Meeting my wife Luda -- from mundane to esoteric

People often ask: how did you first meet your wife, Luda? And OK, it’s one of my favorite subjects. It has many, many levels – and I think it’s entertaining.

First – the normal instructive level, stories I tell lots of people.

We first met at a conference at NIST in 1996, a conference on machine intelligence organized by Jim Albus and Alex Meystel, whom we both knew reasonably well. Jim and Alex planned to bring together all the important approaches to building and understanding intelligence, to get some kind of dialogue broader and deeper than the narrow conferences led by just one discipline. There were lots of stories then about the powerful secrets of Russian AI , so Alex worked hard to locate the eight best people form Russia to represent that stream of work, and get their travel funded. Then I stretch a bit: “They were brought up on the stage for us all to see.. and who were they? Snow White and the seven dwarfs. You can guess which one was Snow White.” (But not at all that Disney personality!)  

Soon after, one of the seven dwarfs approached Luda, and told her: “I have to warn you about something. That Werbos guy, who works for the US government, has been asking lots and lots of questions about you. I think youmay be under watch form them.” “Well,” she said, “There might be another explanation?” Dwarf: “How could there possibly be another explanation? I could not imagine any other possibility.” She just smiled.

Then came a key big plenary talk by Walter Freeman, a leading neuroscientsist.

“YOU neural network people...” he said, pointing directly at me, “and YOU AI people” he said, pointing directly at Luda, “If you people want to build an intelligent system so much, you should just have a baby. That’s the biological approach.” Some time later, I sent an email to Walter: “OK, Walter, we followed your advice. But now how do we UNDERSTAND this intelligent system..?” “Oh, that’s up to you. But we can collaborate on the general subject..”

Lots more amusing stuff, but one last instructive mundane story

Months later, as I went to the coffee stand in the ECCS division of NSF, one of my colleagues said: “Paul, I think you are taking this woman too seriously. That’s normal for people who just met each other, but you really need to be more realistic. If you start going on the path to making a life together... you are from totally different cultures, with different values, and you need to be realistic about the chances of you working together long-term.” My reply: “Well, I don’t know about that. In our area, more than half the people are Indian or Chinese. Being Russian... that’s like the girl next door.”  His face grew almost furious, and he exploded: “How could you even imagine that THAT was what I meant? No, by strange and alien culture and values, I meant, she is a computer scientist and you are an engineer.” I smiled: “Don’t worry. We are both crossdisciplinary types. That much I know for sure.”

OK, that’s the normal part. But real life is not so simple ... has not been, and will not be.

Early in 1989, I visited a townhouse near Cambridge University, which Andy Barto was renting for awhile while collaborating with folks there; he invited me to stay and talk to them for a few days, following on a workshop we both presented at. At that time, my number one intense intellectual effort was in a different area altogether – trying to understand the foundations of physics enough to get back to the notion of objective reality. I had a few papers out on that topic, and had spent years trying to understand all aspects, but somehow the great complexity just wasn’t coming together in my mind. A major problem was that I had no one to talk to to get really deep in that difficult subject.

“This is harder than what Maxwell or Einstein faced. It is a question of ‘order form chaos...” The only one who really had dramatic success in doing that before was Isaac Newton.” .

No, I did not give up on all the many normal rational approaches to the Big Question I was asking... but why not add one more approach, given how hard this was? And so, in a free afternoon, I went to the Cambridge (Trinity?) chapel, which has been in operation fro centuries, and sat down to meditate, focusing on the statue of Newton there (and any Newton vibes I could find or imagine). I had some serious abilities at that time (a bit rusty by now), and could focus energy and questions and links rather well. “Help!.. Oredr form chaos...! Any clues? Can we talk..? I really need help here..”

And then, that night... there was plenty of time to sleep, and time for the period of “astral dreaming” I usually had in those days, maybe about 5AM.

In the dream... here I was in some vast space... and a voice spoke to me above. “I have been giving some serious consideration to your request. It meets  high standards or worthiness, and I am inclined to grant it. However, there are certain things we need to discuss first.

“The soul you were hoping to contact has a very special karma. You know karma is, tings that someone must work on. He had and has all those capabilities you refer to, but had special karma in understanding certain kinds of feeling and the needs of the opposite sex. Thus this great soul has been reincarnated into a form which makes it impossible to avoid learning a lot more about those other aspects of life. And so, this soul has been incarnated in the following form...”

Flash to an image which I should not describe in all detail, but which certainly took my breath away.

The voice continued: “To receive the boon you request, you must do something in return. Would you be willing to fully meet HER needs as they are in this new incarnation?”

“Well, sir, I don’t know if I can. I am just a normal person in some ways. But certainly, I would be very honored to try very hard, without equivocation, and promise to do the very best I can. I would certainly be very, very motivated.”

“Very well,” said the voice, “It shall be so. Things shall be so arranged.” I remember looking out the window of the bus as I left Cambridge, wistfully thinking that I never even saw anyone like that in Cambridge, and sadly feeling it was probably all just a dream. Until 1996, when my life and hers had gone through many changes (curiously supportive of this new direction, though seeming painful at the time)... and a huge wave of response and recognition hit me the moment I first saw her as I entered NIST for that conference.

