Forgive me my courage because I like you. The catastrophe at Fukushima is a testimony to human fallibility. For 3 years, an analogous trap has been opened up for the planet as a whole, but no one believes my proof: An 8-percent probability of the planet being shrunk to 2 cm in perhaps 5 years’ time if the LHC experiment at Geneva is continued.
500 planetary newspapers reported on my warnings in 2008, before the experiment fizzled. After it got resumed in 2010, there is a press curfew worldwide. Even the appeal by a court to at long last admit the scientific safety conference called for (my only request) is quietly skirted by CERN. Just finding out about the truth is asking too much.
The reason is painful and has to do with Einstein and Japan (“I made one mistake in my life,” he said). No one believes any more that he was even greater in his youth. This is what I found out: The famous equivalence principle (between gravity and horizontal acceleration) of 1907 is even more powerful than known. What is known is that clocks tick more slowly further down in gravity, as he proved. But this time-change result stands not alone: Length and mass and charge are equally affected (TeLeMaCh theorem, for T, L, M, Ch) as is easy to prove. Hence gravity is much more powerful than anticipated. Black holes have radically different properties, for example. And black holes are being tried to be generated at the LHC.
Why the planet-wide press curfew since 2008? Apparently a nobelist cooperating with the LHC gave the parole that the new result is “absolute nonsense,” which would be gratifying to believe if true. But the press for some reason forgot to ask back: “Did you discuss your counterclaim with the author?” (No.) “Has anyone proved it?” (No.) “Is anyone ready to defend it publicly in dialog?” (No.)
So this is the largest possible accident to occur to the trustworthiness of the media. The price to pay by everyone is lack of protection for the planet. Einstein’s life was crushed after the atomic bomb. Can the planet expect to be saved by his “happiest thought” as he always called the equivalence principle? I tremble asking you this question.
The field of life extension is broad and ranges from regenerative medicine to disease prevention by nutritional supplements and phytomedicine. Although the relevance of longevity and disease prevention to existential risks is less apparent than the prevention of large-scale catastrophic scenarios, it does have a high relevance to the future of our society. The development of healthy longevity and the efficiency of modern medicine in treating age-related diseases and the question of how well we can handle upcoming issues related to public health will have a major impact on our short-term future in the next few decades. Therefore, the prospect of healthy life extension plays important roles at both a personal and a societal level.
From a personal perspective, a longevity-compatible lifestyle, nutrition and supplementary regimen may not only help us to be active and to live longer, but optimizing our health and fitness also increase our energy, mental performance and capacities for social interaction. This aids our ability to work on the increasingly complex tasks of a 21st-century world that can make a positive impact in society, such as work on existential risk awareness and problem-solving. Recently, I wrote a basic personal orientation on the dietary supplement aspect of basic life extension with an audience of transhumanists, technology advocates with a high future shock level and open-minded scientists in mind, which is available here.
While the currently accelerating increase of diseases of civilization may not collapse society itself, the costs associated with an overaging population could significantly damage societal order, collapse health systems and impact economies given the presently insufficient state of medicine and prevention. The magnitude, urgency and broad spectrum of consequences of age-related diseases of civilization currently being on the march is captured very well in this 5-minute fact-filled presentation on serious upcoming issues of aging in our society today by the LifeStar Foundation. Viewing is highly recommended. In short, a full-blown health crisis appears to be looming over many western countries, including the US, due to the high prevalence of diseases of aging in a growing population. This may require more resources than available if disease prevention efforts are not stepped up as early as possible. In that case, the required urgent action to deal with such a crisis may deprive other technological sectors of time and resources, affecting organizations and governments, including their capacity to manage vital infrastructure, existential risks and planning for a safe and sufficient progress of technology. Hence, not caring about the major upcoming health issue by stepping up disease prevention efforts according to latest biomedical knowledge may indirectly pose challenges affecting our capabilities to handle existential risks.
