[FRIAM] Rare Earth

[steve smith]

I always assumed that the chirality asymmetry of organic molecules on 
earth was a simple feedback loop or the "sensitive dependence on initial 
conditions" of a complex adaptive system (biosphere).   I've heard (but 
not parsed fully) similar arguments about matter/anti-matter?  Or like 
the Highlander Franchise "there can be only one!" (chirality).

Is the chirality dystopian vision more like "grey goo" or a 
protein-molecule "kessler syndrome" scenario from my pantheon/quiver of 
existential threats?

One of my never-to-be-realized novels would be titled /"We Shall Know 
our Chirality"/.

this is a nod to Egger's 2002 "We Shall Know our Velocity", a bit of an 
absurdist "road novel" vaguely relevant to Pirsig's earlier "Motorcycle" 
one.

I did not remember (or know) that Egger's took the theme even further in 
his 2013 "The Circle" novel which became a movie (2017) by the same 
name.   A dystopian story painfully apropos of the moment prophecying 
(sp?) the various parodies and paradoxes of "complete knowledge" and 
"whatever I say means what I want it to mean" (paraphrase of virtually 
every Right Wing figure today). Also shared with "follow the science" 
mantras.

FWiW GPT 4o mini believes/hallucinates thus:

    The phrase *"We shall know our velocities"* comes from *Mark
    Twain*’s novel */The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/ (1884)*. It is
    part of a speech made by *The Duke* in the book, where he is talking
    about his plans to make money by deceiving people.

    The full quote goes:

    *"We shall know our velocities, and we shall know how fast we are
    going, and how far, and where we are going."*

    It is often interpreted as Twain's satirical commentary on the human
    tendency to overthink or complicate matters. Twain is not only
    mocking the characters in the novel who are trying to calculate or
    control things that are uncontrollable but also commenting on the
    absurdity of putting too much emphasis on knowledge or control over
    something that doesn't need to be calculated in such a manner.

I say "hallucinates" because upon searching the text of Huckelberry Finn 
I find no such quote (or even a reference to "velocities" or 
"velocity".    I *was* just asking GPT to help me find/recognize the 
*previous* quote from Clemens/Twain regarding "reading the news two 
weeks late"... so I think GPTs eagerness to please me maybe sent it that 
way?

Others have suggested that soon all original reference material will be 
buried by recursive hallucinations of LLMs quoting the output of LLMs, 
etc.   I was skeptical when this was first mentioned, I'm now feeling 
like I might be living it?

Bah!

  - Steve

Back to perseverating on Capitol Hill/DC events.  Do we think Hegseth 
was on the chopper that hit the passenger jet?  A last romantic flight 
with his next ex-wife, the female combat pilot just before he drums her 
out of the military (but before he discovers she is Trans)?

On 1/30/25 8:18 AM, glen wrote:
>
> Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed
> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00264-3
> "Glavin is most perplexed by the discovery of an equal mixture of 
> left-handed and right-handed amino acids on Bennu. He, like many 
> scientists, had thought that organic molecules from primordial 
> asteroids would have had the same left-handed dominance as those from 
> life on Earth. Now, researchers have to go back to the drawing board 
> to understand how life might have been seeded on Earth."
>
> I remember but now can't find a recent article about how dangerous 
> right-handed molecules are to life on earth. Peter Ward's book gifted 
> me some rhetoric for a basic belief I'd held for awhile. Renee' 
> believes in (complex) extraterrestrials. I don't, at least within some 
> observation window (i.e. maybe they're out there but we'll never meet 
> them). But it's completely reasonable that life emerged all over the 
> universe. It's just difficult for me to imagine it (life) jumping 
> through all these gen-phen ratchets.
>
> There must be a sci-fi novel out there where some cluster (alive or 
> not) of right-handed molecules lands on earth and eats away at the 
> biosphere. I can see 2 basic outcomes: 1. death or 2. chirality 
> co-evolution (including where 1 or the other wins out in the "end").
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20250130/4724fcc6/attachment.html>