Author Archives: danijel

Silurian Hypothesis

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Whenever I show doubt about the aliens, someone inevitably cites all kinds of anecdotes about abductions, sightings and so on, and asks “what else could it be?”

I hate that question. That’s how stupid ideas without any basis in reality held on for centuries. Milky way was made because someone spilled milk in the sky, because what else could it be? The planets are Gods moving in the sky, because what else could it be? The stars are the hearths of ancestors in heaven because what else could it be? The constellations are heavenly homes of the spirit totems, because what else could it be? The plague was caused by the Jews poisoning the wells, because what else could it be? So, now it’s the aliens, because what else could it be?

“What else could it be?” is a sentence that should be punished by public ridicule, because everyone who ever used it was an idiot. It’s like answering every single question in science with “Jesus did it”.

It’s obvious that stupid people hate having question marks in their worldview, and they prefer whatever answer to statement of ignorance, but I don’t. I have no problem with stating ignorance. I don’t know what caused all sorts of things and I’ll tell you I don’t know, but then a stupid idiot with lots of confidence will state he knows the answer, because what else could it be?

Let me cite something that has absolutely no basis in evidence or knowledge of any kind, and is purely a hypothesis, but it provides an alternative to aliens – and, also, to the alternative claim that it must be demons, or nonphysical entities of some kind. It’s called the Silurian Hypothesis.

It goes like this. The dinosaurs evolved into a sapient species at some particular part of the world. This species had a habit of burrowing into the ground, and had whole underground settlements. Whether it was for growing/storing food, or for mining some resource, or for protection against big predators, or all of the above, I can’t tell you, but let’s say they were technologically in an early bronze age, 65 MY ago when the asteroid struck. Since they were dug into rock like Dwarves into Moria, they managed to survive the impact and its aftermath, and if they grew mushrooms or something underground as a food source, they could have survived just fine. Let’s say that the aftermath of the disaster put evolutionary pressure on them, and they evolved both intelligence and technology, and 65 MY is a very long time, mind you. Humans stretch some 200-300 KY into the past. 70 KY ago the Neanderthals ruled Europe. Civilization goes back some 5 KY. 11 KY ago we were in an ice age. So, 65 MY is enough for continents to shift, let alone for a species to evolve intelligence and technology that’s so far ahead of ours that it looks like visitors from another star system, because “what else could it be?”. What else could it be, the Fairies could be fucking in the sky, you fucking idiots. But let’s keep with the Silurian hypothesis. The objections would be as following: a civilization would strip Earth for mineral resources, leaving nothing for the early humans, who on the contrary managed to find things like copper, gold, zinc and iron all over the place, without having to dig into the mountains. Well, as I said, 65 MY is a long time, long enough for the mountains to erode, for the strip-mined sections to be washed away and new, abundant mineral sources to be revealed. One would expect technological signatures of such a civilization to be obvious; not really. Our signature was very obvious when we were broadcasting TV and radio all over the place, but now that we’ve transitioned to watching YouTube over the Internet, and it’s all transferred via fibre-optics and focused microwave beams, it’s pretty much undetectable. Extend this for a thousand years, and it’s the difference between the age of an ox cart and the age of iPhone. Technology of a species that’s been working on it at some pace for a million years in continuity might be something we might not even recognize as technology. I don’t know, using mycelia of fungi as computational devices or communication. Something. Whatever I make up is probably much inferior to what they would think of. They could use either geothermal sources for energy, or they could use nuclear energy, or something even more sophisticated that we wouldn’t even recognize. Let’s say they really like living deep in the mountains because that’s how they were saved from the cataclysm and they worship the mountains on a genetic level and go out only to explore this recent infestation that’s been spreading on the surface. Let’s say they have all kinds of flying saucers and “alien” shit. Let’s say they look generally anthropomorphic, and they are dinosaur-descendants like the birds, only some different branch, so they look more reptilian, so there’s your reptilian “aliens”.

Mind you, I pulled the whole thing out of my arse, mildly inspired by a Dr. Who episode, and I can now say “what else could it be?”.

Fuck you, that’s what it could be.

De-inteling

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Apple decided to remove Rosetta 2 support in the next version of Mac OS. I don’t understand how that’s a good idea, since native support for Intel legacy applications, however inferior to the native ones, is why acceptance of Apple Silicon was so widespread and devoid of issues.

