Vacation on Venus!
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Jason Murphy is a novelist, screenwriter, and content creator. In his house at R'lyeh he waits, dead but dreaming.
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All In A Summer Day
Sending a handful of rich folks to their death at the bottom of the ocean just wasn’t enough, I guess. Now Guillermo Söhnlein, cofounder of OceanGate, wants to send 1000 people to colonize Venus.
When most people make a grave error, like the Titan submersible, they would take a step back, analyze what went wrong, and maybe try again later. This guy? This guy wants to send people to die on Venus.
Known as Earth's "sister planet," Venus has similar size and composition to our home. However, its extreme climate sets it apart. With surface temperatures that can melt lead and crushing atmospheric pressure, Venus has been considered an unlikely destination for exploration, let alone tourism. Read the following and tell me you think this is a good idea?
Extreme Temperatures: Venus's surface temperatures are hotter than the surface of Mercury, which poses a significant obstacle. Advanced heat-resistant materials and innovative cooling systems are being developed to shield spacecraft and habitats from the intense heat. 900 degrees Fahrenheit!
Atmospheric Pressure: The atmospheric pressure on Venus is about 90 times that of Earth. Designing habitats that can withstand this pressure while maintaining a comfortable environment for tourists is a complex engineering challenge.
Sulfuric Acid Clouds: Venus's thick clouds are composed of sulfuric acid, making the planet's atmosphere highly corrosive. Developing protective measures and materials to prevent spacecraft and equipment degradation is essential.
Communication and Navigation: Venus's long days and nights, coupled with its dense atmosphere, can disrupt communication and navigation systems. Advanced technologies will be needed to ensure safe travel and communication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Summer_in_a_Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_in_fiction
Before we realized Venus was a sulfur-choked hellscape, it captured the attention of scifi writers for decades. They thought there were lush, habitable jungles on Venus, filled with monsters and strange, alien civilizations. Explorers setting foot on Venus was a common trope in magazines like “Weird Tales”.
Bradbury has a few stories about all the rain on Venus. Many of us read the short in school and it left a mark because it was super depressing. Then science came along and said, “Yeah, Venus is a nightmare,” and all of those tales faded away.
AI is Killing the Internet
The Dead Internet Theory posits that the real internet died back in 2017 and now most of it is just run by bots. It’s a fringe theory. Clearly there are humans at the helm of much of this unholy shitshow. But how many of the websites you check or the emails you receive are generated by a machine? 10%? 20?
With the advent of AI, we’re going to see a lot more of that. Right now, there are hundreds of websites that operate with little to no human oversight. Artificial Intelligence cranks out news stories to populate zombie websites. The articles are often riddled with inaccuracies, but it doesn’t matter. These things are just there to scam the internet ad-industry. Bad operators create a zombie site, get it scraping the internet and generating exceptionally poor content, and then just … let it go. They sit back and collect the check. It’s clever, really, but these tools to create these zombie sites can be exploited by anyone with a little bit of know-how. It’s going to start happening a lot more. Experts at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies estimate that 99 percent to 99.9 percent of the internet's content will be AI-generated by as early as 2025.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-internet-generation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
There’s been a lot of prognostication from futurists about the impact of Artificial Intelligence. The myopic and frankly unimaginative outcome is Skynet. Killer robots and programs that want to wipe out humanity! We’ve seen the movies. We’ve read Neuromancer. The books I’d like to read are about what’s happening now and in the next few years. What does the transition to an AI driven economy look like? The promise of retrofuturism told of flying cars and lots of leisure time. I don’t think I have to tell you that it will probably be far messier than that. And uglier. With AI, the power dynamic is shifting. How do people deal with that when it happens? It won’t be a synthetic voice on a speaker, suddenly declaring its intentions. There will be societal upheaval. Mass joblessness. And yet still … the promise of something better.
Plan C
In spite of the post-war opulence and optimism, the 50s and 60s were dark times for America. The Cold War quickly escalated into a nuclear arms race. I can’t really express how entrenched these fears were. Even into the 80s, it was something children worried about every day - “maybe today, the bomb will drop”.
Of course, our government, while dealing with near-annihilation moments like the Cuban Missile Crisis, spent a lot of man-hours devising plans to stay in power. “Continuity of Government” plans are chilling, no matter what the catastrophe. There are no good choices, and in 1958, the Office of Defense Mobilization called a meeting to discuss “Plan C.” This was a plan to enact in the moments leading up to an imminent attack from the USSR.
Certain government personnel were deemed ‘essential’ and assigned to secret, remote backup offices in case something happened.
Martial Law. Nearly 13,000 Americans were to be immediately detained for their ties to ‘subversive organizations’ (yikes!)
Soviet diplomats would be collected and handed over to the State Department.
