Category Archives: Futurism

Is that a good idea?Desert of the Real

Once considered a dystopian last resort that could only be realized in movies like "The Matrix" or "Snowpiercer," the idea of reducing the amount of sunlight hitting our planet to reverse climate change has, in recent years, been gaining a small amount of traction. And now, CNBC reports, the White House will be officially coordinating a five year research plan to assess the feasibility of so-called "solar geoengineering."

Obviously, implementing sunlight-blocking comes with massive risks, both to humans and the environment. But some advocates think the idea is at least worth entertaining, and see the White House's cautious interest in it as a positive sign.

"Sunlight reflection has the potential to safeguard the livelihoods of billions of people, and it's a sign of the White House's leadership that they're advancing the research so that any future decisions can be rooted in science not geopolitical brinkmanship," Chris Sacca, founder of the climate tech investment fund Lowercarbon Capital, told CNBC.

According to the outlet, it's not the first time the US government has toyed with the idea. A report to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 detailed a plan to spray the ocean with reflective particles with an estimated cost of $500 million per year. Today, the cost for similar aerosol-based Earth-cooling initiatives has gone up to $10 billion, a professor of environmental law told CNBC.

One prime candidate for stratospheric aerosol injection would be sulfur dioxide, the smelly stuff that billows out of volcanoes when they erupt and out of the smokestacks of coal factories.

But since using sulfur dioxide is so blatantly polluting, others propose implementing marine cloud brightening, a process in which the reflectivity of clouds is increased by injecting them with sea salt.

While these are all interesting solutions, many worry that they're merely a band-aid to a problem that requires global systemic change to address. Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, reaffirms emissions reductions as key to combating climate change, but isn't dismissive of alternative solutions as being supplementary to cutting down on CO2.

"You cannot judge what the country does on solar-radiation modification without looking at what it is doing in emission reductions, because the priority is emission reductions," Pasztor told CNBC. "Solar-radiation modification will never be a solution to the climate crisis."

So solar geoengineering might be a useful tool and that's a big "might" but it's no substitute for reducing emissions. Ultimately, we just don't know what kind of unintended consequences implementing these ideas might have. And the consequences we canpredict, such as acid rain and respiratory illness in the case of using sulfur dioxide, are pretty hard to overlook.

More on climate change: Scientists Have Grim News for Southern Florida

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White House Researching Combating Climate Change By Spraying Particles Into the Atmosphere - Futurism

Police in Oakland are hoping to arm robots with potentially lethal shotgun-like attachments. Why? Because that's the reality we live in now.

As The Intercept reports, the Oakland police force made a "percussion actuated nonelectric disruptor," or PAN disruptor, a top-priority item on their wish list last year.

In short, PAN is a shotgun-shaped accessory attachment for wheeled robots, which areoften deployed in war zones and by bomb squads.

It can be loaded with explosive forces ranging from blanks and pressurized water to live rounds a worrying new development in the use of potentially lethal machinery by police forces across the country.

"One can imagine applications of this particular tool that may seem reasonable," Liz O'Sullivan, CEO of the AI bias-auditing startup Parity and a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, told the Intercept, "but with a very few modifications, or even just different kinds of ammunition, these tools can easily be weaponized against democratic dissent."

When asked during a 2021 subcommittee meeting if they planned to ever put live ammunition into the machine, the Oakland police department originally said no.

But when drafting up rules for using the attachment, the department had a change of tune.

"I don't want to add a prohibited use," lieutenant Omar Daza-Quiroz, who represented the department at the meeting, reportedly told the committee, "because what if we need it for some situation later on?"

Weeks of back-and-forth reportedly followed, with the Oakland PD promising to only use the literal killing machines when deemed necessary, during "certain catastrophic, high-risk, high-threat, mass casualty events."

One problem, though: there's no written, lawful definition as to what those specific terms would entail, ultimately leaving things very much up to the police department for interpretation.

To be clear: the subcommittee appears to have won out, but only to a degree, agreeing on language that bans their use to kill humans which isn't exactly confidence inducing.

The police force is, however, allowed to arm the devices with pepper spray.

"We will not be arming robots with lethal rounds anytime soon," Daza-Quiroz told the Intercept, "If and when that time comes each event will be assessed prior to such deployment."

