Apache AH-64 Gunships On Ships

I've been a longtime advocate of using Apache AH-64 helicopter gunships on naval ships, particularly in roles like piracy suppression on otherwise lightly armed ships, like the Littoral Combat Ships.

Now, the U.S. Navy is now considering the idea.

Posting Patterns At This Blog And Its Sister Blog

Obviously, I'm posting this at this blog than in previous years, averaging about two posts per week, which seems like a reasonable target going forward. This puts this blog on track to have the fewest number of posts since its inception in 2005 (by a wide margin), but still means it is a very active blog compared to many blogs.

Some content that would have appeared on this blog has also been shifted to quick hit posts on Facebook, in lieu of deeper analysis here, because that's quicker and easier. Not infrequently, my Facebook posts get reworked into a quick hits post or a deeper analysis of one of those posts, and conversely, sometimes posts here make their way to Facebook when I think it would be a good fit for that format.

At sister blog Dispatches From Turtle Island, I've managed to keep up the pace of roughly one post every other day that I've maintained since the inception of that blog in 2011, although my posts there have gotten a little thinner and the balance has tipped a little more towards physics from anthropology and prehistory and linguistics type posts that take more effort to write adequately.

I still do continue my practice of about fifteen years of scanning every single preprint at arXiv on astrophysics, general relativity and cosmology, HEP-experiment, HEP-lattice, and HEP-phenomenology (at least 95-98% of the time), of bookmarking the interesting papers, reading the body text of the articles whose abstracts don't tell enough of the story, and of blogging the papers that are truly interesting, as well as scanning my several regular sources for anthropology type articles daily, bookmarking them, and less often actually blogging them (less often than I'd like), and scanning some of my other sources like Science Daily and other science blogs a few times a month. Sometimes I miss a day or two when I'm busy or traveling, but when I do, I go back and add them to my review later (almost all of the time, although I sometimes miss as much as five to ten days a year when I miss too much to easily go back).

This blog has fallen off more than its sister blog, in part, because the means by which I generate ideas for it aren't as systematic.

My stack exchange posting has dropped pretty much to one to three posts a month, mostly at Law.SE but rarely at Politics.SE where I used to be a moderator (a job I've relinquished and don't miss).

I also make an occasional post at the Physics Forums, although that has dropped to maybe 10% of my previous posting rate and often involves cross posts from Dispatches From Turtle Island, or a brief comment to a discussion thread that I started to post at before taking my current job which inhibits my ability to post.

I really mourn the loss of all of the Typepad blog content (even the archival posts!). But, blogger seems to be O.K. for the indefinite future (readers, please give me a heads up if it is preparing to go off line so I can archive my posts, which are also available through Lexis Nexus which syndicates this blog for a trivial royalty of about $25 every 12-24 months), and Substack seems to be quite healthy and is the latest hot blogging platform.

Other 30-90 Year Time Horizon Predictions

In my previous post, Oil and Water, I made some predictions on a 30-90 year time horizon. 

What are some other predictions I'd make in that time frame?

* The U.S. birthrate will fall significantly from current levels, and the U.S. population will decline. Later in that time period, peak global population will be reached as Sub-Saharan Africa reaches is demographic transition, and the global population will start to fall.

* Life expectancies will rise significantly, not only in the less developed world, but in the developed world. Many diseases that are commonplace today with be virtually eliminated or will become much more effectively treatable. These include: M.S., lupus, gum disease, most common STDs, many kinds of cancer, and conditions like Down's Syndrome and cerebral palsy.

* The proportion of people who are non-religious will reach a majority in the U.S. Mainline Protestantism will take the biggest hit. Evangelical Christianity will become much less influential politically and much less conservative as it undergoes generational transitions of leadership. Mormons will experience some of the smaller declines among Christian and Christian adjacent faiths.

* Legacy communications technologies like shortwave radio, a.m. radio, landline phone service, and broadcast television will finally go dark.

* Most global military forces, including the U.S. military, will stop using manned tanks.

* Large surface combatant naval ships will become more scarce globally.

* Everyone's whole genome will routinely be recorded as an infant.

* Existing U.S. race categories will break down and be re-conceptualized as more and more Americans are mixed race.

* There will be at least one major political-economic catastrophe that greatly reduces income inequality.

* Drugs like marijuana and psychedelics which are just being legalized now, will not be re-criminalized.

* Putin's regime will collapse, possibly accompanied by a further break up of the components of the Russian state, and will be replaced by a flawed democratic regime or regimes that are still less authoritarian than the current regime.

