Another Space Jump

Another world-record space jump.

Empathy Gap and Strategy

There are many instances in the history of warfare of a seemingly inferior opponent beating a provably superior opponent who had superior numbers or superior technology.  Yet somehow, the inferior opponent came out on top due to a several reasons.   Among some reasons are more resolve or will to win, willingness to sacrifice, patience to wait out the other guy, etc.  One aspect somewhat covered in papers on strategy and psychology/sociology is termed the “empathy gap.”

From Wikipedia page on the subject:  “Further conclusion can be made about empathy gap and power: the weaker party often doesn’t realize that being in a weaker party can actually give them more power to strategically think and make decision, leading to better outcomes. The weaker party has no idea what they are capable of doing. They convince themselves that being more powerful is often more advantageous. Whereas the powerful party lacks strategy and leads to a poor outcome.^"

So translation, the one with superior forces often has the luxury of using brute force methods to get the win whereas the weaker party almost always has to think strategically in order just  to survive.  Being forced to think strategically often then translates into eventual victory for the seemingly inferior force.   

Red (microstory)

Red

Daisy hunched over her marbles to ponder each whirring on the floor. This was her favorite activity. She would spin them over and over in circles on her little race track. Watching them zoom around was so mesmerizing. Such striking colors. Sitting behind her was Amos, an Elder, “I remember when I was your age, I had a dozen marbles. What endless fun! But at my initiation, I had to give all that up and become an adult. Daisy looked annoyed upon hearing the last words. She hadn’t been looking forward to the initiation. But it was her people’s way and that was that or that was what she had been taught ever since the dawn of her memory. Amos was an amiable old codger. His countenance was all whitened with advanced age and he had shrunk considerably from his glory days, about which of course he would always reminisce. “You have been a child long enough” Amos continued, “Everybody has to go through the ceremony, it is the most important transition in life.” She could feel her face getting hotter. She did not want to grow up, she was quite fine continuing as a bright and shiny child. Why would she want to be some dim old adult? All they did was sit and talk to each other all day. To her youthful ears, their subjects of conversation seemed sooooo boring! They gossiped about everybodys' goings-on in the town. She knew her ceremony was to be later that day. Already some of her friends had already gone through the rites. She thought to herself “we’ll see” and got up and started walking through the neighborhood along the spiral path which wended itself around the whole town. As she whimsically drifted along the path, she overheard 2 adults prattling on.
“Did you hear about Dave, the one that lives downtown? He was quite overweight and he ate like a giant.”
The other one replied “Yeah, I had heard from Steve about it but didn’t get the full story. What happened?”
“Well, he just collapsed. Such sad news. It sent a shockwave through the whole community.”
“That is sad news.”
“Do you know if he became a Shadow?”
“You know that is nonsense, there are no such things as Shadows”
“Shadows DO exist, I felt the presence of one once when I was a kid. Gave me the creeps.”
“Yes, but you didn’t SEE it, so how do you know they exist. You can’t just go on feelings, you need evidence.”
These 2 continued on with their argument while Daisy continued. She had heard of these Shadows. Some Elders, such as Amos, would always scare the neighborhood kids with tales of Shadows who could not be seen but would eat children if they got too close. They would chide the children not to be greedy since greed in one’s heart turns one into a Shadow in the afterlife. She wasn’t quite convinced, but thought there had to be something to it.
Soon, she heard behind her “It’s time.” She knew it was the priestess Helene waiting to perform her initiation rites. She wimpered “But I don’t want to!” “But child, you can’t wait forever. You have to grow up sometime.” Daisy knew deep down the truth, even if she wanted, she couldn’t forestall the inevitable. “Ok” she whispered, a tear rolling down her face. The priestess asked Daisy for her sacrifice. Daisy reluctantly held forth her beloved marbles. The priestess put them in an urn and gave Daisy a sip of a red liquid. She felt a tingle in her gut. “Now destroy them!” bellowed the priestess. Daisy turned a bright fiery red and felt her body expand manifold until the heat of her body completely vaporized all of her marbles. Her mind roiled. Helene asked her “How do you feel now that you are a Red Giant?”

