Cryptoterrestrials among us

What if all the humans, barely a few thousands, died all 70 thousand years ago? Will the Earth be devoid of intelligence? So when on this futurism article they suggested that we may not be alone on Earth after all, I decided to play along. First of course I tried to locate the scientific source. Unfortunately this time I didn’t find it. Probably it was lead by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who said that Ommaumma, the first interestelar object detected, was probably artificial. But allow me to engage. We all know – or assume – that our planet is quite old in comparison with mankind, and we can compare its age with the time it took us to go from the deserts to the cities, so to say. Barely a hundred thousand years, a glimpse if we compare it with the time the dinosaurs rule the Earth. The dinosaurs time itself is also not spectacular in cosmic terms. So here’s the thing. We could divide the age of the Earth, 4.54 × 10⁹ years, on intervals of 100.000 years. To be fair, let’s start counting after the multicellular life is supposed to appear, which leaves us “only” with 1.5 × 10⁹ years. That will be 15000 civilisation intervals. Don’t forget I’m here being quite rough, so I’ll divide the number by two – extending de facto mankind history to 200.000 years. We have now 7500 civilisation intervals. There’s no civilisation after civilisation, so now we need to add, a la Drake, some probability factors. Drake’s equation is like this:

We want to know N, the number of cryptoterrestrial civilisations. Let’s “map” the other values

• R_∗ = is going to be the number of civilisation intervals = 75000
• f_p = the probability of having moving life (no tree civilisation) = 0.5
• n_e =  the probability of having the right challenge (no challenge, no evolution) = 0.2
• f_l = the fraction of consecutive life changes (so that we end on intelligence) = 0.1
• f_i = the fraction of intelligent societies = 0.1
• f_c = the fraction of civilisations with technology = 0.1
• L = the length of time for which such civilisations lasted (one for simplicity) = 1 ^[

After my above leaps of faith (sorry, no science here) my final number is N = 7,5. Which is a big one, if you ask me. So hello, lizard people! Hope you enjoyed watching us…

Bonus: link to An Astrobiology Introductory Course. PhD level needed.

Dream: relaxing in a cabin by the river

I’m not the man in the picture, unfortunately. Let’s say I’m a little bit more round in the middle. Without being fat. I think what I bought is called daddy bod. Anyhow, she doesn’t complain, and my children love to lay over it. But let’s focus. Why this picture? I had a busy dream that I barely remember where I was running around, looking for people to perform mysterious tasks. Like literally I don’t know what I was doing but it was important. And I remember being acknowledged by those I was dealing with, totally, I get it, you are the man of the day, you know, all chocolate and honey. I guess my impostor syndrome is coming back, starting with haunting my dreams. I will survive it, because in the end, I don’t really care about. I don’t give a sh*t. I do it because of the reward. In that case, in this dream, the price was my own cabin, close to that river. Where I can go whenever I want, and get lost. Forget about all the stress and lay down, waiting for the sun to go down. And the fireflies to draw pictures in the sky. Pity that it was just a dream. Fortunately, she was with me also.

Dream: the Dimensional Digesting Robots

I believe we all are unsure of our reality at one point. I find traces of that everywhere: in books, in music, art, philosophy – Plato’s cavern anyone? In my last dream, humankind finally found out the truth about it, and decided somehow to fight it. I was one of those fighters. Reality was being consumed. We called them the DDRs. The Dimensional Digesters. They started destroying the Neanderthal time and space, far in the past, and they advanced little by little until reaching our days. We didn’t know about them because they were careful, and they attacked always where we had no references. But we found them on the Victorian Era. One day, a gentleman from the 19th century appeared on the 21st, in the middle of Piccadilly, grabbing a piece of technology beyond our knowledge. A robot arm, and a piece of its body. The NATO created quickly after analysing it two units: the ground force that was going to enter into their reality, the nicknamed DDR Matrix, and the science force – us – who were suppose to predict when the next deletion was going to happen.

I had fun with this dream. Time travelling, robot fights, you name it. You may think you can track the inspiration for this dream but I’m afraid you are wrong: it comes from a talk I attended about the future of in-silico simulations. At one point, a quite heated discussion started about the algorithm for an N-dimensional random walk. Yeah. We speak about it. Randomly, pardom my repetition.

