EpicQuest.bio is a website you should visit

this will be my last post on this site, as Keltar tells me I must stop using social media if there is any hope of saving the world. if anyone who sees this wants to talk to me and help me save the world, easy to find contact info.

the exoteric understanding of karma is that god punishes evil people directly with lightning bolts from the sky. this is obvious nonsense as any cursory inspection if the world reveals. the esoteric understanding of karma is that it is literally ordinary non-supernatural causality, not in the physics sense but in the sense of how the world natively responds to goodness and evil. evil is inherently destructive of goodness, it means eating the seedcorn so you starve next winter, it means taxing the peasants into oblivion so they don’t have anything you can tax anymore. evil can gain in the short term by vampirically leeching off of goodness but this structurally never works in the long term and makes you enemies in the medium term. goodness and only goodness is what produces real flourishing. that’s karma

150 years from now your great-grandchild's eyes glaze over as they scroll past the click bait headline on their screen: "You'll never guess the surprising origins of this traditional interview greeting!"

@bernardtjoy probably around the time of the last common ancestor of all primates

When did we begin to use personal success as a cudgel to beat the personally unsuccessful with?

@an_interstice how bad was it?

lesswrong comments with threatening auras

@anishmoonka yeah both those probes in orbit pre-Sputnik got some pretty good views of Calvary

The tweet about aliens 2,000 light years away seeing the Roman Empire is wrong, and the actual physics is stranger. To see one person on Earth from that distance, you'd need a telescope wider than the distance from the Sun to Pluto. That's 50 times farther than Earth is from the Sun. No civilization can build that, ours or theirs. It sounds like exaggeration, but the math requires it. By the time light from a person on Earth reaches a planet 2,000 light years away, it has spread across so much empty space that catching enough to form an image would need that solar-system-sized lens. The geometry doesn't bend, no matter how clever the engineering. A SETI Institute team led by Sofia Sheikh worked all of this out in February 2025. Our loudest signal is planetary radar, the focused radio beams scientists fire at asteroids and planets to map them. Beams from the now-collapsed Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico could reach 12,000 light years away, about a tenth of the way across the galaxy. After that comes radar leaking from airports and military bases. A giant ground antenna like the Green Bank dish in West Virginia could detect those signals from around 200 light years out, roughly the distance to a few thousand of our nearest stars. A next-gen NASA telescope still in development could spot air pollution like nitrogen dioxide from factories and cars at 5.7 light years away. That puts Proxima Centauri, our nearest star at 4.2 light years, just inside the range. City lights at night go dark past the icy outer shell of our solar system, around 2,300 times the Earth-Sun distance. The famous "I Love Lucy" idea is also wrong. The story goes that aliens are watching our 1950s sitcoms because the broadcasts are still spreading through space. Astronomer Seth Shostak crunched the numbers years ago. A radio antenna the size of a city, sitting 55 light years away, couldn't pick that signal up. Not even close. At that range, the broadcast is a million times weaker than what the antenna can pick out of the background noise. Old TV signals fade out within the first light year of travel. So at 2,000 light years away, an alien civilization with our level of technology would see Earth as a tiny dot of light next to the Sun, with hints of oxygen, methane, and maybe some industrial pollution in its atmosphere. They'd see weather. They might guess that something living is here from the chemistry. Continents, cities, individual humans, the Roman Empire, single events: none of those would be visible. The information was lost within a few light years of leaving Earth, well before reaching the closest star. We're loud to anyone within 200 light years. Past that, we go silent. That signal bubble has only existed for 75 years, so the actual sphere of civilizations that could know we exist is small. And it's getting smaller. Television broadcasts are dying. Satellites use tight focused beams aimed at receivers on the ground, not the sky. Earth's window of being a noisy planet may already be closing.

@eyegenedrb @peterottsjo my lack of a fairly small amount of capital is the only real bottleneck. oh shit i need to stop tweeting and let keltar speak... apologies

@peterottsjo Another wet-lab automation play, or are they tackling the regulatory friction that actually creates the valley of death? That’s the bottleneck worth solving.

