Many seek a path to enlightenment through study and meditation, but what does science tell us about transcendence? And could entire civilizations seek to leave this reality behind?

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Credits:
Transcendence.
Episode 465; September 19, 2024
Written, Produced \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Editors:
Dillon Ollander.
John M Smart.
Graphics:
Jeremy Jozwik.
Ken York.
Sergio Botero.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator

The year’s biggest supermoon, the Hunter’s Moon, will rise in the sky next week. Astronomers have been thrilled to see three back-to-back supermoons this year, but October’s supermoon is going to be extra special.

It will be the only moon to come this close to Earth in 2024, making it appear extremely large. The supermoon will occur on October 17, reaching its fullest point merely hours after coming to its closest point. It will be 220,055 miles from Earth on this day.

The sky this month is filled with cosmic wonders. You can see two comets this month, with one of them already taking people’s breath away. The second comet will visit towards the end of October.

In the last few months, the mask has really come off.

OpenAI is far from its days of being an altruistic, non-profit company.

It is now the face of a booming AI industry and is effectively for-profit in all but name, steaming ahead with little regard for its technology’s environmental toll, or for the potentially existential risks it poses to society.

But according to Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and prominent AI researcher, the worst is yet to come. In his assessment, OpenAI could soon take an even more dystopian pivot, à la George Orwell’s novel “1984,” by getting into the business of spying on you.

The Taurid asteroids, also known as the Taurid swarm, are a group is asteroids hypothesized to be leftovers chunks from the comet Encke, which orbits the Sun every 3.3 years. But what risk could the Taurid swarm have regarding potential impacts with Earth? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated the potential threat of the Taurid swarm impacting the Earth. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand how to identify threats of asteroid impacts on Earth and the steps that can be taken to mitigate them.

This study builds off previous research pertaining to the Taurid swarm, which estimated the size of the bodies as being kilometer-sized, and while this swarm is responsible for the Taurid meteor shower, asteroids that large could cause significant damage on the Earth if one impacts on our planet’s surface. This new study conducted a first-time analysis of the risk these asteroids pose for impacting the Earth, and with promising results.

“We took advantage of a rare opportunity when this swarm of asteroids passed closer to Earth, allowing us to more efficiently search for objects that could pose a threat to our planet,” said Dr. Quanzhi Ye, who is an assistant research scientist in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study. “Our findings suggest that the risk of being hit by a large asteroid in the Taurid swarm is much lower than we believed, which is great news for planetary defense.”

ESA’s first planetary defence spacecraft has departed planet Earth. The Hera mission is headed to a unique target among the more than 1.3 million known asteroids in our Solar System – the only body to have had its orbit shifted by human action – to solve lingering mysteries associated with its deflection.

By sharpening scientific understanding of the ‘kinetic impact’ technique of asteroid deflection, Hera aims to make Earth safer. The mission is part of a broader ambition to turn terrestrial asteroid impacts into a fully avoidable class of natural disaster.

Developed as part of ESA’s Space Safety programme and sharing technological heritage with the Agency’s Rosetta comet hunter, Hera lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA, on 7 October at 10:52 local time (16:52 CEST, 14:52 UTC) with its solar arrays deploying about one hour later.

Yoshua Bengio played a crucial role in the development of the machine-learning systems we see today. Now, he says that they could pose an existential risk to humanity.

For decades, researchers have noticed that the pace of evolution tends to speed up over shorter time frames, such as five million years compared to fifty million years. This general trend indicates that “younger” groups of organisms, in evolutionary terms, tend to exhibit higher rates of speciation, extinction, and body size evolution, among other differences from older groups.

Evolutionary processes appear to operate at different time scales, perhaps necessitating the need for a new theory linking microevolution and macroevolution. The larger question has tantalized scientists: why?

There are plausible explanations. A new species may inhabit a new island chain, allowing for more variation as it spreads into new niches. An asteroid may hit the earth, increasing extinction rates. Perhaps species evolve to an “optimal” trait value and then plateau.

A brand new comet, known as a sungrazer, has been discovered. It is predicted to be extremely bright.

For decades, researchers have observed that rates of evolution seem to accelerate over short time periods—say five million years versus fifty million years. This broad pattern has suggested that “younger” groups of organisms, in evolutionary terms, have higher rates of speciation, extinction and body size evolution, among other differences from older ones.

The foundation hopes to prevent extinctions, and obtain the necessary biological material to safeguard genetic diversity.

Already backed by a confirmed $50 million in funding, its goal is to halt the extinction crisis through three key conservation focus points.

The Colossal Foundation’s first key…

Who ever said you can’t save a few species on the way to de-extincting a mammoth?