Don Davis/NASA, via Reuters An illustration depicting an asteroid crashing into Earth in an event that scientists believe occurred in the Caribbean region at the boundary of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods in Earth’s geologic history about 65 million years ago, causing the extinction of dinosaurs.
Now that we’ve tracked an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and recovered its debris, might we start taking these close encounters more seriously?
For the first time, scientists have tracked an asteroid headed to Earth, watched it explode in the atmosphere and picked up some of its remnants on the ground, as my colleague Ken Chang reports. This one, which disintegrated in about 23 miles over the Nubian desert of northern Sudan in October, was about the size of a car and weighed 70 tons — not enough to do much damage. But what happens when a bigger one arrives?
NASA has estimated that that there are close to 1,000 near-Earth space rocks at least a kilometer in diameter, my colleague Andy Revkin noted. And scientists have been finding evidence of more frequent catastrophic collisions in the past, as my colleague Sandra Blakeslee reported. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly last year, Gregg Easterbrook summarized the odds: Read more…
. . . we still have some real questions to consider. Nick Bostrom’s argument that we could be living in a simulation, the topic of my Findings column, is a clever new twist on the old life-is-but-a-dream notions of Western philosophers (like the idealist George Berkeley), Eastern religions and science-fiction writers everywhere (cf. “The Matrix,” “The Truman Show,” and the “holodeck” in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”). A few of the questions:
1) How likely is it that we’re living in a computer simulation run by intelligent posthuman beings?
2) Would you consider it ethical for any intelligent beings to run such a simulation?
3) What’s the best way to live and survive in a computer simulation?
If you think it’s unlikely we’re in a simulated world, explain why. Is it because you don’t expect civilization to endure long enough reach the technological maturity required to produce a virtual world with virtual people with virtual nervous systems? Because you don’t think posthumans would run simulations? Or because you’ve found another reason not considered in Dr. Bostrom’s simulation argument?
Dr. Bostrom, a philospher and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, guesses that there’s maybe a 20 percent chance we’re in a simulation, and probably a greater chance that for some reason posthumans would decide not to run these “ancestor” simulations. One big obstacle could be the ethical problem, as he told me: Read more…
With apologies to Dr. Johnson: When a reader knows the world is about to end, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Or at least inspires him to post a comment. My bet that humanity will avert doomsday provoked plenty of intelligent disagreement. But there were a few optimists, too, and my favorite argument is the one by M. Skinner:
Imminent predictions of doomsday have been rife throughout human history. The unwritten subtext is that humanity deserves to be destroyed. This predilection with our self-destruction is just another manifestation of humanity’s hubris. It is the delusion we are so powerful we can cause the destruction of our entire species. In the past, we envisioned ourselves literally at the center of the universe. Now we see the unfamiliar and rapidly changing world we have created and are convinced that this will so offend the “natural order” that surely it will be our demise. We still have not quite grasped the fact that we are just not that powerful, but creating a better life, at least on a small scale, is something we have proven we can do.
A formal version of this “we’re not special” argument is called the Copernican Principle, which has been used to calculate how much longer humanity will survive — supposedly with 95-percent probability of being right, the scientific standard for precision. I know that sounds wacky, but it’s logical enough to have been published in the journal Nature. Read more…
Why bet against doomsday? I give a few reasons in my “Findings” column today (about my wager against a prophet of doom, Martin Rees). If you’d like more cause for cheer, take a look at Edge, the Web site dedicated to a “third culture” bridging the gap between scientists and other intellectuals.
It recently asked some of the world’s savviest thinkers what they’re optimistic about. Besides waxing about the technological breakthroughs they’re expecting, they point to a heartening development you’d never guess from the headlines: Even though our weapons keep getting deadlier, more people are living in peace.
The decline of violence is “the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species,” writes Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and the author of “The Blank Slate.” He explains: Read more…