February 22, 2024
What bores you?
What doesn’t?
OK, I guess I’ll play along…
February 14, 2024
A study published this weekend in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyproposes that the oldest star in the Milky Way is a faint white dwarf that is about 10.7 billion years old and shining roughly 90 light years away from Earth.
https://www.popsci.com/science/the-milky-ways-oldest-star-is-a-white-hot-pyre-of-dead-planets/?fbclid=IwAR3smMe_OryfOHbM03X9HZIz9CcFu85LCsmGiNe5vaBh-7678xtPO4VOuxY
The Milky Way is old. Like, really, really old. One of the oldest galaxies.
This is probably what will eventually happen to our solar system. That’s right, everything will turn to rubble and get sucked into the dying Sun.
So, given all that, there’s only one thing for it…
February 13, 2024
“I’ll take ‘Barely Surviving’ for $100, Alec.”
February 12, 2024
Mimas, the smallest and innermost of Saturn‘s major moons, is believed to generate the right amount of heat to support a subsurface ocean of liquid water
https://www.space.com/saturn-moon-mimas-stealth-ocean-world
Unfortunately the “stealth ocean” is only a few million years old, not nearly enough to harbor life.
But it demonstrates the fact that water may in fact be common in space, opening the possibility of finding life on celestial bodies with older (much older) water sources.
(FYI: Mimas orbits Saturn once every 22 hours, and is affected by tidal forces from Saturn that appear to have melted part of its icy surface.)
January 20, 2024
A Japanese robot has successfully touched down on the Moon but problems with its solar power system mean the mission may live for just a few hours.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) put itself gently on the lunar surface near an equatorial crater.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68035314
Or SLIM, if you want to actually write acronyms properly (snark).
Also, it’s JAXA, not Jaxa. And NASA and ESA, not Nasa and Esa. But I digress.
Anyways, kudos but too bad yet another space mission failed. At this point I’m wondering how on Earth NASA managed to land people on the Moon so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s without killing half of them in the process. We can barely manage to get a tiny robot rover the size of a marble to land (see the link above for the picture of the “hopper” and “shape shifting” ball…curious about the “shape shifting” bit…)
December 20, 2023
Aiming the laser at the spacecraft so the transceiver knows where to point back is the most difficult part, Wright said. And because Earth and the spacecraft are both moving, the lasers must point to where the destination will be in a few minutes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/19/nasa-laser-video-streaming-space-mars-cat/
“The beam’s so narrow, it can’t just point to Earth. It needs to know exactly where on Earth,” Wright said. “Trying to hit a dime from a mile away while you’re moving at 17,000 miles an hour — that’s the challenge.”
So NASA has been working on this idea for a while now. The invisible laser beam that carried this video file came from the Psyche probe, on its way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Psyche is 19 million miles away right now. The laser beam took 108 seconds to reach Earth.
Mars and Earth are on average 140 million miles apart and can be up to 250 million miles apart depending on the timing of their respective orbits.
I don’t think lasers are the answer here. A good start, maybe, but you can do the math. Having to wait between 10 to 20 minutes, or more, for a one-way transmission (double that for an exchange of messages) would not be ideal for a human settlement in an emergency.
Star Trek style instant interstellar communication is still just scifi. Unless there’s still something out there we haven’t found yet, even quantum communication will take time…
But at least NASA has finally realized that non-science people like cat videos.
🐈 🐈⬛
December 20, 2023
Sorry, everyone. It’s been a very stressful and exhausting stretch this month.
Family issues, health issues, work issues…
I need a serious break.
October 26, 2023
We compared current scientific theories of what makes humans conscious to compile a list of “indicator properties” that could then be applied to AI systems.
We don’t think systems that possess the indicator properties are definitely conscious, but the more indicators, the more seriously we should take claims of AI consciousness.
https://theconversation.com/why-chatgpt-isnt-conscious-but-future-ai-systems-might-be-212860
Last year, an engineer for Google who was working on what was then called “LaMDA” (later released as “Bard”) claimed that the software had achieved consciousness. He claimed it was like a small child and he could “talk” with it.
He was fired.
Bard, ChatGPT, Baidu, and so forth are advanced chatbots built on what’s called “Large Language Models” (LLM) and can generate text in an instant.
But the programs are not AI, strictly speaking. They have no sentience.
Continue Reading
September 23, 2023
Both Russian and Ukrainian forces are integrating traditional weapons with AI, satellite imaging and communications, as well as smart and loitering munitions, according to a May report from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-partisan U.S. panel of experts. The battlefield is now a patchwork of deep trenches and bunkers where troops have been “forced to go underground or huddle in cellars to survive,” the report said.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/human-machine-teams-driven-by-ai-are-about-reshape-warfare-2023-09-08/
I found it interesting that many people online were commenting about Iain M Bank’s take on AI (for an in-depth analysis of his Culture series check this out on Blood Knife) and how he “predicted” all this.
Uh. You know, I’m not sure whether Banks wrote much about integrating traditional weapons with AI (since I haven’t read his series). But I do know that PK Dick wrote a short story called “Second Variety” about trench warfare and AI robots making more versions of themselves and taking over the world.
He wrote it in 1953.
(You can read it at Project Gutenberg.)
That is waaay before the Culture series.
Sigh. Read the classics, guys.
September 19, 2023
I must explore alone. I will redefine the quality of being alone for generations to come. The word “alone” will no longer suffice — “aloneness,” the feeling human isolation; “alonetivity,” the alienation from society; “subjectivitis,” the alienation from the objective word; “individualreality,” the division from the former self.
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