oklo

It’s all there on the Wayback Machine. Way back in the early aughts, say 2002, there were a number of efforts that tried to keep track of the then-rapidly expanding exoplanet census. We now know of more than a hundred worlds orbiting alien stars! The go-tos were the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia at exoplanet.eu and the California-Carnegie table at exoplanets.org. I was trying to keep up with the big boys by maintaining a table of potential transit ephemerides at transitsearch.org, in an effort that was soon the subject of an official thumbs-down from the NSF.

Eventually, NASA moved on the small players. As far as I can tell, their exoplanet archive is now the definitive site. I long ago let the domain registration for transitsearch.org lapse, and it now appears to be under the control of some sort of zombie AI agent.

I thought it would be cool to let my own zombie AI agents scrape down the exoplanet archive. (Look up “strigil”, and if it’s not already part of your working vocabulary, it soon will be.)

The current table of planets that (1) have both mass and radius estimates and which (2) are members of multiple-planet systems breaks down as follows:

That is, there are currently forty-five qualifying three-planet systems, etc.

Think of the systems as directed graphs in the planetary (log Radius, log Mass) plane. The nodes are planets, the edges connect radially adjacent nodes. The edge direction always points toward increasing semi-major axis. An individual system graph is colored by the period of the inner planet using managua, with clipping bounds at 1 and 100 days. This generates an interesting diagram, and provides a significant density-of-data update to the paper we wrote in 2017.

Summing the lengths of all the edges of all the graphs gives a far smaller length than if one shuffles the catalog planets among the aggregate of system slots. That’s the peas-in-the-pods effect that I’m often going on about. What’s more interesting, though, is that the diagram is suggestive of an ordered flow. Part of this comes from the well-known empirical observation that planet masses and radii tend to increase outward. Part also stems from the readily intuited observational biases. Yet there appears to be significance beyond those obvious take-aways.

Think of the directed graph edges as point velocity measurements in a compressible flow. In a cold fluid, the bulk motion will be emphasized in comparison to the thermal motion. We can average out the thermal fluctuations by processing the graph edges:

Plotting the bulk flow field along with the planets, again color-coded by the period of the innermost member of the system to which they belong, gives:

The “sink”, where the divergence of the flow is highly negative, is located near the position where the simulations suggest that runaway core accretion is initiated, which seems suggestive… Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence.

It’s awesome when something is perfectly executed. Case in point: this video from House of Strombo of a four-song set by The Cult…. The Cult came and played at the guy’s house. Damn. Check out the stylish art-galleryesque crowd. And Ian Astbury, Billy Duffy, those guys were literally like fifty-three years old nine years ago, but it’s still very credible. In the event that your blog-reading time is at a premium and you need the highlight of the highlight, scroll to ~12:40 in.

Remember when Mick Jagger was all, “When I turn 33, I’ll retire. That’s the time when a man has to dedicate himself to other things. I don’t want to be a rock star all my life”?

Wax Ecstatic (To Sell Angelina) from Sponge off of Wax Ecstatic lies at the global optimum of some extreme-high-dimensional space. If only I could get my chops on the Tom DeLonge signature stratocaster up to the level.

At first glance it’s hard to understand why the Wax Ecstatic record didn’t go RIAA diamond. The band was seemingly right with the early nineties zeitgeist. Rotting Pinata had broken them into the mainstream. If you compare the one-two punch of Wax Ecstatic (To Sell Angelina) and Have You Seen Mary, with say, Everything’s Zen and Glycerine, you’re just left feeling confused. What could be missing?

Something that’s kind of amusing about the peas-in-the-pod style exoplanets:

are the systems that look like this:

I was never into Dire Straits. That’s readily understood if one takes note of the fact that acts of the Phil Collins ilk were (and indeed are) self-evidently inferior to Joy Division if one was (and indeed is) concerned with trying to conceal vast stretches of dorky midwestern-boy naivete behind a faux-edgy poseurish front. We all have our weaknesses.

Nonetheless, Dire Straits, in the tune Industrial Disease off of Love over Gold, redeems it all with one fabulous line.

Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.

It can be routinely applied as a conversational bon mot, even as frequently as once or twice per week if one believes one is trying to take care to remember who one has previously used it on.