Of course, that has remained in my mind always, even as other stories and events occur, and so on. I have generally satisfied my curiosity about “order from chaos,” with new things in process now, but lots more “in a desk drawer until people are ready.” So many other young Luda stories totally consistent with this image... but .. not for now. She understands better than I do the need to be careful about not saying too much too soon;

Some might accuse her of occasional “paranoia,” but it is caution very well grounded in real-world experience.  

==================

OK, one more story.

In my last month at NSF, I went to the coffee station to get some hot water for tea, and talked about lots of little things with a female colleague. Somehow I slipped out the view that Luda might well be the most intelligent woman on earth. I didn't make a big deal of it... but the instant I let it slip out, the expression on her face really, really responded. I can tell that a part of her felt a bit challenged and threatened... but she forcibly controlled that response... and said: "Wow!  ALL husbands should believe that about their wives. It is a great thing that a husband should believe that about his wife.
They all should. This should be an example..."

But I thought back to bits of evidence. For example, I knew nothing about operator field theory (the field theory of field operators, built on creation and annihilation operators which are functions of space or of space-time) or about Fock-Hilbert space until I was 21 years old, in graduate school But she has nice friendly nostalgic memories of going to a grassy, sunny park at age 15, sitting under a tree, and reading Feynman's work on that subject, as a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon. In the early years of our marriage, she showed me some books in Russian on constructive and axiomatic field theory covering aspects I had never seen in the US literature, and connections to the theory of characteristic functions which I had never seen in the US high energy literature.

But no, none of us are infallible. We all have lots and lots of things we have to adjust to, especially if we intend to learn more.

More on the greatest near-term threat to your survival from climate change

OK folks, this is more on the threat of massive H2S emissions from the ocean, and also on the reasons why you haven’t yet been told how bad the threat to your life is.

Part of the problem is that the threat is “crossdisciplonary” – it cuts across different areas of study, and the key information has only recently come to emerge. I have gotten new information on this recently, and we have had discussions on very serious discussion lists. Here is copy a few of the recent discussions, starting with an IEEE discussion of how soon and how it might affect you, and on to the needs for research to really pin this down.

Why do I keep after this same old thing? Well, folks, if something seems likely to kill you, do you just forget it before there is logical reason to do so? Can twitter thinking really save you?

================ Timing and big picture

An IEEE person asked:
Paul, what are the time scales for the effects you discuss?  People do react differently to threats that are likely to occur this year vs. 100 years from now.
----------------------------

As I said, the maps from NOAA show oxygen already decreasing in the deep waters off Antarctica, which are the primary source of oxygen for the deep oceans of the entire earth. On quick eyeball, it looks like about 40 years before zero for the side which supplies oxygen to the Pacific. Once conditions are right for ANY kind of microbe, the explosion and proliferation is instantaneous on the time scales we usually live on.

To put this in perspective -- one of the smallest mass extinctions which Ward talks about in his paperback book, Under a Green Sky, is the paleocene-eocene event, the most recent. AFTER the dinosaurs died off, primates and big  cats evolved -- and all died at this event. we are part of the strand which re-evolved from scratch, presumably from very robust small rodents like rats or aardvarks or whatever. Key point -- this was a relatively small H2S outbreak, mainly from water in the North Atlantic. Earlier, larger H2S breakouts would have been enough to kill off not only the primates but all the rats too. The sheer volume of H2S produced, and discharged through big waves, has a big impact. The Pacific Ocean, which is coming into play now, is MUCH larger than the North Atlantic. (Still, last I heard, transition in the SArctic and North Atlantic might be ten or twenty years off; I haven't paid as much attention, since I learned about the bigger problem in the Pacific.)  Zero oxygen would be like a very sudden, huge step change in "dead zones" and H2S producing areas   Still, the expansion of dead zones is ALREADY a problem -- much more serious for coral reefs, for example, than ocean acidification. And perhaps there may already be some link between dead zones and nutrient runoff with problems in sustainable seafood supplies.

By the way, the Black Sea already is an advanced case of "black water," the kind of water where H2S is produced in huge quantity and where poison crowds out our kind of life. It is sad how Putin's allies have systematically done in  local political leaders who wanted to do something about that threat. But the Black Sea is much smaller than the North Atlantic, let alone the Pacific, and the outgassing is usually far less than from the ocean. Still, there was a similar lake in Africa where people felt very safe... until one night, there was a small ripple... and the folks in the closest town all "woke up dead" the next morning. (I think I read that in Ward's book, but there are other sources). I would not be totally surprised if something like that happened one day in Sevastopol, Istanbul or Ankara (though Sevastopol seems most likely). If the main Russian navy wakes up dead one morning, I do hope Putin shows more self-control than usual.

In truth, years ago, as I tracked down papers which Ward cited, and asked NASA people for their
thoughts, I ran across a paper arguing that it took 2,000 YEARS for the H2S of the great Permian-Triassic extinction to reach levels which would be fatal as poison to a human on the land. That seemed to reduce the urgency.. until I looked at the implied chain of events BEFORE H2S would reach that level of concentration.VERY soon, the entire earth stinks like the very worst foul marsh or rotten eggs you have ever smelled, like the "stench of brimstone" folks once talked about. That already has direct implications on reproductive behavior and selection of all mammals. For many years, the H2S creates other sulfur compounds in the atmosphere, like an SOx problem multiplied a hundred fold, with side effects like severe acid rain and chemicals rising up to the ozone layer. Long, long before the H2S concentration is directly fatal, it makes everyone blind. My guess is that radiation from the ozone layer problem would be what kills people first --
BUT AGAIN: my point is that we really need to understand and quantify the threat a whole lot better than I have done, putzing around part time on my own and asking questions from folks who should know a whole lot better.

