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The total solar eclipse of 2024 thrilled millions of people who turned up to watch the celestial event unfold across North America.

The next great eclipse is upon us, with viewers across North America witnessing the moon passing in front of the Sun. It’s an amazing experience, but also an opportunity to do science. Let’s talk about what we can learn from this momentous event.

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Scientific American staffers headed to locations ranging from Texas to Vermont to try to catch a glimpse of the total solar eclipse

Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the “Great Filter.”

The Great Filter is a hypothesized event or situation that prevents intelligent life from becoming interplanetary and interstellar and even leads to its demise. Think climate change, nuclear war, asteroid strikes, supernova explosions, plagues, or any number of other things from the rogue’s gallery of cataclysmic events.

Or how about the rapid development of AI?

A new paper in Acta Astronautica explores the idea that Artificial Intelligence becomes Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and that ASI is the Great Filter. The paper’s title is “Is Artificial Intelligence the Great Filter that makes advanced technical civilizations rare in the universe?” The author is Michael Garrett from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

“Without practical regulation, there is every reason to believe that AI could represent a major threat to the future course of not only our technical civilization but all technical civilizations.”

Michael Garrett, University of Manchester

Some think the Great Filter prevents technological species like ours from becoming multi-planetary. That’s bad because a species is at greater risk of extinction or stagnation with only one home. According to Garrett, a species is in a race against time without a backup planet. “It is proposed that such a filter emerges before these civilizations can develop a stable, multi-planetary existence, suggesting the typical longevity (L) of a technical civilization is less than 200 years,” Garrett writes.

If true, that can explain why we detect no technosignatures or other evidence of ETIs (Extraterrestrial Intelligences.) What does that tell us about our own technological trajectory? If we face a 200-year constraint, and if it’s because of ASI, where does that leave us? Garrett underscores the “…critical need to quickly establish regulatory frameworks for AI development on Earth and the advancement of a multi-planetary society to mitigate against such existential threats.”

An image of our beautiful Earth taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1990. Do we need a backup home? Credit: NASA/JPL

Many scientists and other thinkers say we’re on the cusp of enormous transformation. AI is just beginning to transform how we do things; much of the transformation is behind the scenes. AI seems poised to eliminate jobs for millions, and when paired with robotics, the transformation seems almost unlimited. That’s a fairly obvious concern.

But there are deeper, more systematic concerns. Who writes the algorithms? Will AI discriminate somehow? Almost certainly. Will competing algorithms undermine powerful democratic societies? Will open societies remain open? Will ASI start making decisions for us, and who will be accountable if it does?

This is an expanding tree of branching questions with no clear terminus.

Stephen Hawking (RIP) famously warned that AI could end humanity if it begins to evolve independently. “I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans,” he told Wired magazine in 2017. Once AI can outperform humans, it becomes ASI.

Stephen Hawking was a major proponent for colonizing other worlds, mainly to ensure humanity does not go extinct. In later years, Hawking recognized that AI could be an extinction-level threat. Credit: educatinghumanity.com

Hawking may be one of the most recognizable voices to issue warnings about AI, but he’s far from the only one. The media is full of discussions and warnings, alongside articles about the work AI does for us. The most alarming warnings say that ASI could go rogue. Some people dismiss that as science fiction, but not Garrett.

“Concerns about Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) eventually going rogue is considered a major issue – combatting this possibility over the next few years is a growing research pursuit for leaders in the field,” Garrett writes.

If AI provided no benefits, the issue would be much easier. But it provides all kinds of benefits, from improved medical imaging and diagnosis to safer transportation systems. The trick for governments is to allow benefits to flourish while limiting damage. “This is especially the case in areas such as national security and defence, where responsible and ethical development should be paramount,” writes Garrett.

News reports like this might seem impossibly naive in a few years or decades.

The problem is that we and our governments are unprepared. There’s never been anything like AI, and no matter how we try to conceptualize it and understand its trajectory, we’re left wanting. And if we’re in this position, so would any other biological species that develops AI. The advent of AI and then ASI could be universal, making it a candidate for the Great Filter.

