Humans

In Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, Mickey gets a shot at immortality by uploading his consciousness, but at what cost, asks Sally Adee

Humans

9 February 2022

By Sally Adee
Died at work? Just load your mind into a new body and finish the jobShutterstock / Photobank.kiev.ua

Mickey7
Edward Ashton
St Martin’s Press (out in the US on 15 February and in the UK on 17 February)Advertisement

IT WASN’T that long ago that sci-fi creators were more starry-eyed and optimistic about the prospects of tech companies keeping our best interests at heart. In 2016, Black Mirror, the TV series whose dark speculations defined the late 2010s, released an unusually upbeat vision of digital immortality in which a dying woman uploads her mind to a global megacorp’s server farm and lives her best life online in perpetuity.
The idea of uploaded consciousness has long been an object of fascination in science fiction. Neal Stephenson spent several hundred pages of his 2019 triumph Fall; or, Dodge in Hell on a gonzo hallucinatory riff recounting his protagonist’s transition into life in silico. Yet, Stephenson’s artistically muscular depiction failed to answer a central question: is it a goal that’s worth pursuing, even in theory? Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 is the first novel I have come across that properly explores the philosophy behind that question.
In the book, titular Mickey escapes a grim life on his home planet by signing on to a mission to terraform a new one. He has no skills to offer, so he applies to be the ship’s “Expendable”, a disposable employee who specialises in dangerous tasks that often prove deadly. The only perk of the job is that no matter how often he is killed, he is uploaded into a new body to carry on his work. “The way they sell you on becoming an Expendable is that they don’t call it becoming an Expendable,” Mickey muses. “They call it becoming an Immortal.”
The ideal version of immortality is as a seamless continuation of the self. But will Mickey2 – or Mickey7, the incarnation we meet in the story – be the original Mickey or just an accurate copy? The hiring manager for the terraforming mission is deliberately ambiguous on this point. As the plot unfolds, Ashton artfully illustrates how this conceptual fuzziness benefits the corporations that make digital immortality their business.
When Mickey’s eighth instance is mistakenly decanted while Mickey7 is still alive, he wakes up to the fact that he has had the wool pulled over his eyes. It is the best illustration of the problem of digital immortality I have read: simple, fast and fun, laying out complicated concepts in an accessible way. Yet beneath the breezy tone lies a vision with harrowing implications.
“It is easy to envision the business case for digital immortality that is anything but customer-centric”
Black Mirror’s megacorp was seemingly able to monetise giving its customers a pleasant digital ever after, but it is easy to envision the business case for digital immortality that is anything but customer-centric. For the full bleak take on this, I refer you to Lena, a short story by Sam Hughes under the nom de plume “qntm”, which was published online in 2021 and is already on its way to being upload canon. After a neuroscience grad student agrees to have his consciousness copied by his university research lab, the initial techno-optimism fades into dystopian despair in ways that feel laceratingly plausible.
Given the prevailing direction of our society, the Black Mirror episode looks almost quaint in its optimism. But whether a life in the digitised beyond feels like heaven for the minds that inhabit it or like a corporate-branded version of hell, Mickey7 makes a good case that any human who decides to upload themselves will be just as dead as anyone else who has ever lived and died.

Lena
qntm
A well-meaning neuroscience grad student donates his digital consciousness to science, a decision he may find he “lives” to regret.

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
Neal Stephenson
William Morrow Speculative science fiction looking into the near future of the US. Like a more emotionally healthy, post-cyberpunk Succession.

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A new book by ecologist Rebecca Nesbit argues that it’s time to stop being romantic about nature and make some rational decisions about what to save

Humans

9 February 2022

By Simon Ings

Would cutting down the last oak tree on Earth make you a bad person?Vandervelden/Getty Images
Tickets for the Ark
Rebecca Nesbit
Profile BooksAdvertisement