I understand why Apple would want to force software developers to issue new versions if they haven’t done so by now, because stuff that’s this old is usually a nest of bugs and issues. Also, support for games on a Mac works mostly due to a combination of virtual Windows and Rosetta 2 support for Intel games. It’s a hack, and it’s a poor substitute for native support, but this hack is now going to stop working. Unless native support becomes widespread, this is going to be a step backwards.

The OS started issuing notifications for stuff that’s about to stop working, and in my case it’s the following:

  • X-Rite calibration software
  • CyberPower Power Panel UPS software
  • Emu48 emulator for HP48 calculator

Everything else seems to have been successfully ported to Apple Silicon by now, which is good. As for the remaining stuff, I replaced my old colorimeter with the modern version, since it was 10 years old and didn’t work properly on new monitors for a while now; either the dyes on the device have faded, or the monitors started using different technology of backlighting it can’t figure out properly. Since it’s a legacy device that forced me to use legacy software, I replaced it. The new Calibrite Display Plus HL just arrived, I tested it with the new Calibrite software and everything works. X-Rite problem solved.

The UPS software and the Emu48 calculator will stop working. The UPS software is not an issue with laptops, but until Apple Silicon version is released, I will postpone upgrading the Mac Studio. Electricity is a problem here and I don’t want disorderly shutdowns by the UPS to break my SSD drives. I expect the software to be updated eventually, because the updates are released with some regularity. As for the calculator, I’m afraid it’s abandonware and unless someone builds a new version, it’s toast.

I also decided to replace my 43″ LG 4k monitor with a LG 32″ 6K device. The 43″ monitor is more than 8 years old, and I was never completely happy with it. First of all, I expected the big surface area to be more useful than it turned out to be. For the most part, I use it the same way I used the previous 27″ monitor – browser and chat tiled, with the chat taking approximately a quarter of the horizontal space on the right side. Lightroom, of course, takes the whole screen when I run it. It’s not that the solution is bad, but I want to try a high resolution, condensed 6K option which scales better on a Mac, rendering crisper fonts and so on. My eyes’ ability to focus on near objects started degrading seriously about the time I bought this huge monitor, and although it’s unlikely to be connected, I’m not sure the thing helped, either. Also, I find the retina-type displays much more pleasant, so I’m trying this out now. Or, at least, when the thing arrives.

None of it is of great importance, of course, but it’s something that keeps me focused while I process stuff that’s better not to discuss at great length.

Aliens

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There’s been lots of very weird American talk about the aliens in the last two years or so. “Weird” because usually their government seems to deny and/or suppress such “leaks”, and this time it looks very much like they’re the source. So, what’s my take on it?

When I was a kid, I thought the existence of aliens was a sure thing – all those UFO and abduction reports had to be at least partially true, the size of the Universe practically guarantees that someone is out there, and sooner or later someone would figure out a way around the limitations posed by the speed of light.

The change in my thinking happened when I researched a few things for completely unrelated reasons; I researched evolution of life and mass extinctions, and I realised that our existence is contingent upon multiple extremely unlikely things. For instance, single (non-binary) stars are extremely rare, and binary stars tend to produce solar flares of extreme strength that routinely sterilise the habitable zone. I hear it commonly claimed that our Sun is an average, ordinary star, but that’s actually very far from reality. Our Sun is extremely well behaved for a star, and that’s a necessary condition for life not having to reboot after every major solar event. Also, the solar system is very unusual in a sense that it doesn’t have gas giants closest to the star, and instead has them in the outer system. Furthermore, Earth has an extraordinarily powerful and stable magnetic field, which is the reason why it doesn’t look like its twin planet, Venus, and the smaller sibling, Mars. This magnetic field, along with axial stability, seems to have a common cause – the Theia impact in the formative phase of the solar system, where a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, and the ejecta from the impact formed the Moon. Apparently, the heavy core of that planet merged with the Earth’s core, while the lighter parts formed the Moon, leaving the Earth with twice the expected amount of heavy elements, whose radioactive decay keep the Earth’s interior liquid, and core spinning. There also seem to be some atypical things about Earth’s core that are still poorly researched, which might actually contribute to the magnetic field’s strength. Also, the Moon seems to axially lock the Earth, making it an extremely stable environment for the evolution of life.

