Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
3 July 2022
It’s Sunday, and that means time for another edition of Winding Down. We start with an essay on one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, move on to AI and climate change, and then ransomware. Also figuring in this issue are cryptocurrency tracking, satellites falling out of the sky, bones and space travel, and even time travel. There’s really nice pictures of Battersea Power Station’s refurbished Art Deco control room, and a satellite selfie taken in space! The quote is from Isaac Asimov.
In the Scanner section we have pointers to cryptocurrency and QAnon, driverless taxis blocking the road, 3D printing, big tech and the internet, vasectomies, a lost USB stick, a plastic-eating enzyme, and a liquid metal...
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue 10 July
Credits: Thanks to Fi Craig for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down and for editing it for spelling, grammer, etc.
Essays:
Just one essay this week, but I thought it was interesting. It is a suggested solution to the Fermi Paradox, which I’ve mentioned before. (‘Why haven’t we been contacted by aliens if the universe is so big and must have more advanced civilisations than us?’) What I like about the authors’ ideas is that their solution doesn’t just depend on pure science, it also looks at things like energy use, the lifetime of stars, and whether a civilisation would spend the time and work to build a Dyson sphere around its own star and then, when it eventually explodes, go to the trouble of building a new sphere round a new star, thus starting the process again.
Take a look at their solution to this problem which, in my view, provides the first realistic solution I’ve read about.
https://www.space.com/aliens-hiding-on-dyson-spheres-around-white-dwarfs
AI and Computing:
The Register has a short and interesting piece on the way in which the massive use of AI and machine learning as we currently design it is using huge quantities of electricity and contributing to the very problems of climate warming that many of the AI supercomputers and such like are trying to find solutions to. And, as the article points out, the whole area of computing is still in its infancy, so there is still a tendency to throw more and more hardware in to find solutions.
See what you think.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/08/ai_climate_impact/
Crime:
Ransomeware gangs are changing their modus operandi. When they break in they don’t bother to encrypt the data anymore. They exfiltrate the data and threated to sell it off to the highest bidder if it’s not ransomed! Basically theft and extortion with no messing about with encryption and keys.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/25/ransomware_gangs_extortion_feature/
Digital Currencies:
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (the largest exchange) has been selling its track and identification software to the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It seems the software allows users to track transactions through the blockchain. The blockchains of most digital currencies are public, so theoretically anybody could do it, but the sheer volume of transactions makes it impossible to do so manually.
It will be interesting to see what happens as this activity becomes better known. Will people stop using Coinbase, or will they just shrug, secure in the ‘knowledge’ that their digital wallets remain encrypted and ‘secure’.
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-ice/
Satellites:
I’m sure you already know that we are in a very unsettled part of the sun’s eleven year cycle. Lots of fierce pictures of the sun’s surface, diagrams full of ovals and arrows, and mysterious references to the ‘Carrington Event’. What you probably don’t know yet is that all this activity is slowing down the stuff in Earth orbit. That’s great for all the junk that’s there because it will help it to de-orbit the stuff to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
It will also slow down Earth low orbit satellites, which means that they will have to use some of their small stock of fuel to boost themselves back into the correct orbit. That means that they will have less fuel for their normal orbital corrections, and will end their lives earlier than calculated and have to be replaced sooner.
https://www.space.com/satellites-falling-off-sky-solar-weather
https://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-1859-carrington-event
Space Travel:
Bad news for those angling up for a trip to somewhere like, say, Mars. It could take, at current technology, three years to reach the place from Earth. That’s a long time to be suffering the weightlessness of space. And I use the word suffer deliberately, because the results of a study on the effects of null gravity on leg bones shows a serious loss of bone material (aka osteoporosis). It also shows that spaceflight alters the structure of the bones. Even worse a return to gravity does not replace the smaller bones that have wasted completely, though it does thicken up the remaining bones.
Set foot on Mars on arrival? You are more likely to collapse ina heap on the sands of Mars...
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-reveals-devastating-effect-on-astronaut-bones-from-being-in-space
Time Travel:
Is time travel really possible? Space.com’s Expert Voice section got Theoretical Physicist Peter Watson, Emeritus professor, Physics, Carleton University to look into the issue, explain it and help figure out whether real (as opposed to SciFi) time travel is possible. I love his conclusion, but if you want to know the answer you have to read his really interesting piece!
https://www.space.com/can-we-time-travel-physicist-explains
Pictures:
Eat your heart out cyberpunks. They’ve just finished restoring the art deco Control Room A in London’s Battersea Power Station, and WOW do I want to play with all those switches and dials! The Londonist has some great pictures. And the bad news is that they are not planning to open it to the public. However, I think, and hope, that there is going to be a lot of pressure to do so!
https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/battersea-power-station-control-room-a-pictures
And how about this, then – a selfie taken by the MP42 microsatellite. Yes – the satellite did use a selfie-stick (a space grade one) to take the picture and a GoPro Hero 7 space graded camera, just like the ones on drones!
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/29/nanoavionics_space_selfie/
Quotes:
This weeks quote comes from scientist and science fiction write Isaac Asimov:
“The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it’s bad for you.”
Source – Oxford Dictionary of Quotations – Fifth Edition
Somehow, I don’t think Asimov was the first or the last person to spot this!
Scanner:
Crypto influencers allegedly weaponize conspiracies to fleece QAnon followers
https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-influencers-allegedly-weaponize-conspiracies-to-fleece-qanon-followers
Driverless Cruise robotaxis stop working simultaneously, blocking San Francisco street [Couldn’t resist this story! AL]
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191045/cruise-robotaxis-driverless-roadblock-san-francisco
Engineers develop new kind of 3D printing
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-kind-3d.html
Big Tech shrank the internet while growing its own power
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/internet_has_shrunk/
Men rush to get vasectomies after Roe ruling
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/29/abortion-vasectomies-roe-birth-control/
Japanese man loses USB stick with entire city’s personal details
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-61921222
Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste [I’m sure there are entire SciFi books about things that could go wrong! – AL]
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-plastic-eating-enzyme-billions-tons-landfill.html
This liquid metal could transform soft electronics
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-liquid-metal-could-transform-soft-electronics-180980043/
Footnote:
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
3 July 2022
Alan Lenton is a retired on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist (among other things), the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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