We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
John Smart has taught and written for over 20 years on topics like foresight and futurism as well as the drivers, opportunities, and problems of exponential processes throughout human history. John is President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, co-Founder of the Evo-Devo research community, and CEO of Foresight University. Most recently, Smart is the author of Introduction to Foresight, which in my view is a “one-of-a-kind all-in-one instruction manual, methodological encyclopedia, and daily work bible for both amateur and professional futurists or foresighters.”
During our 2-hour conversation with John Smart, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as the biggest tech changes since our 1st interview; machine vs human sentience; China’s totalitarianism and our new geostrategic global realignment; Citizen’s Diplomacy, propaganda, and the Russo-Ukrainian War; foresight, futurism and grappling with uncertainty; John’s Introduction to Foresight; Alvin Toffler’s 3P model aka the Evo-Devo Classic Foresight Pyramid; why the future is both predicted and created despite our anti-prediction and freedom bias; Moore’s Law and Accelerating Change; densification and dematerialization; definition and timeline to general AI; evolutionary vs developmental dynamics; autopoiesis and practopoiesis; existential threats and whether we live in a child-proof universe; the Transcension Hypothesis.
My favorite quote that I will take away from this interview with John Smart is:
In an amazing achievement akin to adding solar panels to your body, a northeast sea slug sucks raw materials from algae to provide its lifetime supply of solar-powered energy, according to a study by Rutgers University–New Brunswick and other scientists.
“It’s a remarkable feat because it’s highly unusual for an animal to behave like a plant and survive solely on photosynthesis,” said Debashish Bhattacharya, senior author of the study and distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Rutgers–New Brunswick. “The broader implication is in the field of artificial photosynthesis. That is, if we can figure out how the slug maintains stolen, isolated plastids to fix carbon without the plant nucleus, then maybe we can also harness isolated plastids for eternity as green machines to create bioproducts or energy. The existing paradigm is that to make green energy, we need the plant or alga to run the photosynthetic organelle, but the slug shows us that this does not have to be the case.”
The sea slug Elysia chlorotica, a mollusk that can grow to more than two inches long, has been found in the intertidal zone between Nova Scotia, Canada, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, as well as in Florida. Juvenile sea slugs eat the nontoxic brown alga Vaucheria litorea and become photosynthetic – or solar-powered – after stealing millions of algal plastids, which are like tiny solar panels, and storing them in their gut lining, according to the study published online in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Predicting the lifetime of an electric ion thruster is notoriously difficult. You have to account for the chamber wall effects, which are not present in space environments. Researchers within several different aerospace disciplines in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign worked together to simulate the ion activity, then validate it in a unique experiment that will help predict the lifespan of electric thrusters.
“We can simulate the damage to the engine caused by sputtering, but until now, we could not validate that our simulations were correct,” said Professor Huck Beng Chew.
“Because both the engine and chamber walls are coated with impact-resistant carbon, we didn’t know whether the coating damage was from accelerated ions directly hitting the engine or whether the coating damage was artificially mitigated by the deposition of carbon from ion bombardment off the chamber walls.”
This is some wild stuff o.o. As much is unknown about this universe I still think this phenomenon is more exterrestial possibly even from the grand architect like god or some alien species that is either moving a black hole spaceship or some sorta wormhole expansion for alien transportation or could be even god due its nature as his vehicle the Ezekiel wheel was spotted near Venus in 2020. Still is an unknown threat whether it is an actual threat is still unknown. If it is a threat theoretically we could evaporate the black hole though but this would require large amounts of energy maybe even Higgs bosons somehow.
A fluffy cluster of stars spilling across the sky may have a secret hidden in its heart: a swarm of over 100 stellar-mass black holes.
The star cluster in question is called Palomar 5. It’s a stellar stream that stretches out across 30,000 light-years, and is located around 80,000 light-years away.
Such globular clusters are often considered ‘fossils’ of the early Universe. They’re very dense and spherical, typically containing roughly 100,000 to 1 million very old stars; some, like NGC 6397, are nearly as old as the Universe itself.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have identified two stars responsible for generating carbon-rich dust a mere 5,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. As the massive stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing past one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce the carbon-rich dust. For a few months every eight years, the stars form a new shell of dust that expands outward — and may eventually go on to become part of stars that form elsewhere in our galaxy.
Astronomers have long tried to track down how elements like carbon, which is essential for life, become widely distributed across the Universe. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has examined one ongoing source of carbon-rich dust in our own Milky Way galaxy in greater detail: Wolf-Rayet 140 [1], a system of two massive stars that follow a tight, elongated orbit.
