Lifeboat Foundation

In February 2020, four distinguished astrophysicists — Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf — suggested that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.

“It’s possible that the Milky Way is partially settled, or intermittently so; maybe explorers visited us in the past, but we don’t remember, and they died out,” says Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his collaborators in a 2019 study that suggests it wouldn’t take as long as thought for a space-faring civilization to planet-hop across the galaxy, because the orbits of stars can help distribute life, offering a new solution to the Fermi paradox. “The solar system may well be amid other settled systems; it’s just been unvisited for millions of years.”

A new study proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, suggesting why we may not detect advanced alien civilizations.

A new study offers a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. * The Fermi Paradox wonders why we haven’t encountered aliens yet. * Advanced alien civilizations may be pulling back from space exploration to avoid collapse, predict the researchers.

With the sheer vastness of space, it seems quite conceivable that there should be more intelligent civilizations out there besides us. After all, some estimates peg the observable universe to contain at least 2 trillion galaxies, with each such galaxy having approximately 100 million stars on average but with some like our Milky Way Galaxy estimated as having as many as 200 billion stars and 100 billion planets. We are talking astonishing numbers in quintillions or sextillions for the total number of planets in the universe. new study by Dr. Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Caltech’s Dr. Stuart Bartlett proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

AI-powered predictions of the three-dimensional structures of nearly all cataloged proteins known to science have been made by DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The catalog is freely and openly available to the scientific community, via the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.

The two organizations hope the expanded database will continue to increase our understanding of biology, helping countless more scientists in their work as they strive to tackle global challenges.

This major milestone marks the database being expanded by approximately 200 times. It has grown from nearly 1 million protein structures to over 200 million, and now covers almost every organism on Earth that has had its genome sequenced. Predicted structures for a wide range of species, including plants, bacteria, animals, and other organisms are now included in the expanded database. This opens up new avenues of research across the life sciences that will have an impact on global challenges, including sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases.

To read about all our work on solving protein folding, go to deepmind.com/AlphaFold or read a timeline of the breakthrough here.

It’s been one year since we released and open sourced AlphaFold, our AI system to predict the 3D structure of a protein just from its 1D amino acid sequence, and created the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB) to freely share this scientific knowledge with the world. Proteins are the building blocks of life, they underpin every biological process in every living thing. And, because a protein’s shape is closely linked with its function, knowing a protein’s structure unlocks a greater understanding of what it does and how it works. We hoped this groundbreaking resource would help accelerate scientific research and discovery globally, and that other teams could learn from and build on the advances we made with AlphaFold to create further breakthroughs. That hope has become a reality far quicker than we had dared to dream. Just twelve months later, AlphaFold has been accessed by more than half a million researchers and used to accelerate progress on important real-world problems ranging from plastic pollution to antibiotic resistance.

Continue reading “AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe” »

In late 2020, Alphabet’s DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system’s results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.

Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this undertaking, which covers proteins from across the kingdoms of life — animal, plant, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl, and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, “for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health,” per the AlphaFold website.

“AlphaFold is the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI,” Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, siad in a press statement Thursday. “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new addition of structures illuminating nearly the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved each day.”

-Chapters
0:00 Kardashev scale.
1:55 Level.
03:11 Level 1 (planetary civilization)
4:48 Level 2 (stellar civilization)
6:38 Level 3 (galactic civilization)
8:09 Level 4 (universal civilization)
9:55 Level 5 (multiversal civilization)
11:15 Level 6 (multidimensional civilization)
12:26 Level 7 (creator civilization)

Email: [email protected].

Continue reading “Alien civilizations from level 1 to level 7. We are only at level 0.72” »

Why we need AI to compete against each other. Does a Great Filter Stop all Alien Civilizations at some point? Are we Doomed if We Find Life in Our Solar System?

David Brin is a scientist, speaker, technical consultant and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards.
A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on his book The Postman.
His Ph.D in Physics from UCSD — followed a masters in optics and an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Caltech. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Space Institute and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Brin serves on advisory committees dealing with subjects as diverse as national defense and homeland security, astronomy and space exploration, SETI and nanotechnology, future/prediction and philanthropy. He has served since 2010 on the council of external advisers for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group (NIAC), which supports the most inventive and potentially ground-breaking new endeavors.

Continue reading “A.I. Wars, The Fermi Paradox and Great Filters with David Brin” »

Are we alone?

We are two scientists who study exoplanets and astrobiology. Thanks in large part to next-generation telescopes like Webb, researchers like us will soon be able to measure the chemical makeup of atmospheres of planets around other stars. The hope is that one or more of these planets will have a chemical signature of life.

Life might exist in the Solar System where there is liquid water — like the subsurface aquifers on Mars or in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa. However, searching for life in these places is incredibly difficult, as they are hard to reach, and detecting life would require sending a probe to return physical samples.

Continue reading “The best ways to find life using the Webb telescope, according to two astronomers” »

Scientists recently discovered thousands of ancient unknown bacteria lurking in Hawaii’s lava caves and geothermal vents.

Hawai’i is home to multiple lava caves, lava tubes, and geothermal vents. And a new study that researchers published in Frontiers in Microbiology reveals that these caves have higher bacteria diversity than expected. Researchers have discovered thousands of ancient unknown bacteria lurking within the caves.

Scientists say that these bacteria ecosystems represent how life might have existed during Earth’s early ages. They also say it could give us insight into how life on Mars looked before losing much of its atmosphere. The caves, home to lava tubes and geothermal vents on the island, house ancient unknown bacteria, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Continue reading “Researchers discovered thousands of unknown bacteria in Hawaiian caves” »