Is alien contact likely and if it happens what would be the consequences? Takeaways from the German SETI meeting.
Whether (some) UAP sightings are evidence of an alien presence or not, and whether aliens exist or not, the broad consensus of the IFEX workshop was that we should be prepared for alien contact. Too many catastrophes have occurred in humanity’s past because we were unprepared.
In January 1992, two cosmic objects forever changed our galaxy.
For the first time, we had concrete evidence of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, orbiting an alien star: two rocky worlds, whirling around a star 2,300 light-years away.
Now, just over 30 years later, that number has exploded. This week, March 21 marked the hugely significant milestone of over 5,000 exoplanets confirmed. To be precise, 5,005 exoplanets are now documented in the NASA exoplanet archive, every one with its own unique characteristics.
For self-driving cars and other applications developed using AI, you need what’s known as “deep learning”, the core concepts of which emerged in the ’50s. This requires training models based on similar patterns as seen in the human brain. This, in turn, requires a large amount of compute power, as afforded by TPUs (tensor processing units) or GPUs (graphics processing units) running for lengthy periods. However, cost of this compute power is out of reach of most AI developers, who largely rent it from cloud computing platforms such as AWS or Azure. What is to be done?
Well, one approach is that taken by U.K. startup Gensyn. It’s taken the idea of the distributed computing power of older projects such as SETI@home and the COVID-19 focussed Folding@home and applied it in the direction of this desire for deep learning amongst AI developers. The result is a way to get high-performance compute power from a distributed network of computers.
Gensyn has now raised a $6.5 million seed led by Eden Block, a web3 VC. Also participating in the round is Galaxy Digital, Maven 11, Coinfund, Hypersphere, Zee Prime and founders from some blockchain protocols. This adds to a previously unannounced pre-seed investment of $1.1 millionin 2021 — led by 7percent Ventures and Counterview Capital, with participation from Entrepreneur First and id4 Ventures.
In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory.
It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Two of our best models of reality – Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the laws of quantum mechanics – are as immiscible as oil and water.
Whatever a combination of the two looks like, it will almost certainly reveal foundations to the Universe quite unlike anything we can visualize.
A harsh sun shines down through a cloudless sky, across a vast and unforgiving landscape. It’s covered in gray rock, giant ice sculptures and expansive fields of spiky, yellow and orange bushes. In the distance, intimidating mountain peaks dominate the desolate scene, many miles from the nearest town. Yet alpacas roam freely and flamingos seek out scarce water, both unexpected sights in this wild world.
The extreme environment resembles something from a sci-fi film or another planet, but it’s right here on Earth, on the flanks of the world’s highest active volcano, 22,615-foot Ojos del Salado. Here, on the border of Argentina and Chile, a team of CU Boulder scientists seek to discover how tiny organisms persist at one of the driest and highest points on the planet.
This first-of-its-kind project may ultimately help inform the search for existing and extinct life on other planets.
How many Dyson Spheres, a hypothetical energy source, could be built around stars in the Milky Way?
Researchers calculated the maximum amount of Dyson Spheres in the Milky Way in order to know what it is they did not find.
In a way, it could mean climate change is linked to an “immature technosphere”.
It’s called an epiphenomenon.
The idea is that the ordinary function of one thing can generate a secondary effect that seems unrelated and beyond its scope of influence. And when it comes to the interconnected systems of the Earth, we see it all the time.
Plants, for example, found their way via evolution to photosynthesis, which greatly improved their survival. But it also led to them releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, and that changed everything: One form of life seeded a planet-wide transformation, just by pursuing its own nature.
But, if the totality of life (called a biosphere) can radically reshape the Earth, some scientists speculate that cognition — and cognition-related actions — might exhibit the same effect.
This is the “thought experiment” of a group of scientists who blended empirical knowledge of the Earth with more generic ideas about how life changes worlds. And, in the * International Journal of Astrobiology*, they explored the possibility of a “planetary intelligence\.
The ExplOrigins early career group invites you to join the 2022 Exploration and Origins Colloquium on February 17th–18th, 2022! The live broadcast portion of this colloquium will begin at 10am ET on February 18th.
We are thrilled to have Dr. Amy Mainzer as our plenary speaker. Dr. Mainzer is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, principal investigator of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, and lead of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission. She also has achieved excellence in science communication, serving as the science curriculum consultant, on-camera host, and executive producer of the PBS Kids series Ready Jet Go! and as the science consultant for the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up.
Our program also highlights current astrobiology, origins, and space science projects presented by a cast of early career researchers from the Atlanta area.
Schedule:
10:00 a.m.
Welcome Speech, Breakfast (Tyler Roche)
10:10 – 11:00 a.m.
Talks Section 1:
Clathrates, Cubesats, and Characterization (Christina Buffo)
Bacterial Clathrate-Binding Proteins in the Deep Subsurface Biosphere: Implications for Gas Clathrate Stability and Habitability (Abigail Johnson)
Virtual Super-Resolution Optics with Reconfigurable Swarms (VISORS): a Two-CubeSat Formation-Flying Telescope for Coronal Observation (William Rawson)
Characterization and Thermal Analysis of Metal Phosphites and Their Role in Astrobiology (Kimberly Faye Meyberg)
11:05 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.