Newsletter 60

Superforecasting, JWST, space planes and Omicron

Dec 13, 2021

Apologies for the delayed edition folks - work and travel constraints have delayed all my reading, listening and writing for the past 10 days, plus a Supreme Court hearing tomorrow and Wednesday. I’m putting out a shortened and less refined edition, while I prepare the next one (still plenty in this one though!) Thank you for your patience!

Hi, I’m Gavin. This is my experimental newsletter that explores thinking - how we might think better and learn together as we do so.

I explore several key topics through the lens of several core themes: systems thinking, scenario planning, trends, and cross-disciplinary innovation. These often relate to key issues: climate change, pandemics, astronomy, physics, health, history, philosophy, culture, rocketry, conflict, the impact of technology on society and more (lol!). With a larger question behind it all: how do we progress and how do we progress better?

I hope you like where we go. (901 - nope - 917 of us now! - welcome all new arrivals)

Gavin

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Reading list - the best stuff to read

(The best reads I’ve come across, with excerpts, links, authors and how long it will take to read. Climate change, COVID and China are consistently the stories at the top so are semi-permanent)

🌏 Climate change & biodiversity loss

This would be bad. Crucial Antarctic ice shelf could fail within five years, scientists say

🦠 COVID-19

Omicron. More data is now out and we know more now than we did two weeks ago. As it was two weeks ago the advice is: get your booster if you’re already vaccinated. More antibodies is good to defend against omicron. Here’s the best pieces:

A Scientist’s Guide to Understanding Omicron (€)

Beyond Omicron: what’s next for COVID’s viral evolution

Our First Preview of How Vaccines Will Fare Against Omicron

Omicron’s Explosive Growth Is a Warning Sign

The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here

For the Elderly, Complacency Could Be a Killer

The team trained an artificial neural network on data from 1,161 accurate solutions derived from the Schrödinger equations. To improve accuracy, they also hard-wired some of the known laws of physics into the network. They then tested the trained system on a set of molecules that are often used as a benchmark for DFT, and the results were impressive, says von Lilienfeld. “This is the best the community has managed to come up with, and they beat it by a margin,” he says.
One advantage of machine learning, von Lilienfeld adds, is that although it takes a massive amount of computing power to train the models, that process needs to be done only once. Individual predictions can then be done on a regular laptop, vastly reducing their cost and carbon footprint, compared with having to perform the calculations from scratch every time.

🧠 Space - JWST

The date is coming (Dec 22) and I’m not at all nervous (!). This is one of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment ever, and many many things could go wrong in the launch and deployment of the JWST. Anyways, there is more great coverage of it in these two pieces:

Nature takes a detailed look. Of most interest to me is the planetary science. We might start seeing results from this as early as 2022. (10 mins by Alexandra Witze)

When not looking at stars and galaxies, Webb will spend a lot of its time scrutinizing planets, particularly some of the thousands that have been discovered beyond the Solar System. It can watch as a planet slips across the face of a star and the star’s light briefly shines through the planet’s atmosphere. Webb’s spectral analysis can reveal the composition of planetary atmospheres in greater detail than ever before — and astronomers are particularly keen to find molecules such as methane and water, which signal conditions that could support life. In its first year, Webb will study some of the most famous exoplanets, including the seven Earth-sized worlds that orbit the star TRAPPIST-1.

Quanta has a massive 10,000 word piece on the telescope. Grab a coffee. (35 mins by Dustin Yellin)

But seeing oxygen by itself wouldn’t necessarily be convincing. Computer simulations show that under some conditions, oxygen can fill the skies of lifeless planets. “The challenge is there’s not one gas that’s going to be a biosignature gas,” said Hammel, the planetary scientist. “Methane on Earth is mostly produced by cows … but you look at Neptune, and you can see tons of methane there, and that’s not produced by cows.”
A better biosignature is a peculiar mix of gases. “It’s not going to be a single gas, it’s going to have to be a combination of gases in a configuration that tells us they are in a disequilibrium state,” said Hammel. “They can’t have formed that way naturally.”
Existing telescopes have already spotted molecular fingerprints in the skies of hot Jupiters, but these are lifeless planets. Detecting the weaker signals from rocky, possibly habitable planets’ skies will require JWST. Not only will the telescope have close to 100 times Hubble’s resolution, but it will see exoplanets far more clearly against the background of their host stars, since planets emit more infrared than optical light, while stars emit less. Importantly, Webb’s view of exoplanets won’t be obscured by clouds, which often prevent optical telescopes from seeing the densest, low-altitude layers of atmosphere. “Imagine being in a plane and looking down at an insane cloud deck, and you can’t see the surface at all,” Natasha Batalha said. “When you look at infrared light, you can all of a sudden see through the cloud deck.”

“The Trappist system is unique in that the star is very small, and so the relative feature size of the atmospheres doesn’t need to be big in order for you to be able to see it,” she said. Whether Webb has a realistic chance of spotting biosignature gases is debatable, however. “Often the controversy comes up over the detection of oxygen,” she said. Oxygen absorbs one infrared wavelength in Webb’s range of sensitivity, and so theoretically an oxygen-rich transiting planet could put a noticeable dip in its star’s spectrum at that wavelength. “However,” she said, the wavelength “is just at the edge where the detector loses sensitivity.” Other types and combinations of gases will be easier to detect but might be harder to definitively attribute to life.

Bonus video here: (14 mins)

Philosophy Corner (a journey through thinking about thinking every week)

(A serialised section that started with Greek Tragedy and moved to philosophy. Something to spark ideas. Feel free to go backwards!).

We had this in a previous newsletter but this is the next in the series:

Arendt on action.

Documentary

(A good thing to watch - also serialised - so feel free to go back through past editions!)

On hiatus! (But some suggestions have come in!)

Podcast(s)

(The best stuff I’ve listened to, or been recommended by subscribers)

This newsletter is very much focussed on forecasting. This episode on Superforecasting is talking about several of the themes this newsletter consistently covers. Listen to it all. (52 mins)
Gideon Rachman chats about the potential for a Russian invasion of Ukraine. If it were to happen it would be perhaps towards the end of January and recent reporting on US intelligence suggests as far as the Dnieper river. (23 mins)