Nautilus Magazine: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.[...]

For example, only about 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and stars also hints at unseen mass. [...]

The universe does other funky and unexpected stuff. Notably, it began to expand at an accelerated rate about 5 billion years ago. This acceleration is conventionally chalked up to dark energy. But cosmologists don’t know why the cosmic acceleration began when it did. In fact, one explanation with a modicum of traction is that the timing has to do with life—an anthropic argument. The dark energy didn’t become significant until enough time had gone by for life to take hold on Earth. For many cosmologists, that means our universe must be part of a vast multiverse where the strength of dark energy varies from place to place. We live in one of the places suitable for life like us. Elsewhere, dark energy is stronger and blows the universe apart too quickly for cosmic structures to form and life to take root.

But perhaps there is another reason for the timing coincidence: that dark energy is related to the activities of living things. After all, any very early life in the universe would have already experienced 8 billion years of evolutionary time by the time expansion began to accelerate. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos, or maybe those well-evolved denizens decided to tinker with the expansion.

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The Memory Palace: Stories about the St. Louis

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CityLab: Berlin Tiptoes Into Europe’s Car-Free Streets Movement

This summer, the German capital has announced plans to pedestrianize some vital central streets starting in October. One experiment will ban cars from the main section of Friedrichstrasse, a long, store-filled thoroughfare that, before World War II, was considered the city’s main shopping street. Another will test daily closures on Tauentzienstrasse, another key retail street, with a view toward going permanently car-free in 2020.

These plans are notably muted compared to, say, the blanket car ban in central Madrid, or London’s new Ultra Low Emissions Zone. But they are nonetheless ground-breaking for Berlin, and could do much to slash the presence of cars in some of its busiest areas. [...]

There are budding efforts to go further in Berlin, as well. There’s talk among the city’s Greens—still too hazy to count as proposals—of banning cars in inner Berlin by 2030, after an interim congestion charge. And this Saturday, a group of activists who favor a city-wide car ban are planning a demonstration intended to temporarily shut down Western Berlin’s Sonnenallee, a long avenue bisecting the fast-gentrifying working-class district of Neukölln. Lined with affordable cafés and restaurants, Sonnenallee also has traffic that can sometimes be deafeningly loud, making what might otherwise be a promenade for strolling into something that sounds and smells like a race track. Piloted by an organization called Autofrei Berlin (“Car-free Berlin”), the demonstration hopes to amp up pressure to free the space from private cars.

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PolyMatter: Why China is Building the World’s Biggest City

Vox: Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think

Across the United States, the state recording of vital information — that is, reliable, accurate state record-keeping surrounding new births — was introduced in different states at different times. A century ago, many states didn’t have very good record-keeping in place. But that changed gradually over time in different places. [...]

In other words, as soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there’s a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110. That suggests that of every 10 supposed supercentenarians, seven or eight of them are actually younger than that, but we just don’t know it because of poor record-keeping.

This doesn’t mean that any of these false supercentenarians are lying. It could be that they lost track of their age a long time ago, accidentally double-counted some years, or were told the wrong birth year. But it does mean that the majority of people claiming to be supercentenarians, born in areas that didn’t keep reliable, accurate birth records, are probably not quite as old as they say they are. [...]

The paper puts forward a controversial proposal. It seems unlikely that living in high-crime, low-life-expectancy areas is the thing that makes it likeliest to reach age 110. It seems likelier, the paper concludes, that many — perhaps even most — of the people claiming to reach age 110 are engaged in fraud or at least exaggeration. The paper gives a couple of examples of how this might come about; some of it might be reporting error, and some of the supercentenarians might be produced by pension fraud (someone might be claiming a dead person is still alive for pension benefits, or claiming the identity of a parent or older sibling).

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