Yay! I found it!

A while ago, I posted a blog about a documentary on atheism that I particularly enjoy, and noted that it was, in fact, a supplement to another documentary called “Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief”, which I couldn’t find at all.

Well, I found it. I was walking along one day, thinking about it when it occurred to me: what if it’s in the same place that all other videos ever made in the history of the universe are? YouTube.
So, yeah, failure of imagination. But to be fair, it was released under a different title in the US called simply “A Brief History of Disbelief”.

Anyway, I’m happy.

Creationist Double Fail

A common creationist objection to the theory of evolution is the orbital recession of the Moon. It is well known that the distance between the Earth and Moon is gradually getting larger. Every year, the Moon is roughly 3.8 cm farther away than it was the year before. What creationists claim is that if you run the clock backwards, and let the Moon approach the Earth at that rate, it ends up colliding with the Earth long before the supposed age of the Earth-Moon system, thus showing that the world couldn’t be that old.

The usual objection is over the past 4.6 billion years (the age of the Moon), the rate that it’s been moving away at hasn’t been constant. The mechanics of lunar recession is complicated, having to do with the distribution of oceans and landmasses on the Earth (different distributions produce different gravitational “tugs” on the Moon as it orbits). Today’s rate is actually quite a bit higher than it has been in the past. So directly extrapolating today’s rate into the past won’t actually give you the correct answer.

And then…there’s this:

The Moon is currently 385,000 km away (on average. The Moon’s orbit is actually somewhat eccentric).

385,000 km / 3.8 cm per year = 10.1 billion years. Far older than the accepted age of the Earth.

So even if you do blindly extrapolate backwards, the Moon doesn’t actually end up colliding with the Earth. So not only do creationists not do their research, they also suck at math!

My Story

One of the problems with being an atheist is that you’re always perceived as something negative. And that perception really isn’t that far from reality. I mean most of what you hear about atheists is that they’re usually arguing or fighting against something. They’re trying to remove the 10 Commandments from government buildings, or getting prayer out of school, or they’re writing books blasting traditional religious thought.

While I do believe this is necessary at some level, there’s really nothing substantive about atheism or non-religion in general. There is secular humanism which does have positive core values, but that usually just gets lost in the mix.

I’ve also struggled to come up with something positive while at the same time promoting critical thinking. It’s kind of contradictory to lay out a set of positive values, but then saying “and be critical of everything, even what I just said”. Imagine if a Christian said, “God loves you and wants to save your soul, but also question everything. Even question whether this God exists in the first place.” It just makes it confusing.

So, what I thought I’d do was simply tell my own story of how I got to where I am today in my atheism. Well, not just atheism. Atheism is practically nothing. It is a mere sentence in the thick novel of my personal beliefs. I am a secular humanist, a transhumanist, and deeply convinced of the value and correctness of scientific methodology and of the ongoing scientific endeavor.

First, my parents. I grew up in a non-religious household. My mother is also an atheist, though not much of a critical thinker. She’s into things like Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda; fairly flakey things about consciousness and perceiving the universe. But she’s not really hardcore into these things. She’s like the moderate Christian version of them. Sort of believes it, but isn’t devoted to it. My father was into Scientology, but was never a member; mostly because he had no money and they wouldn’t have him.

After my parents divorced, I lived with my mother and she decided to take me to the Ethical Culture of Brooklyn. If you don’t know, the Ethical Culture is a group dedicated to ethical ideas. Everyone was accepted, and no one was made to feel inferior because of their personal beliefs. It’s sort of a non-religious Unitarianism. But its main focus is on ethics: what is right, what is wrong, how we should act, etc, but also the discussion of those ideas, not just swallowing it whole without thought.

We stopped going after we moved to California. We tried the Ethical Culture here but didn’t it interesting enough to stay. A year later, when I was 12, I met a girl (now my wife) who asked me to go to her and her friends to church, which was the Methodist Church. I agreed, and found it kind of interesting. I eventually went through confirmation and joined the church, but I never really believed in it. I had just done because that was what everyone else was doing so I figured why not.

As it turned both she and her friends really didn’t believe in it either, and stopped going. I found myself alone there now, continually pressured to go by my mother. She obviously didn’t believe either, but she said I made a commitment to them and so need to see it out. Eventually I convinced her that I hated going and she let me sleep in again on Sundays.