This is the risk ASI poses in concrete terms: It could no longer need the biological life that created it. “Upon reaching a technological singularity, ASI systems will quickly surpass biological intelligence and evolve at a pace that completely outstrips traditional oversight mechanisms, leading to unforeseen and unintended consequences that are unlikely to be aligned with biological interests or ethics,” Garrett explains.

How could ASI relieve itself of the pesky biological life that corrals it? It could engineer a deadly virus, it could inhibit agricultural food production and distribution, it could force a nuclear power plant to melt down, and it could start wars. We don’t really know because it’s all uncharted territory. Hundreds of years ago, cartographers would draw monsters on the unexplored regions of the world, and that’s kind of what we’re doing now.

This is a portion of the Carta Marina map from the year 1539. It shows monsters lurking in the unknown waters off of Scandinavia. Are the fears of ASI kind of like this? Or could ASI be the Great Filter? Image Credit: By Olaus Magnus – http://www.npm.ac.uk/rsdas/projects/carta_marina/carta_marina_small.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=558827

If this all sounds forlorn and unavoidable, Garrett says it’s not.

His analysis so far is based on ASI and humans occupying the same space. But if we can attain multi-planetary status, the outlook changes. “For example, a multi-planetary biological species could take advantage of independent experiences on different planets, diversifying their survival strategies and possibly avoiding the single-point failure that a planetary-bound civilization faces,” Garrett writes.

If we can distribute the risk across multiple planets around multiple stars, we can buffer ourselves against the worst possible outcomes of ASI. “This distributed model of existence increases the resilience of a biological civilization to AI-induced catastrophes by creating redundancy,” he writes.

If one of the planets or outposts that future humans occupy fails to survive the ASI technological singularity, others may survive. And they would learn from it.

Artist’s illustration of a SpaceX Starship landing on Mars. If we can become a multi-planetary species, the threat of ASI is diminished. Credit: SpaceX

Multi-planetary status might even do more than just survive ASI. It could help us master it. Garrett imagines situations where we can experiment more thoroughly with AI while keeping it contained. Imagine AI on an isolated asteroid or dwarf planet, doing our bidding without access to the resources required to escape its prison. “It allows for isolated environments where the effects of advanced AI can be studied without the immediate risk of global annihilation,” Garrett writes.

But here’s the conundrum. AI development is proceeding at an accelerating pace, while our attempts to become multi-planetary aren’t. “The disparity between the rapid advancement of AI and the slower progress in space technology is stark,” Garrett writes.

The difference is that AI is computational and informational, but space travel contains multiple physical obstacles that we don’t yet know how to overcome. Our own biological nature restrains space travel, but no such obstacle restrains AI. “While AI can theoretically improve its own capabilities almost without physical constraints,” Garrett writes, “space travel must contend with energy limitations, material science boundaries, and the harsh realities of the space environment.”

For now, AI operates within the constraints we set. But that may not always be the case. We don’t know when AI might become ASI or even if it can. But we can’t ignore the possibility. That leads to two intertwined conclusions.

If Garrett is correct, humanity must work more diligently on space travel. It can seem far-fetched, but knowledgeable people know it’s true: Earth will not be inhabitable forever. Humanity will perish here by our own hand or nature’s hand if we don’t expand into space. Garrett’s 200-year estimate just puts an exclamation point on it. A renewed emphasis on reaching the Moon and Mars offers some hope.

The Artemis program is a renewed effort to establish a presence on the Moon. After that, we could visit Mars. Are these our first steps to becoming a multi-planetary civilization? Image Credit: NASA

The second conclusion concerns legislating and governing AI, a difficult task in a world where psychopaths can gain control of entire nations and are bent on waging war. “While industry stakeholders, policymakers, individual experts, and their governments already warn that regulation is necessary, establishing a regulatory framework that can be globally acceptable is going to be challenging,” Garrett writes. Challenging barely describes it. Humanity’s internecine squabbling makes it all even more unmanageable. Also, no matter how quickly we develop guidelines, ASI might change even more quickly.

