Lifeboat Foundation

We continue our look at possible explanations why life may be very rare in the Universe by examining our planet itself, and looking at which of its characteristic might be important to intelligence developing and how improbable those traits are for a given planet in a given solar system.

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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Earth” »

“Machine learning provides a way of providing almost human-like intuition to huge data sets. One valuable application is for tasks where it’s difficult to write a specific algorithm to search for something—human faces, for instance, or perhaps ” something strange,” wrote astrophysicist and Director of the Penn State University Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, Jason Wright in an email to The Daily Galaxy. ” In this case, you can train a machine-learning algorithm to recognize certain things you expect to see in a data set,” Wright explains, ” and ask it for things that don’t fit those expectations, or perhaps that match your expectations of a technosignature.

Crowdsourcing Alien Structures

Continue reading “Will AI Reveal Extraterrestrial Intelligence Far Beyond Our Level of Consciousness?” »

We conclude our look at possible explanations why life may be very rare in the Universe by looking at the evolutionary pathway to intelligence and the hurdles between life starting on a planet and migrating off of it.

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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Intelligence” »

If conditions on a distant planet allowed life to flourish, would it look anything like life here on Earth? It’s a question that’s seen a Darwinian rise of contradictory theories over the years.

Now, in an interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge, says “with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other parts of the universe.

Could we describe and search for proof of technology originating from outside of Earth?

If an alien were to look at Earth, many human technologies — from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs — could be a beacon signifying the presence of life.

We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem. iStock.

Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He’s the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Continue reading “Andrej Karpathy: Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #333” »

“By now it has become a common futurist prediction and science fiction plot device that intelligent and sentient life forms can be created which are not biochemical in nature and are thus fundamentally different from all currently known life,” distinguished Princeton astrophysicist Edwin Turner wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “Whether or not this would actually be possible,” he explains, “depends on the nature and origin of consciousness, a topic about which we have little more than entertaining whistling-in-the-dark guesses at this point and no clear path toward obtaining any better understanding of this deep mystery.”

Aliens Shaped by Natural Selection

Continue reading “Darwin’s Extraterrestrials” »

The hunt for planets that could harbor life may have just narrowed dramatically.

Scientists had long hoped and theorized that the most common type of star in our universe — called an M dwarf — could host nearby planets with atmospheres, potentially rich with carbon and perfect for the creation of life. But in a new study of a world orbiting an M dwarf 66 light-years from Earth, researchers found no indication such a planet could hold onto an atmosphere at all.

Without a carbon-rich atmosphere, it’s unlikely a planet would be hospitable to living things. Carbon molecules are, after all, considered the building blocks of life. And the findings don’t bode well for other types of planets orbiting M dwarfs, said study coauthor Michelle Hill, a planetary scientist and a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside.

Could this be the reason why we haven’t spotted them yet?

Believers in the Drake Equation may have found just the right explanation for why alien civilizations haven’t been spotted by humanity yet. A new study published by U.S.-based researchers states that alien civilizations are likely looking for particular types of stars when trying to establish an intra-galactic base, and our Sun simply does not meet their criterion, Universe Today.

SETI does not make sense

Continue reading “Advanced alien civilizations haven’t contacted us because of the age of our Sun” »