By David Futrelle
You may have noticed a strange explosion of highly surreal memes hitting your Twitter home page of late. Blame the Artificial Intelligence-powered meme generator that you can find here, which will happily generate as many weird and baffling memes as you could ever want.
Now, the meme generator is a fairly basic thing, in principle: it takes in hundreds (thousands?) of human-generated memes in a variety of formats before pooping out something it doesn’t understand, but that we humans might.
Given that the AI-meme-generator literally doesn’t know what it’s saying, most of the memes it puts out tend to be a bit puzzling:
And sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand the meme format at all:
But alongside the surreal memes, the AI-meme-generator somehow manages to spit out others that make perfect (or at least only slightly imperfect) sense. I’ve been fiddling around with it for awhile and have been surprised and intrigued by these memes, which seem very much like the memes an actual human might produce on their own.
Indeed, these memes make a lot more sense than many if not most of the Men’s Rights memes I’ve run across (and written about) over the years — despite the fact that the MRA memes were generated by actual human beings who, at least in theory, should know what they’re saying.
Let’s look at examples from both genres — contrasting some of my, er, favorite MRA memes with memes the AI-meme-generator made for me.
Let’s start with this authentic MRA meme:
Apparently the thought process behind this, er, hilarity is: “Women are stupid! And rape is funny! Sharks!”
This AI-generated meme makes a lot more sense:
I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a nice hot dog once in a while?
Here’s an MRA meme taking aim at women in the military:
Contrast that with this cheerful and wholesome AI-generated meme:
Again, the AI hits the nail on the head. Everyone loves to see people talking about their cool stuff.
Here’s a dark and bewildering MRA meme:
I suppose the message here is supposed to be “even if she says she’s not a feminist, she might secretly be one, and falsely accuse you of rape.” But I’m not sure anyone not steeped in MRA-talk could discern that.
Also, why is “radical/white” in ironic quotes?
By contrast, this next AI-generated meme, while admittedly rude and perhaps a bit sexist, is as clear as a (school) bell.
This MRA meme may leave you scratching at your head as you try to puzzle out its strange “logic.”
This AI meme, by contrast, makes so much sense it hurts.
In the world we live in today, who has the patience to wait until you get home to get sloshed?
So why are MRA memes so illogical and incomprehensible? Part of the problem is that reality is not on their side, and so many of their memes only make sense if you’re already living in the imaginary world of the Men’s Rights movement, where black is white and mean, bitchy women rule over all. I know enough about this world from the many years I’ve spent doing this blog that I can usually make some sort of sense of most of their memes, but I still struggle with some of them. It doesn’t help much that many MRAs are bitter bastards choking on their own aggrieved entitlement; their attempts at jokes are undercut by their meanness and their barely developed sense of humor.
The AI may not have a sense of humor, but it’s also unencumbered by all this baggage, so when it pops out with something that’s funny, it’s genuinely funny.
Congratulations, MRA; it’s official now: You’ve failed the Turing test.
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@ snowberry
Anton Petrov has done nice video about it. He actually came up with something similar in his earlier days. He’s checked the math on the NASA one. He believes the theory is sound; but he’s cautious about the engineering aspects.
On current technology, to get to .99C you’d need something akin to a thousand nuclear power stations on board. You could get to about .83C with something on a par with an aircraft carrier power plant. But that’s a big difference in terms of Lorentz Transformations; and for a crewed ship you’d want much more time dilation.
Those figures are just for a probe that is essentially all engine though. You’d need to scale up a lot for an habitable space ship. And then I would imagine you hit problems with every particle in the way becoming so high energy it kills you.
Speaking of time dilation, someone has just come up with an explanation for X shaped cosmic jets. I’ve lost a bet; but it is very convincing. One thing that amazes me is that the reason the jets can be millions of light years long but so narrow, is time dilation. The gas is moving so fast (c .99C) that although to the outside observer it’s been 5 million years; inside the jet it’s only been a few years. So the particles haven’t had time to spread out yet.
My initial response was, “Eh?”
