1. Everyone involved with the original post and its’ dissemination is both sincere and woefully ignorant about the way social media works.  None of them have the slightest idea of how their behavior can plausibly be considered a botched astroturf campaign. They are all defensive to the point of paranoia, and have no understanding that a simple “I was wrong, I’m sorry.” would have made this brouhaha never happen. They all confuse criticism of both ideas and presentation as attacks upon themselves. This entire sequence of events is simply a miniature black swan – a cascade failure of communication mirroring and shadowing the progressing events in Fukushima. It’s an intriguing thought, from a psychological perspective.

2. Their attempts to justify themselves are a strategic response to a failed tactic. This is the more parsimonious reading. As  I wrote to  the editor-in-chief of the MIT student paper (at his request) it may be sheer coincidence that the specific details of this situation match a classic astroturf scenario. It is, however, somewhat improbable.

For those wondering what heinous charges I made against Dr Brooks that were redacted from my comments on his blog, here they are:

Barry, you could (and should) have clarified Dr Oehmen’s credentials. Even without peer review, such accuracy should be expected from an academic. While it’s understandable that Mr Morgan – who is not a research academic – might understandably imply and assume a greater expertise than Dr Oehmen has, your role as an advocate does require a greater concern for accuracy in sourcing. Sloppy communication of this kind is ambiguous, and leads to serious suspicion. Defending it leads to even more, since you’re clearly not stupid. It’s reasonable to expect someone of your intelligence and writing ability to recognize that. Of course, it is also a truism that it’s hard to understand an issue when your livelihood depends on misunderstanding it.

So – which is it? A tragic level of naivete and ignorance about the ways of the world and written communication in social networking, or a deliberate attempt to mislead?. You can read the pattern either way, and come to the same conclusion – the source is not credible. Neither reading argues for credibility and that,  perhaps unfortunately, is an actual fact.

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• soulless “persons”;
• neither alive nor dead;
• not conscious;
• driven by single goal;
• doing everything possible to consume your mind.

Let me put it another way.

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Given these factors, the more discrete NGN activity, the greater the probability that US activity will fail in one or more theaters. If the NGN activities are truly discrete, US attempts to understand what is going on without understanding how that is possible will tend towards increasingly bad decisions across the board.

Aristide is back in Haiti, elections are happening, cholera is spreading, and no one knows what’s next. If the US persists in seeing him as a threat, the overseas arm of the empire will need to consume intel and strategic resources. We’re clearly stretched for talent on that level now.

The Bahrain intervention is going badly, as predicted. This will increase pressure on Washington, as well as increasing pressure on oil and relations with the Saudis. This is not likely to end well for the US, and again will stretch the talent even further.

One of the things revealed by the HBGary WikiLeak is the asymmetry of costs associated with cyberwarfare. NGNs have the advantage of the Bazaar of Violence, while nations have the disadvantage of internal security costs. These costs are reflected not only in dollar amounts, but in terms of talent available.

Libya opens another direct front for the US. Gaddafi is done, and he’s beginning to feel it. Given that he’s built a great deal of his offensive on mercenaries, expect them to melt away in a prolonged struggle as his ability to pay them is strangled. It looks like he thinks his only possibility is to win now, but regime change is on the way. We’re stretching our talent a bit more.

And so on.

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So where does that leave us? The current content on the site has integrity and knowledge. The students providing that content were very likely unaware of the controversy around it, or why. The issues around the site – and these posts – are being brought to the students’ attention. My source had no idea why the site was created on a Sunday, and not on an mit.edu subdomain. The administrative contact is not part of NSE, but works for several departments as a contract worker, as far as can be determined.

That takes us back to last Sunday, and the site creation. We’ll see where that goes.

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Speaking of points… Dr Oehmen apparently is now using his cousin-in-law as a mouthpiece. And it doesn’t wash.  An email to family is one thing – permission to post all over the web is quite another. And let’s be very clear, he gave that permission. At any point any one of a number of misleading statements could have been cleaned up – and weren’t.

Let’s remember he told us that there was *no* chance of serious radiation leakage or a meltdown.  On Jason’s blog ( http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/), we currently see the following:

This post is not keeping track of or explaining events after Mar 12. Events kept developing, and many people keep sharing their discovery with me that one is always smarter after the fact.