“Without practical regulation, there is every reason to believe that AI could represent a major threat to the future course of not only our technical civilization but all technical civilizations,” Garrett writes.

This is the United Nations General Assembly. Are we united enough to constrain AI? Image Credit: By Patrick Gruban, cropped and downsampled by Pine – originally posted to Flickr as UN General Assembly, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4806869

Many of humanity’s hopes and dreams crystallize around the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter. Are there other civilizations? Are we in the same situation as other ETIs? Will our species leave Earth? Will we navigate the many difficulties that face us? Will we survive?

If we do, it might come down to what can seem boring and workaday: wrangling over legislation.

“The persistence of intelligent and conscious life in the universe could hinge on the timely and effective implementation of such international regulatory measures and technological endeavours,” Garrett writes.

The post Does the Rise of AI Explain the Great Silence in the Universe? appeared first on Universe Today.

This year's first solar eclipse, the total solar eclipse 2024 has officially begun!

An AI program can learn from smartphone users' behaviours in order to send timely pop-up reminders about when to close attention-grabbing apps. The system effectively reduced how often people opened apps such as TikTok

An AI program can learn from smartphone users' behaviours in order to send timely pop-up reminders about when to close attention-grabbing apps. The system effectively reduced how often people opened apps such as TikTok

It's total solar eclipse day, April 8, and we're rounding up the best images of the phenomenon on social media.

Missions to asteroids have been on a tear recently. Visits by Rosetta, Osirix-REX, and Hayabusa2 have all visited small bodies and, in some cases, successfully returned samples to the Earth. But as humanity starts reaching out to asteroids, it will run into a significant technical problem – bandwidth. There are tens of thousands of asteroids in our vicinity, some of which could potentially be dangerous. If we launched a mission to collect necessary data about each of them, our interplanetary communication and control infrastructure would be quickly overwhelmed. So why not let our robotic ambassadors do it for themselves – that’s the idea behind a new paper from researchers at the Federal University of São Paulo and Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

The paper primarily focuses on the control problem of what to do when a spacecraft is approaching a new asteroid. Current missions take months to approach and require consistent feedback from ground teams to ensure the spacecraft understands the parameters of the asteroid it’s approaching – especially the gravitational constant.

Some missions have seen more success with that than others – for example, Philase, the lander that went along with Rosetta, had trouble when it bounced off the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. As the authors pointed out, part of that difference was a massive discrepancy between the actual shape of the comet and the observed shape that telescopes had seen before Rosetta arrived there. 

Fraser discusses the possibility of capturing an asteroid.

Even more successful missions, such as OSIRIS-Rex, take months of lead-up time to complete relatively trivial maneuvers in the context of millions of kilometers their overall journey takes them. For example, it took 20 days for OSIRIX-Rex to perform multiple flybys at 7 km above the asteroid’s surface before its mission control deemed it safe to enter a stable orbit.

One of the significant constraints the mission controllers were looking at was whether they could accurately calculate the gravitational constant of the asteroid they were visiting. Gravity is notoriously difficult to determine from far away, and its miscalculation led to the problems with Philae. So, can a control scheme do to solve all of these problems?

Simply put, it can allow the spacecraft to decide what to do when approaching their target. With a well-defined control scheme, the likelihood of a spacecraft failure due to some unforeseen consequence is relatively minimal. It could dramatically decrease the time missions spend on approach and limit the communication bandwidth back toward mission control on Earth. 

One use case for quick asteroid mission – mining them, as Fraser discusses here.

Such a scheme would also require only four relatively ubiquitous, inexpensive sensors to operate effectively – a LiDAR (similar to those found on autonomous cars), two optical cameras for depth perception, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that measures parameters like orientation, acceleration, and magnetic field. 

