Lifeboat Foundation

This is an issue that the character Ye Wenjie wrestles with in the first episode of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. Working at a radio observatory, she does finally receive a message from a member of an alien civilization—telling her they are a pacifist and urging her not to respond to the message or Earth will be attacked.

The series will ultimately offer a detailed, elegant solution to the Fermi Paradox, but we will have to wait until the second season.

Or you can read the second book in Cixin Liu’s series, The Dark Forest. Without spoilers, the explanation set out in the books runs as follows: “The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound.”

As we go on with our everyday lives, it’s very easy to forget about the sheer size of the universe.

The Earth may seem like a mighty place, but it’s practically a grain within a grain of sand in a universe that is estimated to contain over 200 billion galaxies. That’s something to think about the next time you take life too seriously.

So when we gaze up into the starry night sky, we have every reason to be awestruck—and overwhelmed with curiosity. With the sheer size of the universe and the number of galaxies, stars, and planets in it, surely there are other sentient beings out there. But how come we haven’t heard from them?

Keywords: With sufficiently advanced SETI, we might discover brief broadcasts or occasional episodes of minor galactic engineering occurring in small portions of a very few galaxies. But because of the acceleration of complexification and the vast distances between civilizations, it seems impossible that even an earliest-to-emerge civilization, however oligarchic, could prevent multi-local transcensions in any galaxy. In theory, one can imagine a contrarian civilization releasing interstellar probes, carefully designed not to increase their intelligence (and so, never be able to transcend) as they replicate. But what could such probes do besides extinguish primitive life? They certainly couldn’t prevent multilocal transcensions. There seems no game theoretic value to such a strategy, in a universe dominated by accelerating transcension. Finally, if constrained transcension is the overwhelming norm, we should have much greater success searching for the norm, not the rare exception. As Cirkovic (2008) and Shostak (2010) have recently argued, we need SETI strategies that focus on places where advanced postbiological civilizations are likely to live. In the transcension hypothesis, this injunction would include using optical SETI to discover the galactic transcension zone, and define its outward-growing edge. We should look for rapid and artificial processes of formation of planet-mass black holes, for leakage signals and early METI emanating from life-supporting planets, and for the regular cessation of these signals as or soon after these civilizations enter into their technological singularities.

9.

From a new AI challenger to Google search to an nearly indestructible robot hand, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

The founders of Perelel, which sells prenatal vitamins, say charitable giving is baked into their business model. Today they’re making good on that promise.

Researchers develop a precise method for patterning gold nanoparticles on surfaces using DNA origami and electron beam lithography, enabling tunable plasmonic metasurfaces.

Discover bottom-up nanotechnology: precision construction of nanostructures for breakthroughs in medicine, electronics, and beyond.

Researchers at the University of Basel have developed a new method for calculating phase diagrams of physical systems that works similarly to ChatGPT. This artificial intelligence could even automate scientific experiments in the future.

A year and a half ago, ChatGPT was released, and ever since, there has been hardly anything that cannot be created with this new form of artificial intelligence: texts, images, videos, and even music. ChatGPT is based on so-called generative models, which, using a complex algorithm, can create something entirely new from known information.

A research team led by Professor Christoph Bruder at the University of Basel, together with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, have now used a similar method to calculate phase diagrams of physical systems.

Creating robots to safely aid disaster victims is one challenge; executing flexible robot control that takes advantage of the material’s softness is another. The use of pliable soft materials to collaborate with humans and work in disaster areas has drawn much recent attention. However, controlling soft dynamics for practical applications has remained a significant challenge.

In collaboration with the University of Tokyo and Bridgestone Corporation, Kyoto University has now developed a method to control pneumatic artificial muscles, which are soft robotic actuators. Rich dynamics of these drive components can be exploited as a computational resource.

Artificial muscles control rich soft component dynamics by using them as a computational resource. (Image: MEDICAL FIG.)