Host
Terrance Vargas
Podcast Content
CLOSE The New York Times and CNN report that a government report on UFOs has provided no evidence that aliens have not been ruled out as a possibility. When scientist Enrico Fermi sat down for lunch in Los Alamos a few hundred years ago, laughing at recent reports of flying saucers and discussing the chances of intelligent alien life, he asked a now famous question. Speculation about the afterlife occurs at a time when the recent discovery of two interstellar objects hitting past the Earth has sparked a surge in interest among scientists in space travel and alien civilizations.
These reports have been linked to the long history of alleged UFO sightings and abductions of extraterrestrials, but several astrophysicists say they are skeptical of reports of alien life. Many SETI scientists agree that UFOs are far from the first discovery of extraterrestrials outside our own solar system. As for UFOs, SETI scientists agree that a UFO sighting could be a real sighting of an alien, a robotic probe, or a ship with biological crew.
You don't have to be a space engineer to satisfy your curiosity about possible alien life. Instead of hunting for life on other planets, most scientists stick to what they know: search for earth-sized worlds orbiting sun-like stars. When extraterrestrial beings are out there, AI and self-driving cars could pull them out of hiding.
She and Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, are working with presumably alien planet hunters on the same kind of technology humans have used to uncover more than 4,400 planets orbiting distant stars. Researchers at Washington State University have identified over 20 planets outside of our solar system that could sustain life beyond Earth - but don't pack your bags as some are over 100 light-years away. A few planets more massive than Earth orbit faint stars dozens of light years away.
If we were to live with the same technology as humans, it would not be detectable on Earth. In this sense, humans would be aware that aliens could travel to us in the age of self-driving vehicles. But it is important to be aware that these vehicles would drive around with people as occupants most of the time.
The third reason why aliens could trigger the advent of AI rests on the part of the equation that actually affects self-driving cars. The question, I would say, is to think about things, such as whether people knew what to do about an alien encounter if they saw it. In this sense, the alien premise offers a kind of sugar coating that leads us to take medicine, but we need to think seriously about the self-directed world and the world of advanced AI.
Last year, Conselice and a co-author of a study published in the Journal Astrophysical Journal estimated that there are about 36 intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way with the assumption that it would take around 5 billion years for intelligent life to be formed on other planets beyond Earth. A model released in December brought the numbers closer to truth, taking into account such things as the frequency of sun-like stars harboring Earth-like planets, the frequency of deadly supernovae beaming radioactivity, and the time it takes for intelligent life to develop if conditions are right, as well as the possible tendency of tool-bearing beings to self-destruct. One of the questions that has complicated the study of extraterrestrial life is whether we will recognize life that is different from what we encounter on Earth.
Other researchers say that the search for perspectives that change over time adds a key component to the search for others in the universe because it takes time for light and radio signals to travel in the vastness of space from one star system to another. The Earth naturally orbits the sun, meaning planets can be found much faster, a trick curious aliens could use to find our planet. This means that aliens with powerful telescopes could search for us and visit us via UFOs on planets around the more than 2,000 stars for which the Earth is visible as it passes in front of the Sun.
The subsequent dialogue would have to take place in real time, as opposed to the slow dialogue between us and an alien civilisation emanating from a star hundreds or thousands of light years away.
Fraknoi is aboard the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, known as SETI, a Mountain View-based institute that discusses questions about alien civilizations. Other researchers are developing ultrafast light-powered nanovehicles similar to those that aliens could launch on Alpha Centauri, a star system close to ours 2.5 trillion miles away to harvest life. Researchers are excited, but cautious, explaining that they need to find out mundane sources such as comets and hydrogen clouds and whether human technology can mimic foreign signals, and that it will take some time before they know whether E.T. Is appropriate.
Avi Loeb, chair of astronomy at Harvard University, has written a scientific paper suggesting that Oumuamua's strange long shape and peculiar non-gravitational acceleration may mean that a mechanical probe with a light sail powered by the sun was sent by an alien civilization. One day, the two started making jokes about how alien scientists could create similar maps that would take them to Earth. The explanation that above is benevolent and does not suggest that the advent of self-driving cars would have aliens dominate humans and overtake them.