The paper spends plenty of time detailing the complex math that would go into the control schema – some of which involve statistical calculations similar to basic learning models. The authors also run trials on two potential asteroid targets of interest to see how the system would perform.

One is already well understood. Bennu was the target of the OSIRIX-Rex mission and, therefore, is well-characterized as asteroids go. According to the paper, with the new control system, a spacecraft could enter a 2000 m orbit within a day of approaching from hundreds of kilometers away, then enter an 800 m orbit the next day. This is compared to the months of preparatory work the actual OSIRIS-Rex mission had to accomplish. And it can be completed with minimal thrust and, more importantly, fuel – a precious commodity on deep-space missions.

Asteroid defense is another important use case for quick asteroid missions – as Isaac Arthus discusses in this video.
Credit – Isaac Arthur

Another demonstration mission is one to Eros, the second-largest asteroid near Earth. It has a unique shape for an asteroid, as it is relatively elongated, which could pose an exciting challenge for automated systems like those described in the paper. Controlling a spacecraft with the new schema for a rendezvous with Eros doesn’t have all the same advantages of a more traditional asteroid like Bennu. For example, it has a much higher thrust requirement and fuel consumption. However, it still shortens the mission time and bandwidth required to operate it.

Autonomous systems are becoming increasingly popular on Earth and in space. Papers like this one push the thinking about what is possible forward. Suppose all that’s required to eliminate months of painstaking manual technical work is to slap a few sensors and implement a new control algorithm. In that case, it’s likely that one of the various agencies and companies planning to rendezvous with an asteroid shortly will adopt that plan.

Learn More:
Negri et al. – Autonomous Rapid Exploration in Close-Proximity of an Asteroid
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity
UT – How to Make Asteroid Landings Safer
UT – A Spacecraft Could use Gravity to Prevent a Dangerous Asteroid Impact

Lead Image:
Artist’s conception of the Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids.
Credit – NASA

The post If We Want to Visit More Asteroids, We Need to Let the Spacecraft Think for Themselves appeared first on Universe Today.

I remember reading about an audacious mission to endeavour to drill through the surface ice of Europa, drop in a submersible and explore the depths below. Now that concept may be taking a step closer to reality with researchers working on technology to do just that. Worlds like Europa are high on the list for exploration due to their potential to harbour life. If technology like the SLUSH probe (Search for Life Using Submersible Head) work then we are well on the way to realising that dream. 

The search for life has always been something to captivate the mind. Think about the diversity of life on Earth and it is easy to see why we typically envisage creatures that rely upon sunlight, food and drink. But on Earth, life has found a way in the most inhospitable of environments, even at the very bottom of the ocean. The Mariana’s Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall and anything that lives there has to cope with cold water, crushingly high pressure and no sunlight. Seems quite alien but even here, life thrives such as the deep-sea crustacean Hirondellea Gigas – catchy name. 

Location of the Mariana Trench. Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Kmusser

Europa, one of the moon’s of Jupiter has an ice crust but this covers over a global ocean of liquid water.  The conditions deep down in the ocean of Europa might not be so very different from those at the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench so it is here that a glimmer of hope exists to find other life in the Solar System. Should it exist, getting to it is the tricky bit. It’s not just on Europa but Enceladus and even Mars may have water underneath ice shelves. Layers of ice up to a kilometre thick might exist so technology like SLUSH has been developed to overcome. 

Natural color image of Europa obtained by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill)

The technology is not too new though since melt probes like SLUSH have been tested before. The idea is beautifully simple.  The thermo-mechanical probe uses a drilling mechanism to break through the ice and then the heat probe to partially melt the ice chips, forming slush to enable their transportation to behind the probe as it descends. 

