A loophole for surviving the heat-death of the universe, or a noose?

3 October 2025

The people at Kurzgesagt are pretty clued-up. They must learn a lot, about everything really, in their line of work. As a result of this ceaseless learning, they might have found a way, for whatever lifeforms are still present, to evade the eventual heat-death of the universe.

Although still conjecture, this is how the universe might “end”, in trillions of years hence. Long after the last star has stopped shining, long after the last black hole has finally disintegrated.

Under this scenario, the universe won’t, or isn’t expected to, collapse in on itself. Seemingly the cosmos will continue expanding forever, as a dark, cold, void.

This, however, appears to the ideal environment for eternal life. In short, a civilisation Kurzgesagt calls the Noxans, will harvest vast amounts of energy from their galaxy, or what’s left of it. This will be stored in a massive battery bank, which the Noxans will draw off for untold trillions of years.

Untold trillions of years, but not forever. This near eternal life, however, won’t be living as we know it.

The temperature in the universe at this stage will be barely an iota above zero degrees on the Kelvin (K) scale. For reference water freezes at about two-hundred-and-seventy degrees on the Kelvin scale. Zero degrees K, or absolute zero, will be pretty cold. Too cold to even play ice-hockey.

But the Noxans will not be particularly active. Their digital avatars, which is all that will remain of them, will spend their waking hours engaged only in thought.

They will need to slumber to conserve resources. But this off-time will aid in cooling them down further, in turn reducing their power needs, in turn extending the life of their batteries. Didn’t the Noxans do well, surviving trillions upon trillions of years after the universe’s heat-death?

Kurzgesagt calls their method a loophole, but it seems more like a noose to me.

I’m curious as to what sort of material the battery banks, and whatever structure the Noxans will “reside” in, are made of. How will these endure for eternity without repair or replacement?

But sitting around in an ice-box until the battery goes flat doesn’t seem like fun. There has to be a better way for a civilisation to live forever. And maybe there is.

The Noxans, it should be pointed out, are what’s called a Type III civilisation on the Kardashev scale. This means they’re able to harness all the energy within a galaxy.

In comparison, Type I civilisations control all the energy on their planet, Type II their solar system. Humanity might be considered a zero-point-seven civilisation. But when Nikolai Kardashev, a Soviet astronomer, draw up his scale in 1964, he did not venture beyond Type III.

Other people though, including Hungarian academic Zoltan Galántai, speculate the existence of Type IIII, and even V civilisations, may be possible.

A Type IIII civilisation would have all the energy of the universe at its disposal. Type V entities meanwhile could probably create a whole new universe in which to live. This seems like a better plan for the Noxans. If they’ve made it as far up the scale as III, they could push on higher.

Reaching the ultimate top level, in this case V, would be a challenge, as I’m sure any gamer could tell you. But if the Noxans start now, with potentially many, many, trillions of years in front of them, I’m sure they could do it.

Eventually freezing to death in a glorified refrigerator seems like an absurd idea in comparison.

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physics, science, technology

Comment spammers use AI in another assault on bloggers

2 October 2025

When I turned comments back on here a few months ago, after an absence of many years, I was amazed at how quickly spam comments began appearing. Good news travels fast it seems. A new outlet has appeared for us to post our drivel — quick — get over there. But because every comment made here is held back for approval, none of them ever see the light of day.

Of course I wasn’t really surprised at the speed at which the spam arrived. Nor the lack of genuine comments, though there have been a few. I re-enabled comments as a way to centralise my web presence back onto this website. I’m not the biggest fan of social media, centralised or decentralised, but not because I dislike it (well, not too much), rather social media is just too time consuming.

What did dumbfound me though was the empty-headed nature of the spam comments being left. Some were barely coherent, while others were literally single words made up of random letters. What blogger, in their right mind, is going to approve those sorts of comments? A time-poor blogger, or one not paying attention, I think might be the answer.

These senseless utterances aren’t offensive, so maybe they’ll, you know, just get approved. And with some websites allowing follow-up comments from the same person to be posted without moderation, the floodgates would be open. But I suspect few spam-commenters saw much of what they wrote ever approved. But now they have changed tactics, and are using AI to craft their foul fare.

A lot of the recent comment spam I’m seeing looks as if the writer has read the post they’re responding to, through the way a comment is worded. When I posted about Tim Berners-Lee a few days ago, a lot of comments similar to this began appearing:

Oh Timothy, your call to have AI development moved under the auspices of a global not-for-profit is just a little simplistic, don’t you think? Yes, you invented the internet and gave it to us for free, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But placing AI development in the hands of a non-commercial entity is asking an awful lot.redacted spammy link

At first pass, the comment seems genuine. I too thought Berners-Lee was being optimistic in the extreme by suggesting a global not-for-profit organisation oversee future development of AI, but I’d never call Berners-Lee naive. He knows what he’s saying, and the idea makes sense, though I can’t see it ever happening. But that’s another story.

