Physicists are exploring how life’s unique information-processing abilities might help us redefine what it means to be alive.
#aliens #robots Welcome to an extraordinary exploration of artificial intelligence and its cosmic counterpart, the astro-chicken! Join me in this mind-blowing video where we delve into the captivating concept of interstellar colonization. You can find my book Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes here on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gravity-Fall… The Cosmic Mystery Tour here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmic-Myste… Artificial intelligences offers the only way to explore the stars. Humans are very delicate and not at all suited to interstellar travel. After all, it is a long long way to the stars. The nearest star is 40 trillion kilometres away. The distance between the stars is too great for it to be feasible to travel so far within human lifespans. The limitations of our biology will prevent us from exploring deep space in person. Although we might like to fantasize about traveling from star system to star system with Captain Kirk, it is almost inconceivable that any humans will ever reach the stars. But maybe there is another way to colonize the galaxy. The British theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson certainly thought so. In the 1960s Dyson, who was one of the architects of quantum electrodynamics — our best theory of electromagnetism — speculated that any sufficiently advanced civilisation would explore the galaxy by launching fleets of autonomous self-replicating robots. There are, of course, many advantages to sending robots rather than humanoids. Robots are more robust than organic lifeforms, they never get bored, and they require far less in the way of maintenance and life support systems. They can survive in harsh environments, and they are adaptable — they can be upgraded. Robots equipped with artificial intelligence could operate autonomously and perform tasks that are impossible for humans, and they could survive indefinitely. Robots could also be miniaturized so they would require far less propulsion to send them on their way. Dyson’s robots would take a blueprint or template that would enable them to create more self-replicating robots. On arrival at a suitable asteroid or planet they would establish a base and set up a means of generating and storing energy. They would then extract and refine minerals and eventually build factories with assembly lines for creating more autonomous robots, each with its own copy of the blueprint, and a propulsion system for the colonization of other star systems. Dyson called these robots astro-chickens. They would travel between the stars as cosmic eggs, hatch on arrival at a suitable destination, then create and disperse the next generation of cosmic eggs. There is no reason, in principle, why super-advanced civilizations could not create such robot explorers. They could attain high speeds as cosmic eggs using some sort of nuclear fusion engine, perhaps. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years. Traveling between stars at a significant fraction of the speed of light, the astro-chickens could colonize the entire galaxy in under one million years, which is not long by astronomical or evolutionary time-scales. So where are the astro-chickens? No artefact of an alien civilization has ever been discovered. But, if alien civilizations exist, it might be easier to find their robot descendants than the original aliens. Maybe they are closer than we think. In fact, I have already created my own design for an autonomous, self-replicating robot, which you can witness here on my laptop. Prepare to be enthralled!
Exoplanets are common in our galaxy, and some even orbit in the so-called habitable zone of their star. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been busy observing a few of these small, potentially habitable planets, and astronomers are now hard at work analyzing Webb data. We invite Drs. Knicole Colón and Christopher Stark, two Webb project scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, to tell us more about the challenges in studying these other worlds:
A potentially habitable planet is often defined as a planet similar in size to Earth that orbits in the ‘habitable zone’ of its star, a location where the planet could have a temperature where liquid water could exist on its surface. We currently know of around 30 planets that may be small, rocky planets like Earth and that orbit in the habitable zone. However, there is no guarantee that a planet that orbits in the habitable zone actually is habitable (it could support life), let alone inhabited (it currently supports life). At the time of writing, there is only one known habitable and inhabited planet—Earth.
The potentially habitable worlds Webb is observing are all transiting exoplanets, meaning their orbits are nearly edge-on so that they pass in front of their host stars. Webb takes advantage of this orientation to perform transmission spectroscopy when the planet passes in front of its star. This orientation allows us to examine the starlight filtered through the atmospheres of planets to learn about their chemical compositions.
Could we identify an alien terraformed planet through the detection of greenhouse gases? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated whether artificial greenhouse gases could be detected from an exoplanet whose alien inhabitants could be attempting to terraform that world, either from trying to control its climate or terraforming an uninhabitable planet into a habitable one. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria and methods for identifying an extraterrestrial civilization, especially with the number of confirmed exoplanets increasing almost weekly.
“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming” said Dr. Edward Schwieterman, who is an Assistant Professor of Astrobiology at the University of California Riverside and lead author of the study. “But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.”
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LIFE after death could in some form be possible if the infinite universe theory is proved to be true, one physicist has claimed.
Using observations by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and many other facilities, two international teams of astronomers have discovered a planet between the sizes of Earth and Venus only 40 light-years away. Multiple factors make it a candidate well-suited for further study using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
TESS stares at a large swath of the sky for about a month at a time, tracking the brightness changes of tens of thousands of stars at intervals ranging from 20 seconds to 30 minutes. Capturing transits — brief, regular dimmings of stars caused by the passage of orbiting worlds — is one of the mission’s primary goals.
“We’ve found the nearest, transiting, temperate, Earth-size world located to date,” said Masayuki Kuzuhara, a project assistant professor at the Astrobiology Center in Tokyo, who co-led one research team with Akihiko Fukui, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. “Although we don’t yet know whether it possesses an atmosphere, we’ve been thinking of it as an exo-Venus, with similar size and energy received from its star as our planetary neighbor in the solar system.”
The SETI Institute has launched a new grants program to support the advancement of technosignature science, utilizing the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a crucial observatory in the search for extraterrestrial technology. This program, the first of its kind, will fund research ranging from observational techniques to theoretical models in technosignature science, with grants available for non-tenured faculty and post-prelim graduate students. Credit: SETI Institute.
The SETI Institute’s new grants program supports advanced research in detecting extraterrestrial technosignatures with grants up to $100,000, leveraging the capabilities of the Allen Telescope Array.
The SETI Institute has introduced a groundbreaking grants program focused on advancing technosignature science. This unique initiative is designed to fund innovative research that tackles essential observational, theoretical, and technical challenges in the quest for technosignatures, which may reveal signs of past or present extraterrestrial technology.
New research suggests stars in the Milky Way give off infrared heat expected from Dyson spheres, which physicist Freeman Dyson theorized could be created by intelligent life.