It was during this time that I really started questioning religion and whether God exists. I hadn’t believed them before, but I hadn’t really been critical of it, and mostly didn’t even understand the concepts. I was an “implicit atheist”, where my non-belief was simply due to the fact that I hadn’t been indoctrinated into it. It was here where I shifted to “explicit atheism” where I did begin questioning and coming up with logical reasons why there is no God, and understanding just what “God” is. I now knew what I was rejecting.

So for a few years I did that until my sophomore year of high school when one of my friends, who was pretty devoutly Catholic, invited me to his church. I decided to go, but due to curiosity about what Catholics believe, not because I thought it might be a way to the truth. I went there for a couple years, and, I have to say, I actually enjoyed it. I didn’t think any of the Catholic dogma was true, but they were nice friendly people to be around. They weren’t pushy at all about their beliefs. I mean, I went to their youth group, called Life Teen, and there was a lot in there about what the church’s teachings were and how to be a good Catholic, but I was never singled out. I felt part of a group that was being taught. And I definitely learned a lot more about Catholic teachings than I did about Methodist teachings at the Methodist Church.

But I eventually decided to move on. During this time I had also really learned a lot about critical thinking and the scientific method, both from my teachers at school and online articles (particularly about.atheism.com). It was in these that I saw the true majesty of the universe. The fact that we have the tools to objectively understand the very fundamental nature of reality is astonishing.

The true power of science is in its ability to test and verify theories, and to discard those that do not conform to nature. It is this that really distinguishes it from religion. There is no faith, there is no condemnation of questioning, and there are no logical gaps and fallacies. There is just no comparison. Science is adaptable. It takes this premise that we don’t know anything about the universe, and tries to figure it out. It doesn’t claim a dogma, then try to work backwards to find the evidence for that dogma. Everything is open to investigation.

By the time I was in college I was pretty set in being an atheist. I still say that I would believe in God if there were sufficient evidence (and given the nature of the claim, the evidence would have to be extraordinarily good), but nothing has made it in so far. There are just no good reasons to believe that a supreme being exists in the universe, and a great many reasons to believe otherwise.

I still struggle with personal beliefs, though. I first discovered transhumanism when I was 19 through Marshall Brain’s web pages. At first I didn’t like it. It just seemed too bizarre and undesirable to me. But, eventually, I sorted through it with my mental critical thinking tool kit, and found there was something here. We could make people better, or rather, develop the capabilities to let people make themselves better. We could develop the technology to upload the human mind to become immortal. We could develop the technology to create vast simulated realities and live in them as literal god-like beings. It is practical.

I’ll close out here with my rejection of my belief in extraterrestrial life, and not just because it’s my latest personal discovery. I had believed that aliens must exist in some form somewhere. Given the incredibly vast number of stars in the universe, coupled with the relative ease it is to make life, the universe must be teeming with life and other civilizations. But, as I started to investigate the consequences of those beliefs, I found that they were incompatible with the universe I saw around me. Where were these aliens? I believed aliens would colonize a large volume of space, as large as they possibly could, and do it quickly, since their only limited by the speed of light. So why aren’t they here already? Eventually, I realized that the simplest explanation was that they didn’t exist at all. It was devastating to me. I wanted to believe that alien life existed so badly, but the evidence just didn’t bear it out. I had to discard that belief, but it was actually not so bad. Because of my experience with having to prune my beliefs when necessary, I found that I was glad I came to a logical conclusion. Critical thinking gets easier, the more you do it. Changing your beliefs that you hold dear, gets easier.

And it’s a good thing too. We don’t know the nature of the universe when we’re born. It makes no sense to then pretend to.

Two Technological Steps Away from Virtual Space

In thinking about how we might get from today’s technology to the technology I’ve envisioned in the future, it’s often useful to work backwards; envisioning how to step back from high technology to lower technology.

For virtual space, it seems that we might accomplish the transition from today with only two “stepping stone” technologies. So, what exactly is virtual space? Simply a fully immersive, artificially created simulation of the world. You can interact with it just as you do the real world. You can see, hear, smell, feel, taste, etc, everything in the simulation just like you would in real life and, above all, have abilities that are impossible in the real world (flight, teleportation, instant creation of anything, etc.) So what would one step back from that be? Maybe a less-immersive type of virtual space.