And why don't they?

Years ago, I remember telling a colleague with excitement: "Hey, we have early indications of a fuel cell which could actually WORK for automobiles,\which actually gets that more than 50% whole systems efficiency without which none of this is real. Just go to arxiv and search on Urquidi and Grimes..." And his response: "But Paul, all the money is specifically for PEM fuel cells."
Me: "But none of them show any sign of actually working." Him: "The money is not for things that work, it js for PEM, for what the folks want who control the budgets. We know not to talk back to them; they don't like that kind of thing." I suppose there is a lot of  money for warming and ocean acidification, and that the folks in Congress who doubt that warming is THE BIG THING are more interested in phasing out climate and evolution altogether, rather than trying to understand anything. They sure don't put up with any kind of back talk; they like to keep things simple, which seems to be their concept of transparency. (I do wonder what they plan to do with quantum physics when they get to it.)

I do wonder about the big contradiction between "wealth management" classes, which teach highly motivated big donor types how to make sure their grandchildren have money, even as those same grandchildren are being scheduled for a rather unpleasant death. And no, they are not doing anything at all serious to develop launch systems capable of providing any fraction of the human population an alternative; their lobby systems are blocking that too (perhaps because the folks in charge of such top-down political networks don't have information about technical requirements for RLV development).

==================================== Where this started after recent conference

Five to ten times in past earth history (after the initial evolution of life) the levels of H2S and radiation on the land
reached levels which would kill every human on earth, if humans had been there at the time. Peter Ward, whose book Under a Green Sky
gives a good description of how that data is collected, believes that we are on course to reaching those levels again -- killing every human on earth.
Though I disagree with the details of Ward's THEORIES about the data, I for one do not intend to just ignore this threat. More and more, this is looking to me like the most likely "final trigger" likely to kill us all.

One of the IEEE people, from the IEEE Oceans Society, recently expressed worry that nutrients released from the biofuels industry are causing dead zones in the Caribbean. That seems very different from what Ward was saying -- but from the viewpoint of science I see them as pointing to the same tasks we really ought to be focusing on. When the much lesser threat of global warning surfaced years ago, Reagan was wise enough to say that we really ought to be studying the threat seriously, to try to understand how serious it is and what it depends on. With so much more at stake on the H2S front, it really should not be left to a part time hobby for a retired guy like me doing it alone, mainly focused on other topics! Still, I do keep trying to improve my understanding of this topic, and do have new thoughts to report.

The risk which concerns me most is the risk that the oxygen level in the deep waters of the southern Pacific
will get close enough to zero in about 40 years to cause a very sudden spurt in the growth of the specific type of microbe (a type of archaea)
which produces H2S. Ward gives various examples of places where that has already happened in a small area, and argues that this is what explains the mass extinctions of the past, which he is a leading expert on. That part of his story makes sense to me.

But then he gets politically correct. He notes a correlation between past extinctions and the rate of change of CO2, and speculates that ocean acidification is the "second trigger" which, combined with low oxygen in deep oceans, will kill us all.

At a conference yesterday on satellite data, I had a chance to speak to one of the Navy people, who has gotten a clear message from above that
sea level rise is a major concern (guiding some of the data collection), but none of that other stuff. "But what about threats that could kill every human on earth? Are they a concern or anyone?" Response: a knowing look, and a question, "oh, are you talking about ocean acidification"  In fact, since Ward has such high credentials in his field, as well as a powerful book aimed at the public, his theory that ocean acid is the trigger has had a strong impact on a certain circle of people. It has mainly just added energy to one of the existing factions in the climate debates.  But Ward is a paleontologist, not a chemist or a physicist. Why don't we have the kind of effort going to probe the competing explanations, and really try to learn what the implications are, instead of trying to act politically immediately without having any idea of what we are doing and what is really facing us?  This is really serious, for example, when data collection itself will have major blind spots.

Though I tend to doubt Ward's acidification theory, I still have deep respect for how he treated the subject in his book, which is far more satisfying to real scientific thinkers than most of what is published these days. He explained why he believes that theory, but he also cited other sources in a serious way, and emphasized the need for new crossdisciplinary research (especially on "thermohaline currents," the study of how levels of saltiness and temperature shape the currents which bring oxygen to the deep ocean, most of the time).

One of the sources he cites is a paper by Kump of Penn State, whose work seems to draw more respect than Ward's in those particular circles.
In effect, Kump says: "Our bottom line worry is the proliferation of those archaea which produce H2S. That's what kills us. But these archaea are not such a mystery. To proliferate, they need just two things -- low oxygen levels, and a supply of nutrients."

