Inconvenient questions about human genetic diversity

A friend recently accused me of gross myopia. And no, it's not about "race", which is a confusing fuzzy distraction. Since 2019, I have tried to focus my own personal energy on five real centers of value or telos: (1) reducing the chance that the human species will go extinct within a century or two, due to what some of us now know about climate change (http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm and http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/09/worlds-greatest-engineering-society.html); (2) likewise, reducing the "existential risk" to humanity due to a complex of huge changes coming to the world internet; (3) human potential, as in helping us connect better to the noosphere of which we are a part, embedded of course in a large cosmos; (4) passing on important unique things I have learned in an incredibly information rich life; and (5) working on the kind of direct human connections which keep us all alive. BUT: MYOPIA. Even before huge changes in technology and in our relations to the noosphere changed the path of human history, great civilizations were dying in just a few centuries, more than the century we get for climate and internet effects. Many of the causes of those deaths are still in play. I even proposed doing my PhD thesis on what I learned about those issues before 1972, and the Harvard faculty preferred that over neural networks and backpropagation and such, what I ended up choosing. Selection effects are clearly central to what pathways are really open to humans in the coming millennium, and I am sorry that I have not done as much justice to them as they deserve. but where can an honest and deep enough dialogue be created on that? For my climate and internet concerns, there is at least important public discussion now on "existential threats". But for selection effects? All I can offer now are a few diffuse observations and questions. Back when I was an undergraduate, a classmate once said: "Washington and Jefferson did such a deep job of creating a whole new order, a new social contract. They created a great rat race. But now we who must live in what they created have no choice but to learn to be rats. That's not fair. It's not what I want with MY life." That social vision was grounded in liberte, egalite, fraternity, and I have seen where Lafayette and Washington met. For many years, people in neuroscience and neural networks followed the vision of Donald Hebb, which assumed for neurons what many have assumed for humans: one universal social contract, one learning rule for all neurons, leading to great cooperation. From 1963 to 1964, it was a huge transition for me to understand how and why Hebb was wrong. ONE neuron type does not work. One can build a real intelligent system (without cheating) only by having at least a few very basic very different TYPES of neuron, adapted to different signals, responsive to different feedbacks. The caste system of India worked out in truly horrid, nonsustainable directions, which reminded me of the opening scene of the old Superman movie explaining how the caste system in Krypton caused the explosion and death of that planet. Those risks are very serious, more serious than we would imagine if we only had estern values in play. But simple money-based selection mechanisms ( selecting which genes persist) may be equally fatal, and there is lots of experience showing that too. In nature, speciation is a very pervasive fact of life. No new economic system, whether based on (1) law, on (2) chaos, on (3) gene manipulation or on (4) most varieties of what seems to be Sustainable Intelligent Internet (SII, a new option for social contract) can avoid the very deep and serious implications of whatever selection mechanisms are in effect for humans over future centuries. Anyone who claims that his or her choice from this menu (1 to 4) avoids the existential risks implied here is lying, either to himself and herself or just as a con game. What POSSIBLE sustainable outcomes might be possible? I tend to believe that some kind of SII (http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm) might be the most workable, maybe. GIVEN that we have brain designs with just a few basic cell/organ types (like giant pyramid cell, limbic ell, etc), perhaps a sustainable intelligent market design which provides for just a few parallel roles in the larger market system, might be sustainable, if it includes the kinds of conflict of interest provisions which we now know are essential to stability even in less intelligent brains. (See the discussion of DHP stability in http://www.werbos.com/HICChapter13.pdf.) A kind of rule-based honorable competition. Alternatives? Well, I see in the EU what happens when folks with roles like that of Schroder migrate to jobs funded by Gazprom, massively perverting EU markets in a way which screws up the EU economy here and now, blocking the kinds of climate technology which COULD be saving us all. Good old fashioned conflict of interest effects, reaching fatal proportions, and not just that one example!!! But I see other modes of gross instability in every other region on earth!! If ALL of us fall into myopia, because we ALL face incentives to do so, then we all die together! The rules need to be better crafted to support the kinds of functions which our brains rely on neocortex to perform. (I do hope Amit and Benjamin will send us URL of our discussion of that in their conference last week.) Best of luck. We all need it... a lot of it... ====================== Deep in my files I still have that thesis proposal to Harvard from 1971/1972. But I know a lot now which I did not know then.

Serious meditation on covid booster as a case study of bigger issues

There are MANY times in this life when performing a small task offers us a chance to learn much larger and important lessons, if only we are open and aware ("conscious"?) enough to see what lessons are offered. For me, this morning [2AM-3AM], in a higher regular meditation time, I feel a duty to pass on SOME of the many lessons which result from thinking about a simple task I will do later this morning: getting a third pfizer covid shot, which I scheduled yesterday (with help from my wife). [I Posted this 6 hours ago on a serious covid discussion list and on two lists studying human consciousness. A key covid guy encouraged me to repost it here.] First interesting part: I had not planned to get the third shot so soon. Coming back to the US from two or three weeks in Greece, mainly revisiting ancient history, I have a lot of important catchup work to do. I was planning to do the catchup stuff first before any kind of covid stuff. But we are grateful to a neighbor who is unusually well-informed about such things, who passed on links first to the report showing less than 50% effectiveness of the shot after 6 months in preventing covid, and then a more radical reduction just a month later. Second: I still have work to do in controlling my own emotions. Thanks to our neighbor, I did look more closely at emails in my gigantic inbox from Arlington county on scheduling vaccinations. I navigated enough to see a link to a close place, a Harris Teeter we visited in past years, and start to schedule an appointment. But a badly designed web page were bad enough to unleash negative hormones, and I was giving up, until my wife calmed me down, took charge for awhile, and reminded me of alternatives, like the nearby Safeway we visit much more often anyway. (Just as close as the Harris Teeter, but the web sites did not know that.) And so at 11AM, I should be there. I feel strange announcing that when I know weird things can undo almost any plan these days, but it LOOKS inevitable this time. Third: the booster shot policy issues in the US are a great case study in public administration, where people work hard but fail to live up to the kinds of standards of rationality and efficiency we should all have learned, following the great work of John Von Neumann, important to policy in bigger and riskier areas like climate, internet policy and human potential, the three areas I have committed to try to help more this month (really, since 2019). (( Side comment: I also see new work on real physics, as in Yeshua's new experiments, as being far more important than covid, as part of these priorities)). Standards of rational and efficient policy include the question: WHY are many of us now offered a third pfizer shot as the only option, when Moderna might be just as good or better for the booster shot? THAT question deserves very serious analysis by folks who know enough to approach it rationally. But for myself, I have lots of thoughts about that serious question, but even more thoughts about how I myself have my own special pattern of connections and dharma and whatnot, urging me to focus much more on those other priorities I mention. I DON'T want to dedicate too much of my OWN limited time and energy to covid. But this issue itself is a beautiful case study in rational first person experience and decision making, more important as a case study than as a thing in itself. It reminds me of another lesson: how many people, people WITHOUT special dharma for covid, waste too much time or energy either fighting covid risk or fighting against reasonable, easy precautions (like the shot I will get this morning). Why do humans waste so much energy in neurotic ways like that? This is ever so basic to real scientifically grounded understanding of human consciousness as it works in reality!! That is worthy of a long discussion on both of the consciousness lists I cc'ed here, but advances in internet company policies make it more difficult to to get you links to important, quick straightforward explanations!! And it is a very big question in any case, based on the connections between issues studied in human psychology (from Freud and Jung to folks like Losscher and Vaillant) and ojr new mathematical understanding of the brain (as in Amit's conference last week, for which recordings will be announced this week). Some of us understood the basic principles of intelligent or conscious systems many years ago, but the issues of neuroses and local minima in human brain development, and then higher creativity, took more years to get a fix on, even just the aspects based on mundane brain function. My slides last week included a nice new flow chart explaining key aspects of what we learned in the paper by Werbos and Davis, easy to find via scholar.google.com if you know about advanced search (as you all should!). That in turn is a reminder that folks who pretend to be omniscient gods on earth really need to work especially hard (as we all should!) to strengthen mundane "first order sanity", as explained in the suite of three papers I published in 2019, linked to from werbos.com/religions.htm. One hour ago, meditation told me to get this down NOW, before I get distracted by other things, but now I will go back to bed, after one small thing on another track... Best of luck, Paul [P.S. It took me an hour to write this, but it covered only about 15% of about 10 minutes in midddle of night meditation. That is typical, except that it is usually between 4AM and 7AM that I get to the highest state I get to in normal life. TRAVEL is different because it offers special new connections in meditation, usually in daytime because that is when we travel. But in Varkisa beach, near Athens, one night, it worked just as well there.]