@Snowberry
In this context those are synonymous: the proposed preservation of viable human tissues by cooling them to cryogenic temperatures (i.e.−150 °C or below). This process is completely nontenable.
In fact there are not. There are a bunch of people who say they have ideas, but they all have “and then a miracle occurs” as the middle part of their equations, which means that in practical terms they’re up there with people working on perpetual motion machines.
No, absent effective intervention the limit is about 120. In the event we ever develop any effective intervention, we might be able to push that to 150, or even a few years beyond.
@Naglfar: That’s what Dalillama was referring to, and I was speaking against that.
@In General:
Since I should probably drop this for now (I have important things to take care of) I feel that I should more fully explain the source of my optimism. I have been steeped myself in the advances of medicine, science and technology, the predictions of futurism, and bleeding-edge theories of the same, for 30 years now. I learn enough physics (and occasionally biology) to know why things might work… and why they might not. And most of it won’t work, or won’t be practical enough to see any real use. But it’s almost certain that something will.
I can’t tell you what it will look like. The maze is too wide open, the dead ends far from eliminated. If certain areas aren’t feasible at all and some aren’t easy, like if say near immortality is easy but interstellar travel isn’t realistic, it’s a very different future than the reverse.
I’m not going to say anyone’s actually wrong. As mentioned before, point at any particular thing, point out why it probably won’t work, and you would probably be right, unless your reasons for believing so involve a misunderstanding how it works. I try to maintain a healthy degree of skeptism as well. But, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Point to all of them, and maybe one of them will work anyway, or nothing will, but one or two will point the way to something better. I’m being contrary in general because right now, there are always more options.
Or, you know, the maze may have no exits after all, metaphorically speaking. But if there were a way to bet on it, I’d put my money on “yes there is”.
Cryopreservation’s main obstacle is likely to be finding a way to prevent ice crystal growth rupturing cell membranes. But as others have pointed out it’s not the only route to some sort of space hibernation. More promising are approaches that reduce temperature to near zero and protect the brain from hypoxic damage. There have been exciting results with the use of hydrogen sulfide (normally poisonous!) and refrigerator-cold temperatures (just above freezing) in combination:
https://www.livescience.com/33053-can-humans-hibernate-suspended-animation.html
As for ship designs or types, the generation ship is at the feasibility stage that airplanes were in DaVinci’s time: we know in principle how to build a working instance, but it’s economically infeasible for the time being and we’d need a big enough power plant. But the basic idea is sound: hollow out an asteroid (perhaps using nukes); landscape the interior; spin it up (Saturn V rockets mounted horizontally around the equator in Catherine wheel configuration and fired until dry would likely suffice for this); and of course populate and launch it. There need to be sunlamps strung along the axis, too. The energy for propulsion and those lamps will have to be nuclear: a big fission plant in the tail by the engines. The engines could be NERVA or VASIMR designs already on our drawing boards.
The hard bit is a) keeping the ecosystem-in-a-bottle stable and b) keeping it socio-politically stable over the journey. While we can’t claim to know fully how to do these things yet, both should be feasible.
a) mostly is a matter of good-enough recycling, and good-enough understanding of the relationships of the organisms, including all needed symbionts. Stability is helped by size, and by some degree of compartmentalization. So patches of riparian habitat, meadow, and forest would be stabler than a big monoculture expanse, as a problem that develops in one patch will hit a barrier to spreading very far, whether it’s a fire or a pestilence. Ways to recover from a serious crash would also be needed, such as isolated greenhouses buried in the shell here and there that maintain seed cultures of various species, usable to restore anything that goes extinct in the main habitat. More than one chamber with a separate ecosystem in each would also add redundancy, connected only through airlocks and an axial aperture above most of the air.