Even though I am theorist myself, I always ask: "What do the primary empirical data really tell us?" A year or two, I thought: "If it is that easy to get archaea and H2S proliferation, could we even see it (and model it) in an aquarium?" So I googled on 'stinky aquarium" -- and I didn't see anything to contradict Kump's idea. Lots of entertainment there, and maybe some possibilities for even a high school science project to be useful. (By the way, the Black Sea is another important test, though fortunately there is much less upwelling from there to the atmosphere than there is to the oceans. Still, I wonder what the chances are of a poison cloud striking Sevastopol or Istanbul in the night some day, causing an interesting international situation.)

There is pretty decent data on oxygen levels in the deep ocean. I was really stunned, a year or two ago, to learn that the issue is not "when will the oxygen-bearing currents by the Antarctic shut down?" Ward asked "what do the THC people have to tell us about the risk of stratified ocean?" That's not the issue, because it already happened! The new ice which guys like Inhofe crow about is due to the great wash of fresh water (which freezes much more easily than salt water, which is why we put salt on roads), water due to melting on the surface of the Antarctic, pouring into the ocean nearby. That same fresh water has simply zeroed out the current which bring oxygen to the deep ocean. The best maps I find on the web suggest we have about 40 years to go before it hits zero in the deep ocean, for the side which brings oxygen to the Pacific. It doesn't have to be zero on the surface for archaea to proliferate.

But it turns out that this happened before, even just a few thousands of years ago, before widespread human agriculture.
The risk is due to the COMBINATION of growing areas of low oxygen, and widespread (also growing) areas of nutrition
pouring into the ocean.

What would we need to be able to do a decent forecast (even stochastic) of how far away we are to a sudden tipping point when our extinction becomes assured?

Before the last IEEE Energy Policy Committee meeting, I had a nice conversations with the oceans guy (who is welcome to identify himself if he chooses).  We began thinking.. it would be nice if we had a database, with "adequate' resolution in three dimensions and time, of ocean oxygen and ocean levels of crucial nutrients such as phosphates, carbohydrates, iron, etc... above all the ones most important to archaea. Anticipating large dead zones has near-term benefits, as well as benefits in understanding the extinction possibility.

But what could be done at minimum cost to get a better feeling for the risk than what I said on these lists? How could we get such a database?

It would be nice if the DOD climate folks could add this to their radar. It is possible that the Navy already collects streams of data which simply require new back end analysis, to give us some better feeling. But the back end analysis might require some new research collaborations, to learn what new information could be extracted from the existing data either on its own or in combination with other data sources.

I was very interested yesterday in the presentations on "from Argos 3 to Argos 4," a report on plans for an ongoing productive collaboration on the Argos system of satellites. the French spaced agency (CNES) started this, and still leads the collaboration, but the US, the EUMETSAT effort and now (as of 2007) India's ISRO all play important roles as well. I wonder whether and how soon the network of ocean-observing buoys they maintain could be expanded to measure ocean chemistry?

Some big US aerospace stakeholders were also there. They suggested that we could simply combine the ongoing data on oxygen levels (limited as it is) with data from satellites on chlorophyll observed on the surface. My initial reaction was pretty negative, since archaea in the deep ocean aren't on the surface and they may have special nutrient vectors. However, BEFORE we have that kind of data, there may be some kind of statistical correlation (with error bars we need to know) between surface chlorophyll levels and the kind of nutrient variables which drive the growth of archaea. If we learn to understand those correlations better (with high school science experiments?), perhaps we could make better use of existing data, to give us at least a gross handle on the present threat and the future threats in the pipeline. The uncertainty bars may give at least some indication of the value of getting more and better data.

In the end, this still begs the question: whether the new Great Dying begins 40 years from now or 100 or 200, what can we do about it? I pay more attention to that question than I do about the timing, but this email is already long, and it is best for me to postpone that to other times and venues.

Best of luck,

    Paul
================== more on acid ocean not the real problem

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:20 PM an IEEE person wrote:

IMO, the problem with promoting adaptation is that there are no conceivable ways in which even industrialized countries will be able to adapt to an acidified (and thereby under productive) oceans or the unrest and migration resulting from diasporas in less developed regions of the world.

My reply:

A lot of the most serious scientists in climate, with important first-hand knowledge, like Caldeira and Ward, do point to acid ocean as the problem which worries them the most. Ward claims that the COMBINATION of acid ocean and "stratified ocean" (zones of low oxygen) are the two factors which have directly led to massive production of H2S in the ocean in the past, enough H2S to kill every human on earth, and are likely to do so again.

However, I respectfully disagree.

In 2009, working with the Senate EPW group, I had access to the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on ocean acidification. CRS did an excellent job on this. Among other things, instead of the pure tide of words and images we usually see from left and right, they had freal numbers for Ph. The kinds of ph people are talking about even through 2100 or 2200,
even in worst case discussions, are nothing even remotely like the really low (acid) ocean bottom acidity levels lone could see that year in the Smithsonian exhibit on ancient marine life. (Unfortunately, the same kind of pressures working to dumb down NASA and NSF have also been working on the Smithsonian, particularly in areas involving the evolution and history of life.) The direst worst case numbers I could find fell well short of making the ocean AS ACID as the normal fresh water we drink every day, which life in rivers and streams has long adapted to.

