Lifeboat Foundation

A mysterious signal coming from deep in the universe has finally been traced to its source.

Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, have only been heard 18 times and have been a puzzle to scientists since they were detected in 2007. Nobody knows where they could be coming from or how they might be triggered, with speculation ranging from a huge star, jets of material shooting out of a black hole – or even aliens.

FRBs are powerful but very short radio waves, which last no more than a millisecond.

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Scientists may have found proof that E.T. really is phoning home — in the form of powerful radio signals, which have been detected repeatedly in the same exact location in space.

Astronomy experts with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have discovered six new fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from a region far beyond our Milky Way galaxy, according to a recent report in the Astrophysical Journal.

The discovery — made in the direction of the constellation Auriga — is significant considering the fact that at least 17 FRBs have now been detected in this area. It is also the only known instance in which these signals have been found twice in the same location in space.

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In “Passengers,” a 2016 science-fiction thriller film two space travelers wake up 90 years too soon from an induced hibernation on board a spaceship bound for a new planet. From “Aliens” to “Interstellar,” Hollywood has long used suspended animation to overcome the difficulties of deep space travel, but the once-fanciful sci-fi staple is becoming scientific fact. The theory is that a hibernating crew could stay alive over vast cosmic distances, requiring little food, hydration or living space, potentially slashing the costs of interstellar missions and eradicating the boredom of space travel.

In Brief

• An expert on the intersection of science and philosophy posits that our current transition to “postbiological” life could have already been undertaken by extraterrestrial species.
• She warns that these alien lifeforms could by artificially intelligent, in which case they could pose a tremendous threat to life on Earth.

Susan Schneider is a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). She is also an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, and her expertise includes the philosophy of cognitive science, particularly with regards to the plausibility of computational theories of mind and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence (AI).

In short, Schneider has a keen understanding of the intersection between science and philosophy. As such, she also has a unique perspective on AI, offering a fresh (but quite alarming) view on how artificial intelligence could forever alter humanity’s existence. In an article published by the IEET, she shares that perspective, talking about potential flaws in the way we view AI and suggesting a possible connection between AI and extraterrestrial life.

Continue reading “The Goals of Extraterrestrial AI May ‘Conflict With Those of Biological Life’” »

Just one aspect of our existence, maybe not necessarily survival.

The discovery of life on another planet might seem incompatible with faith in a deity. Yet many theologians are already open to the existence of extraterrestrials, argues the writer Brandon Ambrosino.

Astronomers say they could detect signs of advanced civilizations by searching for their defense mechanisms.

Move over, chemists. Thanks to proteins from Icelandic bacteria, scientists at Caltech have managed to coax microbes into making silicon-carbon bonds, a feat that until now has been achieved only by humans in the lab.

The findings, published last week in the journal Science, could open the door to new avenues in organic chemistry and drug development — and could help scientists investigate essential mysteries, such as whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon on other planets.

A team of astronomers believes that strange signals emanating from a cluster of stars are actually aliens trying to tell the universe they exist.

The study, which appeared in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, analyzed the odd beams of light from 234 stars — a fraction of the 2.5 million that were observed.

The bizarre beacons led the paper’s authors, Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Quebec, to conclude that it’s “probably” aliens.

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Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.

Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.

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