* China and the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America will join the ranks of fully developed countries.

* The Palestinian territories of Israel will cease to be. There are multiple, hard to predict scenarios regarding how this comes about. Also, since this is such a hot topic (managing fights over Israeli-Palestinian issues was the worst part of being a moderator at Politics.SE), I want to make clear that this does not reflect a preference about whether this is good or bad, and instead simply represents a prediction about what is likely to happen, particularly in light of recent geopolitical developments in Gaza and the West Bank, and in Southern Lebanon, especially since the events of October 7, 2023, and also in light of trends in Israeli-Palestinian relations during the 21st century (which we are more than a quarter of the way through, yipes!).

* Moderate and modernist tendencies within Islam will eventually start to prevail over extreme Islamist factions in most countries. This will happen earliest in countries where fossil fuel production is the least important part of the economy on a percentage basis.

* Cryptocurrencies will go out of style and will be relegated to a historical curiosity.

* The number of people employed to transport goods will dramatically decrease.

* Drones in all transportation modes, and sessile automated systems will pervasively influence both civilian life and the nature of military conflicts, transforming both profoundly.

* Global manufacturing employment will decrease to due increased automation and Africa will become a manufacturing center due to its cheap labor and permissive regulatory environment, once political stabilization is achieved.

* A much larger share of construction employment will work in factories making large subcomponents of buildings to be transported to the building site for final assembly.

* Economic growth rates will start to stagnate, especially outside Africa.

* People on Earth will launch a space probe to the nearest star, although it probably will not yet have reached its destination and will be in deep space moving very fast towards its destination. In the meantime, it will function as a deep space, space telescope.

* Social norms will increasingly devalue privacy.

* Popular consumer software will become much less buggy, and will eventually get easier to use, after somebody sees the potential for profit in improving on the widely known defects of the current leading software programs in wide consumer or business use.

* The concept of dark matter will be abandoned in favor of some gravitational law based explanation for phenomena attributed to dark matter. This will probably also be the case with dark energy, and the time period half half a century to a century when these theories were the conventional wisdom will be known as the dark ages of astronomy and cosmology.

* While it will never die entirely, I suspect that beyond the Standard Model physics research will lose a lot of luster and support and empirical evidence for it becomes more scarce with an additional generation or three of improved high energy physics experiments that further narrow the gaps where it could play a role, even though physicists will never entirely abandon this pursuit. 

* There are also at least even odds in this time period that theoretical explanations for most of the two dozen experimentally measured physical constants of the Standard Model will be found. Indeed, going towards the next point, this may be a particularly promising place for quantum computing and AI to play a role.

* Quantum computing will be developed, but it will only make much of a difference in specialized applications. Quantum computing seems particularly promising for applications like high energy physics (especially QCD), numerical general relativity capturing non-perturbative effects there, and cryptography.

* I'd be remiss not to mention it, as this time from is critical for AI, but I don't have strong predictions about the impact of AI and machine learning. It seems most useful practically in efficiently analyzing big data sets, for doing something similar to Bayesian statistical analysis to discovery hidden subtle patterns in data,  for digesting research information quickly for people who don't need to understand it in depth, in serving as an efficiency amplifier for computer programmers and other people who write text whose quality isn't important, and for automating customer service, and for automating fairly narrow tasks and jobs even if they require high level "thinking" (as opposed to more general unstructured roles). Visual image interpretation is further down the line but we're getting there. The impact of generative creative fields like art, fiction, and audio-visual presentations is hard to gauge - will it be a curiosity and fad, a tool for serious creators to increase efficiency as in other fields, or will it be transformative in ways unforeseen. And, the non-transparency of AI will continue to be an ongoing issue, although it is hard to know if its current tendency to hallucinate and have no sense of what is true or not is an early beta test version bug or if it is likely to be an ongoing issue. AI alignment as we progress toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) and artificial super-intelligence is also a key issue with some signs already emerging of consciousness and self-preservation tactics by AI models and social cooperation between AI models already starting to emerge. I don't see it as an apocalyptic or existential threat, but there are definitely serious risks involved in the technology, many of which are unknown unknowns.

* The mix of jobs in the job market will change a lot, with many traditional job categories shrinking a great deal and replaced but large numbers of new jobs in sectors that we barely even conceptualize as distinct job roles now. This structural change in the job market will have immense, but hard to predict in detail, political implications.