That’s the closest he comes to admitting he was wrong. It’s not a matter of “being smart” – it’s a matter of accuracy. Something that a real scientist would understand, and someone with an engineering degree almost certainly does.  So – score another for weasel evasion.

He also claims it “went viral”. That is…. incorrect. It was pushed viral by Barry Brook – the same Barry Brook who runs the BraveNewClimate blog referenced on the mitnse.com site as a “reputable link”.

The kicker is the last paragraph:

As far as I am concerned, I was just doing my job. Fixing things. In this case, a complete lack of understandable context information that would have allowed my family and friends in Japan to make an informed assessment of their situation.

So many ways to take that. It’s unfortunate, particularly in this context of death and destruction, that a young German would say “I was just doing my job” after shilling for the nuclear industry. It would be easy to play upon, but “fixing things” just makes me boggle. What, precisely, was fixed? Other than the google search results for the disaster, of course.  And his last sentence is complete rubbish. If you lead by telling people there is no chance of something happening, and you’re wrong, you’re NOT providing an environment for an informed assessment. You’re lying to them.

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It’s changed again – surprise! the heading now proclaims that it is

hosted by http://web.mit.edu/nse/ :: Maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT

The first sentence is, to be blunt, a lie.  As of this moment it’s hosted on wordpress.com, and it’s DNS is WP DNS.  I worked in civil engineering for a while, and grew up in an engineering household.  Engineers are picky about details – like that one. The second sentence is also interesting, because not one single real name – of anyone except Josef Oehmen – appears on the site. That makes it hard to evaluate, but let’s continue.

It’s certainly just an oversight that the clickable link in the blog title includes the words  http://web.mit.edu/nse/ and doesn’t link to the site named.

Nothing misleading about THAT at all, is there? Suddenly that faint pink pennant is resolving into a red flag. And we haven’t even gotten to the content.

How much credibility can we give the content? No matter how good it is,  none. Being a Professional Engineer (a  PE) is required before you can sign off on anything actually engineering related.  Unlike most PhDs, if a PE makes a mistake someone can get sued. That’s ingrained early.  It’s a liability issue. Students typically are not PEs unless they’ve already worked in the field and passed the exam. They might pick up work as an EIT (engineer in training), conceivably. They aren’t engineers, they’re students. And just like in the rest of academia, they want publication credits.  See, I sandbagged you there – the big red flag is the anonymity of the entire production.  Engineering students would spot the issue in a second. If you like it, you shoulda put your name on it. And your seal, if  it’s a design.

I also find it hard to swallow that MIT caliber students believe

“Our mission at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering is to help develop the next generation of technical leaders of the global nuclear enterprise and to provide technical leadership in energy and non-energy applications of nuclear technology. We also have a responsibility to inform public debates on the wise uses of nuclear science and technology.”

That’s a bit more grandiose than the department’s page:

The Department of Nuclear Science & Engineering provides undergraduate and graduate education for students interested in developing the peaceful applications of nuclear science and engineering for societal needs. Given the global climate change and fuel supply security concerns, nuclear energy is emerging as an important national energy policy element. The applications of other nuclear technologies in medicine and industry have focused attention on the value of strong nuclear science and engineering program. In response to this demand, the department has developed a new discipline-focused program of study that prepares students for the many diverse applications of nuclear science and technology. Applied nuclear science is the core discipline, comprising low energy nuclear physics, the interaction of ionizing radiation with matter, and plasma science and technology. Most of the applications fall within three main sub-categories: nuclear power, plasma physics and fusion technology, and the broad area of nuclear science and technology.

Now that sounds like engineers. The grandiosity (and bozo-osity) of the first one sounds typical of propagandists and fanatics – not technical people.

So who is doing it? I’m holding out for the guy whose name is on it as administrative contact – Ilavenil Subbiah.

He’s not listed that I can find in the MIT directory, and (as I pointed out yesterday) has his own web and graphic design business. He’s done work for NSE before.  And, it’s really odd for someone’s personal business phone number to be listed as the admin contact for a departmental site.  It raises all kinds of questions.

And somehow, Josef Oehman’s original article keeps getting buried deeper and deeper.

If I were a cynic, I might think that the entire purpose of this site is to hide the indefensible and fraudulent propaganda that he and Barry Brook engaged in. That gave false hope to thousands, if not millions, of people. That if properly looked at will completely kill any hope he has of a legitimate academic career. That accidentally pries the lid a little further off of LAI.

