Vince Cable produces fallacious mitigations for further science funding cuts

... is what the title of this BBC article should read. [1]

Waving a banner of necessary austerity to reduce public services and support for the lower paid majority of society is borderline morally corrupt, but cutting science funding is outright stupid. It's the equivalent of trying to buoy up a sinking hot air balloon by throwing fuel canisters overboard. But I can't say my dismay is a surprise, even when stimulated by the words of a prominent member of a political party I recently supported as our best hope.

Vince Cable and David Cameron in India (from the Dailymail.co.uk)

UK science is already under too much financial pressure, and has been for some time. Short term (2-4 year) projects are favoured too heavily over those that are more long term ('speculative'). Also, efforts I've heard of to commercialise the information products of university science have only left the universities out of pocket while lining those of layers and other middle men.

It is highly likely that the route to technological advancement is computationally irreducible, i.e. it is impossible to predict which research routes will yield important advances. Viewed from a great height scientific research is a process of memetic evolution. Evolution is not just (or rather rarely) about making gradual improvements to an organism, it mostly involves creating increasingly greater complexity by expanding into and creating as many new niches as possible, spreading tendrils out to every direction of phase space.

Adonna Khare -"Goldfish with Legs" (2008)

If mother nature were incarnate, and on a tight budget for biological evolution, would she have given the go ahead for fish with hydro-dynamically goofy protrusions, unable to know that these whimsical contrivances would eventually be used as the fist ever legs, spawning a vast new evolutionary tree of mammals. Please don't get caught up on my inadequate metaphor here, what I am trying to say is that limiting resources to the 'most promising' could create detriment well beyond a linear contraction in output.

In a previous post [2] I speculated that financial bubbles might be a boon for better businesses/technology, fostering evolutionary explosions after mass extinctions. But these austerity measures are non cyclical: a more gradual squeezing. What is more, the survival criterion are arbitrarily biased away from the most beneficial break throughs, towards short term money spinners and well entrenched "internationally excellent research".

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11225197
[2] http://lewyland.blogspot.com/2010/04/utility-of-green-energy-bubble.html

Why SETI is stupid!

Many minds have pondered the tired, old 'Fermi Paradox' (the conspicuous lack of alien buddies out there in our humongous universe).

[XKCD]

+ Susan Blackmore's solution to the Fermi paradox (see her TED lecture): the necessary paradigm shifts to each kind of replicator (genes, memes, temes) are apocalyptically dangerous. Each (necessary) transition reduces the chances of a fertile planet bearing space-faring life forms; each adds an extra constant to the Drake Equation. She speculated in "The Meme Machine" that meme's evolutionary force driving bigger brains may have overstretched the physiology of our hominid peers, driving Neanderthals extinct. Mems have also, through humans, have wiped out more genetic diversity than a mass extinction, fostered luming terrors are nuclear annihilation, or terminator style runaway AI. I'm more optimistic, seeing only the risk of delay, not unrecoverable oblivion.

[TED (2008) - http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html]

[The (standard) Drake Equation]

+ In the BBC news article (that triggered this blog article): "Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence'", Seth Shostak is interviewed as saying we should look for AI aliens, rather than flesh and bones. e.g. not just concentrating observations on biologically 'habitable' planets, but areas richest in mass and energy where only machines could exist.

[BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449 ]

So it seems the realisation may be approaching mainstream consciousness: ogling the skies for alien peers is quite clearly pointless. Not because (the conditions for) life is necessarily rare (or because of any literal religious truth), but because life (e.g. humanity) will pass through this (SETI) phase in gynaecological evolution so rapidly...