This week’s “Heard in the Milky Way” offers audio and video talks and interviews with leading astronomers and astrophysicists that range from Would Data from an Alien Intelligence be Lethal for Us to Neal Stephenson on Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI and the Future of Humanity to Is Alien Life Weirder than We Think, and much more. This new weekly feature, curated by The Daily Galaxy editorial staff, takes you on a journey with stories that change our knowledge of Planet Earth, our Galaxy, and the vast Cosmos beyond. Highly recommended for insomniacs.
Today’s stories range from A New Place for Consciousness in Our Understanding of the Universe to Installing the World’s Highest Weather Station on Mount Everest to Military Memo Deepens Possible Interstellar Meteor Mystery, and much more. The 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.
“Machine learning provides a way of providing almost human-like intuition to huge data sets. One valuable application is for tasks where it’s difficult to write a specific algorithm to search for something—human faces, for instance, or perhaps “something strange,” wrote astrophysicist and Director of the Penn State University Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, Jason Wright in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “In this case, you can train a machine-learning algorithm to recognize certain things you expect to see in a data set,” Wright explains, “and ask it for things that don’t fit those expectations, or perhaps that match your expectations of a technosignature.
Another week of amazing news from our Pale Blue Dot, with stories ranging from Earth Is Tiny Because The Sun Had Saturn-Like Rings Before It Had Planets to How Can Something So Small Live So Long.
“If the Perseverance rover finds evidence for microbes on Mars, our self-esteem will not be affected since it is obvious that we are more intelligent than they are,” wrote Harvard’s Avi Loeb in an email to The Daily Galaxy asking him for his thoughts about the impact of evidence of the existence of an advanced alien civilization. “But if the rover will bump into the wreckage of a spacecraft far more advanced than we ever produced, our ego will be challenged.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it -at least not by searching in the Milky Way. We have a slim chance, he suggests, of distinguishing an ET artifact from a natural celestial object.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily 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.
Drake Equation for Alien Intelligence is More Important Than Ever (Planet Earth Report)
Scanning Images for Alien Signals to Can a Universe Be Created from Nothing?
The Milky Way Is Like an Ecosystem: The Center Is Where the Action IsDid the Big Bang Make Cracks in Spacetime to What Would Intelligent Aliens Mean? (The Galaxy Report)
How Earth Avoided a Mars-like Fate to Why is There No Planet B? (Planet Earth Report)