Well, I’m a cynic. I think that’s exactly what it is. Dr Oehmen is supposedly an expert in supply chain management, and the global issues that the disaster in Japan is raising cry out for someone with that expertise to step up.

Someone honest, that is.  Someone who recognizes that what he actually knows is valuable to the world, and that what declaiming on what he doesn’t can only be pernicious.

But, fair is fair. Dr. Oehmen isn’t “giving interviews”, so I can’t ask him about it. And I really hate to make those assumptions, because maybe MIT really is willing to put their academic rep on the line for this fraud and coverup.  So here’s a way around that. Asking MIT directly. They’re probably not going to like it much, because either they have to deal with Dr Oehmen, or they have to buy into a blatant cover-up that brings the entire school’s academic integrity into question.

Patti Richards (prichards@mit.edu ,617-253-8923) is the MIT Director of Media Relations.

Caroline McCall (cmccall5@mit.edu,617-253-1682) is the Media Relations Assistant

I’m sending them the following list of questions, tonight. It’s well past midnight on the east coast, but they’ll be in their in-boxes in the morning.

1.  Did the NSE department approve the creation of the domain and website mitnse.com, prior to it’s installation on Sunday, March 13, 2011?

2. What is the relationship between Ilavenil Subbiah and MIT?

3. Is Ilavenil Subbiah authorized to make purchases in MIT’s name? If so, how much, and   why?

4.  Which students and faculty members of the NSE department are involved with the site, if any?

5. If this is an MIT site, why are technical articles being presented anonymously?

6. Was this domain purchased with MIT funds?

7. Dr Oehmen approved the original blog post, and it’s re-publication.  Does MIT feel that he allowed himself to be presented in a deliberately misleading manner?

8.  Is MIT aware that the mitnse.com site has been registered in its name?

9. Is MIT willing to assume any liability for the operation of the site?

10. If the answers to 7 and 8 are no, what steps will be taken to insure that MIT’s name and reputation are not associated with a fraudulently registered site?

11. If this is an MIT site, why is there no contact information on the site?

12. Are you aware of the alumni and faculty repercussions this site can cause through misrepresentation  of MIT?

13. What is the current status of Dr. Oehmen?

14. Is there any further statement MIT would care to make about both the creation and the attempted coverup of this egregiously bad propaganda under cover of the University’s reputation?

That’s a start – let’s see what we can find out. I’m hoping they’ll email me back. Someone more impatient might want to call them. The questions won’t be a surprise.

Greg

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On Sunday, March 13th, I saw an interesting link on Facebook. Since the previous Friday, I’d been posting update information on the Japan disasters, and had been one of the first people to post that there might – and I stressed might – be nuclear problems. So when I saw a link saying “MIT scientist says no problems”, it’s only natural to read it.

The post originally came from http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com. Let’s first note that the name “Jason Morgan” does not appear on the morgsatlarge site. The site has one post (now redirecting to another site, which we’ll get to). Apparently, it was created yesterday. The “about” info is “About morgsatlarge English teacher, F1/ UFC enthusiast. Japan resident, quake survivor, and most importantly a husband to an amazing woman, and father to a beautiful baby girl.”

Jason is on Twitter, though, and thinks his “scientist friend” stuck his neck out for him, and is telling the truth. He’s had a  Twitter account longer than last week, and he says Oehmen’s married to his cousin and is an “awesome guy”. Sounds pretty benign, what with his claims the article will be published on mit.edu, and has been vetted by nuke folks at MIT.

Jason had JUST been at the Japanese immigration office when the quake hit. And he sure enough was genuinely worried about the nukes, based on his tweets, in one of which he says he’s “shitting himself”. Nothing real suspicious here.

In the Google cache for the site today, we see this (no longer on the site):

“I do not work for the nuclear industry. I am an English teacher, from Australia, living in Kawasaki, Japan. My friend Dr J. Oehmen is a family member, and by far and away the most intelligent person I know. Feel free to believe/disbelieve whatever we have written. There are no conspiracies, however if you need to, feel free to make some up….

This post is by Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, in Boston.
He is a PhD Scientist, whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. I asked him to write this information to my family in Australia, who were being made sick with worry by the media reports coming from Japan. I am republishing it with his permission.”

The site I got linked to, though, was a repost from something called The Energy Collective. http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/53461/fukushima-nuclear-accident-simple-and-accurate-explanation . This ONE instance of the article has been shared over 5000 times on facebook, and over 32k times in total.