Let’s buy some vegetables

“One of the highlights of this location is the fresh vegetables. You can buy organic food almost everywhere – and it’s not outrageously expensive!” She says. We are walking across the main axis. The sun, a line over us, is still fully powered, which means we are having at least another 4 hours of light. “Let’s buy some vegetables. Any preference?”

I hesitate to answer. As an human, I am very sensible to foreign food. The business between both planets is growing quite fine, but a lot of ground is still uncovered, the gastronomy being one of them. “Tomatoes.” I say. “I like tomatoes. Do you have of those?”. She smiles. “Yes. But they are blue – a lot of our vegetables are in my planet – I hope you don’t mind.” I nod. Then I turn my eyes to my left, where a strange buzz is calling me. A huge metallic bee is dancing over the giant flowers. “Drones.” She says. Of course. We have of those also. It makes sense to have them in such a flying ecosystem, since insects are not precisely easy to control. I run a little, just for fun. She laughs and catches me. I struggle with her, get free, and run again. We may not be of the same kind, but we are happy together. “There is the farm.” She says. I look. It’s oddly familiar to me, just one house, with the typical roof. Beyond it I can even see a barn. “Where is the market?” I ask. “Well.” She says. “We don’t have such a big crew here, so we don’t have precisely a market. You’ll see when we arrive.”

The “market” is a collection of racks showing baskets filled with goods and a touchscreen from time to time. Like a row of vending machines. “You can order what you want here ” she points at a big screen ” and then the robots will deliver it to you here ” to a little window under the screen with a flap door. Like the one of our vending machines. “Tomatoes, please. One kilo.” She says. Or I understand that. Translation is assisted, as usual. With a metallic sound, something is delivered to us. She grabs a paper basket and we walk to a table and a chair close by, obviously placed around for the purpose of snacking. “Try it!” I grab the blue ball, and give it a bite. Yes, it’s a blue tomato. maybe a little bit more salty than ours. I smile. She smiles. I’m happy. She’s happy. Life is beautiful when everything else is taken care of.

The Hakonth festival

“So how was your weekend?” We decided to take a coffee together to speak about the project, but because of our busy agenda it didn’t happen until now. She was sitting in front of me with the coffee I just poured. Our first plan was to walk down the line to that lovely coffeeshop but the weather decided not to accompany us.

“Well it was great. I met my friends from XYZ.” She smiled. We have a work relationship and I knew the smile was a genuine manifestation of happiness, not a compromise. On the other hand, we are coworkers, so I was wondering if I was focusing the whole relation wrongly. I sip my coffee.

“Really? Did they come here?”

“No, we decided to meet in M.”

“M? It’s not in the neighbourhood! Of course you can take a high speed, but still, it’s not my idea of a weekend trip.” Although I did it when I was her age to go to discos and similar…

“Well, there were more of us in M. Look. ” She draws out her comm device and call a video screen. Then she moves to sit by my side. I can see the scroll feed. She stops in a particular video, then magnifies it, and let me watch it. “This weekend was Hakonth. And since we are not anymore in XYZ we decided to celebrate it together in M.” I look at the party. A lot of people are in it, looking familiar to each other. And friendly. They sing, but as expected I can’t understand what they say. “We are praying together.” She zooms in. In the back of the party hall there’s a big, golden idol of a lady with eight arms. People are bowing in front of her. “This is one of the biggest celebration on the place we come from. It’s like your … Christmas, I think. But bigger and with friends.”

“I had no idea.” I’m such an ignorant of other cultures. Fortunately I’m tolerant, I believe.”Is this a party only for XYZ people? Or, in other words, is this a popular celebration?”

“Yes but only in the place I come from. I believe, I must confess our land is so big that I can’t be sure my rule is the rule for everybody.” I nod. “Can you tell me the typical food of France, for example?” I cackle a little.”You need to remember it’s my first time out of XYZ, so I want to know how others like me live here. In M, I met people like me in similar situations.”