b) is something where we have at least one big fat clue: past episodes of major sociopolitical instability were ultimately driven by Malthusian processes. So you need a strict population control regimen: everyone is on contraceptives and there is some birth lottery that wanna-be parents can enter, with as many winners as there have been deaths since the previous lottery. This maintains the population against both increase and decline and prevents overpopulation-and-crash. When the population is well below the carrying capacity human societies tend to be relatively egalitarian and stable; it’s when the carrying capacity is approached that those with more become very protective of what they have and work hard to exclude swathes of the population, producing the intertwined phenomena of intra-elite competition and popular immiseration (aka, widespread poverty). Social instability ensues and typically leads to civil war, or else the immiseration culminates in a major disease outbreak or famine. Basically, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, disease, and death. Stability is restored when these have reduced the population to well below the carrying capacity again. If a birth lottery system is introduced when the population is at, say, half the theoretical maximum the environment would support, the instability should never be reached (and without the accompanying breakdown of social trust and order, and trust in institutions, attempts to cheat and violate the birth restrictions will be rare as well).
Of course, the big thing here is that once a civilization learns how to use such methods to live sustainably and within its means, it may cease to have any expansionist ambitions at all: once it is capable of launching a successful generation ship venture it might lose interest in actually doing so. A smart one might still seed a few distant colonies to avoid having all of its eggs in one basket, but halt there, rather than producing an ever-expanding colonization wavefront. It’s one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox.
As for faster types of ships, most require either unobtanium (but then, aerospace quality aluminum and titanium were this in DaVinci’s time) or a long term project sustained back home (e.g. a laser sail beam station) over timescales longer than individual careers and which tend to see wild swings in politics. These could limit the ability of most civilizations to succeed with faster ship types, perhaps combining with the above to make colonization the “hard step”.
Gee tolerance isn’t going to be an issue: any ship large enough to be colonizing is going to either have hibernation or a centrifuge if significant gees are needed for long term health and no way is found to change that. It also isn’t the Great Filter since it’s likely a problem only for some intelligent species. Radiation might be an issue for long duration missions in ships more compact than a hollowed asteroid, but the latter, with a thick enough wall, should be adequate to shield its occupants.
The biggest unknown might be the “space reef problem”: how navigable is interstellar space? If it’s littered densely enough with objects like ‘Oumuamua it might be difficult to cross at relativistic speeds without hitting something big enough to blow you up right through your ablative shield. Again, the hollowed asteroid would have better chances, with speeds low enough to easily dodge objects comparable to its own size and a thick, solid nose of cratered rock that will simply be a bit more cratered when it gets to its destination from the smaller debris encountered along the way. Indeed, for it, objects like ‘Oumuamua are opportunities to stop and refuel, or even to reproduce, hollowing them out and colonizing them in turn. One ship sets out and a whole fleet arrives. This also adds redundancy over time, to where loss of one entire ship isn’t loss of the whole expedition.
Easing the “reef problem” is that if objects like these are mostly close to the local standard of rest, then we can chart the space reefs with slower (or numerous and expendable) probes within a cylinder between Earth and a destination before sending a populated vessel to that destination, and the charts will remain valid for the duration of the mission. There’s still the risk of being clobbered by a fast-moving object, but these might remain rare, and the risk correspondingly low if all the near-stationary junk is mapped and a course plotted to avoid that. The risk will be highest when traversing the Oort clouds of both origin and destination stars, and skirting (if necessary) those of others. The denser Kuiper belts and other debris belts can be rendered nonissues by approaching and departing out of the plane of the systems’ ecliptics, though grazing their northern or southern extremes might be desirable because larger Kuiper objects would be great refueling stops.
All in all, it seems clear that hollowed asteroid generation ships are very likely to be a successful method for (slow) interstellar colonization, for any civilization that reaches a roughly late-21st-century level of development without either blowing itself up or losing interest in expanding beyond its home system. It becomes more open to question for smaller and faster vessels: is interstellar space navigable enough? Radiation damage low enough? Fueling and engines for faster vessels feasible, technically and economically? Hibernation reliable enough?
We don’t know if the stars are reachable by an equivalent of fast steamers. We do know they are reachable by an equivalent of Polynesian rafting, unless the laws of physics are wildly different from what we thought, or else we’re in a simulation and everything past a few hundred AU or so is just a projection on the holodeck walls. (The walls can’t be too much closer than that, or Voyager 1, at 140 AU and counting, would have hit them already.)