Like say, portable, light-weight virtual reality glasses. These glasses simply give visual and auditory feedback, like playing a video game, but operated completely through audio and tactile command (with something like a virtual keyboard, which the glasses create, much like what can be done today). These glasses will be used to surf the internet, play games, make video and audio phone call, perhaps even be used to travel though a primitive version of virtual space. They could also be used as a real-world HUD (Heads-Up Display), which can overlay important information about real-world things, appearing on the things themselves (for example, lets say you’re at a restaurant and you don’t know what to get. You might use the glasses to go online, look for reviews of specific dishes, which the glasses will then point out by apparently projecting some sort of highlighting feature on the physical menu in front of you. I say “apparently” because the “projection” is entirely contained between the glasses and your eyes meaning only you can see it).

So how might we get to this technology? Well, I can see it growing directly out of cell phones. Basically, imagine something like this, but as an add-on to cell phones, like Bluetooth. Instead of looking at your screen, the information is relayed by Bluetooth, or similar technology, to these glasses that you are wearing. But you still have the phone and everything on you.

So that would be only two steps: electronic glasses connected to cell phones, electronic glasses without cell phones. The final transition comes at the end. It’s likely that real virtual space won’t come about until people start uploading. The demand just won’t be high enough to encourage a large percent of the population to undergo major surgery just to have the latest high-tech gadget (also, what do you do when the next model comes out a year later? Go through surgery again?). But if you’re uploaded, the transition from one set of virtual space hardware to the next becomes much simpler. Being uploaded means that your mind and your brain will already be easily accessible in the future.

So, what do we need to start on this path? Well the electronic glasses would be a considerable piece of technology in their own right. In order for there to be wide demand of these, they would have to be very similar to existing glasses of today. They would need to be just as light-weight and allow just as much visibility out of them, and be just as easy to take on and take off. They would also have to be very cheap, possibly no more that $100-$200 in today’s money. That might take some time, but we do have a few decades for this to be developed. Maybe in fifteen to twenty years, we’ll all have glasses like these.

Happy τ Day!

That’s right, its τ Day! Wait, what?

Recently, I have found an interesting proposal regarding the number π (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter, or, 3.14159265358979…and so on…). It states that using π is not the best choice and that we should use a constant that is equal to 2π, which is 6.283185307179586…and so on… Basically, the ratio between the circumference of a circle to it radius is more basic a concept than circumference to diameter.

So what’s the difference? Well the main point is that in almost every single equation that you encounter in math and physics that comes with a π in it, it actually comes as 2π or some multiple thereof. Therefore, it is more convenient to simply write τ (called “tau”), one character, than 2π, which is two characters. Physicists like to simplify things as much as possible when they can.

Therefore τ Day is 6/28, which is today!

There are other reasons too. Conceptually, it is more intuitive. Travelling τ radians takes you once around a circle. Travelling τ/2 radians takes you halfway. One tenth of a circle is τ/10, and so on. For π, the values would be 2π, π, and π/5, which don’t really make sense. Travelling π/5 takes you a tenth of the way around a circle, rather than a fifth?

Anyway, I love it, and maybe I’ll try to use it on some test and see what happens (initially noting that τ = 2π, of course).

Metric Time

The idea of re-doing the clock to use the metric system is something that is appealing to me, but I must admit I don’t see the idea catching on anytime soon.

The best system I believe is one based on the day, where days are divided into partitions that differ by some factor of ten (like 10, 100, 1000, etc.). There are currently 86,400 seconds in one day, so it seems logical to divide a day into 100,000 parts, and so that each “tick” of the metric clock will be almost as long as the current second.

My proposal is that the day is divided into 100 “hours” (equal to 14.4 minutes), which is then divided into 100 “minutes” each (equal to 8.6 seconds). You could have a decimal after that which could count the “seconds”, but it’s necessary.

Basically, under this system, looking at the clock would immediately tell you how far through the day you are. “25:00″ would be around sunrise. “50:00″ would be noon. “00:00″ would be midnight.

I also programmed an analog/digital metric clock so you can see how this works:

(Download here)

The clock automatically syncs up with your computer’s time, so all you have to do is run the program.