World's Greatest Engineering Society proposes a new direction in understanding and coping wth worst climate risks

I was very excited today to see this new draft book proposal, from the leader of the IEEE Press Series on Power and Energy. Based on new information, I now agree with Greta Thunberg's two key points: (1) that the very extinction of humanity is a serious risk; and (2) the need for true science based policies, UNLIKE those we now see in governments around the world who claim concern but do not have the kind of policies which could save us. IEEE is a major foundation of modern quality science and engineering, following scientific approaches with a peer review system and internstional dialogue second to none. The IEEE Power and Energy Society has noticed what Greta and I have been saying, and what science I have brought to bear. THat is why I was so excited to receve the followng draft proposal from the group I am glad to be part of now. Do note how the bios at end show that these are highly qualified people already, but are reaching out to enlarge the serious scientific dialogue as far as we can... ============================= ================= New Technology and Market Design for Energy and Climate Security Draft of an invited Book Proposal to IEEE Press Series on Power and Energy Systems Authors: Drs. Paul J. Werbos, G. Kumar Venayagamoorthy, Peter Ward, James Momoh, and Veronika Rabl Overview At a Hearing led by John Kerry of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, Senator Kerry urged that climate policy should not focus on expected or average climate outcomes, but on the PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE, on reducing the risk of the worst truly serious possibility before us. Many in the public have started to worry that the extinction of the human species itself due to climate risk might well be serious enough to justify serious efforts, well grounded in the very best science and engineering. Some of us did not believe in the extinction threat in 2009, when one of us attended Kerry’s Hearing and worked for a Republican Senator, but as we get deeper into the scientific issues we have learned that the risk is far greater than we once thought, and needs to be investigated further: https://tosavetheworld.ca/314-ocean-currents-and-our-future/. The purpose of this book is to try to connect the very best science and engineering now available, both to understand the risk and to support new RD&D and other policies aimed at developing new ways to reduce the risk as soon as possible, at minimum cost (or even benefit) to the world economy. We as experts in these fields agree that these risks could be prevented at costs far lower than what we now see in policy discussions which do not yet have the benefit of the kind of very best, front line peer-reviewed science available today, particularly through IEEE, the world’s leading professional society, well know for defending high standards for diversity in viewpoints, objectivity and dialogue, as well as strength in the many fields of research we lead. The book will not discuss market design in general; rather it will include specific market design technologies, grounded in mathematical principles, for each of the relevant sectors, most notably the systems unified by IEEE research to be discussed with emphasis on power and energy systems (Section 1). Outline The book will reflect the general strategy illustrated in the slide below, but will aim to upgrade and improve that strategy by building new dialogues as part of developing and disseminating the book.

