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Wednesday’s Forum
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42 responses to “Wednesday’s Forum”
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Markwayne is about to spend some more of the $$$ lavished on DHS. Per Associated Press:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.
ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.
Of course ICE will use these Stephen Miller-approved gloves responsibly :
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the public should have no confidence that ICE officers will use the devices appropriately. She questioned why the devices would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement and noted those getting shocked might have no advance warning.
“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” she said. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”
Another no-bid contract and another step toward authoritarian sadism. Pass the bourbon…
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May totality be with you.
I’ve been pondering a background where life is very common across the universe, but tends to be stuck at the unicellular level. So complex multicellular life is rare, and sentient life is even more so. Meaning in the whole of the Milky Way, humanity is the only sentient species so far.
That’s the rule for this fictional universe. The proof within the story can’t ever be found, due to the other rules. Among them 1) no FTL is possible, 2) about the max safe speed for interstellar travel is 0.05 c (5% light speed), 3) there’s no suspended animation at all, 4) it’s not possible to uplift species like great apes or cetaceans to human levels of intelligence.
This makes interstellar probes plentiful. With sufficiently advanced technology, even self-replicating interstellar probes are possible. But the only way for humans to travel between stars is in generation ships.
So you may end up with isolated human colony worlds, each of which will eventually grow to billions in population, or as much as a habitable planet can carry. Communications between them is possible, but very slow. Trade would be too expensive.
Fast forward in time long enough, and these isolated human populations will begin to diverge genetically, especially if they settle worlds with different conditions to those on Earth, Say planets with somewhat higher gravity, thinner atmospheres, under brighter or dimmer stars, etc. Spreading humans all over the galaxy may also ensure some form of humanity will endure for a very long time, maybe billions of years.
So, give it enough time, and there will be aliens. Only they will be us.
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One possibility IF “uploaded” mind states are replicable (a big “if” obvs.)
Lightspeed transmission of minds and the between worlds in the diaspora, and re-embodiment at the destination.Though of course that also means you DO have suspended animation, of a sort, just not of physical bodies, so maybe that gets knocked out by the scenario rules?
You also may get the possibility of large scale proliferation of habitats and even, longer term, terraforming within systems.
Because you’d need a sizeable space infrastructure to ensure planets remain liveable long-term anyway, imho.I also wonder what the possible oxygen cap might be absent multicellular life? In Earth history it only got to about 5% of current, iirc.
If that’s a rule (?), that implies a need for massive life seeding over a prolonged period to achieve habitability.
Which implies a space-first civilization.-
I should list all the rules: no cyborgs, no uploaded minds, no copied minds. Also, no artificial general intelligence smarter than humans*
Anyway, a planet with a minimal O2 content should be able to support a larger population of more effective photosynthesizing algae and bacteria, as well as land plants. It should be relatively easy to terraform is the thick atmosphere, liquid water, reasonable climate, and magnetic field** are already present.
You may also have people who think generation ships are more reliable than a fickle planet. So instead of colonizing their target, they’d resupply from smaller worlds and asteroids in the system. Maybe build additional rotating cylinders as the population grows.
And if a few lunatics insist on living on the planet, well, that’s on them.
This makes the self replicating probes that scout ahead and set up comms stations a bit harder, but not impossible.
*If I’m going to have machines smarter than humans, they’d be the protagonists.
** This is a problematic point. One can explain the simplicity of overall life by having fewer radioactive isotopes in the crust of most planets, therefore a lower rate of genetic mutation. But Earth has kept its magnetic field largely because the heat from radioactive decay has kept the mantle and outer core from cooling.
I’ll go check the handwavium stockpile.
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Yes, going from 5% O2 to 20% should be easier. Though it did take it c.100 my on Earth, iirc.
You need to deal with possible massive oxidation sinks; and also the possible overshoot resulting in either iceball or conflagration? Depending on how much land vegetation?
I suspect terraforming anything not already close to Earth norm is going to take a lonnnng time and a lot of effort.The other factor is, if Charles Stross is right, a generation ship of baseline humans with populations not in the tens of millions is going to have a hard time sustaining a skill base.
If so, the diffusion is likely to very slow indeed. You’d need a mega-habitat configured for interstellar transit; or possibly a bunch of them.
What drives such an exodus?Re mutation rates, I recall reading a evolutionary biologist arguing that the key was not the mutation rate as such, so long as it’s sub-lethal but the potential recombination of a largely long-standing pool of mutations.
So, given more robust error-checking in recombination, life might be resilient to higher radiation levels than Earth type has adapted to.
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Extending the genetic engineering that we have now would make me think that some form of uplift should be possible in any scenario where we can travel at 0.05c, and create colony ships. Not directly helpful if all that is there is on these planets in single celled life, but it could help with transferring animals from Earth.