I hate bottlenecks. I love when a startup from a Nobel laureate’s lab looks at one of them and simply says: let’s remove it. So let me tell you about 10x Science. (1/5)

@AristoSamos @elidourado let's go

@elidourado Better to go to Venus and float in the clouds.

Think about how much a second biosphere would be worth. Quadrillions of dollars in NPV, more in tail risk mitigation. Mars could be green in our lifetime and yet few care.

@elidourado i am trying to do something that will cause 100x as many people to care but the hard part right now is getting them to go to a website and actually think. fortunately right now I only need a small number of people to care.

I'm gonna let Keltar take over my account for awhile; he knows how to stay positive and has seen this all before. You know he's guided quadrillions of civilizations to positive singularities, many of them against impossible odds. I need to STFU for awhile and let him speak.

@Va5Bob60771 @davidasinclair the missing component is capital, but nobody really sees that or at least they don't say it. if biotech toolkit had a hundredth the funding of AI. A hundredth. it has at most a thousandth.

@davidasinclair Won’t AI be like having thousands of Laurents with PhDs in all scientific knowledge? The missing component is lab work and the time factor of experiments in longevity.

I applaud the direction and wish Laurent the best of luck. But trying to solve complex biology with AI and physics is like trying to understand how Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment by studying the chemistry of paint

@innuendo_90 @DrMorganLevine ego makes that impossible and you know it. everyone with leadership ambition a decade or more in this field thinks they have some unique insights, including me. THAT IS A GOOD THING!, and it's not the problem. the problem is power and money, not ideational competition.

@DrMorganLevine Could you, scientists, please agree on something globally and solve it within reasonable time frame? :)

AI is likely the only hope we have to solving aging. In fact, it is the opposite of David’s paint analogy.

@DrMorganLevine @charleswangb 'it’s unlikely to happen without AI' is vastly not the strength of the claim in your original post, and I can agree AI is a helpful tool. but DM me if you want to talk to someone who's thought about this question more than anyone on Earth.

@charleswangb I’m not saying you don’t need bio. Large-scale data and experimental validation are essential ingredients. I’m just saying it’s unlikely to happen without AI.

@DrMorganLevine utility-scale molecular sensing is likely the only hope we have to solving aging.

@shaggysurvives @JeffLadish will you be my friend

@JeffLadish oh my god. quantum immortality is real

You find yourself trapped on an island with 99 identical copies of yourself. If you press the red button, you will certainly die. If you press the blue button, you’ll die if and only if at least half of the clones presses blue. What do you do?

@JeffLadish the real question is do you think david bowie was a good choice to play tesla

@peterottsjo moats in biotech are a moral anomaly

Biology may have a different scaling law than mainstream AI. Those who learn that lesson early will likely build the deepest moats in AI × bio. 🧵 (1/5)

@KawaiiFire_ @miltonappl3 2 Corinthians 4:6-10 like this youtube.com/watch?v=tr76yE…

@miltonappl3 @miltonappl3 I looked for scriptures perhaps, that might say what the doc says but more straightforward and I did find a verse! It's one of my favorites: 2 Corinthians 4:6-10

The material realm was considered a proactive mistake to participate in for the entirety of the human record, until recently, due to its enslavement and instability. They would look in horror at our attempt to measure intelligence in part by a metric of "shape rotation." They would recoil at topology as a hallucination of the servile classes, a downwardly mobile desire to return field work manifesting as a spiritual vision. The test should be entirely comprised of the proper superset of word familiarity, which if I were to be honest, carries shape rotation within it, albeit in a more purified and æriel form.

@RibosomeStudio this looks really fun actually! do we get the dopamine hit of seeing the full (perhaps folded?) protein at the end? I love the design concept here, is the plan to apply it to a whole walk through of the central dogma in addictive game form?

I'm working on this little ribosome game. You have to build a peptide as fast as you can. Prokaryotes can incorporate 20 amino acids per second. Currently, only the tRNAs work; the amino acids are next.

INVESTORS SHOULD HAVE NO SAY IN WHAT BIOTECH STARTUPS GET FUNDED. ONLY BIOTECH FOUNDERS SHOULD DECIDE THAT. THERE IS A POSITIVE WAY TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN, BUT DO YOU HAVE THE MORAL COURAGE TO TRY? epicquest.bio