Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is ‘eating’ its host galaxy to death.

The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect the black hole, which dates from 400 million years after the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago. The results, which lead author Professor Roberto Maiolino says are “a giant leap forward,” are reported in the journal Nature.

That this surprisingly massive black hole —a few million times the mass of our sun—even exists so early in the universe challenges our assumptions about how black holes form and grow. Astronomers believe that the supermassive black holes found at the center of galaxies like the Milky Way grew to their current size over billions of years. But the size of this newly-discovered black hole suggests that they might form in other ways: they might be ‘born big’ or they can eat matter at a rate that’s five times higher than had been thought possible.

Like it or not, humans are becoming as gods. Where will this trend lead?How about the ability to bring back to life people who died years, decades, or centur…

6D Heterotic Little String Theories(LSTs) are a subsector of every 6D SUGRA (with at least one tensor multiplet), after decoupling gravity. As such, while possessing usual QFT-like properties such as global symmetries, they also possess gravity-like properties such as T-duality, which makes them an interesting intermediate. Recently, a fruitful line of research has been to chart the landscape of T-dual LSTs, and establish certain invariants across this T-duality, which includes the 5D Coulomb branch dimension, and the 2-Group structure constants (mixed anomalies). In this talk, we will argue that the rank of the flavor algebra is another invariant across this duality. This involves using 6D anomaly cancellation conditions and carefully taking into account potential ABJ anomalies. We will then discuss some interesting novel LSTs with non-trivial flavor holonomies, focusing on their T-duality structure. Based on arXiv:2311.02168.

Hi guys, in the video I get to grips with the chilling Dark Forest Theory from Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest.

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Continue reading “The Dark Forest’s CHILLING solution to the Fermi Paradox” »

If there is a high probability of alien life, why has none tried to make contact?

You have probably heard of the Fermi Paradox, but if you haven’t, here it is in a nutshell: Given the high probability that alien life exists out there in the universe (bearing in mind the vastness of space and that we keep finding planets within habitable zones) why has nobody got in touch yet? If there are so many other civilizations out there, possibly at far more advanced stages than we are because of how long the universe has dragged on, surely at least one would send out messages or probes, or do what we are doing: Desperately searching for signs of life?

Answers to the paradox range from the optimistic to the downright frightening. It could be that we simply haven’t been looking long enough, nor emitting our own traceable signatures for aliens to find us yet. Or it could be that no aliens will ever make it to the point where they are able to make contact with other species, destroying themselves long before they get to the kind of tech required to do so.

On Earth, technological advances required open-air combustion, which needs an oxygen partial pressure of about 18%. This threshold can help guide searches for detectable technospheres on other planets.

An ancient supernova has left a legacy so strange astronomers deemed it worthy of the nickname, despite never seeing the explosion.

In the quest to understand the potential for life beyond Earth, researchers are widening their search to encompass not only biological markers, but also technological ones. While astrobiologists have long recognized the importance of oxygen for life as we know it, oxygen could also be a key to unlocking advanced technology on a planetary scale.

In a new perspective published in Nature Astronomy, Adam Frank, the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester and the author of The Little Book of Aliens (Harper, 2023), and Amedeo Balbi, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy, outline the links between atmospheric oxygen and the potential rise of advanced technology on distant planets.

“We are ready to find signatures of life on alien worlds,” Frank says. “But how do the conditions on a planet tell us about the possibilities for intelligent, technology-producing life?”