Whether the Oakland police's amended policy will be approved by Oakland's City Council remains to be seen. But as the Oakland PD isn't the only department in the country to push for the adoption of PAN, it's likely that we'll see more of the same across the country and there's no telling what might happen in each individual case.

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Oakland Police Want to Arm Robots With Shotguns, Because We Live in a Dystopian Nightmare - Futurism

"Musk has this theory of her that shes not real."Girlfriend Simulation

Which is worse: the concept that Elon Musk thought his now-ex and acclaimed musician Claire"Grimes"Boucher was a simulation of his "perfect companion" or that she agreed with him?

That sci-fi-inspired question is at the heart of one of the weirder anecdotes from a recent episode of the BBC's docuseries about the world's richest man titled "The Elon Musk Show."

In this particular episode a synopsis of which was published byCosmopolitan filmmakers explored Musk's relationship with Grimes, who is also the mother of his infamously-named children X A-12 and Exa Dark Siderl, or "Y" for short.

When American author Devin Gordon spoke to Boucher for the docuseries, things got, well, about as weird as one would expect.

"She told me repeatedly that Musk has this theory of her that shes not real," Gordon said in the episode, "that shes a simulation who was created by him and exists in his cerebral cortex as sort of the perfect companion to him."

The author admitted that the whole concept "sounds a little crazy and maybe even a little creepy" "except, she agrees with it."

"She said she does feel like this simulation which was perfectly created for him," Gordon said. "Her interests are all the same as his and her music is very technologically oriented."

Indeed, the author added that when speaking to the pair separately, "both made a similar nerdy joke about a scary AI theory of the future."

The whole thing would almost be romantic if one forgets the fact that the duo broke up last September. When Boucher began dating whistleblower-turned-DJ Chelsea Manning, Musk also posted a seemingly transphobic meme in what could be read as a dig at Manning's transgender identity.

Since then, things have remained complicated. Boucher referred to Musk as her "boyfriend," who she sees "all the time" in a Vanity Fair interview back in April, despite living "in separate houses."

All the same, the two still seem like a match made in "The Matrix" and maybe one day, they'll get back together to have more babies via surrogate.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Warns "Civilization is Over" if Ukraine Doesn't Give in to Russia

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Elon Musk Reportedly Thought His Ex-Girlfriend Might Have Been a Simulation - Futurism

"My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six."Very Grim

These, as we know, are not internationally chill times so much so that, unfortunately, nuclear war has been on much the collective mind.

But while verbal and in North Korea's recent case, physical nuclear threats have been made, how likely is it that we'll see an actual nuclear conflict?It's a seemingly impossible question, but one MIT physics professor Max Tegmark believes he has the answer to.

"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war," the professor wrote on the blog LessWrong. "My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six." Great.

Tegmark's argument centers on a David vs. Goliath framework the former being Ukraine, the latter being Russia. And within that dynamic, the professor explores a series of possible outcomes and their likelihoods.

His worst case scenario is labelled "KABOOM," which in his words marks "a major US-Russia nuclear war that might cause nuclear winter and kill most people on Earth." But again, that's worst case, and Tegmark offers a number of other scenarios that might happen either instead of KABOOM or en route to it.

"'Kosovo' & 'Vietnam' refer to scenarios where one side wins outright (breakaway succeeds & Goliath is expunged, respectively)," he writes, "'Libya,' 'Korea' & 'Finland' refer to intermediate outcomes involving simmering war, frozen war and full peace, respectively."

The academic ultimately concluded through his risk model that based mostly on his own psychoanalysis of Putin, NATO, and the general world public there's an 80 percent chance that NATO will take some form of collective military action against Russia; a 70 percent chance that Russia will retaliate against that NATO offensive with nuclear weapons, which could ultimately bring us to KABOOM territory; and a 30 percent chance that both sides decide to de-escalate.

Distill those percentages, and as Tegmark writes, you get a roughly one-in-six figure.

It's important to remember that Tegmark's guess is, in a way, as good as anyone's.

There's no true scientific model for human nature, which is what this ultimately comes down to. Nuclear war doesn't just happen. A button, somewhere, has to be pressed though that seems to be exactly what the prof is trying to remind us.

READ MORE: Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war [LessWrong]

More on nuclear war: Horrific Simulation: Nuclear War Would Kill Five Billion People

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MIT Professor Says There's a One-in-Six Chance of Nuclear War - Futurism

Sound familiar?Waterworld

A new study published this week in Nature Astronomy suggests that, if life once existed on Mars billions of years ago, the planet could've been host to subterranean microbes that produced methane as a byproduct, known as methanogenic microbes.

