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Category: existential risks – Page 55

The Holographic Principle, Quantum Mechanics, and Simulated Reality (SR)

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KEYWORDS:
Scienc, Technology, Philosophy, Futurism, Simulation, Simulationism, Ockham’s Razor, Argument, Hypothesis, Anthropic Principle, Holographic Principle, Holographic Universe theory, Brain in a Vat, Brain in a Jar, Matrix, Inception, Hologram, Artificial Intelligence, Vocaloid Hologram, Reality, Ontology, Epistemology, Elon Musk, Solipsism, Illusion, Renee Descartes, George Berkeley, Materialism, Idealism, Solipsism, Cogito Ergo Sum, Esse es Percepi, Gilbert Harman, Hillary Putnam, Robert Nozick, The Experience Machine, Multiverse, Omniverse, Black Hole Hologram, Event Horizon, Singularity, Moore’s Law, Black Dual Linear Error Correcting Code, Jim James Sylvester Gates, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Plato’s Cave, Quantum Mechanics, Schrondinger’s Cat, Observer Effect, Double-Slit Experiment, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Superdeterminism, Free Will, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Quantum Gravity Research, Eugene Vignor, Consciousness, Fermi Paradox, SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), Drake Equation, Alpha Centauri, Wave Function Collapse, Video Games, VR, Virtual Reality, God, Theology, Fine-Tuning Argument, Teleological Argument, Simulationism, Mormonism, LDS, Heavenly Father, Glitch, Dyson Sphere.

The Fermi Paradox: Technological Timebombs

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We often wonder where all the aliens are out in the galaxy, but could it be that the technologies needed to get to space and travel the stars lead to inevitable catastrophe?

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Credits:
The Fermi Paradox: Technological Timebombs.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 355, August 11, 2022
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:
David McFarlane.
Jason Burbank.

Cover Art:

Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Technological Timebombs” | >

For 15 Years, America’s Secret Nuclear Launch Codes Were “00000000”

I heard they changed it to 80085.

By Wes O’Donnell Managing Editor, InMilitary.com and InCyberDefense.com. U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force Veteran. Speaker and Veteran Advocate.

Some say that truth is often stranger than fiction. According to a 2004 memo by Dr. Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missile launch control officer, the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) once intentionally set the launch codes at all Minuteman nuclear missile silos in the U.S. to a series of eight zeroes.

SAC’s goal was to minimize the time it would take to launch a retaliatory nuclear missile strike against the Soviet Union in the event of World War III breaking out. After all, forcing young Air Force officers to dial in launch codes of eight random numbers would just waste good nukin’ time.

We Might Already Speak the Same Language As ET

Alien communication could utilize quantum physics, so SETI needs a new way to listen.

The Fermi paradox, the “where is everybody?” puzzle, is a persistent question in the search for life in the universe. It asks why, if life is not exceedingly rare in the cosmos, it hasn’t shown up on our doorstep. Equally we might ask why we haven’t even heard from alien life, through radio signals or any other means. A part of the answer could be that our present work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is actually very limited. Estimates show that we’ve only examined the equivalent of a hot tub of water compared to all the world’s oceans in our combing through the electromagnetic information that rolls in from the cosmos.1

If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person you’ll see this as an opportunity, but the problem is that we don’t actually know what might be filling the glass in the first place. The vast majority of SETI studies look for structure in electromagnetic radiation, whether in amplitude or frequency modulations of radio waves, or regularity in pulses of light, or in multi-wavelength correlations. In other words, we assume that information might be sailing past us in representations built using classical physics. But what if that’s just wrong?

In recent years a small cadre of physicists and astrophysicists have examined the possibilities for communication across the universe that uses the quantum properties of matter and radiation.2 Here on Earth quantum mechanics is perhaps the greatest triumph and the greatest headache of 20th-century physics. As theories go it has repeatedly validated itself through some of the most exquisite measurements we’ve ever made about the world, yet it remains profoundly challenging because of its counterintuitive rules and contentious interpretations. Even the “simple stuff” is hard, including the basic mathematical tools needed to describe how matter and radiation futz around in weird states of uncertain superposition (think Schrödinger’s cat) or mind-bending entanglement, where properties are linked across space and time, yet never definite until interactions occur.