A commenter though is entitled to their opinion. And it almost seemed like an actual point-of-view, but for the ridiculous inclusion of an embedded spam link. Without, notably, a space after the previous sentence. The writer seems switched-on, but their oddly deficient syntax betrays them. And then the question: why on earth embed a spam link within the comment?

Did they not see the field on the comment form that allows a URL to be included? It’s possible I might have missed the spam-link if they did that. Usually though, I look closely at the URL of a commenter’s website. But then going on to post numerous, slightly differently worded, variations of the same comment, from the same IP no less, somewhat gives the show away.

Even writing this article is helping train the AI spam-commenters though. What bloggers, who allow comments, are facing though are somewhat more sophisticated spammers, who are using AI to compose comment spam that look like the real deal.

And yes, I look forward to seeing the thoughts of the AI spam-commenters in response to this post.

Tim Berners-Lee: the web needs to return to its roots

30 September 2025

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, writing for The Guardian:

I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever. Regulation and global governance are technically feasible, but reliant on political willpower. If we are able to muster it, we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late.

Berners-Lee also calls for AI research and development to be facilitated by a not-for-profit body, along the lines of CERN, the international organisation where Berners-Lee created the internet.

V Sagittae nova might outshine Antares, Betelgeuse supernovas

29 September 2025

A binary stellar system consisting of a Wolf–Rayet (WR) star, and a larger main sequence star, known as V Sagittae, are predicted to erupt in a massive explosion, possibly before the end of the century*.

Presently the WR body is furiously feeding on the substance of its nearby companion. The stars orbit each other about every twelve hours, and are gradually drawing closer together.

When both collide, they will explode as a nova.

The remnant of the nova explosion will be visible from Earth during the day, so fierce will the event be. V Sagittae is ten-thousand light years away from Earth, so we will be well clear of the blast zone.

Two red giant stars, Antares and Betelgeuse, being about five-hundred-and-fifty, and six-hundred-and-forty light years respectively away, will explode as supernovas eventually.

Astronomers think Antares may last at least another one-million years, while they give Betelgeuse about one-hundred-thousand years.

My money has been on Antares going first, but that looks like a real outside chance. Instead, I will, where possible, keep my eyes on the Sagitta constellation, where V Sagittae is located.

* I’m not sure if the nova/explosion has already occurred and becomes visible before the end of the century, or the actual explosion takes place then, meaning it won’t be visible for ten-thousand years.

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Time Alone, a short horror film by Rod Blackhurst

27 September 2025

On Friday 27 September 2013, I posted a link to a short film I saw that day.

The story still holds up twelve years on. Directed by Rod Blackhurst, Time Alone is about a young woman, Ann, portrayed by Rose Hemingway, who spends a weekend camping alone in a wilderness area. The horror of what happened during Ann’s sojourn, however, is revealed when least expected.

Fantastic, if disturbing, storytelling.

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Microsoft to pay some publishers for content used by AI agents

27 September 2025

David Uzondu, writing for Neowin:

Microsoft is reportedly discussing with select US publishers a pilot program for its so-called Publisher Content Marketplace, a system that pays publishers for their content when it gets used by AI products, starting with its own Copilot assistant.

It’s a step in the right direction, but a lot hangs on the word select. The suggestion here is the majority of publishers, particularly smaller ones, including bloggers, will be excluded. Even if their content has been scrapped, and is being used in AI products.

Answer engines: a new challenge for content writers, bloggers

25 September 2025

Press Gazette:

The biggest year-on-year declines were at Forbes (down 53% to 85.5 million visits — the steepest decline year on year for the second month in a row), Huffington Post (down 45% to 41.3 million), Business Insider (down 44% to 66.6 million), and News 18 (down 42% to 146.3 million). The Independent, CBC and Washington Post also closely followed with drops of 41% in year on year site visits.

Nearly all of the world’s top fifty English language websites have experienced declines in traffic, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last twelve months. Only one has bucked the trend, Substack, but I’m not sure that’s good news. But the reason for the sometimes sharp falls in visitors? AI overviews generated by many of the search engines, that’s what.

People searching for information online are increasingly satisfied with the AI generated summaries, that appear, as the first “result”, in response to a question they have. These overviews are created by drawing on webpages carrying relevant information, and spare search engines users from the need to visit said webpages.

