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Category: existential risks – Page 42

More Science Fiction Audiobooks : https://bit.ly/3Lx162h.

If you like this book, please buy the paper to support the author.

Would like to give me a cup of coffee : https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FreeAudiobooks.

Paypal : https://www.paypal.me/VuBaDatNow this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.#sciencefiction #audiobook #audiolibrary

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The long-term impact of biodiversity loss in Madagascar has been modelled by researchers. Their work suggests that recovery from the current wave of extinctions could take as long as 23 million years.

Madagascar is one of the world’s most biodiverse hotspots. Following the breakup of the prehistoric supercontinent of Gondwana, the island country split away from the Indian subcontinent about 80 million years ago, allowing native plants and animals to evolve in relative isolation. Consequently, over 90% of its wildlife is endemic and found nowhere else on Earth.

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Sixty-six million years ago, the age of the dinosaurs came to a dramatic close as a huge asteroid impact accelerated them on a path towards extinction. Not all of them died out, however; those that survived went on to become today’s birds.

Scientists are still trying to carefully map out the anatomical changes that occurred between dinosaurs and birds during this time, and there’s arguably no better way to do this than to engage in a little “reverse evolution.” With this in mind, a team of researchers has grown “dinosaur legs” in chicken embryos, as revealed in their study in the journal Evolution.

Remarkably, previous research manipulating chickens into “becoming” dinosaurs has already taken place. Back in 2015, a study showcased that chickens that had been tweaked during embryonic development could grow a dinosaur-like snout. A year earlier, a more low-tech study demonstrated how a few strategically-placed weights could make a chicken walk along like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

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A discussion of the most unsettling solutions to the fermi paradox.
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2:33 Beginning.

Where are all the aliens?
Is there a solution to the fermi paradox?

Joining John Michael Godier is Dr. Stephen Webb, astronomer and author of ‘If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… WHERE IS EVERYBODY? Seventy Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life’.
To discuss unsettling and spooky solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

Stephen Webb’s book: https://amzn.to/2T4W2rx.

Our Fermi Paradox playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_EX9FUDv3o&list=PLulqF9kD2B…rw9lxKoGiV

Continue reading “The Most Unsettling Solutions to the Fermi Paradox With Stephen Webb” | >

The NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures.

NEO Surveyor is, as the name implies, a satellite specifically designed to survey objects near the Earth (NEO). One of its primary contributions will be to look for asteroids and other small bodies that are potentially on an eventual collision course with Earth but are invisible to typical NEO survey missions because of their location in the solar system.

Typically, their signals are just background noise against the overwhelming signal from the Sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this novel technique. With the increased focus on “planetary defense,” as it has come to be called, NASA has been interested in the mission, which was initially proposed in 2005, for some time.

But, as with all bureaucracies, NASA has budgetary difficulties, and NEO Surveyor was no exception. The agency initially canceled NEO Surveyor’s budget for the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, forcing project scientists and engineers to move on to other projects for their salaries. So when NASA again picked up the bill for the project, it ballooned to $1.2 billion, partly due to the increased inflation throughout the economy in the intervening years.

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Forged 66 million years ago, an enormous impact crater near Chixculub, Mexico, was left undiscovered until only a few short decades ago. But what caused it?

Millions of years ago, a dramatic mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs.

Marking the transition between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras (which we are still in), it was one of the most significant events in Earth’s history. The cause? Perhaps a giant asteroid hit Chixculub near modern-day Yucatan, Mexico.

Sixty-six million years ago, something from the very edge of our solar system completed its unlikely journey into the inner planets.

Aunt_Spray/iStock.

Continue reading “Chicxulub crater might be the smoking gun for the dinosaurs’ end of days” | >

The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.

For the first time since 2006, we have two joint recipients of the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award. This year’s recipients are Jerome C. Glenn and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who are defending against world existential risks and country existential risks, respectively.

Jerome C. Glenn and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are winners of the 2022 Guardian Award.

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A Peninsula biotech startup cofounded by pioneering geneticist George Church — who already is working to engineer the woolly mammoth out of extinction — is trying to raise as much as $5 million in a crowdfunding effort to design healthier, longer-living pets.

AdoraPet Biosciences Inc. of San Mateo plans to apply the genome-engineering CRISPR technology at the egg stage of dogs and cats or insert CRISPR-modified DNA into eggs, to make nonallergenic pets that don’t shed and ultimately live longer, are free of genetic diseases caused by inbreeding and are resistant to cancer and other serious diseases.

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Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years—an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public.

Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions.

For the creative professions, the rise of generative A.I. feels like an existential threat. But a familiar technology, invented 184 years ago, can show us how to adapt and thrive in a new reality.

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