Links #15

Fertility technology, space news, and the right to be sued.

Source

1.

Sarah Constantin has a great piece on fertility technology in Asterisk magazine covering artificial gametogenesis and extending fertile lifespan among other things. What’s even better is that it has saved me from having to write a similar piece.

I think it’s worthwhile considering some of the more speculative fertility technologies that people are working on. One of the most interesting is iterated meiotic selection (update here) which would essentially split and fuse cells from the same person to shuffle the genes present in their gametes. This would allow parents to do something similar to embryo selection with more precision. In terms of controlling your child’s genetics, scientists have also made a step towards parthenogenesis, which produces a clone of the mother.

I think infertility deserves more attention as well. Recently, a gene therapy was used in mice to restore fertility, translating these therapies to humans could help many more couples conceive. The vaginal microbiome also plays an important role in fertility, though we know very little about it.

One area that has received little attention so far is multiple pregnancies, which have a higher risk of complication than single pregnancies. Some women are predisposed to having twins and some drugs used in IVF can increase the rate of twins. I wonder, what do the risks of carrying twins look like on a per child basis? Could it be safer than having sequential pregnancies? Bearing children has enormous costs, and a single pregnancy with two children might defray the overall cost if we can make multiple pregnancy safer.

Related: Lyman Stone has a nice thread on age-specific fertility rates. Basically, people are having kids later, and as a result, having fewer overall. Interestingly, birth rates for 30, 35, and 40 year olds are rising, just not enough to compensate for declines at younger ages. Perhaps oocyte aging interventions could help?

2.

Some good space stuff this week.

Mars

Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles. It seems much more feasible now to warm Mars with a combination of nanoparticles and orbital reflectors made on Earth.

See also: Handmer discussing the nanorod stuff. He talks about making the nanorods on Earth, but figuring out the process on Earth and then making them on Mars makes more sense to me. You can greatly reduce the mass you have to send this way.

As for making the nanoparticles, Nickel has a significant atomic percent in Martian soil. You can potentially treat the soil with syngas to produce nickel tetracarbonyl, use the Mond process to turn it into metal, and use this protocol used to educate college students to make the wires.

Nickel (and iron) are nice materials to make the wires out of because they’re ferromagnetic. That will make it easier to clean up the atmosphere later.

Liquid water in the Martian mid-crust means that it’s much easier to get water on Mars, which is critical for rocket fuel, chemical synthesis, and terraforming. millimeter wave drilling might come in handy here.

With a path to warming up Mars and a source of liquid water, terraforming is looking a whole lot easier. The next challenge is figuring out how to deal with the toxic chlorine compounds in the soil so that plants can grow there.

Antimatter

A thread on producing antimatter. Some designs could reach 0.1% efficiency of converting energy into antiproton rest mass, which seems surprisingly good? To put that into perspective, solar energy falling on the Sahara desert could generate 900 tonnes per year of antiprotons.

How much antimatter do we need for space travel? Casey Handmer addresses this in Antimatter is the best post-chemical rocket propulsion system. It takes 360 milligrams for a flight to Mars and back. But see the comments on twitter about much more efficient methods of space travel with antimatter such as ICAN-II that only require 140 nanograms of antiprotons.

Rocket deliveries: the company Outpost is developing rocket systems to deliver critical goods rapidly across the globe. I didn’t expect my post on rocketplanes to be validated so quickly.

3.

Interesting discussion on twitter on the importance of the right to be held liable for your actions:

If the laws are enforced on everyone equally, then people can safely interact with each other, knowing that they have recourse if they are wronged. But when one particular group of people is exempt from the law, the safest thing for everyone else to do is to avoid having any contact with that group, because they are now uniquely threatening.

The people being stolen from are not the only victims of the decriminalization of theft. The victims that nobody sees are all of the unlucky but perfectly trustworthy people who are now pariahs because society has decided to remove their ability to enter into binding agreements. To remove the social safety net that allows everyone else to feel safe around them.

Related: Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman (long) on the modern conflict between individualistic “master morality” and collectivist “slave morality”. I think giving everyone market-supporting rights (and a system of torts) essentially reconciles these views. That way, individualists can act freely while collectivists get the protections they want.

Considering the previous link, Nietzsche’s ideal individualist might voluntarily commit to certain standards of behavior in order to increase their own power. By respecting peoples rights you gain the power to exchange with them. Extra credit: connect these ideas to one of: AI risk, animal welfare, Grabby Aliens, or the evolution of human values¹.

See also:

Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players.

AI Rights for Human Safety

The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI

Everything else

A new drug can completely prevent HIV infection over the following 6 months. Fantastic news! Half of the miracle comes from the new drug, but the other half is the drug delivery system. I can’t find many details, but it seems like you inject a solution under the skin that slowly releases the drug, providing protection for months. It’s results like this that make me think that vaccines and small molecule drugs can eradicate every infectious disease. Let’s do malaria next.

What Milton Friedman Got Wrong About Immigration and the Welfare State

On the higher fertility of semiconductor workers.

“What’s happening with solar in Pakistan is so interesting. Customs records show a huge amount of solar equipment being imported. But the utility / grid operator isn’t reporting much more solar on the grid. It implies nearly all of that solar is being used as [distributed energy resources] … Another clue — grid demand has dropped 10% over two years, but GDP hasn’t, while importing tons of unaccounted for solar panels.” link here. More here. The solar industrial revolution is happening.

NREL has a nice page on the economic feasibility of converting atmospheric CO2 to various chemicals.

A short Wikipedia page on new drilling technologies.

Current opinion on the prospect of mapping electronic orbitals in the transmission electron microscope: State of the art, challenges and perspectives (H/T Andy McKenzie). A discussion of how electron microscopes could be used to visualize atomic orbitals, the clouds of electrons around an atom. I didn’t know that was possible!

Sarah Constantin also scooped me with LLM Applications I Want To See. I’ll write more on this later.

Twitter post on collecting a small amount of teleoperated robot data, multiplying it up in simulation, and using that for training data.

Davis Blalock reviews the LLama 3.1 paper, which gives a ton of details about training a frontier model. I’m struck by the proliferation of different training steps and specializations needed to improve the model.

Zach’s tech blog is cool. Some highlights:

Solving Optimization Problems with Asynchronous Oscillators on FPGAs

What’s the difference between Extropic, Normal Computing, and D-Wave?

Solving the Randomness Bottleneck in Stochastic Computing

A cool, old-ish result in cryptography that I’m dumping here for future reference: section 4.3 of this paper constructs a “complete one-way function”. This is an algorithm similar to a hash function that is provably a one-way function (OWF) if and only if any one way function exists. OWF’s would enable us to do all of cryptography securely, and their existence would prove P vs. NP. Right now, almost all cryptography relies on the assumption that OWF’s exist.

1. Ken Binmore’s work may be of interest for the latter topic.