Monthly Archives: May 2022

How will humanity meet its end?

Thats 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 wouldnt be our struggling primate species.

But well likely be around for a while yet, pondering things as we do. One of the things we love to ponder is: why dont we hear from any other alien civilizations?

Any species that advances far enough to gain control of a planet and expand into space likely faces a similar set of existential conundrums in their continued survival. The Great Filter concept catches that idea. The Great Filter is an implication of the Fermi Paradox. The two fit together to try to give context to humanitys situation.

The Fermi Paradox asks If there are so many planets and possibilities for life to emerge, then where are all the aliens? The Great Filter is one possible solution to the paradox. It says that as civilizations become more and more advanced, they face evolutionary hurdles they cant clear. They collapse and become impossible to detect from great distances.

A pair of researchers have tackled these ideas in a new research article. Its title is Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox? Its published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, and the authors are Michael Wong and Stuart Bartlett. Wong is a post-doctoral fellow at the Earth and Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Bartlett is a Geological and Planetary Scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

At the heart of their work is this idea: Intelligent civilizations can realize their continued expansion is unsustainable and will lead to collapse, so they aim for a kind of homeostasis instead and become undetectable.

The authors invite us to think of life as systems where fluxes of mass and energy lead to the production of functional information that life utilizes and transmits. In this case, functional means it allows the living system to survive. Over time, lifeforms evolve to produce and use functional information better than their predecessors. But evolution isnt steady. Life has become more complex due to a series of major transitions in the way it manages functional information. Such transitions thus represent major shifts in the ways in which biological information is encoded and exploited, the authors write. Obviously, being better at it is an evolutionary advantage.

From there, the idea expands to include cities, which in a manner of speaking are alive. The authors write that In some ways, a city is a superagent composed of individual human agents analogous to a multi-cellular organism that is a superagent composed of individual cellular agents.

Now consider a planet-encompassing civilization that is basically one big city. Were not at that point on Earth, but we can see the possibility. Instead of lifeforms going through evolutionary transitions that allow them to continue to use energy and information effectively and overcome barriers to survival, global civilizations are in the same position.

So too has human society been shaped and reshaped by innovations that accelerate and widen the spread of informationmost notably the inventions of the printing press, telecommunication, computers and the internet, write Wong and Bartlett. And just as lifeforms have evolved to utilize other energy sourcesmicrobes using geochemical energy, plants using sunlight, predators eating fleshso have we. Weve learned to use fossil fuels, weve developed nuclear energy, and were expanding our use of renewables like solar and wind.

So far so good for humanity, right?

But what happens as a globe-bestriding civilization continues to grow? Cities may behave like lifeforms in some ways, but obviously, theyre different. One of the ways theyre different, and the critical difference for the authors, is in their superlinearity.

A trend thats superlinear is faster than a linear trend. The easiest way to understand superlinearity is to look at a graph of three lines, one linear, one sublinear, and one superlinear.

Many aspects of a city are superlinear. Things like GDP, wages, crime, and disease are superlinear because they generate increasing returns with increasing size. Biological entities are different. Many aspects of biological life scale sublinearly, according to the authors. Some aspects of cities also scale sublinearly: total road surface, number of gas stations, and length of electrical lines, for example.

So some aspects of a city are sublinear and thats desirable. That creates economies of scale which work in our favour. But some things in our envisioned global city are superlinear, and that, according to the authors, is the crux of the problem facing technological civilizations. Superlinearity leads to what the authors call singularities.

Superlinear scaling results in crises called singularities, where population and energy demand tend to infinity in a finite amount of time, the authors write. The singularities are clashes between growth and expansion on one hand and the energy needed to sustain them on the other. a global civilization will march towards a singularity where energy resources can no longer sustain the trajectory of unbounded growth, they write.

The solution to singularities is technological innovation or resets. Singularities arise more often as a planetary civilization continues to grow, and must be avoided by ever more frequent resets or innovations that postpone the systems collapse, they write.

So tension sits at the heart of the civilization as it reaches global status. Singularities arise and are overcome by resets or innovations. But what if the time between these critical singularities keeps shrinking? At that point, the planetary civilization will face an asymptotic burnout, an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation.

Now the planetary civilization is in trouble. And that, say the authors, is why we dont hear from any other civilizations. There are only two paths now.

One path is collapse. The asymptotic burnout that the authors talk about is kind of like the Great Filter. Every technological civilization that controls a planet eventually faces it. If there are or were other civilizations somewhere out there in space, maybe many of them slammed into asymptotic burnout and then just collapsed.

But others may not have. How did they avoid it? With homeostatic awakening.