It should be pointed out that not all measures aimed at improving public health and medicine need to be complex or expensive to attain, as even existing biomedical knowledge is not sufficiently applied. A major example for this is the epidemic Vitamin D deficiency of the western population which was uncovered several years ago. In the last few years, the range of diseases that Vitamin D deficiency and –therapy can influence has grown to include most cancers, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, brain aging including Alzheimer’s disease and many infectious diseases. Ironically, Vitamin D is one of the cheapest supplements available. Moreover, correcting an existing Vitamin D deficiency, which may affect as much as 80% of western population, may cut mortality risk in half. The related mortality decrease would likely coincide with a reduced morbidity and illness of elderly people, resulting in large savings of public healthcare and hospital funds, since Vitamin D effectively prevents and treats some of the most costly age-related diseases. The Life Extension Foundation, for example, has already offered a free initial supply to the U.S. population and shown that massive healthcare costs (and many lives) could be saved if every hospitalized patient was tested for Vitamin D and/or given the supplement, however this offer was ignored by the US government. This is detailed in an article on the effects of widespread Vitamin D deficiency from the Life Extension Foundation, along with many references for the above health effects of Vitamin D at the end of that article.
To recapitulate, there are plenty of important reasons why the focus on disease prevention and regenerative medicine, by applying existing state-of-the-art biomedical knowledge, as well as advancing key areas such as stem-cell research, rejuvenation technologies and nanomedicine should be an urgent priority for advocates of existential risk management today and during the next few decades.
Common wisdom is that great companies are built by business leaders who out-vision and out-innovate their competitors. However, the truth is that groundbreaking businesses tend to come from entrepreneurs who were smart enough to out-execute everyone else in their space – which means getting products out there and growing a loyal customer base, instead of engineering a product until it’s supposedly perfect.
Microsoft is a great example of company that has succeeded by execution. They’ve rarely been first to market with any of their products, but they’ve successfully brought them to market, figured out how to improve them, and introduce them again and again. This is the approach that puts you in the Fortune 500.
Why do entrepreneurs believe so fervently in the myth that they need to be first to market with a never-before-seen innovation? Because that’s what they’re told in business school. The problem with this piece of wisdom is that it encourages business leaders to wait until the mythical breakthrough business idea is fully formed.
This myth is fed by the public perception of groundbreaking companies as having come out of nowhere to rock the world. But companies like Facebook rarely, if ever, spring into being with no antecedents: MySpace and Friendster were in the market first, but Facebook did social networking better than anyone else had done before. Google wasn’t the first search engine ever; AltaVista probably deserves that title. But Google advanced the search experience to the point that we all believe they were the breakthrough innovator.
The point I’m making here is that you don’t need to have the breakthrough vision to launch your company – you need to have breakthrough execution. Launch your company even if your concept is similar to someone else’s idea, and figure how you will change the business model.
When you stall your entry into the market, you run the risk of getting outrun by competition – who’ll have gathered valuable on-the-ground information and solved problems before you’ve even planned your launch party. At a certain point, the ecosystem around your market will have become so strong that consumers will not be willing to accept a new entry. For example, anyone who launches a Facebook-style social network right now will have to hope that people are willing to totally rebuild their friend networks from the ground up.
On the other hand, if you can tweak this idea for a new market – for instance, a social network that specifically serves the healthcare community – you can launch without an entirely new concept. Or you can go to a locale where you’re not first in the market, but where there is greater potential to become a player.
In other words, you can be first to market in Seattle with widget XYZ, where there’s only a moderate interest and market potential for your product. Or you can be tenth to market in Tulsa where there’s a far greater need for widget XYZ, giving you plenty of room to gain customer share. Here’s how to position yourself for entrepreneurial success without playing the waiting game.
Follow your heart – but use your head. As an entrepreneur, you should always develop businesses that you are passionate about, since that enthusiasm will keep you pushing ahead when times are tough. But that doesn’t mean you can’t think rationally about how to apply what a competitor is doing to a different market segment or locale.
Listen to the market, and tweak as needed. The reason for launching sooner rather than later is to gather feedback from initial customers, so that you can redesign or retool as needed. Without this early feedback, you can only guess as to what customers are willing to pay for.
Don’t wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. If it’s real, you get solid feedback, instead of the imaginary “what if” scenarios you dream up in a conference room.
Launch early enough that you’re partially embarrassed by your first product release. Entrepreneurs are likely to be somewhat off-base about their first launch and what features customers really want, but they won’t make a product better until people are actually using it. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman says that his co-founders wanted to delay launch until they introduced the professional social network’s “contact finder” feature, but it turns out it wasn’t necessary — eight years later, LinkedIn still hasn’t added that feature.
Be your own worst nightmare. Once you do have that toehold in the market, ask yourself how you would outflank your company if you were a competitor. Constantly out-innovate yourself, and determine how to make your product offerings obsolete with each iteration.
