K2-18b?
Interesting, in light of my recent prior readings on astrophysics and exobiology. Also timely given a new book I was just made aware of. Elon Musk:
One potentially existentially dangerous guy. Let's begin with the end in mind:
AFTERWORD
Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2. One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later.
Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry.
Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” “Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.”
Musk’s mind was elsewhere.
“I have bigger visions,” he said.
Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation.
“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.”
What?
Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?”
“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.”
That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.
The presidential campaign of 2024 was a Musk gamble of galactic proportions, perhaps the only pivot that could have landed him with responsibility bigger than his business empire could afford him. By the time of the election, Musk had become convinced that this new foe stood in the way of his ambition to propel humanity to Mars, the same pursuit that motivated his bet on his massive pay package from Tesla, that had evidently driven his acquisition of Twitter in his effort to defeat the “woke mind virus,” the one that represented SpaceX’s north star.
“Unless we stop the slow strangulation by overregulation happening in America, we will never become a multiplanetary civilization,” he said, before adding, “Unless something is done about strangulation by overregulation, humanity will never reach Mars.”
And when the dust settled, Musk had sided with the winning party and become “first buddy” to the incoming president.
At the time of this writing in December 2024, Elon Musk appears to have secured the power necessary to challenge the bureaucrats and oppressive regulations that have been holding him back. In appointing Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration appears to have given him the opportunity to reshape the government while perhaps putting Musk’s own ambitions for autonomous vehicles on a glide path. And while there are questions about how much authority Musk’s quasi-agency will actually have, his influence on Trump—after pouring more than $275 million toward seeing him and other Republicans elected through a super-PAC, the America PAC—is clear.
Days before the official announcement of the role, Musk had elevated a call for “defanging” agencies that had investigated him and his businesses, including the SEC and FTC. Now he had the blessing of the most powerful person in the world, who outlined a vision to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies,” and believes he has a mandate to carry it out.
Musk’s entrance into politics—and governance—is a predictable outcome. At any time in Musk’s history, given the scale of the gambles he has made with his fortune and power, he has variously seemed to be utterly in command or on the verge of total destruction. But one thing remains: he is inevitable.
However, now that he has reached a new plateau of power, the stakes have shifted. He is no longer limited to recklessly gambling with one of his companies’ bottom lines, or the livelihoods of his workers. He is poised to apply his existential thinking to our society as a whole, exerting his influence on the foundational rules and regulations—such as norms around conflicts of interest—that hold us together. Protecting those conventions and the order they are intended to bring is hardly Musk’s concern—as evidenced by the chapters of this book—especially if upholding them results in the continuation of the slow march to humanity’s destruction that he believes has already begun.
Musk and his acolytes have made clear that they are comfortable with imposing a short-term “hardship” on Americans, including an economic and market downturn, in pursuit of their ultimate goal. One of Musk’s closest allies said the DOGE would require a “collective sacrifice.”
That only leaves the question—to what end? What is the collective sacrifice for, if not Musk’s clearly stated goal of putting humans on Mars? And what has Musk done for the public at large to earn that kind of loyalty from the millions he is asking to take the plunge with him? Some may argue that his business achievements merit that sort of leap of faith, but it is an immense amount of power to give someone who is unaccountable to the public, by any measure.
And what if this publicly stated goal—the noble ambition to extend the reach of humanity—masked another worry?
Going into the election, Musk had seemed to sense danger. He felt he had everything on the line. Musk made no secret of how he saw the stakes—both for the country and for himself personally.
“I view this election as a turning point, like a fork in the road of destiny that is incredibly important. You know I’ve not been politically active until this election,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan. “And the reason I’ve been politically active this election is because I think if we don’t elect Trump, I think we will lose democracy in this country. We will lose the two-party system,” Musk said, while explaining his unfounded theory that the Democrats in power were “importing vast numbers of” undocumented migrants into swing states as part of an elaborate conspiracy to hold the Electoral College in perpetuity.
But as with all his political activism, Musk cheekily hinted he had a personal stake as well.
“If he loses, man, you’re fucked, dude,” Tucker Carlson told him during an October 2024 interview.
“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk agreed. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Will I see my children? I don’t know.”
It was meant to be a light-hearted moment, but it hinted at what Musk felt he had on the line. At the time, Musk’s companies—and in certain cases, Musk himself—faced scrutiny from the Department of Justice, the SEC, the FTC, federal transportation regulators, and the Federal Communications Commission, just to name a few, and his PAC’s unconventional methods of voter outreach were raising some early eyebrows as well.
