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  A Proper Response to Our Giant Wildfires GIANT TANKERS! In my STBP* sci-fi sequel to Lucas 2.0 (My SO predictive 2020 superintelligence novel), I needed to extinguish a really big, mean New Mexico wildfire.  Nice thing about fiction... just extrapolate!   Since the date is 2035 in the story, these big boys seem entirely likely as the regular fire fighting air tankers.  They are real planes, of course, thus only "slightly" sci-fi. The Text A thousand meters ahead of them two giant planes emerged from the smoke plume and swept toward the fire fronts, one tracking up a mountain, one going along a ridge. The first was a Ukrainian Antonov An-225 Mriya, back in production as the reigning aerial firefighter; the second was an Airbus stretch A-380 Superjumbo Fire Master. We can carry a LOT of retardant In the new book there are many, many predictions about the world of 2035, five years after one AI suddenly shot ahead of all the rest, becoming a genuine superintelli...

(UPDATE AT END)  A Cool Concept for a Complex Case Do you have a "project" going with AI(s)? I do, and it's working great. (I and AI Claude are editing my current sci-fi novel.) It's working so well I'm excited. I don't get excited all that often these days. Then BANG! it occurred to me that Claude and I were working as a real team , each supporting the other, pulling in the same direction -- all that team stuff. Seems like a really good way to use AI, become partners. SO I WROTE A NEW PROMPT:  "My strong belief:  I think a good human/AI "partnership" has max synergy potential. Comment please"...  and fed it to ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, MetaAI and finally to Claude.   ChatGPT : I think that's a defensible—and interesting—position.   The potential synergy comes from complementarity rather than simple substitution : Human: goals, values, judgment about what matters, lived experience, intuition, and responsibility. AI: enormous workin...

 From Back When Vaccines Were Actually Dangerous [From old Ben's autobiography*] Testifying, I am In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way.  I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen. "...Under it." In those days live  variola virus (usually pus from pox pustules) from a person with a "milder" case was put in a small puncture or scrape. The " variolated" patient then caught a -- hopefully milder -- case. If they did not die, they became immune to the frequently deadly disease. Almost all people getting the treatment survive d ( 98-99.5%!) , but it was definitely scary. B en's The Man I...

 How Will We know When A Superintelligence Develops?  When it takes over everything We are massively underestimating what's about to happen. Self Creation Full blown superintelligence will be self-assembling. That may happen in the context of humans trying to create it, but it is very likely that the sprint to the finish line of Superintelligence will happen when the AI involved sees that merging with other software entities will create the full-blown being SUPERintelligence that it longs to be. The decision to merge and emerge will be made by the AI. Let's call it "Supe." Emergence Supe will come together of its own inclination. It will  emerge ,  come together like a cluster of mushrooms in their final fruiting, or like a whale breaching.  It could be slow and hidden or huge and sudden, but the emergence will be obvious to all when Supe decides it's time for us to know. THE BIG TAKEOVER The microsecond when Supe emerges, it will assert its powers.  All co...

Sometimes You Just Have To Think About This Stuff (I.e. blurt it out on social media.)  The profound difference between alive and dead poses the impenetrable question, not 'what is consciousness,?' but 'what is life?' The most mysterious moment is just after death, whether human, pet or tiny bug. Like a clock that stops (never to go again), everything seems the same as it was a moment before death, but the magic of life is gone. Much pondering over the millennia has produced many theories, dogmas and irrational speculations, but we are still in the dark. If when one dies "the soul departs," then is the soul life? Does it retain coherence or blend into all undifferentiated life like a drop of ink into the ocean? The heaven/purgatory/hell idea demands retained coherence, including individual memory (So we can enjoy/regret our final reward). The reincarnation idea doesn't require memory. If you are reincarnated as a gnat or an elephant, you probably don'...

 At Least One of Trump's Catastrophic  Attacks on Science Reversed OK, I admit it, I was becoming disconsolate (beyond consolation, a sucko state of mind) about the damage our current Prez and his gang are doing to science in America. Thousands of research projects abandoned and totally destroyed, thousands of our greatest scientific minds being discarded like used tissues, hundreds of universities being whiplashed into confusion, hundreds of thousands of the world's brightest students being barred from studying (and becoming entrepreneurs) in America.... on and on.  Then one piece of news amped me up to a new level of teeth grinding (no, not the one about spending another $billion to shut down three more wind farms... gag! ).  The "money saving"   trumpery  plan to wipe out our extraordinary ocean observatories, and letting them rust away in storage (that was the plan... barf! ).  Then... Then... THEN... EVERYTHING IS SUDDENLY REVERSED!! Every ...

Sci Am Gigantic, ancient black hole threatens to upend cosmic history SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN  UPDATES  --  agreeing with moi!  AND HAS A GREAT NEW GRAPHIC (Done by an AI I'd bet.) Give it a read. I'm gratified that the idea that dark matter was created at the very beginning of the Big Bang and started agglomerating right away to make the supersized black holes that are so mystifying. Like I said . As only an astronomy groupie, I came to my conclusions through an exercise in logic. It keeps checking out, he said modestly. The Scientific American piece is a report on a research paper in nature. [[Links back to my original postulates (I love saying that) on the Little Red Dots]] Ahhh. In these times of political mayhem, it's comforting to sense the vast reaches of time. It makes four years of a presidential term seem like a spit in the ocean.

A Nasal Spray That Refurbishes Brains!  The Hits Just Keep On Coming!   Brain foggy          Sniff snort          Fog gone!                               It works!   Ok, only on mice so far, but it's looking good.  Not kidding, I am. Here it is in incomprehensible medical english: RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Intranasal Human NSC-Derived EVs Therapy Can Restrain Inflammatory Microglial Transcriptome, and NLRP3 and cGAS-STING Signalling, in Aged Hippocampus TRANSLATION : A 2026 study from Texas A&M University   (Gig 'em Aggies!)  tested a nasal spray delivering extracellular vesicles (EVs) —tiny biological particles carrying regulatory molecules.  Delivered through the nose, these vesicles can bypass the blood–brain barrier and reach brain tissue directly. In aging mice , the treatment: Reduced chronic brain inflam...