Disclaimer: I am not an exobiologist. Nor have I read more than the abstract and conclusion of the paper so far. However I do have an interest in exobiology and try to keep up with developments in the field.
To summarize the paper: They have developed some new models that show it is theoretically possible that Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f could be warm water worlds. Their models also show that with the new generation of telescopes coming online, such as the James Web Space Telescope, it should be possible to determine if Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are actually warm water worlds.
If these two planets do turn out to be warm water worlds, it would be big news, as some of the elements for 'earth like' life would be present on two exoplanets – abundant liquid water. If I remember correctly, there is some other work being done (not related to this paper) on obtaining an atmospheric spectra of transiting exoplanets. This could tell us the chemical makeup of the planets atmospheres and we could possibly see various markers that would indicate life.
All up, it looks to be pretty exciting, but we are going to need some bigger and better telescopes before we know more. Keep watching this space!
In the search for exobiology one possible sign to look for within planetary spectra might be a predictable annual oscillation of carbon dioxide levels as occurs on Earth when plants photosynthesize more in the summer than the winter.
There is a funny story about when Carl Sagan brought James Lovelock into the NASA exobiology think tank set up to design experiments that could determine if there was life on Mars. Lovelock, being your archetypal scientific maverick got to thinking and with his experience with CFCs and Gaia theory he deduced that all one needed was a telltale signature: a seasonal pattern of waste compounds excreted into the atmosphere. He told Sagan, they trained the appropriate detectors and started looking. Sure enough, there were quite obvious seasonal waste deposit blooms exactly where Lovelock had anticipated. Conclusion: there IS life[-like processes] on Mars. The fact that this was not "hard" evidence drove the revelation under the rug because it does not play into the hands of the scientific community as a whole which needed experiments that required us to send probes and develop technologies to get "hard" evidence. Which I don't refute is the correct method (we would need this before a categorical "life on mars" conclusion could be given the weight of the scientific community), but I think it would be a kind of vindication of Lovelock's brilliance that HIS method is more "useful" in the real search for exobiology. Mars is in a very sweet spot that allows us to confirm our suspicions and validate our methods before we go looking and finding this "life" shit all over the place (literally).
EDIT:
as other comments are pointing out I think "seasonal" is misused, but I think you get my point.
I (quite deliberately) didn't say methane. And this isn't wikipedia, take it or leave it. Or, you know, contribute to the discussion.
EDIT:
sorry, didn't mean to be cranky, just sick of "citation" comments on HN. If I remember correctly it was an anecdote during a BBC documentary "Beautiful Minds" [1] which is well worth watching in full. Lovelock is one of my very favourite scientists - one of the few that write like poets (along with E.O. Wilson)
When it's winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa. It's just the case with the Earth than most of the land masses are on the Northern Hemisphere, but would not necessarily be the case with another planet.
Conflating two different effects. What you describe is due to the Earth's tilt. There's a smaller but globally significant effect due to moving closer/farther from the Sun in Earth's elliptical orbit.
Yes, but it's even more complicated. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxigen#Photosynthesis_and_resp... ), the green algae and cyanobacteria in the ocean produce between 70% and 45% of the free oxygen. (It's a lot of variation in the estimation.)
True, but just measuring carbon dioxide for the whole planet does show a distinct seasonal variance and that's for the reasons previously stated - there's a lot of land mass in the northern hemisphere and terrestrial plant life has a significant effect.
Possibly on exoplanets there might be similar asymmetries, or the asymmetry of an elliptical orbit. Seasonal variation in atmospheric gasses aren't necessarily a certain sign of life since there could be other non-biological causes, but they're a big clue.
I assume that the orbits of most planets is not perfectly circular and that the axis of rotation is not usually perfectly aligned with that of the host star.
Something I've been thinking about a lot lately: if / when it becomes possible to "upload" our minds, wouldn't that be the ideal way to explore the universe? Space travel becomes much less daunting when you don't have to worry about an ordinary human lifespan, along with all the intricate & inefficient fueling and environmental needs a biological organism requires.
I hope if there's ever an Kurzweilian singularity that the AIs come with a lust for discovering the universe and spread across it like dandelion seeds.
Uploading something just means making a copy, and if that becomes possible the AI potential would be millions of generations smarter than a carbon copy of a human brain. Sort of like digitizing a record or wax cylinder - we don't do it for the quality, we do it for historical or nostalgic purposes.
If AI becomes possible then the only reason to upload a human algorithm would be for the same reasons as the wax cylinder. It wouldn't be to rely on the created construct to do decision making or exploring.
More likely AI programs would do all the exploring and it would be brought back holodeck/matrix style for people to experience safely in the confines of earth.
