Month: October 2025

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Interesting articles, October 2025

IT’S OVER (for now): Israel and Hamas have signed a peace treaty and ended the Gaza War.
https://www.cfr.org/article/guide-trumps-twenty-point-gaza-peace-deal

Russia’s 2025 summer offensive has ended. It gained a small amount of Ukrainian territory at very high cost in lives and equipment, and did not change the overall trajectory of the war.

‘According to Jompy’s analysis of prewar depot inventories versus what has been taken out for repair and deployment, Russia has recovered and returned to service 4,800 tanks out of an estimated 7,342 kept in storage before the war.’
https://united24media.com/latest-news/from-7342-to-92-satellite-analysis-shows-russias-depot-armor-is-nearly-spent-12298

Russia is increasingly refurbishing old T-72A tanks to make up for battlefield losses.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-bets-on-refurbishing-800-aging-t-72-tanks-to-replace-huge-battlefield-losses-12409

Leaked documents show Russia is planning to rebuild its tank force after the end of the Ukraine War by making more T-90s and upgrading existing T-72s to a higher standard than current. Conspicuously absent is any mention of building more T-14 Armatas, which are Russia’s most advanced tanks. High costs and/or a lack of faith in the latter probably explain this.
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/leaked-documents-reveal-russias-secret-10-year-plan-to-rebuild-its-tank-army/

Making Frankenstein tanks is actually a Russian tradition stretching back to 1941.
https://youtu.be/dX-GvcorWDU?si=m7t3E-adJ1UR-0A7

A lack of aircraft has reduced Myanmar’s air force to using paragliders as bombers. The pilots either manually drop their bombs or use some simple release mechanism.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge2l1xj2zdo

In 1741, 3,500 troops from the Thirteen Colonies helped the British attack Spanish colonies in Colombia and Cuba. The campaign was a huge failure due to poor planning and tropical diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooch%27s_American_Regiment

The U.S. military has been ratcheting up the pressure against Venezuela’s government. The official U.S. government stance is that the current government is illegitimate due to fraud at the last elections, and that it is intertwined with the international drug trade.

Eduard Dietl was such a Nazi fanatic that he forbade his troops from fraternizing with Norwegian women because he thought they would corrupt the German “race.”
https://youtu.be/PjIfWM1c-ck?si=JwmDMBvkLI4famne

The U.S. military had a secret cloud seeding program during the Vietnam War. It was meant to increase rainfall over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, slowing the flow of enemy troops and supplies south. It’s unclear if it worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye

Every kid who learns a little about the Civil War ends up asking why the troops didn’t use lever-action Wild West rifles instead of the clunky muskets they actually did. There were actually good reasons for what we really did.
https://youtu.be/W2Qp2ETe1gc?si=h1V_65fw3pFP6c_J

Here’s a prediction from 13 months ago. A recession hasn’t started, the Federal Funds Rate is 4.1%, and the Fed hasn’t resorted to QE purchases. Again and again, I’m struck by how useless predictions are from “experts” in finance and economics.

‘”The Fed hiked rates into such a huge, unprecedented debt complex … That’s why I say I’m looking for a crash that we haven’t seen since 1929.”

A recession could occur as soon as this year, forcing the Fed to cut rates aggressively from the current level of 4.75%-5%, and eventually pushing the central bank back to quantitative easing (QE), or bond buying – a process that generally occurs amid unsettled markets and aims to bolster monetary policy when rates are near zero.’
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/clock-is-ticking-us-recession-return-feds-qe-says-black-swan-fund-2024-09-27/

Concern is growing that the “AI” sector is in a bubble.

Nvidia is worth $5 trillion, making it the most valuable company on Earth.
https://apnews.com/article/nvidia-trillion-ai-apple-huang-trump-xi-c9bbf5cfa017dadaf248a4d197763cb9

Andrej Karpathy gave a recent interview that has been making waves. Note he still believes AGIs will ultimately take over the world and render humans obsolete, he only disagrees with the optimistic timelines common in the Silicon Valley crowd.
https://youtu.be/lXUZvyajciY?si=nGkyWmSX9m0MYTO_

‘Note that an extremely small amount of motivation wouldn’t necessarily stop the AI from (e.g.) boiling the oceans and destroying the biosphere while keeping humans alive in a shelter (or potentially scanning their brains and uploading them, especially if they would consent or would consent on reflection). Preserving earth (as in, not causing catastrophic environmental damage due to industrial expansion) is more expensive than keeping physical humans alive which is more expensive than only keeping humans alive as uploads. Preserving earth still seems like it would probably cost less than one billionth of resources by default. Keeping humans alive as just uploads might cost much less, e.g. more like one trillionth of resources (and less than this is plausible depending on the details of industrial expansion).’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4fqwBmmqi2ZGn9o7j/notes-on-fatalities-from-ai-takeover

