Lifeboat Foundation

This is an issue that the character Ye Wenjie wrestles with in the first episode of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. Working at a radio observatory, she does finally receive a message from a member of an alien civilization—telling her they are a pacifist and urging her not to respond to the message or Earth will be attacked.

The series will ultimately offer a detailed, elegant solution to the Fermi Paradox, but we will have to wait until the second season.

Or you can read the second book in Cixin Liu’s series, The Dark Forest. Without spoilers, the explanation set out in the books runs as follows: “The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound.”

As we go on with our everyday lives, it’s very easy to forget about the sheer size of the universe.

The Earth may seem like a mighty place, but it’s practically a grain within a grain of sand in a universe that is estimated to contain over 200 billion galaxies. That’s something to think about the next time you take life too seriously.

So when we gaze up into the starry night sky, we have every reason to be awestruck—and overwhelmed with curiosity. With the sheer size of the universe and the number of galaxies, stars, and planets in it, surely there are other sentient beings out there. But how come we haven’t heard from them?

Almost 99% of all human ancestors may have been wiped out around 930,000 years ago, a new paper has claimed.

The new research, published in the journal Science, used DNA from living people to suggest that humans went through a bottleneck, an event where populations shrink drastically. The paper estimates that as few as 1,300 humans were left for a period of around 120,000 years.

While the exact causes aren’t certain, the near-extinction has been blamed on Africa’s climate getting much colder and drier.

Scientists have unveiled three concepts for tiny spacecraft that could voyage from Earth to meet Apophis in April 2029.

New Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics and Figure 1 from OpenAI, leaked $100b OpenAI plan and a new project to avoid our extinction.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Sora.

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Sunspot as large as the Carrington Event sunspot from from 1,859 prompts NOAA Storm alert — first time since 2005 that a G4 Severe Geomagnetic storm alert has been issued. This sunspot is capable of even worse. Watch to learn more.

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We often look out into the galaxy and wonder where all the civilizations are, but could it be that we don’t see them because they have all chosen to exist in fortress star systems, surrounded by despoiled deserts of their own making?

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Interdiction” »

Supercomputer prediction about the end of the world is pretty much as bad as it sounds.

Machines that could think and learn like humans. A blessing for humanity, or an existential threat?