IMAGINE you are the last person on Earth. On your dying day, you cut down the only remaining oak tree, just because you can. Are you morally in the wrong?
Rebecca Nesbit would argue that you aren’t. A science writer and ecologist, she has form in tackling subjects where scientific rationalism and general intuition don’t necessarily line up. Her first book, Is That Fish in Your Tomato?, explored the pros and cons of genetically modified foods. In Tickets for the Ark, she turns her spotlight to the moral complexities of conservation.
She points out that, given we can’t save every species, we have some difficult decisions to make. For example, if push came to shove and their extinctions were imminent, should we choose to preserve bison or the Siberian larch; yellowhammers or Scottish crossbills; salmon or seals? And what criteria should we use to decide? Charisma, perhaps, or their edibility? Are native species more important than invasive ones? And is it morally acceptable to kill some animals to make room for others?
Working through these gnarly issues, Nesbit shows how complex and problematic conservation can be. In particular, she questions the way that efforts tend to focus on the preservation of species. This, she points out, is really us deciding to save what we can easily see. If our aim was to preserve the planet’s biodiversity, we could as easily focus on genes, individual strings of DNA or the general health of whole ecosystems, she argues.
At times, Tickets for the Ark reads as a catalogue of errors on the part of well-meaning conservationists. Many conservation projects are attempts to reverse human interference in nature – clearly an impossible task, considering we have been shaping the biosphere for at least 10,000 years.
Far from being a counsel of despair, though, Tickets for the Ark reveals the intellectual vistas that such blunders have opened up. Even supposing it ever existed, we know now that we can’t return Earth to some prelapsarian Eden. All we can do is learn how natural systems change – sometimes under human influence, sometimes not – and use this information to shape the future world according to our values and priorities.
In a sense, of course, we have always done this. What is agriculture, if not a way of moulding the land to our requirements? But now that we have learned to feed ourselves, perhaps it is time to think a little more broadly.
“If we accept that conservation is about the future not the past, the most troubling conundrums fall away”
To do that, we need to accept two things: one, that “nature” is a social construct, and two, that conservation is about the future, not the past. Then the most troubling conundrums in conservation fall away, writes Nesbit. The death of the last oak, at the hands of the last human, becomes merely the loss of a category (oak tree) that was defined and valued by humans – a loss that was inevitable at some point anyway. It is a conclusion that is counter-intuitive and feels uncomfortable, but Nesbit says that it should be liberating because it leaves us “free to discuss logically what we should save and why, and not just fight an anti-extinction battle that is doomed to failure”.
With this in mind, we can consider what conservation efforts will achieve for entire ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole without wasting our time agonising over whether, say, British white-clawed crayfish are natives, or if dingoes are a separate species from other wild dogs, or whether we are morally entitled to introduce bison to clear the steppe of Siberian larch. Larch is a native species, but it is also covering and warming ancient carbon-sequestering permafrost. In an era of potentially catastrophic climate change, Nesbit argues that we should keep our eyes on the bigger picture.
This is an ambitious and entertaining book, which foresees a dynamic and creative role for conservation in the future. Having freed ourselves of the idea that species belong in their original ranges, we may decide that it makes more sense to shepherd the most vulnerable species into new habitats where they have a better chance of survival. A brave proposal – but, as Nesbit points out, for some species, such drastic measures may be the only option.

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Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as those sung in English even though there are significant cultural differences in musical tone and scales

Humans

3 February 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A woman playing a koto, a traditional Japanese musical instrumentShutterstock/PixHound
Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as English language ones even though they are sung in different tones and scales.
Patrick Savage at Keio University in Japan and his colleagues analysed the musical notation of more than 10,000 folk songs, including the well-known Child Ballads from the pre-20th century. Around 4125 of the songs were sung in English and 5957 were Japanese.
The team defined a folk song quite loosely. “There are a lot of definitions, but we essentially said a folk song is an old song that has been orally transmitted between generations,” says Savage.Advertisement
There are a few differences between Japanese and English folk songs. For example, Japanese folk songs use a five-note musical scale, whereas English ones typically use a seven-note scale. They are also quite different tonally.
The researchers, however, were looking specifically at how the two musical genres evolved and whether there were any similarities. They first converted the musical notations into letter sequences that could be read by an algorithm that usually tracks evolutionary changes in nature. “This algorithm can identify highly related pairs of melody,” says Savage.