There were arguments (which CRS worked very hard to do justice to)
about specific endangered species, especially coral. But I really wouldn't want to give individual endangered species a priority comparable to the risk of H2S killing us all! Also, studied of coral by people really intensely concerned about individual coral reefs tend to implicate issues like oxygen dead zones and excess nutrients (and other chemical runoff) much more than ocean acidity.

On the other hand, I cited the work by Kump -- and note that one could even do experiments in an aquarium to clarify some of these issues! Low oxygen and nutrients are what drive the proliferation of those archaea which produce H2S, and they are both a serious concern, short-term and long-term.

How does this affect Lee's bottom line? Well, the nations of the world seem even less mobilized to understand (let alone respond to) the oxygen/dead-zone threat and the interaction it has with existing nutrient runoff than they are to ocean acidity. So it essentially strengthens his concern.

Hearing Peter Ward's talk about past H2S runups (and the immediate radiation problems near the start of those runups) was a big personal shock to me, since we are talking about OUR personal lives, and the lives of everyone we know. But in a way, it was a bigger, more depressing shock that almost everyone else who heard that story either treated either as just a nice little ego booster ("See! Look at me! I'm a good guy! I've been doing exactly the right thing all along") or as an alien evil thought meme to be rejected on religious or ideological grounds. ("My church says it's evil even to breathe a hint of the possibility that there might be some brimstone in our future?")
WHY don't more people WANT TO KNOW what the risk to them might be, and what might be done about it, the questions which really matter?

(I had a long dinner conversation with a visiting IEEE guy a few days ago, and this kind of question about human reactions came up, in a study about 45 years ago from Greeley, with links to Valliant. It's a really serious issue how people react to important things off their usual track.)



That is, none conceivable without significant reductions in standard of living or security. The above doesn't even consider weather extremes, impact of droughts on crops, biodiversity loss, wildfire losses, sea level rise, and other detrimental (but perhaps more manageable) occurrences.

While I don't like to sound like a pollyanna, the means for meeting the 2C goal should still be our primary concern, particularly if we consider the IEEE to be an organization that 'engineers for humanity.'

I have the impression that the official IEEE policy already accepts the idea that some balance between reducing net CO2 from human activities, adaptation, and developing technologies for geoengineering to survive worst cases (looking ever more likely) is called for. And I agree too. As for the details of that balance, and the types of R&D we need in the geoengineering part of it... I've written a lot already, and this email is too long for now.

Best regards,

email to that Jesus guy

A few years ago, arranging a visit to the University of Memphis, I joked with my collaborator there: "Hey, have there been any good Elvis sightings out there lately? Any day now I expect to hear stories of people seeing him on a date with Princess Di."

His response: "No, not really, but we have seen a lot of Jesus lately. In fact, he'd like a little talk with you when you come down." OK. He was a nice guy, and I got his email. This morning I sent him
an email, slightly pruned... below..

==================

Good morning, Yeshua!

Yesterday I had a long dinner conversation with .... where we got into a lot of areas -- like religion, politics, Boeing, and small bits of many other related topics. He has generally identified himself as Catholic.

At some point, your name came up. I said something like: "A lot of people would ask -- is he the real Jesus or Ben David, omniscient from heaven, or is he a charlatan? But I believe these simple binary categories are out of touch with reality. It is like the people who ask 'Would this system be conscious, or would it not?' It is not a binary world."

"Let me make an analogy between Yeshua and Karl Pribram. 

Of course, Karl was well known and at the top level on neuroscience and psychiatry and connecting the two, but he did not understand mathematics so much as we do. I remember talks he gave, where the first slide was a quote from Schrodinger (from the book "What is Life?"),

which Pribram liked and endorsed. Schrodinger's quote said something like:"All real understanding of big questions like this requires a crossdisciplinary approach -- and a deep conversation between people from different disciplines. Conversations like that cannot happen unless someone form one of the disciplines is willing to offer himself up as a kind of fool, suggesting things about the other disciplines which require vast improvement... and so in this book I offer myself up as that kind of fool, to try to begin a most important conversation." Karl would then say: "In this talk, I plan to do the same. I do not know as much about quantum theory or mathematics as many of you, but the conversation has to start somewhere. I look forward to working with you all later to improve the story."

So I said to him: "Yeshua is also a bit like that. As we come from the world of mathematics, to some degree, he is coming from the world of spiritual experience, where he is quite real and authentic. (I told some water stories, and we talked about human rapport.) Not godlike nor mundane, but real as he is, and, like some of us others, trying to learn

more about the aspects he does not yet know."

Before that, when we discussed Washington politics, I mentioned my image of spiritual couch potatoes. "Consider the analogy between health of the spirit and health of the body. Imagine a room full of people who believe very deeply in physical fitness, who implement their belief by sitting on couches in a big living room cheering for their football team (a model of physical fitness).  The biggest exercise they get is screaming at the top of their lungs to support their team and express hatred of the other team. They fill themselves both with physical poison (excess alcohol) and poisonous thoughts. They grow fat, unhealthy and old, and fall apart both inside and outside."

"In the midst of all that, if a real mountain climber (even a mezzo-mezzo one like us) were to walk into the room, and briefly say something about exercise or health, they would all just raise their voices as they usually do, and not even begin to understand ... the reality."

So later, when we talked about you, I referred to that, and basically said

how you are the opposite of those couch potatoes.