The Energy Collective is a Siemens AG lobbying/influence/astroturf organization – it says Powered by Siemens right up front. They present as a “Nukes for the Environment” type. The author of the piece here is Barry Brook, who lists himself as a “Professor of Climate Change” on the site. He is – at the University of Adelaide – and is a strong proponent of nuclear power. In other words, he has credentials on climate change, and is pro-nuke. Then let’s note that this is a repost of something Brooks posted on BraveNewClimate. We’ll get back to the crosspostings later.
In his introduction he says “Below I reproduce a summary on the situation prepared by Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, in Boston. He is a PhD Scientist (sic), whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. This was first posted by Jason Morgan earlier this evening, and he has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. I think it is very important that this information be widely understood.”

So let’s look at that “awesome guy”, Josef Oehmen.

Does he have a PhD? – indeed he does. In supply chain risk management. And yes, he’s a “Research Scientist” – that’s his part of his actual job title, not what he does. (LAI Research Scientist appears to be his title.) He’s not in a traditional department – he works for something called the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI), which is a military-industrial-academic project. As of today, his information page  http://lean.mit.edu/about/lai-structure/faculty-researchers-and-staff/oehmen-josef clarifies that he is not involved with nukes at all.

It adds “Josef is working hard with a team from MIT to provide an appropriate response to the interest the post has generated. The original blog will be migrated to an MIT site, managed by a team of experts from MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. The link will be posted here when it becomes available.”

In the Twitter page set up yesterday, he says  ”Josef is a research scientist in mechanical engineering and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology“. His about page says “He is a mechanical engineer by training, working on product development processes.” Interesting, not quite the same thing. He also says “MIT setting up information hub on nuclear situation in Japan incl my original post: http://mitnse.com/” on his Twitter page.

Ok, that’s really interesting. Because mitnse.com was registered yesterday, through wordpress.com. That was a Sunday, right? And while the contact information says it’s for MIT, the admin contact is given for an independent contracter, with the contractor’s phone number. The contractor is a graphic designer who has done prior work for the department. (here’s his  site:  http://www.subbiahdesign.com/web/index.html

There are only a couple of links from the department site – added well after normal working hours on Monday night.

Before “mitnse” killed the comment and rss functions on this wordpress.com site, you could see that rss feed said the site was “maintained by students” in the NSE department. No such students have identified themselves. And while the originally, highly erroneous post has been redacted, the editors have not seen fit to identify themselves.

So – “students” on the site, “experts” in the announcement of it.

The comments were filled with statements about “intellectual dishonesty” and “academic fraud”, as well as point by point rebuttal of many statements Dr Oehmen had originally made. They were killed 5 minutes after I posted the following:

“So far, although I see a link to this site from NSE, I don’t see any discussion of it. And frankly, Mr/MS mitnse, as far as I can tell you’re actually Ismail Subbiah, graphic designer occasionally on contract to MIT. The links between Siemens AG, Dr Oethman, Barry Brook, and MIT/LAI (which has cleverly been avoided – lets do bring that up, shall we?) suggest that no matter why the article was written in the first place, it’s become a major piece of disinformation masquerading falsely as academic opinion.”

As you can see, Siemens AG comes up again. Not surprising, because it recently became an “industry partner” of MIT/LAI. But there is almost certainly another connection. Dr Oehmen is German. If his father spent much time in the German nuclear industry, there is a very very good chance that he worked – or works – for Siemens.

LAI’s website says “LAI accelerates lean deployment through identified best practices, shared communication, common goals, and strategic and implementation tools honed from collaborative experience. LAI also promotes cooperation at all levels and facets of an enterprise to eliminate traditional barriers to improving industry and government teamwork.” http://lean.mit.edu/about/about-lai .

What that doesn’t say is who the industry partners are. Oddly, they are all major defense contractors. And the only one I’ve found so far with any direct connection to nuclear power plants is Siemens.

I’ll be looking deeper at this story, including the mechanisms used to spread the original, and entirely specious, article across the web. It’s still spreading now, mostly from people who would be horrified at this.