I therefore don’t think the Great Filter is a technical inability to cross interstellar space. If ‘Oumuamua did it, and 2I/Borizov did it, then a NERVA-accelerated hollowed-out Juno full of humans (generation or sleeper ship) can do it.
It could be the dichotomy of “stops expanding if it learns to live within its means, collapses otherwise” though.
@Surplus
No, we don’t. Nobody has the first clue how the hell to make a functional ecosystem from scratch, nobody has a working model of one, nobody has a design for one on paper, and that’s not even getting into the issues of putting one in a bottle and maintaining it indefinitely at sub-planetary scales. Building a big honking spaceship, we could totally do that if we spent sixty to a hundred years building up the necessary space-based infrastructure and were willing to throw enough resources at it. That’s the easy part. The hard bits are the ones you’re blowing off as trivial: putting an ecosystem in a bottle and then working out a society that can remain functional in said bottle for several centuries and still be in a state to do anything useful at the other end. We’re nowhere close, even theoretically, to either of these things.
Not the physics. The scale. Polynesian explorers didn’t spend centuries on small rafts, they took trips of several months to a year or so between islands. They knew for an absolute fact that there would be life-bearing islands they could stop at to replenish their supplies. A few thousand miles of water is not even remotely comparable to tens of millions of light years of empty void pocked with frozen rocks.
The ʻOumuamua object, assuming it did originate at Vega, the closest star along its incoming vector, took about 600,000 years to get here. That’s fine if you’re a lifeless, featureless rock, but problematic if you have a metabolism.
This is sort of about space. But as predicted the usual suspects are already complaining about the new Dune film; and it isn’t even out yet!
(If you like Dune; this guy is brilliant on the series. He’s not normally this sweary though.)
@Alan
I don’t agree with this guy’s assessment that “Dune has been woke from the start.” It’s not. It’s the story of how women aren’t fully able to harness the ultimate power and that they need a man to do it for them. It’s not a woke story. It only looks that way if you’re shallow enough to see “strong female character” and interpret that as feminist. The power of the Bene Gesserit is a passive kind of power, a manipulative kind of power. It’s very yin. There’s nothing feminist in there.
Other than that, good vid.
@ POM
You will recall that the purpose of the Kwisatz Haderach was “to look into that place we cannot see”. Yet in later books various Reverend Mothers have no trouble tapping into those particular areas.
Someone commented “Turns out they could have saved themselves 30,000 years just by looking a little harder.”
But yeah other than that I think it’s a pretty good analysis. He has done a lot of really insightful commentaries; and I do like the soft power* aspects of the BG. Nice contrast to the more blunt instrument approach of most of the factions, even the supposed politically astute ones.
But really Dune is just OPEC…in spaaaaace!
Although there’s a really good early interview with Herbert where he outlines his main premise i.e. The dangers of trusting charismatic leaders; and all the ecological warnings.
(* I’m not sure if soft power is really the right term; but it’s the best I can come up with at half three in the morning)
@Alan
It absolutely isn’t, that’s far too simplistic an analysis. It’s The Sabres of Paradise INNNNN SPAAAAAAACE!!!
@ dali
That was a tantalising article. Have you read SoP? Must confess I hadn’t heard of it. I’m just wondering whether it was a direct influence or both books drew on common source material.
Do you know if Herbert ever addressed this?
I haven’t finished it, I got distracted and also the Orientalism is thick enough to cut with a knife, but the article appears to be substantially accurate. It can be had through Amazon Kindle.
Mmmmhmmm. Just thought I’d drop in and note this, from iconic billionaire Elon Musk:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1262076474565242880
The fact is, we’re spreading. The Red Pill (the MRA one) is spreading. And you’re powerless in the face of it.
Elon Musk has been a misogynist for a long time. His ex wife had some choice stories about him.
So if you think we’re going to be devastated that some rich white tech bro is outing himself as garbage, well it’s about the least surprising thing in the entire universe.
The @MansVoice
I think this is flounce fail number 5.
