“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
Stephen Hawking warned before his death on March 14, 2018, that “the real risk with AI isn’t malice, but competence.” Hawking foreshadowed the big surprise to astrophysicists, who in 2019 used artificial intelligence Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M for short, to generate complex 3-D simulations of the universe in an amazing 30 milliseconds, including how much of the cosmos is dark matter.
“Our galaxy may be teeming with technologically active life or populated by a single very long-lived civilization. In either case, we should be incredibly lucky to get a detection one day,” wrote physicist Claudio Grimaldi in an email to The Daily Galaxy about the possibility of there being a fundamental flaw in why we have not received a signal from an advanced alien civilization.
“We should plan ahead,” warned physicist Stephen Hawking who died March, 2018, and was buried next to Isaac Newton. “If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here, we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not, but this is more or less what has happened with AI.”
While the scientific community debates Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s bold conjecture that our solar system has been visited by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, philosopher Susan Schneider, who holds the Baruch Blumberg Chair, Library of Congress and NASA, preemptively upped the ante, suggesting that artificial intelligence exists out in the Universe, and it’s billions of years old. (more…)
In Space Odyssey 2001, HAL 9000, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, consigned the crew commander to his death by refusing to open the pod bay doors. Leaping forward to June, 2020, NASA announced a visionary step: that intelligent computer systems will be installed on space probes to direct the search for life on distant planets and moons. The AI program will start with the 2022/23 ESA ExoMars mission before moving beyond to moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and of Saturn’s Enceladus and Titan.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