Remarkably, the Federal Reserve has published an analysis of the economic effects of a technological singularity.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0624

The late Suzanne Somers’ husband has created a digital clone of her that he interacts with. He said Ray Kurzweil inspired the project.
https://people.com/alan-hamel-suzanne-somers-ai-project-exclusive-11832986

Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
‘The main limitation of this testing, Ahmad said, is that he can only verify the accuracy of his models if patients survive and can later confirm that the model made the right choice.’
https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/10/should-an-ai-copy-of-you-help-decide-if-you-live-or-die/

‘Fig. 2 shows the development we consider likely. The current 1st generation eTrucks have replaced the diesel motor with the electric one and the fuel tank with the battery. The 2nd generation will use multiple small electric motors closer to the wheels to eliminate a lot of weight currently taken for granted in diesel powertrains, such as from the driveshaft, gearbox, and differential14,25. This becomes possible because electric motors are tiny compared to combustion engines with the same power, need no exhaust system, and dissipate about twenty times less heat. A (fixed or two-speed) gearbox can reduce the weight of the electric motor further25. The 3rd generation is expected to use structural batteries26,27,28, which creates space, and reduces cost and weight.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44333-025-00029-5

‘The NdFeB magnet was invented in 1983 by John Croat of GM and Masato Sagawa of Sumitomo simultaneously and independently when each of them announced the same discovery at a conference in Pittsburgh.’
https://www.nanocrystalmagnetics.us/our-novel-technology

Elon Musk has launched a competitor to Wikipedia.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-wikipedia-grok-grokipedia-4dab7c6ebb16cc7718b231adae4aac95

The U.S. could have put the first satellite into orbit a year before the Soviets were it not for bureaucratic meddling. Werner Von Braun proposed repurposing a nuclear missile to deliver a peaceful satellite into orbit, but a committee rejected the idea.

After Sputnik and the failure of the civilian “Vanguard” missile that had been holding everything up, the U.S. decided to do what Von Braun originally suggested, and modified nuclear missiles were our first civilian space rockets.
https://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000101.html

The Soviet rocket that was to take cosmonauts to the Moon actually had more advanced, more efficient engines than their U.S. counterparts.
https://youtu.be/1vPdSK4OcNU?si=osL6U8-JpMobRROz

Because it had less money, the Soviet Lunar program developed simpler, cheaper, but less dangerous space technology for their Moon mission. The Soviets were more gutsy but also likelier to tragically fail.
https://youtu.be/XHVhREau0-s?si=W99Q-nIyH98lSZfh

An analysis of old photos taken by space telescopes before Sputnik was launched found anomalous flashes of light, which today are common thanks to shiny satellites briefly reflecting sunlight at Earth’s surface. But before 1957, they couldn’t have been caused by our satellites since we had none.

The objects apparently showed an interest in our nuclear tests, and some of the flashes happened at the same time that people on the ground saw UFOs or detected them on radar. We know of no natural phenomena that could cause such flashes.
https://www.su.se/english/news/unexpected-patterns-in-historical-astronomical-observations-1.855042

Apparently without realizing it, Jeff Bezos predicts the rise of a Dyson swarm.
‘Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos predicted on Friday gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years and that continuously available solar energy meant they would eventually outperform those based on Earth.’
https://nypost.com/2025/10/03/business/jeff-bezos-expects-data-centers-will-be-built-in-space-in-10-to-20-years/

This was very fascinating, though you won’t understand most of it unless you remember AP Biology. Two points:

1. A bottleneck to the emergence of complex life in the universe is endosymbiosus– the permanent absorption of mitochondria into cells. If we replayed the history of Earthly evolution, it might not happened.

2. The disadvantage of having two sexes is you can’t breed with half of the population. Arguably, it is better to be hermaphroditic or to have many sexes, like some species of fungi.
https://youtu.be/0GMWxuYuxJI?si=TbxYXgiLFcyo6R0O

Bill Gates has finally come around to my position on global warming.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate

‘Scientists use human skin cells to create functional eggs, opening a door to new infertility treatments’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/science/human-skin-cells-egg-infertility

‘About 60,000 children have avoided food allergies since 2015, including 40,000 children who otherwise would have developed peanut allergies.’
https://apnews.com/article/peanut-allergy-children-infants-anaphylaxis-9a6df6377a622d05e47c340c5a9cffc8

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Thoughts on panspermia and the aliens AGIs will create

[Written with the help of GPT-4]

“Panspermia” is the hypothesis that organic life originated elsewhere in the universe and was brought to Earth either accidentally by a meteor or deliberately by intelligent aliens. While it might be true, there’s no evidence to support it, and it’s most likely life originated here. Once our spacefaring and genetic engineering technology improves, we will be able to make panspermia a reality by seeding other celestial bodies with life forms designed to thrive there. 

