Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks – Page 67

When did the first humans arise on planet Earth?

By the time our planet was four billion years old, the rise of large plants and animals was just beginning. Complexity exploded around that time, as the combination of multicellularity, sexual reproduction, and other genetic advances brought about the Cambrian explosion. Many evolutionary changes occurred over the next 500 million years, with extinction events and selection pressures paving the way for new forms of life to arise and develop.

65 million years ago, a catastrophic asteroid strike wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but practically every animal weighing over 25 kg (excepting leatherback sea turtles and some crocodiles). This was Earth’s most recent great mass extinction, and it left a large number of niches unfilled in its wake. Mammals rose to prominence in the aftermath, with the first humans arising less than 1 million years ago. Here’s our story.

The Rise and Fall of the Riskiest Asteroid in a Decade — “I’ve Never Seen Such a Risky Object”

For a few tense days this January, a roughly 70-meter asteroid became the riskiest observed in over a decade. Despite the Moon’s attempt to scupper observations, the asteroid is now known to be entirely safe.

Initial observations of an asteroid dubbed ‘2022 AE1’ showed a potential Earth impact on July 4, 2023 – not enough time to attempt deflection and large enough to do real damage to a local area should it strike.

Worryingly, the chance of impact appeared to increase based on the first seven days of observations, followed by a dramatic week ‘in the dark’ as the full Moon outshone the potential impactor, ruling out further observations. As the Moon moved aside, the skies dimmed and ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) took another look, only to find the chance of impact was dramatically falling.

Risks of using AI to grow our food are substantial and must not be ignored, warn researchers

Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities’ worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilizing, monitoring and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up.

A new risk analysis, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers and that are poorly understood and under-appreciated.

“The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction. Large companies are already pioneering the next generation of autonomous ag-bots and decision support systems that will replace humans in the field,” said Dr. Asaf Tzachor in the University of Cambridge’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), first author of the paper.

Iawn: IAWN Home

This group appears to be doing its ‘bit’ for NEO identification and is always open to new members, check it out?

IAWN was established (2013) as a result of the UN-endorsed recommendations for an international response to a potential NEO impact threat, to create an international group of organizations involved in detecting, tracking, and characterizing NEOs. The IAWN is tasked with developing a strategy using well-defined communication plans and protocols to assist Governments in the analysis of asteroid impact consequences and in the planning of mitigation responses.

Astronomers spot a wandering black hole in empty space for the first time

Machine learning can work wonders, but it’s only one tool among many.

Artificial intelligence is among the most poorly understood technologies of the modern era. To many, AI exists as both a tangible but ill-defined reality of the here and now and an unrealized dream of the future, a marvel of human ingenuity, as exciting as it is opaque.

It’s this indistinct picture of both what the technology is and what it can do that might engender a look of uncertainty on someone’s face when asked the question, “Can AI solve climate change?” “Well,” we think, “it must be able to do *something*,” while entirely unsure of just how algorithms are meant to pull us back from the ecological brink.

Such ambivalence is understandable. The question is loaded, faulty in its assumptions, and more than a little misleading. It is a vital one, however, and the basic premise of utilizing one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever built to address the most existential threat it has ever faced is one that warrants our genuine attention.

Full Story:

An international team of researchers has spotted the first isolated black hole that is wandering around in interstellar space.

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