Never? I agree our minds are incredibly complex, but it's not magic. Once humankind can measure what happens inside a brain, it's surely should only be a matter of time before it can replicate its machinery. I agree it may be something that's quite far into the future, but consider how far medicine has come in the past 25, or even 10 years with regards to replacing other human organs.
My personal opinion is that AGI will look a lot more like a convergence of man with machine than software suddenly gaining consciousness. I think it will be a viewed as performance enhancement much more than the merging of two foreign entities. I think it will begin with an interface that will allow us to communicate with software neurally, or store our memories externally (even if it's just copies). Early research is already happening in rats to this effect[1][2], I have a hard time believing that our brains are so complex that they will never be deciphered.
> Uploading something just means making a copy, and if that becomes possible the AI potential would be millions of generations smarter than a carbon copy of a human brain.
I see where you're going with this, but I would like to compare human minds more to a work of art than a tool.
Even today we can easily generate a familiar gradient of all colours on a canvas, or numerous gorgeously fascinating fractals. Yet we continue to value original hand-crafted art far beyond procedurally generated art.
I believe you're right that we will be able to build AIs which far exceed our capabilities in many fields, probably shortly before we figure out how to mirror a human mind within a machine. Even still, there will continue to be value in an organically grown human mind, shaped by decades of experience, weathered by relationships and subtle chemical reactions.
Perhaps someday we will be able to simulate that as well, but it will take much longer and at that point we would have created a true artificial life form.
why would the ai be millions of generations smarter?
what if it only means we can run existing human algorithms on faster and faster hardware?
maybe the future belongs to recognisably human cognitive processes, which experience the universe unfolding at a snails pace because they are running millions of times faster than we are
> why would the ai be millions of generations smarter?
Pure uneducated speculation on my part.
1) In order to emulate a Super Nintendo you need hardware at least 20x faster than the hardware needed to run the Super Nintendo natively. In order to emulate a human brain you'd need something with much more potential... if that potential exists why waste cycles emulating? If it isn't emulated then it is something else entirely.
2) We choose to rely on robots to explore the floor of the ocean with the occasional human being showing up just to make a documentary. We'll have cars driving us around, we use video for everything, we'll rely more and more on stuff brought to us instead of us going to various locations.
3) Even if we start with human intelligence the ability to remove unnecessary components will create something that is no longer human. I don't believe the needs/wants of an ai program or modified human construct will behave remotely human. Take a real basic element of human/animal behavior; survival. I don't think AI would find it necessary to 'defend itself' because it is a logical next-step for any advancing species. If it is destroyed today it'll come back in a ten, a hundred, or a million years. AI (if it is possible) is as inevitable as the printing press, lightbulb and stone mill.
Of course, ymmv, I mean we may as well debate how many noodles the Flying Spagetti Monster has, there's only 1% science and 99% science fiction at this time.
> you need hardware at least 20x faster than the hardware needed to run the Super Nintendo natively
Only if the emulating hardware is general purpose. Yes, simulating a human brain on a cluster of Intel i7's or AMD GPU's, or their future equivalents, will probably require an enormous hardware investment.
But once you have one working emulated brain on general-purpose hardware, you can produce specialized hardware. E.g. if we knew that Super Nintendo held the secrets to immortality, we would soon make updated versions of all its chips with today's technology, and you could probably fit dozens or hundreds of SNES cores on a single modern chip with the decades of improvement in manufacturing processes.
Likewise, once we make an initial discovery of how to emulate human brains on general-purpose computers, the things we find out from that implementation will start to pave the way for special-purpose computers that can more cost-effectively execute the brain emulation application.
Also, it's entirely possible that you can emulate human brains, but you don't know how to create more potential. E.g., if we can simulate the physics and chemistry of human brains well enough to replicate cognitive processes, but our best experts are simply stumped at figuring out exactly which essential features of the physical/chemical processes translate into intelligence. And if early experiments at tweaking model parameters show that the human brain has evolved into some local maximum, where any tweak produces a less powerful intelligence or one that's defective in some way, and after this is observed over many experiments, it might then become taboo to tweak the model for ethical reasons, making the situation stable over the long term.
In other words, we might be "forced" to "waste" cycles if we can't figure out which cycles we're wasting, and the experiments that might tell us would entail sacrificing too many artificial humans to be ethically acceptable.
This state of affairs isn't necessarily likely, but it's certainly possible.
You barely beat me to mentioning Egan. I find it interesting that he's able to write engaging stories using AIs as the principal characters, as if to say that most of the attributes we normally attribute to being "human" are actually general properties of sentient minds in general, and we just conflate the two because we happen to be the only sentient minds we know about.