In a homeostatic awakening, a global civilization becomes aware of its predicament and its trajectory. The civilization will have a window of time to affect a fundamental change to prioritize long-term homeostasis and well-being over unyielding growtha consciously induced trajectory change or homeostatic awakening.

Thats the authors potential solution to the Fermi Paradox and it tells us why we dont hear from any more advanced civilizations. The lack of signal doesnt mean theyre not there; it means theyve gone silent. Theyve understood that their continued growth will doom them, and they stop expanding. In prioritizing homeostasis, they make themselves difficult to detect.

In tracing a civilizations path toward asymptotic burnout or homeostatic awakening, the authors lean on the idea of the dataome. The dataome encompasses the external recording and processing of information (in e.g. books, architecture and computers) as well as the coevolution of those infological organisms atop of a collection of biological organisms they write. Were witnessing the dataomes continued development right now, and were taking part in it.

The dataome emerged and accelerated during the Agricultural Revolution, as more energy (food) became available and societies transitioned away from hunter-gatherer status and established cities. The emergence of a dataome leads to accelerated growth. Weve seen that in our own history, and were watching as our society continues to accelerate. There are more and more of us, we produce and consume more goods, and we hunger for energy. And were headed for a singularity, where continued growth demands greater energy, but the climate cant handle it.

Will we reset technologically? Its within our power to do so and to avoid the climate change singularity. The authors look at a society that has managed to resist continual expansion and growth and prioritize other things.

Bhutan is a small mountainous kingdom between India and China. Bhutans government doesnt bother with GDP, the measure that most nations use to gauge their progress and well-being. Instead, Bhutan maximizes their Gross National Happiness. Bhutans GNH is based on four things:

So Bhutan has resisted the quest for growth and economic supremacy. The authors dont claim that Bhutans case is necessarily relevant to avoiding asymptotic burnout, and the countrys an isolated case. But it does seem that Bhutan is unlikely to reach any kind of technological singularity in the near-future (burnout risk is relatively low at present).

The authors mention examples of mini-awakenings where humans have realized theyre heading for big trouble and have changed their trajectory. The banning of ozone-depleting chemicals, the de-escalation of WMDs after the Cold War, and the moratorium on whaling are examples. Maybe, if we can live up to our climate change agreements, theyll be in the same category.

All of this leads us back to the Fermi Paradox. The question at the heart of the Fermi Paradox is In a universe that seems amenable to abiogenesis and the evolution of life leading to technological civilizations, why havent we seen definitive evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations? Wong and Bartlett say that the question itself is a paradox. Thats because there is an implicit assumption that the trajectory of progress can be extrapolated from the past, i.e. that the future is a linear extension of past and current trends.

The assumption behind the Fermi Paradox is that civilizations will continue to harness more energy and expand. That assumption is expressed in the Kardashev Scale, which measures a civilizations technological advancement based on its energy consumption. In the Kardashev Scale, civilizations grow until they harness all the power of their star with massive engineering megastructures called Dyson Spheres. Once theyve harvested the energy of their solar system, they spread throughout the galaxy as a Type III civilization and should be detectable.

The Kardashev Scale is fun but simplistic. It ignores the fact that evolution isnt linear, and it ignores superlinearity and the crises that singularities create.

The authors say that Type III civilizations may be unattainable. Instead, civilizations either burn out and potentially collapse, or they reach homeostatic equilibrium and are undetectable.

Other solutions to the Fermi Paradox talk about potential bottlenecks in a civilizations technological advancement up the Kardashev Scale. Thinkers attach probabilities to those bottlenecks, like in the Drake Equation. But this idea is different. According to the authors, its inevitable that a civilization will come up against singularities. The solution we propose here is of a different kind: it is aninevitablebarrier, emergent from the dynamics of energy and information flows within a living system, that civilizations will either meet or learn to redirect themselves around.

If the authors are correct, then homeostatic civilizations will last much longer than burnout civilizations. The civilizations that slam into the singularity barrier will collapse.

The authors are merely presenting their idea for discussion. They make no claim that its true, but point out that its based on things we know about life and biology on Earth. Like so many other astrobiological hypotheses, there is no evidence yet that this idea is true, other than its rooting in the laws of life that seem to govern biological organization on Earth, they write.

For those of us who are interested in all things space-related, including our own civilization, this idea is sort of like a life-preserver. Many of us grew up watching one of the iterations of Star Trek, where humanity is more or less unified and weve gone out into space to meet our neighbours. Its a great and inspiring vision, at least until it runs into things like the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter.

But maybe theres hope. Maybe our civilization will be one of the ones that can see singularities coming and can reorient itself towards homeostatic equilibrium.

