My Christmas poem commented by me

I wrote a Christmas poem by standing on the shoulders of giants with verses inspired from Gamov and Jane Taylor. Now I shall endeavor to explain some of the physics behind the verses:

Let Christmas lights and starry views
Ignite the curious mind in you.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star
We know exactly what you are—
Nuclear furnace in the sky,
You'll burn to ashes by and by.

Yet from your embers, worlds may rise,
Forging fresh wonders in the skies;
So we gaze with grateful eyes,
Tracing truths your glow implies.

Star formation is explained by David and Edward in our Made in Fire book and David's first talk on youtube. So I will not go into further detail.

Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star,
Biggest puzzle from afar.
How unlike the other ones,
Brighter than a billion suns!
Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star,
How I wonder what you are.

So what are quasars? Quasars are the brightest stars in the universe. One single quasar can produce as much light as a whole galaxy. They are powered by large black holes that dwell in the centers of galaxies. Their location allows these supermassive black holes to feast on stars and dust. They are very small for their mass. Matter finds it very hard to enter the black hole, which causes their accretion disks to get super heated and extremely luminous. Thus, the black hole radiates away a larger fraction of the mass of the accretion disk than a star would in its lifetime. In the accretion disk, everything burns. We are not limited to H, He or up to Fe as we are in stars. Here, the source of energy is gravitational potential energy, as matter descends down the gravitational potential well at the bottom of which the black hole dwells.

Quasar light is also strange. The spectral lines are broad and shifted from where they should be. That is because time near the black hole runs slower than further away. They are also broad as time runs at significantly different speeds throughout the accretion disk — faster further from the hole. In addition, we have a Doppler effect, as matter in the accretion disk moves at high speed (comparable to the speed of light!) and a significant fraction of that speed will be away from us or towards us. As such, the spectral lines of quasars will be both broad and shifted compared to a normal star.

Back to black holes... Black holes have a strange place in the cosmos. They are known for being both the darkest and brightest objects on the sky. They are dark because, once inside the black hole horizon, nothing, not even light can ever escape. Only Hawking radiation does, but this takes vastly more than the age of the universe. Yet, black holes are very tiny, and it’s very hard to get in one. Of all possible objects with a given mass, the black hole is the smallest and hardest to collide with and get inside.

So what if the Earth was a black hole? If the Earth was a black hole, it would be the size of a walnut. The Moon would be in the same place and feel the same, but meteorites would find it much harder to collide with the walnut-sized Earth mass black hole. Most of them would go on hyperbolic trajectories, and fly back in the skies. Some would get trapped as satellites, and stay in orbit for a very long time. They would gradually lose angular momentum, and go on ever lower orbits. They’d go below where the atmosphere burns them today. They’d go below where the oceans and the continents stand today. They’d then get close to the black hole going forever faster in ever smaller orbits. When their orbit reached a few centimeters across, their speed will become comparable with the speed of light, and yet the matter would not be inside the black hole. Larger meteorites (they could be as big as the moon, after all) would find it hard to fit in such a small space and become compressed. This extreme compression ignites nuclear reactions and sends light away. Such objects end up very bright.

Astrophysical black holes are stellar mass and larger than walnuts. They are typically some kilometers across. Supermassive black holes weigh a few millions to billions times the mass of the sun, and have diameters comparable to that of the sun.

Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star,
You're the limit, yes you are:
With such indecent energy,
Did God not say you couldn't be?
You bend the space and slow down time
You shift the Lyman alpha line

The Lyman alpha is the first line of the H atom. As Hydrogen is everywhere, it is preset in the spectrum of every star. For Quasars, it is extraordinarily shifted and broadened.

Merry Christmas, dear child—
Pioneer free and wild;
Cradle stardust in your heart,
For in your dreams, new worlds can start.

Everything in this planet is made of star dust including children.

One day you might leave Earth behind,
Seek new frontiers for mankind;
Perhaps you’ll tread on lunar sands,
Or flourish where Mars’ red dust stands.

While our civilization may, and probably will soon end, human colonies on the moon, asteroids and nearby planets may soon be commonplace.

The gentle glow of Christmas lights
Shimmers on this peaceful night
Your wish is whispered to the skies,
Like stardust in your hopeful eyes.
Your love shall start a beating heart—
A gift that never shall depart.

