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POPSFive Reasons Why Aliens Will Make Contact with the Japanese First North Korea is rumored to have recently released a statement claiming that their nuclear reactor has the dual capability of communicating wirelessly with alien species up to 1,000 light years away in real time. Of course, we can't believe everything that the North Korean government says, but seriously, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were already communicating with other planets. If that's the case, it should be relatively easy for Japan, a neighboring country, to intercept their signals with laser pulses and let the world know definitively what Kim Jong Il has known for decades—that there is life beyond Earth.
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POPSTwenty science fiction novels that may change your life Cryptonomicon (2000), by Neal Stephenson The Mount (2002), by Carol Emschwiller Perdido Street Station (2002), by China Mieville Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), by Cory Doctorow Pattern Recognition (2003), by William Gibson Newton's Wake (2004), by Ken MacLeod Glasshouse (2006), by Charles Stross
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POPSStretching the Mind Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.
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POPSTransformers - The Nature of Alien Life
The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence. This brain swap may not be as far off for humans as one might think. In only a few decades, the computer revolution here on Earth has produced supercomputers capable of performing more than a quadrillion calculations per second. According to research by Hans Moravec, an artificial-intelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University, that rate trumps the human brain’s estimated top speed of 100 trillion calculations per second. Some scientists speculate that in a few decades, an event called the technological singularity will occur, and machines armed with computer brains will become sentient and surpass human intelligence. Civilizations equipped with technology light-years ahead
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POPSHave You Heard "The Hum"? Various features of modern life have been blamed - gas pipes, power lines, mobile phone masts, wind farms, nuclear waste, even low-frequency submarine communications. The internet is abuzz with rumour and speculation. There are dark mutterings about secret military activity, alien contact and government cover-ups. The hum even featured in an episode of the sci-fi drama "The X-Files". Such conspiracy theories are understandable, but unhelpful, according to Dr David Baguley, who's head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He estimates that in about a third of cases there is some environmental source that can be tracked down and dealt with. "It may be a fridge or an industrial fan or a piece of heavy machinery at a nearby factory that is causing the disturbance and can be switched off," he says. Most of the time, however, there is no external noise that can be recorded or identified. You can hear an amplified recording of the hum, at the source.
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POPSMicropbes Under Sea Floor Shows Possibility of Alien Life However, this population lives at an unusual rate. Single-celled organisms usually consume food for energy and then rather than grow larger, simply divide and reproduce themselves. While the Bacteria Escherichia Coli, as an example, doubles its numbers every 20 minutes, these Archaea double on the order of hundreds or thousands of years and consume very little energy. "In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards," says House. "They metabolize a little, but not much." According to House, organisms metabolizing at such slow rates is what we could expect to find in other areas of our solar system because such environments have much less energy available than on Earth. Perhaps, similar organisms may be in hydrothermal vents beneath the ice of Europa -- the second moon of Jupiter -- or in subsurface aquifers of Mars.
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POPSDoes Earth harbour a 'shadow biosphere' of alien life? "Our search for life based on our assumptions of life as we know it. Weird life and normal life could be intermingled, and filtering out the things we understand about life as we know it from the things we don't understand is tricky." The tools and experiments researchers use to look for new forms of life - such as those on missions to Mars - would not detect biochemistries different from our own, making it easy for scientists to miss alien life, even if was under their noses.
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POPSomg!!!! — Navy Cracks Kids' High-Tech Online Code Actual slide from an actual US Navy presentation on why recruitment rates are at record lows amongst the youngest generation and how deciphering their mysterious alien language could help. im in ur navy, draftin ur kidz!
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POPSLiving Dust This is pretty cool. I think it could also explain more about how we got here on earth.
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POPSMars Soil Sample Reveals Presence of Nutrients for Plants to Grow “We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past, present or future,” said Samuel P. Kounaves during a telephone news conference on Thursday. “The sort of soil you have there is the type of soil you’d probably have in your backyard.”
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POPSStephen Hawking on Extraterrestial Life more: Hawking continues: "What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? \One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence." We are used to thinking of intelligent life, as an inevitable consequence of evolution, Hawking emphasized, but it is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes.
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POPSAlien hunt is too exciting to ignore Well, the writer certainly has a point. There is something very basic in answering this question. Life on earth is ultimately unique as long as no alien life is discovered. And yet we strive to know that we are not alone even at the cost of losing this very unique place. Is it the primordial blessing of the tree of knowledge that makes us go there?
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POPSArctic Scientists Explore a "Lost" 26-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem “The origin of life discussion comes up because the rocks that are exposed on this very slow spreading ridge are not volcanic, but instead come directly from Earth’s mantle,” says geochemist Susan Humphris. “The chemistry is very much like the volcanism that occurred on the primordial Earth. If you are thinking about origins of life, you’d like to have an area that is the closest analog to what was happening on the early Earth.”
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