Looking around at the world today, it can seem unlikely. But humans can be very good at generating solutions. Maybe we can overcome some of the singularities that are coming our way. Maybe well figure it out one day. People criticize the capitalist mindset by saying perpetual growth is unattainable. The usual comeback from space-knowledgeable people is that we can expand into space and preserve the biospheres health. We can have moon bases, a presence on Mars, asteroid mining, etc.

The papers authors leave it to the rest of us to wonder about those aspects of humanitys future. They also leave it to other researchers to explore and test their ideas. We hope that future work will test the assumptions outlined above, they write in their conclusion. Specifically, we encourage the collection and analysis of global datasets to quantify how growth, productivity and other social metrics have changed over time.

Regardless of whether the burnoutawakening hypothesis does or does not describe auniversaltrajectory for life in the universe, it is critical to know whetherhumanityis in danger of suffering from an asymptotic burnout, they explain.

Humanitys future is up in the air. Will our distant descendants have the wisdom to see singularities coming? Can we create a global political system to deal with singularities effectively? Who knows.

But theres a melancholy aspect to both asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening. In both cases, well never meet the neighbours.

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Maybe We Don't Hear From Aliens Because They Choose To Go Silent - Universe Today

Nearly three billion years ago, oceanic mats of cyanobacteria, called blue-green algae, transformed Earths atmosphere by converting carbon dioxide into the oxygen we complex animals breath. In their time on the planet, theyve survived five mass extinctions with naught but light and water. And now, in a small tank on a windowsill in England, this billion-year-old bit of biotechnology is lending its expertise to a relative rookie.

The tank, constructed by Cambridge scientists, is about the size of a AA battery and has four plastic windows set into a simple aluminum frame. Inside, a colony of algae take in sunlight and convert it to food by way of photosynthesis. In the process, they produce a small electrical current, which makes its way to electrodes in the aluminum frame. To these, the researchers attached a low-power computer chip programmed to run in cycles45 minutes on and 15 in standbyand left this curious apparatus to its own devices for six months.

To their surprise, it chugged along continuously and without complaint.

We were impressed by how consistently the system worked over a long period of timewe thought it might stop after a few weeks but it just kept going, said Paolo Bombelli, a Cambridge biochemist and first author of a paper on the work.

In addition to being a simple power source built from readily available parts and materials, the system runs day and night (in contrast with solar power). The algae, the team thinks, overproduces food during the day, so it continues to happily munch away, and produce electricity, through the night. Although the paper addresses their findings from just that first six-month period, their algae-powered-computer has now been running continuously for a year (and counting).

Its a pretty nifty trick, but some scaling is probably in order. The system produces a tiny amount of current. The chip, an Arm Cortex M0+ commonly used in Internet of Things applications, sips just 0.3 microwatts an hour to perform very basic calculations. As The Verge notes, if your average laptop uses around 100 watts an hour, youd need millions of these algae energy harvesters just to check your email or zone out in a Zoom meeting.

But the researchers arent targeting laptops. Rather, they believe future iterations would find a niche application powering the billions or trillions of simple sensors and chips making up the Internet of Things. These might take measurements of local conditions in remote locations, for example, or they might be able to charge a small device.

[Scaling] is not entirely straightforward. So putting one on your roof isnt going to provide the power supply for your house at this stage, senior author Christopher Howe told New Scientist. Theres quite a bit more to do on that front. But [it could work] in rural areas of low and middle income countries, for example, in applications where a small amount of power might be very useful, such as environmental sensors or charging a mobile phone.

But there is room for improvement. There are thousands of species of cyanobacteria, and the team have found some produce more current than others. Also, in prior research, the team genetically modified cyanobacteria to more efficiently produce electricity.

Other benefits are more immediately apparent. The needed materials are recyclable, cheap, and scalable. Whereas batteries and solar cells are dirty to produce and require materials that arent always readily availablelike lithium and rare earth elementsaluminum, plastic, algae, and water are more easily procured with less mess. The team has even tested out a model of the system reusing common plastic water bottles.

The hope is this kind of system could be replicated hundreds of thousands of times to power edge devices and potentially be commercially viable in five years. Whether that proves true remains to be seen, but it seems we may need alternative forms of power regardless. The team estimates running trillions of devices on lithium-ion batteries would require triple the lithium produced each year. And as Stewart Brand recently toldThe New York Times, progress is all about adding options.

In any case, wouldnt it be suitable if the organism that gave us the air we breathe ends up, among other things, helping us measure and keep it pristine too?