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credit:
rmatthendrick

A purely virtual rc tribe is not, and will not be, entirely useful in terms of disaster/collapse situations. This is partly for the reasons Andrew and Lance mention, but also from physical reality. Take Katrina as the example – without comms to outside, the value of the net is limited. Software developed freely and ad hoc for people locating was done rapidly, and with a minimal requirement for coordination, although the temporary creation of relief 2.0 (which I helped create and co-ordinate) allowed the software to be standardized.

But by the time the tsunami hit, no one was participating – it wasn’t nearly as useful as putting up voip servers.

What was lacking in Katrina – and in most disaster/collapse situations – is a replacement non-national-grid infrastructure systems internal to the region. Which is to say:

- Solar/battery/wind powered mesh cell/wireless networks with cheap, easily deployable nodes. A lot of them.

- Solar/alt energy water pumps and distillation distributed at a block level.

- Locally accessible databases for currently available resources and co-ordination – who is where, and what are they doing?

- Human powered vehicles – more trikes than bikes, to move material where needed and perhaps function as ambulances.

- Triage facilities and local co-ordination points at the same level of granularity. Centralized relief facilities (superdomes, what have you) should be a secondary level of response.

- All of these need to be provided in a way that non-authority powers (gangs, etc) can also be leveraged for comunications, co-ordination, and material, transparently to the “authorities”.

A local police department cannot provide the manpower necessary to police every block in the manner required for security, so “down for the block, yo”. Under situations like this, painkillers and stimulants may be required in quantities local hospitals and pharms can’t supply. Heroin is a *useful* thing when you have a large number of injured folks and no access to pharms – so is marijuana. Got a moral issue? Too bad – survival trumps morality almost every time. (This is the bottom line on “no ideology”).

Participation in a virtual RC frankly isn’t required for the 98% of the population that won’t use it anyway. They just need to be able to get to someone who can tell them what to do – that’s what they will want and respond to. And by “get to” I mean walk, crawl, or swim no more than a quarter mile.

Of the 2% who use their access, 80% of *them* will just be reporting in. Community logistics and tool management overhead (where necessary) should require minimal personhours and perhaps a core of 10-20 people for the *entire* enterprise.

There *will* be knowledge/information/power differentials. There *will* be power struggles over control of the resources. There *will be “bad behavior”. It can all be handled, and “swordlessness” is probably the only effective way for the duration of the emergency.

With or without this, a response community of people who do useful things will emerge – it *always* does. The goal should be to provide that emergent community with the tools to be effective in what they do, rather than pre-establishing an organizational model and identifying members, or centralizing and standardizing “what they should do” beyond “deploy the block kit”.

With this kind of distributed system in place, it *doesn’t matter* if the Gov responds as slowly as in Katrina. Basic needs will get handled, the nightmares of the domes don’t get repeated, and there is something in place already for the disaster relief folks to tie into if they eventually show up.

You may notice there has been no mention of either food or weapons. Generally speaking those are both secondary to the situation. Reality is that most people won’t starve to death in a couple of weeks, even with no food at all. The will die of dehydration or injuries long before starvation is a problem. And not “hoarding” is an example of swordlessness – if there is nothing to take by force and that is known, no one will bother trying to take it by force.

And what of the rural survivalist “preppers”? Utterly irrelevant in the larger context. Suburbanites “protecting” their communities? Route around them – if they don’t like it they can’t have any. Oh, they’ll be there, but wasting their time and cutting themselves off from the best means of dealing with it all for everyone. You want emergency food? Buy a case of ramen.

Total cost of each node in such a network can be brought down to well under 2 grand, including a weatherproof triage tent/yurt. The entire kit would weigh under 200 lbs, and be storable in the space under a conventional single bed. If you want to get fancy, add a container in your yard to store it all and act as c&c facility – that would run about 3 grand additional.

(note: reposted from a comment I made on John Robb’s Global Guerrillas

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This is an answer to that question.

You might model it. You build a system around some basic rules. You observe it, and test it to destruction. Then you add more rules, and refine your procedures, and you keep repeating it. It’s an iterative procedure. And then you might create programs to solve for different functions. These agents are intelligent, which means that they process information. They are objects, and they have attributes. I flash back here to Dr. Arthur Danto droning on about “blue” while I quite seriously pondered jumping out a third floor window at Columbia University in 1968.

Coders and gamers nowadays can understand and work with the concept of objects and attributes pretty easily – back in the day it was a mental construct in the province of philosophy, and for this 18 year old was impossible to comprehend.