And since methane is a climate driver, the scientists say, those microbes may have irreversibly damaged the Martian atmosphere, wiping themselves out in the process.

Today, the Red Planet is a cold and barren desert, but extensive observation and exploration has long revealed that the planet was once flowing with rivers, lakes, and maybe even oceans and therefore was once habitable, too.

According to the study, the abundance of hydrogen in the planet's atmosphere could have sustained the existence of methanogenic organisms four billion years ago, right around the time when the Martian climate was best suited for supporting life.

From there, Regis Ferrire, senior author of the study and professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, and his team, applied several models to predict temperatures at both the surface and in the crust, and how hypothetical ecosystems would've survived within them.

"Our goal was to make a model of the Martian crust with its mix of rock and salty water, let gases from the atmosphere diffuse into the ground, and see whether methanogens could live with that," Ferrire said in a press release.

"And the answer is, generally speaking, yes, these microbes could have made a living in the planet's crust," he added.

Since the surface would have been too cold, Ferrire said, the microbes would have been most comfortable in the "upper few hundreds of meters" of the Martian crust.

But while these microbes may have been thriving underground, their success was fleeting.

"According to our results, Mars' atmosphere would have been completely changed by biological activity very rapidly, within a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years," said the study's first author Boris Sauterey, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Paris, in the release. "By removing hydrogen from the atmosphere, microbes would have dramatically cooled down the planet's climate."

It's a tantalizing theory that illustrates how much we still have to learn about Mars' history but our search for ancient life is far from over.

More on Mars: Chinese Rover Finds Evidence of Ancient Floods on Mars

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Ancient Life Caused the Destruction of Mars, Scientists Speculate - Futurism

The Earth isn't the only planet experiencing extraordinary heat waves.

A team of scientists led by James ODonoghue, planetary scientist at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), was shocked to discover a cataclysmic "heat wave" in Jupiter's atmosphere, reaching scorching temperatures of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat wave stretched for some 80,000 miles roughly the equivalent of ten Earths lined up next to each other racing from the gas giant's poles to the equator at speeds of over 600 mph.

Until now, why Jupiter experiences extreme temperatures even in the absence of surging heat waves has remained a scientific mystery. It only gets less than four percent of the warming sunlight that Earth does, which should suggest that it'd be a lot colder.

In fact,estimates have found that Jupiter's upper atmosphere should be a frosty -99 degrees Fahrenheit. But according to observations, its upper atmosphere is roughly the same temperature as Earth's, sitting at around 788 degrees Fahrenheit.

This discrepancy, nicknamed the "giant planet energy crisis," has been puzzling astronomers since the 1970s but fortunately, we may be getting much closer to an answer.

At this year's Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC), O'Donoghue and his colleagues presented their latest theory as to what may have caused Jupiter's blistering heat wave: its auroras.

Unlike Earth's auroras, which only occur during intense solar wind activity, auroras are a permanent presence in Jupiter's atmosphere.

O'Donoghue and his colleagues previously found that these auroras can get intense enough to heat the regions around Jupiter's poles. Forceful winds then push this heat around the entire planet's surface.

The massive "high-temperature planetary-scale structure," as described in a paperpublished in the journal Nature last year, only added credence to the theory.

"The heat wave is highly likely the result of a recent, large injection of energy to the auroral/polar region," O'Donoghue told Futurism. "We see this at Earth, but this is the first time weve seen it at another planet."

"These heat waves are an extra source of heat in upper atmospheres in general," he explained, "driven by the solar wind."

In fact, Jupiter may not be the only planet experiencing these scorching waves of heat.

"Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are also measured to be hundreds of Kelvin warmer than expected based on the amount of sunlight they receive," O'Donoghue added. "There is evidence that the distribution of auroral heat occurs at Saturn, while we can only speculate that it may also exist at Uranus and Neptune at present."

In short, the Sun could have far-reaching effects on the evolution of not only Jupiter's atmosphere, but other planets in our solar system as well a tantalizing glimpse into what drives the turbulent nature of our largest planetary neighbors.

More on Jupiter: James Webb Captures Jupiter in Glorious Infrared

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A Wave of Incredible Heat Ripped Through Jupiter - Futurism