One structure on the dwarf planet Ceres made big news but there is a hitch. It seems that the square-shaped form inside a larger triangle, located in a crater. Everyone else saw it, but the use of artificial intelligence might be a square peg not fitting a round hole. This remark by a Spanish neuropsychologist is questioning the veracity of depending on AI, which might be unsound by SETI.
Ceres is located in the main asteroid belt, a dwarf planet, and the biggest object too. One of its craters, Occator had bright lights which lead to several ideas of what it was. NASA sent the Dawn probe to go close enough to capture visual evidence of what these lights were and solve the mystery. These lights were from volcanic ice and salt eruptions, nothing more.
It gets more interesting as researchers based in the University of Cadiz (Spain) have examined images of these spots. Areas like them are called Vinalia Faculae, in an area where geometric contours are very evident for observers. It now serves as a template to compare how machines and humans perceive images on planetary surfaces in general. Tests like these will show artificial intelligence can see technosignatures of other lifeforms besides human-civilization.
There are so many places and things to explore in the universe! From distant. exoplanets to faraway galaxies that might host intelligent life, to massive black holes, to. bright stars. However, there is a problem with space exploration; distance! Everywhere. you want to go in deep space is far! For example, Elon Musk wants to put humans on. Mars permanently while NASA wants to send astronauts there. However, any traveler. going to Mars has to endure a grueling trip through harsh space that lasts not less than. five months, even with the most powerful rocket in history! If only we could find a faster. way to travel through space! Also, the next star to us is about 4.5 light-years away. making it impossible to visit with the current space technologies! However, an. accidental discovery promises to fix that problem by enabling faster than the speed of. light travel! What is the discovery, how does it affect space travel, and how does it affect. you personally? Join us as we explore how NASA scientists accidentally discover the. world’s first Warp Bubble! Warp travel is not strange to fans of the Star Trek franchise. The warp drive is a. charming futuristic technology from Star Trek Universe, which since its first episode in. 1966, includes ten television series and thirteen feature films. In these series and. movies, characters explore the universe using powerful and fast spaceships, traveling. from planet to planet and communicating with a crew of aliens. The torsion engine is the. center of attraction because, without it, the story would be implausible. The universe is. strange, unimaginable, and insanely large, and even if you want to visit the next star. the immense cosmic distances create an almost impossible barrier! Let’s take a look at the next star, Proxima Centauri, 4.5 light-years away. This distance. means it takes 4.5 years to reach the star if you could manage to attain the speed of. light! Light flies at full cosmic speed and acts as a sort of universal speed cap, so any. other method takes longer! In fact, if you decide to use the fastest space probe ever. built, the long journey through the interstellar void would take nearly eight thousand. years! So, it makes sense to stay put to Earth and its immediate environment! Of course, the Star Trek crew didn’t stay close to the Earth because they found a. solution! This solution makes long-distance travel possible by shortening the distance! The torsion engine, using warp drive tech, achieves this by juggling space and time. making for great entertainment! Warp drive was destined to remain imaginary until a. scientist suddenly realized that such an engine was really possible at the end of the last. century! The physicist was Miguel Alcubierre, and he came up with a theory that rocked the. scientific community globally. In 1994, Alcubierre watched an episode of Next. Generation while doing his Ph.D. research on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. where heavy masses can curve space and time. And so Alcubierre picked up a scrap of. paper, did the calculations, and laid the foundation for an article that appeared in the. science magazine later that year! In his paper, Alcubierre describes how you can compress space and time in front of a. spacecraft and stretch it back behind the ship so that you have to travel a much smaller. distance to the desired destination safely trapped in what he calls a torsion bubble! In. visualization, the concept was compared to a surfer riding a wave and a metaphor often. used to describe how a ship could travel the stars. There is, however, a problem with. Alcubierre’s warp bubble! You see, the warp engine is tough to build in reality! You can’t. just curve space forcefully with normal mass! To do so, you need exotic matter, which. has negative gravity! Dozens of Warp Engine publications would follow in the following decades. But they. also remained theoretical exercises and thought experiments that manipulated the. formulations of the theory of relativity in search of new insights. The need for the foreign. matter remained! That was until Eric Lentz, a physicist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the. US, stepped in. He watched Star Trek as a kid. However, he has not been able to forget.
