Manned space flight is going nowhere; rockets are a technical dead end due to energy overheads.
There's a reason manned exploration stopped after 10 years: the only place suitable for human life beyond earth must be brought along with the travelers, and the only place close enough to reach this way is just rocks. Even if those rocks happened to be useful as raw materials for vehicles and human habituation in space, where the moon's order of magnitude lower gravity would almost seem liberating for further sojourns, but those rocks are not useful. Mars is no more hospitable nor advantageous than the moon, and an order of magnitude more unapproachable. So physics as we know it keeps us stuck on spaceship earth.
A breakthrough in physics enabling something like the Krell machines to arbitrarily rearrange matter could overcome the universe's indomitable nature. But if we had Krell machines, what would be the human purpose of exploring? Just make everything as you wish right here!
As to humanities (life's) destiny to colonize the far reaches to escape our plight on earth: if we can't it work for us here, where the preconditions and provisions were optimal for us to emerge from sea slime, what's with the hubris of exporting our pathos into the void except to indulge megalomania? In other words, humanity is already an output of a Krell machine known as Sol.
Kubrick and Clarke were truly sages to envision the next step between humanity and the star child as an orbiting Hilton hotel in the form of a Ferris wheel guarded by nuclear bombs which unexpected purpose is to gain access to a black box within which psychedelic schematics pour into humanity to enable us reach the next evolutionary level beyond Teihard de Chardin's noosphere.
But at that point matters are religious not physical.
Well it so happens the situation of humanity is already very suitable for religion.
One simple criteria is a distinction between the exogenous (computers) and the endogenous (organism).
It's appropriate to wonder what external and internal mean, but we could stipulate some things about the interfaces to be more clear: first being that for any thing to be living, it's on a continuum of manifestations that contain all the code necessary to manifest it since the origin of time. A computer does not fit this criteria because it has an edge at which its existence is nothing more than its raw materials, and it doesn't contain the apparatus necessary to reproduce. After some singular initial condition, an organism is manifestation of a code that has always existed. The tree of life is unbroken, even as its flowers bloom and wilt. A computer is manufactured.
Relative to its manifestation, we known almost everything about the design and operation of a computer: because we stipulated its organization. As it was never designed to be conscious, why should we expect it could ever be so?
Compared to life, of which we relatively know almost nothing about life's design and origination, except that not only does it manifest a-priori to our capacity to understand anything, but by definition gives rise to us.
So consciousness of life is just one of myriad, possibly endless mysteries, and our lack of understanding of consciousness is no more unexpected than our lack understanding about the rest of nature.
We may never get to the bottom of the mysteries, but we can order effects, and in this regard we find a clear distinction between ourselves and machines, one being emergent of our wills and the other giving rise to our wills.
From this vantage we avoid confusion even as we must abide enormous uncertainty.
There is no theory of consciousness, and no one is anywhere close to forming one.
In place of a theory, the paper supplies a circular set of references to attributes of consciousness associated with human activity. These references are coined in a manner as if having editorial control over some jargon, such as "perceptual self awareness", which is sandbagged by secondary subordinate, vague terms, such as "wakefulness", can seem like a cogent alternative to the total lack of any formal approach to understanding of consciousness.
Using bloated prose, which necessitates a disclaimer that it wasn't pooped out of a gen-AI, the paper surfs heavy waves of lamentation about the "complexity" of "phenomenological" and "clinical methods" to reach a shore of intelligibility that Descartes colonized centuries ago with the maxim: There is nothing a man comprehends more self-evidently than his own existence.
Intellectually there's precious little at stake in this paper, so what's its purpose? The answer can be found though an analogy of the resounding words of JFK announcing the Apollo program: "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won..."; whomever can take control of an sciency vernacular for humanistic traits applied to today's AI will gain a seat at any roundtable on industrial policy, and this seat could prove very valuable.
In conclusion, this work needs funding, lots more funding!
Well said. When I read stuff like this implying 'consciousness studies' can be a hard science, the undefined and ill-defined terms just keep piling up until I nope out. I'm lucky if I make it past the abstract to maybe the third paragraph. No reproducible science can be built on so many subjective vagaries.
I think consciousness studies can be interesting but they need to stay in the philosophy department between Searle's Chinese room and the P-Zombie lounge until they're ready to experimentally test falsifiable hypotheses with neuroscientists. And until they have a rigorous, consistent definition of what human consciousness is and is not, they really need to stop pretending AI has any relevance to human consciousness. There's no evidence AIs are conscious, and even if there someday is reproducible evidence - there's no reason to think it might be similar enough to human consciousness to make useful predictions about either (and that's assuming humans are conscious, which is still a matter of some debate in the field).
Major analysts are tracking the onset of a "big tech" stock price rout, Half of a trillion dollars is being spent on AI data centers this year by 5 companies, including Microsoft, and these costs are now being weighed against earnings
Microsoft is a key indicator as earnings from its cloud business are unexpectedly stagnant. The absence of cloud earnings growth in the midst of exceptionally large spending on data center buildouts resulted in a wipeout of roughly $0.4 trillion of market cap on a $1.4 trillion valuation.
A chart of this year's capex vs. market valuation among big tech firms shows Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta are way out on a limb with spending on data centers, having committed $70–125 billion each to buildouts, as compared to a larger community of related companies, including Apple and Tesla, with capex averaging $10 billion each.
Meta cloud market cap is not suffering like MSFT because they just reported best earnings growth in 4 years, but the article doesn't examine whether that growth in any way accommodates the $125 billion being spent right now.
According to chart, Nvidia stands out as far and away the most valuable firm in the charted constellation, yet its capex is in the bottom 5% of the spread of companies considered.
//“It was never a commitment,” Huang told reporters in Taipei. “They invited us to invest up to $100 billion and of course, we were, we were very happy and honored that they invited us, but we will invest one step at a time.” ... The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the investment plan announced in September [to build 10GW data center(s)] had stalled after some inside Nvidia expressed doubts about the deal.//
//As I stood there coughing, eyes streaming, lungs on fire, watching cops lose their goddamn minds over a dildo, I realized something sacred and stupid and true: You can’t baton your way out of satire. You can’t gas a punchline. And you absolutely cannot maintain authority while tear-gassing people over a rubber dick.//
Lunacy of Artemis
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
Why Not Mars?
https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
Shape of a Mars Mission
https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...
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