Lifeboat Foundation

Andrew Strominger is a theoretical physicist at Harvard. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Andrew’s website: https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/strominger.
Andrew’s papers:
Soft Hair on Black Holes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00921
Photon Rings Around Warped Black Holes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.

Continue reading “Andrew Strominger: Black Holes, Quantum Gravity, and Theoretical Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #359” »

But with so many signals that could happen, how can scientists possibly sift through all of them to try to find a possible alien transmission?

Well, it turns out, scientists found the answer: Don’t. Instead, let AI do it for you.

That’s exactly what the researchers behind this study did, utilizing an AI algorithm to look through signals from a designated 820 different star systems. These targets were made from the Hipparcos catalogue, a collection of data from 118,200 stars made by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hipparcos satellite, and totaled over 480 hours of data.

While Venus has long been ignored as a potential home for alien existence, MIT researchers say that the skies of Venus may be hosting aerial extraterrestrial life.

Phosphine Found

Continue reading “Life on Venus? Planet’s Clouds Could Host Extraterrestrial Intelligence” »

It actually makes a lot of sense from a computing standpoint.

If life is common in our Universe, and we have every reason to suspect it is, why do we not see evidence of it everywhere?

This is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, a question that has plagued astronomers and cosmologists almost since the birth of modern astronomy.

Continue reading “Alien Civilizations Could Use Black Holes as Massive Quantum Computers” »

NASA is building spacecraft parts that look alien. In a way, they are because it is a generative manufacturing AI that is the designer.

Scientists at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are attempting to establish a doorway to a parallel reality. The goal of the project is to depict a world that is nearly comparable to ours and where life is mirrored. The experiment’s leader, Leah Broussard, told NBC that the strategy is a little crazy, but it will completely transform the game. If the studies are successful, particles will be able to morph into images of themselves, allowing them to burrow through a solid wall. This might demonstrate that the cosmos we observe is merely half of what exists. Broussard revealed that he believes the test will yield a result of zero.

The habitable zone is the region around a star where an orbiting planet could host liquid water and, therefore, possibly support life.

The habitable zone is also known as the “Goldilocks zone” because planets orbiting at that “just right” distance from a star are not too hot or too cold to host liquid water. If planets are closer to their star, the water turns to steam; if they’re farther, it freezes.

A new paper has proposed an absolutely wild idea. What if aliens are creating black holes to use as quantum storage? It sounds crazy, but some scientists say it could give us a solution to the Fermi Paradox, which essentially states that if life is common in our universe, why have we not found evidence of it beyond Earth?

This paradox has caused quite a few ripples throughout the scientific community, especially within parts that believe alien life is out there, just waiting to be discovered. The new paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but it was created by a team of German and Georgian scientists who say we may be looking in the wrong direction in our search for alien life.

Currently, we rely on radio signals to search for signs of life out in the universe. But, these researchers suggest that we should instead approach black holes as if alien civilizations created them as massive quantum computers to store data in. As such, we should be looking for technosignatures emanating from megastructures like pulsars, white dwarf stars, and black holes.

Yeah, death is scary and freaky, but on the other hand, I have no direct idea of what it actually involves (having never been dead myself). Given that reality, my job is to live this life as completely as possible. You can engage fully in its richness, its sorrows, and its beauty, or you can miss it by worrying about when or how this aspect of being ends.

From this perspective, the transhumanist desire to “conquer” death sounds like the worst forms of religious zeal. Both science and spiritual practice are supposed to help us look directly into the truth of life, the Universe, and Everything. Death, whatever it means, is part of all three. To spend effort thinking otherwise is to, quite sadly, miss the point profoundly.

Even more important, however, is the wrong-headedness of the transhuman conception of what it means to be human. Their idea is that it’s literally all in the head. Your life, in the transhumanist conception, is reducible to the computations happening in your brain. The totality of your experience — its vibrancy and immediacy and the strange inescapable luminosity of its presence — is all just meat computing. And if that’s the case, who needs the meat? Let’s just swap out the neurons for silicon chips, and it will all be the same. Heck, it will be better, and it gets to go on forever and ever.