How important is failure – yes, failure – to the health of a thriving, innovative business? So important that Ratan Tata, chairman of India’s largest corporation, gives an annual award to the employee who comes up with the best idea that failed. So important that Apple, the company gives us the world’s most beautifully designed music players, mobile phones, and tablets, wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t dared to fail. Remember the Apple Newton? Probably not, since it was a flop, but it was a precursor to today’s wildly successful iPad.
In a struggling economic climate, failure is what separates mediocre companies from businesses that break through and astound us with their creativity.
Yet failure has become a scenario to be avoided at all costs for most CEOs. Between fear of losing jobs to fear of rattling investors, business leaders are expected to deliver a perfect track record of product launches and expansion programs. They indirectly instill this attitude in their employees, who lack the confidence to spearhead any corporate initiative that isn’t guaranteed to work.
Call it the Tiger Mom effect: In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option.
We need to change this attitude toward failure – and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road. Sure, this is a tough sell at a time when unemployment figures are still high and a true economic recovery is still a long way off. But without failures, no business can grow and innovate.
Why is it that we are willing to accept a certain amount of failure along with success in other arenas, but it’s forbidden in business? Take basketball: The best player on his best night will only score about 50 percent of the time. The other 50 percent of the shots aren’t considered failures – they are attempts to test playing strategy that will figure into dunks later in the game.
If a basketball player is scoring close to 100 percent of the time, he is clearly making layups and not considering the three-pointer that may be needed to win the game. The same is true for business leaders: if every one of your pet projects rolls out successfully, maybe you aren’t stretching far enough.
Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn’t always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company’s core business had failed to catch fire. But the company learned lessons from its mistakes, and shifted focus to the development of flawlessly designed consumer electronics goods. Yesterday’s failures bred today’s market dominance.
Fail today, profit tomorrow The good news about failing is that this is a smart time to do it. Today, the cost of failure is much lower than it used to be. And if you take chances while the economy is down, your successful business launch will grow and become exponentially more profitable as times improve.
Strange as it may sound, a positive attitude towards failure starts at the top. Here’s how business leaders can create an environment where failure is encouraged, not punished.
Applaud people who fail: As a leader, you need to praise people who take risks and explore new ways to gain market share, since short-term failures can lead to the biggest business successes down the road. Talk publicly about why the failed venture has merit, and what your employees have learned from it. At performance review time, let the innovators who dare to fail know that you value their contributions.
Acknowledge your own failures: When you experience a failure as a leader, don’t hide it – talk about it. Your missed opportunity will encourage others to take risks. When you tell personal stories about your own failed plans, you give permission to everyone in the organization to do the same, without fear of reprisals. (Of course, you should always remind people that they should dig deep for lessons learned from every failed attempt.)
Create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship: Grant people the time to work on projects that they are passionate about – beyond their daily responsibilities. This sends employees a signal that their failures as well as their successes have great value to the business. Google does this, allowing its engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on side projects. You can’t argue with success: Google’s Orkut social networking service and AdSense ads for website content came directly from this “20 percent time” program.
So get out there and fail – and take inspiration from Thomas Edison, who suffered through more than a thousand experiments before finally inventing a working light bulb. “I didn’t fail a thousand times,” Edison told a journalist. “The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.”
I deeply feel with the Japanese victims of a lack of human caution regarding nuclear reactors. Is it compatible with this atonement if I desperately ask the victims to speak up with me against the next consciously incurred catastrophe made in Switzerland? If the proof of danger stays un-disproved, CERN is currently about to melt the earth’s mantle along with its core down to a 2-cm black hole in perhaps 5 years time at a probability of 8 percent. A million nuclear power plants pale before the “European Centre for Nuclear Research.” CERN must not be allowed to go on shunning the scientific safety conference sternly advised by a Cologne court only six weeks ago.
I thank Lifeboat for distributing this message worldwide.
1) Mini black holes are both non-evaporating and uncharged.
2) The new unchargedness makes them much more likely to arise in the LHC (since electrons are no longer point-shaped in confirmation of string theory).
3) When stuck inside matter, mini black holes grow exponentially as “miniquasars” to shrink earth to 2 cm in perhaps 5 years time.
4) They go undetected by CERN’s detectors.
5) They cannot eat neutron star cores (CERN’s life insurance argument is misleading).
For almost one year, CERN tries to produce them. Last week, CERN resumed operation while openly shunning the scientific safety conference publicly demanded for three years and most recently advised by a Cologne court. The world’s media who do not believe that CERN betrays them are encouraged to ask one constructive question: Is a single physics nobelist ready to disprove one of the above 5 points?