I also mentioned about our trip to India last month. (Many people in this little restaurant, Ravi Kabob, were Indian or Pakistani, and it seems that many ears were listening at some point.) On its visa application form, India demanded that we state our religion -- either one from a list of five or so (Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever), or "other... what?"

Luda just checked "Christian." But to Indians... this would indicate a kind of sectarian commitment which would be both unfriendly and misleading in my case, so I felt duty bound to pick something else.

For a moment, I considered checking "Buddhist," since there are strands of high Tibetan Buddhism where I feel pretty much in harmony with people... (like the mindfulness people) but really, that is a small part of Buddhism and it would also be misleading. So I checked "other," and wrote "Quaker Universalist."

I then said to him: "But if I was telling the whole truth, and not just part of it, I would have written instead that my religion is given at

www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf. Yeshua and I have discussed that, and we see pretty much eye to eye on these things."

(Luda says: "That's not your religion, that's your belief. Religion is an organized thing." By those semantics, Quaker Universalist was more or less the right thing for me to write.)

I mentioned Teilhard de Chardin again at various times. Early on, he asked: "Noosphere, what's that?" That was a very vivid moment for me. What is a noosphere? What would you say if someone asked

"What is air? What is water? What does it mean to be alive? What is an internet? Can you tell me what colors look like, and where they can be seen?" It reminded me of the old expression "stranger in a strange land." (Two days ago, we saw the movie 'Avengers' in IMAX 3D, and it 

also reminded me of that expression.)

So I started from basics... recalling that I was once VERY well informed and committed to a certain mundane point of view, until experience reached a critical threshold where I could not ignore the empirical data. 

Fortunately, he remembered my newspaper/Mao story, so I did not have to repeat it. 

I think I then jumped ahead to the article by Greeley years ago in the New York Times Magazine, which I saw at a very good time, which I 

pointed to as one of the most important things ever written on this subject -- and also both highly readable and scientifically solid. I went over the whole story, including a key point from the end of Greeley's article: After having a really major mystical experience, ALL of the high-ranking professors in the final sample had reacted by saying: "OK, God, thank you for that, that was really very impressive. But I don't think I could handle any more of that. Thank you, but please not more of that. I promise I will be good boy." So if they were Christian, they would be more avid, diligent and correct Christians; likewise, if Jewish, more Jewish; likewise if Moslem, more Moslem. All trying to be good boys, to respect the source of the experience, and to prevent more of it.

"My response to this kind of thing, just like my response to learning about the green sky threat, was completely different from that of the others. I did not run away. My response was 'This is important and I want to know more.' Yes, when people open their eyes, they can see scary things, but at the end of the day I feel more secure in the light than in the darkness. Yes, I was thankful, but I resolved not to run away from this, but to try to understand. That implied seeking more data, among other things, because things like religious speculation not grounded in reality and experience is obviously rather useless and harmful in the world around us."

I mentioned the problem we have today, when religious organizations are largely dominated by a mix of outright crude power-seekers and lackeys of vested interests, and by people who are fiercely saying " not more of that, I'll be good boy," who try to cut off themselves and their parishioners from real life and real hope. I mentioned the "credit card model of the soul,' in which the soul is just a hidden object where credits and debits are accumulated."

And so, as first step in answering the question "what is a noosphere?", I said -- my view is that the soul is not an object in our back pocket, but in many ways WE ARE our souls. More precisely, we are a symbiotic combination of mundane 'body' and 'soul.' We are alive as soul

(except maybe some of those couch potatoes who succeeded in poisoning themselves to death). 

But... with experience... 'we are not islands.' As soul... our individual souls are like cells in the greater spiritual life which includes all of earth. That is what the noosphere is.

I also mentioned how Luda recently asked: "Paul, how can you be so

interested in silly popular movies like the new Netflix video Journey to the West, or Shaolin soccer? We have the original book Journey to the West , and it is so much deeper and more intelligent than this silly movie which does not even have the right to pretend it is a remake of the story." My response: "Yes, I value that book. But those movies, like our recent tour of India, give a kind of window into the noosphere. A window into the thoughts which really fill the minds and souls of so many people. Windows into the noosphere are of huge importance... especially for those of us whose mission is to try to assist in the evolution of that noosphere, hopefully rapid enough to prevent the physical death of our species, but important in any case."

After a slight break (when I went back to get more water), Don started to explain the idea of the world of forms, which he attributed to Socrates, and the notion of form and substance. Certainly I knew of that ever so long ago, including those parts of the high Upanishads which get into the metaphysics of form and metamathematics and logic and so on. "I still value mathematics, of course, but the point is... soul and noosphere are not just a matter of form or formalism. They are a matter of substance. What IS the substance for soul and noosphere? Maybe stuff like dark matter or dark energy, maybe fields in physics we do not know about as yet, but whatever... It is a matter of substance." And Don agreed.

I believe Don raised the question then of the True God of everything. I expressed the view that this whole earth, and all of its noosphere, and the entire solar system, is really just a very tiny dot in something immensely bigger , and that humans are really very very far out of touch with reality when they assume even subconsciously that earth is bigger than it is. We are each so much smaller than our noosphere, yet our noosphere is just a baby, a very tiny entity in the larger scheme of things, and certainly not all-knowing,

even if it subsumes as data all of fully conscious human experience and thought. So what lies beyond that? 