Source: http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm After the failure of omnibus climate legislation in the US in 2009, many serious experts said that we would have done much better with sectoral measures, focused and strategic efforts, focused on more concrete targets and drawing deep focused experts in the sectors. The book will support that approach, connecting IEEE leaders and other leading scientists to each of these five policy sectors. Because these policy issues are urgent, we will begin writing from the following draft five-part outline building on our many discussions so far, but will plan to invite others and expand the discussion as we can: • General introduction or preface (similar to the words above) • Section 2, by Momoh, with Werbos and Venayagamoorthy on “point 1” -- reducing net GHG from electricity production. • Section 3, by Rabl, on “point 2” -- reducing net GHG from transportation and from production of liquid or gaseous transportation fuels • Section 4, by Werbos, on “points 3 & 4” -- additional priorities in agriculture, in developing geoengineering options, in case of a need to move quickly to prevent the worst, and related sectors, where new efforts scattered about the world suggest that those sectors could actually sequester net CO2 in a way which converts them into an important asset, with only moderate economic incentives (circa $20-40/ton-of-CO2). • Section 5, by Ward and Werbos, on “point 5” of the slide -- new knowledge and R&D needs to assess the risk to human survival. A brief summary of the sections of the proposed book are given below: Section 2 -- Technologies from Generation to Market Design for Low-Cost Zero GHG (Momoh, Venayagamoorthy and Werbos) Net CO2 production from making electricity is the best and most important target for CO2 reduction. The IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) is the world’s leading international society for all aspects of producing electricity, and many related technologies. Prof. Momoh led a major new direction in crossdisciplinary research in electric power in an initiative he created, advancing PES technology in a way which integrates operations research, intelligent system and microeconomics platform: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/nsf02188/nsf02188.pdf. When market design is done right, and most effectively, as in the best US transmission systems, there is no real dividing line between market design and advanced system coding and hardware. The further advancement of that kind of crosscutting technology is essential to deeper, low-cost reductions in GHG, Actual data on the sources of CO2 tend to be confusing, in part because of problems of definition, in part because of data collection issues, and in part because political advocates want to draw attention to sources of greatest interest to them. A few years ago, however, the most complete data came from the US, where more than 80% of the net CO2 came from just two primary sources -- making electricity, and transportation. There was heavy CO2 emission from industry, but much of that came from making electricity in industry for use by industry, and from off road vehicles using engines like those used in cars and trucks. Recent OECD data seems to fit the same general kind of pattern: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Breakdown-of-CO2-emissions-by-sectors-in-OECD-countries-14_fig14_323533605 Focused, high efficiency efforts to reduce net CO2 from just two technical areas, then -- making electricity and transportation -- could solve our CO2 problems far more effectively than fuzzy broad-brush efforts which do not exploit our best technical and microeconomics knowledge of these two sectors. After the failure of the broad-brush, 1/2 to 2 trillion dollars per year climate bills due to Waxman's Committee, Pew Trust was one of the many activist groups who concluded that we would have done better with "sectoral bills," bills focused with maximum intelligence, detail and technical competence on these (and a very few other) sectors where special characteristics allow much greater efficiency than what is possible with broad brush bills. In 2011, after this experience in 2009, the White House issued a new policy for the Smart Grid which still offers a huge improvement in impact and efficiency beyond anything underway today: "...the White House priority regarding Smart Grid development is to support NSF research on a ‘4th generation intelligent grid’ that would use intelligent system-wide optimization to allow up to 80% of electricity to come from renewable sources and 80% of cars to be pluggable electric vehicles (PEV) without compromising reliability, and at minimum cost to the Nation (Werbos 2011, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine)." By 2019, experts in electric power systems (such as those we funded and reviewed from the IEEE PES) were aghast at the contrast between support for renewable electricity which would cost the consumer more than $1 per kilowatt hour (5 or 10 times the prevailing generation cost) after the need for backup and power quality were accounted for, versus new technologies already demonstrating they could cost less than oil and gas or fission, on a realistic foundation allowing for electricity production in regions of more reliable sun. By 2019, the breakthroughs in new solar technology changed the proven options to a huge degree. (See werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf, supported by the French electric utility system but widely reviewed in the US, in Chile and Brazil.) In 2009, representatives of Exelon (the largest fission utility in the US) stated to many of us in EPW that the real, total cost of safe fission electricity (not even counting the security costs reviewed at werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf), were well over 10 cents per kwh, real cost -- even as new types of solar farm allow costs of reliable electricity well under that. Crucial to this have been proven breakthroughs in the user of power tower solar farms, using new forms of Brayton conversion of heat to electricity pioneered in the US but now used more in the Middle East and space programs, and low-cost storage of heat energy (pioneered in the US NREL but advanced substantially in Chile) which allows renewable electricity to track electricity demand even better than the best baseload sources today. The most important barrier to zero- CO2 electricity production today are the regulatory biases which make it easier to build long-distance pipelines than to build long distance power lines, and which favor in-state electricity production over long-distance transport. Next most important is the repatriation of solar thermal technologies back to major OECD nations, to Microsoft and to China, and the greater use of advanced power flow technologies (as in Werbos 2011) which allow more efficiency, reliability and lower cost. New breakthroughs in Quantum Information Science and Technology also provide a clear pathway to greater intelligence in the distribution and power electronics networks, crucial to costs and reliability in an all-renewable global electricity system. About one-tenth of global electricity demand comes in regions more than 1,000 miles away from low-cost solar thermal power sources. For the benefit of those regions, and for the sake of diversity and security, the world should also support the R&D essential to assessing and developing the full potential of electricity from space, as outlined in the book “The Case for Space Solar Power by Mankind”, which requires dramatic but feasible new R&D to reduce the cost of access to space down to $1000/kG-GEO, using technology like that proposed by Chase of ANSER in peer reviewed R&D funded by NSF in the past (under the JIETSSP program and follow-ons at Wright-Patterson). Abdul Kalam of India strongly recommended expansion and use of this kind of technology for geoengineering. Section 2: Increasing Energy Security and Reducing GHGs from Transportation (Veronika Rabl) Most of the impetus for the current move to electrify transportation is driven by energy and environmental benefits. While these benefits are significant, there is another aspect that should be taken into consideration – energy security. Although the specifics in this discussion tend to refer to U.S. conditions, the trends and issues encountered apply to much of the rest of the world. Transportation is almost entirely dependent on oil and consumes most of the petroleum used in the United States. Dependence of a critical economic sector on a single fuel represents a serious threat to national security. Ninety percent of the energy used in transportation during 2019 came from oil, an energy source subject to potential disruptions and market dislocations due to events beyond the control of the U.S. During the same period the transportation sector consumed more than 70 percent of all petroleum used in the United States. Our ability to reduce petroleum use will be essential to mitigating the energy security risks inherent in the dependence on a single energy source for transportation. An efficient way to curtail dependence on petroleum is to pursue electrification of passenger and commercial vehicles, and mass transit, such as buses and rail. Continuing to develop and implement alternative fuel options is also necessary to satisfy the continuing requirement for liquid fuels. Cleaner transportation is also critical to addressing environmental issues. Most of the CO2 emissions are generated from burning of fossil fuels. Electricity generation and transportation are the largest sources of these emissions; transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the U.S. The 2nd largest U.S. source are emissions from electricity generation. As discussed in Section 1, emissions due to generating electricity can be addressed by substituting renewable generation, such as wind and solar, for fossil fuels. In fact, this transition is already taking place. In 2020, wind and solar generation accounted for over 10% of kilowatt-hours (kWh) consumed in the U.S. With this generation mix, CO2 emissions can be reduced by converting transportation from fossil fuels to electricity. Fuel combustion from transportation contributes about 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding those due to power generation. Because transportation emissions are widely dispersed, it would be impractical and uneconomical to capture and store transportation emissions once they are emitted. Only fundamental changes in transportation efficiency can alter this situation -- electrification represents such a fundamental change. Electric motors are inherently more efficient than internal combustion engines and can be used in mass transit, passenger and commercial vehicles, buses and rail. For example, electric vehicles convert about 69-73 percent of the grid’s electrical energy to power at the wheels compared to conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, which convert only about 16–25 percent of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels. Conservatively, in the U.S. this implies that already with current generation mix the CO2 emissions of gasoline cars are three-times those of all-electrics. Similar analyses of well-to-wheels results for medium and heavy-duty trucks show that all electric -- Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) -- significantly improve environmental sustainability by providing deep reductions in GHGs, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide emissions, compared to conventional diesel counterparts. Increasing shares of renewable and natural gas technologies in future national and regional electricity generation are expected to further reduce particulate matters and sulfur oxide emissions for further improvement of the environmental performance of BEVs. A radical transformation of the transportation sector will also reduce emissions, particularly in large cities. Gasoline combustion is responsible for most precursors of urban smog. A taste of what clean air feels like was offered by the 2020 pandemic. NASA satellite measurements revealed a 30% reductions in air pollution over the major metropolitan areas of the Northeast United States. Similar reductions have been observed in other regions of the world. Even with current generation mix, electrifying the transportation sector has the potential to increase transportation energy efficiency and reduce both greenhouse gas and criteria pollutants. Such factors consider on-road performance, battery manufacture and battery disposal, recycle and reuse. On average, this holds true worldwide. However, the impacts in any one economy or region are entirely dependent on the generation sources for electricity used to power the transportation conveyance. The transportation electrification strategy has challenges to overcome before reaching a broad-based electrified transportation system. The most prominent among these are range limitations, combined with longer refueling times. A focus on the following areas will help to meet these challenges: • Development of market channels and incentives for Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) • Improved battery technology • Development and deployment of battery charging infrastructure • Integrating PEVs into the electric grid (incl. DER) operations • Reduced weight, volume and cost of power electronics and electric machines for PEVs Continuing advances in batteries and ultra-fast charging are some of the technology options that are being pursued to reduce “range anxiety.” Section 3. Agriculture & Related & Geoengineering (Werbos) In 2009, the USDA held many briefings on how they could contribute to GHG reduction. Senator Specter was a strong supporter of that, but it did not get the attention it deserved. Only later, as we built connections to Brazil, especially, and probed that literature, did we learn how huge the unmet opportunities are for the entire earth -- but also how much is available to us only in Portuguese, at a time when covid and politics have complicated the communications. We plan to continue to discuss these opportunities, as in some of our discussion: That leaves agriculture and related, the submission to the COP26 event, and the issue of whether to consider a sixth section on AI/quantum for climate which I would have to handle myself. Today, there are signs that we might be able to get co-leaders from Brazil who could do true justice to that very tricky area. A combination of the terra preta techniques for soil management, combined with sustainable but profitable livestock management, could turn this sector from being "20% of the problem" to OFFSETTING 20% of the problem. (Not to mention some understanding of the Amazon!) But we will see. I am open to new possibilities if you suggest them. Likewise, geoengineering has been widely underestimated in environmental policy, in part because some offer it as an alternative to the other actions. We will push hard on the theme of wide ranging, innovative new RD&D, intended to do full assessment and advancement of a wide variety of options. In addition to the usual space mirrors and reflective particles, there are new options especially suitable for new R&D, like https://spectrum.ieee.org/climate-change and proposals for chemical engineering at high altitudes to create “band aids” for stratospheric ozone (lack of which was a crucial factor in the speed of past mass extinctions). Section 5 -- Assessing the Risk of human extinction by climate change (Werbos, to be updated by lead author Ward) What IS the nature of this risk? Why should we even believe that the risk is real? What target variables need to be the real focus of policy? Without clear, quantitative