos on Netflix.
IDEALIST IN THE PAST FLASHBACK
- In Issue 4 I mentioned Blockchain and UBI. Here they are working together like champs.
- In Issue 4 I carelessly mocked Magic Leap and the internal wait for a product to ship. Looks like other people have more faith as they just raised another cool half a billion dollars.
Pop Fact Footnotes!
- TIL: Dopamine is our curiosity driver, powering our motivation and feeding our search for information. It is different to (but commonly mistaken with) our pleasure (opioid) system. Dopamine is the drive, not the reward. Which I guess makes scientific journals my new drug.