There are a lot of variables and constraints in the system. Here are a couple of key ones: Intelligence is not consciousness. Both intelligence and consciousness are distributed unevenly.

You are operating in multiple dimensions. This means you must account for the dimensions you’re operating in. This includes the physical. In order to resolve, your program must have a body – it must embody the solution.

Next is that it’s an all or nothing scenario on this question – the outcome is binary. Do or die. There is no try. (Thanks, Yoda!) This has certain implications for your agents. They either solve for their function or not. If they test themselves to destruction, that set of circumstances didn’t resolve that question. As  far as we know, or can know.  Self-preservation seems like a good idea to incorporate.

You have a huge amount of data to work with, including the full or partial output of all your other agents, including those that have been tasked with or assumed that function. That data may or may not be corrupt. This means that you need a strategy for quality. You have all your agents, themselves. They may or may not be functioning correctly.

So let’s start the design. We’re going to need a body – with at least enough capacity to hold the intelligence. It needs to be able to interact with the other body/program/intelligence/consciousness agents. Because we’re concerned with survival of the species, the (let’s call it a “human being” at this point) has to embody as a human being.

A human being has a lot of attributes in multiple dimensions. We can handle that. One idea is that we can do it effectively by designing for the problem. Another idea is that we can just program for the creation of permutation sets and run a lot of them, hoping to brute force the solution. Cool – permutation sets are easy, but they’re kinda boring – it’s repetitive work. We’ll task that part to the replication subroutine for the genetic structure.  (it’s not that simple, and we can speed up the process using something called a Taguchi test, but roll with it for now, ok?)

So let’s engage in some conscious, intelligent design, shall we? Because it’s a question of “how”, you might want to maximize for something we’ll call “strategic intelligence”. So let’s add that to the spec. In fact, let’s make  intelligence a prime attribute.

It’s got to be able to handle utterly incredible amounts of data, and that means multimodally – input comes in many shapes and sizes, colors and tones and flavors and scents, ideas and feelings and interactions. Broad spectrum doesn’t begin to cover it. So let’s add Input to the design spec, and make it highly sensitive.  A precision instrument.

Due to the nature of distributed consciousness and distributed intelligence, it’s got to be able to communicate with other agents and the environment, and report when it’s found a solution. It would be nice if it was self-documenting.  Sounds like Communication might be just the ticket.

It’s got to be able to process that data effectively…. so it has to be able to Learn. Got it, check.

And if it really solves the problem, it will communicate the solution to enough humans that the species survives, AND they will somehow store that information, process it, and make any system changes required.  It’s an important task, so let’s give it the ability to induce other agents to do what it wants – let’s call that Command. Ok, we’ve got our Pick 5 for main elements.  We get five here, out of 34. The other 29 aren’t excluded, but they are present at more minute levels, down to trace amounts.

Ok – we’ve got the human basically designed. Let’s make it specific, because it has to be specific. Pick some gene pools – let’s say marginal Jews, refugee Slavs, and English Puritans. They all are promising test pools for survival and resiliency.  Just for grins, let’s drop it in Los Angeles, California in, say, 1950. Then we wait and let the program run. If it fails, there’s no big loss, it’s  just one approach. If it succeeds, great – issue resolved. Either way, we can deal with other interesting things in the meantime.

Ok, so that’s how you do it consciously, if you’re me. That’s hindsight, too – reverse engineering, if you will.  It’s self-justifying. But Consciousness is not Intelligence – we do not have to believe that intelligent design implies conscious design. You don’t even have to believe that the process is intelligent – remember, we added that to the mix fairly late. You can if you want to, but it doesn’t really matter.  I’m here no matter what you believe.  (Darn, there’s the limit on “you create your own reality”).

The universe has enough intelligence and consciousness to do that now (I’m in the universe, I’ve consciously specified the strategy: doh). But remember something – I don’t solve for “does God exist” or “intelligent design” or anything else – this solution is for “How does the human race survive an unknown catastrophe that may or may not happen at any time?”

If you are an economic and rational type, you have a bottom line, even if I don’t. I’d like to make you a present of how to calculate that.  Your situation:

There is a solution to that problem. Solving that problem implies a great many things about other problems and problem-solving in general. It’s a non-trivial problem with multiplex solutions, and this part of it took 59 years to work out in a system that is designed and/or adapted to solve it.  That might be demonstrably true. If  it is, what’s access to that kind of processing power worth to you? You may want to think about that.

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