Atheism: Good Enough…

I like funny infographics. Here’s one:

(From here. L-R, T-B: Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sagan, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin.)

Now, you might argue that not all the men pictured here were really atheists. While it is true that people like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin did believe that there was probably some sort of god, it was only because scientific knowledge in that day was so lacking.

In the 18th and first half of the 19th century, there was no theory of evolution, or the big bang. It would have been very difficult to reject the Christian belief that god created everything, when there was no real alternative theory that could explain everything. If you could somehow bring these people into the 21st century, and teach them all that science has discovered along with the vast bulk of evidence that goes along with it, I’m almost certain they would accept it.

What we do know for certain is that all the people pictured were not faithful Christians, or believed in a personal god.  And that they were at least adherents to rational thought and skepticism, which is the most important thing of all.

Alien Civilizations VII: Black Hole Power

Some of you might remember my posts about the possible existence of alien intelligence. Executive summary:

Alien civilizations will tend to expand rapidly over intergalactic distances, eventually sweeping over our solar system. Such intelligence will harvest any and all resources it can for its own use, and thus be harvesting the solar system. Thus, alien civilization, if it existed, would be blatantly obvious. It is not, therefore, alien civilizations are unlikely to exist.

Now with my recent realization about black hole power, I have come to refine my arguments about alien intelligence. 1) Since a black hole power plant would be, in theory, a 100% efficient matter-to-energy converter, it will be the preferred method for alien intelligences to use. 2) Obviously, matter to fuel the black holes will still be necessary, thus alien intelligence will likely still harvest as much matter as they can. 3) Black holes are much more ideal for energy storage than antimatter, since literally nothing can escape them (except for Hawking Radiation as described earlier).

So, my former conclusion still holds.

But I did realize something interesting. Let’s say there was an alien intelligence doing this. They are expanding at slower-than-light speeds across intergalactic space, basically making them look like an expanding sphere of darkness where they have enclosed stars with Dyson Swarms (or perhaps collapsed them into black holes). This is basically what we see in the universe today. Huge intergalactic voids with “nothing” in them. And between these voids are thin streams of galaxies.

I made this argument before, but discounted it because Dyson Swarms would still allow waste heat to escape and thus be detectable over intergalactic distances (or, at least, a whole galaxy of infrared sources would be detectable).

The thing is, black hole power plants wouldn’t give off this waste heat. At least in theory. A whole galaxy of black holes would radiate almost no power, and thus be undetectable across the universe, except for their gravity.

Which would be even closer to what we see today: Dark Matter, Intergalactic Voids.

Basically, my idea is, we happened to evolve at a point in history where a number of civilizations have arisen in the universe and are just starting to bump into each other in intergalactic space. Our galaxy hasn’t been reached yet, but it will soon.

We can even apply the Anthropic Argument here. Basically, why are there no alien civilizations apparently around? Because they haven’t reached us yet. If they did, we wouldn’t have evolved to ask the question.

Anyway, despite all this rampant speculation, it is important to review Sagan’s quote at the top of the page: “We should not be afraid to speculate. But we should be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.” No matter what I may type here, it is ONLY empirical evidence that will decide on way or another. Speculation may have its place, but speculation must always give way to scientific evidence.

I don’t know if I’m right, but it is interesting to think about. It’s a jumping off point, not an end in itself.

And The Winner Is…

A) He will say his mathematics were in error. Thank you for playing…erm…this game that I just made up.

So yeah, as I already noted, and as you may already be aware, the Rapture did not happen. However, Camping has announced that, going through his “math”, he now predicts the whole thing will happen on October 21st.

Ok, the thing is, all this does is cause people who don’t know better to get panicky and so dumb things like sell their possessions. Yeah maybe it’s their own fault for not being critical enough in their beliefs but it still causes real harm to real people who might otherwise not have done anything.

Another thing that surprised me is how a lot of attention is still on Camping about his failed prediction. Usually when someone gives a date for the end of the world (or Rapture, whatever) when the day actually passes, people just tend to forget about it and the person who made the claim is basically let off the hook. But this time it seems to be different.

Anyway, my estimation of the odds of this happening on 10/21 are about the same as the last time:

No Rapture

I would say that I’m surprised…but that would be an utter lie.