Thursday Things: Comic Book Reality Edition
12 October 2023. Vol 5 No 41. By Dan McGirt. #218
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Now in color! Photo by Pratham Kumar on Unsplash
Free trail maps
We haven’t done a “free stuff” item in a while, so with fall hiking season upon us, let me share this:
Hiking App Releases Over 25,000 Trail Maps for Free Download, Making It Safer to Hike
An Irish hiking app called HiiKER is changing that. It has released all of the trails in its database—over 25,000 routes—and made them available to download free of charge. Users can choose to download a map to their phone or smartwatch for easy access. It also saves their devices’ battery by not having to constantly ping GPS.
I usually go old school with paper maps and have my phone off or in airplane mode when I hike. But if you like to use your phone or smartwatch as your map along with the 500 other things phones do, check out HiiKERs database.
Super soldiers
The world becomes more and more like a comic book each day. Jet packs! Sky lasers! Artificial intelligence! Miracle medicine! Even superpowers:
DARPA today has a long-term, $3 billion program to help make such a “Metabolically Dominant Soldier.” In other words, the military is studying how to use technology and biology to meld man and machine and transcend the limits of the human body. Described the project director, “My measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do” The $3 billion program is definitely trying to achieve transhuman performance goals.
The wearable gear would enable running at 100 meter Olympic sprinter speed for hours and the 7 foot vertical leap, the wall crawling, personal flight, invisibility, greatly enhanced strength, better body armor and carrying bigger and more powerful weapons.
This would be awesome to see in a future Avengers movie. In the real world it’s still cool … and also terrifying.
But I’m sure nothing will go wrong with the flying, invisible, super strong, wall crawling super soldiers. Right?
Still, I can’t resist. Tell me more:
The drugs and genetic enhancements and some technology which gets applied would allow for regeneration, faster healing, muscle strength enhancement up to current Olympic levels, endurance of an Alaskan sled dog, cognitive enhancement, operate without sleep for many days without performance degradation, the metabolic energy of twenty year old for a forty or fifty year old and immunity to pain.
Many technologies that enhance (mostly) our lives today began as military research. So if these things are possible, if these technologies can be developed, the civilian applications are endless.
Regeneration, better healing, better immune systems would all revolutionize healthcare costs and healthcare effectiveness. So trillions in economic benefit as a side effect of supersoldier success. DARPA is also trying to enhance cognition, training and giving the energy levels of youth to the elderly. Those could provide multi-billion or even trillion dollar per year boosts to the US and world economy.
Exactly.
Of course, if everyone is super soldier, then no one is a super soldier and we’re back to square one. Read the full article for more specifics of what DARPA is working on.
Then again, maybe everything is like a comic book because none of this is real. Read on…
Simulated world
Is this the real world? Or something else?
Physics Revelation Could Mean We're All Living in a Simulation
The scent of coffee. The clarity of sunlight dappling through the trees. The howl of the wind in the dark of night.
All this, according to a philosophical argument published in 2003, could be no more real than pixels on a screen. It's called the simulation hypothesis, and it proposes that if humanity lives to see a day it can repeatedly simulate the Universe using come kind of computer, chances are we are living in one of those many simulations.
If so, everything we experience is a model of something else, removed from some kind of reality.
I’ve seen these speculations before — is the universe merely a simulation, presumably running in a computer in a bigger universe that might itself be a simulation? Is it simulations all the way down?
I don’t know. Nor for day to day purposes does it really matter.
As Robert E. Howard’s famous barbarian Conan speculated in ‘Queen of the Black Coast’:
“I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” — Conan
I agree with the Cimmerian. So I don’t spend much time worrying whether we’re all living in a sleeping god’s dream or an advanced civilization’s supercomputer — this is where we find ourselves, so we have to make the best of it.
What was new to me in this item, however, was the concept of “infodynamics”:
The second law of infodynamics devised by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson and mathematician Serban Lepadatu from the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute for Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy in the UK supports the notion that all of this is nothing more than a sophisticated model on a rather fancy computer.
"The 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (infodynamics) facilitates new and interesting research tools at the intersection between physics and information," Vopson writes in a new paper published in AIP Physics.
Say what now?
Vopson's and Lepadatu's second law of infodynamics is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that any naturally occurring process in the Universe will result in a loss of energy and increase in a system's measure of disorder, or entropy.
Vopson, who has proposed that information could in fact be considered a form of matter, expected that the same would be true of information systems; that, over time, its own kind of disorder ought to increase over time as well.
However, studying two different information systems – digital data storage and an RNA genome – he found that this was not the case. The second law of infodynamics requires 'information entropy' to either remain at the same level, or even decrease over time.
I don’t quite get it, but what I think the second law of infodynamics is saying is that information tends to become more organized over time.
"This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we're living in a simulation."
The next steps will be to validate these findings experimentally. If we are living in a simulation, then information is the fundamental building block of our Universe – like bits are the fundamental unit of information in computing – and may, Vopson has previously proposed, have mass.
Information has mass? Now I’m lost again.
Anyway, read the manual on our possibly simulated universe at The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis1 at AIP advances, complete with squiggly math!
If this is a simulation, the graphics are pretty good. Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Thank you for reading!
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“The simulation hypothesis is a philosophical theory, in which the entire universe and our objective reality are just simulated constructs. Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry. Recent scientific developments in the field of information physics, such as the publication of the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, appear to support this possibility. In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (infodynamics) facilitates new and interesting research tools at the intersection between physics and information. In this article, we re-examine the second law of infodynamics and its applicability to digital information, genetic information, atomic physics, mathematical symmetries, and cosmology, and we provide scientific evidence that appears to underpin the simulated universe hypothesis.”