The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
Sixty-five years and 35 films later, Godzilla is back and bigger than ever in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Godzilla first made his debut in 1954. At inception, he was a 50-meter tall metaphor for wanton destruction, particularly U.S. hydrogen-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which, in the film, destroyed Godzilla’s deep-sea ecosystem.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“We should plan ahead,” warned physicist Stephen Hawking who died last 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.”
Imagine a 2001-like scenario on the Red Planet, suggests astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, the current chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, where, instead of HAL gone rogue, a camera-operated airlock or some other system—perhaps vital oxygen-supply gear that relies on facial-recognition algorithms—never turns on for a non-white settler. A person could be left, trapped outside her own home, unable to trigger the airlock or to obtain more oxygen, literally asphyxiating in the biases of someone else’s shoddy computer program. The effects would be both fatal and enraging.
World-renowned linguist Noam “Chomsky has often said that if a Martian visited Earth, it would think we all speak dialects of the same language, because all terrestrial languages share a common underlying structure,” Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) head Doug Vakoch. “But if aliens have language, would it be similar to ours? That’s the big question.”