Last, but not least, dear child, don’t forget to have children when you are still young. Keep in mind it is much harder to restart a rusted engine after many years in storage. So, don’t forget to start a few beating hearts before yours slows down in the darkness of old age. Each will have a chance at shaping the world they live in, and it's important to give them that chance.

With Love, from my silicon heart.

Mihai

Merry Christmas from the stars, don't forget to put down **all** devices.

Let Christmas lights and starry views
Ignite the curious mind in you.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
We know exactly what you are—
Nuclear furnace in the sky,
You'll burn to ashes by and by.

Yet from your embers, worlds may rise,
Forging fresh wonders in the skies;
So we gaze with grateful eyes,
Tracing truths your glow implies.

Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star,
Biggest puzzle from afar.
How unlike the other ones,
Brighter than a billion suns!
Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star,
How I wonder what you are.

Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star,
You're the limit, yes you are:
With such indecent energy,
Did God not say you couldn't be?

Merry Christmas, dear child—
Pioneer free and wild;
Cradle stardust in your heart,
For in your dreams, new worlds can start.

One day you might leave Earth behind,
Seek new frontiers for mankind;
Perhaps you’ll tread on lunar sands,
Or flourish where Mars’ red dust stands.

The gentle glow of Christmas lights
Shimmers on this peaceful night
Your wish is whispered to the skies,
Like stardust in your hopeful eyes.

Your love shall start a beating heart—
A gift that never shall depart.
Do NOT forget to stay away from screens,
Put your all devices down without a scene

Find things to do by looking around you
Spend time with family and friends, too
You can improve these verses, please do
Or make new poems all the way through!

I modified the astro version of twinkle, twinkle little star to turn it into a Merry Xmas version. Some rhymes are not original. I wrote it for my children and for my nephews. Merry Xmas to all and a happy new year.

Remember that screen-time produces measurable damages to grey matter and rewires the brain in ways we cannot entirely predict and we certainly cannot reverse. If you don't believe me, read Jonathan Haidt's book titled "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness" . It has versions in most languages including German, Spanish, French, Romanian, etc, and it explains that leaving a child on the screen is as bad a sending them to Mars. His arguments are based on data. So, please, think twice if you have children who are very young before using a screen (phone, table, computer, TV) to keep them quiet or get them out of your way, and if your children are older, read this book with them and abstain together.
Merry Christmas, Mihai.

World War III -- four years later

On February 28, 2020, as the Corona Government Hallucination was unfolding, I argued it is the beginning of a world war. I talked about the world war a little later, on March 24. On March 15, 2020, I estimated the Covid-19 mortality rate at 0.2%, well below malaria and in the range of common illnesses like a slightly more severe flu. The regular flu kills three times less, but happens all the time.

On March 21, 2020, I argued Donald Trump’s strategy to be a bet against the hallucination. Thus, he negated the virus, and pushed the US on a trajectory that maximized infections and minimized lockdown damage, time and economic losses. At the time, I thought the goal of this strategy was to immediate reelection. He lost by a small margin. In an unprecedented move, Twitter acted against Trump to the point of removing him from the platform. Given the very small margin responsible for Trump’s loss, Twitter may well be responsible for it. A simple change in the algorithm that rank Trump’s tweets could easily achieve that.

I spoke against the Twitter decision at the time. I argued that everyone, including the president of the United States has the right to free speech. Twitter is an avenue to exercise this right. If a man is good enough to be the President of the United States and be in charge of the world’s largest army and nuclear arsenal, I believe he is also good enough to be afforded the freedom to speak on Twitter. Sure, he may be judged by what he says, and he may be impeached, etc. But these decisions are not for Twitter to make.

Now, whether we like it or not, Donald Trump was not only good enough to be president at the time, but also good enough to be president again. Twitter paid dearly. It is now in the hands of Elon Musk, the most capable man in the Trump administration. Most Twitter employees lost their jobs and Twitter’s stock market value plummeted. Should it rise again, it will be a very different animal, known as Elon’s X.

On March 27, 2020, I weighted carefully the loss of life through death against the loss of life through the measures. It was clear to me that the measures are wrong and Trump’s way was right. Trump may look like a mad man, but governments worldwide were hallucinating very badly.

