Humanity will change. Or be replaced. Or go extinct. An exploration of the many potential posthuman offspring of humankind, from the biological to the artificial.
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What do you imagine when I say the future of human evolution?
One of the world’s foremost experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) believes that with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, humans are closer to discovering life outside our planet than ever before.
Lisa Kaltenegger, who directs the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, told The Telegraph this week that because the Webb Telescope is designed to detect biosignatures — the scientific word for “signs of life,” including organism-produced methane gas — we may well find ETs very soon.
Kaltnegger, whose new book “Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos” was published this month, waxed enthusiastic when discussing the JWST, bragging that with its technological leaps, humanity is now in “this era of golden exploration, with thousands of other worlds on our doorstep, that we now can actually explore.”
Eyeball-scanning orbs are, apparently, not a dime a dozen — and now, a Sam Altman-backed crypto startup is running out of them.
As Semafor reports, the Altman-backed Worldcoin crypto startup, which uses bespoke metallic orbs to scan one’s iris and verify their identity, is running low on the spherical devices after giving out somewhere between 300 and 500 of them.
This news, as the site notes, has been confirmed by Alex Blania, the CEO of the Tools for Humanity startup that acts as Worldcoin’s parent firm.
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The Future of Humanity Institute announced last week that they have shut down. Located at the University of Oxford in the UK prior to its demise, the institute was one of the few places worldwide studying the risk of human extinction and a few other controversial research areas. Let’s have a look at the events leading to the institute’s closure.
Continue reading “Institute for Extinction Risk Shuts Down: What We Know” »
First @NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen “to advance AI, computing, and humanity”: v/ @gdb.
First @NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen “to advance AI, computing, and humanity”: pic.twitter.com/rEJu7OTNGT
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) April 24, 2024
The galaxy is a vast place with billions of potential new worlds for humanity to colonize, but interstellar space is so enormous that reaching even the nearest stars and planets by spaceship would take decades at best, and maybe many centuries. Even on arrival terraforming those barren planets would take just as long.
Two options for overcoming the immensity of space and time are the Seed Ship and the Data Ship, automated vessels able to colonize the worlds for us. We will examine those today, their advantages, limitations, and misconceptions, and variations of them we might use to seed the stars.
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/ seeding-the-stars-narration-only Credits: Seeding the Stars Episode 166, Season 4 E52 Writers: Isaac Arthur Editors: Alex Chamak A.T. Long Cooper de Ruiter D. Hemanshi Daniel McNamara Darius Said Edward Nardella Evan Schultheis Keith Blockus Mark Warburton Matthew Acker Safia Postgate Stuart Graham https://beyondnerva.wordpress.com Sigmund Kopperud Producer: Isaac Arthur Cover Artist: Jakub Grygier https://www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier Graphics Team: Bryan Versteeg http://spacehabs.com Darth Biomech https://www.artstation.com/darth_biomech Fishy Tree https://www.deviantart.com/fishytree/ Jarred Eagley Jeremy Jozwik https://www.artstation.com/zeuxis_of_… Justin Dixon LegionTech Studios Mihail Yordanov Sam McNamara Serigio Botero https://www.artstation.com/sboterod?f… SpaceResourcesCGI Audio Editing Eric Schneider Narrator: Isaac Arthur Music Manager: Luca DeRosa — [email protected] Music: Markus Junnikkala, “Plotting a Course” https://www.markusjunnikkala.com/ Paradox Interactive, Andreas Waldetoft, “Dark Minds” https://www.paradoxplaza.com Lombus, “Hydrogen Sonata” https://lombus.bandcamp.com Paradox Interactive, “In Search of Life” https://www.paradoxplaza.com Serena Elis, “Between the Space”
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Meanwhile, Bostrom’s email from the 1990s resurfaced last year and resulted in him issuing a statement repudiating his racist remarks and clarifying his views on subjects such as eugenics. Some of his answers – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to further criticism from fellow academics that he was being evasive.
The university launched an investigation into Bostrom’s conduct following the discovery of his racist email, while other major effective altruism groups distanced themselves from him.
“We unequivocally condemn Nick Bostrom’s recklessly flawed and reprehensible words,” the Centre for Effective Altruism, which was founded by fellow Oxford philosophers and financially backed by Bankman-Fried, said in a statement at the time.
As NASA focuses on exploring the Moon, Mars, and the solar system for the benefit of humanity, the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) is shifting how it prioritizes technology development. As part of this refinement effort, NASA is asking the American aerospace community for feedback on nearly 190 national space technology needs – or shortfalls – it has identified for future space exploration and science endeavors.
“Our ambitious future missions pose many unique challenges, and STMD is positioned – as the nation’s tech base for civil space – to innovate and advance solutions for those problems,” said Dr. Kurt Vogel, associate administrator for Space Technology at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “STMD is developing many critical technologies, but shifting to a more open and collaborative approach allows us to better prioritize our efforts and align with key stakeholder needs while ensuring we all get the most bang out of our investments.”
NASA aims to collect broad aerospace community feedback on critical technology shortfalls – like additive manufacturing, cryogenic fluid management, in-situ resource utilization, and others – ahead of future operations on the Moon and Mars. Understanding and prioritizing the most important and impactful efforts allows STMD to appropriately direct available resources to best support mission needs for NASA and the nation.
How optimistic.
First, a little background. With 200 billion trillion (ish) stars in the universe and 13.7 billion years that have elapsed since it all began, you might be wondering where all the alien civilizations are at. This is the basic question behind the Fermi paradox, the tension between our suspicions of the potential for life in the universe (given planets found in habitable zones, etc) and the fact that we have only found one planet with an intelligent (ish) species inhabiting it.
One solution, or at least a way of thinking about the problem, is known as the Great Filter. Proposed by Robin Hanson of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, the argument goes that given the lack of observed technologically advanced alien civilizations, there must be a great barrier to the development of life or civilization that prevents them from getting to a stage where they are making big, detectable impacts on their environment that we can witness from Earth.
Continue reading “New Solution To The Fermi Paradox Suggests The Great Filter Is Nearly Upon Us” »
If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different human beings wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities. Natural or supernatural, that is the question.
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Continue reading “Lee Smolin — Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?” »
