humanity Archives

April 8, 2024April 8, 2024 by Evan Gough

Does the Rise of AI Explain the Great Silence in the Universe?

Will AI become indispensable in an age of "big data" astronomy? Credit: DALL-E

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?

December 11, 2023December 11, 2023 by Evan Gough

What Would a Modern “Golden Record” Include?

Voyager's Golden Record. Credit: NASA/JPL

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.

May 18, 2022May 18, 2022 by Evan Gough

Maybe We Don’t Hear From Aliens Because They Choose To Go Silent

Artist impression of an alien civilization. Image credit: CfA

How will humanity meet its end?

That’s only a depressing question if you think that humanity will go on forever. Alas, nothing lasts forever, and if something could last forever, it probably wouldn’t be our struggling primate species.

But we’ll likely be around for a while yet, pondering things as we do. One of the things we love to ponder is: why don’t we hear from any other alien civilizations?

May 2, 2022May 2, 2022 by Evan Gough

Humanity Will Need to Survive About 400,000 Years if We Want any Chance of Hearing From an Alien Civilization

Standing beside the Milky Way. Drowming out the night sky blocks us off from nature, and that's not good for humans. Credit: P. Horálek/ESO

If there are so many galaxies, stars, and planets, where are all the aliens, and why haven’t we heard from them? Those are the simple questions at the heart of the Fermi Paradox. In a new paper, a pair of researchers ask the next obvious question: how long will we have to survive to hear from another alien civilization?

Their answer? 400,000 years.

February 23, 2022February 23, 2022 by Evan Gough

Does the Entire Planet Have a Mind of its Own?

In a self-described "thought experiment," University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank and colleagues David Grinspoon at the Planetary Science Institute and Sara Walker at Arizona State University use scientific theory and broader questions about how life alters a planet, to posit four stages to describe Earth's past and possible future. Image Credit: (University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw)

What is humanity? Do our minds set us apart from the rest of nature and from the rest of Earth? Or does Earth have a collective mind of its own, and we’re simply part of that mind? On the literal face of it, that last question might sound ridiculous.

But a new thought experiment explores it more deeply, and while there’s no firm conclusion about humanity and a planetary mind, just thinking about it invites minds to reconsider their relationship with nature.

Overcoming our challenges requires a better understanding of ourselves and nature, and the same is true for any other civilizations that make it past the Great Filter.