Image Credit: Paolo Bombelli

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This Algae Powered a Computer for a Year With Just Water and Sunlight - Singularity Hub

Youve probably heard the term the Great Resignation in the last year or so, as millions of people reportedly quit their jobs during the pandemic. Hospitality was one of the hardest-hit industries, and multiple sectors of the economy felt (and are still feeling) the pain. Trucking wasnt spared, and its been a blow to a crucial piece of the supply chain that was already experiencing labor shortages before the pandemic. Starting salaries for long-haul truckers are as high as $100,000, and even so, companies are having trouble filling cabs.

One solution? Trucks that drive themselves.

Volvos Autonomous Solutions (VAS) division announced earlier this month that it will soon launch a hub-to-hub autonomous transport solution in North America. The service has been designed to serve shippers, carriers, logistics service providers, and freight brokers. Logistics provider DHL already signed up to pilot the program in partnership with VAS. The company says its working on additional partnerships with customers from other business segments, and will use feedback from pilot program participants to adapt the autonomous service to each segments needs.

Today, the increasing demand for freight is outgrowing capacity and solutions must be bolder, safer, smarter and more sustainable to move the world forward, said Nils Jaeger, president of Volvo Autonomous Solutions.

VAS worked with driverless hardware and software specialist Aurora Innovation on the driving systems for its trucks, retrofitting long-haul sleeper cabs with the companys Aurora Driver. Just this week, Aurora announced an expansion of its autonomous freight pilot with FedEx in Texas, adding a new route between Fort Worth, in the states northeast, and El Paso, which is southwest right on the border with Mexico. At around 600 miles, the new route more than doubles the distance of the existing route, which ran 240 miles between Dallas and Houston. While the Dallas-Houston route reportedly ran every night, the El Paso-Forth Worth route will run once a week.

Autonomous trucks have increasingly been taking to the roads over the last couple years, with Texas emerging as the epicenter of driverless trucking thanks to its mild weather, extensive highway network, and comparatively lax regulatory environment. Though theyre already being called driverless or autonomous, the trucks do still have safety drivers on board who take over for non-highway driving, and theyll likely continue to have them for the foreseeable future. But the self-driving software will eventually reach a level of sophistication that allows a driver to nap for a few hours during long stretches of highway, thus enabling longer uninterrupted mileageor at least, thats the goal.

Given the supply chain backups and labor shortage issues were seeing right now, solutions like this will not only be welcome, but necessary to keep the gears of the logistics and shipping industries grindingand to get you your packages on time, stock your supermarkets shelves with fresh produce, and get that furniture you ordered months ago to your door sooner rather than later.

Sasko Cuklev, head of on-road solutions for Volvo Autonomous Solutions, said, We are built on the conviction that we can address the constraints the transportation industry faces and contribute to building a better society by offering scalable, autonomous freight capacity that can unlock new ways to move goods.

Image Credit: Volvo Autonomous Solutions

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Volvo and DHL Are Partnering on Hub-to-Hub Autonomous Trucking - Singularity Hub

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DNSFilter today announced the appointment of Colin Britton as Chief Operating Officer and Dave Raphael as Chief Product Officer. The executive appointments come on the heels of DNSFilters continued growth and increasing scale, as the company doubled its headcount over the past twelve months.

At DNSFilter, were transforming the way the industry thinks of DNS security, said Ken Carnesi, Co-Founder and CEO, DNSFilter. Were at an exciting point in our companys evolution, and Im pleased to welcome Colin, Dave and all our recent executive hires to the team. Colin and Daves guidance will be a critical asset as we continue to scale and deliver innovative solutions to protect millions of end users from falling victim to todays advanced cyber threats.

As a growth-stage operator, strategist and technologist, Colin Britton brings over 20 years of experience to DNSFilter, spanning SaaS, big data, and technology. Prior to joining DNSFilter, Mr. Britton served various growth roles at organizations including Teamviewer, LogicNow, now a part of N-Able, and Devo. As Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Britton will be responsible for guiding strategic growth and ensuring operational excellence.

In the remote work era, security that works quickly, effectively and wherever end users choose to connect is paramount, added Mr. Britton. DNSFilters unique approach to DNS security is scalable across multiple use-cases from consumer to major enterprises and managed service providers and Im excited for the opportunity to further execute the companys strategic priorities and drive sustainable growth.

Dave Raphael is a seasoned, hands-on executive leader, builder and investor with over 20 years of experience in software development and application security. Previously, Mr. Raphael was Managing Director of Engineering at Singularity Venture Partners and Senior Director, Chief Architect for MSP at SolarWinds. As Chief Product Officer, Mr. Raphael will lead product management, engineering, threat research, and design of the companys AI-powered DNS security solution.

