Welcome to Weeklies, where I recap some of the weird links I’ve shared on the homepage over the past week! Check back daily for new ones, and hopefully meet here again sometime in the future, hopefully during the weekend but you never know what might come up!
The Giant Spires of Early Earth
The early Earth, before the tallest trees and terrestrial vertebrates, was ruled by giant 24-feet-tall spires known as Prototaxites. These towering structures would have existed up to 420 million years ago. According to Smithsonian Magazine, ever since the first Prototaxites fossil was discovered in 1843, scientists have wondered if they might have been an early lichen or fungus, like gigantic through-the-looking-glass mushrooms (without their caps). Geophysicist Kevin Boyce has stated that the idea is a little hard to believe.
“A 20-foot-tall fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here’s the fossil.”
However, while their true nature is still debated, chemical analysis has shown that Prototaxites are more likely to have been fungi than plants. It was a weird and wild Earth back then!
An Astrobiologist Survey
Over at The Conversation, a recent survey of astrobiologists asked how they felt about the likelihood of basic, complex, and intelligent extraterrestrial life out there somewhere in the cosmos. The results showed that a majority do believe we are not alone.
“The results reveal that 86.6% of the surveyed astrobiologists responded either ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ that it’s likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.”
67.4% agreed that said life might even be “complex,” and when removing neutral responses, the percentage of those who agree or strongly agree that life exists elsewhere shoots up to 97.8%.
Social Somethings
Why don’t we see dinosaur ghosts? That’s what one Redditor asked last week over on r/Paranormal, and the answers ranged from environmental recordings, in which case the dinosaurs have just been gone too long and have since faded away, to no longer having a connection to this world and so they have moved on. I once wrote about the concept of ghosts fading over time, and it’s a compelling idea!
Meanwhile, a parent recently checked their baby monitor, only to find two children appearing on it. The problem? They only have one. “My camera froze and when I checked I saw my daughter looking at another toddler in the corner of her room,” the poster wrote, “I immediately walked in and the corner was empty.” While some believe it may have been a camera glitch or something else perfectly ordinary, I’m drawn to the comment about a potential future premonition of having a second child…
Tired of all this ghost talk? Great, let’s go back to fungus. Here’s a video of some mushrooms playing a keyboard via electrical fluctuations.
AI Nightmares of the Week
Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have created an embodied intelligence model that “appears to learn how to generalize in the same way that children do,” according to TechXplore. This, they say, potentially shows a mechanism in neural networks that allows them to achieve compositionality, which is basically the ability to separate a whole into reusable parts (the example used is recognizing different objects as the color red, so even if you encounter an unidentified object that is also red, you at least know that it is red).
That’s interesting, but can robots and AI match the human hand? A BBC article last week explored their progress, revealing that “advances in AI are ushering in a generation of machines that are getting close to matching human dexterity.” New robotic prostheses using generative AI can learn to anticipate the desired movements of their wearers.
Last week, I also posted an article about AI and consciousness. These topics have been swirling around in the news lately, and philosopher Jonathan Birch is worried that, if and when AI do become sentient, we may continue to regard them as strictly tools or toys. As IEEE Spectrum writes, “he’s also concerned that people will soon attribute sentience to chatbots like ChatGPT that are merely good at mimicking the condition.” If sentient AI is ever reached, we’ll want to make sure we differentiate between convincing chatbots and sentient beings.
Finally, VentureBeat takes a look at the current crop of robots, from bartenders to puppy dogs and Tesla’s Optimus units, as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proclaims that “the ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming.”
Links Of Interest
Lucid dreaming is shown to boost creativity and lessen nightmares.
Calm Tech Rewards for calmer, less stressful technology.
Whistleblower reveals UAP retrieval program.
Were some “gifted students” in the 80s and 90s part of a top secret intelligence program?
New study suggests that the grandfather paradox may not be a problem after all.
Fast radio burst in long-dead galaxy puzzles astronomers.
NDE expert Peter Fenwick passes.
An egg-shaped UFO?
“Artificial sun” breaks record in China.
Dyson Trees could make a home for humans – and other things.
That’s it for this week’s Monday edition of Weeklies. Check back soon for more!
