Lifeboat Foundation

For species classified as “extinct in the wild”, the zoos and botanical gardens where their fates hang by a thread are as often anterooms to oblivion as gateways to recovery, new research has shown.

Re-wilding what are often single-digit populations faces the same challenges that pushed these species to the cusp of extinction in the first place, including a lack of genetic diversity. But without conservation efforts, experts say, chances of these species surviving would be even smaller.

Since 1950, nearly 100 animal and plant species vanquished from nature by hunting, pollution, deforestation, invasive lifeforms and other drivers of extinction have been put into critical care by scientists and conservationists, according to the findings.

A new model explains a possible route for the extraterrestrial rock before it blasted Earth.

Geoengineering gone awry a partial solution to the fermi paradox.

Shared with Dropbox.

Artificial Intelligence or AI more specifically strong AI or artificial superintelligence could possibly be the answer or the solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability of existence. The conundrum for the existence of aliens and more categorically intelligent aliens could be a much simpler solution that we’ve previously thought. To more broadly answer the question of intelligent aliens, we first have to think about whether it’s possible that we are a just a tiny spec in the vastness of space, the only place in the universe where intelligent life found its way to manifest Or maybe there is an abundance of intelligent life out there and we just haven’t found it yet. The search for extraterrestrial life is arguably one of the most all-encompassing scientific quest endeavours of our time. How would we know if we had found alien life? It would be interesting to find something that looks like intelligent alien life, but is not actually alive. It could be a space probe. Or a satellite. We often imagine extraterrestrial life as having a face, because we can’t figure out what it would look like. But if we were to find intelligent alien life, we might not immediately know what it is. Our guesses till recently were random mixtures of biological forms. An advanced civilization however could also be able to engineer machines or digital living forms with the exact same properties as biological forms. A growing number of scientists believe that the aliens we are looking for are in fact AI. It is quite possible that some civilizations could have transcended biology all together to become artificial superintelligence.

#Aliens #AI #ScienceTime.

Continue reading “Could Intelligent Alien Life be AI?” »

The great silence and the fermi paradox by Ted Chiang.

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

Peptide chain formation from amino acids such as glycine is a key step in the emergence of life. Unlike their synthesis by living systems, how peptide chains grow under abiotic conditions is an open question given the variety of organic compounds discovered in various astrophysical environments, comets and meteorites. We propose a new abiotic route in the presence of protonated molecular dimers of glycine in a cold gaseous atmosphere without further need for a solid catalytic substrate. The results provide evidence for the preferential formation of mixed protonated dimers of glycine consisting of a dipeptide and a glycine molecule instead of pure protonated glycine dimers. Additional measurements mimicking a cosmic-ray impact in terms of internal excitation show that a single gas-phase collision induces polymerization via dehydration in both the mixed and pure dimer ions.

Based on analysis of preliminary information from several sources, NASA experts believe the object was a meteoroid about two feet in diameter weighing about 1,000 pounds. The angle and speed of entry, along with signatures in weather radar imagery, are consistent with other naturally occurring meteorite falls. Radar and other data indicate that meteorites did reach the ground from this event.

Although meteorites tend to hit Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds, they slow as they travel through the atmosphere, breaking into small fragments before hitting the ground. Meteorites cool rapidly and generally are not a risk to the public.

On Feb. 3, an asteroid more than three times as long as it is wide safely flew past Earth at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers, or a little under five times the distance between the Moon and Earth). While there was no risk of the asteroid—called 2011 AG5—impacting our planet, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California closely tracked the object, making invaluable observations to help determine its size, rotation, surface details, and, most notably, shape.

This close approach provided the first opportunity to take a detailed look at the asteroid since it was discovered in 2011, revealing an object about 1,600 feet (500 meters) long and about 500 feet (150 meters) wide—dimensions comparable to the Empire State Building. The powerful 230-foot (70-meter) Goldstone Solar System Radar antenna dish at the Deep Space Network’s facility near Barstow, California, revealed the dimensions of this extremely elongated asteroid.

“Of the 1,040 near-Earth objects observed by planetary radar to date, this is one of the most elongated we’ve seen,” said Lance Benner, principal scientist at JPL who helped lead the observations.

It actually makes a lot of sense from a computing standpoint.

If life is common in our Universe, and we have every reason to suspect it is, why do we not see evidence of it everywhere?

This is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, a question that has plagued astronomers and cosmologists almost since the birth of modern astronomy.

Continue reading “Alien Civilizations Could Use Black Holes as Massive Quantum Computers” »