When the ‘God of chaos’ asteroid Apophis makes an ultraclose flyby of Earth in 2029, our planet’s gravity may trigger tremors and landslides that totally change the asteroid’s surface.
Category: existential risks – Page 8
Could Earth be a cosmic sanctuary for observation? The Zoo Hypothesis suggests so.
In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?” The question has since become the basis of the Fermi Paradox, addressing the conflict between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of evidence for its existence. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this, including the Zoo Hypothesis, first introduced in 1973 by Harvard astrophysicist John A. Ball. This theory posits that advanced alien civilizations may know of Earth and its inhabitants but choose to avoid contact, allowing humanity to develop naturally without interference.
The two new studies place the sources of ordinary chondrite types into specific asteroid families – and most likely specific asteroids. This work requires painstaking back-tracking of meteoroid trajectories, observations of individual asteroids, and detailed modelling of the orbital evolution of parent bodies.
The study led by Miroslav Brož reports that ordinary chondrites originate from collisions between asteroids larger than 30 kilometres in diameter that occurred less than 30 million years ago.
The Koronis and Massalia asteroid families provide appropriate body sizes and are in a position that leads to material falling to Earth, based on detailed computer modelling. Of these families, asteroids Koronis and Karin are likely the dominant sources of H chondrites. Massalia (L) and Flora (LL) families are by far the main sources of L-and LL-like meteorites.
The year’s biggest supermoon, the Hunter’s Moon, will rise in the sky next week. Astronomers have been thrilled to see three back-to-back supermoons this year, but October’s supermoon is going to be extra special.
It will be the only moon to come this close to Earth in 2024, making it appear extremely large. The supermoon will occur on October 17, reaching its fullest point merely hours after coming to its closest point. It will be 220,055 miles from Earth on this day.
The sky this month is filled with cosmic wonders. You can see two comets this month, with one of them already taking people’s breath away. The second comet will visit towards the end of October.
In the last few months, the mask has really come off.
OpenAI is far from its days of being an altruistic, non-profit company.
It is now the face of a booming AI industry and is effectively for-profit in all but name, steaming ahead with little regard for its technology’s environmental toll, or for the potentially existential risks it poses to society.
But according to Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and prominent AI researcher, the worst is yet to come. In his assessment, OpenAI could soon take an even more dystopian pivot, à la George Orwell’s novel “1984,” by getting into the business of spying on you.