focus, climate policy can easily degenerate into a kind of Christmas Tree handout to well-placed stakeholders, or to other deserving causes. Climate change causes many kinds of serious but lesser risks, but the world also needs books like this and new institutions with a very sharp focus -- not as an alternative to other worthy forms of climate action, but as a strategic challenge in itself calling out for very clear focus. This section, section 5 of the book, defines the overall focus, the key target variable: prevention of the risk of mass extinction of the human species. In 2009, when Werbos was the National Science Foundation (NSF) research Program Director assigned to work with the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee to develop and evaluate climate legislation, He simply did not believe that the risks from climate change were so bad. Werbos worked well with the friendly group of Senate staffers under the leadership of Senator Inhofe (the true leader of climate skepticism in the US), under Republican Senator Specter, an honest but tough senator more involved in national security than in climate at the time. In his office, with access to all the information available to both political parties, we agreed with the IPCC report at the time. That report said that climate change is real, that moderate rational market actions are called for, but that business as usual would probably reduce world GNP by only 5% by 2100, not nearly so important as other issues Werbos worked on, such as the security of US transportation fuel in the face of new issues in the Middle East (Werbos.com/oil.htm). We had very good relations with the Marshall Institute. Werbos will never forget their witness at an EPW hearing who said: "You are all so afraid of CO2 reaching 800 or 1000 ppm. Don't you realize that for most of the history of life on earth it was 2000ppm or more, and life just went on as usual?" But later in that year, the Director of Geosciences for NSF invited us back to a big public lecture led by Prof. Peter Ward. He introduced Peter as the number one frontline expert on earth on the real science of what has caused mass extinctions in the past on this planet. No, life did NOT always go on as usual. And yes, we need to work very hard to truly understand the lessons of history, in order to avoid the risk of repeating them? What exactly DID cause the five to 15 gigantic past mass extinctions of life on earth? There are two main goals of this section of this book: (1) to give us the best range of information now available to science on what the risks are we should be worrying about, and even how to measure them, so as to support and guide the work in the other sections; and (2) to stimulate the true old NSF-style debate and dialogue, to guide us to the questions and research efforts we need to narrow down the remaining uncertainties. I also hope that the great geohistorian, Robert Hazen, who has told us so much about the role of volcanoes and carbon, can join in the intellectual integration and synthesis in this chapter. (I see no contradiction here with his work, but ne must read closely.) Peter Ward's talk was a life-changing experience for me, because of the final few minutes when he compared the data curves for past mass extinction events versus the curves we are on now. "By eyeball," he said,"It looks to me that at 1000ppm, it's PT (the greatest extinction ever) all over again." What worried me the most was not his conclusion, but the responses of others in that room. Most just agreed or disagreed, and changed nothing in their lives. I began ten years of intense checking what to believe, starting with his great paperback book Under A Green Sky, for which I did a three-page summary: http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm. The risk is that a type of microbe called sulfanogenic archaea will proliferate in deep oxygen-deprived water, near the Humboldt and Gulf Stream currents, resulting in outgassing of H2S to the atmosphere, causing a rerun of many very pleasant outcomes which the earth has experienced before. Peter's book “Under A Green Sky” stressed that we needed more cross-disciplinary research, bringing in experts in partial differential equations (PDE, like the Navier Stokes equations which govern thermohaline currents, like those responsible for most of the great extinctions of the past). One of the core programs I ran at NSF focused on advanced PDE, and that guided me in some of the further reading I cite on my climate web page. It led to the talk I gave on these problems, led by the Global Leadership forum of the Millennium Project, broadcast on Korean national television: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPccNVHRFIM More recently, however, Peter himself has done deeper research into those past extinctions of life on earth. His newer book https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Life-Discoveries-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00OZM4AN2/ is the most comprehensive review in depth of what science now knows about the history of life on earth. Chapter 12 reports on startling but solid new findings by Professor Lee Kump on the direct causes of the PT extinction, the greatest extinction of all. It was a great shock to me to learn that two causal variables best predict what followed: (1) "stratified ocean," which is already starting now in the Arctic and Antarctic; (2) phosphates -- in indicator of a kind of fertilizer in the ocean, which has already spread in recent years but needs to be much better narrowed down with new research. Volcanoes also played a crucial role in the sequences of past events. I am very grateful to Peter Ward and to Metta Spencer for hosting two recent discussions of how these variables play out, and the questions they raise for the Arctic and for the Antarctic, over the next two to four decades especially: https://tosavetheworld.ca/314-ocean-currents-and-our-future/ https://tosavetheworld.ca/290-extinction/ Better understanding of oxygen-bearing ocean currents and chemical fertilizer flows in the ocean will be directly important to designing and evaluating our options for geoengineering (section five), and to the cycles of energy and life which currently power the great "chimneys of water" which bring oxygen to the deep Pacific, Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. Some of the risks to human existence come more directly from how we use energy, as well be discussed in those later sections. Brief Author Biographies (Partial list for now) Dr. Paul J. Werbos (www.werbos.com) is a Fellow of the IEEE and one of the first recipients of the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, in recognition of the original development of backpropagation and of adaptive dynamic programming (now abbreviated as RLADP) in the 1960’s and 1970s. In 2021, he received the 2022 Frank Rosenblatt Award, then highest technical field award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Backpropagation and RLADP are the foundations which made deep learning possible, including reinforcement learning systems more powerful than those used in Alpha-Go. INNS granted him its highest award, the Hebb award, recognizing his work showing how these mathematical tools can explain key aspects of learning in biological brains. He received Ph.D. from Harvard University (1974), Masters’ from the London School of Economics (1968) and Harvard (1969). In high school, he took undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, and obtained FCC First Class Commercial Radiotelephone license. He has also published on issues of consciousness, the foundations of physics, and human potential. He serves on the Planning Committee of the Millennium Project, the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Lifeboat Foundation and the Chile Solar Energy Research Consortium. He has been active in IEEE-USA; for example, for IEEE-USA he gave a major talk in Rayburn to over 200 Congressional staffers, which helped prepare the State of the Union message which led to the Energy Information and Security Act of 2007. In 2009, he served as a Brookings Fellow in the office of Senator Specter, responsible for climate, energy and space policy. In the last years before his retirement from NSF in 2015, he led research in three core areas -- electric power grids, adaptive and intelligent systems (AIS) and quantum and high performance modeling for systems and devices (QMHP). Dr. Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy (S’91-M’97-SM’02-F’21) is the Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Power Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University in January 2012. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), Rolla, USA where he was from 2002 to 2011, and a Senior Lecturer in Department of Electronic Engineering, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, where he was from 1996 to 2002. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is the Founder (2004) and Director of the Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems Laboratory. Dr. Venayagamoorthy received his PhD and MScEng degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, in April 2002 and April 1999, respectively. He received his BEng degree with a First-Class Honors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi, Nigeria in March 1994. He holds an MBA degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Clemson University, SC (August 2016). Dr. Venayagamoorthy’s interests are in the research, development and innovation of power systems, smart grid and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a 2004 US NSF CAREER Awardee, a 2007 US Office of the Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Awardee, and a 2008 NSF Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) Awardee. He led the Brain2Grid project funded by US National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Venayagamoorthy is an inventor of technologies for scalable computational intelligence for complex systems and dynamic stochastic optimal power flow. He has published over 550 refereed technical articles which are cited over 20,000 times with a h-index of 66 and i10-index of > 280. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has given over 500 invited technical presentations including keynotes and plenaries in over 40 countries to date. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is involved in the leadership and organization of conferences including the Clemson University Power System Conference and Pioneer and Chair/co-Chair of the IEEE Symposium of Computational Intelligence Applications in Smart Grid (CIASG) since 2011. He is currently the Chair of the IEEE PES Working Group on Intelligent Control Systems, and the Founder and Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Task Force on Smart Grid. He has served/serves as Editor/Associate Editor/Guest Editor of several IEEE Transactions and Elsevier Journals. He is the Editor for the IEEE Press Series on Power and Energy Systems. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has received several awards for faculty, research and teaching excellence from universities, professional societies, and organizations. According to a recent Stanford study, Dr. Venayagamoorthy is among the Top 25,000 scientists worldwide across all fields and in the top 0.1% worldwide in the fields of energy and AI. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is a Fellow of the IET (UK) and the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE), and a Senior Member of the INNS. Prof. Peter Ward (Bio to be inserted) Prof. James Momoh. FNSE, FIEEE, FAEng, FAS and Member ofNational Academy of Engineering (NAE). Dr. James A. Momoh received his BSEE top of his class (Howard), MS EE (Carnegie Mellon University), MS System Engineering (U of Pennsylvania), and PhD Electrical Engineering (Howard) and MA, Theology (School of Divinity) at Howard. He authored and co-authored over 300 published journal articles of nine modern power and voltage stability, Optimal Power flow(OPF), generalized fault studies and transient stability called sampling (Theta), smart grid and micro grids The work also led to award of 4 patents to his credit. He served as Chair and CEO of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission from 2018 through 2020 where was responsible for providing oversight of the overall Nigeria Electricity Industry. Dr. Momoh served as chairman of EE department at Howard for 11 years (1989 -2001). He also served as director of the Center for Energy System and Control (CESaC) from 1984 until 2001. His research interest includes Optimization Theory Applications, Smart and.Micro Grid. Design and Implementation, and application of AI to Market design and power system Operation and Planning. Dr. Momoh served as Program Director at NSF from 2001 to 2004, where he was responsible for energy and power and computational intelligence. He designed and built a new interdisciplinary initiative called Electric Power Networks Efficiency and Security (EPNES). He previously received the highly coveted National Science Foundation (NSF) – US White House Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) and several other awards and Fellows. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), FAEng, and FAS FNSE. He is recently awarded the 2021 Distinguished Tau Beta Pi (National Honor Society). He was elected into membership National Academic of Engineering, for his distinguished contributions to engineering; for the development of electric grid and for optimization techniques and implementation of advanced technology and policy for emerging electric grids in Africa. Dr. Veronika A. Rabl Veronika Rabl is a consultant in the Washington, DC, area, specializing in energy technology and policy. She has advised electric energy companies and governments around the world and has been an invited speaker at many events in the U.S. and abroad. She is an author, coauthor, and editor of numerous publications. Veronika’s work spans energy efficiency, demand response, electric transportation, clean power supply, and electric grid modernization, as well as energy and environmental life cycle assessments. Most recently she has been a team lead and coauthor of the IEEE PES (Power and Energy Society) Energy Storage Primer. She helped launch the Engineering Founder Societies’ Technology for Carbon Management Grand Challenge Initiative; assessed EPA Clean Power Plan implementation options; reviewed ISO/RTO market rules and processes; served as co-chair of IEEE Joint Task Force on the DOE Quadrennial Energy Review (QER); and cochaired development of report on demand management alternatives for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Until 2001 Dr. Rabl served as General Manager and Director at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). She established EPRI’s load management research program and technology portfolio, including energy storage, energy management, and distributed load control systems. She then held a series of positions with increasing technical, business, and policy responsibilities, covering both sides of the meter -- demand-side management, integrated resource planning, engineering load forecasting, electric transportation, power electronics and power quality, distribution systems, and metering. Dr. Rabl is a Senior Member of IEEE, past Chair of IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee, and member of the IEEE PES Industry Technical Support Leadership Committee. Veronika is a recipient of the IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award for Individuals. Veronika holds a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University and an M.S. from the Weizmann Institute, Israel.

