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Why Have We Not Found Any Aliens? — with Keith Cooper

After six decades of examining signals from space, why have we yet to discover evidence of extra-terrestrial life?
Keith’s book “The Contact Paradox: Challenging our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” is available now — https://geni.us/JFpy.

For the past six decades a small cadre of researchers have been on a quest, as part of SETI, to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, SETI has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but with more than a hundred billion stars in our Galaxy alone to search, the odds of quick success are stacked against us.

Keith Cooper explores how far SETI has come since its modest beginnings, where it’s going and the assumptions that we make in our search for extraterrestrial life.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/_qEjTXrQ7vs.

Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor. Since 2006 Keith has been the Editor of Astronomy Now, and he is also the Editor of Astrobiology Magazine. In addition he has written on numerous space-and physics-related topics, from exploding stars to quantum computers, for Centauri Dreams, New Scientist, Physics World, physicsworld.com and Sky and Telescope. He holds a BSc in Physics with Astrophysics from the University of Manchester.

This talk was filmed in the Ri on 22 November 2019.

Traces of ancient ocean discovered on Mars

A recently released set of topography maps provides new evidence for an ancient northern ocean on Mars. The maps offer the strongest case yet that the planet once experienced sea-level rise consistent with an extended warm and wet climate, not the harsh, frozen landscape that exists today.

“What immediately comes to mind as one the most significant points here is that the existence of an ocean of this size means a higher potential for life,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on the study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

“It also tells us about the ancient climate and its evolution. Based on these findings, we know there had to have been a period when it was warm enough and the atmosphere was thick enough to support this much liquid water at one time.”

Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Earth

We continue our look at possible explanations why life may be very rare in the Universe by examining our planet itself, and looking at which of its characteristic might be important to intelligence developing and how improbable those traits are for a given planet in a given solar system.

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Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/fermi-paradox-…rare-earth.
Cover Art by Jakub Grygier: https://www.artstation.com/artist/jakub_grygier.

Graphics Team:
Edward Nardella.
Jarred Eagley.
Justin Dixon.
Katie Byrne.
Misho Yordanov.
Murat Mamkegh.
Pierre Demet.
Sergio Botero.
Stefan Blandin.

Script Editing:
Andy Popescu.
Connor Hogan.
Edward Nardella.
Eustratius Graham.
Gregory Leal.
Jefferson Eagley.
Luca de Rosa.
Michael Gusevsky.
Mitch Armstrong.
MolbOrg.
Naomi Kern.
Philip Baldock.
Sigmund Kopperud.
Steve Cardon.
Tiffany Penner.

Music:
Lombus, “Cosmic Soup“
Markus Junnikkala, “A Memory of Earth“
AJ Prasad, “Aether“
Lombus, “Hydrogen Sonata“
Dan McLeod, NeptuneUK, “Mysterious Universe“
Kevin MacLeod, “Spacial Winds”

Will AI Reveal Extraterrestrial Intelligence Far Beyond Our Level of Consciousness?

“Machine learning provides a way of providing almost human-like intuition to huge data sets. One valuable application is for tasks where it’s difficult to write a specific algorithm to search for something—human faces, for instance, or perhaps ” something strange,” wrote astrophysicist and Director of the Penn State University Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, Jason Wright in an email to The Daily Galaxy. ” In this case, you can train a machine-learning algorithm to recognize certain things you expect to see in a data set,” Wright explains, ” and ask it for things that don’t fit those expectations, or perhaps that match your expectations of a technosignature.

Crowdsourcing Alien Structures

For instance,’ Wright notes, theoretical physicist Paul Davies has suggested crowdsourcing the task of looking for alien structures or artifacts on the Moon by posting imaging data on a site like Zooniverse and looking for anomalies. Some researchers (led by Daniel Angerhausen) have instead trained machine-learning algorithms to recognize common terrain features, and report back things it doesn’t recognize, essentially automating that task. Sure enough, the algorithm can identify real signs of technology on the Moon—like the Apollo landing sites!

Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Intelligence

We conclude our look at possible explanations why life may be very rare in the Universe by looking at the evolutionary pathway to intelligence and the hurdles between life starting on a planet and migrating off of it.

Use my link http://www.audible.com/isaac and get a free audio book with a 30 day trial!

Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
Join the Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1583992725237264/
Support the Channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IsaacArthur.
Visit the sub-reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/
Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/rare-intelligence.
Cover Art by Jakub Grygier: https://www.artstation.com/artist/jakub_grygier.

Graphics Team:
Edward Nardella.
Jarred Eagley.
Justin Dixon.
Katie Byrne.
Kris Holland of Mafic Stufios: www.maficstudios.com.
Misho Yordanov.
Pierre Demet.
Sergio Botero: https://www.artstation.com/sboterod?fref=gc.
Stefan Blandin.

Script Editing:
Andy Popescu.
Connor Hogan.
Edward Nardella.
Eustratius Graham.
Gregory Leal.
Jefferson Eagley.
Luca de Rosa.
Mark Warburton.
Michael Gusevsky.
Mitch Armstrong.
MolbOrg.
Naomi Kern.
Philip Baldock.
Sigmund Kopperud.
Steve Cardon.
Tiffany Penner.

Music:

Human-Like Alien Species Are Likely Living In the Far Reaches of the Universe

If conditions on a distant planet allowed life to flourish, would it look anything like life here on Earth? It’s a question that’s seen a Darwinian rise of contradictory theories over the years.

Now, in an interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge, says “with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other parts of the universe.

Alien life: Leaking radio waves and hidden megastructures could hint at extraterrestrials

Could we describe and search for proof of technology originating from outside of Earth?

If an alien were to look at Earth, many human technologies — from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs — could be a beacon signifying the presence of life.

We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem. iStock.

Andrej Karpathy: Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #333

Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He’s the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings.
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EPISODE LINKS:
Andrej’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/karpathy.
Andrej’s YouTube: http://youtube.com/c/AndrejKarpathy.
Andrej’s Website: http://karpathy.ai.
Andrej’s Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=l8WuQJgAAAAJ
Books mentioned:
The Vital Question: https://amzn.to/3q0vN6q.
Life Ascending: https://amzn.to/3wKIsOE
The Selfish Gene: https://amzn.to/3TCo63s.
Contact: https://amzn.to/3W3y5Au.
The Cell: https://amzn.to/3W5f6pa.

PODCAST INFO:
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 — Introduction.
0:58 — Neural networks.
6:01 — Biology.
11:32 — Aliens.
21:43 — Universe.
33:34 — Transformers.
41:50 — Language models.
52:01 — Bots.
58:21 — Google’s LaMDA
1:05:44 — Software 2.0
1:16:44 — Human annotation.
1:18:41 — Camera vision.
1:23:46 — Tesla’s Data Engine.
1:27:56 — Tesla Vision.
1:34:26 — Elon Musk.
1:39:33 — Autonomous driving.
1:44:28 — Leaving Tesla.
1:49:55 — Tesla’s Optimus.
1:59:01 — ImageNet.
2:01:40 — Data.
2:11:31 — Day in the life.
2:24:47 — Best IDE
2:31:53 — arXiv.
2:36:23 — Advice for beginners.
2:45:40 — Artificial general intelligence.
2:59:00 — Movies.
3:04:53 — Future of human civilization.
3:09:13 — Book recommendations.
3:15:21 — Advice for young people.
3:17:12 — Future of machine learning.
3:24:00 — Meaning of life.

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