We harness the power of the sun using solar panels. What if you were to scale this idea to astronomical proportions? Surround an entire star with solar-collecting structures or satellites to power your sprawling alien galactic empire. Such massive structures are known as megastructures—in this case a “Dyson sphere.” We are already trying to detect possible megastructures in space using the dimming of a star and the glow of megastructure components in infrared light. But recent research provides a new detection method—a Dyson sphere may cause its host star to swell and cool.
New findings from the Curiosity Rover’s samples have given scientists another look at distinct carbon signatures found on Mars.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover continues to send back new information about the Red Planet on a frequent basis. The latest discovery brings news of an interesting carbon signature that we didn’t expect to see on Mars. Following analyzations of rock samples returned by the rover, NASA announced that several of the samples are rich in a carbon type that we see on Earth, too. The signature, NASA claims, is most often associated with biological processes, which could give more credence to the possibility of life on Mars.
Learnings For Regenerative Morphogenesis, Astro-Biology And The Evolution Of Minds — Dr. Michael Levin, Tufts University, and Dr. Josh Bongard, University of Vermont.
Xenobots are living micro-robots, built from cells, designed and programmed by a computer (an evolutionary algorithm) and have been demonstrated to date in the laboratory to move towards a target, pick up a payload, heal themselves after being cut, and reproduce via a process called kinematic self-replication.
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), we’ve often looked for signs of intelligence, technology and communication that are similar to our own. But as astronomer and SETI trailblazer Jill Tarter points out, that approach means searching for detectable techno signatures, like radio transmissions, not searching for intelligence itself. At the moment scientists are considering whether artificial intelligence (AI) could help us search for alien intelligence in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.
If you are a scientist, willing to share your science with curious teens, consider joining Lecturers Without Borders!
Established by three scientists, Luibov Tupikina, Athanasia Nikolau, and Clara Delphin Zemp, and high school teacher Mikhail Khotyakov, Lecturers Without Borders (LeWiBo) is an international volunteer grassroots organization that brings together enthusiastic science researchers and science-minded teens. LeWiBo founders noticed that scientists tend to travel a lot – for fieldwork, conferences, or lecturing – and realized scientists could be a great source of knowledge and inspiration to local schools. To this end, they asked scientists to volunteer for talks and workshops. The first lecture, delivered in Nepal in 2017 by two researchers, a mathematician and a climatologist, was a great success. In the next couple of years, LeWiBo volunteers presented at schools in Russia and Belarus; Indonesia and Uganda; India and Nepal. Then, the pandemic forced everything into the digital realm, bringing together scientists and schools across the globe. I met with two of LeWiBo’s co-founders, physicist Athanasia Nikolaou and math teacher Mikhail Khotyakov, as well as their coordinator, Anastasia Mityagina, to talk about their offerings and future plans.
Julia Brodsky: So, how many people volunteer for LeWiBo at this time?
“Here’s How Humans Might Beat Other Intelligent Life in a Science Fictional Space Race | Tor.com”
Suppose for the moment that one is a science fiction writer. Suppose further that one desires a universe in which intelligence is fairly common and interstellar travel is possible. Suppose that, for compelling plot reasons, one wants humans to be the first species to develop interstellar flight. What, then, could keep all those other beings confined to their home worlds?
Here are options, presented in order of internal to external.
In our first episode of John Michael Godier’s Event Horizon, we discuss the possibility of Alien civilizations moving to Galaxy Clusters to make the best use of mass and energy, why making copies of ourselves may be the key to interstellar travel and colonization, the habitability of planets around red dwarf stars such as Proxima Centauri, Black Holes, and so much more with our first guest Harvard Theoretical Physicist Dr. Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University.