“I had once a jewish friend. We celebrated Hanukkah and it was fun. Do you think I can join your festivity at one point?” She smiles to me. Again, I think it’s a sincere smile.

“Well I don’t know, it can be boring if you don’t know our songs, or our rituals. Besides, it’s a little bit private. It’s like… Christmas.” We say that at the same time, and laugh about it. I look at the dancing people, now throwing… flowers? to the golden statue. On one of the arms she has a scimitar, on the other, an axe. A very skilled goddess, obviously. “Well, we’ll see next year. We have 12 months to speak about this. But enough about me. It’s your turn. Tell me, what did you do the last weekend?”

Sweet Sausages and VR

There’s nothing better than a good old weird dream. I will try to describe the scene I remember. I was entering into some kind of coffee shop. Imagine the one from the Hopper paint but European style. Big panoramic windows and art-deco chairs. Old and classy. I take a chair and the girl with the apron – chewing gum – ask me if I want to try the Special. I agree without questioning what’s in, and in a couple of minutes she brings me a dish with what looks like a thick, deformed, caramel-coloured, sausage, accompanied with a couple of slices of a spongy bread that I’m not able to recognise and some vegetables. Cherry tomatoes maybe. “Would you like sugar or honey with it?” the blonde waitress asks. I think I mumble honey, then she places a bottle of the golden liquid in front of me. Maybe it’s a big churro, not a sausage. She sees my dubitative face and gesticulate cutting a slice with the knife and fork and pouring the liquid over it. I do so and I am surprised of the exquisite sensation in my mouth. It reminds me something but I can’t locate the memory. Actually I still remember the flavour in the wake – sometimes it happens – and I can tell you I will not eat it if offered for real I think. But it was definitely tasty.

A couple of men arrive then and sit close to my table. The blonde girl now is brunette. Or maybe it’s another waitress. I was paying attention to my sausage, maybe the other one left. I look tentatively to her ass, and I remember the popular saying about hair colour. “Thank you love.” The fat man says. “And bring me another of those sweet sausages.” He points to me. “Good choice. I’m coming here since half a century, they have the best $%^& (I don’t understand) of the city.” I don’t give conversation. His colleague? friend? looks at me and nods. There’s something like resignation in his eyes. They seem to tell me again with the same, don’t worry he does it all the time. The sweet sausage arrives. The speaker points to it. “Now you can’t find these guys around. All the shops are now fucking VR shops.” I don’t want to ask but I think he sees my confusion. “You don’t do VR? Then you are one of us! Who can understand these youngsters?” I nod. “I tried. I swear to god I tried it ” he continues, cutting the sausage into slices while speaking to all of us “but when I put those googles over my head, I automatically feel ill. They are all VR junkies, eating popcorn and drinking Cola, paying per hour! Instead of speaking one with each other directly, interacting in a virtual world. Ridiculous, right? Well, I say fuck them and their gadgets!”

Really. I don’t know where I dream, but sometimes I’m having fun.

The robot land

I’m on a road trip. To whom I don’t remember, but who cares. Our cabriolet is red, and probably rented. The wind blows gently, but it’s hot. The road is now crossing black, volcanic terrain. I don’t drive and actually I don’t know my driver. Meaning I don’t know anyone like him in the real world. An Italian by the accent. We stop over a gently slope, on some kind of lookup, and as if agreed previously, we park and open the trunk lid to get some cold beers and a couple of binoculars.

“There” he says, after sweeping the land for a good five minutes, while I stare at the infinite. “I found a group. Look with me.” I take the googles and look in the direction he’s pointing. After focusing, I see them. Machines. Barely humanoid, similar to the Star Wars attack drones, but less clumsy and with more limbs. “Are they them?” I ask. “Yes they are.” He answers. “Do you see how they dig with the first set of arms? I believe those are actually the mouths. The second set they use to build their offsprings. They grow them on their backs. But it’s a collaboration effort, one makes a piece, then he passes it to another. You get it.” I sip my beer. He leaves the binoculars hanging over his chest.”Isn’t the Government unhappy about them?” He chuckles. “The Government? They don’t know what to do. If it’s not going to produce money, they are not interested.” I sip my beer, and decide to throw away the empty can as far as I can, hoping maybe to hit one of the robots on the head. Of course I don’t manage, but my gesture speaks by itself. “But they are self-replicators, right? Aren’t they dangerous?” My driver starts heading back to the car. I follow him. He takes a soda, and drinks it without looking at me. With a sad voice he says “We hope not. Actually, some of us believe that they are repairing the land, that they are some kind of long-lost pollution cleaning system. If this is true, they will simply deactivate after the job is done.”

