⦿ Chrysalis
Project Hyperion winner Chrysalis

2025 August 7

Project Hyperion

The Guardian

The Project Hyperion design competition to develop plans for "generation ships" capable of supporting up to 1,500 people on a 250‑year journey to a habitable planet, was launched last year. An expert panel including NASA scientists judged the viability of almost 100 submissions.
The winner was Chrysalis, a 58 km craft designed around a series of concentric cylinders, each dedicated to a different function: 3D-printed living quarters, communal spaces, and various farms and biomes. The Chrysalis proposal also explained how family structures would become centered on the starship community.
Initiative for Interstellar Studies executive director Andreas Hein: "We asked participants to integrate architecture, technology and social systems to conceptualize a functional society spanning centuries − and the outcome was beyond expectations."

AR Fascinating, but it would exceed any budget we could devise − unless we outlawed war and devoted all our former defense spending to building Chrysalis. Even then, the money would be better spent on making an overheating Earth more liveable.
 

2025 August 6

Nuclear Arms Race

Ankit Panda

Amid a rise in geopolitical rivalries, technological advancements, and civic discord, the shadow cast by nuclear weapons over international politics is growing once again.
In May, fighting broke out between two nuclear-armed rivals when India and Pakistan traded air strikes and missile attacks. In June, Russia lost a significant number of nuclear-capable platforms after Ukraine attacked them using drones.
Less than two weeks later, Israel took military action to stem nuclear proliferation in Iran. Iran's retaliation with hundreds of missiles was the largest-ever attack against the heartland of a country possessing nuclear weapons.
Allies of the United States ask whether they can continue to rely on its guarantees of nuclear deterrence. South Koreans watch North Korea's nuclear arsenal growing. Eastern European NATO members see Russian nuclear weapons enter Belarus.
Loose talk around the pursuit of nuclear weapons speaks to growing malaise about a world that is more primed for conventional wars and about a less consistent United States.
China is building up of its nuclear arsenal, which could grow from roughly 200 warheads in 2019 to 1,500 by 2035. Washington and Moscow will lose numerical limits on their nuclear forces when the 2011 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires in February 2026.
The United States is likely to deploy more nuclear weapons on its existing submarines and ICBMs, while pursuing a missile defence system dubbed Golden Dome.

AR Projected US spending on Golden Dome could well-nigh bankrupt an already heavily indebted America. Also, it wouldn't pay off until after Trump ceased to be POTUS and left MAGA undone.
This is just as well, because an effective Golden Dome would give POTUS a first-strike capability, incentivizing a recklessness that could kill most of humanity outside America.
 

Remembering Hiroshima

Terumi Tanaka

Last December, I accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H‑Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The Nobel committee bestowed the prize on us in recognition of the work we have done over the past 70 years to build and strengthen the global taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.
Today, the nuclear taboo is on the verge of collapse. In the current wars in Europe and the Middle East involving nuclear-armed states, threats by the belligerents to use nuclear weapons are weakening the taboo over deploying them.
We are facing an emergency, but we have the solution in our hands. The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons not only bans nuclear weapons and all activities related to their production, deployment and use, but also mandates that countries that joined the treaty provide support for people harmed by nuclear weapons in the past and for the cleanup of areas that were used for nuclear testing.
Over four years after the treaty coming into force, half of all nations in the world have signed or ratified or acceded directly to it. More must join.
President John F Kennedy: "The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."

AR This message needs repeating until we all live in peace.

 

AR
Celebrating August with a walk in the woods
 

2025 August 2

Global Societal Collapse

Damian Carrington

Luke Kemp in Cambridge is pessimistic about the future. His new book Goliath's Curse covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years.
He says our global civilization could lead to the worst societal collapse yet. Leaders with a dark triad of traits dominate a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, and killer robots.
He calls kingdoms and empires built on domination Goliaths and says all Goliaths are cursed by inequality. People high in the dark triad fight for resources, arms, and status: "As elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile."
Collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. Our societies all act within a global capitalist system. The three most powerful men in the world share the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping is a Machiavellian manipulator.
Kemp says the agents of doom are the corporations and groups that cause global catastrophic risk: "It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us."
We can escape global collapse: "First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths."