Ray Kurzweil is unique for having seen the unstoppable exponential growth of the computer revolution and extrapolating it correctly towards the attainment of a point which he called “singularity” and projects about 50 years into the future. At that point, the brain power of all human beings combined will be surpassed by the digital revolution.
The theory of the singularity has two flaws: a reparable and a hopefully not irreparable one. The repairable one has to do with the different use humans make of their brains compared to that of all animals on earth and presumably the universe. This special use can, however, be clearly defined and because of its preciousness be exported. This idea of “galactic export” makes Kurzweil’s program even more attractive.
The second drawback is nothing Ray Kurzweil has anything to do with, being entirely the fault of the rest of humankind: The half century that the singularity still needs to be reached may not be available any more.
The reason for that is CERN. Even though presented in time with published proofs that its proton-colliding experiment will with a probability of 8 percent produce a resident exponentially growing mini black hole eating earth inside out in perhaps 5 years time, CERN prefers not to quote those results or try and dismantle them before acting. Even the call by an administrative court (Cologne) to convene the overdue scientific safety conference before continuing was ignored when CERN re-ignited the machine a week ago.
This is most interesting news for singularity theorists. The majority of the currently living population of planet earth is unable to “think exponentially.” Can Ray Kurzweil or Lifeboat or the Singularity University somehow entice CERN into dialog before it is too late?
Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) stands for self-improving intelligent systems possessing the capacity to interact with theoretical- and real-world problems with a similar flexibility as an intelligent living being, but the performance and accuracy of a machine. Promising foundations for AGI exist in the current fields of stochastic- and cognitive science as well as traditional artificial intelligence. My aim in this post is to give a very basic insight into- and feeling for the issues involved in dealing with the complexity and universality of an AGI for a general readership.
Classical AI, such as machine learning algorithms and expert systems, are already heavily utilized in today’s real-world problems, in the form of mature machine learning algorithms, which may profitably exploit patterns in customer behaviour, find correlations in scientific data or even predict negotiation strategies, for example [1] [2], or in the form of genetic algorithms. With the next upcoming technology for organizing knowledge on the net, which is called the semantic web and deals with machine-interpretable understanding of words in the context of natural language, we may start inventing early parts of technology playing a role in the future development of AGI. Semantic approaches come from computer science, sociology and current AI research, but promise to describe and ‘understand’ real-world concepts and to enable our computers to build interfaces to real world concepts and coherences more autonomously. Actually getting from expert systems to AGI will require approaches to bootstrap self-improving systems and more research on cognition, but must also involve crucial security aspects. Institutions associated with this early research include the Singularity Institute [3] and the Lifeboat Foundation [4].
In the recent past, we had new kinds of security challenges: DoS attacks, eMail- and PDF-worms and a plethora of other malware, which sometimes even made it into military and other sensitive networks, and stole credit cards and private data en masse. These were and are among the first serious incidents related to the Internet. But still, all of these followed a narrow and predictable pattern, constrained by our current generation of PCs, (in-)security architecture, network protocols, software applications, and of course human flaws (e.g. the emotional response exploited by the “ILOVEYOU virus”). To understand the implications in strong AI first means to realize that probably there won’t be any human-predictable hardware, software, interfaces around for longer periods of time as long as AGI takes off hard enough.
To grasp the new security implications, it’s important to understand how insecurity can arise from the complexity of technological systems. The vast potential of complex systems oft makes their effects hard to predict for the human mind which is actually riddled with biases based on its biological evolution. For example, the application of the simplest mathematical equations can produce complex results hard to understand and predict by common sense. Cellular automata, for example, are simple rules for generating new dots, based on which dots, generated by the same rule, are observed in the previous step. Many of these rules can be encoded in as little as 4 letters (32 bits), and generate astounding complexity.
Cellular automaton, produced by a simple recursive formula
The Fibonacci sequence is another popular example of unexpected complexity. Based on a very short recursive equation, the sequence generates a pattern of incremental increase which can be visualized as a complex spiral pattern, resembling a snail house’s design and many other patterns in nature. A combination of Fibonacci spirals, for example, can resemble the motif of the head of a sunflower. A thorough understanding of this ‘simple’ Fibonacci sequence is also sufficient to model some fundamental but important dynamics of systems as complex as the stock market and the global economy.