"From all I have seen... there is no justification for imagining that ANY consciousness at all is omniscient and all powerful, as the PR agents of various churches have tried to sell... except to the degree that you consider that maximizing a Lagrangian exactly could be seen as a kind of consciousness, which is worth thinking about. So when Jesus talked about 'the Father," just who was he talking about? Was he talking about a kind of powerful archetype floating around in the noosphere, or a paternal organism of the same species as our noosphere in the real biology of our cosmos? Something like that, maybe a mix... as we all can leave archtypical reflections, shadows or traces in the noosphere."

===============

All for now. 

Best regards,

     Paul

P.S. Please forgive some jokes... Jung would say I give the trickster a place to be heard in my mind,

but not allowed out of control... A joke which popped up a few weeks ago: "And then, in the dying days of the great Republic, as corruption and contradiction drew it into the gradual decay and death

of empire and slavery, the voice of Yeshua came to Paul as said 'Hey man, don't you think it's time for a few more good epistles here and there?" Whatever. This month, I intend to do some meditation on questions in physics for which I know no one on earth knows the answer, an exercise of the mind for which there is no local or cheating short-cut, even though it does entail some mobilization of local resources.

Now that I think of it (posting this), I discussed both of the books by Teilhard de Chardin which I cited in my own paper. For example, from Activation of Human Energy, how we are called to engage with the rest of humanity and life, the noosphere, regardless of how high we rise. Even in Buddhism, many understand that the correct model is less like nothingness and more like the boddhisatva...

===========================
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Yeshua had some interesting thoughts in his reply, but I am not sure which ones he would want me to share
right now.

One is.. maybe I should be a bit more clear, in discussing this, that these are not "my beliefs."
In a world where so many people choose "beliefs" the way they choose clothes, as a kind of esthetic fashion statement about themselves... it is important that there is another way. This conversation was summarizing a paper
(Mind_in_Time) which was the outcome of decades and decades of focused and disciplined search for the real truth, using a scientific type of approach (as discussed in the paper). That included  incessant brutal self-criticism,
highly iterative, at a level most people would not want to undergo. To understand such things as quantum field theory is/would-be much less challenging and painful than ripping it all apafrt and rebjuidling it with one's own efforts.

Just this week, I did some of that again, for one of the many topics I have tried to understand. It reminded me how I have imposed disciplines on myself I would certainly not expect of others these days. I understand it is challenging enough for folks to understand when it's served on a silver platter... but someone needs to probe the unknown, for any kind of real knowledge to grow. The university system, in the US in the past century or so has played a critical role in the culture (and noosphere) of the US, with huge economic benefits, in providing an outlet and channel for the kind of exploratory thinking needed to make progress -- but for the past two years, pressures form folks who want to convert it all into just another factory IPO cheering squad and vehicle for corporate welfare have become very worrisome.

 Big subjects, but I am getting beyond what Yeshua said....

Yeshua also mentioned how a lot of what he is doing is really carrying forward a very long-standing family tradition, going back to Biblical times. But neither he nor I feel it is appropriate to distract people with esoteric bits of family history here.

update on what we know about threat of H2S killing us all

Five to ten times in past earth history (after the initial evolution of life) the levels of H2S and radiation on the land

reached levels which would kill every human on earth, if humans had been there at the time. Peter Ward, whose book Under a Green Sky

gives a good description of how that data is collected, believes that we are on course to reaching those levels again -- killing every human on earth.

Though I disagree with the details of Ward's THEORIES about the data, I for one do not intend to just ignore this threat. More and more, this is looking to me like the most likely "final trigger" likely to kill us all.

One of the IEEE people, from the IEEE Oceans Society, recently expressed worry that nutrients released from the biofuels industry are causing dead zones in the Caribbean. That seems very different from what Ward was saying -- but from the viewpoint of science I see them as pointing to the same tasks we really ought to be focusing on. When the much lesser threat of global warning surfaced years ago, Reagan was wise enough to say that we really ought to be studying the threat seriously, to try to understand how serious it is and what it depends on. With so much more at stake on the H2S front, it really should not be left to a part time hobby for a retired guy like me doing it alone, mainly focused on other topics! Still, I do keep trying to improve my understanding of this topic, and do have new thoughts to report.

The risk which concerns me most is the risk that the oxygen level in the deep waters of the southern Pacific

will get close enough to zero in about 40 years to cause a very sudden spurt in the growth of the specific type of microbe (a type of archaea)

which produces H2S. Ward gives various examples of places where that has already happened in a small area, and argues that this is what explains the mass extinctions of the past, which he is a leading expert on. That part of his story makes sense to me.

But then he gets politically correct. He notes a correlation between past extinctions and the rate of change of CO2, and speculates that ocean acidification is the "second trigger" which, combined with low oxygen in deep oceans, will kill us all.