Trump conjures with chaos
John Gray

Donald Trump is a clairvoyant channeling the American unconscious. After his sweeping victory last November and six months into his second presidency, there is no going back to the old world.
Trump has released forces that neither he nor the remnants of the liberal order can control. By making judicial institutions targets for political capture, liberal legalism signed its own death warrant.
Trump is eviscerating any institution that could inhibit executive authority. His removal would leave a society too polarized for consensual governance. The international system in which a liberal superpower could function has imploded.
The American-led financial system is already history. A multipolar global currency system is emerging, in which gold plays a key role. As Trump's tariffs risk inflaming domestic inflation, Western capitalism has become a self-undermining system.
Trump's economic nationalism is the perfect inversion of an unfettered global free market. An established economic orthodoxy has been upended to please a faction of MAGA.
Trump's global inheritance will be a mess of radical populisms − mystical imperialism, millenarian fervor, and feelings of hatred and revenge. As he conjures with chaos, nemesis unfolds.

AR Looking grim ..
 

2025 August 1

End of the American Scientific Empire

Ross Andersen

From 1945 to 2025, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It remained so until earlier this year.
The very best scientists came to America from all over the world. That may no longer be the case a generation from now. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for foreign researchers.
Not since the Red Scare has American science been so beholden to political ideology. Three-fourths of American scientists in a recent poll said they are considering leaving the country.
Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. Germany was a great scientific power for decades. When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged the universities.
The center of gravity for science moved across the Atlantic Ocean. Until Trump took power again, support for science was a given. His interference in the sciences is something new.
All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers do not intend to approve Trump's full requested cuts. Research institutions are suing the administration for executive overreach.
If America ceases to be the world's techno-scientific superpower, it will suffer. China may begin to recruit elite foreign scientists.

AR The demise of US science is a world-historical tragedy, but mostly for Americans. Science will go on elsewhere.
 

Entropic Gravity

Jon Cartwright

Erik Verlinde says gravity may be a byproduct of rising entropy. This could explain dark energy and dark matter and may be testable in a lab.
The rise of entropy is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Jacob Bekenstein said the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. Ted Jacobson then said the gravity in empty space behaves like a thermodynamic system.
Verlinde says gravity is an emergent phenomenon. He imagines a spherical mass enclosing another mass within and calculates that the outer mass feels a gentle push inward because the total entropy of the system increases if the two masses get closer.
Entangled regions around galaxies ought to be more disrupted than their mass distribution suggests, resulting in more entropy and gravity. This avoids a need for dark matter.
Dan Carney et al aim to test entropic gravity in the lab. When test masses interact with a system that conserves energy and raises entropy, the masses gravitate by the inverse square law. Carney et al aim to detect quantum jitters in a pendulum next to a quantum cloud of atoms.
Kazem Rezazadeh finds that entropic gravity on a cosmic scale ought to accelerate the expansion of spacetime. This avoids a need for dark energy.
No one can yet say what gives rises to gravity. But existence may be a network of entangled qubits.

On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton
Erik Verlinde

Starting from first principles and general assumptions we present a heuristic argument that shows that Newton's law of gravitation naturally arises in a theory in which space emerges through a holographic scenario. Gravity is identified with an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton's law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle suggests that it is actually the law of inertia whose origin is entropic.

AR I'm excited anew by this concept. Verlinde's paper is really interesting and compelling. I wish I'd read it years ago − unusually for such research papers, it's quite readable and intelligible.