Consider the treasure trove of JWST transmission spectra obtained over the past year or so with MIRI/LRS. Take K2-18b, an ideal laboratory for detecting biosignatures. This take on some of that deluxe hi-fi IR jet-propulsed its Oxbridge authors to the front-page pinnacles of science-outreach heights.

Haters gonna hate, yo? This one‘s coming at you from an outer-borough crew tryna bum-rush the stage.

Fortunately, this’ll all get straightened out when the $7B Habex Mission flies in the 2030s.

I’m historically very prone to latching on to some idea, text, artist or algorithm, proceeding through a phase of wild-eyed evangelism, then rapidly moving on to jaded hipper-than-thou dismissal.

I’ve noticed that the capable frontier models — Claude 3.7 long thinking, GPT-4.5, et al. — can greatly speed this process up. Yesterday I went from (1) knowing literally nothing about metaheuristics, to (2) making dramatic Nietzschean pronouncements along the lines of, “If the ants faced the micro-second torrent of Bitcoin perpetual swaps under existential pressure, they would not back-prop through a colossal end-to-end network,” to (3) having a working implementation of ACO, all properly coded with linted classes, etc., to (4) laconically dismissing metaheuristics with an approach along these lines — run through a cynical Yawny’s Digest-style filter.

Meanwhile, the forecasters at Metaculus are predicting that once a (weak) AGI is created, it will be 33.87 months before the first superintelligent AI is created. Just sayin’.

I’ve always liked Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. Not for the ornithological minutiae per se, but for the way it conveys a sense of place, a connection to the local environment through detailed observation.

And then, of course, there is White’s letter to Daines Barrington — an authority on child geniuses — regarding the Bee Boy:

…

SELBORNE, Dec. 12, 1775.

DEAR SIR,

WE had in this village more than twenty years ago an idiot-boy, whom I well remember, who, from a child, shewed a strong propensity to bees; they were his food, his amusement, his sole object. And as people of this cast have seldom more than one point in view, so this lad exerted all his few faculties on this one pursuit. In the winter he dosed away his time, within his father’s house, by the fireside, in a kind of torpid state, seldom departing from the chimney-corner; but in the summer he was all alert, and in quest of his game in the fields, and on sunny banks. Honey-bees, humble-bees, and wasps, were his prey wherever he found them: he had no apprehensions from their stings, but would seize them nudis manibus, and at once disarm them of their weapons, and suck their bodies for the sake of their honey-bags. Sometimes he would fill his bosom between his shirt and his skin with a number of these captives; and sometimes would confine them in bottles. He was a very merops apiaster, or bee-bird; and very injurious to men that kept bees; for he would slide into their bee-gardens, and, sitting down before the stools, would rap with his finger on the hives, and so take the bees as they came out. He has been known to overturn hives for the sake of honey, of which he was passionately fond. Where metheglin was making he would linger round the tubs and vessels, begging a draught of what he called bee-wine. As he ran about he used to make a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees. This lad was lean and sallow, and of a cadaverous complexion; and, except in his favourite pursuit, in which he was wonderfully adroit, discovered no manner of understanding. Had his capacity been better, and directed to the same object, he had perhaps abated much of our wonder at the feats of a more modern exhibiter of bees: and we may justly say of him now,

” — Thou,
“Had thy presiding star propitious shone,
“Should’st Wildman be —.”

When a tall youth he was removed from hence to a distant village, where he died, as I understand, before he arrived at manhood.

I am, &c.

Where the extrasolar planets are concerned, it’s easy to be cynical. And where the extrasolar planets orbiting Barnard’s Star are concerned, it’s even easier.

Nonetheless, the accumulating Doppler measurements seem to be making the case that there is a pod full of peas accompanying the charismatic M-dwarf as it streaks through our night-time skies.

It’s been quite a while since this blog featured actual radial velocity curves. Flower-shift-4’ing from the above-linked ApJ Letter, we have:

Most convincingly, there’s something of an offhand confirmation implicit in the way that this latest incarnation of the Barnardian system sort of fits with the emerging M-dwarf planetary consensus. Again, from the paper:

And the best part? It’s too hot for any of those Barnard planets to be overrun by an algae bloom.