Why do that? It could let us “terraform” other planets and moons–a process of gradual transformation of an environment to match Earthly conditions. For example, if we found a planet whose atmosphere contained too little oxygen and too much carbon dioxide for humans to breathe, we could introduce plants and bacteria that consumed carbon dioxide and excreted oxygen as part of their metabolisms. The atmosphere’s composition would eventually shift as intended. 

Will we ever terraform another planet or moon? No…WE…won’t since we humans won’t be in charge of the space program by the time the option to do this becomes available. However, the AGIs and/or posthumans who will be in charge might.

Being rational agents, they won’t seed other planets and moons with life just for its own sake, as some starry-eyed sci-fi novelists think we should do. They will only do so if it serves a higher purpose that benefits them. (Additionally, I hope that advanced ethics go hand-in-hand with advanced intelligence, and they think twice about manufacturing ecosystems where none existed before just so countless animals will arise only to suffer and die, without any ultimate purpose.)  

What purpose could organic life in other star systems serve? Biological intelligences could serve as “backups” for their AGI masters. Machines are vulnerable to hazards that biological organisms are not, like computer viruses and electromagnetic pulses. Keeping biological intelligences around would increase the “slack” and resiliency of civilization since they could help or rebuild the machines if something laid the latter low. 

Notice I used “biological intelligences” and not “humans” in the last paragraph. Even if AGIs found the need for such a niche, it’s unlikely they’d use humans to fill it. For one, we’re not properly evolved to live on other planets. Even a small difference in gravity would wreak havoc on our health. Second, humans are not the pinnacle of complex organic life. There are ways to make life forms that are smarter, stronger, faster, more obedient, and more efficient than we are. Given the chance to engineer servants from genetic scratch, doubtless AGIs will make creations with no link to Homo sapiens. Third, humans will probably be more trouble than we’re worth given our sense of lost greatness and resentment towards the AGIs that surpassed us. Why would AGIs want to spread that attitude across the cosmos when they could instead make wholly new intelligent species that have no historical or cultural baggage and only express gratitude for being brought into existence? 

Intelligent life forms are only useful as backups if they can survive without AGI help and can survive at least some of the disasters that could wipe out AGIs. If all of the faithful humanoids are living on a space station, the same EMP that disables all the AGIs will also destroy the electronic systems in the station, ultimately killing the humanoids. Therefore, in every star system where there is an AGI presence, there must be a planet or moon where the humanoids live in the midst of a self-sustaining, closed ecosystem. This requirement necessitates terraforming. 

Imagine a colony in a distant star system, 10,000 years from now. The most important aspect of the colony would be a Dyson Swarm that enshrouded most of the star, harvesting nearly all of its energy. Each component of the Swarm would be a large satellite. A tiny hole would be kept open in the Swarm so light could strike the surface of a planet, roughly the size of Earth. The planet would teem with millions of species of organic life forms, engineered to thrive in the planet’s conditions and to function together. Any resemblances to Earthly life would be coincidental and the result of designing life forms to function best under similar external constraints. 

The ecosystem would exist solely to keep the planet naturally habitable for a species of  biological intelligences. Depending on what is found to thrive best on that specific planet, they may or may not be humanoid or may be bigger or smaller than humans. For sure, they will be at least as good as we are at understanding technology, and they will be more loyal and obedient to authority than we are. 

To these life forms, the understanding that they were created by machines to serve machines will come naturally and be accepted without resentment. They will be more acquainted with how to survive catastrophes and will know the function if one day the lights go out and big chunks of the Swarm start falling out of the sky. 

Will every star system have a planet (or moon) full of organic backups? Probably not, since there are many systems amenable to Dyson Swarm construction while also being hostile to organic life. For example, there are star systems that lack rocky planets, or that have rocky planets that are not the right distance from their stars. Given the limitations of organic chemistry, no kind of complex, intelligent animal could live on a hot planet like Mercury without constant technological support. 

If panspermia ever becomes reality, it may not be the work of dreamers scattering Earth’s seeds across the stars, but of machines ensuring their own continuity. Organic life, then, will not be humanity’s legacy but civilization’s survival mechanism.