Traveling by "AI over laser" is a clever cheat for the speed of light that I hadn't thought of. But how do the physical outputs on the receiving end get there in the first place? <:)
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion such as "warp drive", and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
When. I am willing to bet that neither of us nor any of our grandchildren will be alive when it becomes possible to copy one’s personality onto a robot of sorts.
The future isn't something in the future anymore. We are living in the middle of it. I'm 33 and can easily see the effects of rapid technological change since the time I was a boy. Things are just getting faster. Betting against change has been a losing bet for decades, if not arguably centuries.
As a practical example: solar power. It's been commercially a available for at least 30 years. It's often been derided and dismissed because even now, it's less than 1% of energy production in the US. 30 years of no significant traction, so an obvious loser right?
The price per watt has been falling logarithmically. This corresponds to a rise in efficiency.
If you look at the last 5 years or so, you can see that solar panels are starting to hit the up slope of a hockey stick. Within a very few number of years, be prepared to see an incredible impact on the energy industry. It's not going to make oil and gas obsolete, but we'll see cheap energy being used in lots and lots of places.
My personal opinion, not really supported by hard data, is that we'll see an African renaissance in the next 10-20 years. Contrary to Western belief, Africa is not entirely desert and full of starving black kids who's parents are never around for some reason. It's also not entirely in some state of civil war. There's problems, but only in spots.
What many African countries are doing is leap frogging into modern times. They are bypassing the massive infrastructures that Western nations have and using modern tech to fix their problems. With the spread of inexpensive solar power, you'll see the darkest night time parts of the continent lighting up.
Uh, I’m not saying the future isn’t now. I am saying that uploading one’s mind (in whatever form that will take place) will require much much more energy and complexity than currently available. In fact, I’d go so far to say that we find a way around relativity before we find a way to remodel the human brain – it is just so mind-boggingly complex, based on such difficult-to-simulate physics, that I don’t think it will be done any time soon.
And I fully agree with you on solar power, it is a wonderful thing, though Germany is possibly not the brightest place to put the largest installation in terms of energy output…
You're making the same mistake again. You're equating complexity to impossibility/improbability. They are not causally related.
We know that brains work. You and I having are having this disconnected conversation using an incredibly deep stack of technological infrastructure, all created with human brains over decades and centuries. Brains are physical things, not metaphysical. The physics of the universe we live in allow matter to interact in particular ways that let brains exist.
The physics that lets brains exist is the same physics that describe relativity. We have 100+ years of thousands upon thousands of experiments and acquisition of data that backs up relativity. Its very unlikely to go anywhere.
I'll agree that the physical structure of an adult brain (not just human) is very complex. Its not mind boggling though. Much of the brain is just repeated neural structures. There are what, a few trillion connections? In 1950 that was a mind boggling huge amount of data. Now? That amount of data fits into a thumb drive with room to spare.
The tricky part up to now, and a couple years into the future, is building the right tools to pick it all apart. Its just like the solar panel problem. Low efficiencies, high cost. Same with Moore's Law and cpu's. But we have, if not the highly refined eventual versions, but the basic and functional tools to brute force through figuring out the its & bits of the brain. Actually, a lot of the work is already done. Neuro chemistry, effects of different neurotransmitters, effects of various drugs on the brain, FMRI, etc and etc.
Don't forget that Obama recently announced a brain initiative. Its the along the same line as the human genome project in the 1990's. Detractors said that it would take hundreds of years to finish with technology in the early 90's. Was done under budget and on time within 10 years. By 2020, just 7 short years away, everything computer-related is going to have doubled a little over 3 more times.
With all of this in place, the subsystems of the brain are complicated but not insurmountably. Even without initially having a sound mathematical description of how the brain works, we are/will have enough data to brute force a detailed simulation. If that's the route we have to go, then the mathematics will come later. Indeed, this is how much of the relationship between engineering and science/math has been for thousands of years. People were using arches in buildings long, long before understanding the math behind weight distribution.
In terms of energy, we can easily calculate how much energy it takes to simulate a brain. Let me put some numbers together. I was born 1/30/1980. I am 12,149 days old. Lets say that on average, it has taken 2200 calories a day for me to survive from birth to the current moment. Roughly, it has taken 26,727,800 calories for my body and brain to survive and prosper. To keep this simple, I won't even try to calculate the energy spent on everything else like clean water, electricity, transportation, entertainment, etc. In general terms, since I live on Earth with you and billions of others, its not an insurmountable amount of energy since we're all here. Plus, I'm a big guy so its safe to say it takes less calories to raise a human-class sentience to adulthood.
