Is anybody home? Astronomers have pinpointed two planets orbiting a nearby star that meet pretty much every requirement for supporting life. They’re almost exactly the same mass as the Earth, they are billions of years old (which means life could have had time to evolve), and they’re orbiting their star at a distance that would support things like water flow and habitable temperatures.
Could an exotic super heavy element provide the key to humanity’s future in the stars? According to physicist Bob Lazar, “Element 115” is the fuel source for an alien spacecraft he was hired to reverse-engineer by the U.S. government—and if we can harness its awesome power, it will change our world forever.
Future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the stars.
A new study envisions firing laser beams that would curve around a black hole and come back with added energy to help propel a spacecraft to near the speed of light. Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are using such a “halo drive,” as the study dubs it, by seeing if pairs of black holes are merging more often than expected.
Study author David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, came up with the idea of the halo drive through what he calls “the gamer’s mindset.”
Extremely happy to be able to already share with you the two videos from our last salon🚀! We gathered not one but three individuals who have been pre-eminent luminaries in their fields for 30 years to discuss their alternative approaches to the current AI paradigm: Kim Eric Drexler, Robin Hanson, and Mark S. Miller.
Allison Duettmann (Foresight Institute) discusses alternative approaches to the current AI paradigm with three individuals who have been pre-eminent luminaries in their fields for 30 years: Eric Drexler, Robin Hanson, and Mark S. Miller.
Eric Drexler:
Drexler is widely known for his seminal studies of advanced nanosystems and scalable atomically precise manufacturing (APM), a prospective technology using arrays of nanoscale devices to guide chemically-reactive molecular encounters, thereby structuring matter from the bottom up. Drexler’s current research explores prospects for advanced AI technologies from the perspective of structured systems development, potential applications, and global implications. Key considerations in this work include advances in AI-enabled automation of AI research and development, and the potential role of thorough automation in accelerated development of comprehensive AI services.
Mark S. Miller:
Mark S. Miller is a pioneer of agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, the main designer of the E and Dr. SES distributed persistent object-capability programming languages, inventor of Miller Columns, an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system, a representative to the EcmaScript committee, a former Google research scientist and member of the WebAssembly (Wasm) group, and a senior fellow of the Foresight Institute. Eric and Mark co-authored the Agoric Papers, which have recently received substantial attention in the cryptocommerce community, 30 years after their initial release: https://agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/markets-and-computation-agoric-open-systems.pdf
Robin Hanson:
Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University Press published his book The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth in June 2016, and his book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, co-authored with Kevin Simler, in January, 2018. Professor Hanson has 900 media mentions, given 350 invited talks, and his blog OvercomingBias.com has had eight million visits. He has pioneered prediction markets since 1988 and suggests “futarchy”, a form of governance based on prediction markets. He was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu, of the first web markets, the Foresight Exchange, of DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market, and of IARPA’s combinatorial markets DAGGRE and SCICAST. He coined the phrase “The Great Filter” as part of an effort to understand why the universe looks so dead.
The kilogram isn’t a thing anymore. Instead, it’s an abstract idea about light and energy.
As of today (May 20), physicists have replaced the old kilogram — a 130-year-old, platinum-iridium cylinder weighing 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) sitting in a room in France — with an abstract, unchanging measurement based on quadrillions of light particles and Planck’s constant (a fundamental feature of our universe).
In one sense, this is a grand (and surprisingly difficult) achievement. The kilogram is fixed forever now. It can’t change over time as the cylinder loses an atom here or an atom there. That means humans could communicate this unit of mass, in terms of raw science, to space aliens. The kilogram is now a simple truth, an idea that can be carried anywhere in the universe without bothering to bring a cylinder with you.
A radically new view articulated now by a number of digital philosophers is that consciousness, quantum computational and non-local in nature, is resolutely computational, and yet, has some “non-computable” properties. Consider this: English language has 26 letters and about 1 million words, so how many books could be possibly written in English? If you are to build a hypothetical computer containing all mass and energy of our Universe and ask it this question, the ultimate computer wouldn’t be able to compute the exact number of all possible combinations of words into meaningful story-lines in billions of years! Another example of non-computability of combinatorics: if you are to be born and live your own life again and again in our Quantum Multiverse, you could live googolplex (10100) lives, but they all would be somewhat different — some of them drastically different from the life you’re living right now, some only slightly — never quite the same, and timeline-indeterminate.
Another kind of non-computability is akin to fuzzy logic but based on pattern recognition. Deeper understanding refers to a situation when a conscious agent gets to perceive numerous patterns in complex environments and analyze that complexity from the multitude of perspectives. That is beautifully encapsulated by Isaiah Berlin’s quote: “To understand is to perceive patterns.” The ability to recognize patterns in chaos is not straightforwardly algorithmic but rather meta-algorithmic and yet, I’d argue, deeply computational. The types of non-computability that I just described may somehow relate to the non-computable element of quantum consciousness to which Penrose refers in his work.
O.o.
Official video for Life On Mars? by David Bowie.
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Lyrics
It’s a God-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling no
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
For she’s lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
It’s on America’s tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
’Cause Lennon’s on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
But the film is a saddening bore
’Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