The nature of the subject matter influenced the analysis. “It is difficult to tell which version of a song or which style of melody came first,” says Savage. This means that when the researchers compared two similar songs, they couldn’t say for sure whether a difference in the number of notes between the two was due to an insertion or a deletion – so they treated all of these sorts of changes as the same.
They could, however, distinguish insertion/deletions from note substitutions, where the number of notes in a melody is the same in two songs, but a given note has a different value in each song.
The researchers found that these note substitutions were less likely than note insertions or deletions in both Japanese and English folk songs. “We think this is because note insertions or deletions don’t really affect the melody too much,” he says. “Substitutions, like singing everything in a lower note, obviously messes up the melody a lot more.”
What’s more, the effect was stronger in Japanese songs. “Ornamentation is a bigger deal in Japanese folk songs,” says Savage, referring to when small, rapid changes are made to non-essential notes in a melody.
The team also found that musical notes that played a bigger role in a song’s melody were less likely to change as the ballad evolved. “The way the music is being transmitted – whether they are Japanese or English – is very analogous,” says Savage.
“The patterns of change documented in this study will come as no great surprise to musicologists,” says Marisa Hoeschele at the Acoustics Research Institute in Austria. “But it is interesting that these same constraints apply cross-culturally.”
“Studying how folk music evolved can lead to insights into how cultural evolution occurs more generally,” adds Hoeschele.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039
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Josie Ford
Va va vacuum
Like many people who have difficulty distinguishing science fact from fiction, Feedback is anticipating with trepidation the rise of the sentient machines. We see the story recently reported by the BBC, “Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge”, as a kind of low-budget prequel.
“The automated cleaner failed to stop at the front door of the hotel in Orchard Park in Cambridge on Thursday, and was still on the loose the following day,” the article informs us, emphasising the point made by observers, sensibly hiding on social media, that robotic vacuum cleaners have no natural predators in the wild.
Nature also abhors a vacuum, of course. Fortunately, the Cambridge incident had a happy ending: the errant sweeper was “found under a hedge on Friday”. A mere test run, we fear. As is traditional, we would like to take this opportunity to state that we, for one, welcome our new robot vacuum cleaner overlords.Advertisement
Big. Very big.
“Asteroid bigger than Carrauntoohil to soar past Earth tonight,” boomed the Irish Examiner on 18 January, in a clipping sent by Stuart Neilson. “Named 7482 (1994 PC1), the asteroid is more than a kilometre wide at 1,052m and is just about bigger than Ireland’s highest peak, Carrauntoohil which is 1,038m tall.”
For those still struggling with just how big that is, never fear. “Its size means it is also bigger than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which, at 830m, is the world’s tallest building,” we further read.
So pretty big, then. “Most asteroids that whizz past the Earth are about the size of a family car. They’re not terribly big but this one is not the size of a family car, it’s the size of Carrauntoohil,” space commentator Leo Enright added helpfully. Our only open question now is how big is a family car in Burj Khalifas.
Mind that gravity
“Is the Hubble crisis connected with the extinction of dinosaurs?” enquires physicist Leandros Perivolaropoulos at the University of Ioannina, Greece, in a paper recently added to the arXiv preprint server, meriting an immediate induction into our pile of “questions we had not thought to ask”.
To back up some 13.8 billion years: the Hubble crisis (we paraphrase, slightly) is the fact that if you look at what the universe was doing very far over there in the dim and distant, and then work out what it should be doing over here now, what it is actually doing now is different, meaning something naughty must have happened when our backs were turned.
Something like, we don’t know, someone pressing a taped-over button on a control panel saying “do not touch” and inadvertently increasing the strength of gravity rather suddenly about 100 million years ago.
Stuff happens. The point is, had this increase actually occurred, it might explain the Hubble crisis and also, according to Perivolaropoulos’s calculations, have discombobulated the outer solar system sufficiently to have sent a load more space rocks careering towards Earth. This might have included the one that came steaming in flying a dino skull and crossbones flag some 66 million years ago.
We like this idea, on the basis that no one is going to tell us it isn’t true. And on the scale of cosmic conspiracies, this is hardly the largest. Everything is connected to everything else, after all, which is why we are going to go out on a limb and say it was actually the big bang that did for the dinosaurs.
Quantum whipping
A hop, skip and a jump across the Ionian Sea away, meanwhile, Theodore Andronikos and Michael Stefanidakis at the Ionian University on Corfu consider how a quantum parliament would work, also on the arXiv server.
Why, you may ask. The way things are going right now, we might counter: why not? Yet despite staring very hard at the paper for some time, our answer is somewhat indeterminate. The premise is replacing a system in which party loyalty dictates how legislators vote with a “free will radius” that can take any value from 0, for total loyalty, to 1, for total independence, running it through a quantum voting system and then seeing what happens.
Answer: it depends. But why stop there? What if not just quantum voting systems are employed, the authors muse, but voters, parties, politicians and bills themselves become quantum? “This is a fundamental question of a rather philosophical nature that is probably very hard to answer and, in our view, it deserves further consideration,” they write. We add it to our pile of ones we never thought to ask. Or not.
Entangled thinking
The covid-jabbed may find out sooner than we thought, if US anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny is to be believed, an assertion to which we prophylactically assign a classical truth value of 0. “Remember this term, because you’re going to hear a lot of it in the next year: quantum entanglement,” she avers in a clip circulating on Twitter. “From a physics perspective, what happens when you take that shot in? There’s all this entangling that goes on, and what the artificial intelligence hooking you up to the Google credit scores and all of the dematrix and all of those things.”
Not only that, Sherri, it unleashes the robot vacuum cleaners, too. If this is the best we can come up with, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
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From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil’s new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going and commands us to know them better