 

AR

2025 July 25

Psy-Phy: A Brief Introduction To Ultimate Reality

J Andrew Ross

The human mind is still in many ways a mystery to science. This book explores a framework for scientists to understand it. It aims to found psychophysics, where the science of mind meets physics.
Physics is the fundamental science of nature. Psychology is not yet a science in the same sense. The framing logic needs recasting. We need to recognize the role of becoming, or of evolution in the widest sense, to the task of building models in science.
The new perspective on psychology is radical. A logic of becoming distinguishes the big self from the little self. If the ego is the big self in being, the little self is projected into existence as a puppet avatar in a virtual reality, or a mindworld. As conscious beings, we live in a mindworld movie. Our lived reality grows in time.
The book introduces a new logic for science. It is written for readers who want not only to see how it works but also to enjoy the ride.

AR It's done! Fifty years of work and nine months of writing − a life's work, if I dare say so.

 

⦿ Leon Neal/PA
Friedrich Merz with Keir Starmer, Downing Street, Thursday
 

2025 July 17

New Anglo-German Treaty

The Guardian, BBC News

German chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK prime minister Keir Starmer signed a friendship and cooperation treaty at a ceremony in the V&A museum in London today.
Starmer: "It's a privilege to have you here today, particularly to sign this Kensington Treaty, which is a very special treaty, because it's the first of its kind .. between our two countries."
Merz: "Our treaty on friendship stands for freedom, security and prosperity − and for bringing our young generations closer together."

Highlights of the treaty
•  Cooperation on military and training exercises, cyber threats, and arms exports
•  Commitment to limit global warming to the 1.5 K laid out in the Paris climate accords
•  Strengthen bilateral trade within the framework of EU−UK agreements
•  Commitment to free and open markets, promoting employment, and economic growth
•  Cooperation in science and technology development
•  Cultural exchange, youth mobility, and partnerships in education
•  Frequent UK travellers to Germany via e-gates at the German border by August
•  All UK nationals via e-gates as soon as technically possible
•  New direct rail service between UK and Germany by 2035
•  Explore border controls like those for Eurostar passengers
•  Visa-free school group travel made possible by the end of 2025
•  Cooperation on deterrence, law enforcement, and irregular migration

AR Excellent development. It's not much, I know, but small steps are better than none. The direct train link may be too late for me personally, sad to say.
 

Shamanism

Manvir Singh

Shamanism is a practice in which a specialist enters altered states to engage with unseen realities or agents and provides services like healing and divination.
Shamanists often have public ceremonies in which musicians play drums and the shamans dance. Healing ceremonies may induce trance through psychoactive substances.
Trance is a compelling performance for both practitioner and audience that demonstrates a profoundly different state of being with access to special powers.
Shamanism is religious at its core. It offers engagement with unseen realities, services like healing and divination, and altered states. Behind shamanic ritual is an intuitive dualism of mind and body.
Around the world, the vast majority of hunter-gatherers practice shamanism. During the classical period, many of the Hebrew prophets were shamans. Greece had shamanic oracles.
Shamanism works on our sense that uncertain events are influenced by invisible agents, our reliance on ritual to influence high-stakes outcomes, and our intuition that people who seem different may have special powers.
Shamanic healing feels festive and celebratory. It can induce the placebo effect and offer escape from harmful self-narratives. It can provide an assurance that you are loved and that people are fighting for you.
Psychedelics echo shamanic tradition. Historically the shaman enters an altered state, not the patient, but both seem to heal patients by altering harmful beliefs through subjectively profound experiences.
Shamanism offers direct relationships with the divine. Its practices can induce mystical experiences that can be meaningful and therapeutic.

AR Interesting perspective on the limits of mind and the roots of religion. When shamans do their thing, experience is raw, unfiltered by the Kantian categories, and rational cognition is gone.
Can a scientist have such raw experiences while remaining rational?

 

⦿ Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Ukrainian brigadier general "Hunter" sits on sea drone Avdiivka
 

2025 July 15

Is America Ready for the Next War?