Life itself in its most basic form seems to have come from space, and the evidence for this is that we’ve found all the basic chemicals for it on the asteroids and comets, and the earliest life on Earth seems to have formed as soon as the planet itself solidified enough. So, life had a very early start here, and yet it took an inordinate amount of time for it to form multi-cellular organisms, and the amount of luck necessary for that to happen seems to be extraordinary. I used to think that life itself is unlikely, but once you get it started, it will eventually evolve into intelligent life. However, based on what I’ve learned, the opposite seems to be the case. Life itself might actually be quite likely, and will probably start whenever the conditions are even the least bit favourable. Anything more complex than the simplest single-cell organisms without a defined nucleus and organelles, however, might be extremely uncommon and likely requires singular extremely unlikely events across billions of years.

Then we come to radiation. There’s cosmic radiation, and then there’s solar radiation. Earth has multiple layers of shielding against both – there’s the magnetic field, then the thick atmosphere, and then there’s the ozone layer. Without those, life might exist in the deep oceans, but not on land. Also, without the magnetic field, the oceans would evaporate into space, like they did on Mars, and probably on Venus as well, if they even formed in the first place.

I’m not saying that life is impossible somewhere in the atmosphere of the gas giants, or in the oceans of their satellites. I would actually be surprised if it didn’t exist there. However, I would also be extremely surprised if we found anything multi-cellular.

Our kind of life – multi-cellular, on the ground and not in a liquid or gaseous medium, complex, intelligent, and forming a civilization – has so many extremely unlikely prerequisites, that I became convinced that as large as the Universe is, it is too small for this to happen more than once. Earth indeed seems to be the centre of the Universe, if we define central in the terms of significance, because everything of significance seems to happen here. Sure, the Universe is big, and full of stars and black holes, rocks, dust and gas, but rather than being a “pale blue dot” of insignificance in the middle of nowhere, Earth seems to be the most special planet around the most special star, where extremely unlikely things occurred across time, to make everything we know possible.

My next argument against aliens is that, if they exist, they are inconsequential. We can argue back and forth as to why an alien species would come here, and produce nothing more than sightings of unexplained things, and occasional abduction testimony, but the fact remains that if the aliens are here, they are doing nothing of consequence as far as human life is concerned. If something is inconsequential, I’m certainly not going to dedicate much thought to it.

Sure, something might happen to change my mind – for instance, if aliens actually do exist and contact us, then they will cease to be inconsequential, and I will have to revise my ideas about how common our type of life is in the Universe, but so far it seems to be that the more we know, the more special Earth seems to be.

Vulgar materialism

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I had a weird experience on a photographic forum in the recent months. Essentially, I was praising the optical qualities of a cheap lens, the Sony FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6, and someone reacted as if the very possibility of a cheap lens being as sharp as the top quality lenses was a personal insult to his pay-to-win worldview.

This is why people mischaracterise the FE 50mm f/1.8 as a “beginner lens”, something you “graduate from” to a more expensive, high quality lens. It just can’t be that a cheap lens can be good. It’s good if you don’t really have experience with the expensive stuff, but if you did, if you could afford the expensive glass, of course you would get it, right? Praising cheap lenses is certainly a coping mechanism for poor people.

FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6

I find this line of thinking extremely annoying. OK, I understand there are insecure people who are trying to turn everything into a status symbol, and it’s probably some aspect of aspirational buying characteristic for people of a materialistic worldview, who think possession of things gives them value. It’s also why sharpness became so overused in assessing picture quality; it’s measurable, and it’s also highly dependent on equipment, and as such, you can make it into a pay-to-win proposition; he who has sharpest pictures wins, and he who has the most money will be able to buy equipment that makes the sharpest pictures. So, obviously, my proposition that a 200 EUR lens can be as sharp at f/8-11 apertures as any expensive GM lens is something that is seen as so incredibly offensive to the materialistic worldview, that it needs to be rejected as outright preposterous and clearly a coping mechanism of someone who can’t afford the GM glass.

Only, I can. I have a pretty extensive collection of high grade lenses, and I do actually know what I’m talking about. As far as sharpness and resistance to flare are concerned, the cheap 28-60mm zoom really does hold its own against glass of the highest grade. This makes it ideal for some use cases. People should be happy about it – after all, if a cheap lens can do the job, they don’t have to waste money on an expensive one, right?

You would think, but that’s hardly the case. It’s as if being inexpensive automatically makes a lens suspect. Even if people are happy with the lens itself, they will “upgrade” from it as soon as possible, simply because it’s cheap and they don’t wish to be associated with cheap equipment. It’s for the beginners, for people who don’t really know.

