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1 week ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
In an interview last night, I was asked two scientific questions. First, there was the news report about the discovery of the `strongest evidence yet’ of life on a distant planet, K2–18b. I was asked: “If life is confirmed there, what would be the next step? Should we try to establish some sort of contact?
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1 week ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
In a recent WORLD.MINDS forum led by the brilliant Rolf Dobelli, I had asked the creative MIT professor Daniela Rus: “As of now, our main goal is to align artificial intelligence (AI) systems with our objectives. But we also know that the human brain is shaped by its interactions with the environment. If our future interactions will be mostly with AI systems, how will AI shape the human brain?”Both Daniela and Rolf confessed that this is a profound question that needs to be studied further.
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1 week ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
Why should Government officials be the ones who are tasked with telling us what lies outside the Solar system? After all, this is the job definition of astronomers. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) currently chairs a Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which among various unresolved mysteries plans to also investigate Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).
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1 week ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
Today’s infants constitute the first generation of humans who will live their entire life under the shadow of artificial intelligence (AI). Content on digital screens might always surpass their cognitive capabilities because by the time they are ten years old, AI will be more capable than humans on most cognitive tasks. Centuries ago, religions placed humans as inferior beings under the supremacy of God.
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2 weeks ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
On February 1, 1993, about 32 years ago, I arrived on my first day as a junior faculty member to my new office at Harvard University. A young student was waiting by the door. He spoke politely and introduced himself: “My name is Daniel Eisenstein. I am a graduate student at the Harvard Physics department and was waiting for your arrival. Would you be willing to mentor me as a PhD student on theoretical research in cosmology?” I replied: “Of course.
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2 weeks ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
It is conceivable that the Earth-mass planet Proxima b, which lies in the habitable zone of the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, hosts a civilization similar to ours. Owing to minor differences between their and our history, it is possible that they had reached our current technological state slightly in advance. Consider a tiny margin of head start for Proxima b science, of order 0.00002 of the age of the Earth.
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2 weeks ago | 
thedebrief.org | Avi Loeb
The alarming news from the recent DESI data on the expansion of the Universe is that the energy density of the vacuum might not have been constant over the past ten billion years. Stability has its virtues. Right now, life is fun under the Sun. But even as the Sun will die in 7.6 billion years, the most abundant dwarf stars will continue to serve as nuclear furnaces for habitable-zone planets over the upcoming trillions of years.
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2 weeks ago | 
thedebrief.org | Avi Loeb
One of the most exciting breakthroughs in astronomy over the past decade was the detection of gravitational waves. Since the days of Galileo Galilei, astronomy was about the detection of electromagnetic signals with telescopes. As it turns out, the main constituents of the Universe are not observable in that way. Our current data indicates that 85% of the matter in the Universe is invisible electromagnetically, constituting dark matter.
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2 weeks ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
Avi Loeb·Follow4 min read·--(Image credit: Wikimedia)The alarming news from the recent DESI data on the expansion of the Universe is that the energy density of the vacuum might not have been constant over the past ten billion years. Stability has its virtues. Right now, life is fun under the Sun. But even as the Sun will die in 7.6 billion years, the most abundant dwarf stars will continue to serve as nuclear furnaces for habitable-zone planets over the upcoming trillions of years.
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2 weeks ago | 
avi-loeb.medium.com | Avi Loeb
Avi Loeb·Follow5 min read·--Sensitivity of existing and future gravitational wave observatories in terms of spacetime strain as a function of frequency. (Image credit: Sabin et al. 2015)One of the most exciting breakthroughs in astronomy over the past decade was the detection of gravitational waves. Since the days of Galileo Galilei, astronomy was about the detection of electromagnetic signals with telescopes. As it turns out, the main constituents of the Universe are not observable this way.
