Humanitys

This side of a commemorative plate mounted on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft features U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s handwritten “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” It will be affixed with a silicon microchip stenciled with names submitted by the public. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechWhen it launches in October, the agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will carry a richly layered dispatch that includes more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public.Following in NASA’s storied tradition of sending inspirational…

Call it an epic troll by Elon Musk if you want, but the billionaire's lawsuit against OpenAI puts a refreshing spotlight on the endless humanitarian posturing by AI businesses.Musk has sued the world-leading AI company and its chief executive officer, Sam Altman, for breaking their founding agreement about building powerful AI systems “for the benefit of humanity.” OpenAI still touts that mission on its website, but Musk is calling BS: “In reality… OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary…

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that…

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented…

Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how drastically the world is changing as it warms.Aerosols are little bits of dust, wildfire smoke, and fossil fuel pollution floating around the atmosphere, which both absorb and…

Now that several decades have passed since the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, we look back on that time with a hazy sense of history and what the event meant for humanity's ongoing odyssey.While the Voyager spacecraft were sober scientific missions, they also carried with them a hint of the deeper yearnings that lie inside humanity's heart: the Golden Records.The Voyager Golden Records were a message in a bottle to any other intelligent species out there that may stumble on them. While the odds are strongly…

Thales Alenia Space and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) are embarking on a pioneering venture to construct the first permanent human outpost on the Moon, a critical component of NASA’s Artemis program.Like It or Not, Your Doctor Will Use AI | AI UnlockedNASA’s Gemini and Apollo missions, and the Cold War space race in general, understandably expanded the horizons of science fiction writers, who began to portray futures in which the Moon wasn’t just a celestial body to visit but a place to inhabit. This vision, as vividly…

A new study reveals that humanity is at risk of falling into 14 evolutionary dead ends, termed “evolutionary traps,” ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence. The research, focusing on the Anthropocene era, highlights the need for global cooperation and active societal transformation to avoid these traps.Misaligned AI is not the one you should worry most about (yet).For the first time, scientists have used the concept of evolutionary traps on human societies at large. They find that humankind risks getting…

When she describes the moment she realized that CTE and football were connected, she sounds as shocked as she must have been back then.“My first football player was a 45-year-old man who played nine years in the NFL, and when I saw his brain, I was floored because it meant football was a risk for this degenerative disease,” says McKee, a homegrown Green Bay Packers fan. “I’d been watching for many years. They don’t look like they’re getting hurt, but of course it’s a slow degeneration that happens over many years.”Now…

When aliens or our distant progeny sift through layers of sediment 500,000 years from now to decode the Earth's past, they will find unusual evidence of the abrupt change that upended life half-a-million years earlier: chicken bones.That is the conclusion of scientists whose findings are offered as proof that rapid expansion of human appetites and activity so radically altered natural systems as to tip Earth into a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, or the "era of humans".There will be other telltale clues in…