So, lets sum up your arguments and my counters:
1) Uploading (understanding) a brain is too complex:
-> There's already a large understanding of the biochemistry and mathematics behind brain function. Its not a mystical black box. Given current and in-development tools, combined with massive data storage and analysis systems, picking apart all the bits of the brain will be done in a few years.
2) Too much energy:
-> We're already well on the way to reverse engineering the brain. The energy required to finish the task is marginal. To simulate a brain, we already grow billions of real brains for less calories than it takes for a fat guy in San Francisco to write everything you've been reading. Convert those thermal calories to heat in the world's most efficient sterling engine, and that's one thing you can use to power your simulated brain. I dare say that it will cost less power to run a sentient AI than it does to support my love of bacon.
3) We'll find a way around relativity before understanding the brain:
-> Brains exist. So does relativity. The physics of the universe support reverse engineering brains. They don't experimentally support breaking relativity at the moment. However, I too am hopeful that some loophole or something is discovered that lets relativity be less of a barrier than it appears. However, given practical real-world data, that isn't likely any time soon.
4) Physics is difficult to simulate:
-> I didn't hit on this point explicitly above, but yes and no. Yes in that creating a simulation of universe from particles on up is daunting. Even with today's and near-future doubling growth, doing massive particle simulations will be very hard. No, in that you don't have to simulate every atom in a brain to understand how it works. You create mathematical models detailing how the tiny little structural bits of the brain work (neurotransmitters for example) and perform calculations based at that. Still a large computational problem, but one that is already with our grasp as of this minute and only easier to do going into the future. So basically, you don't actually have to simulate physics. You just have to simulate the mathematical interactions of the subsystems that make up the brain to get comparable results.
5) Germans
-> That's the great thing about solar power. Its everywhere. During the day in most parts of the world, even when its overcast, you still get enough sunlight hitting the ground to provide lots and lots of power. Sure, you'll get more in the desert on the equator, but that's the maximum and not minimum useful amount. People that make the statement you did have the argument backwards. You have to ask, "What is the minimal amount of solar energy we can collect to be useful and economical?"
Man, this took a lot longer to write than I thought it would.
That's one possible solution to the Fermi paradox -- nobody's contacted us yet because they don't feel like trying to have a conversation with something that has the life span of a mayfly.
I think the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is that civilizations destroy themselves before advancing to the stage where interstellar travel is possible. Look here at earth, all civilizations collapse sooner or later and this means that technology is forgotten or lost. Humans are too likely to engage in conflicts with each other before anything like interstellar travel will happen.
It's not that bad with non-FTL, about 10 years[1] on board with constant 1.5g acceleration (Kepler-62 is about 1200ly away). You wouldn't even need a real generation ship for that. Relativity would make it a long wait here on earth though. Of course even accomplishing that kind of acceleration would be a fairly major feat for humanity, but at least it wouldn't break any major laws of nature like FTL.
Have you tried applying the relativistic rocket equation to that little journey? A generation ship would be a considerably easier engineering problem than a rocket that can constantly accelerate at 1.5g for 10 years
A generation ship is made pointless by technological advance. Why leave in a 1000yr generation ship now when it will only take 25 years to develop one which gets us there in half the time? And why then if another 25 years could cut that time in half again? For that matter, why not wait, say 150 years until a combination anti-matter / interstellar-hydrogen fueled engine that could accelerate at 1g for a decade?
It'd be kinda silly to arrive 1000yr later only to find the system entirely colonized by people from the 'future'.
The point I was trying to make was that while space is really really big place with vast distances, interesting destinations are still very much reachable with slower-than-light travel. Of course that doesn't make reaching those destinations easy, but it's still most likely significantly easier than FTL.
If I didn't know better, I'd say they're quietly and rightly cautiously hinting at the discovery of extrasolar photosynthesis. Their note about methane levels and the -f datum together draw an interesting picture.
To summarize the paper: They have developed some new models that show it is theoretically possible that Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f could be warm water worlds. Their models also show that with the new generation of telescopes coming online, such as the James Web Space Telescope, it should be possible to determine if Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are actually warm water worlds.
If these two planets do turn out to be warm water worlds, it would be big news, as some of the elements for 'earth like' life would be present on two exoplanets – abundant liquid water. If I remember correctly, there is some other work being done (not related to this paper) on obtaining an atmospheric spectra of transiting exoplanets. This could tell us the chemical makeup of the planets atmospheres and we could possibly see various markers that would indicate life.
All up, it looks to be pretty exciting, but we are going to need some bigger and better telescopes before we know more. Keep watching this space!