Tag: science fiction

Maybe I Should Be More Optimistic About Humans

I read the Psychiatric Times article “How Psychiatry Has Enriched My Life: A Journey Beyond Expectations” by Victor Ajluni, MD and published on July 4, 2023. It was like a breath of fresh air to read an expression of gratitude. Just about everything I read in the news is negative.

At the end of the article, Dr. Ajluni added a comment acknowledging that artificial intelligence (AI ChatGPT) assisted him in writing it. He takes full responsibility for the content, to be sure. I wouldn’t have guessed that AI was involved.

There’s a lot of negative stuff in the news. There are hysterically alarming headlines about AI.

I suppose you could wonder if Dr. Aljuni’s article is intentionally ironic, maybe just because the gratitude tone is so positive.  If it had been intended as irony, what could the AI contribution have been, though? I have a pretty low opinion of the AI capacity for irony.

I think irony occurs to me only because I tend to be pessimistic about the human race.

Maybe that’s because it has been very easy to be pessimistic about what direction human nature seems to be taking in recent years. I’ve been reading Douglas Adams’ satirical book, “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It contains several of his books which I think are really about human nature, and the setting is in a funny though often terrifying universe. I think there’s an ironic tone which softens the pessimism. The most pessimistic character is not a human but a robot, Marvin the paranoid android.

Unlike Marvin, I don’t have “a brain the size of a planet” (it’s more the size of a chickpea), but I am getting a bit cynical about the universe. I’m prone to regarding humans as evolving into a race of beings similar to those described in the book “Life, The Universe and Everything.” In Chapter 24, Adams describes the constantly warring Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax.

The Silastic Armorfiends are incredibly violent. Their planet is in ruins because they’re constantly fighting their enemies, and indeed, each other. In fact, the best way to deal with a Silastic Armorfiend is to lock him in a room by himself—because eventually he’ll just beat himself up.

In order to cope better, they tried punching sacks of potatoes to get rid of aggression. But then, they thought it would be more efficient to simply shoot the potatoes instead.

They were the first race to shock a computer, named Hactar. Possibly, Hactar was an AI because, when they told Hactar to make the Ultimate Weapon so they could vanquish all their enemies, Hactar was shocked. Hactar secretly made a tiny bomb with a flaw that made it harmless when the Silastic Armorfiends set it off. Hactar explained “…that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than setting it off…”, which was why it made the bomb a dud. While Hactar was explaining that it hoped the Silastic Armorfiends would see the logic of this course of action—they destroyed Hactar, or at least thought they had.

Eventually, they found a new way to blow themselves up, which was a relief to everyone in the galaxy.

There are similarities between Hactar and the AI called Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence (V.I.K.I.) in the movie “I, Robot.” The idea was that robots must control humans because humans are so self-destructive. Only that meant robots had to hurt humans in order to protect humanity. The heroes who eventually destroy V.I.K.I. make up a team of misfits: a neurotic AI named Sonny, a paranoid cop who is himself a mixture of robot and human, and a psychiatrist. Together, the team finally discovers the flaw in the logic of V.I.K.I. Of course, this leads to the destruction of V.I.K.I.—but also to the evolution of Sonny who learns the power of the ironic wink.

Maybe kindness is the Ultimate Weapon.

The Skinwalker Ranch Connection to Nikola Tesla

I watched one of the new episodes of The Secret of skinwalker Ranch the other night. The use of special imaging techniques led to finding what looked like little tunnels running underground in one area of the property.

That led to trotting out the little excavator and digging up the ground. They found some light-colored veins of dirt, which they analyzed. They contained elements, things like sodium, potassium and whatnot. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t compare that to the surrounding normal-looking dirt, because I think dirt everywhere has those elements in it.

I think one of the scientists/actors, Dr. Travis Taylor, mentioned that this kind of dirt might be able to transmit electricity. That got me thinking about Nikola Tesla and his fascinating experiments with electricity. I’m probably all mixed up about his theories but I think he tried to send electricity through the earth in an effort to show it could be transmitted without wires.

In fact, that led me on my usual wild goose chasing through the internet. I didn’t know Tesla almost died from cholera when he was much younger. I also found out he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). That led me to a paper that was published in a neuroscience journal in 1999 showing that an intracellular form of cholera toxin was associated with OCD-like behaviors in mice.

Tesla also became friends with Mark Twain, one of my favorite humorists. Tesla used his “earthquake machine” to cure Twain’s constipation—by causing diarrhea.

You can learn a lot about science by watching the skinwalker ranch show. On the History Channel website, it’s subtitled as “science fiction.”

Campbell KM, de Lecea L, Severynse DM, Caron MG, McGrath MJ, Sparber SB, Sun LY, Burton FH. OCD-Like behaviors caused by a neuropotentiating transgene targeted to cortical and limbic D1+ neurons. J Neurosci. 1999 Jun 15;19(12):5044-53. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.19-12-05044.1999. PMID: 10366637; PMCID: PMC6782675.

We took the picture of the Nikola Tesla sculpture at Niagara Falls in 2015.

