First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don’t learn from history
We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
Sixty-five years ago, in 1958, several government programs that had been pursuing spaceflight combined to form NASA. At the time, I was only 3 years old.
Nearly all life, from bacteria to humans, uses the same genetic code. This code acts as a dictionary, translating genes into the amino acids used to build proteins. The universality of the genetic code indicates a common ancestry among all living organisms and the essential role this code plays in the structure, function and regulation of biological cells.
A congressional subcommittee met on June 26, 2023, to hear testimony from several military officers who allege the government is concealing evidence of UFOs. By holding a hearing on UFOs – now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena” by government agencies – the subcommittee sought to understand whether these UAPs pose a threat to national security.
Making art using artificial intelligence isn’t new. It’s as old as AI itself.
My colleagues and I have used a tool from economics to measure the costs and benefits of wearing an exoskeleton, and we found that it offers a modest average benefit of US$3.40 per hour while walking uphill, when considering the combined effects of the assistance and device weight. This modest value is in contrast to the value of the assistance alone, which was much greater, at $19.80 per hour. These values were derived using our novel approach, which subtracts the values of the costs and benefits.
A light, cheap space telescope design would make it possible to put many individual units in space at once.
Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of the solar system to date. The grand question is whether any of these planets are home to life. To find the answer, astronomers will likely need more powerful telescopes than exist today.