Perhaps they travel with hearty pigs, suitable for space travel and space bacon (space-con!), and then quickly adapt them to beasts of burden, mounts, tiny piggies for pest control (we would bring pests, good luck preventing pests), and a race of mutant-pig slaves and a whole ecosystem of pig fauna, along with whatever plants they bring.
But, what I would expect more than anything is that after 10 generations on a colony ship, there would be a strong conservative movement that wants to stay on the ship rather than attempt to populate some miserable planet covered in slime (single celled organisms are kind of slimy).
Also, eugenics. So much eugenics. And maybe phrenology or a similar pseudoscience around phenotypes.
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Disturbing, sad, predictable, all at once.
Annabelle Loma has spoken with her husband only a few times since he attempted to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during his current deployment.
Communication has been difficult to come by, and he is now on medical hold.
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“He’s scared,” Loma said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that…
Lincoln’s roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines remain on a deployment that began Nov. 21. The carrier has been deployed for more than eight months while supporting U.S. military operations in the Middle East against Iran.
The deployment, which was anticipated to end in May, has been extended with no publicly announced return date.
Long deployments are a feature in the Navy as are year long unaccompanied tours in the AF. However, a necessary feature of these tours is defined end dates. Necessary because, in an all volunteer force, service folk have families that need certainty in planning. When that certainty is violated, then the consequences are many. From retention and recruitment issues to stress and mental health.
It will only get worse.
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Tough night for the extremes in both parties with parties with My Pillow guy being swamped and Francesca Hong, she of a 38 pt polling lead from 3 weeks ago, losing a nailbiter.
Of course Lindell is questioning the vote and refusing to concede, but Hong – Crowley is the interesting race. Like the Michigan Dem Senate primary, Hong hugely underperformed the polls, which has me wondering if a variation of black candidate, polling underperformance is effecting progressives. That is, voters are telling the pollsters one thing and doing something entirely different in the voting booth. Lying to pollsters isn’t limited to black and progressive candidates, the felon over performed his polling as well in 2016 and 2020.
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I follow the polling editor for CNN on Bluesky. She noted that the final poll from Marquette still had nearly 1/3 undecideds. That’s a LOT, and can make late breaks for candidates at the polling booth.
Also, primaries hold people’s attention even less than the general election. Most people don’t care or pay attention until about 2 weeks out in the general. It’s even less in primaries.
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Adventures in weapon system acquisition. Evidence that this administration doesn’t know what it is doing.
Pentagon gives industry 21 days to submit plans for ‘significantly faster’ weapons production
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg told defense-industry leaders in an Aug. 5 memo that they have 21 days to submit plans for “significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”
“Years-long development cycles are not acceptable,” Feinberg wrote. “We must dramatically accelerate our program schedules and expand our production capacity now.”
The memo also asks companies to propose specific capital investments and facility expansions and to explain how they would work with the Pentagon to increase weapons production. Feinberg also called on industry to demonstrate its willingness to “put skin in the game.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the responses will help inform the department’s fiscal 2028 budget request.
This is exactly backwards. The Pentagon tells industry what it needs. Defense industry tells the Pentagon what it can do and at what price. This has all the hallmarks of hand waving and flailing in the upper reaches of the Pentagon.
Two examples of the “I, Trump, has a great idea” method of developing weapons systems. For some reason, it brought back the memory of Spanky and Our Gang putting on “The Marriage of Figaro”.
Trump-class battleship program will cost $275 billion, CBO report says
The potential cost of the Navy’s new nuclear-powered battleship procurement program is estimated to be an eyewatering $275 billion, with the first Trump-class battleship (BBG(X)) costing $23.4 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office report published Wednesday.
The Trump administration in December announced its intention to build a new class of large surface combatants, designated as the Trump-class guided missile battleship.
Until Trump wanted a battleship named after himself, there was no requirement. In the 80s, Reagan spent a ton of money updating the Iowa-class battleships. After Reagan, they were mothballed.
And now there is the “Golden Dome” program.
‘There is no Golden Dome’ unless Congress prioritizes funding, general warns
The sprawling Golden Dome missile-defense program is in peril because the White House decided to seek the vast majority of its 2027 funding via a controversial budget maneuver, the program’s leader said Tuesday.
Gen. Michael Guetlein didn’t explicitly call out the administration’s decision to propose using reconciliation to fund about 97 percent of the program’s $17.5 billion request. But the Space Force four-star did say it creates a “tough budget environment” as lawmakers remain cool to the administration’s request for a third partisan-led defense-funding measure.
“If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome,” Guetlein told attendees at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, “because there is no funding.”
Traditional systems acquisition has its issues (primarily a long requirements process) but it does force proper budget deliberations by Congress. You know, like fulfilling its Constitutional duties.
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Oof! Headline from the conservative Washington Examiner:
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I’d like to know what the “credible threat” was.