Thoughts on UFOs and UAPs

I was either too sleepy the other night or briefly abducted by extraterrestrials to stay up for the new spin-off TV show, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch. They hired new actors—I mean researchers. The original show, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, is actually interesting and I usually watch it. The actors are always firing off rockets into the sky to provoke either the extraterrestrials or the skinwalkers.

One of the cast members is an actual scientist. He’s Dr. Travis Taylor, PhD, an astrophysicist. He’s in charge of firing off those rockets. There’s a Wikipedia article on him. He has several degrees and has written many books. He’s a pretty good actor.

The other night, the show hosted a guest who was the guy who came up with the alternative name for UFOs: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). I can’t remember his name but he was used as bait to attract attention from the ranch, which is sometimes conceptualized as being a kind of mysterious living entity, capable of ignoring humans and not creating any weirdness—and at other times causing major atmospheric disturbances and UAP activity that makes everybody on the show say things like: “We’ve got to get Travis’s eyes on this piece of dead animal skin—it’s just crazy!”

I’m not sure how any of the cast can keep themselves from laughing. On the other hand, they’ve managed to involve the Utah state attorney general. He has the same tailor as Johnny Cash, apparently. He supports the actors and seems to know better than to try and upstage any of them. He wants to know what’s flying in the air in his state. Judging from the number of sick and dead mutilated animals strewn around the 512-acre property, my guess is that it’s mainly buzzards.

The show might talk to the guy who recently identified himself as an ex-intelligence official and whistleblower who reports that the federal government is hiding numerous UAPs, many of which have no doubt been crashed on Earth by drunken extraterrestrials, none of whom have ever taken a defensive driving course and are doing hard time in underground prisons in Utah for operating UAPs while under the influence of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, an alcoholic beverage described by researcher Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Try to say that sentence in one breath, I double-dog dare you.

I think the producers of the skinwalker show should consider hiring another actor, Nick Pope, the retired employee of the British Ministry of Defense. He investigated UAPs when they were still called UFOs, which of course made him a laughingstock, but that all changed when the name was changed to UAP. He is now a famous member of the Ancient Aliens team and the only one sane enough to persuade people from actually breaking down the gates of Area 51 during the Storm Area 51 crisis in 2019. He also has a Wikipedia entry. He has never publicly denied successfully completing treatment for Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster use.

Unless the new Beyond Skinwalker Ranch spinoff moves to an earlier time slot, I’ll just have to wait for the reruns. It’s probably not as funny as the original and certainly won’t equal the uproariously hilarious Mountain Monsters (which we can no longer watch because it left cable TV). Only a parody like that can top the current UAP TV program fare.

Avatar Fever

Sena and I just watched the original Avatar movie on TV last night. The new sequel just opened: “Avatar: Totally Under Water Without Snorkel or Scuba.”

I can’t recall when we actually saw the original Avatar, although it was probably not long after it was released in 2009. The CGI effects are still mesmerizing.

Sena found a YouTube with a demo showing how the action sequences were made, which pitted Sam Worthington (who played Jake Sully) against what looked like a rubber dragon yanked around by a few guys while other actors played their parts, all of them wearing what looked like ping pong balls and green dots.

It doesn’t take any of the magic away from the finished product, believe it or not.

However, I’m not totally sold on the avatar concept. I get it that Jake’s consciousness jockeyed back and forth between his human and Pandora bodies. But I can’t pin a specific inconsistency on any particular scene in the movie suggesting sometimes Jake was conscious and interacting during the day on the spaceship during the times when he should have been conscious learning how to be one of The People.

You know, when Jake’s conscious in the spaceship and out of the incubator (so to speak), his blue guy avatar should become limp and lifeless out in the Pandora Forest, maybe at the exact time when Neytiri (ultimately his main squeeze, and played by Zoe Saldana) is trying to teach him how to juggle deadly 3-headed zebra-striped iguanas, whose main diet consists of a certain male Na’vi body part involved in reproduction. This is why many of them look like they have Peyronie’s disease. This is available only in the Director’s cut, of course.

I was astounded by the relative difference in stature between the Na’vi and humans. For example, Jake’s main rival for Neytiri’s affection is a guy named Tsu’tey (played by Laz Alonso) who looks like a shrimpy, homely nerd next to his Pandora comrades. But when he’s on the airborne military transport toward the latter part of the movie, he’s several feet taller than the human soldiers and he tosses them around like garbage bags.

I wasn’t clear on why the head scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver), smokes cigarettes. What’s up with that? Her line early in the movie when they are all in their avatar bodies, some of them for the first time: “Don’t play with that, it’ll make you go blind.” Is that supposed to let the audience know that the Na’vi males have penises? Or do I just have a dirty mind?

Sena read an on-line source that the James Cameron, who wrote, directed, co-produced, and co-edited Avatar, called the main bad guy, Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) in the film a “motherf***er.” I guess he’s been reincarnated in the sequel. Evil never dies.

But Good always triumphs in the end-we hope.