The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the days’ headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” says Susan Schneider of the University of Connectict and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton .”The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.” Schneider is one of the few thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction— that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.
“We leave open the question whether the origin of life is genuinely quantum mechanical,” says the team behind exciting new research that provides a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics — a new approach announced October 2018 to one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries in science: how does life emerge from inert matter.
“I am sure that during this century people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression,” said physicist Stephen Hawking, who today lies buried next to Isaac Newton. “Laws will probably be passed against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won’t be able to resist the temptation to improve human characteristics, such as size of memory, resistance to disease and length of life.”
“I think that if we find life elsewhere it’s going to look, at least chemically, very much like modern life,” says evolutionary biologist William Martin at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Among the astrobiological implications of our LUCA paper is the fact that you do not need light. It’s chemical energy that ran the origin of life, chemical energy that ran the first cells and chemical energy that is present today on bodies like Enceladus.”