As they swing past one another (within the central white dot in the Webb images), the stellar winds from each star slam together, the material compresses, and carbon-rich dust forms. Webb’s latest observations show 17 dust shells shining in mid-infrared light that are expanding at regular intervals into the surrounding space.
We stand on the brink of a transformative era in space exploration: a shift from government-led to commercial-led activities off-planet. With this shift comes the need to recognize that the United States commercial space industry will play a pivotal role in maintaining the nation’s leadership in low Earth orbit (LEO). And while NASA has long shouldered this responsibility, its commitment to pass the torch, to foster commercial partnerships and support commercial space development, is falling short. The new Trump administration has a unique opportunity to ensure that American leadership is not usurped by our fiercest geopolitical adversary, China. To maintain U.S. leadership, the government must act with urgency to support a smaller number of companies most likely to achieve success in the critical foothold of LEO.
For a quarter of a century, the U.S. has benefited from sustaining a continuous human presence in space on the International Space Station (ISS), a strategy that China is emulating with its Tiangong space station, which has been continuously crewed since 2022. Through the ISS achievement, the U.S. not only advanced scientific understanding but also brought nations together and spurred economic growth through uncontested leadership. However, with the ISS set to retire by the end of this decade, it is imperative to transition from a government-run space station to a robust commercial space framework. This transition is essential to ensuring U.S. presence, enabling discovery, fueling our space economy and safeguarding our strategic priorities in space.
A commercial platform will continue to support the nation’s needs at a much lower cost than the ISS while stimulating a new generation of technologies that will revolutionize our economy and preserve the national asset that is our LEO workforce. Hard-working Americans in this microgravity industry are the lifeblood of what makes America great and will ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have characterized the atmosphere of a hot super-Neptune exoplanet designated WASP-166 b. As a result, they found that the atmosphere of this alien world contains water and carbon dioxide. Their findings were reported Dec. 31 on the arXiv preprint server.
WASP-166 b is about seven times larger and 32 times more massive than the Earth. It orbits its host star every 5.44 days, at a distance of approximately 0.067 AU from it. The planet is relatively hot as its equilibrium temperature is estimated to be 1,270 K. The parameters of WASP-166 make it a representative of the so-called hot Neptune desert—a region of parameter space at high insolation fluxes and intermediate planet radii that is very sparsely populated.
The parent star WASP-166, which is located some 368 light years away, has a spectral type of F9V, and is about 20% larger and more massive than the sun. The star has an effective temperature of 6,050 K, metallicity at a level of 0.19 dex, and its age is estimated to be 2.1 billion years.
Based on a material view and reductionism, science has achieved great success. These cognitive paradigms treat the external as an objective existence and ignore internal consciousness. However, this cognitive paradigm, which we take for granted, has also led to some dilemmas related to consciousness in biology and physics. Together, these phenomena reveal the interaction and inseparable side of matter and consciousness (or body and mind) rather than the absolute opposition. However, a material view that describes matter and consciousness in opposition cannot explain the underlying principle, which causes a gap in interpretation. For example, consciousness is believed to be the key to influencing wave function collapse (reality), but there is a lack of a scientific model to study how this happens. In this study, we reveal that the theory of scientific cognition exhibits a paradigm shift in terms of perception. This tendency implies that reconciling the relationship between matter and consciousness requires an abstract theoretical model that is not based on physical forms. We propose that the holistic cognitive paradigm offers a potential solution to reconcile the dilemmas and can be scientifically proven. In contrast to the material view, the holistic cognitive paradigm is based on the objective contradictory nature of perception rather than the external physical characteristics. This cognitive paradigm relies on perception and experience (not observation) and summarizes all existence into two abstract contradictory perceptual states (Yin-Yang). Matter and consciousness can be seen as two different states of perception, unified in perception rather than in opposition. This abstract perspective offers a distinction from the material view, which is also the key to falsification, and the occurrence of an event is inseparable from the irrational state of the observer’s conscious perception. Alternatively, from the material view, the event is random and has nothing to do with perception. We hope that this study can provide some new enlightenment for the scientific coordination of the opposing relationship between matter and consciousness.
Keywords: contradiction; free energy principle; hard problem of consciousness; holistic philosophy; perception; quantum mechanics; reductionism.
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Spotting flaws is sometimes the first ripple in making waves of innovation.
Comparing directly observed gravity waves with the latest advanced simulations, researchers from the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS) and their colleagues have revealed significant limitations in current atmospheric modeling. Their findings emphasize the complexities of these atmospheric waves and their impacts on weather and climate systems.
The study was published in the Journal of the Meteorological Society of Japan on Sept. 2.