Terrible news on out of control AI

I was ever so excited, months ago, when John Kerry and UN Secretary General Guterres called for a new climate extinction office in UN HQ which would generate real information about the biggest real threats and technically valid solutions (using peer review, two-way communicatins and the other tools maximized by "the old NSF"). That seemed to peter out, but I found it even more exciting that the office of the Secretary General asked my friend for a more substantive, detailed response: ================================================ Paul, As an addendum to the letter to the UN Sec-Gen (attached) on the proposed UN Office of Strategic Threats, we were asked to give a paragraph on each of these with weblink(s) on best research so far --Weakening of the Earth's magnetic shield that protects us from deadly solar radiation -- Massive discharges of hydrogen sulfate (H2S) from de-oxygenated oceans, caused by advanced global warming ----Malicious nanotechnology (including the "gray goo" problem) ----Loss of control over future forms of artificial intelligence ---A single individual acting alone, who could one day create and deploy a weapon of mass destruction (most likely from synthetic biology) ---Nuclear war escalation ---Uncontrollable, more-severe pandemics -- A particle accelerator accident -- Solar gamma-ray bursts ---An asteroid collision. ============= I replied with technical details, and then summarized the big picture: ---- Key points: 1. It is not a risk that AI or internet of things will go out of control. It is a certainty. The competitive forces (both political and economic) guarantee that higher and higher levels of true artificial general intelligence will be deployed. Smarter systems will dominate over less intelligent and capable systems, in the fast growing world where the number of controllable "things" has already surpassed the human population and "intelligence" is what controls the signals which get through. 2. The massive transformation of the earth already underway is almost certainly NOT unique in our galaxy, let alone our cosmos. It is part of a massive long-standing system of evolution, depicted in many new actual photographs like the one attached. If we adapt intelligently enough to the new cyberearth, before entropy catches up with it (as it is already doing in our out of control world internet), we can become like the living connected nodes in this vast network of dark matter connecting and shaping small nodes like our galaxy. But if we reject the needs of adaptation, and do not keep up with greater intelligence and connection between humans, cybersystems and the living natural world of our solar system, we can easily be washed away by the kinds of currents already destabilizing markets, legal frameworks and battlefields already. Highly intelligent decisions can learn to be cooperative, or even be designed for true social connection, but to try to "control" them is utterly unrealistic. No one should trust those who promise to do so. 3. Only the highest, more connected exercise of our human potential, our connections with nature, and the very highest levels of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could give us hope of surviving and keeping up with the visible competition across our cosmos. True AGI is based on GOALS or VALUES, as in the most powerful new breakthroughs we now have in RLADP, defined in what I sent you already, and in the links. (I hope some of you can recall/retrieve that, and use somehow.) Just FYI, I attach two totally new papers, one an abstract accepted to the IEEE QCE21 conference and one submitted yesterday to an Elsevier journal (for which odds look quite good). These give links to the best AGI known to most people yet, but also a pathway to build Quantum AGI (QAGI), a level of AGI which has not yet been discussed by anyone else before. There is simulation work and new experiments which I hope I can discuss more publically before too long. ================================ ================================= The SLIGHTLY more complete explanation of the risk I sent before this: Hi, Jerry! You asked me for climate and James for grey goo. But I feel I owe you a few comments on 4, uncontrolled AI. By the way, IEEE has just widely distributed the announcement of my winning the Frank Rosenblatt Award, their top award for Computational Intelligence: 2021 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award “For development of backpropagation and fundamental contributions to reinforcement learning and time series analysis ======================================= The truth is that very few policy makers understand the real tradeoffs and possibilities, and what is going on under their nose, regarding uncontrolled "new types of AI." That includes the Lifeboat Foundation and the vast communities of enthusiasts and worriers. A major part of the threat is that so many people are making decisions and forming opinions without knowing key basics, even in the software development community itself. By the way, Karl Schroder in the MP circle has a kind of natural understanding of where AGI might REALLY be going much more valid than what the verbal policy "experts" seem to imagine. But for me, the problem is where to begin in summarizing the full story, and which of the thousands of backup documents to begin with. Maybe it is better done by accepting Metta's invitation to do a (citeable) Zoom DISCUSSION, based on your questions, after you have a little time to scan this email and sources like http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm. Or some of the youtubes, which range from trying to simplify, to hard core technical reality in the very best venues. ONE WAY to pose the issue is to ask: "What could AGI do to us? Will it be uncontrolled?" One way to DEFINE AGI is .. a type of information processing systems designed to LEARN to maximize some kind of hardwired utility function. True AGI are an integration of two hard core universal technologies, the PREDICTION and the OPTIMIZATION aspect. ANYONE WHO INSTALLS A TRUE AGI must hardwire a decision or system to evaluate the bottom line of what it is supposed to maximize. This is an absolute unavoidable reality; efforts to wiggle around it just hide the path and raise the risks. There are LEVELS and LEVELS of learning and cognitive capability, from the lowest lamprey kind of artificial brain, to rat level, to human level, to sapient level, and beyond, to new types of quantum and multimodular systems which most people think are science fiction but which others are quietly deploying already in ways which start to control human lives. LIMITING the level of AGI intelligence is no solution. NSF and NASA once studied plans for lunar development which would exploit the moon by deploying hordes of "artificial metal cockroaches" -- systems intelligent enough to survive and dominate, but not refined enough to benefit humans or even avoid longer-term risks. The PRESENT TRENDS in AI deployment, both in governments and corporations, are very similar or worse, moving towards what we call a "Nash equilibrium", very popular among many program designers but likely to cause fatal instability in the global system, by many paths, not least of them slaughterbots and human unemployment. Many believe slaughterbots are just sci fi, but some of us have seen them. One source proving that you cannot trust what most hopeful "experts" tell you is: http://1dddas.org/activities/infosymbiotics-dddas2020-october-2-4-2020/dddas2020-video-presentations The sheer diversity is amazing. RTX and PWC, however, already demonstrate capabilities others consider impossible, and the new IEEE work goes well beyond that. Luda and I have new papers on how to build quantum AGI (QAGI), a huge step beyond the AGI we designed in the past, and I am very worried about where to place them to navigate between being too open and being too restrictive. IEEE QCE2021 has accepted my abstract connecting QAGI to climate, but where to put the mathematical details and how to navigate dysfunctional politics? "Nash equilibrium" is another term for war of all against all. Best of luck, Paul More on the actual AGI situation: My concern is that AGI development is like riding a bicycle, where slowing down OR EVEN NOT GOING FASTER ON THE DEEP level may be riskier and more unstable. PRESENT trend is a "Nash game" of developers working for governments and corporations, moving fast to deploy top down low intelligence solutions. Ironically, part of this is my fault, because they are moving on the path up to mammal-level AI maximizing a central U over time, treating humans more and more as things in the internet of things. They do it because the math and the tools are THERE. SOME hope lies in Sustainable Intelligent Internet, a different KIND of optimization design, based on RLADP with maximum full use and development of mundane human potential. That's another level of design challenge, NOT BEING advanced in a mathematically well-grounded and integrated way ANYWHERE yet. It is POSSIBLE, as I outlined. But in truth, Pareto optimality and issues like climate survival require MORE, and that is why quantum and noosphere connections are important. The utility determining system is crucial to the outcome.