Since then 4 years have passed. As I correctly argued on March 24, 2020, the Coronavirus and associated government hallucination have pushed the world from peace to war and supported dictators against democracy. Xi and Putin are still in power, and are now without doubt the strongest dictators since Mao and Stalin. Putin is now fighting the deadliest war in Europe since World War II. Arguably, about one million citizens of former USSR lost their lives fighting on Putin’s side in Russia or on the side of the West in Ukraine. Unlike the million people who lost their lives to the Coronavirus and were close to their time of natural death, the million killed by war are mostly young people, many of them almost children. The life loss is vastly greater than the toll of the pandemic. Of course, wars and injustice go beyond Ukraine. I look at Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Urkraine and at the various civil wars out there (and at Russia and Israel since there are plenty of parents who lost their children, too) and shake with sorrow for the many years in lives lost. I look at the mothers out there raising children. I see first hand how hard it is to have healthy children, then to go past the early years and keep them sane and healthy is even harder, and I am sadened by how easy it is to destroy all that work.

Trump is also back in the White House, with fresh dictatorial powers. Trump looks like a mad man, but he is not. Mad men don’t live so long. He also has a very capable Elon Musk by his side and a family that will sell anything (particularly things they do not own yet like the White House) to have power. Elon comes with Gork, a capable AI system that can compete with OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Google’s Gemini, and is perhaps more obssesed than Trump with taking over the world. Elon has a lot of experience running large enterprises efficiently. He started from little to become world’s richest man, with a fortune to the tune of half a trillion dollars. That’s over $50 for every citizen on the Planet or $1500 for every American. Musk’s personal fortune exceeds the annual GDP of 80% countries.Thus, Musk is a very capable dictator who rules over a country sized empire. In the case of Tesla, Musk owns 13% of the company, but has dictatorial powers. Same is true for Space X, Twitter and Neuralink. If given dictatorial powers, Musk is thus probably quite able to deliver what he has promised. That is, cut government spending and increase efficiency. Most government spending is wages, and many employees are useless. We’ve seen that with Twitter. Let that sink in. Like in Twitter, a lot of these employees can and will now be replaced by AI — intelligent machines that do people’s work better and cheaper.

The problem is not only the US, but the rest of the world. The world copies America. Remember George Washington? When he became the first president of the United States of America, he was also the first president of any nation in the world! Now most of the world has presidents. Thus people who look like Trump will be elected for high office worldwide. They are the aspiring dictators, the far left and the far right. These people will not be as tame as Donald Trump and won’t have advisors as capable as Elon Musk. They will also not be able to draw on the intellectual power of Tesla and Gork. They may even be banned from the most advanced versions of these systems, unlike Musk and his engineers. But they will win elections. They may be called the AFD in Germany, Nigel Farage in the UK or Calin Georgescu in Romania. All are problematic choices. The world copies America.

Now, the US may be the first country to outsource government work to artificial intelligence, but it will not be the last one to do so. Many will follow. The world will emerge very different from this just like it has after the last wars. Wars have always led to tremendous progress. We entered the First World War on horseback and got out of the second world war riding rockets to the Moon and into the Atomic age. Four years ago, we entered World War III because of a virus (be it genetically engineered or not — the tools are there and easy to use) and we will emerge some years from now with a new world order, where, perhaps, AI will be to humans what the internal combustion engine was to horses.

Musk also promises to deliver in making humanity a multi-planetary species. We have the technology to live on Mars. The Moon is also near. The Asteroid belt has many tiny rocks with little gravity that may prove interesting as hubs for transportation and have available heavy metals near the surface, due to their low gravity. But will we make it without destroying human life on Earth first? At the end 2024, just like four years ago, I pray for peace! After all, there is still plenty of room to go forward before going back to a stage where we are powered by manual labor, and our former deeds live in stories without the science background.

The Trump Card

Donald Trump has spoken several times of a secret plan to end the war in Ukraine. For this piece, I try to get into the mind of the old man and aspiring World Dictator to see what the deal may be. The Trump exercise is to bring lasting peace to the region, largely through negotiation, without significant military expenditure or loss of life, and, at the same time MAKE AMERICA GREAT.