I look again to the robots. They don’t look specially dangerous in fact. “I see.” I say. “So you’re letting them clean your mess.” My driver looks at me, angry. “My mess? It’s their mess! The politicians created this wasted land! They didn’t care about us! They only wanted more money, and they didn’t care about the consequences. So we are grateful, and if needed, we will even give them resources, if we manage to communicate with them. We have now a name for this area, la terra dei robot, the land of the robots.”

On the way down

In my dream, I was going out, maybe in Trento, Lausanne, or some place with a very aggressive geometry, with big slopes and in-between valleys. I was invited to a street party, I believe, and I was looking for the specific spot of it. In Europe some villages are having medieval acute slopes, or streets with stairs and not enough place to drive. OK, maybe enough space for a motoretta or similar. The current slope I was running down was around 8 meters wide and it was bisected by irregular step groups, two, three, five, each 8 meters or so, connecting different plateaus. Between the yellow and white heterogenous buildings on both sides there were laid cables and strings with paper lanterns, garlands, and festive, colourful light bulbs. The road was really crowded. Most of the people were wearing masks, not surgical, but for a masquerade, or a carnival. The moon was shining above us all, right on top. While wandering I was offered by a girl a glass with champagne, that I took, and I was asked to follow her, that I did. I don’t know if it was the person I was supposed to meet. I wanted to ask her, but the ambient music was kind of loud. I tried to identify from where was the music coming and if we were heading there. Not only I didn’t manage but I found out there was not a single source of the melody. They were overlapping, oddly enough, in harmony, rock and traditional, classical and jazz.

I’m done with my glass by the moment we arrive. “I found him!” she says. “Hey everybody!” I smile, and unknown people wave to me. We are on a small lateral alley with an impossible exit, like one meter above everyone. Some kind of half-built well, somehow, very comfy. There’s a sofa on the ground, some stools, and a table filled with colourful bottles. This time I’m offered a spritz. “Did you see him?” – the dark-haired man with the purple mask asks me as soon as I find my spot. “He was asking before for you, saying that your portable thingy is ready.” Then I remember. “The hologram projector. Why did I ask him to meet me here?” The man smiles.”I guess you wanted to feel supported.” I nod.”There he is!”

I head to the man with the leather jacket. Actually, he’s totally dressed as an aviator. I don’t recognise his army badges, though. In the middle of my way, I decide to offer him a drink also, so I come back to our table to serve us another spritz. The leather jacket man moves up his shades. When I come close, I see that his eyes are composed, like from a fly or something. “Thanks for the drink.” He says. The eyes are not as inhuman as one could think. I wonder what he sees with those. I doubt about asking him. He gulps the spritz and takes out something from his pocket. “There you have it.” I look at the thing. It looks like a small wrist band with circular section, or half cuffs.”How does it work?” I ask. He takes it and rotate some parts of it. “Here, on the central part, you have the 2D projector. You can use it to check the matrix status, that is, temperature, rendering, stability, etc. You see? ” on the wall the thing seems to project a set of small and shinny progress bars. They mutate to pie charts, and then to numbers, while the pilot manipulates the device.” The next four rings ” he fumbles with some sections of the bracelet ” you may need to exchange from time to time. They are the matrix memories. You can easily burn them if you are not careful. Please be careful!” I nod.”And these two, close to the lock, are the switch. Yes, they are double, to avoid an accidental switching on of the whole theatre. Wait.” I wait. He shows me how to switch the thing off, and then his insect eyes are gone. It was an hologram.” Now it’s all yours. What do you want to do with it?” I tell him I don’t know yet. I look at his now fully human blue eyes, looking for a message of a lie. “Well, just be careful and don’t overestimate the battery. I recommend you play with it before going to the war. Give yourself a new face, or change your color, things like that.” I smile, thinking about it.”That’s also possible. But remember it’s an hologram, she will find out it’s not solid!” He laughs. I laugh. “Thanks.” I say, and I walk back to my people. Whoever they are.