Tales from the real front lines of climate wars

A friend sent me a video expressing doubts about all those big climate models. So why do I put climate on my list of three top global issues, above all else? In reply, I have come clean on how I came to be such a climate extremist NOW: ============================================================================ We all need to remember what we aren't sure of yet, and probe hard on our uncertainties, when the issue is one of life or death. But with climate, I have already done that, meeting the full demands of my conscience. Because I believe in the power of positive visualization (more for me than for most others!), I seriously would prefer to worry less about it, if I could justify that. But I cannot. The questions you cite about the big climate models are more than familiar to me. In actuality, in 2009, I started work in Senate Staff working for a Republican Senator on the Environment and Public Works Committee. I worked with the staff group under Senator Inhofe, who was THE leader of climate skepticism in the US. I attended all the hearings, and certainly listened carefully to all sides. I will never forget the day when I brought back to my cubby the full testimony of Prof. Happer of Princeton, who argued that CO2 only blocks SOME frequencies of light, and that failure to account for different frequency bands and absorption invalidated the big climate models. All of us serious professionals had studied the current IPCC reports on climate, but I remembered nothing form them to invalidate Happer's argument. For a day or two, I felt, "Hey, maybe I CAN join more completely with my friends on the committee!" I certainly enjoyed being a serious, honest outlier, as I have always been for my whole life in science. This was one of my most intense once-in-a-lifetime experiences. (Though it is weird how MANY unlikely once in a lifetime experiences I have had.) But my conscience then ordered me to consider what other evidence I might have. I remembered a computing conference at Argonne (held in Chicago) where I got to present a new mathematical algorithm, which I had developed, applicable to any differentiable big mathematical model. (I posted my ccapter later at http://www.werbos.com/AD2004.pdf.) At that conference, I was surprised to learn that my algorithm actually HAD been used by one and only one of the big climate models. Many people had told me that all the big climate models were basically just "airball models," never calibrated to hard core time-series data. This guy explained how he used my method (which he did not give proper credit for!!) to calibrate HIS climate model to real time-series. The same guy (Prof. Carl Wunsch at MIT) also appeared in a propaganda video a family member had sent me, attacking all climate stuff, in which this same guy Carl Wunsch appeared, attacking Gore. And so, to check my facts in an honest way, I called Wunsch out of the blue by telephone. (It is amazing how often phone calls from the US Senate do get answered.) I asked him whether Happer's story was true. I was VERY deeply surprised (quite a day!!) when Wunsch got very emotional. I forget when I checked his web page, which also made part of the story clear. The folks who mace the tape basically snookered him, deliberately quoting him out of context, deliberately giving a grossly wrong impression. YES, he did have serious gripes about other climate models, and YES he was a bit of a curmudgeon. (Why else would he give more credit to folks closer to him than to a nonmember of the club developing an algorithm?) But NO, he did not mkae the equally biased assefrtions in the video or inHapper's testimony. Happer made strong statements about what is IN the climate models. "Sorry," said Wunsch, "but MY model certainly knows what a frequency is! And..." But even after all that, my position was: "OK, I believe the IPCC story is the best we have for now. But it only projects 5% loss in the 2100 GNP, with 75% probability, in the business as usual case. That's real, and market theory justifies a MODEST well-calibrated carbon fee, but NOT the Obama bill. INSTEAD, we should give priority to the security of fuel for cars and trucks, a much bigger national security priority anyway." I even drafted a bill to that effect, got it through Senate General Counsel, and brought it representing Specter to the Senate Majority Leader Reid. Reid had made many promises to Specter of what he would do if Specter changed parties, but Reid was a liar. The bill ( based on an upgrade of a bill from Inhofe and of Bush's EISA law) is posted at werbos.com/oil.htm. When the heartland institute started to schedule speakers saying "climate is only a 5% issue," and after I attended some great meetings at the Marshall Institute (and even spoke at one of their meetings, albeit of space and defense technology, another Specter are)... well... whatever. BUT THEN CAME ANOTHER LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCE. IN 2009, I was on detail from my home institution, the NSF. NSF invited a crowd of us, late in 2009, to a large public talk back in Ballston (where I still live). The head of the Geosciences Directorate of NSF introduced Peter Ward as the nation's number one real frontline expert on the subject of mass extinctions of life on earth. There were a LOT of technical details I will spare you (until/unless you ask), but most of it was about field study techniques and results and ancient history. But he did show curves of past concentrations of CO2 by ... millennium... across the great extinctions. At the end of his talk, he showed us the current numbers, and the similarity. "It is my gut feeling that if we get 1000ppm, it will be a simple rerun. We all die." I knew the energy economics VERY well, enough to believe we ARE on a path to 1000ppm now. In many talks after that (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvteE6smrF0), I recalled that day. "The SMALLER shock for me was what he said. The BIGGER shock was the way the rest of the audience reacted. Some like it, some hated it. Was I the ONLY one who seriously honestly wanted to find out whether we are all going to die or not? Is he right or is he not? What is the truth? What will decide the outcome, how soon?" I spent a lot of time probing these questions, updating my understanding every year. And now, I am not relying much at all on those models your URL talks about. We have a lot of real, current time series data on Arctic and Antarctic, and new information on past extinctions in sources like Ward and Kirschvink and like Hazen (who probably would get respect from Inhofe!). As of THIS WEEK, I have gotten new information, which adds a few questions which DEMAND NEW RESEARCH, but which make me more worried than ever before, on a closer time schedule: http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/08/new-information-on-what-we-know-about.html This isn't about left or right. It's about survival. Didn't Ayn Rand say something about survival? (I met a lot of "right" lobbyists who reminded me a lot of the Taggarts, especially in aerospace.) Folks who talked about reducing regulation, even as they jiggered FERC to try to impose MORE state monopoly and reduced competition! But Reid lied to Pickens as much as he lied to us. Best of luck,

New information on what we know about how soon and how climate change might kill us all