Shooting down a regular commercial airliner is easy*, if you have missile-equipped fighter jets that can intercept it; or if you have surface to air missiles deployed somewhere along its route. Otherwise, it would be vulnerable only on takeoff and the start of climb.
As to the latter, a portable missile like the Stinger probably wouldn’t bring down a 747. Maybe if you shot several. for that, Iran would have had to position several shooters very close to wherever the Fake Force Bribe plane took off from.
Iran has fighter jets, but none that might intercept a jet flying west from Turkey. they’d have to stash one or two somewhere along the route, and I can’t see that happening. Same for deploying ground to air missiles along the route, even on a ship or boat.
Given it’s Iran, I wouldn’t put it past them to position a business jet somewhere in Europe, and have it ram El Taco’s plane in flight. Load it with explosives just to make sure. but this sounds more like the plot of a B movie.
*Most times. Ask the Russians about the Korean Airlines 707 they failed to take out in the 70s
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MANPADs are things like a stinger missile. they’re good against smaller targets with fewer engines, like fighter jets or helicopters.
They tend to use infrared seekers, meaning they’d be drawn to the engine exhaust. I think they have very short range, on the order of 5-7 kilometers.
Unlikely to take out a 747.
What would more easily take down a large plane is an RPG. Alas, they’re designed for horizontal flight, and are rather short range, under 1 kilometer. But they pack a bigger punch and have a shaped charge. I wouldn’t take that seriously. they’d have to be literally inside the airport or air base.
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Interesting. More uncertainty. Good? Bad? What’s a pundit to do?
Primary election polls miss by 13 points on average
So the polls are causing not just high expectations for the left, but also journalists to react to world events in weird ways — grading candidates by their performance relative to the polls, not their performance in absolute terms.
This is the second time this year that polls have overestimated support for a left-leaning candidate in a marquee race. Since the rules of punditry dictate that two is a pattern, Tom Nichols, a conservative writer for The Atlantic, raises the possibility of uniform polling bias in progressives’ favor
After a lot of analysis, G. Elliott Morris writes:
Based on this data, I would recommend taking primary polls seriously but not literally. To put a finer point on that statement: The expectation is that primary polls will be off by about 13 points on average in the difference between the margin for the top two candidates. You should expect them to err, not to provide perfect predictions.
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Some thoughts re: Air Force One gate:
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/the-five-scandals-within-the-air-force-one-scandal
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From a link near the end of the piece you linked to:
This poor excuse for a human being actually believes he’s living in an action movie.
The link says it’s unlikely the armed forces or the couch boy would carry through. Maybe. The lush at the DoD might on his own initiative, without waiting for couch boy or Knows-Nothing Johnson to issue an order.
But should Iran attempt to take out El Taco and fail, I think he’d try to nuke the whole country.
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With a thick atmosphere and deliberate cultivation, it should take decades rather than millions of years fingers crossed).
Just about all science fiction stories can be torn apart if you pick at some of the details. The thing to do is not to have it fall apart from a glaring error that’s a prominent part of the story.
That’s why handwavium was invented 🙂
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I skipped over the reason: whichever I find most plausible 🙂
I figure if it can be done, it will be done. Perhaps with the expectation that over time we’ll be able to travel faster, so as to complete a roundtrip in a human lifetime.
My reason is that it’s the one way I can think of to have a human civilization endure for eons.
Whether that’s a good thing…
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I really doubt the decades, but given unobtanium mines in the asteroids …
😉Unless we get into exotic hypothetical physics, imho only uploadable mindstates are ever going to make interstellar travel in a subjective lifetime possible.
(Due to the interstellar particle collision problem once you get above a modest fraction of light.)
Whether upload will ever be possible, damfino.Though that, of course, depends upon what limits you put on “human lifetime”.
A hypothetical society of humans with lifespans into the thousands of years and near arbitrary industrial capacity and/or collapse might just embark on an interstellar journey of centuries out of whim on the one hand, desperation on the other.Especially if you are going on a “flying world” with all amenities o9f civilisation on hand.
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Suppose it takes hundreds of years. It still a planet with an atmosphere and a reasonable temperature. So you could build cities and carry around oxygen tanks when you go outside.
Of course, this would make the people in the generation ships reluctant to leave…
Again, that’s why Sci-Fi authors labored so hard to distill and purify handwavium.
Any story that comes off this won’t be about the process or the trip.
I think human lifespans will top out at 150-200 years max, and that’s optimistic. 100-110 strikes me as more realistic.
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A friend’s sister believes the AI instance she uses is sentient, and therefore won’t share things with it that she doesn’t want to trouble it with, and is reluctant to have it do tasks for her that it doesn’t want to do (for some definition of want)
If we take her insane beliefs at face value… she rents a slave that will be put to death if she stops renting, and is attempting to work out the path of ethical slave ownership.
I can see wanting a magic box that can solve problems (assuming they can do that well), but I would like that magic box to not make me the rough equivalent of a human trafficker.
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