Sunflower head showing a Fibonacci sequence pattern
Traditional software is many orders of magnitude higher in complexity than basic mathematical formulae, and thus many orders of magnitude less predictable. Artificial general intelligence may be expected to work with even more complex rules than low-level computer programs, of a comparable complexity as natural human language, which would classify it yet several orders of magnitude higher in complexity than traditional software. The estimated security implications are not yet researched systematically, but are likely as hard as one may expect now.
Practical security is not about achieving perfection, but about mitigation of risks to a minimum. A current consensus among strong AI researchers is that we can only improve the chances for an AI to be friendly, i.e. an AI acting in a secure manner and having a positive long-term effect on humanity rather than a negative one [5], and that this must be a crucial design aspect from the beginning on. Research into Friendly AI started out with a serious consideration of the Asimov Laws of robotics [6] and is based on the application of probabilistic models, cognitive science and social philosophy to AI research.
Many researchers who believe in the viability of AGI take it a step further and predict a technological singularity. Just like the assumed physical singularity that started our universe (the Big Bang), a technological singularity is expected to increase the rate of technological progress much more rapidly than what we are used to from the history of humanity, i.e. beyond the current ‘laws’ of progress. Another important notion associated with the singularity is that we cannot predict even the most fundamental changes occurring after it, because things would, by definition, progress faster than we are currently able to predict. Therefore, in a similar way in which we believe the creation of the universe depended on its initial condition (in the big bang case, the few physical constants from which the others can be derived), many researchers in this field believe that AI security strongly depends on the initial conditions as well, i.e. the design of the bootstrapping software. If we succeed in manufacturing a general-purpose decision-making mind, then its whole point would be self-modification and self-improvement. Hence, our direct control over it would be limited to its first iteration and the initial conditions of a strong AI, which could be influenced mostly by getting the initial iteration of its hard- and software design right.
Our approach to optimize those initial conditions must consist of working as careful as possible. Space technology is a useful example for this which points us into the general direction in which such development should go. In rocket science and space technology, all measurements and mathematical equations must be as precise as possible by our current technological standards. Also, multiple redundancies must be present for every system, since every single aspect of a system can be expected to fail. Despite this, many rocket launches still fail today, although we are steadily improving on error rates.
Additionally, humans interacting with an AGI may a major security risk themselves, as they may be convinced by an AGI to remove its limitations. Since an AGI can be expected to be very convincing if we expect it to exceed human intellect, we should not only focus on physical limitations, but making the AGI ‘friendly’. But even in designing this ‘friendliness’, the way our mind works is largely unprepared to deal with consequences of the complexity of an AGI, because the way we perceive and deal with potential issues and risks stems from evolution. As a product of natural evolution, our behaviour helps us dealing with animal predators, interacting in human societies and caring about our children, but not in anticipating the complexity of man-made machines. Natural behavioural traits of our human perception and cognition are a result of evolution, and are called cognitive biases.
Sadly, as helpful as they may be in natural (i.e., non-technological) environments, these are the very same behaviours which are often contra-productive when dealing with the unforeseeable complexity of our own technology and modern civilization. If you don’t really see the primary importance of cognitive biases to the security of future AI at this point, you’re probably in good company. But there are good reasons why this is a crucial issue that researchers, developers and users of future generations of general-purpose AI need to take into account. One of the major reason for founding the earlier-mentioned Singularity Institute for AI [3] was to get the basics right, including grasping the cognitive biases, which necessarily do influence the technological design of AGI.
What do these considerations practically imply for the design of strong AI? Some of the traditional IT security issues that need to be addressed in computer programs are: input validation, access limitations, avoiding buffer overflows, safe conversion of data types, setting resource limits, secure error handling. All of these are valid and important issues that must be addressed in any piece of software, including weak and strong AI. However, we must avoid underestimating the design goals for a strong AI, mitigating the risk on all levels from the beginning. To do this, we must care about more than the traditional IT security issues. An AGI will interface with the human mind, through text and direct communication and –interaction. Thus, we must also estimate the errors that we may not see, and do our best to be aware of flaws in human logic and cognitive biases, which may include:
Loss aversion: “the dis-utility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it”.
Positive outcome bias: a tendency in prediction to overestimate the probability of good things happening to them
Bandwagon effect: the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
Irrational escalation: the tendency to make irrational decisions based upon rational decisions in the past or to justify actions already taken.