This actually has a happy ending, MAYBE, if you read through to the end and take action different from what all the current climate activists are talking about. This is what I sent today to some folks I hope will be willing and able to do something: ============================================================ MOST URGENT: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/ward-peter-6323/ The "Save the World" podcast just now, on ocean currents and the threat of human extinction by the worst types of climate risk, was a great dialogue, informative to all of us, even those of us who have worked hard to track these issues for decades with real science. NOTE THE URL above. I call it "urgent", not because it requires urgent action directly in the policy world. Rather... it is about an important radio broadcast COMING SOON. Peter told us that this is a national broadcast going out to millions of people -- with a heavy right-wing tilt, but that is one of the important audiences which needs to understand what is going on. They may also be a good venue for understanding how space technology could play a crucial role in averting these risks. Metta will probably be posting today's discussion soon on her general web site, https://youtube.com/c/ToSaveTheWorld Two main take away points hit ME hardest today: (1) Many people naturally assume that the scenario of death by H2S must be further off in time than sea level rise and whatnot. (Ward has a new book, published in German, on that issue.) "After all, if the PT extinction happened over millions of years, shouldn't we expect it to take a long time now?" No. Not really. At werbos.com/Atacama.pdf, I even have a slide on how it can be done overnight in an aquarium!!! Microbes can proliferate VERY quickly, once the conditions in the water cross a tipping point. (I think of it as a hypersurface in state space.) We all agreed that knowledge in all aspects of these threats are far less than what they could and should be, with even a moderate NSF-level focused effort on the right questions (though it would help to have Navy or NOAA data on more dimensions of what is happening, BOTH near Arctic AND Antarctic). In point 5 of my proposed action strategy, http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm, I include AQUARIUM LEVEL research to better understand exactly what the tipping point is. What are the conditions of regular chemistry (fertilization) and oxygen level (and maybe T and P, maybe) which separate conditions where the dangerous archaea go nuts and when they don't? And how fast do they go nuts when they do? We also agreed -- Peter can contact Lee Kump, one of the other crucial leading scientists on climate extinction, whose work is essential to all the issues we discussed today. We hope that he AND Peter can discuss these issues for Metta in a future podcast. (2) Stratified ocean is NOT ONLY about Antarctic/Humbolt/Pacific, what I have focused on the most. If the Gulf Stream conks out, it implies BOTH a freezing of Western Europe ("fimbulwinter") but ALSO stratified ocean in that region. Peter Ward, Lee Kump and I have all talked a lot about the "Great Dying", the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, based on H2S and radiation enough to kill every mammal on earth, based on H2S produced by archaea in the deep Pacific Ocean. But there was ANOTHER mass extinction, much smaller, based on H2S from the Arctic and North Atlantic, described in ANOTHER chapter in Ward's older book, Under a Green Sky. That was far less fatal. Large enough to wipe out all the LARGE mammals, but still leaving the mice and rats alone. (Or at least the aardvarks.) Such a small event, bad enough only to wipe out creatures like humans and cows, all over the earth. But since that is coming much sooner than what I have been talking about, maybe we should pay more attention. Most startling to me is how little we know about the TIMELINE for the cutting out of the Gulf Stream, to lead (immediately?) to fimbulwinter and stratified ocean in the local region. I was glad that Metta's guests expert in Arctic waters know that the changes in Gulf Stream due to fresh water pouring out more or less from Greenland is NOT the only (or even main ) effect we need to worry about, even though it was the dominant effect in the past. But when exactly will surface water temperatures, at the prevailing level of saltiness, cross the line to where heating does not increase the density of sea water any more? (That line is where the Gulf Stream conks out, a sharp tipping point coming soon.) HOW SOON? Is it decades or months? Or is it months for part of the year and just a few years for the whole year? We really need to know the exact timing, and control factors. ======================= =========================== By the way, we did discuss timing of what happens when H2S poison starts outgassing. I was very relieved for a few days when I first started reading this literature years ago, and learned that H2S outgassing from the oceans comparable to that of the worst mass extinctions in the past would still take a few thousand years to reach the level deemed as poisonous to humans. But as Peter Ward noted in the discussion today, people like Lee Kump worked out these aspects in some detail many years ago. The FIRST effect is a massive production of H2S byproducts in the atmosphere, some rising to the stratosphere, causing massive acid rain and radiation, within just a few decades, starting immediately. It is no coincidence that books depicting the Great Dying typically show drawings of barren muddy landscapes, trees mainly burned out and washed away. Phenomena like blindness and reproductive behavior disorders usually occur at H2S levels far less than outright death. Coming first to Western Europe? Best of luck. We really need it. Current COP26 work will do nothing to stop this, and the ocean economy mitigation efforts will either make this happen sooner (to EVERYONE) or have little effect; we do not yet know. See the R&D proposed under POINT 4 of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm. But better market design and other types of new technology could prevent these problems at no cost or even a profit, if only the right information could get to the right place? (See points 1 to 3 of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm, the kind of areas NSF actually hired me to work on from 1988 to 2015!). ============================================ Just for this blog post: I still believe that threats from bad syndromes on the emerging Internet of Things are even bigger and more imminent, but as I think over the Gulf Stream issue, I do start to wonder.Both might even come to a head in my own lifetime, old as I am!! Still, this was a break from new work crucial to the internet side, which requires science much harder than climate. After all, we had convection currents and aquaria in eighth grade science class! It amazes me how little our species seems to have digested that!! But getting the internet straight requires intelligent systems and quantum math beyond what they could teach me even in the Harvard PhD program in Applied math in the 1970s!!

Faith Versus Practice is like Theory Versus Experiment

 General Principles

Yesterday, on a discussion list, I wrote about the huge gaps I have seen between theory and practice in physics. Specifically, I talked about the type of physics called "QED," which addresses how quantum effects work in the realm  of electrons, protons, neutrons and electromagnetism. When I ran the "QMHP" research area at NSF, I had a chance to observe the greatest empirical work in the world in experimental research into those areas, but now I see huge gaps between that realm and the beliefs about quantum mechanics and physics which most people assume today. Based on what I saw at NSF, I believe that better understanding of QED physics is the most important challenge open to rigorous, fundamental physics today

In the realm of soul and spirit, I see a similar gap. Many people have talked about the gap between people's BELIEFS and people's ACTIONS. Many of us believe that prayer or meditation are important ACTIONS they take in their spiritual life. This  morning, in my own daily morning meditation, I see more clearly how we need to state and remember some basic principles.

Faith and Practice In My Life
Forty years ago, I decided to join a local Quaker Meeting, affiliated with Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM), which has strong ties both with Friends General Conference (FGC) and Friends United Meeting (FUM). To create a kind of social contract or agreement, to allow diverse people to work together, they agree on an official document (updated at times) called "Faith and Practice." Some people come because of what they believe, their Faith. Others, like me, come because of practice. We all try to work together, positively, for many reasons, but I came for practice.

 
When I travel to Asia, I often say: "If I lived in your nation, I probably would affiliate with a different religious institution. This wasn't a declaration of what my beliefs are, which I state in my papers. It was a choice of practice. Practice usually requires that we connect with other people. There are churches in the US who follow great practices, but with FGC Quakers I am not making a false declaration about my beliefs." At http://www.werbos.com/religions.htm and http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm I discuss what my beliefs were in 2019 and in 2021, but I also give links to photos of temples and shrines in Japan which I connected to in 2019, which I would connect with more if I lived there. In India, I actually accepted basic initiation into one of the orders of yoga. (Some others in our local Meeting have done the same.) The first of those Shinto Temples was called the Temple of Connection  by some.

 
LCD: A Core Practice
Yesterday in our local Quaker "Meeting for Worship", I summarized what the three real pillars are of our practice: an emanation of light, like an "LCD" light. (It is OK to smile in Quaker meetings, and many did at this point.) L for Listening, C for Connection, and D for discernment.
None of these are things we just hear about in kindergarten, and then forget. None of these are things any human can claim to have mastered completely.

[Exactly after I typed that sentence, and settled down to a breakfast of Dahi yogurt and blueberries, I decided to listen to the background. What popped was a video on eco India. That fits my message and practice so well I have to add it!!! But it appeared directly on DW,

and this nay not be exactly the right choice: Eco India - The Environment Magazine | Eco India | DW | 02.07.2021]

All of us humans are challenged to learn better and better how to do better on these three keys, the L and the C and the D. "This year," I said yesterday, "C is especially prominent. Many of us have been challenged to upgrade our skills in making spiritual connection. Our very lives are powered by those spiritual connections. We depend on C for our very life! " [No, the life in our physical body will not just disappear if that cuts out, but I for one expect I would suffer from "failure to thrive" if the daily infusion of light, life and love should be cut off.]

 
In all three areas, we are called to push as hard as we can, but no harder, to strengthen and exercise the skill. If we push as hard as we can, as in strenuous physical exercise, we will feel some pain, some growing pains and some confusion. Thus we are also called to learn more and more self awareness and self control to prevent negative irrational reactive emotions which could confuse and misdirect us. We are all called to do this, here and now....

