Lifeboat Foundation

Diverse and full of sea life, the Earth’s Devonian era—taking place more than 370 million years ago—saw the emergence of the first seed-bearing plants, which spread as large forests across the continents of Gondwana and Laurussia.

However, a mass extinction event near the end of this era has long been the subject of debate. Some scientists argue the Late Devonian mass extinction was caused by large-scale volcanic eruptions, causing global cooling. Others argue a mass deoxygenation event caused by the expansion of land plants was to blame.

A recently published study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment led by researchers at IUPUI now posits that both factors played a role—and draws attention to the environmental tipping points the planet faces today.

The development of artificial intelligence poses potential risks to society and requires a shift in goal definitions, consideration of the motivational landscape, and wisdom to prevent self-extinction and promote sustainability.

On this episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger returns to discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence.

Continue reading “Risks of Artificial Intelligence & Shifting Goal Definitions” »

Micrometeorites, tiny space rocks, may have helped deliver nitrogen, a vital life ingredient, to Earth during our solar system’s early days. This finding was published in Nature Astronomy on November 30 by an international research team, including scientists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Kyoto University. They discovered that nitrogen compounds like ammonium salts are common in material from regions distant from the sun. However, how these compounds reached Earth’s orbit was unclear.

The study suggests that more nitrogen compounds were transported near Earth than previously thought. These compounds could have contributed to life on our planet. The research was based on material collected from the asteroid Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2020. Ryugu, a small sun-orbiting rocky object, is carbon-rich and has experienced considerable space weathering due to micrometeorite impacts and solar charged ions.

The scientists studied the Ryugu samples to understand the materials reaching Earth’s orbit. They used an electron microscope and found the Ryugu samples’ surface covered with tiny iron and nitrogen minerals. They theorized that micrometeorites carrying ammonia compounds collided with Ryugu. This collision sparked chemical reactions on magnetite, resulting in iron nitride formation.

The potential impact of generative AI on the economy, society, and work is polarizing, swinging from the positive benefits of a technological revolution to doomsday scenarios. The authors have come to think about this issue as points on a spectrum and have created a sports analogy to help think about it: AI tools can range from steroids, to sneakers, to a coach, each representing a different relationship between human users and the technology. Steroids elevate short-term performance, but leave you worse off in the long term. AI-powered tools can instead be used to augment people’s skills and make them more productive — much like a good running sneaker. On the most desirable end of the spectrum, AI-powered tools can be used like a coach that improves people’s own capabilities. This framework can be used to help conceptualize how we might craft AI-based tools that enhance rather than diminish human capabilities.

Page-utils class= article-utils—vertical hide-for-print data-js-target= page-utils data-id= tag: blogs.harvardbusiness.org, 2007/03/31:999.368607 data-title= A Sports Analogy for Understanding Different Ways to Use AI data-url=/2023/12/a-sports-analogy-for-understanding-different-ways-to-use-ai data-topic= AI and machine learning data-authors= Jake M. Hofman; Daniel G. Goldstein; David M. Rothschild data-content-type= Digital Article data-content-image=/resources/images/article_assets/2023/11/Nov23_22_200404124-001-383x215.jpg data-summary=

Will next-gen tools be used as a steroid, sneaker, or coach?

To address the long-standing debate about whether a massive asteroid impact or volcanic activity caused the extinction of dinosaurs and numerous other species 66 million years ago, a team at Dartmouth College took an innovative approach — they removed scientists from the debate and let the computers decide.

The researchers report in the journal Science a new modeling method powered by interconnected processors that can work through reams of geological and climate data without human input. They tasked nearly 130 processors with analyzing the fossil record in reverse to pinpoint the events and conditions that led to the Cretaceous –Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event that cleared the way for the ascendance of mammals, including the primates that would lead to early humans.

Another event — volcanic eruptions — might have played a major role in wiping out the dinosaurs.

Ugurhan/iStock.

Two main events that could be responsible for all the chaos happened at the same time: massive volcanic activity called the Deccan Traps in India and Seychelles and a huge meteorite hitting Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater in Mexico.

Continue reading “What caused dinosaurs’ demise? Study says it wasn’t only asteroids” »

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In the grand theater of the cosmos, amidst a myriad of distant suns and ancient galaxies, the Fermi Paradox presents a haunting silence, where a cacophony of alien conversations should exist. Where is Everyone? Or are we alone?

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“The world isn’t doing terribly well in averting global ecological collapse,” says Dr. Florian Rabitz, a chief researcher at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania, the author of a new monograph, “Transformative Novel Technologies and Global Environmental Governance,” recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, chemical pollution, and more are threatening the Earth’s future. Despite decades of international agreements and countless high-level summits, success in forestalling this existential crisis has remained elusive, says Dr. Rabitz.

In his new monograph, the KTU researcher delves into the intersection of cutting-edge technological solutions and the global environmental crisis. The author explores how international institutions respond (or fail to respond) to high-impact technologies that have been the subject of extensive debate and controversy.

I suggest two responses to this difficult challenge for the United States and its allies: At the time of attack, the allies should respond with nonnuclear retaliation as long as politically feasible, in order to prevent further nuclear escalation. However, this will be difficult given the likely post-strike panic and hysteria. So, in preparation, the US should deconcentrate its northeast Asian conventional footprint, to reduce North Korean opportunities to engage in nuclear blackmail regarding regional American clusters of military equipment and personnel, and to reduce potential US casualties and consequent massive retaliation pressures if North Korea does launch a nuclear attack.

North Korean first-use incentives. The incentives for North Korea to use nuclear weapons first in a major conflict are powerful:

Operationally, North Korea will likely have only a very short time window to use its weapons of mass destruction. The Americans will almost certainly try to immediately suppress Northern missiles. An imminent, massive US-South Korea disarming strike creates an extreme use-it-or-lose-it dilemma for Pyongyang. If Kim Jong-Un does not use his nuclear weapons at the start of hostilities, most will be destroyed a short time later by allied airpower, turning an inter-Korean conflict into a conventional war that the North will probably lose. Frighteningly, this may encourage Kim to also release his strategic nuclear weapons almost immediately after fighting begins.