Lifeboat Foundation

Equal parts interesting and disturbing.

Mass extinctions occurring over the past 260 million years were likely caused by comet and asteroid showers, a new study concludes. An artist’s illustration of a major asteroid impact on Earth. (credit: NASA/Don Davis)

Mass extinctions occurring over the past 260 million years were likely caused by comet and asteroid showers, scientists conclude in a new study published in an open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBrPPnyXc58

This is one of the most fascinating and riveting documentaries I’ve ever seen…

Watch it.

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Today on Far Future Horizons we present another exciting episode of the acclaimed documentary series How the Universe Works ~ Weapons of Mass Extinction.

The Universe is a very dangerous place to live. Death and destruction lie all around us. The Cosmic Grim Reaper lies in wait; scythe in hand, in some dark corner of the universe ever ready to bestow some dark faith upon us.

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He believes in a good backup plan.

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For unknown reasons, the Earth’s ionosphere has weakened dramatically during the course of the last century, resulting in the collapse of the entire ecosystem. Earth has become an increasingly hostile and uninhabitable place and with no shield to protect it, it is at the full mercy of meteors.

All animal and plant species perished decades ago. All that remains is one small group of humans who attempt to resist the hostility and hardness of the external environment from SUMER, the last hive city in the world, which has been specifically designed to keep the population alive through oxygen supply systems.

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“Billionaire Elon Musk has a really compelling reason to ramp up NASA’s budget: We need to become a multi-planet species to ensure the survival of the human race, and we need NASA’s help to do it.”

Someone tell Congress.

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Giant impact of space rock could have intensified volcanic eruption, scientists say.

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Although it was made in 1968, to many people, the renegade HAL 9000 computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey still represents the potential danger of real-life artificial intelligence. However, according to Mathematician, Computer Visionary and Author Dr. John MacCormick, the scenario of computers run amok depicted in the film – and in just about every other genre of science fiction – will never happen.

“Right from the start of computing, people realized these things were not just going to be crunching numbers, but could solve other types of problems,” MacCormick said during a recent interview with TechEmergence. “They quickly discovered computers couldn’t do things as easily as they thought.”

While MacCormick is quick to acknowledge modern advances in artificial intelligence, he’s also very conscious of its ongoing limitations, specifically replicating human vision. “The sub-field where we try to emulate the human visual system turned out to be one of the toughest nuts to crack in the whole field of AI,” he said. “Object recognition systems today are phenomenally good compared to what they were 20 years ago, but they’re still far, far inferior to the capabilities of a human.”

To compensate for its limitations, MacCormick notes that other technologies have been developed that, while they’re considered by many to be artificially intelligent, don’t rely on AI. As an example, he pointed to Google’s self-driving car. “If you look at the Google self-driving car, the AI vision systems are there, but they don’t rely on them,” MacCormick said. “In terms of recognizing lane markings on the road or obstructions, they’re going to rely on other sensors that are more reliable, such as GPS, to get an exact location.”

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When humanity needs to make use of a facility known lovingly as the “doomsday seed vault,” you know things have gone off the rails. After four years of civil war in Syria, the region’s main source of important seeds in the region has been damaged, and researchers from the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) is asking to make a withdrawal from the seed bank. This will be the first time humanity has had to draw on this resource.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was officially opened in 2008 and contains more than 860,000 samples of seeds from nearly every country on Earth. Its goal is to preserve important agricultural crops like beans, wheat, and rice so they will be available in the event of war or natural disaster.

To do this, the vault is built into the side of a mountain in the remote northern reaches of Norway on the Svalbard archipelago. It’s only 800 miles (1300 km) from the north pole, which allows researchers to keep the seeds at a frosty 0 degrees fahrenheit. Even if all the people left Svalbard and the power went offline, the vault would remain frozen and intact for at least a few centuries.

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