Dexter Filkins

The Pentagon is trying to remake itself in response to new ways of fighting seen in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, drones are helping the Ukrainians fight the Russian army. Russia has suffered about a million casualties, many inflicted by drones.
As the conflict began, Russian warships roamed the Black Sea. Ukraine attacked them with missiles and aerial drones. When maritime drones sank three Russian warships, the Black Sea fleet retreated and agreed to a ceasefire.
Last year, Ukrainian factories turned out more than three million drones. Their main worry is the supply of parts made in China.
American officials are looking on with a growing sense of unease. For decades, US armed forces have relied on sophisticated weapons that take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce.
The Pentagon is accustomed to doing business with huge, entrenched players selling fantastically complex systems running on software that was often obsolete before it was deployed. The Defense Innovation Unit aims to give contracts to new technology companies with better ideas.
Palmer Luckey helped found the California defense startup Anduril in 2017. Anduril plans to build devices and offer them to the Pentagon. If the generals want something slightly different, Anduril can simply rewrite the code. The weapons are little more than shells for software.
The Pentagon needs them now. President Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. The PLA has been testing kit for an invasion and conducting sorties around the island.
In 2023, US defense officials launched the Replicator initiative to mass-produce air and sea drones to deter Chinese military action. If the Chinese invade Taiwan, US officials aim to flood the skies and seas with drones.
The drones would be guided by a kill chain. Satellites would detect an invasion force and relay location data to targeting systems for the drones. The kill chain requires rapid, intricate orchestration of satellites and sensors controlled by numerous US federal agencies.
Integrated command and control is a big problem. US leaders are working on it.

AR Interesting that Ukraine is showing so much more innovation in this conflict than Russia. The obvious contrast is that for Ukrainians the fight is an existential bid for survival and freedom, whereas for Russians it's an unwelcome duty to the unloved Putin regime.

 

Ukrainian Emergency Service
Ukrainian firefighters Wednesday following overnight Russian attack in Volyn region
Russia continues its overnight strikes on Ukraine with large drone attacks.
Donald Trump said "a lot of bullshit is thrown at us" by Vladimir Putin.

AR TACO, your mentor in klepto-autocracy is no one's friend.
 

2025 July 9

Consciousness

Adam Frank

To explain consciousness, the physicalist approach has not worked.
Viewing organisms as complicated machines overlooks their organization. Living organisms each form a holistic unity. How a cell is organized defines its nature.
Living things are self‑organized in an autopoietic unity. They are self‑creating and self‑maintaining. This is what separates them from machines.
Consciousness is something you do, not something you have. Experience and consciousness are performed. Organisms are inseparable from their life‑worlds.
Cognition is inseparable from the body and its capacities. How we move and interact with the world shapes what we perceive and how we understand. Organisms are engaged in an ongoing process to establish meaning and relevance as they interact with their world.
Brains are part of the organizational unity of organisms that co-create the world around them. A world without us and our experience is a fantasy.
The life‑world of experience is a world of others. Life always occurs in communities. The entire planetary history of life is implicated in individual experience.
Sentience is fundamental to life. To be alive is to be a locus of experience as a mutually arising agent and its environment or life‑world.
We cannot separate experience from nature. Our deepest stories about the universe include ourselves in it.
Organisms are physical systems that use information. Our use of information gives it semantics. We aim to understand the autopoietic information architecture of organisms.
Our scientific stories must include us and our place in life.

AR All this is consistent with my words in Psy‑Phy (in prep). Caveats: I say foregrounding experience is compatible with physicalism, and I ignore autopoiesis to keep my story on point.