Humans

2 February 2022

By Simon Ings

IN SUCH a complex world, no one can be expected to understand everything. But for energy expert Vaclav Smil, there are limits. In his view, it is inexcusable that most of us don’t know the first thing about the basic workings of modern life and the technologies that keep us all alive. It’s not all rocket science, he says. “Appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made… are not the same as asking… somebody to comprehend femtochemistry.”
Smil deplores the way that Western culture disproportionately rewards work that is removed from the material realities of life on Earth. Most of all, he is concerned that the general public is abandoning its grip on reality. How the World Really Works is Smil’s attempt to redress the balance, showing the fundamentals of how food is grown, how the built environment is made and maintained, and how all of this is powered.
Smil believes it is worth understanding what might seem like outdated technologies given that the building blocks of our lives won’t change significantly over the next 20 to 30 years. Most of our electricity is still gener­ated by steam turbines, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884, or by gas turbines, first commercially deployed in the late 1930s, he writes. And many of the trappings of the industrial world still hinge on the production of ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, all of which currently require fossil fuels for their production. Even the newest technologies – AI, electric cars, 5G and space tourism – get most of their energy from fossil fuel-based turbines, says Smil.
Alternative methods are on their way, of course, but they will take decades to fully establish. Coal displaced wood relatively easily in the early 20th century, but it will probably take longer to bring in renewables because global energy demand is now an order of magnitude higher.
Given the irrefutable evidence of climate change, does this mean that Western civilisation, so hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels, is doomed?
Perhaps, but Smil would prefer that we concentrate on practical solutions, rather than wasting our energies on complex socio-economic forecasts. In his view, such forecasts will get less accurate over time because “more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors”.
How the World Really Works neither laments the possibly imminent end of the world, nor bloviates about the potentially transformative powers of the AI Singularity. Indeed, it gives no quarter to such dramatic thinking, be it apocalyptic or techno-utopian.
Instead, in an era where specialisation is seen as the pinnacle of knowledge, Smil is an unapologetic generalist. “Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me,” he writes. “I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do.”
He chooses to explain the workings of the world as it is today, from energy to food, materials, the biosphere, globalisation and the perception of risk. He covers sizeable ground that other commentators ignore. It is a grumpy, pugnacious account that, I would argue, is intellectually indispensable in the run up to this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. In short, How the World Really Works fully delivers on the promise of its title. It is hard to formulate any higher praise.

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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

2 February 2022

Read
Strange Bedfellows accompany many of us through our lives, yet most of us know next to nothing about common sexually transmitted infections. Ina Park aims to change all that in this upbeat look at the science of STIs.
National Museums Scotland
Visit
Audubon’s Birds of America is a chance to see this rare, hand-coloured natural history book and to learn more about its controversial creator, John James Audubon. It is on show at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from 12 February.Advertisement
Shutterstock/Triff Source: Shutterstock
Watch
Death by Shakespeare sees chemist Kathryn Harkup reveal the science behind some of the grisly methods used by the Bard to kill characters in his plays. Online talk by the Royal Institution on 10 February at 7pm GMT.

