It Awaits Your Experiments

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11511

by pavel_lishin • 1 year ago

194 80 1 year ago

jkingsman3• 1 year ago

It took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts.

If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.

subscribed2• 1 year ago

I think the Blindsight is the best sci-fi book for me. Absolutely gripping and novel.

And what I found particularly interesting, the afterword is about as interesting and engaging as the book.

It's such a gem of a book.

lproven5• 1 year ago

I agree. I read it twice, enjoyed it, and don't know why some people found it hard.

otikik• 1 year ago

I wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.

ImaCake• 1 year ago

He blogs a lot on the OP link. I would imagine he has a few words about LLMs in there.

One of his older works explores the risks of software similar to LLMs but a little more advanced.

Boogie_Man4• 1 year ago

This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely speculative science fiction. The author explains how these fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic.

Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated

ZpJuUuNaQ5• 1 year ago

extremely plausible science fiction
I thought it meant "very hard to understand"

For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.

jkingsman3• 1 year ago

Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic" or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there is an understandable system at work at some level.

Scarblac• 1 year ago

The way I see it is that hard science is about the new science and its effects on people, so it has to make the science believable somehow.

Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.

ngangaga• 1 year ago

I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".

swayvil2• 1 year ago

How about very comprehensible science fiction?

Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.

Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.

throwanem19• 1 year ago

"Hard" refers to scientific plausibility. The antipode of "hard science fiction" is "space opera."

When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.

NikolaNovak• 1 year ago

Astonishing book which I reread regularly. Echopraxia has grown on me upon further reading - initially I focused on the seeming promise of action and plot, vs ideas and concepts.

His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible, feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of the book.

duskwuff4• 1 year ago

"Checkers or chess?"

But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials: humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into duty for another, much more impactful task which it was completely unsuited for.

atombender• 1 year ago

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also fantastic, along with the short stories, which collectively form the "Sunflower" cycle.

Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction. There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well plotted.

Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent, standalone read.

lynx97• 1 year ago

I would have enjoyed that book so much more if he had left out vampires. To me, that part unnecessarily ruined the "seriousness" of that book for me. Apart from that, the underlying premise of the book is quite chilling and refreshing at the same time.

davidthewatson• 1 year ago

For those of you who read with glee of the author's work and it's launch in Toronto soon, the event is free and open to the public if you wanna flee to Toronto for fun or are already there. I hope this won't become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...

duskwuff4• 1 year ago

At least they didn't describe the event as a "release party".

Atreiden• 1 year ago

This is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.

The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.

I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.

The5thElephant• 1 year ago

Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.

Wobbles422• 1 year ago

I read Starfish close to 20 years ago. He had a uniquely dark vision of the future compared to the zeitgeist in 2007 or so. It's been interesting living through reality since then. I fear the day will come when I reread his earlier works and they start sounding optimistic.

subscribed2• 1 year ago

You can download several of his novels from his own website.

Yeah, for free.

And indeed, his style is like this. It's really hard to put the book down.

sriram_malhar• 1 year ago

This (Xenotext v2) blew my mind. I'm astonished not just by how people can think like this, but the persistence of effort to get it to fruition.

I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a delight!

MinimalAction• 1 year ago

Amazing article! His writing style is unique and made me go down a rabbit hole of discovering his other works.

I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill all lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.

Fun fact: Thermococcus gammatolerans is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

alnwlsn• 1 year ago

only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon

Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly Streptococcus mitis and even that situation is greatly contested.

dekhn3• 1 year ago

their description of deinococcus has several errors. For example, they claim it reproduces without DNA, which is not true.

lproven5• 1 year ago

Yeah, Conan the Bacterium is tough, but it's not magical. It's really really good at fixing DNA errors but it still has DNA and errors in it.

dejobaan• 1 year ago

Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.

flysand7• 1 year ago

This reminds me of "I'm Humanity" by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song.

Also see https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity...

dekhn3• 1 year ago

I have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also enciphers... another poem?

duskwuff4• 1 year ago

You've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a protein, whose amino acids can be read as English text as well ("the faery is rosy / of glow..."), and which causes the bacterium to glow red. Watts mentions this work in his book Echopraxia as follows:

"The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem."

There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök:

https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...

dekhn3• 1 year ago

I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). Ultimately, I see this more like an incomplete quine, or something similar but not identical to a quine.

flobosg4• 1 year ago

Broadly speaking, think of codon-anticodon pairings, but with actual letters mapped to them.

    any style of life/ is prim
    ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦  ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦
    the faery is rosy/ of glow

scajanus2• 1 year ago

There is a bit more flexibility to this than 1:1 mappings, since there are more codons (64) than amino acids coded (20). You could have both CUU and CUC be different characters on the DNA side, that both map to same character on the protein side.

Plausible alternative would be to have the codons or amino acids still code the other half, but have pairs of nucleotides code a 1.5 times longer poem. This would restrict you to 16 different characters, vs. 64 possible codons (minus a few stop codons).

There are around 20-22 amino acids commonly used by known life, so that already restricts you to a bit smaller alphabet than 26 letters.

aaroninsf2• 1 year ago

De rigeur trigger warning,

Peter Watts' Rifters books (hence the domain),

are however full of memorable compelling ideas,

totally un-recommendable,

because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.

throwanem19• 1 year ago

Oh, don't be a child.

andrewflnr4• 1 year ago

Have you read Behemoth? Recently? Blindsight is one of my favorite books of all time but Rifters is dark, even by whatever standards a reasonable person might consider "adult".

Wobbles422• 1 year ago

Content warnings make sense, and I do know what portions you are talking about, but they really are a fairly small part of only one of the books (IIRC the third one?).

I wouldn't describe the entire series as torture-porn just for that, personally, though I would agree that the work would be better if they were removed or at least toned way down.

swayvil2• 1 year ago

Meh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging.

Otoh science guided by art is good.

flobosg4• 1 year ago

Wow! Happy to read that the Xenotext went on. I’ve been following Christian Bök’s work for more than a decade and he never fails to impress me. Ulver’s musical rendition of his “Vowels” poem is just beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw

SideburnsOfDoom• 1 year ago

The article says

"To quote Bök himself: ... It needs no oxygen to live."

And I assumed that this means that it's anaerobic.

Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to read up about this bug (1)

And it says:

It is an obligate aerobic chemoorganoheterotroph, i.e., it uses oxygen to derive energy from organic compounds in its environment.

Are they both correct? Can anyone clarify?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

scajanus2• 1 year ago

This (1) suggests that it can perform some metabolism in anaerobic conditions, but not all that it would need to grow/replicate:

"Deinococcus radiodurans is an exceptionally radiation-resistant microorganism capable of surviving acute exposures to ionizing radiation doses of 15,000 Gy and previously described as having a strictly aerobic respiratory metabolism. Under strict anaerobic conditions, D. radiodurans R1 reduced Fe(III)-nitrilotriacetic acid coupled to the oxidation of lactate to CO(2) and acetate but was unable to link this process to growth."

The abstract goes on to describe the metabolism in a bit more detail.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10788374/

It Awaits Your Experiments

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