 

VKW
Paradise in Poland: Saturday noon in a country garden
 

2025 July 6

America Switches Sides

Anne Applebaum

Donald Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin on July 3, and Putin responded with more attacks on Ukraine. Russian soldiers continue to be wounded or killed and the Russian economy is heading for a recession, but Putin still thinks he can conquer all of Ukraine.
The American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace. The Trump administration will not send a large shipment of weapons to Ukraine. The Russians interpret this as a signal that American support for Ukraine is ending.
American incentives help persuade Putin to keep fighting. Sanctions are disappearing and weapons are diminishing. Different US policies would help the Ukrainians win faster.

Europeans will pay more for arms
Steven Erlanger, Jeanna Smialek

European countries have committed to spending nearly double, as much as €14 trillion, on military investments over the next decade. EU officials will limit spending on US equipment from the €150 billion EU defense funding program. But Europe lacks good alternatives to the best US defense equipment.
As the United States shrinks its support for Ukraine, French officials and EU institutions want to restrict the use of EU funds for building the European defense industry. The Nordic and Baltic nations and Poland say Europe needs capabilities now to help Ukraine.
Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski: "From our national budgets, most European countries will continue to buy, with the possible exception of France, a huge proportion of their weapons from the United States."
Buying F‑35 jets means committing to a long-term relationship with their manufacturer for updates. Given the recent wobbling of the transatlantic alliance, officials question future purchases. But with no equivalent alternative to this 5G fighter, Nordic and German officials say Europe must keep good relations with US defense companies.
Université Libre de Bruxelles professor Guntram Wolff: "It's really about weaning Europe off the technological dependence on the United States."

The UK is threatened by China
Paul Mason

The People's Republic of China aims to become the dominant global power by 2049. British universities rely on Chinese student fees, and 11% of British science is co-authored with the PRC.
President Trump is encouraging Chairman Xi to focus on a military solution in Taiwan. China will be able to invade and conquer Taiwan by 2027. Taiwan is the world leader in semiconductor design and manufacture.
The UK government warns that in future it might have to choose between values and interests. The UK should not let authoritarian China dominate the world.

AR The American abandonment of Ukraine and Europe is the surest sign yet that a US implosion is imminent. Under Trump, America is heading the way Germany went a century ago.
Rational European defense officials will cut their losses, resist the allure of more F‑35 procurements, and develop a European 6G jet together, fast. The UK should throw its investment in Tempest into the pot. This is no time to resist a joint Euro-Japanese project.
On China, I advise caution. Xi wants Russia to win in Ukraine mainly to keep the US focus off Taiwan. Once that issue is resolved, peaceful relations with China are possible.
 

2025 July 4

AI Creativity

Webb Wright

Algorithms can mimic our intellect and our creativity.
Diffusion models are designed to generate copies of their training images. They use denoising to convert an image into digital noise, then reassemble it.
Technical features of the denoising process cause diffusion models to be creative. A mathematical model of trained diffusion models shows that their creativity is a deterministic process.
In morphogenesis, Turing patterns reflect how groups of cells self-organize into organisms. Cells coordinate at local level. They adjust how they act in response to signals from their neighbors.
By locality, diffusion models focus on one patch of pixels at a time. By translational equivariance, if you shift an input image in any direction, the model makes the same change in the output image. The models generate the patches and then fit them into place using a digital Turing pattern.
Mason Kamb works in the lab of Surya Ganguli at Stanford. Kamb conjectured that locality and equivariance lead to creativity. A system that optimizes for locality and equivariance should behave like a diffusion model.
Kamb and Ganguli's ELS machine can predict denoised images based solely on the mechanics of locality and equivariance. It can match the outputs of trained diffusion models with an average accuracy of 90%.
The creativity of diffusion models is a result of the denoising process. It can be formalized and predicted with high accuracy.
The work may provide insight into human creativity.

AR Beautiful work! This result does indeed help me understand human creativity.

 

NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory
Small section of the Vera C Rubin Observatory's view of the Virgo Cluster
The observatory is in Chile and has a digital camera with about 3.2 billion pixels. It produces about
20 TB of data every night, to be transferred and processed in California, France, and Britain.