Discussion with the alien intelligence embodied in the o3 model’s trillion-odd transformer weights suggests that a terrestrial genesis story really is the best bet for emergence of life on Earth. That fits with the bedrock principle that the cool hypothesis is the wrong hypothesis, and it does seem like it’d be somehow cooler if we were all descended from Venusians.

Nevertheless, conversation with the AI also indicates that there’s a window of responsibility that permits one to at least seriously humor the life-started-on Venus story. The fact that the latest universal common ancestor seems to have been a relatively capable organism points to a serious bottleneck in the history of life on Earth, and it’s plausible that bottleneck was the limited availability of impact-generated tickets for passage from Venus to Earth.

One of the figures from the Cabot-Laughlin paper shows just how painless the trip can be if you depart Venus in the early A.M. at a velocity appropriate to give you a (relatively) leisurely v_inf= 2.7 km/sec at the Hill Sphere radius. It’s a comfy three year trip to the Earth-Moon system. A no-brainer for a brainless thermophilic archean prokaryote.

I used to tell my Ph.D. dissertation students that if you stick it out with the astronomy, the odds are fairly high that at some point you’ll get swept up more or less randomly into a Warholian vortex of notoriety. That phenomenon was certainly on display week before last when a formerly obscure researcher at Cambridge University pyramided his bumpy JWST spectrum into dimethyl sulfide and an algae-covered world that merited push notifications across the global media ecosystem.

My own fifteen minutes arrived back in January 1997 when Fred Adams and I were tapped to do an American Astronomical Society press conference on the End of the Universe. At the time, my mind was appropriately blown when I looked out at that modest sea of reporters and cameras. It was surreal to contemplate that a two-decade drought in press mentions that had begun with the 1977 story in the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette about how I’d been named Paper Route Carrier of the Month had abruptly ended with me holding forth about the Dark Era on the front page of the New York Times.

Charged with youthful energy, I was able to parlay that 1997 story into a multi-year stop-n-go career on the swampy fringes of public intellectualism. A museum talk with Philip Glass about the “music of the spheres”. A History Channel episode on the speed of light that featured a segment with some Shot Show promoters at a gun range in the Inland Empire. Extended back-and-forth wrangling over whether or not ‘Oumuamua is made of hydrogen ice.

What I’m proudest of, though, is that I ended my run on the pages of Rolling Stone in the company of Lil Uzi Vert.

I was reading through a competing blog the other day, and I saw that it contained a link to a very interesting article.

The article stuck in my mind, “this has got to be relevant…”

My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes, I think you’ve seen me before

o3, as we know, uses advanced reasoning, and I’ve been softening things up to help ease my transition to the post-AGI world.

On Friday, a glossy eighteen-wheeler stretched its deluxe 75-foot frame along the prime High Street parking spaces across from Harkness Tower and adjacent to Yale’s Old Campus courtyard. “Black Elm Productions” was embossed on the side of the double-stacking Kenworth Cab.

Hey, that’s gotta be associated with the Spring Fling, I realized. I got out my phone and went to the Yale Daily News to find out who would be headlining this year.

Bring ’em out. Bring ’em out… like everybody else, I like hearing some rim-rattling Glocks ‘n Gucci flow from the Dirty South. But I’ve never really managed to progress beyond my late-aughts cultural touchpoints. T.I. — What You Know. Rick Ross — Port of Miami. Young Jeezy. Now that it’s literally the year 2025, I’m literally like some mesozoic insect caught in amber. I’d never even heard of NLE Choppa, not to speak of never having heard Shotta Flow.

When I got home, I was wiring up the subwoofer so that I could get a bead on Choppa’s merits when I was informed that I’d missed a recent update from the Yale Daily News.

Some additional web-searching revealed how the committee had wound up handling the blow.

Ken Carson? WTF? Sounds like somebody that would have been opening up for Toby Keith.

My initial concerns, however were, thankfully, entirely unfounded. Check out the way the ‘808 drops in right at 2:10 of Blakk Rokkstar. That’s just about the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.

In 1991, brown dwarfs had a sketchy reputation. They were variously held responsible for everything from killing the dinosaurs to preventing the galactic rotation curve from decreasing in a sensible manner. A few years prior, there had been a high-profile discovery of the “first” brown dwarf, VB-8b, which was spotted orbiting VB-8 — a low mass red dwarf twenty-one light years distant that is part of the nearest known quintuple star system.

