Lifeboat Foundation

As scientist extraordinaire and author of an empire of science-fiction books, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the farthest-seeing visionaries of our time. His pithy quotations tug harder than those of most futurists on our collective psyches for their insights into humanity and our unique place in the cosmos. And none do so more than his famous Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This observation stimulated me to think about the impact the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have on science and religion. To that end, I would like to immodestly propose Shermer’s Last Law (I don’t believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book says, the last shall be first and the first shall be last): “Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God.”

God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Because we are far from possessing these traits, how can we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely from an ETI who merely has them copiously relative to us? We can’t. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than we are, then by definition the deity would be an ETI!

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about new explanations of the Fermi paradox focusing on the Hart Tipler Conjecture that tries to disprove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Links:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1975QJRAS…16…128H/abstract.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09575
Potential other resolutions of Fermi paradox:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3xro2jHevk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_B9YP5nEWw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3xro2jHevk.
Hawking radiation: https://youtu.be/6h6MgvBLrxk.
Penrose process: https://youtu.be/A-WIsnoX2Uw.

Continue reading “Where Are All The Alien Robots? Hart-Tipler Conjecture and What It Gets Wrong” »

Will a machine learning AI be the way we find out we are not alone in the Universe?

In a January 2023 published paper in Nature Astronomy, a collaboration by authors from universities in Toronto, Canada, Berkeley in California, Manchester in the United Kingdom, Malta, Queensland and Western Australia, and the SETI Institute, created a machine learning algorithm variational autoencoder, a type of neural network that learns through the unsupervised study of unlabelled data. They used it to try and find technosignatures contained within 150 Terabytes of radio traffic from 820 nearby stars. The data source came from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. This data had previously been searched in 2017 using traditional techniques.

Radio signals are abundant throughout the Universe and they represent the most effective way for us to find out if we are a solo act or one of many technical civilizations. Our contribution to radio traffic has been going on for more than a century which means an alien civilization within a hundred light-years from us with technology similar to ours can now detect us.

Continue reading “Will AI Make First Contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence?” »

A pair of worlds that are just around the corner in cosmic terms look to be in the right spot to potentially host life as we know it.

A report in the February issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics details the discovery of two exoplanets the orbit the red M-dwarf star GJ (or Gliese) 1002 in its habitable zone and are not far off from the mass of Earth.

These two characteristics top the list of things that make another planet worth getting excited about in terms of the odds it might have some sort of critters or even just primitive microorganisms hanging out.

For thousands of years, humanity has wrestled with the idea we may not be alone in our solar system.

Speculation that aliens might exist dates back to philosophers in ancient Greece, but it was the middle of the 20th century when people’s imaginations really began to run riot — suddenly ‘little green men’ were everywhere in popular culture.

The reality is that if extraterrestrial life does exist in our solar system it will be of a more simpler variety, perhaps hidden in Venus’ clouds, beneath Mars’ surface or in the vast underground oceans of one of Saturn’s icy moons.

Continue reading “MailOnline looks at where aliens could exist in our solar system” »

How difficult is it to find life on Mars or elsewhere in the Solar System? Is there only one definition for life or many?

Through a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, aliens could be transmitting signals using the sun, but a quick scan for such signals has turned up nothing.

The Universe has an asymmetry, but that’s a good thing. Imperfections are essential for the existence of stars and even life itself.

Artificial Intelligence or AI more specifically strong AI or artificial superintelligence could possibly be the answer or the solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability of existence. The conundrum for the existence of aliens and more categorically intelligent aliens could be a much simpler solution that we’ve previously thought. To more broadly answer the question of intelligent aliens, we first have to think about whether it’s possible that we are a just a tiny spec in the vastness of space, the only place in the universe where intelligent life found its way to manifest Or maybe there is an abundance of intelligent life out there and we just haven’t found it yet. The search for extraterrestrial life is arguably one of the most all-encompassing scientific quest endeavours of our time. How would we know if we had found alien life? It would be interesting to find something that looks like intelligent alien life, but is not actually alive. It could be a space probe. Or a satellite. We often imagine extraterrestrial life as having a face, because we can’t figure out what it would look like. But if we were to find intelligent alien life, we might not immediately know what it is. Our guesses till recently were random mixtures of biological forms. An advanced civilization however could also be able to engineer machines or digital living forms with the exact same properties as biological forms. A growing number of scientists believe that the aliens we are looking for are in fact AI. It is quite possible that some civilizations could have transcended biology all together to become artificial superintelligence.

#Aliens #AI #ScienceTime.

Continue reading “Could Intelligent Alien Life be AI?” »