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Two enormous cracks in Earth’s crust opened near the Turkish-Syrian border after two powerful earthquakes shook the region on Monday (Feb. 6), killing over 20,000 people.

Researchers from the U.K. Centre for the Observation & Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes & Tectonics (COMET) found the ruptures by comparing images of the area near the Mediterranean Sea coast taken by the European Earth-observing satellite Sentinel-1 before and after the devastating earthquakes.

The longer of the two ruptures stretches 190 miles (300 kilometers) in the northeastern direction from the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea. The crack was created by the first of the two major tremors that hit the region on Monday, the more powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck at 4:17 a.m. local time (8:17 p.m. EST on Feb. 5). The second crack, 80 miles long (125 km), opened during the second, somewhat milder 7.5-magnitude temblor about nine hours later, COMET said in a tweet on Friday (Feb. 10).

Artificial Superintelligence or short, ASI, also known as digital superintelligence is the advent of a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the smartest and most gifted human minds.

If we as a species manage not to destroy ourselves up until the advent of true artificial general intelligence, the moment of the next phase for our survival in a post AGI world, will be even more paramount.

The consensus among AI experts is that the time it takes to go from AGI or artificial general intelligence to ASI or artificial superintelligence, is exceptionally shorter than the time it takes to achieve AGI from current narrow artificial intelligence systems.

So we really have only one try to make it right.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom has expressed concern about the advent of ASI. He thinks artificial superintelligence may pose the biggest existential threat to humanity.

Besides Nick Bostrom, other well known public thinkers that are concerned about ASI include Elon Musk.

For the first time, researchers have recorded live and in atomic detail what happens to the material in an asteroid impact. The team of Falko Langenhorst from the University of Jena and Hanns-Peter Liermann from DESY simulated an asteroid impact with the mineral quartz in the lab and pursued it in slow motion in a diamond anvil cell, while monitoring it with DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III.

The observation reveals an intermediate state in that solves a decades-old mystery about the formation of characteristic lamellae in material hit by an asteroid. Quartz is ubiquitous on the Earth’s surface, and is, for example, the major constituent of sand. The analysis helps to better understand traces of past impacts, and may also have significance for entirely different materials. The researchers present their findings in Nature Communications.

Asteroid impacts are that create huge craters and sometimes melt parts of Earth’s bedrock. “Nevertheless, craters are often difficult to detect on Earth, because erosion, weathering and cause them to disappear over millions of years,” Langenhorst explains.

Aunt_Spray/iStock.

“Having focused on genetic advancements in ancient DNA for my entire career and as the first to fully sequence the Dodo’s genome, I am thrilled to collaborate with Colossal and the people of Mauritius on the de-extinction and eventual re-wilding of the Dodo. I particularly look forward to furthering genetic rescue tools focused on birds and avian conservation,” Shapiro added.

Researchers have found that some asteroids that are largely made from small pieces of rubble could be very difficult to deflect if one were to ever hurtle towards Earth, a terrifying finding that could force us to reconsider our asteroid defense strategies.

It’s an especially pertinent topic considering NASA’s recent successful deflection of asteroid Didymos by smashing its Double Asteroid Reduction Test (DART) spacecraft into it last year, a proof of concept mission meant to investigate ways for humanity to protect itself from asteroid threats.

An exploration of the idea that life can actually cause the extinction of previously existing life.

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Cylinder Eight by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

An astronomer has captured “extraordinary” footage of an asteroid that made an “extremely close” approach to the Earth on Thursday.

The space rock, known as 2023 BU, zoomed over the southern tip of South America yesterday, while it was only around 2,200 miles above the surface of the Earth.

This is one of the closest approaches of an near-Earth object ever recorded. Data from NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies showed that the flyby of 2023 BU was the fourth-nearest of more than 35,000 past and future Earth close approaches in the 300-year period from 1900 to 2200.

CYBERNETIC THEORY: THE CODE OF REALITY & OUR FUTURE AS CYBERGODS: presenting my published works in a recent talk. Topics include evolutionary cybernetics, computational physics, consciousness, philosophy of mind, cybernetic theory, Omega Point cosmology, physics of time, simulation theory, Global Mind, AGI, VR, Metaverse, Cybernetic Singularity, transhumanism, posthumanism, cybernetic immortality, synthetic telepathy, mind-uploading, neurotechnologies, Fermi Paradox, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, the Argument for Cybertheism, and more.

The main 45-minute slide presentation is followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. This presentation is in Russian with slides and subtitles in English.


Russian-American futurist Alex M. Vikoulov presents his published works in a talk titled CYBERNETIC THEORY: THE CODE OF REALITY & OUR FUTURE AS CYBERGODS at the Rotary Club, The Grand Autograph Hotel, Novosibirsk, Russia, on July 19, 2022. The main 45-minute slide presentation is followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. This presentation is in Russian with slides and subtitles in English (for subtitles turn on caption in settings).

Author publications referenced:

The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020), available as a Kindle eBook, paperback, hardcover and Audible audiobook: https://www.amazon.com/Syntellect-Hypothesis-Paradigms-Minds…atfound-20