Copyright 2014

Dissent Channel (microstory)

copyright 2014
Dissent Channel

“Utopia they said. Yeah right.” thought Jack as he viewed the latest work requests. “You know the story, we have revolutionary technology here that will change things ‘for the better’ blah blah blah, shit hits the fan, the law of unintended consequences, and now we live in this ‘utopia’” Jack further thought. Dave sent him a message, “you better keep your thoughts to yourself, man, the QUEEN will hear your thoughts.”
Jack replied, “yep that's the problem with utopias, no one can think for themselves.” “damn it Jack!” Dave yelped. “ok, ok, I’ll just be a good little drone and do my sums.” He sat and closed his eyes and let the implant download billions of bits of data to be processed by his sub-conscious mind and then uploaded back to the Quantum Unitary Electronic Expert Network. Ever since that prick Dr. Whats-his-name from HiveMind, Inc. figured out high bandwidth brain-machine interface, things have gone to shit. Yes, the economy went gangbusters and technology development all around multiplied by a hundreds of times. But still. It’s just that when everyone can be a rocket scientist or quantum physicist or surgeon overnight, it makes everyone unique in a ‘unique like a snowflake’ sort of way. Jack opened his eyes and thought “and we can’t have deviant thoughts infecting everybody now can we? can’t even think my own thoughts, utopia indeed.” “What the hell, Jack?” “Sorry, I was just thinking softly”
“You know what happens to strays right?” Dave inquired.
“Yeah, they get excommed. A particularly painful experience from what I hear” Jack replied.
“Yeah, that’s because the brain grows dependent on QUEEN and has a hard time adjusting.” Dave said.
Agent Melissa Johnson, a Thought-Contagion Control agent buzzed at their office door. “I have come to ask Jack Samson some questions regarding recent irregularities in a few recent uploads.”
Jack looked up with worry in his eyes.
“Can you explain these recent data irregularities?”
“No, I have just been doing my work as requested. I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary”
Dave blurted out “He has been having deviant thoughts lately.” “Shut up Dave!” Jack shouted out loud.
She looked at Dave, then back at Jack. Jack stood up and started to run but Agent Johnson blinked once and Jack just fell to the floor. “Not looking good, Mr. Samson.” She pulled him off the floor and took him away.
Jack awoke to find himself by a machine. Agent Johnson explained that he was guilty of thought deviance and for that he was to be excommunicated from QUEEN. Jack then heard something in his mind “Sorry Jack, it was for a worthy cause. They can’t hear us on this channel. Soon we will all be like you.” Dave whispered in his mind. “You made me a honeypot and a virus, clever boy, Dave, clever boy” Jack whispered back. The machine engaged the implant, synced up for afew seconds and removed it from Jack’s skull and then Jack was turned over to the half-way house manager. Agent Johnson returned to her office and linked up with QUEEN to get her next assignment.
A thought flashed across her mind “Agents of TCC: order number BEE23984: excomm 10,000,000,000 entities from QUEEN”
“Well, we can’t disappoint the QUEEN” she thought to herself.

What if the Moon were a giant computer?

I got to thinking the other day of the question of planet-sized computers and naturally to how much computing power would the moon have it were a computer?
First, what would the benefits be of having a moon-computer?  First, it would act as a backup of all of human knowledge in case the Earth gets wiped out for whatever reason such as an asteroid strike.  Obviously it would also act as relay points for the Interplanetary Internet.   Making other moons in the solar system computers for internet storage (and additional human knowledge backups) would also decrease latency for non-synchonous internet activities.  If I'm on Mars, I don't want to wait a half hour for my funny internet cat videos to download!  :)
Nerd_on/
Now some totally SWAG Rough Order Calculations: 
The mass of the moon is 7.34X10^22 kg and assuming a chip can execute at 3Ghz with nominal area and volume of a chip and support pad as 400mm^2 x 2mm= Volume 800mm^3 per chip.  Also further assuming that 96% of the moon mass would be support structure including memory supporting 4% mass that is turned into computer chips, the number of 3GHz chips would be on order of 1.43X10^24 chips (assuming a mass density of 2.57gram/cc).   If this were made to be perfectly but massively parallel system, it would result in a 4.28x10^24 GHz performance which roughly equates to 1.71x10^16 ExaFLOPs.  It has been said that to simulate a human brain it would take about 37PetaFLOPs of computational power, though how a brain works is totally different so comparing the 2 is rather moot.  Comparing the 2 numbers, one can simulate 4.66x10^17 human brains if the entire moon were a giant computer. 
 Nerd_off/
That is a LOT of computer power. That is assuming one can get enough power into the giant moon computer (I'll leave that for another post). But assuming one can get enough power via solar or nuclear (He-3!) for even a fraction of that computing power, the applications are unimaginable such as a rather good simulation of reality...  :)

Interstellar Trade

I came across interesting paper done by the well-known Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman in his early career.  The paper explores implications of interstellar trade.  It comes to the conclusion that interest rates would reach parity (on 2 planets in same inertial frame) even with relativistic effects and distances involved.  Several assumptions are made to simplify the problem.  What is not addressed may be the differential characteristics of the counter-parties in the trade.  In conducting trade with an alien civilization some challenges would need to be overcome regarding these characteristics even setting aside problems of communications. 

