Lifeboat Foundation

It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors – it occasionally still is – but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one.

The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in 1951, was a small 210-gram chunk of strange-looking space rock that fell out of the sky. For decades, scientists have been trying to decipher its secrets, and researchers just decoded another.

In a study published in August this year, led by Caltech mineralogist Chi Ma, scientists analysed the Wedderburn meteorite and verified the first natural occurrence of what they call ‘edscottite’: a rare form of iron-carbide mineral that’s never been found in nature.

Improvements are seen after playing a modified version of Guess Who?

Is that all this means?

#propaganda

Sending construction robots into outer space will help pave the way for human exploration, but there are some real challenges that lie ahead.

In the life extension movement, longevity escape velocity (sometimes referred to as Actuarial escape velocity^[1]) is a hypothetical situation in which life expectancy is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which longevity escape velocity would be maintained, technological advances would increase life expectancy more than the year that just went by.

Life expectancy increases slightly every year as treatment strategies and technologies improve. At present, more than one year of research is required for each additional year of expected life. Longevity escape velocity occurs when this ratio reverses, so that life expectancy increases faster than one year per one year of research, as long as that rate of advance is sustainable.^[2][3][4]

The concept was first publicly proposed by David Gobel, co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation (MF). The idea has been championed by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey^[5] (the other co-founder of the MF), and futurist Ray Kurzweil,^[6] who named one of his books, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, after the concept. These two claim that by putting further pressure on science and medicine to focus research on increasing limits of aging, rather than continuing along at its current pace, more lives will be saved in the future, even if the benefit is not immediately apparent.^[2].

“As an entrepreneur I like to know the next two or three things I might start a company on. For me it was robotics, bio-hacking, and quantum.”–whurley.

Earlier this year, we celebrated a first in the field of quantum physics: scientists were able to ‘teleport’ a qutrit, or a piece of quantum information based on three states, opening up a whole host of new possibilities for quantum computing and communication.

Up until then, quantum teleportation had only been managed with qubits, albeit over impressively long distances. This proof-of-concept study suggests future quantum networks will be able to carry much more data and with less interference than we thought.

If you’re new to the idea of qutrits, first let’s take a step back. Simply put, the small data units we know as bits in classical computing can be in one of two states: a 0 or a 1. But in quantum computing, we have the qubit, which can be both a 0 and 1 at the same time (known as superposition).

All evidence points to the fact that the singularity is coming (regardless of which futurist you believe).

But what difference does it make? We are talking about a difference of just 15 years. The real question is, is the singularity actually on its way?

At the World Government Summit in Dubai, I spoke with Jürgen Schmidhuber, who is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at AI company NNAISENSE, Director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA, and heralded by some as the “father of artificial intelligence” to find out.

Continue reading “The ‘Father of Artificial Intelligence’ Says Singularity Is 30 Years Away” »