It’s great for those looking for a quick answer to a query, provided of course the overview is accurate. It’s not so good for the people who wrote articles, or blog posts, that feed the AI generated overviews, as they no longer see a visit to their website. But this is the future of online search. Instead of search engines though, we will be using answer engines to source information.

In short, answer engines results will be similar to the AI overviews we see at present. Everything a searcher needs to know will be displayed in the result. There will be no need to visit individual webpages again.

From a content writer’s perspective, it can only be hoped answer engines will cite the sources used to concoct their response to a query. This for however many people who might still wish to verify the information provided by the answer engine, that is.

But not everyone writes content to be indexed by a search engine, and many actively prevent their websites from being looked at by the search engines. I get the feeling this may not be the case for answer engines though. Writers and bloggers are all too aware of AI scraper bots marauding their content, whether they like it or not, to train AI agents.

But going forward, this might be something content writers have to expect, accept even, it they want their work to be recognised. We can all see where this is going. The end of SEO, and the advent of — I don’t know — AEO, being Answer Engine Optimisation. Those wanting their content to be found by the answer engines are going to need to figure out how to optimise it thusly.

No doubt help will at be hand though. AEO experts and gurus will surely be among us soon, if they are not already. But that’s enough good news from me for one day.

Download your TypePad blog and post the content to a new website

24 September 2025

Phil Gifford, who gave us ooh.directory, has published a method for downloading a TypePad blog, and uploading the files to a another server, should you so wish, so your TypePad blog can live on under a new guise. Don’t forget, TypePad closes at the end of September, so you need to act quickly if you want to retrieve your blog.

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Subscribe Openly, and (almost) one-click RSS feed subscriptions

23 September 2025

In an ideal world subscribing to a website/blog’s RSS feed should be as simple as following a page on the socials. Simply click the follow button, and that’s it. In the case of, say, Instagram all future posts of whoever you started following will be visible — algorithms permitting — in the main/home feed.

Of course, subscribing to a RSS feed isn’t difficult. If you know what you’re doing. But to those to don’t know much about RSS, clicking the subscribe button might result in confusion and frustration, and see them abandoning the process all together.

Sometimes clicking the subscribe button might only open the URL of the RSS feed, leaving a budding subscriber wondering what to do next. “Am I meant to bookmark this link?” they might wonder.

But before we ask people to subscribe to a RSS feed, we need them to understand they first need a RSS reader. A RSS reader is an app that allows people to subscribe to, and read, RSS feeds. But to the uninitiated, the process of installing a RSS reader might present another confusing hurdle, only further complicating matters.

Subscribe Openly, however, created by James, is a step in the right direction.

Instead of presenting a would-be RSS subscriber with a screen filled with the raw data of a RSS feed, when they click on the subscribe button, they are presented with a list of RSS readers they can install. Here’s what you’d see if you were subscribing to the RSS feed for my website this way.

Next it needs to be made understood to prospective RSS subscribers that setting up a reader app is not that difficult. They doubtless have numerous apps on their device already, a RSS reader would simply be just another app they need to install. Let’s get to it.

Perhaps though styling feeds so they’re coherent in a web browser is something publishers who syndicate content to RSS should consider. Having a RSS feed that renders like a webpage — that could be bookmarked like any other website — does of course seem like it defeats the purpose of having a RSS feed.

But, if people new to RSS see a coherent looking webpage when clicking the URL of a RSS feed, they might have more incentive to find out more about RSS.

The Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, 3-5 October 2025

20 September 2025

A large blue spacecraft hovers above a futuristic cityscape of Sydney, Australia, with tall buildings and structures. The background features a large, bright yellow sphere, possibly the Moon, with a gradient sky transitioning from orange to red.

Running since 2020 I believe, this year’s Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival is on from Friday 3 October until Sunday 5 October 2025, at Event Cinemas, on George Street, in Sydney’s CBD. Eleven features will be screened, with many having their Australian premieres.

One title, The Eagle Obsession, trailer, a documentary directed by American filmmaker Jeffrey Morris, will have its international premiere at the festival.

Also known as The Eagle has Landed, the film explores travel to the Moon, both actual and imagined. William Shatner is among those appearing in the film, along with Barbara Bain and Nick Tate, who starred in 1970’s sci-fi TV series, Space 1999. Now I get the eagle reference…

The Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival Awards ceremony also takes place on the closing evening.

The spectacular banner for this year’s festival, as seen above, which is a futuristic representation of the skyline of Sydney’s CBD — spot the iconic Westfield Tower towards the left — was created by Australian filmmaker and artist Joshua Reed.

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