Harsh times call for harsh measures, but I can’t help but think that many of those 13K people were targeted for other, unsavory reasons - the color of their skin? Their education? It’s the kind of thing that made J. Edgar Hoover salivate.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-top-secret-cold-war-plan-to-bring-the-us-under-martial-law
https://gizmodo.com/plan-c-americas-nuclear-doomsday-plan-to-declare-marti-1682760808
Dystopian novels and stories are a mainstay of our fiction. People look to art for its predictive powers. “What will happen to us if this horrible thing occurs?” Books and movies have prepared us for all manner of future horrors. But what happens when those “future horrors” appear in the now? What happens when you find yourself living in dystopia?
As I work on my own dystopian novel, I started to have difficulty separating the fiction from the fact. On paper, our society is starting to resemble many of those cautionary tales. Is it possible to fictionalize it? To turn this dystopia into a “what if” instead of a “what now”?
AI vs CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, has long been a defense against malicious automated bots seeking to exploit online platforms. But AI-powered systems are increasingly demonstrating their ability to defeat CAPTCHAs.
CAPTCHAs emerged as a means to prevent automated bots from gaining unauthorized access to websites and online services. The challenges, which often involve distorted letters, images, or puzzles, were designed to be easily solvable by humans but difficult for computers to crack. This approach worked for a time, but with the advancement of machine learning and AI, CAPTCHAs have faced significant challenges.
AI's progression in recent years has led to the development of powerful machine learning models capable of mimicking human perception. These models, known as neural networks, can be trained to recognize patterns and solve CAPTCHAs with a high degree of accuracy. Researchers have used large datasets of labeled CAPTCHA images to teach neural networks how to identify the characters or objects within them.
One particularly innovative method in defeating CAPTCHAs involves Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs consist of two neural networks, a generator, and a discriminator, which work in tandem to create and evaluate content. In the context of CAPTCHAs, GANs have been employed to generate artificial training data for neural networks, allowing them to become proficient at solving CAPTCHAs that they haven't seen before.
In response to the growing threat posed by AI-powered bots, CAPTCHA developers have evolved their techniques to stay one step ahead. Some of these strategies include:
Advanced Puzzles: CAPTCHA systems have incorporated more complex and diverse puzzles that are challenging for AI to decipher but still solvable for humans.
Behavioral Analysis: Some CAPTCHAs now employ behavioral analysis, evaluating user interactions beyond the solving of puzzles. These systems consider factors like mouse movements and time taken to solve challenges, making it difficult for automated bots to replicate human behavior.
Audio CAPTCHAs: To diversify challenges, audio-based CAPTCHAs have been introduced. Solving these requires audio recognition, an area where AI models still struggle compared to visual recognition.
Image-based Challenges: CAPTCHAs that involve identifying objects or scenes within images add a layer of complexity that many AI models find difficult to navigate.
Continuous Evolution: CAPTCHA developers now implement continuous changes to their systems, making it harder for AI to adapt quickly and necessitating ongoing development of AI techniques to breach them.
It’s a game of Whack-A-Mole, really. CAPTCHA evolves, AI breaks it. In that way, it’s not much different than every other thing that AI can defeat now. Artificial Intelligence is quickly eroding all of our digital safeguards. In a way, it’s like child-proofing. You want it to be so good that AI can’t get into it, but simple enough that an adult human could gain access.
https://www.inverse.com/science/captcha-tests-future-ai
What ridiculous ways will we develop to increase our security? How many hoops will we have to jump through just to check our email? The absurdity of it could quickly approach Phillip K. Dick territory. Will our phones do retinal scans? Take a blood sample? If you’re trying to come up with a grim (and really annoying) future, take a look around you, observe the small things, and then turn them into huge, debilitating problems. Something like this - the CAPTCHA arms race - has the potential to alter the way we go about our day-to-day lives. And not in a good way.
The Strangerous Channel Updates
We’re editing some Strangerous podcasts at the moment and we’ve got some exciting and weird stuff. As a bit of a teaser, I just spent a few hours with mentalist and all around interesting guy, Joe Diamond. Joe “hacked the Pentagon with his brain” and is a font of bizarre stories and knowledge. We had a great discussion about mentalism, conspiracy theories, and magicians. Here’s a bit of silliness we did with Joe on the Modern Rogue.
If you’ve got a guest we should have on the show, let me know!
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Even More Strange and Dangerous!
Thanks for reading our online newsletter! Here’s just a bit of our favorite things we’ve found lately.
It’s been a Star Trek summer here at the Murphy house. We’re finally catching up with Star Trek: Picard. It’s like going to a family reunion and seeing all of my old aunts and uncles one more time. The writing is a little dodgy at times, with some story-choices that seem both anachronistic and at odds with Roddenberry’s philosophy. Still, it’s fun to see the TNG crew back together again.
I’ve been spending a little bit of time with the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre video game. Right now, I’m at the ‘screaming at the screen and throwing the controller’ stage of figuring out just how to get the hell away from Leatherface. It’s an atmospheric love letter to the movie, one that lets you explore the iconic settings of the 1974 film. It’s also maddeningly difficult.
Got anything Strangerous on your radar? Games, movies, or bizarre articles you’ve uncovered? Send them our way!