Pioneer 10 was ahead of its time.
A mere fifty years ago, Pioneer 10 launched and became the first unmanned mission to Jupiter. The mission revealed new details about the Solar System — and sent a message to aliens.
Category: alien life – Page 93
Astronomers looked at 260,000 stars to find alien megastructures in the Milky Way
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.
Can a planet “think”? The bold idea gets new backing
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\.
Exploration & Origins Colloquium 2022: Space Exploration, Origins, & Astrobiology
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.
Stephen Hawking Predicted a Race of ‘Superhumans’ To Take Over the World
Stephen Hawking made terrifying predictions of the future. Based on science, the late British physicists predicted several things that could happen on Earth, from the rise of powerful Artificial intelligence to fearful robots poised to destroy humankind. Hawking also spoke about how it was dangerous to search for aliens and how global warming could destroy Earth as we know it.
However, Stephen Hawking also spoke about how abrupt advances in genetic science could lead to creating a future generation of superhumans that could eventually destroy humanity as we know it.
In recently published papers, Prof. Hawking predicted that an elite class of physically altered, intellectually powerful humans could come into existence from rich people choosing to edit their existing DNA and manipulate future generations’ genetic markup.
Robust Local Synchronization — Research Notebook Video
Discussion and demos about synchronizing the asynchronous robustly in computing systems.
The T2 Tile Project:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A
https://t2tile.com/
Software:
https://github.com/DaveAckley/T2Demos.
Living Computation Foundation:
https://livingcomputation.org/
0:00 Introduction.
0:45 Sync of Computers Past.
3:05 Sync of Computers Present.
4:34 Sync of Computers Future.
5:58 Sync over Asynchronous Cellular Automata.
8:25 Demo 1: Waiting for the neighbors.
10:56 Simulating synchronous updating.
12:30 Demo 2: Conway’s Game of Life.
15:00 It’s the end of the universe.
18:30 Bottom Line: Global sync fails.
19:14 Local programmed sync is different.
21:28 Demo 3: The jerk and the empath.
24:25 Related work: Ring Oscillators.
27:50 Demo 4: Generalized Software Ring Oscillator.
34:13 Discussion: Against object-orientation.
36:53 Conclusion: Fight the master of the universe.
Artificial Intelligence Suffers from The Biases of their Human Creators, that Causes Problems Searching for ETs
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.