Anyway, here’s what one half of the creators of The Matrix had to say:
Misogyny is, as has been the case for a long time, very popular. You’re not new and creative, you’re just playing into millennia-old bullshit dressed up in new ways.
Elon Musk is a pompous asshole whose money comes from diamond mines during apartheid and has a savior complex. Not sure why I should have any respect for a man so pretentious he names his son X Æ A-12.
@ mansvoice
In what specific way are people powerless? What relevance does this have to the real world anyway?
In the case of Musk and Trump it’s just people attaching a label to beliefs they had anyway. In the case of MRAs it’s just a bunch of men, whom women don’t seem to want to interact with anyway, also attaching a label to what is just old fashioned misogyny.
Ironically it’s just virtue signalling in the original technical sense of the phrase.
I doubt if a tiny fraction of the population at large even get the reference, let alone care what it means. It’s only real value even in this space is that it gives David something to write about.
But in practical terms it’s irrelevant. Musk might just as well have said “I like Cheerios”. We’d be ‘powerless’ to do anything about that too; because there’s nothing of substance to actually react to.
Elon Musk DESTROYS simps and feminists
Markus Person ANNIHILATES smug liberals
Ben Shapiro DECIMATES idiot SJWs
Jordan Peterson DOMINATES feminists
It’s true, you all have this little maladjusted comment section/ridiculous echo chamber. I still think we’ve got the edge, here.
@ mansvoice
Could you provide one concrete and evidenced example of your assertions for each of the persons listed please?
And also a brief bio of the middle two; I have no idea who they are!
(And if you think this place is an echo chamber you clearly haven’t been around for any of the frequent rows)
The trolling level has really gone downhill since the last time a Man’s Whine was here. Now he’s just naming annoying reactionaries.
Well since this thread is way off topic and we are ignoring the worthless and pathetic boysvoice who has really devolved now. I want to share the news
First I made it through my worst semester and i have applied for a research assistant internship opportunity.
Second my husband and I have been discussing children, once he is out of the Marines so in a year or so time y’all might be getting sonogram pictures and hearing me complain about pregnancies symptoms depending on how the future goes.
@Lainy
Congratulations!
… but mostly I’m here just to d’aww at MansVoice, who’s too timid to venture into a newer thread and thinks namedropping is going to distract anyone from the fact that all of his assertions are worthless because he never has anything to back them up. He’d be such a precious little thing if it weren’t for all the hate and delusions of grandeur.
@MansVoice
FTFY.
@Alan Robertshaw
Markus Persson is the guy who originally created Minecraft then left the company and is now an internet troll. Ben Shapiro is a conservative shock jock famous for demanding people debate him (then shouting and gish galloping over them) and for his transphobia.
@Lainy
Congrats on finishing the semester and good luck with your research and future children!
Jesus, BoysWhine isn’t even trying anymore.
What a pathetic waste of time, to bother posting that sad, boring drivel.
@Lainy
Congratulations! And good luck to you and your husband.
@Alan
I’m rather fond of Philosophy Tube’s Oliver Thorn when it comes to discussions of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU
Troll guy reminds me of an incident I had years ago on a site dedicated to cataloguing a certain comic book company’s characters. One character, in one of the books he appeared in, had brief encounters with various historical figures, including Martin Luther King. The site crank provided little historical tidbits for those cameos to use in the character history.
The tidbit he provided for MLK was something along the lines of ‘US civil rights leader who was a worshipper of Mithra’. When he was challenged to back that one up (because, uh, why would a famous Christian minister be worshiping a Conan the Barbarian god?), the dude just provided a quote allegedly from a letter by King, and linked to King’s online archive for us to see the context for ourselves. Not a link to the actual letter that allegedly had that quote, the entire archive homepage that had hundreds of links to King’s assorted documents for us to search through. Because clearly most of the people on that site had more than enough time to spare to manually search all those letters for an obscure Mithra reference. >.<
Needless to say, the Mithra reference was dropped, mostly because no-one else outside of the crank felt like dying on that hill for no gain to the site.
I see we’ve reached the “shaking his little fists and stamping his tiny feet” stage of the “debate.” sigh