Category: Technology

Street View’s mesmerizing ability to allow us a peek into the nooks and crannies of the world is both its strength and potential weakness. While it’s great for getting a feel for a potential vacation spot or to virtually stand outside an event venue you’re planning to visit, this easily accessible, in-depth view can be a double-edged sword. It’s not just the curious tourists or event-goers who are looking – potential stalkers and criminals can also use this tool to their advantage.

Imagine the unsettling feeling of knowing that anyone, from anywhere in the world, can virtually stake out your home without leaving the comfort of their living room. Although it’s true that the same could be achieved by physically staking out a location, Google Maps certainly makes the process more convenient.

The good news? Google has provided an option for those concerned about their privacy. If you want to obscure specific details from Street View, like your home, it’s quite straightforward to do so.

Tamitha Skov, a renowned space weather physicist who keeps her followers abreast of all things celestial, took to social media to voice her excitement over the discovery. She exclaimed, “Talk about Polar Vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star.”

Such solar prominences, made of hydrogen and helium, often protrude from the sun’s surface and release plasma. But it’s rare to witness them behave in this peculiar fashion.

One of the speculations surrounding this baffling occurrence revolves around the sun’s magnetic field. Every 11 years, in a process intrinsic to its life cycle, the sun undergoes a magnetic field reversal. Intriguingly, these bizarre activities tend to crop up when the sun reaches a 55-degree latitude during this cycle.

Solar physicist Scott McIntosh, the deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, delved deeper into this peculiar solar dance. Speaking to Space.com, he elaborated, “Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55-degree latitude and it starts to march up to the solar poles.”

He continued with a sense of scientific wonder, “It’s very curious. There is a big ‘why’ question around it. Why does it only move toward the pole one time and then disappears, only to re-emerge three or four years later in exactly the same region?”

While the sun’s recent activity may sound alarming, it’s worth noting that these phenomena, although not fully understood, are a part of the sun’s complex dynamics. As researchers continue to probe the mysteries of our star, discoveries like these remind us of the vastness and intrigue that space holds.

A Series of Puzzling Experiments

Yet, the experiments designed to detect life provided conflicting results. Of the three tests conducted, the first hinted at potential metabolic processes. However, the other two tests failed to corroborate these findings, leading scientists to suspect the initial results were the product of non-biological chemical reactions. Some of the soil experiments involved adding nutrient-infused water with radioactive carbon to the Martian soil, expecting microorganisms—if present—to release radioactive gas. Although this gas was initially detected, subsequent tests did not replicate the results.

An Overlooked Possibility?

Professor Dirk Schulz-McKoch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin, offers a new angle. He theorizes that the very act of adding water to the Martian soil might have destroyed potential life forms. Citing examples of Earth-based extremophiles that thrive in harsh conditions but can be killed by excess water, he suggests that the same might be true for Martian organisms.

Hydrogen Peroxide and Martian Life

In a 2007 study, Schulz-McKoch proposed that Martian life forms might contain hydrogen peroxide in their cells, which could offer numerous benefits for survival, like a lower freezing point and a built-in oxygen supply. He argues that if such life forms existed, the experimental conditions imposed by the Viking program might have been fatal.

“We might have killed the very organisms we were searching for,” Schulz-McKoch posits in his June article in BigThink. “The heating process before analysis could have triggered a deadly reaction if hydrogen peroxide was present, destroying any organic molecules and generating a burst of carbon dioxide—exactly what was detected in the experiments.”

A Sobering Speculation

While purely speculative, this theory raises unsettling ethical and methodological questions about our approach to exploring other planets. Did we, almost 50 years ago, discover and inadvertently annihilate Martian life forms? If so, the implications are far-reaching, not just for the ethics of space exploration but for understanding life’s rarity and resilience across the universe.

Joel Sercel, TransAstra’s founder and CEO, shared his excitement about the project’s potential, saying, “This could be a game-changer for orbital debris cleanup.” TransAstra plans to navigate the inflatable bag around low Earth orbit using a space tug, whimsically named Worker Bee, to collect multiple pieces of debris.

Despite the promising technology, we are still years—possibly decades—away from deploying such solutions in space. “The journey from ground testing to actual space missions is a long one, filled with numerous challenges and milestones,” said Sercel.

The space debris problem is becoming increasingly severe. The European Space Agency estimates that Earth’s orbit currently contains around 36,500 objects larger than 4 inches and as many as 330 million objects larger than 0.04 inches.

Highlighting the urgency of the problem, a piece of space debris targeted for removal by another debris-elimination project was recently struck by another piece of space junk. This collision, which occurred in August 2023, likely generated even more fragments, exacerbating the issue.

As space becomes increasingly cluttered, technologies like TransAstra’s inflatable bag could play a crucial role in maintaining the long-term sustainability of orbital activities. Though it may be early days for this particular solution, the innovative approach offers a glimmer of hope in what has become a race against time to clean up our cosmic backyard.

What is consciousness?

One of the challenges in studying consciousness in AI is defining what it means to be conscious. Peters says that for the purposes of the report, the researchers focused on ‘phenomenal consciousness,’ otherwise known as the subjective experience. This is the experience of being — what it’s like to be a person, an animal, or an AI system (if one of them does turn out to be conscious).

There are many neuroscience-based theories that describe the biological basis of consciousness. But there is no consensus on which is the ‘right’ one. To create their framework, the authors therefore used a range of these theories. The idea is that if an AI system functions in a way that matches aspects of many of these theories, then there is a greater likelihood that it is conscious.

They argue that this is a better approach for assessing consciousness than simply putting a system through a behavioral test — say, asking ChatGPT whether it is conscious, or challenging it and seeing how it responds. That’s because AI systems have become remarkably good at mimicking humans.

A theory-heavy approach

To develop their criteria, the authors assumed that consciousness relates to how systems process information, irrespective of what they are made of — be it neurons, computer chips, or something else. This approach is called computational functionalism. They also assumed that neuroscience-based theories of consciousness, which are studied through brain scans and other techniques in humans and animals, can be applied to AI.

On the basis of these assumptions, the team selected six of these theories and extracted from them a list of consciousness indicators. One of them — the global workspace theory — asserts, for example, that humans and other animals use many specialized systems, also called modules, to perform cognitive tasks such as seeing and hearing. These modules work independently but in parallel and share information by integrating into a single system. A person would evaluate whether a particular AI system displays an indicator derived from this theory, Long says, “by looking at the architecture of the system and how the information flows through it.”

Seth is impressed with the transparency of the team’s proposal. “It’s very thoughtful, it’s not bombastic, and it makes its assumptions really clear,” he says. “I disagree with some of the assumptions, but that’s totally fine because I might well be wrong.”

The authors say that the paper is far from a final take on how to assess AI systems for consciousness, and that they want other researchers to help refine their methodology. But it’s already possible to apply the criteria to existing AI systems. The report evaluates, for example, large language models such as ChatGPT and finds that this type of system arguably has some of the indicators of consciousness associated with global workspace theory. Ultimately, however, the work does not suggest that any existing AI system is a strong candidate for consciousness — at least not yet.