Sixty-three percent. That’s the proportion of mammal species that vanished from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 30 million years ago, after Earth’s climate shifted from swampy to icy. But we are only finding out about it now. — HeritageDaily — Archaeology News.
“To slow the ongoing loss of animal and plant life in the United States, President Biden signed an executive order in January 2,021 stating his administration’s goal to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and water by 2030. This bold, science-based initiative – America the Beautiful – is the first ever nationwide conservation effort to address both climate change and biodiversity loss.” https://www.futuretimeline.net/images/robot-future-timeline.jpg
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has declared 23 species extinct, due to a combination of development, invasive species, logging and pollution.
The agency is recommending that the species be removed from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the primary law in the United States for protecting and recovering imperilled organisms and the ecosystems they depend on. For the animals proposed for delisting, the protections of the ESA came too late.
Continue reading “23 species declared extinct in the U.S.” »
What if none of this is real? What if everything we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and perceive is part of a gigantic simulation designed to keep us contained? And what if the beings who built this simulation are part of a highly advanced alien species that created the simulation so they could study us and keep us under control.
This is the essence of the “Zoo Hypothesis,” which is a proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox. It is also sometimes referred to as the “Planetarium Hypothesis” as a way of clarifying that the intention of the big simulation is not to protect but to control. Moreover, the zookeepers in this scenario have designed the simulation so that humanity won’t suspect they are living in a cage.
Brief summary of this episode:
- (1:35) OpenAI: AI Beneficial for All.
- (7:15) AI as an existential risk.
- (11:47) Safe AI development.
- (16:16) Neuralink — “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.“
- (19:04) The Future of AI
Continue reading “OpenAI & Neuralink: Shaping Our AI Future” »
Circa 2018
The birth of the world’s first “test-tube” lion cubs have sparked hope that the some of the world’s most endangered big cat species could be saved from extinction.
The male and female lion cubs were born in South Africa last week and mark the first time a successful pregnancy has been achieved through artificial insemination.
Continue reading “Test-tube lion cubs spark hope endangered species could be saved” »
A giant asteroid almost hit earth on September 16 but because it came from the direction of the sun, scientists missed it.
If you heard a whooshing noise recently, you weren’t imagining it—there was indeed a gigantic asteroid that almost hit earth this month. And NASA didn’t see it coming.
Continue reading “A huge asteroid almost hit earth but NASA didn’t detect it until a day later” »
Talk about comets or asteroids coming anywhere near us and mind immediately goes back to what happened to dinosaurs. It just needed a space rock to end the reign of those fearsome reptiles who dominated nearly the entire foodchain. The asteroid that killed dinosaurs was just 10 kilometres across. But now a comet larger than Mars’s moons is speeding up toward the solar system.
Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is a mammoth! Remember Hale-Bopp? The comet that went around us in the year 1997? It was called a massive comet. And Bernardinelli-Bernstein is 10 times the mass of Hale-Bopp.
Also Read | NASA posts image of ‘Hand of God’, netizens are awestruck.
“DeepGreen is offering a false or dystopian choice,” Deep Sea Conservation Coalition cofounder Matthew Gianni told The Guardian.
Dangling the possibility of widespread electric vehicle adoption by securing the resources necessary to manufacture more and better batteries is certainly tantalizing. But scientists told The Guardian that getting those metals from the seafloor — especially with machines that would cause a poorly-understood environmental impact in an area that’s nearly impossible to monitor and regulate — would come at too great a cost.
“There are some very significant questions being raised by scientists about the impacts of ocean mining,” University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Douglas McCauley told The Guardian. “How much extinction could be generated? How long will it take these extremely low-resilience systems to recover? What impact will it have on the ocean’s capacity to capture carbon?”
Not sure if this is new or not. We all know about the Carrington event, but it looks like tree rings reveal a number of much more massive events in the past 10,000 years — perhaps 10 times as strong as the Carrington event, perhaps 100 times or more. (This particular article only references the lower estimates.)
Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the Sun.
A new group is seeking to warn European policymakers about AI’s ‘existential’ threat to humanity.