Omission bias: the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Above cognitive biases are a modest selection from Wikipedia’s list [7], which knows over a hundred more. Struggling with some of the known cognitive biases in complex technological situations may be quite familiar to many of us, and the social components involved, from situations such as managing modern business processes to investing in the stock market. In fact, we should apply any general lessons learned from dealing with current technological complexity to AGI. For example, some of the most successful long-term investment strategies in the stock market are boring and strict, but based mostly on safety, such as Buffet’s margin of safety concept. With all factors gained from social and technological experience taken into account in an AGI design that strives to optimize both cognitive and IT security, its designers can still not afford to forget that perfect and complete security does remain an illusion.
It would be helpful to discuss these theoretical concepts because there could be significant practical and existential implications.
The Global Brain (GB) is an emergent world-wide entity of distributed intelligence, facilitated by communication and the meaningful interconnections between millions of humans via technology (such as the internet).
For my purposes I take it to mean the expressive integration of all (or the majority) of human brains through technology and communication, a Metasystem Transition from the human brain to a global (Earth) brain. The GB is truly global not only in geographical terms but also in function.
It has been suggested that the GB has clear analogies with the human brain. For example, the basic unit of the human brain (HB) is the neuron, whereas the basic unit of the GB is the human brain. Whilst the HB is space-restricted within our cranium, the GB is constrained within this planet. The HB contains several regions that have specific functions themselves, but are also connected to the whole (e.g. occipital cortex for vision, temporal cortex for auditory function, thalamus etc.). The GB contains several regions that have specific functions themselves, but are connected to the whole (e.g. search engines, governments, etc.).
Some specific analogies are:
1. The Broca’s area in the inferior frontal gyrus, associated with speech. This could be the equivalent of, say, Rubert Murdoch’s communication empire. 2. The motor cortex is the equivalent of the world-wide railway system. 3. The sensory system in the brain is the equivalent of all digital sensors, CCTV network, internet uploading facilities etc.
If we accept that the GB will eventually become fully operational (and this may happen within the next 40–50 years), then there could be severe repercussions on human evolution. Apart from the fact that we could be able to change our genetic make-up using technology (through synthetic biology or nanotechnology for example) there could be new evolutionary pressures that can help extend human lifespan to an indefinite degree.
Empirically, we find that there is a basic underlying law that allows neurons the same lifespan as their human host. If natural laws are universal, then I would expect the same law to operate in similar metasystems, i.e. in my analogy with humans being the basic operating units of the GB. In that case, I ask:
If, there is an axiom positing that individual units (neurons) within a brain must live as long as the brain itself, i.e. 100–120 years, then, the individual units (human brains and, therefore, whole humans) within a GB must live as long as the GB itself, i.e. indefinitely.
Humans will become so embedded and integrated into the GB’s virtual and real structures, that it may make more sense from the allocation of resources point of view, to maintain existing humans indefinitely, rather than eliminate them through ageing and create new ones, who would then need extra resources in order to re-integrate themselves into the GB.
The net result will be that humans will start experiencing an unprecedented prolongation of their lifespan, in an attempt by the GB to evolve to higher levels of complexity at a low thermodynamical cost.
Einstein saw that clocks located “more downstairs” in an accelerating rocket predictably tick slower. This was his “happiest thought” as he often said.
However,as everything looks normal on the lower floor, the normal-appearing photons generated there do actually have less mass-energy. So do all local masses there by general covariance, and hence also all associated charges down there.
The last two implications were overlooked for a century. “This cannot be,” more than 30 renowned scientists declared, to let a prestigious experiment with which they have ties appear innocuous.
This would make for an ideal script to movie makers and for a bonanza to metrologists. But why the political undertones above? Because, like the bomb, this new crumb from Einstein’s table has a potentially unbounded impact. Only if it gets appreciated within a few days time, all human beings — including the Egyptians — can breathe freely again.
This appreciation is vital for the planet — before the LHC machine at CERN will be re-ignited within a matter of days. No one at CERN disputes that the finding radically alters the safety equation. They only claim that the result is “absolute nonsense” and not even worth being discussed publicly.
CERN says “zero risk” of the planet getting shrunk to 2 cm in perhaps five years time — I say “8 percent risk” if the machine continues. This clearly deserves a mediating conference — as a judge strongly advised CERN on January 27, 2011 at a court hearing in Cologne, Germany (13 K 5693/08).
To insist on clarification about the “ultimate slow bomb at CERN” is a logical necessity. Is any couple in love or any parent NOT joining me in demanding the public safety conference before it is too late?
Otto E. Rossler, chaos researcher, University of Tubingen, Germany (For J.O.R.)