Dry land

“I’m having trouble getting my phone fixed but I’m going back in a bit and then we are just waiting on you guys.” She texted.

“If she doesn’t have a phone, how the hell she sent the message?” Christoph was reluctant from the very beginning about the idea of letting her go alone to the shop. We were scheduled to come back in less than three hours. The phones, the same than everything else we were carrying over, was supposed to end up being just an atomic cloud afterwards.

“Don’t know, doesn’t the shop give you a replacement while your phone is being serviced?” Alena tended always to cover her friend. She and Christoph were together since our first trip, which is funny, since she originally declared her love for Joe.

“Maybe. She wants us to go directly. Shall we start?” I gently pushed them into the car. I learned to love to drive after my first trip, so I took the pilot seat. Christoph and Alena sit together in the back. I started the engine and carefully left the parking place.

“I’m not surprised they were almost extinct.” Said Alena suddenly. “I don’t understand what do you see on driving an auto. They are burning liquid bones and plants, for the sake of God.”

“Well, you must admit, Alena, that this place has its charm. With all the …macroscopic technology and colourful food. I remember you face when you tried that pizza. I will not believe you if you tell me you didn’t really enjoy it!” I turned to the left. The traffic was quite relaxed, very good. We had plenty of time to reach the cinema, but I wanted to find a nice spot to park and buy popcorn and beer before entering. I wanted the whole experience. “And you, Christoph, don’t you like this?”

“I do like it. Specially the beer. It makes my heart tinkles!” He smiled widely. “Anyway, you guys know, everything else is better than that dry land.” Alena used the moment to hug him. They were really sad to leave, it was all visible around their round faces. On our first trip together, they almost did not interact with anything, now they were even eating local food. “But I do also understand our terms and conditions. I’m making my mind already for the transition. It’s helping me to land back.”

“Yes, it’s better that way for me also.” I added. “Besides, this doesn’t need to be our last trip. It’s going to take me a little, but I do plan to save enough for another trip.How about you guys?”

“Yes, definitely. We’ll love to join you, as before.” I parked the car and we went to pick them up.

The g-factor discrepancy

The official results. Image taken from here.

I assure you this g-factor is not something dirty, I’m sorry if you were looking for something else. I don’t know from where is really this name coming, but it refers to particle physics. The electron has a heavy counterpart, in fact 207 times heavier, called muon, discovered already quite some time ago (in1936) on cosmic rays. Both particles, electrons and muons, behave as if they have a tiny internal magnet. So if you place one In a strong magnetic field, the direction of the magnet wobbles, like the axis of a spinning beyblade. The strength of the internal magnet determines the rate of the precession in an external magnetic field, which is called in other words a factor. As we may find other factors, physicists called this one the g-factor.

I have mentioned several times in my posts the delicious Standard Model (SM). The SM predicted a value for the g-factor based on quantum calculations, a value that can be approached as 2 for the muon. But let’s have a look to the so called “accepted” values.

The accepted theoretical values for the muon are:
g-factor: 2.00233183620(86)
anomalous magnetic moment: 0.00116591810(43)
[uncertainty in parentheses]

The new experimental world-average results announced by the Muon g-2 collaboration are:
g-factor: 2.00233184122(82)
anomalous magnetic moment: 0.00116592061(41)

You can find the source here, from where I took the above graph also. Let me explain what you see anyway. The discrepancy between the accepted theoretical value and the experimental one is quite clear. It took literally years to achieve these results, and it means that the probability that the results are a statistical fluctuation is about 1 in 40,000. Say it again? In plain words, it means the SM doesn’t agree with the experimental results. Yes. We need a new theory. Maybe one with new forces, or with dark matter, or I don’t know, with little green men. If you want my opinion, this result is just the tip of the iceberg…I’m hearing things… be ready for a tsunami of papers about new physics, maybe the coming back of dark sorcerers, and why not, aliens. Stay tuned!