Lifeboat Foundation

Alien communication could utilize quantum physics, so SETI needs a new way to listen.

The Fermi paradox, the “where is everybody?” puzzle, is a persistent question in the search for life in the universe. It asks why, if life is not exceedingly rare in the cosmos, it hasn’t shown up on our doorstep. Equally we might ask why we haven’t even heard from alien life, through radio signals or any other means. A part of the answer could be that our present work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is actually very limited. Estimates show that we’ve only examined the equivalent of a hot tub of water compared to all the world’s oceans in our combing through the electromagnetic information that rolls in from the cosmos.¹

If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person you’ll see this as an opportunity, but the problem is that we don’t actually know what might be filling the glass in the first place. The vast majority of SETI studies look for structure in electromagnetic radiation, whether in amplitude or frequency modulations of radio waves, or regularity in pulses of light, or in multi-wavelength correlations. In other words, we assume that information might be sailing past us in representations built using classical physics. But what if that’s just wrong?

Continue reading “We Might Already Speak the Same Language As ET” »

We have always wondered whether other intelligent life exists in this galaxy, but for the first time we have the technology to help answer that question. With artificial intelligence, researchers have renewed the hunt for alien life in space and also begun to wonder if an entirely new life form has been born on earth.

The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world.

Continue reading “How A.I. is searching for Aliens | The Age of A.I.” »

In February 2020, four distinguished astrophysicists — Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf — suggested that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.

“It’s possible that the Milky Way is partially settled, or intermittently so; maybe explorers visited us in the past, but we don’t remember, and they died out,” says Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his collaborators in a 2019 study that suggests it wouldn’t take as long as thought for a space-faring civilization to planet-hop across the galaxy, because the orbits of stars can help distribute life, offering a new solution to the Fermi paradox. “The solar system may well be amid other settled systems; it’s just been unvisited for millions of years.”

Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox Revisited and Resolved?” »

A new study proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, suggesting why we may not detect advanced alien civilizations.

A new study offers a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. * The Fermi Paradox wonders why we haven’t encountered aliens yet. * Advanced alien civilizations may be pulling back from space exploration to avoid collapse, predict the researchers.

With the sheer vastness of space, it seems quite conceivable that there should be more intelligent civilizations out there besides us. After all, some estimates peg the observable universe to contain at least 2 trillion galaxies, with each such galaxy having approximately 100 million stars on average but with some like our Milky Way Galaxy estimated as having as many as 200 billion stars and 100 billion planets. We are talking astonishing numbers in quintillions or sextillions for the total number of planets in the universe. new study by Dr. Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Caltech’s Dr. Stuart Bartlett proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Continue reading “Where are the aliens? A new study may finally solve the Fermi Paradox” »

AI-powered predictions of the three-dimensional structures of nearly all cataloged proteins known to science have been made by DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The catalog is freely and openly available to the scientific community, via the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.

The two organizations hope the expanded database will continue to increase our understanding of biology, helping countless more scientists in their work as they strive to tackle global challenges.

This major milestone marks the database being expanded by approximately 200 times. It has grown from nearly 1 million protein structures to over 200 million, and now covers almost every organism on Earth that has had its genome sequenced. Predicted structures for a wide range of species, including plants, bacteria, animals, and other organisms are now included in the expanded database. This opens up new avenues of research across the life sciences that will have an impact on global challenges, including sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases.

Continue reading “DeepMind AI Powers Major Scientific Breakthrough: AlphaFold Generates 3D View of the Protein Universe” »

To read about all our work on solving protein folding, go to deepmind.com/AlphaFold or read a timeline of the breakthrough here.

It’s been one year since we released and open sourced AlphaFold, our AI system to predict the 3D structure of a protein just from its 1D amino acid sequence, and created the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB) to freely share this scientific knowledge with the world. Proteins are the building blocks of life, they underpin every biological process in every living thing. And, because a protein’s shape is closely linked with its function, knowing a protein’s structure unlocks a greater understanding of what it does and how it works. We hoped this groundbreaking resource would help accelerate scientific research and discovery globally, and that other teams could learn from and build on the advances we made with AlphaFold to create further breakthroughs. That hope has become a reality far quicker than we had dared to dream. Just twelve months later, AlphaFold has been accessed by more than half a million researchers and used to accelerate progress on important real-world problems ranging from plastic pollution to antibiotic resistance.

Continue reading “AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe” »

In late 2020, Alphabet’s DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system’s results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.

Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this undertaking, which covers proteins from across the kingdoms of life — animal, plant, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl, and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, “for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health,” per the AlphaFold website.

“AlphaFold is the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI,” Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, siad in a press statement Thursday. “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new addition of structures illuminating nearly the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved each day.”

Continue reading “DeepMind’s AI has now catalogued every protein known to science” »

-Chapters
0:00 Kardashev scale.
1:55 Level.
03:11 Level 1 (planetary civilization)
4:48 Level 2 (stellar civilization)
6:38 Level 3 (galactic civilization)
8:09 Level 4 (universal civilization)
9:55 Level 5 (multiversal civilization)
11:15 Level 6 (multidimensional civilization)
12:26 Level 7 (creator civilization)

Email: [email protected]

Continue reading “Alien civilizations from level 1 to level 7. We are only at level 0.72” »

Why we need AI to compete against each other. Does a Great Filter Stop all Alien Civilizations at some point? Are we Doomed if We Find Life in Our Solar System?

David Brin is a scientist, speaker, technical consultant and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards.
A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on his book The Postman.
His Ph.D in Physics from UCSD — followed a masters in optics and an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Caltech. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Space Institute and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Brin serves on advisory committees dealing with subjects as diverse as national defense and homeland security, astronomy and space exploration, SETI and nanotechnology, future/prediction and philanthropy. He has served since 2010 on the council of external advisers for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group (NIAC), which supports the most inventive and potentially ground-breaking new endeavors.

Continue reading “A.I. Wars, The Fermi Paradox and Great Filters with David Brin” »