But as he often did, he was projecting those personal worries onto humanity itself, suggesting that the endless labyrinth of regulatory intervention stifled human potential as a whole, by slow-rolling and interfering with matters that were ultimately existential.
Indeed, “survival,” as we laid out in the introduction, “is the organism’s ultimate value, the ‘final goal or end to which all [its] lesser goals are the means,’ and the standard of all its other values: ‘that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil,’” according to the , outlining a core tenet of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.
When Musk declared himself Alexander the Great around thirty-odd years ago, it felt like a one-off from a brash founder like any other in Silicon Valley. But as the election loomed, Proudian, one of the first Silicon Valley power brokers to recognize Musk’s spirit but also his stubbornness, suddenly thought: “Oh, shit,” he told me.
Now he had begun to see his experiences with Elon Musk through a new lens. Strange outbursts and spontaneous, one-off utterances—that he had brushed off as hubris or the brashness of maladjusted youth—started to take on a new meaning.
“I thought the market forces would control Elon,” Proudian said, adding later that he “didn’t take it that seriously when he was a twenty-three-year-old entrepreneur who didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
“I am really concerned because I know how smart this guy is and I know how much money he has and I know how ruthless he is and it’s playing out in front of my eyes.”
We should all heed that concern. It’s unfashionable to admit now—but Musk’s record of firings and his zealous deletion of once-normal business principles has emanated far beyond his business empire.
So many who have worked closely with Musk have emerged with the same sort of impression as Proudian, as Hubris Maximus demonstrates time and again: that Musk, however misguided he may be at times, is unyielding.
Some have lost sleep in connection with Musk’s hubris; others have lost their lives believing in his company’s promise. Whatever the harm in connection to something bigger, it matters greatly. People have lost their lives believing in his technological promises; others have seen their lives upended or careers destroyed; still others have faced potential financial ruin from believing in him.
Whether Musk’s latest forays into the political realm ultimately achieve their stated goals, or his relationship with the Trump administration deteriorates at some point along the way, he has consistently shown a taste for opportunist behavior and a disregard for limiting collateral damage in the pursuit of his goals, and the stakes have never been higher.
Even if DOGE is a big success—by his own standards—history has shown that he’s unlikely to be satisfied; the pattern shows he’ll continue to seek more power and responsibility, to go all-in on the next moon shot. And if it isn’t, and his “samurai spirit” calls him to commit seppuku rather than admit failure, he very well might take a lot of us with him next, before dusting himself off and trying again.
Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-268). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Let that simmer just a bit. See also my citations of recent works on astrophysics and exxbiology, "The Edge of Chaos."
apropos.
OK, LET'S BACK UP ABOUT A HALF CENTURY
In 1976 Cheryl and I were living in Homewood, Alabama (B'ham area). I read a fascinating book I'd checked out of the Homewood Public Library. It has subsequently gone "out of print." But, you can still find random hardcopies via Amazon 3rd party sellers. Got a copy.
Wonderful reading.
I transcribed some excerpts via voice input on my iPad.
Chapter 1, Where Speculation Begins, pp 7-9
One of these days, our descendants, near or distant, are going to find life in some form on other planets, either in the solar system, in other parts of our galaxy, or in other galaxies.
The very fact that life has arisen on our earth is evidence enough that it must exist in other parts of the universe, for the elements of which the entire universe is composed are remarkably uniform. If some of these elements have combined in ways that produce life here in our solar system, they must, by the laws of chance and probability, have combined in an analogous ways elsewhere. Even in our galaxy, there must be some thousands of other planets, sustaining life, in some form, and all the forces of reason would suggest that it cannot be otherwise in other galaxies.
What miracles of chance and combinations of chances made it possible for life to evolve here on earth?
For life to arise on any planet, certain factors have to be present in certain combinations. The solar system of which the planet is part must have formed in a way that some or one of its evolving planets takes shape at a suitable distance from the blazing inferno of its central sun – neither so near that its surface temperatures inhibit life by intense heat, nor so far that life cannot arise because of insufficient solar radiation. The masses into which the swirling gases originally solidify must be within the range that permits a force of gravity, sufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere, since without a protective atmosphere, solar radiation would be too intense for life forms to be sustained, even if all the other elements of life were present.
The chance that these two factors alone – distance from the center, and the degree of mass that governs gravity occur together in just the right circumstance, puts a preliminary limitation on the possibility for life. Even after this has occurred, there must be a further series of chances following and working upon chances – and again interlocking with other chance happenings – so that atmosphere, water, rocks, and some soil come into being in states that conform a basis for the evolution of life. Of course there is a possibility, remote as it seems, that some form of life might arise on a lightless planet. should that planet be capable of generating heat of its own within a life sustaining range.
