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Category: existential risks – Page 52

It will be reconfigured to meet testing needs.

The giant drone, RQ-4 RangeHawk, will soon be used to support the development of hypersonic missiles in the U.S., its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, said in a press release.

Hypersonic missiles are the newest frontier in the weapons race, with countries like Russia and North Korea laying claims to have successfully demonstrated this technology. The U.S. hypersonic missile program has faced a few hiccups with repetitive test failures. Last month, the U.S. Air Force confirmed that its Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) had been successfully tested, almost after a year after similar claims from Russia.

GRAND FORKS, N.D. – Aug. 24, 2022 – Northrop Grumman Corporation’s (NYSE: NOC) RQ-4 RangeHawk is poised to support the SkyRange program’s U.S. hypersonic missile flight tests from its Grand Sky facility near Grand Forks, North Dakota. SkyRange is the Department of Defense Test Resource Management Center’s (TRMC) unmanned high-altitude, long-endurance, responsive mobile flight test system.

In support of the SkyRange initiative, Block 20 and 30 RQ-4B Global Hawk aircraft are being transferred to TRMC to be reconfigured into RangeHawks. The conversion will integrate advanced payloads to equip the aircraft with the capability to support the testing of hypersonic vehicles and other long-range weapons. RangeHawks provide over-the-horizon altitude, endurance and flexibility, which are critical for collecting telemetry and other data to monitor the vehicle during flight tests. Increasing the capacity of hypersonic vehicle testing furthers research and development necessary to remain competitive in the global landscape.

“Our RQ-4 RangeHawks will support the emerging class of hypersonic weapons and provide a combination of range, endurance and payload capacity,” said Jane Bishop, vice president and general manager, global surveillance, Northrop Grumman. “These aircraft will continue their role in vital national security missions while enabling us to bring premier aircraft design, modification, operations and sustainment work to the Grand Forks community.”

Continue reading “Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 RangeHawks Embark on New Mission” | >

All around smart guy Dr Goerge Church talking about genetic engineering technologies.

George Church, Ph.D. is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Church played an instrumental role in the Human Genome Project and is widely recognized as one of the premier scientists in the fields of gene editing technology and synthetic biology.

EPISODE LINKS:
Show notes and transcript: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/george-church.
Dr. George Church on Twitter: https://twitter.com/geochurch.
Dr. George Church on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/george.church.
Church lab: https://arep.med.harvard.edu/
Regenesis Book: https://www.amazon.com/Regenesis-Synthetic-Biology-Reinvent-…atfound-20

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Continue reading “George Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease and Aging” | >

Artificial General Intelligence — Short for AGI is a trending and recent topic of debate among AI researchers and computer scientists. A pressing issue for AI or artificial Intelligence is the AI alignment problem. The AI control problem could be the most important task for humanity to solve. There have been many suggestions from AI researchers to avoid the dangers of artificial general intelligence or a digital super-intellgience. It seems among the best solutions to this problem has been a merging scenario with AGI. Elon Musk has suggested we regulate artificial intelligence and we should proceed very carefully if humanity collectively decides that creating a digital super-intelligence is the right move. Elon Musk is the founder of many high tech companies, including Neuralink. Which develops implantable brain–machine interfaces. Elon Musk warns that AI is probably the biggest existential threat for humanity. AGI is probably even more dangerous than nuclear warheads and nobody would suggest we allow anyone to build nuclear weapons if they want. The pressing issue for a potential AGI development and eventually the creation of a digital super-intelligence is going to be increasingly relevant in the coming years. Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO & Founder, of SingularityNET Foundation, is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence. According to him these reactions are probably going to look very silly to people a few decades from now, as they go about their lives which have been made tremendously easy and happy and fascinating compared to 2020 reality, via the wide rollout of advanced AGI systems to handle manufacturing service, and all the other practical jobs that humans now spend their time doing. Elon musk suggested, the merge scenario with A.I. is the one that seems like probably the best,” or as he put it on the Joe Rogan Experience. “If you can’t beat it, join it.

#AGI #AI #Artificialintelligence.

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Sources:
DARPA: https://www.darpa.mil/

Neuralink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vbh3t7WVI
https://www.neuralink.com/

SingularityNET: https://singularitynet.io/

Continue reading “Can We Merge With Artificial General Intelligence? — The AGI Symbiosis” | >

The invasion that Russia has wrongfully started in Ukraine has led to more people talking about the threat of Nuclear war and World War 3. How does the Doomsday Clock relate to all this?

And Lifespan News: https://www.youtube.com/LifespanNews.

Support the great work being done by Lifespan, the team powering Life Noggin: https://www.lifespan.io/life-noggin/

Script:
Since 2020, the Doomsday Clock has been set to 100 seconds to midnight. Which is the closest its ever been to midnight in its 75 years of existence. As the scientists who set the clock put it: we’re “at doom’s doorstep.”

The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor to remind humans how close we are to destroying our planet through the technology we develop, with midnight representing the apocalypse. It’s a symbol to remind us to address these dangers so that we can survive on our planet. It was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by scientists at the University of Chicago who worked on the Manhattan Project, which was America’s effort to develop atomic weapons during the Cold War.

When the Doomsday Clock debuted in 1947, its creator, artist Martyl Langsdorf, set it to 7 minutes to midnight. She was married to a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. When she heard him and other scientists talk about the consequences of developing this dangerous technology, she created the clock to show that we didn’t have much time left to get atomic weapons under control.

Continue reading “What Happens When the Doomsday Clock Hits Midnight?” | >

Nuclear winter visualizations made by Prof. Max Tegmark using state-of-the-art simulation data from these science papers:
* Lili Xia, Alan Robock, Kim Scherrer, Cheryl Harrison, Benjamin Bodirsky, Isabelle Weindl, Jonas Jägermeyr, Charles Bardeen, Owen Toon & Ryan Heneghan, 2022, published in Nature Food.
* Joshua Coupe, Charles Bardeen, Alan Robock & Owen Toon 2019, J. of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 124, 8522–8543
* Owen Toon, Charles Bardeen, Alan Robock, Lili Xia, Hans Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, R. Peterson, Cheryl Harrison, Nicole Lovenduski & Richard P. Turco 2019, Sci. Adv. 5: eaay5478
* Alan Robock, Luke Oman & Georgiy L. Stenchikov 2007, J. Geophys. Research 112, D13107.

Special thanks to Chuck Bardeen for data and Meia Chita-Tegmark for editing!

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Is de-extinction realistic?

Scientists in the US and Australia have announced a multi-million dollar project — resurrecting the extinct Tasmanian tiger. The last known marsupial officially called a thylacine, died in the 1930s. According to the team, the extinct thylacine can be recreated using stem cells and gene-editing technology, and the first one could be “reintroduced” to the wild within 10 years.

We would strongly advocate that first and foremost we need to protect our biodiversity from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowing down in species loss.

TIGGR Lab.

The last known marsupial officially called a thylacine, died in the 1930s. According to the team, the extinct thylacine can be recreated using stem cells and gene-editing technology, and the first one could be reintroduced to the wild within 10 years.

Read more | >