 
[This was our first "hybrid meeting", with many of us in the meeting house and many shown as Zoom images on the wall. I did not comment on that example, visible in plain sight, but after the silent period we certainly discussed it.]

I was very silent before I stood up and spoke that message. I had hoped others would voice the thought (as they often did at previous times, with previous thoughts). In silent meditation, I had tried to reach out to higher intelligence and ask for explanations of some points.... including many aspects and examples of connections on my mind.

MORNING AFTER
Almost every day, I begin by trying to attain the highest level of "meditation" I am capable of, trying to connect better with the noosphere, the cosmos, the Spirit of the Deep. This was when I was more able to listen to the response of higher intelligence to the questions I projected out there so hard at Meeting yesterday.

As always, the complexity of what came from higher intelligence, and my own brain and soul, and the other inputs we have access to, is far too great to do justice to even in a long blog post. I remembered how I now have to get used to the idea that many of my most important thoughts can only be voiced at that level, going to the noosphere and others that way, simply because there is too much and too many to fit in narrower channels like this computer.

 
An exercise

As part of this session, I was reminded of a very great Zen exercise (a Practice!), which I performed often and respect deeply even though I am shocked by some of the dangerous false Beliefs of Bodhidharma.

 
That exercise begins with a type of exercise familiar to many schools of Western mysticism and yoga: focus your whole awareness in this part of your body. (Foot? heart? Solar plexus?Upper head? A few inches above it? A cloud a few feet away?) BE there in that place. Feel what you feel when you locate your whole awareness there. Then shift...

BUT THEN the Zen script asks: "WHO is doing the focusing? Who is looking first to one place and then to the next? No, do not just turn around, keep looking forward but FEEL back, and feel deep, to WHO is doing the looking."

 
This morning, it became like the same thing at a higher level. I can meditate and feel awareness from my personal viewpoint, my own personal self or soul. I try to gate with higher intelligence, to try to share some of what it offers in the gating activity, and see what life feels like from its point of view more than I do in normal everyday life. And then suddenly: I can see through my own self soul... and the other within limits... but there is value in coming back to the... Self?... which can switch perspectives.

 
More thoughts

There are practical concrete schisms between parts of our noosphere, the cosmos and our very best efforts to understand the ultimate truths. These were major themes this morning.

One theme was LCD, and prayer. Some friends are very serious about listening (to perceive) and praying (to send out a request).

 
Some would meditate hard on the question: "What does "God" (higher intelligence) really want, and how can I  make sense of and fit with his or her plan?"

 
So look at it visually. We can try to exchange information, to input (listen) or output (request or articulate), either to our external environment or to our body. These are all important aspects of practice. But there is also information to the buffer, to a shared information space between us and higher intelligence, essential to our hope of seeing an honest answer to the very tricky kinds of questions I was posing yesterday.

I also remembered the good old oracle of Delphi: a practice where people did not only request favors, but requested insight or information. Failure to ask the right question often leads to endless confusion, at all levels of life!!!

Long, long ago, I understood that the "plans" of a higher order intelligence would be too complicated to state clearly and reliably to lower levels of intelligence. Even in good Quaker Meetings, we expect some people to be guided in one direction, and others in others. The Meeting urges people not to confuse personal, current leadings with guidance which everyone  would benefit from. But if we develop our intelligence, our arsenal of universal concepts and representations, and our flexibility, we can serve as better channels of a more accurate understanding, updated every day, and thus be more energized. 

This does not require that we give up our personal human values and feelings, but by working with the bigger tide we have a much better chance of getting where we really prefer to go: a Pareto optimum. (This has some relation to the old Rosicrucian version of Alychymical marriage.)
When they asked me "Are you a person of the book?", I still say, "Yes, the book by Von Neumann and Morgenstern" (as interpreted and explained on my web pages, as best I can, always in need of update and explanation).

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Later that day:

In yesterday's message, I stressed that we are called to reach out more and better, but NOT to erode our own core spiritual connections and foundations.

For example, when we reach out to the left of us, we can also reach out to the right of us, and even help improve connections between left and right! After all, we are all part of the same noosphere. That is who we really are, even when we try to listen to the cosmos and the night sky!

Like neurons inside a brain, we, inside the noosphere of this solar system, live or die based on our connections to others in that noosphere, and to the noosphere itself. 

A few weeks ago, one of the BLM people urged us to resist "perfectionism." Yes, we need to connect better with people who cannot afford to spend energy on details we might feel obliged to address ourselves. But many of us also need to remember the need to connect better with people like those who truly appreciate higher mathematics. This week was especially challenging for me personally, as I learned to respect more fully their need for connection, as we need to work out workable details for challenges like the internet of the future. Without getting those details right, we might well all die. I am very deeply grateful to them for their patience as I struggle with this.

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Next day: (Tuesday, 7/13/21)

From the voice of Loki: "Ask not what God wants. Ask how much he is willing to pay for it." Wild as this sounds, it may have a lot more truth in it than most people are willing to face up to. ALL intelligent systems, from brains to noospheres to systems of collective intelligence -- even universal optimizers based on Lagrange-Euler equations -- are governed in the end by tradeoffs. Some of us have seen things which might be viewed as miracles, but they are never free, even if the price is in a different level of economy. This is an aspect of what it means that our souls are parts of a larger system.

It reminds me of how I adapted to working at NSF, learning to live within budget constraints as painlessly and efficiently as possible, still focusing on the big goals at stake.

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And next: 7/14/21

In morning meditation, as in Quaker Meeting, some messages are really meant for everyone (to be transmitted and discussed later by whatever mix of channels works). The one today was mainly for a few people, like me

and part of my family, though logically it has some connection to everyone.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when I lived in Maryland with children in the house, I often thought of "This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter..." Different morning meditation periods, and different days seemed to have different themes, fitting the old image of this whole world as a school.

This post started with LCD, letters important to all of us. EVERY soul in this noosphere connects to others, like neurons in a brain, and our very lives depend on the exchange of "energy" and information with other neurons, connecting us to all different parts of the noosphere. But, just as different cells in the brain tend to learn different pieces of information, and develop different connections (some longer-distance, some shorter), some of us put special weight on one aspect of C which I glossed over quickly above:

the aspect of learning universal concepts or representations which strengthen connection and strengthen our value to higher intelligence (noosphere, cosmos, spirit of the deep). 

So for me this morning, the letter U for understanding or unique plays a central role. [oops: TODAY these ae the "U" in play. But there is another U, Von Neumann's cardinal utility function, which is just as important. For another time of day.] 

My experiences as a program director at NSF 1988-2015 are still of such great value to me in expanding and organizing my own understanding! For example, in my first week, as I set up a review pane to do justice to certain advanced proposals and thinking, I felt a huge reaction which I will never forget: "I have been worrying so much about the world having too many people. [Yes, it still does, in numerical terms.] But when I need to find the people who can really understand THIS aspect, and THAT aspect, and THIS central issue of global importance... it seems as if there are not enough of us! People with unique understanding (UU) are so essential to the health of science, of truth, and of the noosphere itself! I often feel I can "see" a kind of hidden tree or network of those very special souls, past and future, connecting key ideas and insights necessary to really integrate anyone's understanding. Lately, those people are often unknown to 99% or 99.999% of humanity, or grossly misunderstood if known, but important to integrate.

But this blog is not the time/place to name names, even though they figure prominently in my last few days. Even though I woke up from an assumption dream where a powerful and enlightened person had to revise plans (we all do!!) do to a U U aspect he had not really known or accounted for, not about me... 

But I CAN repeat a useful lesson I learned at NSF, which I often recall and relive.

"In this information economy, many of us are knowledge workers of one kind or another.

There are three essential duties of ANY knowledge worker: to input, to output, and process or add value in creating new knowledge. ALL THREE are ESSENTIAL and NECESSARY for everyone, and the total value is roughly the product of the three." Some were better at

one of the three than others; diversity was crucial, such as connections between those creating new ideas or technologies and those better at education and passing them on. 

That applies both in our mundane information economy and in the noosphere itself!