At a conference yesterday on satellite data, I had a chance to speak to one of the Navy people, who has gotten a clear message from above that 

sea level rise is a major concern (guiding some of the data collection), but none of that other stuff. "But what about threats that could kill every human on earth? Are they a concern of anyone?" Response: a knowing look, and a question, "oh, are you talking about ocean acidification?"  In fact, since Ward has such high credentials in his field, as well as a powerful book aimed at the public, his theory that ocean acid is the trigger has had a strong impact on a certain circle of people. It has mainly just added energy to one of the existing factions in the climate debates.  But Ward is a paleontologist, not a chemist or a physicist. Why don't we have the kind of effort going to probe the competing explanations, and really try to learn what the implications are, instead of trying to act politically immediately without having any idea of what we are doing and what is really facing us?  This is really serious, for example, when data collection itself will have major blind spots.

Though I tend to doubt Ward's acidification theory, I still have deep respect for how he treated the subject in his book, which is far more satisfying to real scientific thinkers than most of what is published these days. He explained why he believes that theory, but he also cited other sources in a serious way, and emphasized the need for new crossdisciplinary research (especially on "thermohaline currents," the study of how levels of saltiness and temperature shape the currents which bring oxygen to the deep ocean, most of the time).

One of the sources he cites is a paper by Kump of Penn State, whose work seems to draw more respect than Ward's in those particular circles. 

In effect, Kump says: "Our bottom line worry is the proliferation of those archaea which produce H2S. That's what kills us. But these archaea are not such a mystery. To proliferate, they need just two things -- low oxygen levels, and a supply of nutrients." 

Even though I am theorist myself, I always ask: "What do the primary empirical data really tell us?" A year or two, I thought: "If it is that easy to get archaea and H2S proliferation, could we even see it (and model it) in an aquarium?" So I googled on 'stinky aquarium" -- and I didn't see anything to contradict Kump's idea. Lots of entertainment there, and maybe some possibilities for even a high school science project to be useful. (By the way, the Black Sea is another important test, though fortunately there is much less upwelling from there to the atmosphere than there is to the oceans. Still, I wonder what the chances are of a poison cloud striking Sevastopol or Istanbul in the night some day, causing an interesting international situation.)

There is pretty decent data on oxygen levels in the deep ocean. I was really stunned, a year or two ago, to learn that the issue is not "when will the oxygen-bearing currents by the Antarctic shut down?" Ward asked "what do the THC people have to tell us about the risk of stratified ocean?" That's not the issue, because it already happened! The new ice which guys like Inhofe crow about is due to the great wash of fresh water (which freezes much more easily than salt water, which is why we put salt on roads), water due to melting on the surface of the Antarctic, pouring into the ocean nearby. That same fresh water has simply zeroed out the current which bring oxygen to the deep ocean. The best maps I find on the web suggest we have about 40 years to go before it hits zero in the deep ocean, for the side which brings oxygen to the Pacific. It doesn't have to be zero on the surface for archaea to proliferate.

But it turns out that this happened before, even just a few thousands of years ago, before widespread human agriculture.

The risk is due to the COMBINATION of growing areas of low oxygen, and widespread (also growing) areas of nutrition

pouring into the ocean.

What would we need to be able to do a decent forecast (even stochastic) of how far away we are to a suddent tipping point when our extinction becomes assured? 

Before the last IEEE Energy Policy Committee meeting, I had a nice conversations with the oceans guy (who is welcome to identify himself if he chooses).  We began thinking.. it would be nice if we had a database, with "adequate' resolultion in three dimensiona nd time, of ocean oxygen and ocean levels of crucial nutrients such as phosphates, carbohydrates, iron, etc... aboveall the ones most important to archaea. Anticipating large dead zones has near-term benefits, as well as benefits in understanding the extinction possibility.  

But what could be done at minimum cost to get a better feeling for the risk than what I said on these lists?

How could we get such a database?

It would be nice if the DOD climate folks could add this to their radar. It is possible that the Navy already collects streams of data which simply require new back end analysis, to give us some better feeling. But the back end analysis might requtre some new research collaborations, to learn what new information could be extracted from the existing data either on its own or in combination with other data sources.

I was very interested yesterday in the presentations on "from Argos 3 to Argos 4," a report on plans for an ongoing productive 

collaboration on the Argos system of satellites. the French spaced agency (CNES) sgtarted this, and still leads the collablratoin, but the US, the EUMETSAT effort and now (as of 2007) India's ISRO all play important roles as well. I wonder whether and how soon the network of ocean-observing bouys they maintain could be expanded to measure ocean chemistry?

Some big US aerospace stakeholders were also there. They suggested that we could simply combine the ongoing data on oxygen levels (limited as it is) with data from satellites on chlorophyll obsderved on the surface. My initial reaction was pretty negative,

since archaea in the deep ocean aren't on the surface and they may have special nutrient vectors. However, BEFORE we have that kind of data, there may be some kind of statistical correlation (with error bars we need to know) between surface chlorophyll levels and the kind of nutrient variables which drive the growth of archaea. If we learn to understand those correlations better  

(with high school science experiments?), perhaps we could make better use of existing data, to give us at least a gross handle on the present threat and the future threats in the pipeline. The uncertainty bars may give at least some indication of the value of getting more and better data. 

In the end, this still begs the question: whether the new Great Dying begins 40 years from now or 100 or 200, what can we do about it? I pay more attention to that question than I do about the timing, but this email is already long, and it is best

for me to postpone that to other times and venues.

Best of luck,

    Paul