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By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Anna Omiotek-TottIN MY garden, bulbs such as snowdrops are coming up. Every year, I wonder if spring is arriving earlier due to climate change.
One study from 2006 found that many signs of spring, such as plant species unfurling their leaves, had been hastened by 7.5 days across Europe in the previous 30 years (Global Change Biology, doi.org/b7vmgk). And research published this week has found that UK plants are flowering nearly a month earlier than they did before the mid-1980s, probably due to warmer temperatures from January to April.
You might think that warmer weather would be welcomed by gardeners, … More

Josie Ford
No-vax’s good vibrations
“If you wish to understand the Universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.” This quote, attributed to the visionary electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla, possibly in his distinctly odd late phase, has long been beloved of those with a vibrantly different understanding of the universe.
Feedback hesitates to use the word “fruitloopery”, particularly as we now encounter the quote on the website of QuantBioRes, a company whose blameless existence investigating alternative treatments for covid-19 has recently been disturbed by the revelation that its majority shareholder is world men’s tennis no. 1 and vaccine refusenik Novak Djokovic.
“At QuantBioRes, we work in utilizing unique and novel Resonant Recognition Model (RRM),” we read on the company’s website. “The RRM is a biophysical model based on findings that certain periodicities/frequencies within the distribution of energies of free electrons along the protein are critical for protein biological function and interaction with protein receptors and other targets.”Advertisement
Following the paper trail a little further, we discover that, in the case of covid-19, the crucial frequency is 0.3145. We aren’t entirely sure what units that is in for those inclined to try it at home. Sadly, clicking what we hoped were links to a battery of exciting tests already performed produces no vibration on the internet’s surface, so we are left none the wiser as to progress.
These things can take time. In the meantime, we point to the existence of highly effective vaccines, whatever your resonant frequency may be.
Champagne’s moment
David Myers writes from the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland – nice work if you can get it – asking us to sit down as we imbibe the revelation contained in an article from CNN that “No amount of alcohol is good for the heart”. We are unsure whether it is the message itself that he expects to give us the vapours, or the fact that the chair of the World Heart Federation advocacy committee that released the report is Beatriz Champagne. No cause for celebration either way.
Pussy galore
Our news report “Ancient Egyptians used bandages for medicine too” (15 January, p 20) caused ripples in our inbox. For Ian Gammie, it was our assertion that “until now, Egyptologists hadn’t found bandages used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians”. As he points out, living ancient Egyptians are hard to come by these days.
Others were more exercised by the mention of a dressing placed over a “puss-filled wound”. This seems to imply a degree of veneration of the feline form beyond even that familiar from ancient Egypt. Ken Hawkins wonders whether it was discovered using a CAT scan, a line that we will file under “timeless”.
Fine words, buttered
Talking of which, Feedback had considered correspondence closed on the age-old conundrum of why toast lands buttered-side down – except perhaps when its polarity is reversed by being attached to the back of a falling cat. Not so, judging by our post since its reappearance in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on 4 December last year.
“Howdy Dr Feedback,” booms one missive from Heikki Henttonen in Espoo, Finland – a city where we seem to have quite a following, judging by our postbag – exhibiting both forthright charm and a suitable (and entirely justified) faith in our academic qualification. “How to make sure that your toast lands butter-side up,” he writes succinctly. “You should butter your toast on both sides.”
Sensible advice. Although we shouldn’t be at all surprised if a double-buttered slice would never hit the floor, but instead remain suspended slightly above it, permanently rotating, unsure of which way up to land. You might call that a physics-violating perpetual motion machine; we just call it resonance.
The universe against us
The last word on the toast thing – until the next one – goes to our mathematics guru Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick, UK. “As regards toast landing butter side down, you might be interested in the article ‘Tumbling toast’, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants’ by Robert Matthews in European Journal of Physics 16 (1995) 172-176,” he writes.
We most certainly would, since it contains the results of a model that applies Newton’s laws of motion with realistic parameters for the height of intelligent bipeds, the height of the tables they use and the nature of their toast to conclude that, if a slice of toast starts sitting butter-side up on a table, it will rotate more than 180 degrees but less than 360 degrees for any reasonable value for the initial speed at which it is nudged off, thus almost always landing buttered-side down.
Further expressing the relations in terms of eight fundamental constants, including the gravitational and electromagnetic fine-structure constants and the Bohr radius, leads to a stark conclusion: in any universe that supports intelligent bipeds, toast will almost always fall buttered-side down. “This is the opposite of cosmological fine tuning: there is no way to fine-tune a universe to prevent this outcome,” Ian writes. “I call this the Anthropomurphic Principle.” Also timeless.
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More