First, the fundamental moral or ethical values of the counter-party could quite different stemming from totally different perspective on hierarchy of needs (i.e. Maslow's hierarchy).  The needs of individuals of an alien species could be vastly different than the traditional human hierarchy if indeed they would be considered "individuals."  An alien species could be a hivemind type of civilizations in which individuals don't serve their own self-interests but that of the collective.  One wonders how one would conduct trade with intelligent bees or the Borg of Star Trek.  Thus human need of self-actualization would have a counterpart of self-subsumation (total melding of individual into the collective mind) in such an alien society.  The need of the aliens could be different such as need for basics like water or food.  

Secondly in regard to interest rates and time, the alien civilization could be working on a whole different time sense.  Lifespan, sense of passage of time and speed of thought could be expected to be different than humans.  Difference in speed of thought and communications speed could make a difference in expectations for interest rates between human-alien trade.  As an extreme example, if humans encountered an intelligent species of tree-like aliens with very slow thought and comms speed and longer lifespans into the hundreds or thousands of years, the interest rate and term lengths expected by the trees would   most likely be lower and much longer (a thousand year mortgage anyone?).  Besides the excruciating process of communicating so slowly with them, how would humans trade with them?  Similarly, a race of super intelligent machines working at very fast speeds would also be challenging.  However, these differences could be arbitraged, at least by the first ones to make the trade.  Financial engineers would most likely come up with financial instruments to correct for these inter-species differences which would close any arbitrage gaps. Maybe this could be a "third theorem of interstellar trade", that inter-species financial differences would eventually reach parity by intermediaries arbitraging those differences.   Another subject of interest (pun intended) would be currency trading of human currencies and alien ones with these differences in mind.

References:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
Theory of Interstellar trade, by Paul Krugman 
 

Space Invading is Hard

Assuming an interstellar war between 2 Earth-sized civilizations, a question could be asked, “How many troops would I need to invade another world in another star system?” 

To answer this question would need several assumptions.  Just considering raw troop-numbers needed to invade that world one can arrive at a needed effectiveness ratio of said troop against an enemy defender.  Technology disparities between the antagonists would obviously be needed to reach a match between the invaders numbers vs. home world troop numbers as it can be conceived that home world defenders would vastly out-number invaders.  Thus invaders would need to make up the difference in technology superiority as well as better strategy.  An example may illustrate the thought experiment. 

Assuming Earth would invade another world of similar size and population in Alpha Centauri, how many operators would it need to do so?  Assuming number of operators would be 0.01% (according to 1^st Law of Interstellar Warfare) of current world active duty personnel would yield approximately ~2000 “shooters” that would go invade Centaurian home world.  On the flip-side, Centaurians would use all available combat power to defend themselves.  More or less all military able population between ages of 15 to 49 years of age.  Again only 10% would be combat troops while remaining 90% would make up logistical tail including manufacturing of war materiel to carry on the fight.  If A-C has a similar population to Earth of 7B people that yields about 350M combat troops to defeat in order to subjugate the Centaurian home world.  So a combat effectiveness of a Terran space marine would in fact need to be ~200k times a Centaurian warrior for rough tactical combat parity between defender and invader.  But in general, defenders always have an advantage, sometimes up to 3 to 1, so the effectiveness may well need to be much more.  So from a technology point-of-view, Earth technology would need to be on same order of betterness or 200k times more advanced than Centaurian.  Flipping it around with Centaurians invading Earth, they would need to be 200k more advanced technologically than Earth.  And that would just be for tactical parity which does not guarantee victory.  That comes to another consideration of strategy.    

To invade Centaurian home world, Earth would need superior technology (200k) plus superior strategic thought.  To make sure of victory strategies would need to be 10X better at least.  But why not just send robots to do it?  Right now, our computers can win at chess, but still even have a hard time with Go and those are games with known rules and no hidden information.  Artificial Intelligence would need to advance a fair amount to be able to compete in messy strategic conundrums such as warfare, let alone interstellar war.  And we sure don’t want to commit the Ludic Fallacy (hat tip Dr. Taleb) confusing games with Black Swanny real-life.   So in light of this, it could be thought that these 2,000 troops would be superior strategic thinkers (My name is KHAN!) who would be the generals-admirals directing fleets of robotic soldiers who could manage for themselves on a tactical-level. 

Concluding this thought experiment, one reason we haven’t been invaded by aliens is that being the invader would be ‘ahem’ challenging.  One’s civilization has to be advanced technologically which may take millions of years, while at the same time needing to span the gulf of space to get here.  One may conclude the best route strategically is not to fight and just look for uninhabited planets to colonize while avoiding any inhabited ones.  Of course, none of the above considers interstellar politics and rationales of why one would want to invade another star system.