With a single application using hundreds, if not thousands, of domains, its become increasingly difficult for security teams to monitor their network and easy for cybercriminals to exploit, noted Mr. Raphael. I look forward to leveraging my deep understanding of both the underlying technology and the broader security landscape to continue delivering innovative, AI-based DNS threat protection to the market without losing any of the magic thats made DNSFilter into the company it is today.

The company also announced the appointment of Mark Bliss as Senior Vice President of Marketing, Brendan Spooner as Vice President of Engineering, Mandy Cole as Vice President of HR, and Cathlin Sullivan as General Counsel.

DNSFilter expects to grow its headcount by 50% in 2022. To learn more about remote career opportunities, please visit: https://www.dnsfilter.com/careers.

About DNSFilterDNSFilter is redefining how organizations secure their largest threat vector: the Internet itself. With 70% of attacks involving the Domain Name System (DNS) layer, DNSFilter provides AI-powered security via DNS that uniquely identifies 60% more threats than competitors on an average of seven days earlier, including zero days. Over 15K organizations and managed service providers trust DNSFilter to protect millions of end users from phishing, malware and advanced cyber threats.

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DNSFilter Appoints Colin Britton as Chief Operating Officer and Dave Raphael as Chief Product Officer - Business Wire

Some 252 million years ago, the world was going through a tumultuous period of rapid global warming.

To understand what caused it, scientists have looked to one particular event in which a volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia spewed huge volumes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. However, there is evidence the climate was already changing before this. Sea surface temperatures had increased by more than six to eight degrees Celsius in the hundreds of thousands of years leading up to the Siberian outpouring. Temperatures increased again after it, so much so that 85 to 95 percent of all living species eventually went extinct.

The eruption in Siberia obviously made a mark on the planet, but experts remained puzzled about what caused the initial warming before it. Our research reveals Australias own ancient volcanoes played a big role. Prior to the event in Siberia, catastrophic eruptions in northern New South Wales spewed volcanic ash across the east coast. These eruptions were so large they initiated the worlds biggest ever climate catastrophethe evidence for which is now hidden deep in Australias thick piles of sediment.

Our study, published last week in Nature, confirms eastern Australia was shaken by repeated super eruptions between 256 and 252 million years ago. Super eruptions are different to the more passive Siberian event. These catastrophic explosions spewed massive amounts of ash and gases high into the atmosphere.

Today we see evidence of this in light-colored layers of volcanic ash in sedimentary rock. These layers are found across huge areas of NSW and Queensland, all the way from Sydney to near Townsville.

Our study has identified the source of this ash in the New England region of NSW, where the eroded remnants of volcanoes are preserved. Though erosion has removed much of the evidence, the now innocuous-looking rocks are our record of terrifying eruptions. The thickness and spread of the ash produced is consistent with some of the largest volcanic eruptions known.

At least 150,000 km of material erupted from the northern NSW volcanoes over four million years. This makes them similar to the supervolcanoes of Yellowstone in the US and Taupo in New Zealand.

To put it into perspective, the 79AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which obliterated the Italian city of Pompeii, produced just three to four km of rock and ash. And the deadly Mount St Helens eruption in 1980 was about one km.

The Australian eruptions would have repeatedly covered the entire east coast in ash meters thick in some places. And a massive outpouring of greenhouse gases would have triggered global climate change.

Ancient sedimentary rocks provide us with a timeline of the environmental damage caused by the eruptions. Ironically, the evidence is preserved in coal measures.

Todays coal deposits in eastern Australia show ancient forests used to cover much of this land. After the super eruptions, however, these forests were abruptly terminated in a series of bushfires over some 500,000 years, 252.5253 million years ago.

Typically the plant matter accumulated in swamps and was then buried under sediments. The burial process provided heat and pressure which enabled the conversion of the plant matter into coal. Without the forests, there was no plant matter to accumulate. The ecosystem collapsed and most animals became extinct. The subsequent eruptions in Siberia only exaggerated the devastation started by Australias supervolcanoes.

And this collapse of ecosystems was not limited to Australia, either. The catastrophic event affected all of the ancient continents. It had a substantial influence on the evolution of life which eventually led to the rise of the dinosaurs.

Australias super eruptions were a key marker of change in the ancient world. As we look to achieving a more habitable climate in the future, who knew the clues to environmental catastrophe lay buried beneath our feet?

Acknowledgement: we would like to thank our colleague Phil Blevin from the Geological Survey of New South Wales for his contribution to this work.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: ELG21 / 1625 images

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How a Volcanic Bombardment in Ancient Australia Led to the World's Greatest Climate Catastrophe - Singularity Hub