The probe, which looks rather like a light sabre, is then able to transmit data from the subsurface water back to the lander. A tether system is used for the data transmission using conductive microfilaments and an optical fibre cable. Intriguingly and perhaps even cunningly, should the fibre cable break (which is a possibility due to tidal stresses from the ice) then the microfilaments will work as an antenna.  They can then be tuned into by the lander to resume data transmission. The tether is coiled up and housed inside spools which are left behind in the ice as the spool is emptied. I must confess my immediate thought here was ‘litter’! I accept we have to leave probes in order to explore but surely we can do it without leaving litter behind! However there is a reason for this too. As the spools are deployed, they act as receivers and transmitters to allow the radio frequencies to travel through the ice. 

The company working on the device is Honeybee Robotics have created prototypes. The first was stand alone, had no data transmission capability and demonstrated the drilling and slushing technology in an ice tower in Honeybee’s walk in freezer. While this was underway, the tether communication technology was being tested too with the first version called the Salmon Probe. This was taken to Devon Island in the Arctic where the unspooling method is being put through its paces. The first attempts back in 2022 saw the probe achieving depths of 1.8m! 

A further probe was developed called the Dolphin probe and this was capable of getting to depths of about 100m but sea ice limitations meant it could only get to a depth of 2m! Thus far, all probes have performed well. Honeybee are now working on the Narwhal Probe which will have more measuring equipment on board, a deployable tether and spool and will be far more like the finished product. If all goes to plan it will profile the ice on Devon Island to a depth of 100m.  This is still quite short of the kilometre thick ice expected but it is most definitely fantastic progress toward exploring the cold watery depths of alien worlds. 

Source : SLUSH: AN ICE DRILLING PROBE TO ACCESS OCEAN WORLDS

The post Testing a Probe that Could Drill into an Ice World appeared first on Universe Today.

3 Min Read NASA Names Finalists of the Power to Explore Challenge A word cloud generated from student essay entries. Credits: NASA/Dave Lam NASA has selected the nine finalists of the Power to Explore Challenge, a national competition for K-12 students featuring the enabling power of radioisotopes.

NASA selected nine finalists out of the 45 semifinalist student essays in the Power to Explore Challenge, a national competition for K-12 students featuring the enabling power of radioisotopes. Contestants were challenged to explore how NASA has powered some of its most famous science missions and to dream up how their personal “super power” would energize their success on their own radioisotope-powered science mission.

The competition asked students to learn about NASA’s Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS), a type of “nuclear battery” that the agency uses to explore some of the most extreme destinations in our solar system and beyond. As cities across the United States experience a total solar eclipse, we experience first hand a momentary glimpse into what life would be like without sunlight. This draws attention to how NASA can power missions at destinations that cannot rely on the energy of the Sun, such as deep craters on the Moon and deep space exploration. In 250 words or less, students wrote about a mission of their own enabled by these space power systems and described their own power to achieve their mission goals.

The Power to Explore Challenge offered students the opportunity to learn more about these reliable power systems, celebrate their own strengths, and interact with NASA’s diverse workforce. This year’s contest received 1,787 submitted entries from 48 states and Puerto Rico.

"The RPS Program is so impressed by the ideas and quality of writing that come forth from essays submitted to NASA’s Power to Explore Challenge

Carl Sandifer

Manager, Radioisotope Power Systems Program

“The RPS Program is so impressed by the ideas and quality of writing that come forth from essays submitted to NASA’s Power to Explore Challenge,” said Carl Sandifer, NASA’s manager for the Radioisotope Power Systems Program in Cleveland. “We would like to congratulate the finalists, and we look forward to welcoming the winners to NASA’s Glenn Research Center this summer.”

Entries were split into three categories: grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. Every student who submitted an entry received a digital certificate and an invitation to the Power Up virtual event that announced the semifinalists. Students learned about what powers the NASA workforce to dream big and work together to explore.

Three national finalists in each grade category (nine finalists total) have been selected. In addition to receiving a NASA RPS prize pack, these participants will be invited to an exclusive virtual meeting with a NASA engineer or scientist to talk about their missions and have their space exploration questions answered. Winners will be announced on April 17.

