FTFY

The magnetic fields goes out of the atmosphere.. if the spider for some reason can't control its ascent, I'd guess it goes all the way up? Sounds like a new micro-satellite technology!

very cool to see more empirical work on this!

I used the basic resonance model to figure this out for humans.. seems to work well:

    https://sites.google.com/site/pablomayrgundter/mind

Cheers,
Pablo

I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology, i.e., "today" that's just too much data to store. But in keeping with technologies amazing storage capacity growth, it's only a matter of time before the content is also recorded and archived. It's just too tempting not to.

Compare to Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature, which: "meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics" (Amazon).

(Deacon's book is good, though has been criticized as drawing heavily from prior work: "This work has attracted controversy, as reviewers[2] have suggested that many of the ideas in it were first published by Alicia Juarrero in Dynamics of Action (1999, MIT Press) and by Evan Thompson in Mind in Life (2007, Belknap Press and Harvard University Press) yet these works were not cited or referenced by Deacon." (Wikipedia))

Or compare to Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order, which Deacon cites (and it seems the two are in communication). Kauffman's notion is that there are implicit geometries to energetic forms which in the situation of excess total energy can locally channel a system towards structure and shape that bias, and perhaps belie, the notions of random variation and natural selection being the primary drivers for the creation of structures in living beings.

Neat to see this coming to the east coast/MIT.

Article says predecessors may have evolved around the predecessor star to our Sun, but given the time spans involved why just our sun? If early bacteria were ejected into space by vulcanism, solar wind would accelerate them outwards to ~400km/s, or about .1% speed of light. At that speed, you could cross the galaxy in a scant 100 million years.

Depends on what happens to low-weight particles at the heliopause though, especially if they've become ionized during travel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Wealth,_2007.jpg

Imagine a banquet for 100 people where everyone brought their produce from a day of work in their home gardens and farms, 2000 calories worth each, and then divvied up the food like this:

    40 people were given a single slice of apple and water
    20 people were given a serving of ham and potatoes, so 60 had been served
    20 people were given a salad topped with blue cheese and vinaigrette and then salmon on rice with a side of broccoli, so 80 had been served.
    10 people were given a large meal, with nuts and breads to start, then a salad, a couple of appetizers each, a large steak with potatoes on the side, a desert and cappuccino, and multiple glasses of wine throughout, so 90 had been served
    5 people were given a dinner that they simply couldn't finish.. like the last one, but with 90 oz T-bone steak, a whole plate of mashed potatoes, a spread of fruits and cheeses and 2 or 3 deserts, so 95 had been served
    4 people were given a full week's set of these really surpassing, 7-course meals, all arrayed nicely in front of them in a building crescendo of delights for the next 7 days, so that 99 had been served
    And the last person, was given a month of these 7-course meals and it was not clear even how to get them back home.

So everyone had been served. Now imagine what these people talk about at dinner. Perhaps something like this?

    "It's not fair that 40 people just got a slice of apple! Did you see those slices?! They're puny. We should give them a bigger slice of apple!"

Sigh. At least talk about Maximum wage instead of Minimum wage:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_wage

But then, if you really want to build a nice community to live in for the long-term (remember, wage is not the only way to accumulate wealth), talk about maximum wealth; no wiki about this yet though ;)