An exploration of what I think is one of the spookiest solutions to the Fermi Paradox that could explain SETI’s great silence.
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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox: The Malevolent Alien Megabrain Scenario” »
The end of classical Computer Science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit.
I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers like the Commodore VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study Computer Science in college and ultimately getting a PhD at Berkeley, the bulk of my professional training was rooted in what I will call “classical” CS: programming, algorithms, data structures, systems, programming languages. In Classical Computer Science, the ultimate goal is to reduce an idea to a program written by a human — source code in a language like Java or C++ or Python. Every idea in Classical CS — no matter how complex or sophisticated — from a database join algorithm to the mind-bogglingly obtuse Paxos consensus protocol — can be expressed as a human-readable, human-comprehendible program.
When I was in college in the early ’90s, we were still in the depth of the AI Winter, and AI as a field was likewise dominated by classical algorithms. My first research job at Cornell was working with Dan Huttenlocher, a leader in the field of computer vision (and now Dean of the MIT School of Computing). In Dan’s PhD-level computer vision course in 1995 or so, we never once discussed anything resembling deep learning or neural networks—it was all classical algorithms like Canny edge detection, optical flow, and Hausdorff distances. Deep learning was in its infancy, not yet considered mainstream AI, let alone mainstream CS.
But they also offer an explanation of the solar system’s earliest days | Science & technology.
► Subscribe: https://goo.gl/r5jd1FIf we consider our solar system is typical of billions and billions of other similar systems, then where are the extraterrestrials? The universe should be full of intelligent life by now that would create some kind of signal that is easy to detect…yet, we have seen and heard nothing. There is one possible solution to the unnerving silence of the cosmos, and it could be the most chilling answer to why we’ve heard from no one…because if an alien civilization does exist out there somewhere, they certainly know we are here…and that is something that should scare all of us. We are on social media:
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Continue reading “Solution to the Fermi Paradox Found! Scientists Hope They’re Wrong” »
Defense officials fear Russian President Vladimir Putin may flex his military power by testing a massive nuclear torpedo called Poseidon, a report said.
NATO reportedly issued an intelligence report to its members and allies warning that the Kremlin is planning to test so-called “doomsday” nuclear torpedo drones, a senior UK defense source told the Times of London on Monday.
Poseidon is a long-range undersea nuke designed to hit coastal cities at extremely long range by traveling to targets underwater.
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Tuesday fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan, its neighbors said, escalating tests of weapons designed to strike key targets in regional U.S. allies.
It is the most significant missile test by North Korea since January, when it fired the Hwasong-12 intermediate-range missile capable of reaching the U.S. territory of Guam. It is also the first time that a North Korean missile has flown over Japan since 2017.
The Japanese prime minister’s office said at least one missile fired from North Korea flew over Japan and was believed to have landed in the Pacific Ocean.
Putin has previously threatened to resort to nuclear weapons if Russia’s goals in Ukraine continue to be thwarted. The annexation brings the use of a nuclear weapon a step closer by giving Putin a potential justification on the grounds that “the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” as he put it in his speech last week.
He renewed the threat on Friday with an ominous comment that the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a “precedent” for the use of nuclear weapons, echoing references he has made in the past to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as setting a precedent for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more.
Astronomers on a small slice of our planet’s surface, extending from southern and eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula, could actually watch it live with their telescopes. Among those were a half dozen stations joined together for a dedicated observing campaign organised by ESA’s Planetary Defence Office and coordinated by the team of observers of the Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC). As usual, when such a timely astronomical event happens, not all stations were successful in their observations: clouds, technical problems and other issues always affect real-life observations.
Continue reading “DART asteroid impact impresses in ESA’s view from the ground” »
In a new paper published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, scientists have estimated the conservation status of nearly 1,900 palm species using artificial intelligence, and found more than 1,000 may be at risk of extinction.
The international team of researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the University of Zurich, and the University of Amsterdam, combined existing data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List with novel machine learning techniques to paint a clearer picture of how palms may be threatened. Although popular and well represented on the Red List, the threat to some 70% of these plants has remained unclear until now.
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is widely considered to be a gold standard for evaluating the conservation status of animal, plant, and fungal species. But there are gaps in the Red List that need to be addressed, as not all species have been listed and many of the assessments are in need of an update. Conservation efforts are further complicated by inadequate funding, the sheer amount of time needed to manually assess a species, and public perception favoring certain vertebrate species over plants and fungi.
“Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers to survive a societal collapse they helped create,” Rushkoff says.
The world is going to hell in a handbasket. And no, we’re not saying that; science does. It seems that billionaires cannot ignore all the signals pointing at a doomsday scenario while trying to make their way out of this world — or stay in this world.
