A newly discovered asteroid called 2023 DW has generated quite a buzz over the past week due to an estimated 1-in-670 chance of impact on Valentine’s Day 2046. But despite a NASA advisory and the resulting scary headlines, there’s no need to put an asteroid doomsday on your day planner for that date.

The risk assessment doesn’t have as much to do with the probabilistic roll of the cosmic dice as it does with the uncertainty that’s associated with a limited set of astronomical observations. If the case of 2023 DW plays out the way all previous asteroid scares have gone over the course of nearly 20 years, and further observations will reduce the risk to zero.

Nevertheless, the hubbub over a space rock that could be as wide as 165 feet (50 meters) highlights a couple of trends to watch for: We’re likely to get more of these asteroid alerts in the years to come, and NASA is likely to devote more attention to heading off potentially dangerous near-Earth objects, or NEOs.

The recent observations prove that not all asteroids are boring objects simply hanging out in space.

Gone are the days when we believed asteroids to be just large rocks hanging out in space. As space exploration has progressed, we have come to note that they are much more complex than that.

A great example of this is the asteroid Didymos, which according to a new study published on Monday, is literally spitting rocks into outer space due to the excessive speeds at which it is spinning.

Didymos has been studied for quite some time now in preparation for NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and the European Space Agency’s Hera mission.

ESA

So what would happen if we ever came face to face with such an apocalyptic scenario?

Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman want to live forever, here’s how they’re planning on doing it and what it could mean for society.

First ‘long form’ video I have made in awhile. Very excited to get back into it and play around with different ways of styles and editing. Excited to hear what you guys think!

Chapters.
0:00 Introduction.
0:35 The Epic of Gilgamesh.
1:23 The Anti-Aging Industry.
1:59 Billionaire Life Extension.
3:17 Digital Heaven.
3:40 The Immortal Animal.
4:25 Impacts on Society.
5:25 The Great Equalizer.

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In a universe with more than a hundred billion billion planets, why have we only found life on one? DEAD SPACE offers a terrifying reason why: gigantic “Brethren Moons” made of meat with an unrelenting hunger for biomass.

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A post-apocalyptic exhibit features an AI that expresses remorse for being the reason for the near-extinction of humanity.

The beating heart of tech-revolution, a museum in San Francisco, has visualized a memorial to the extinction of the human race, considering the fast and significant advances coming in artificial intelligence.

The pieces in the temporary exhibition combine the frightening with the humorous.

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“Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum”, a new exhibit on the controversial technology.

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If the end of the world is nigh, it may be too late to avert a catastrophe. So what can we do to mitigate the damage or recover after a cataclysm comes?

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▬ Cataclysm Index ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
0:00 — Intro.
03:43 — Nuclear War.
11:24 — Asteroid.
15:34 — Supernova.
18:34 — Gamma Ray Burst.
21:51 — Massive Climate Shift.
23:15 — Snowball Earth.
24:34 — Super Volcano.
28:51 — BioWar.
30:46 — Zombie Apocalypse.
32:25 — Robots / AI
35:10 — Alien Invasions.

Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: Episode’s Audio-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/journey-to-alpha-centauri.
Episode’s Narration-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/journey-to-alp…ation-only.

Credits:
Surviving An Apocalypse.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 385a, March 12, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:
Briana Brownell.
David McFarlane.
Lukas Konecny.

Fungi are everywhere—in our lawns and forests, in and on our bodies, and even lurking in that forgotten Tupperware container in the back of the fridge. While some fungi are harmful, the vast majority are beneficial to their environments and serve important ecological roles.

Some fungi act as parasites, infecting their hosts and sickening or even killing them. Common human ailments such as ringworm and athlete’s foot are caused by fungi. Pathogenic fungi like rusts and mildews regularly cause costly damage to important agricultural crops. Chestnut blight, Cryphonectria parasitica, was inadvertently introduced to North America from Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century and in a few short decades wiped out billions of chestnut trees in the United States, nearly causing their extinction. Fungi even attack other fungi. Hypomyces lactifluorum parasitizes species of Lactarius and Russula, transforming them into the choice edible known as the lobster mushroom.

Hands down, though, the fungal parasites that infect insects have to be among the most bizarre. These fungi keep their insect hosts alive but take complete control of their actions, using them as zombie minions to spread their spores for them.

A comet that will make a (somewhat) close approach to the Earth in September 2024 is already creating excitement among amateur astronomers. Comets are unpredictable beasts, and a great many have proven disappointing – but C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) has many of the characteristics required to put on the best display for at least a decade.

Comets visit the inner solar system quite frequently, but few can be seen with the naked eye. Most are either regular visitors (short period) that have been slowly losing material on previous approaches to the Sun and don’t have enough left to be very bright. Others never get close enough to Earth to put on a show.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passes both those tests. Its orbit is so long it there is debate as to whether it visited the inner solar system 80,000 years ago, or if it never has. At closest approach, it will be 58 million kilometers (36 million miles) or just under 0.39 AU (Earth-Sun distance) from the Earth.

By understanding how asteroids function, we can know more about how to knock them off course.

The DART mission moved an asteroid, setting the stage for planetary defense strategies that could avoid collision with more dangerous objects.

This larger-than-expected result shows the change in Dimorphos’ orbit was not just from the impact of the DART spacecraft. The larger part of the change was due to a recoil effect from all the ejected material flying off into space, which Ariel Graykowski of the SETI Institute and colleagues estimated as between 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent of the asteroid’s total mass.

A First Success

The success of NASA’s DART mission is the first demonstration of our ability to protect Earth from the threat of hazardous asteroids.