Are We Ready for the Next Big Solar Storm?

The biggest geomagnetic storm in recorded history happened more than 150 years ago. Now, we’re entering yet another period of solar maximum.

It was just another September night in 1,859 when Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson witnessed a remarkable event. The British astronomers weren’t together, but both happened to be peering at the Sun through telescopes at the precise moment that a massive ejection spewed from the fiery star. Within a few days, others on Earth noticed colorful aurora streaking across the skies and telegraph lines — the advanced technology of the day in Europe and North America — erupting in sparks.

The solar flare came to be known as the Carrington Event, named after one of the two astronomers who first described it. Despite occurring more than 150 years ago, it still stands as the strongest known geomagnetic storm (though we lack measurements to say precisely how big it was).

Earth has felt the effects of a few significant geomagnetic storms since then, all of which caused power blackouts and satellite damage. As a result, power companies and satellite manufacturers have built resistance into our technology. But what would happen if another Carrington Event-level solar flare occurred today? Would we be ready for it?

Saving the world one algorithm at a time | The Age of A.I.

Many say that human beings have destroyed our planet. Because of this these people are endeavoring to save it through the help of artificial intelligence. Famine, animal extinction, and war may all be preventable one day with the help of technology.

The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world.

0:00 Poached.
8:32 Deploying Cameras.
11:47 Avoiding Mass Extinction.
23:04 Plant Based Food.
26:16 Protecting From Nature.
36:06 Preventing Calamity.
41:41 DARPA

The Fermi Paradox Revisited and Resolved?

In February 2020, four distinguished astrophysicists — Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf — suggested that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.

“It’s possible that the Milky Way is partially settled, or intermittently so; maybe explorers visited us in the past, but we don’t remember, and they died out,” says Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his collaborators in a 2019 study that suggests it wouldn’t take as long as thought for a space-faring civilization to planet-hop across the galaxy, because the orbits of stars can help distribute life, offering a new solution to the Fermi paradox. “The solar system may well be amid other settled systems; it’s just been unvisited for millions of years.”

Where are the aliens? A new study may finally solve the Fermi Paradox

A new study proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, suggesting why we may not detect advanced alien civilizations.

A new study offers a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. * The Fermi Paradox wonders why we haven’t encountered aliens yet. * Advanced alien civilizations may be pulling back from space exploration to avoid collapse, predict the researchers.

With the sheer vastness of space, it seems quite conceivable that there should be more intelligent civilizations out there besides us. After all, some estimates peg the observable universe to contain at least 2 trillion galaxies, with each such galaxy having approximately 100 million stars on average but with some like our Milky Way Galaxy estimated as having as many as 200 billion stars and 100 billion planets. We are talking astonishing numbers in quintillions or sextillions for the total number of planets in the universe. new study by Dr. Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Caltech’s Dr. Stuart Bartlett proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

OpenAI’s DALL-E 2: A dream tool and existential threat to visual artists

The greatest artistic tool ever built, or a harbinger of doom for entire creative industries? OpenAI’s second-generation DALL-E 2 system is slowly opening up to the public, and its text-based image generation and editing abilities are awe-inspiring.

The pace of progress in the field of AI-powered text-to-image generation is positively frightening. The generative adversarial network, or GAN, first emerged in 2014, putting forth the idea of two AIs in competition with one another, both “trained” by being shown a huge number of real images, labeled to help the algorithms learn what they’re looking at. A “generator” AI then starts to create images, and a “discriminator” AI tries to guess if they’re real images or AI creations.

At first, they’re evenly matched, both being absolutely terrible at their jobs. But they learn; the generator is rewarded if it fools the discriminator, and the discriminator is rewarded if it correctly picks the origin of an image. Over millions and billions of iterations – each taking a matter of seconds – they improve to the point where humans start struggling to tell the difference.