That generated a lot of excitement, a lot of analysis, even a conference. Here’s a Nature article that held forth on the cool new object. According to the abstract, the authors even racked up their own “first” (on the theoretical side):

Unfortunately, however, VB-8b vanished upon further scrutiny.

The lack of any known brown dwarfs served to elevate their edgy mystery. The idea that one might actually be lurking in the near-solar neighborhood, nearer, perhaps than the closest stars, held a weird attraction. It was something I could glom onto. It was not like L1551.

In August of 1991, there was a conference at UCSC on star formation, and one of the speakers was Ben Zuckerman from UCLA. I remember that it was a day when the thick coastal fog didn’t lift. Everything outside was gray and dripping wet. Zuckerman showed the results of different ongoing searches for brown dwarfs. I found myself suddenly snapped to attention. He was discussing the conclusions from a paper that they’d just gotten accepted and which was in press. It was eventually published in February of ’92.

The take-away was that brown dwarfs were probably very rare. That was a disappointment, and remarkably, given the lethargy I’d been showing toward astronomy generally, I was actually disappointed. I was surprised at how much I wanted the brown dwarfs to be looming out there. Preferably nearby.

As Zuckerman showed his transparencies, I suddenly had a flash of an idea — maybe the first concretely independent and actionable idea that I’d had up to that moment. I had the intuitive feeling that the brown dwarfs weren’t showing up in the surveys because they were too dim. The cooling curves needed to be taken properly into account. They were out there, yes! but they were beneath the threshold of detection. And this was something moreover, that wasn’t just limited to a vague feeling. It could be calculated! I was galvanized into action. As soon as the session let out, I went to the Lick Observatory library to find the ingredients that I needed. Evolutionary models for low mass objects near the bottom of the Main Sequence. Bolometric corrections. The results of red dwarf surveys. I started working feverishly.

———–

Recently, in going through old boxes, I found the notes from that effort, a time capsule from decades ago.

After several weeks, I had an answer. Even if the number of brown dwarfs per unit mass were increasing as one considered lower and lower masses, they would not be expected to show up in the extant surveys! I scrambled to write up a single-author paper. Peter Bodenheimer agreed that it was good enough to submit to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. It seemed to be the real deal.

I remember putting the final version in a mailing envelope and walking it to the post office. That was quite a feeling.

Almost three months went by. In January, one morning, the Observatory Director had placed a letter from Astrophysical Journal Letters in my mailbox. Heart pounding, I quickly opened the envelope.

The yellowing letter and the accompanying referee’s report still carry the dull remnant shock of rejection… “how does author explain the negative results from astrometric and radial velocity searches which DO seem to probe into the low mass stellar and brown dwarf regions?”, “wording is also rather sloppy and confusing”, “the title isn’t very useful” … and on and on.

But the brown dwarfs are no longer so elusive. Thousands are known. I Iooked into the literature to see whatever happened to the mass function at the low-mass end. The most definitive treatment seems to be this article by Kirkpatrick et al. from last year:

And satisfyingly:

Brown dwarfs basically got the short end of the stick. At the start of the Nineties, the theory of stellar evolution was in very good shape. All of the genuinely relevant details regarding how stars work had been sorted out. If you did research on stellar evolution, you were engaged in the process of tying up loose ends. That state of affairs was possible because stars are essentially one-dimensional functions of radius. Spherical symmetry. Plots like this one from Icko Iben’s 1967 Annual Reviews article are emblems of a dramatic scientific success story.

With stars solved, brown dwarfs were on deck to be discovered and savored, and then it would be time, at some distant point, to start discovering extrasolar planets. Actual planets orbiting actual nearby stars — in 1991, that was a heavy concept.

That wasn’t how things turned out. The first bona-fide brown dwarf and the first HoJo were both confirmed in 1995. Look ’em up! The first exoplanet orbiting a bona-fide star, moreover, was discovered at 150-sigma statistical significance, which opened up the floodgates, led to a demand for ever-smaller planets at ever-smaller signal-to-noise, public outreach, explainer podcasts, and ultimately the dramatic conclusion to that age-old quest — the discovery last week that we are not alone.