FE 50mm f/1.8

Do you know what I did after I bought the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM lens? The best, sharpest, brightest 50mm prime? The replacement for my FE 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty”? I kept using the cheap f/1.8 whenever I needed a light, inconspicuous, versatile lens. As for the f/1.2 GM, it’s absolutely great. Completely free of the optical flaws the cheap lens manifests wide open and against the light. Autofocus is instantaneous and incredibly accurate, unlike the cheap lens, whose AF is its worst aspect. But the secret is, from f/2.8 onwards the two lenses are mostly indistinguishable. The cheap lens is optically extremely good when you use it the way you should for most things. Of course I kept using the 50mm f/1.8 for things where it’s actually better; things like keeping it light and not looking like a professional.

So, I didn’t “graduate” from a cheap 50mm lens to a professional one. I didn’t replace the cheap lens. I merely added a new high-quality tool to my arsenal. The cheap lens is still excellent and I use it when the advantages of the more expensive lens are irrelevant. For instance, if I am shooting landscapes in good light, both lenses are going to be used at f/8. Autofocus is going to lock instantly on both in this use case. Sharpness is going to be the same. However, one is going to be lighter to carry. As for the image quality, I already had situations where I looked back at the pictures and thought “ah, the f/1.2 GM is so incredibly sharp here”, only to look at the EXIF and find out that the picture was taken with the cheap 50mm f/1.8. So yes, I will have to disappoint the crowd that sees this as a pay-to-win competition where most money gets you the sharpest pictures. Sharpness is in fact one of the easiest things to achieve inexpensively. You do, however, have to know what you’re doing, which is a different matter entirely.

But if you can get sharpness at high resolution with inexpensive lenses, why did I even get all those expensive GM lenses? Because there’s sharpness, and there’s sharpness of that one single crisp detail in a sea of blurred-out colour.

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

Because I hate chromatic aberrations messing up my shots at contrasty details against the light. Because I like shooting in low light, when the colours are particularly “meaty”, and I like shooting wide open, at extreme apertures, while still retaining critical resolution in landscape shots. My photographic style is such that I can actually use those extreme optics for what they are made. I want things blurry, and yet clear and crisp at the same time.

FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM

That’s the part that’s hard to get, and I had to pay through the nose for it. It’s just what it is. If I could get away with a cheap lens, be completely sure that I would have used one. In fact, I do have a few cheap lenses that I use regularly, because they are what works the best in some cases. They are not inferior lenses – merely inexpensive because there’s a compromise that doesn’t matter for my intended use case. For instance, I have a Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, which I bought very inexpensively, but its picture quality is stellar, build quality is incredible, and it’s very small and light.

Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN

The compromise? It’s a f/3.5 lens, so aperture is limited compared to the more expensive lenses. I don’t care, because I shoot it mostly at f/8-11. It’s a wide angle lens; I don’t care to have extreme aperture on it, and I also already have one extreme aperture wideangle for the situations where I want to use it hand held with the stars visible in the sky. I need this one to be crisp, resistant to flare and light, which it is. It’s just not a bokeh monster. However, if you want optical quality, it’s absolutely top notch. It’s the lens I use when I want pictures to look as if they were taken with a smartphone, only without the stupid artefacts.

Being inexpensive, however, seems to be an unforgivable crime for some people. If a piece of gear is guilty of that crime, no amount of stellar performance can absolve it, and it needs to be avoided so that people wouldn’t suspect you of not having enough money to afford the “really good stuff”.

I’ve been thinking about this mentality a lot lately, since I keep encountering it. It’s as if some people have a desperate need of showing everybody that they have money. One would expect it to be something poor people do in order to hide their desperate financial situation, and they do. It is also, however, something very rich people do if they happened to have a really shitty financial situation earlier in life, like Andrew Tate. When he goes to a restaurant, he orders the most expensive steak. When a waiter asks him for his exact preference, it turns out that “most expensive” is his preference. One would expect a rich person to just order what he wants to eat that day, and not care about prices at all, and I am certain that most do. Some, however, always need to have the most expensive thing, so that people wouldn’t suspect them of being poor, because they were so traumatised by being poor, they started acting in the most ridiculously ostentatious manner once they got into money. I find such behaviour distasteful. If you can’t wear an excellent Seiko because of what people would think, or you can’t drive a normal car because of what people would think, you can’t have furniture from Ikea because of what people would think, and you can’t be seen with an excellent “kit zoom” on your camera because of what people would think, trust me, you have bigger problems than what people would think.