Grades K-4

• Katerine Leon, Long Beach, CA
• Rainie Lin, Lexington, KY
• Zachary Tolchin, Guilford, CT

Grades 5-8

• Aadya Karthik, Redmond, WA
• Andrew Tavares, Bridgewater, MA
• Sara Wang, Henderson, NV

Grades 9-12

• Thomas Liu, Ridgewood, NJ
• Madeline Male, Fairway, KS
• Kailey Thomas, Las Vegas, NV

About the Challenge

The challenge is funded by the Radioisotope Power Systems Program Office in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and administered by Future Engineers under the NASA Open Innovation Services 2 contract. This contract is managed by the NASA Tournament Lab, a part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

Kristin Jansen
NASA’s Glenn Research Center

People with long covid after a serious covid-19 infection have raised levels of many immune molecules in their blood. Better understanding how these molecules can vary could lead to more targeted treatments

People with long covid after a serious covid-19 infection have raised levels of many immune molecules in their blood. Better understanding how these molecules can vary could lead to more targeted treatments

One in three adults have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease – often without knowing. Now we understand what causes this stealthy condition and how to reverse it

One in three adults have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease – often without knowing. Now we understand what causes this stealthy condition and how to reverse it

It has often been likened to talcum powder. The ultra fine lunar surface material known as the regolith is crushed volcanic rock. For visitors to the surface of the Moon it can be a health hazard, causing wear and tear on astronauts and their equipment, but it has potential. The fine material may be suitable for building roads, landing pads and shelters. Researchers are now working to analyse its suitability for a number of different applications.

Back in the summer of 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first visitors from Earth to set foot on the Moon. Now, 55 years on and their footprints are still there. The lack of weathering effects and the fine powdery material have held the footprints in perfect shape since the day they were formed. Once we – and I believe this will happen – establish lunar bases and even holidays to the Moon those footprints are likely still going to be there. 

There are many challenges to setting up permanent basis on the Moon, least of which is getting all the material there. I’ve been embarking on a fairly substantial home renovation over recent years and even getting bags of cement and blocks to site has proved a challenge. Whilst I live in South Norfolk in UK (which isn’t the easiest place to get to I accept) the Moon is even harder to get to. Transporting all the necessary materials over a quarter of a million kilometres of empty space is not going to be easy. Teams of engineers and scientists are looking at what materials can be acquired on site instead of transporting from Earth. 

The fine regolith has been getting a lot of attention for this very purpose and to that end, mineralogist Steven Jacobsen from the Northwestern University has been funded by NASAs Marshall Space Flight Centre to see what it back be used for. In addition NASA has partnered with ICON Technology, a robotics firm to explore lunar building technologies using resources found on the Moon. A key challenge with the lunar regolith though is that samples can vary considerably depending on where they are collected from. Jacobsen is trying to understand this to maximise construction potential. 

ICON were awarded the $57.2 million grant back in November 2022 to develop lunar construction methods. Work had already begun on space based construction, again from ICON in their Project Olympus. This didn’t just focus on the Moon though, Mars was also part of the vision to create construction techniques that could work wherever they were employed. 

Artist’s concept for a lunar base using construction robots and a form of 3D printing contour-crafitng.

3D printing may play a part in the lunar construction approach. It is already being used by ICON and others like them to build houses here on Earth. Employing 3D technology on the Moon using raw lunar material could be one solution. 

One of the first priorities would be to establish a suitable permanent landing area on the Moon. Without it, every time a lander arrives, the fine regolith will get kicked up and disturbed and may very well play havoc with other equipment in the vicinity. The particles can be quite sharp too so it may be quite abrasive on equipment. 

Source : Examining lunar soil for moon-based construction

The post What Could We Build With Lunar Regolith? appeared first on Universe Today.

The atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-76b may rain iron and form a strange, rainbow-like phenomenon called a “glory” never yet seen outside the solar system

An elite athlete’s metabolism mostly looks different from that of a person with COVID—but their occasional similarities can reveal important insights into health and disease

Look for these astronomical and Earthbound phenomena during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024.

The post What to Look For & When During a Total Solar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.