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According to the reputable Australian astro-enthusiast journal, SkyNews, a leading biologist says that it is surprising we have not already discovered extra-terrestrials that look like us — given the growing number of Earth-like planets now discovered by astronomers.

Planet_moonSimon Conway Morris, an evolutionary biologist suggests that aliens resembling humans must have evolved on other planets. He bases the claim on evidence that different species will independently develop similar features which means that life similar to that on Earth would also develop on equivalent planets.

The theory, known as convergence, says evolution is a predictable process which follows a rigid set of rules. Read the full story at Skynews…

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Philip Raymond is Co-Chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards
Association [crypsa.org] and chief editor at AWildDuck.com

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Behind London and Berlin, the Dutch startup scene is already considered to be one of the most prominent in Europe. (If it feels unfair to weigh an entire country against individual cities, consider that the Netherlands has 17 million people crammed into an area half the size of South Carolina.)

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We’ve seen 3D-printed cars and even 3D-printed body organs, but now the city of Dubai plans to use the technology to create an entire office building. Because they are always trying to one-up themselves. Dubai is known around the world for its over-the-top architecture, extreme stunts and attention-grabbing New Year’s Eve light shows.

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July 9 update:
3 days after posting, Visa acknowledged that Bitcoin has a future in payments. This is an understatement, of course. The bank described below goes a step further by acknowledging that the entire financial infrastructure may cave to cryptocurrencies.

burning-cashFrench bank BNP Paribas warned customers and investors that the technology behind bitcoin might one day overtake conventional, account-based financial institutions, thus rendering existing companies redundant (that’s British for “obsolete”).* It’s a tectonic acknowledgement from one of the world’s biggest banks.

Analyst Johann Palychata writes in the company’s magazine Quintessence that Bitcoin’s blockchain, the underlying architecture that allows cryptocurrency to function, “should be considered as an invention like the steam or combustion engine,” that has the potential to transform the world of finance and beyond.

Check out the full story by Oscar Williams-Grut at Business Insider.

* Although Bitcoin will obsolete the current service mix of financial institutions, it is my opinion that for savvy governments and established businesses, it represents a long term opportunity rather than a threat. —PR

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Philip Raymond is Co-Chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards
Association [crypsa.org] and chief editor at AWildDuck.com

This is quite the interesting article, but the sheer number of unknowns that surround the Fermi Paradox, without even taking into consideration all the hypotheticals of a potential multiverse, pretty much render the whole thing scientifically pointless.

That said, Philosophically speaking, it’s priceless.

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“Genetic improvement involves writing an automated “programmer” who manipulates the source code of a piece of through trial and error with a view to making it work more efficiently. This might include swapping lines of code around, deleting lines and inserting new ones – very much like a human programmer. Each manipulation is then tested against some quality measure to determine if the new version of the code is an improvement over the old version. It is about taking large software systems and altering them slightly to achieve better results. Read more

Remember a few weeks back, when we learned that Google’s artificial neural network was having creepy daydreams, turning buildings into acid trips and landscapes into Magic Eye pictures? Well, prepare to never sleep again, because last week, Google made its “inceptionism” algorithm available to the public, and the nightmarish images are cropping up everywhere.

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http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/24/darpa_s_biology_is_technology_conference_discusses_problems_with_open_source/data.jpg.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge.jpg

“If goodwill and curiosity aren’t motivating researchers to work with open-source data on their own, there is still something that probably will: human limitation. ‘We have tiny little brains. We can’t understand the big stuff anymore,’ said Paul Cohen, a DARPA program manager in the Information and Innovation Office. ‘Machines will read the literature, machines will build complicated models, because frankly we can’t.’ When all you have to do is let your algorithms loose on a trove of publicly available data, there won’t be any reason not to pull in everything that’s out there. ” Read more