The information we have been able to gather from our own solar system suggests that ours is the only planet around our sun that sustained life. It could be that other suns, even thousands or tens of thousands of other suns, sustain no life at all on the planets that circle them. Given the myriad suns in our galaxy and the multiple myriads in the universe, it is impossible to believe that chances similar to those that occurred on earth have not also occurred on many other planets.
Once these miraculous chances have come about, however, the prerequisites for life are rather minimal: An element capable of forming self-replicating chains, like carbon, and another capable of combustion, like oxygen these, together with hydrogen and nitrogen, form and matrix that may merge with other elements to create all the varied, complex, and wonderful forms of life on earth – from amoeba and bacteria to plants and spiders and fishes and man.
What shapes may life have taken in other worlds? Have they developed into intelligent creatures, and, if they have, what sort of intelligences have evolved? Have other kinds of life developed high orders of intelligence capable of developing technologies, and, if so, what sort of technology has arisen from their special kinds of being? Shall we ever be able to communicate with these beings, if they exist, in any meaningful way?
One thing is certain: we have no reason to assume that evolutionary forces on other planets will produce forms or intelligence that are the same as ours, even though the basic raw materials must be similar. Whatever chance factors combined to produce any form of life, infinitely more, must combine to produce an advanced form.
Genetic inheritance is only a beginning. Two offspring of the same parents by chance born in different environments will produce eventual descendants so markedly different that after many generations, it will hardly be possible to realize that the ancestors of each line had parents in common.
The variables of habitat, the chance of availability of mates, natural selection, and sexual selection among the offspring will all have combined and recombined to produce members of the same species as buried as a pygmy, a Watusi, a Swede, a Chinese, or a magnesian, and eventually to divide into species, such as man, apes, and monkeys have separately descended from the same stem.
Our own earth provides an illustration of the almost incredible number of living forms that can possibly be derived from a single celled organisms that were once the triumph of evolution on our planet. All the species now extinct, and all those still flourishing form only apart of the total possibilities, for who knows how many new species will yet take shape?
Ch 11, Beyond Human Intelligence, pp 212-217
Intelligence begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current combination in spacecraft, cyclotron, and satellite relayed television. At the same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its environment and learns how to live in it, overtime, and also by a cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high cultures and great arts.
For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.
The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be available, be they leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presents or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between the environment and creatures that affects the development of tools and cultures, as well as of census and intelligence.
In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In central America, the presence of lava led to cutting edge tools of obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have told that the sweet-potato washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese Macau colony, and the subsequent shifting of sand from the grain in the sea, would so accustomed these forest animals playing in the water that they would eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the newfound ability to swim might lead?
Yet strangely enough—or perhaps, not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of mankind’s cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed into advanced civilization, we find that man’s greatest thoughts, as epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence propounded by the wise men of China, so distant from us in place in time, are stunning in their modernities and still current validity.
In the misty beginnings of China’s long, cultural history, Lao the, expanding his concept of Tao, the way (of nature and wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue, and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from it a sage as in “intellectual.“ The worst government would be one of philosophers, he has said to have averred, they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their in capacity for action!
At a later period the philosopher, Chuang the, who lived about 370 BC, showed the sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those in early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; that is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.
He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has become gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the grounds of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, said Chuang tze, can never avail to understand, ultimate things, for any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must “sternly suppress one’s knowledge“: we have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no help towards such an understanding: submission in the flow of nature is all important.
And Wang Yang Ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: “the mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?“
Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shandiar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rights, and put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last 20 to 30,000 years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment that has been formally present in all the branches of our species throughout his existence. The brief excerpts we have given of an ancient Chinese thought about thought would certainly seem to bear out this opinion.
There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapt a living creature to its environment by the use of artifacts, and through the cultural transmission of knowledge, the creature and the environment, modify each other at an exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants for the termites, which has existed in a balance between being and have unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat, presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to device accommodation, and then the process speeds both the rate of change and the need for new changes.
And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological advances of western men might indicate new departures from the human brains’ capacities, yet we have also to recognize that the technology is rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species this new Environment may well ultimately affect our species future development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward homo neocorticus
There are, of course, far too many imponderables Involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of technology itself, and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population density, and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the question of the medical preservation of the “unfit“ and whether we can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference may ultimately make mankind’s existence untenable.
Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological, if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of another Ice Age, for instance, would effectively alter and recalibrate the balance between men and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a possibility.
We believe that the possibility, and even the likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In that case, the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which we can only speculate.
To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naïve exercise in human fantasy. Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary systems, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to our imagination…
'eh?
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