August 1991. I was making no evident progress toward my career goals. I was fronting an industrial band in the derivative vein of Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly. We’d been essentially driven off stage during a recent show at the Kennel Club in San Francisco, in part because we weren’t very good and in part because we insisted on running both the SM-57 vocal mic and the bass guitar through an over-driven pre-amplifier before routing the signal to the house board. Our record had just come out, but it wasn’t moving units. Disconcertingly, I’d just heard No Depression from Uncle Tupelo, and the first bars of Factory Belt had triggered the inexorable erosion of enthusiasm for the industrial stylings of Bill Leeb and Nivek Ogre.

My astronomy research was also stalled out. I was supposed to be taking output from a hydrodynamical simulation of molecular cloud collapse and using it as input to a radiative transfer code, which would then create a fit to a spectrum of something called L1551.

The radiative transfer code generated points that were to be connected into a solid line which could then be plotted to compare with the observations of L1551. The idea was to get a line that was at least as good as the lines that had been published.

In retrospect, my total lack of progress is easy to diagnose. I had zero mental image or investment in what was going on. I didn’t care about L1551. I knew in the abstract what an infrared spectrum was, but I had no order-of-magnitude feel for it.

The crinkly 60 micron contour maps of L1551 bring to mind a segment from a 1981 interview of William S. Burroughs, in which the interviewer, Slyvere Lotringer, showed him a copy of a speech by Ulrike Meinhof on “Armed Anti-Imperialist Struggle”

“… Reality can only be perceived in a materialist way related to struggle — class struggle — war… The Guerilla has no real viewpoint, no basis from which to operate. Everything is constantly in motion, so is the struggle. Struggle comes out of motion, moving on and is moving on. All that matters is the aim. The Guerilla perceives class struggle as the basic principle of history and class struggle of history and class struggle as reality, in which the proletarian politics will be realized…

Burroughs quickly leafed through Meinhof’s tract and put it down impatiently.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I can’t visualize anything when I read this kind of material. I don’t see what it corresponds to.

I’m partial to that genre of articles where they detail the over-the-top morning routines of over-the-top productive go-getters. Like Mark (formerly Marky Mark) Wahlberg, who gets up at 2:30 AM for a big weight session followed variously by cryotherapy, prayer, supplements and intermittent fasting. That’s pretty bad-ass, you’ve gotta admit.

I set myself the challenge to write an Oklo post each day for thirty days in a row. It’s just over a week in now, and it’s starting to show. I’m gonna hit the sack now and schedule this post to show up at 2:30 AM.

No denying it, Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was a seminal book, and the follow-ups, in particular, Envisioning Information, were remarkable as well. I was exactly the right age to absorb them when they came out. Some of Tufte’s lines are just classic:

… A series of weird three-dimensional displays appearing in the magazine American Education in the 1970s delighted connoisseurs of the graphically preposterous. Here five colors report, almost by happenstance, only five pieces of data (since the division within each year adds to 100 percent). This may well be the worst graphic ever to find its way into print ...

That paragraph falls in the midst of admonitions against self-promoting graphics. Tufte calls such constructions Ducks, where the reference is to the Big Duck Store on Long Island:

Tufte’s take-away, as explained in a quote (which itself is from a quote) that he pulls from Learning from Las Vegas, seems to be that is is all right to decorate construction but never all right to construct decoration.

Sure, I’m fine with that. But then I’ve always been confused by p. 119, whose single line of text runs, ambiguously, “There are some superbly produced ducks:”

So clearly, p. 119 seems intended to serve as another admonition, yet that graphic doesn’t strike me as bad at all… In fact it’s a great graphic that incorporates many of the stylistic choices (small multiples, etc.) that Tufte generally recommends. The net effect was to leave me feeling confused regarding exactly where I should properly hold forth and grandstand within the whole endeavor of data graphics.

The splash image for this post is definitely a construct of decoration. It was constructed by Sam Cabot using his black-belt photoshop skills for the purposes of decorating our self-promotional press release. It strives for photorealism of a KT-style impact on Venus, back when Venus had a one-bar atmosphere, oceans, life, maybe a civilization, etc. What does the moment of impact actually look like?

In the paper itself, we have another graphic that Tufte would probably dismiss as a duck:

It serves to fix ideas regarding the impacts that could have transferred huge amounts of material from Venus to the Moon, where they’re now churned up in the lunar regolith, waiting to be analyzed and discovered, and chewed over in a few upcoming posts.