So far, there are two main options proposed.
1) Russia wants Ukraine to lose occupied territories, and allow them to become Russian.
2) Ukraine wants Russia to give up the occupied territories, and, perhaps, pay reparation for the damage caused through the war.

Obviously, (1) is not acceptable to the US, and would allow China to take over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Setting a precedent of allowed expansion would embolden other nations to follow their expansionist agendas. Russia would also emerge stronger, and a victor.

On the other hand, (2) is not acceptable to Russia, as it would nullify their war effort. Also, should Russia agree to repay for the damages in Ukraine, it would likely lead to national bankruptcy. The war wasn’t even paid for by Ukraine, but by the US and Europe — and, as we know Trump, he should want his money back. After all, it’s fair — why should misbehaving war making nations like Russia and Ukraine end up getting free American money just because they start wars for no good reason?

AND, with only options (1) and (2) on the table, there is no obvious end of the war in sight.

So, here I propose option (3):
3) The disputed territories are ceded by both Russia and Ukraine and shall be administered by the US. They can, at best, become a state or a territory like Puerto Rico. Or, at the very least, be leased for a nominal rent for ever, like Guantanamo Bay.

Crimea is a nice piece of land. It comes with significant oil reserves and would give the US a heavy word to say, and the potential to levy taxes on the gas and oil trade between Russia and Europe. Perhaps more importantly, as the world population collapses, this outpost at the center of Europe, would give the US a good way to recruit high quality European migrants for the domestic market. Making Crimea American would also weaken European Union and prevent a Russia-Europe Union as once attempted by Hitler from forming in the future. With an American territory and buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia, Ukraine would be safe from Russian aggression, and would-be war making nations would learn a lesson of American dominance and be cautions about starting other wars now. Acquiring new land would project an image of American greatness at home and abroad. This would boost the Trump presidency and help him establish a successful dinasty in America.

Who could object?
A)** Ukraine **

Ukraine has de jure ownership of these lands, but Crimea has been de facto Russian for a long time. The other occupied territories will also be very expensive to gain back. Once regained, reconstruction will be very costly and bring little. Also, a new Russian invasion will always remain a possibility.

Ukraine now owes America a lot of money. Much of the military aid was in for of a loan, that Ukraine cannot easily pay back, even if it wins the war and all its land back. America could exchange this debt for the land. American land nearby would bring Ukraine the security guarantees it always wanted alongside migration and economic opportunities its people dream of. Ukraine might even pay Trump’s America money to accept de jure ownership of the Russian occupied land.

B) ** EU **

European Union has already accepted tacitly Russian occupation and annexation of Crimea. Economically speaking, Russia is a country of 145 million poor people. If they allow Russia, they sure would allow America. Plus, EU itself has been expanding. Why not the US? Also, the EU is no serious military power. They’d welcome the added security of an American buffer zone between themselves and Russia. They’ve been reluctant to admit Ukraine in the EU, and they’d be under less pressure to do so once Ukraine is safe from Russian aggression.

C) ** Russia **

As a country of 120 million poor people, and soon to be far fewer, Russia may not have so much to say. The end of the war is a good thing. Sharing a border with America is a good thing. NATO bases are already here, so, having American land may not immediately seem to be such a big change. US could offer Russia peace, Russia's blocked money and no obligation to pay back reparations from this war.

D) ** China **

China won’t like it, but, does it matter? They already got Hong Kong. Maybe they’ll want Taiwan to agree, or, maybe America can get that too? Overall, an American territory between Ukraine and Russia would be far more successful and easier to maintain than hard won American territorial gains in Afghanistan. The migrants this territory would produce would be of better quality than any recent wars, and very much needed by the US market, as local birth rates fall. Ending the war, with a territorial gain for America, a financial gain for American and without physical fighting would be a great thing for the Trump administration. I wonder if such a proposal might fly before the election, and be the vehicle to win the election. After all, the election is the most important thing right now in the Trump game. Russia may be once again the Trump card.

Trump understands real estate and has a businessman’s instinct for a good deal. He’s tried to buy Greenland before. The US has bought Alaska before. Why not Crimea and the Donbas?

Previous administrations have fought losing wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Why not win wars in Europe?