“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. —Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute”
Until summer of 2018, the earliest stars in the universe were thought to lack elements heavier than helium, such as carbon, the building block for life on Earth. In 2015, astronomers at Leiden University discovered an extremely distant galaxy called CR7, by far the brightest from its epoch ever seen, which matched their prediction. Three years later, with measurements using the ALMA telescope they found to their surprise, that the galaxy does have carbon after all, and even in normal concentrations.
“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, one of the world’s leading theorists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
“Finding a civilization dead due to war or climate change will hopefully convince us to get our act together and avoid a similar fate. But it would be even more remarkable if radar imaging or flyby photography near an interstellar relic within the solar system would show signs of an advanced technology that our civilization had not mastered as of yet. There is no better lesson to learn than that of civilizations that had developed advanced technologies up to the point of self-destruction.”
“The discovery of a terrestrial planet around a nearby M dwarf during the first TESS observing sector suggests that the prospects for future discoveries are bright. It is worth remembering that 90 percent of the sky has not yet been surveyed by either TESS or Kepler,” NASA reports.
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.
