UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Learning From the Past

Humans are naturally inclined to think towards the future. We find ourselves wondering about the next steps in our lives, imaging the potential consequences of advances today, even fictionalizing them to their most extreme forms as a sort of sandbox for possible futures.

Scientists might be one of the few groups to actively suppress that desire to predict the future. Conservative and data-driven by nature, they might be uncomfortable making guesses about the future because that requires a leap of faith. Even if there’s a lot of data to support a prediction, there are also infinite variables that can change the ultimate outcome in the interim. Trying to predict what the world will be like in a century doesn’t do much to improve it today; if scientists are going to be wrong, they’d rather do it constructively.

Indeed, the world has changed a lot in the past 100 years. In 1918, much of the world was embroiled in the first World War. 1918 was also the year the influenza pandemic began to rage, ultimately claiming somewhere between 20-40 million lives — more than the war during which it took place. Congress established time zones, including Daylight Saving Time, and the first stamp for U.S. airmail was issued.

Looking back, it’s clear that we’ve made remarkable strides. Today, it’s rare to die from the flu, or from a slew of other communicable diseases that were once fatal (such as smallpox, which was eradicated in 1977). That’s mostly due to the advent of prevention tactics such as vaccines, and treatments like antibiotics.

The pace at which technology is evolving can feel dizzying at times, but it’s not likely to slow down anytime soon. Here are some of the ways we suspect the technology of today will shape the world in the century to come.

Quantum Computing Will Come Of Age

As the internet transformed society over the past few decades, quantum computing will forever alter our view of the world and our place in it. It will give us the capacity to process more data about ourselves, the planet we live on, and the universe than has ever before been possible.

No one is totally sure yet what we’ll do with that data. We’ll likely find some answers to longstanding questions about physics and the universe, but it’s also likely there are answers to be found that we don’t even have the ability to fathom.

We’ll Hack Our Brains

We may not even have to wait a century to have our brains fully integrated with our devices, as research into brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is now firmly out of the realm of science fiction. Early prototypes have already helped patients recover from strokes and given amputees the ability to experience touch again with the help of a sensor-covered prosthesis. If and when they become commonplace, the human-machine mashup could irrevocably alter the course of human evolution. Prototypes for non-invasive BCIs in which electrode arrays pick up brain signals through the skull are already in development, and may serve as stepping stones toward the full-on “brain mesh” proposed by Elon Musk.

We’ll Zoom Around Our Revamped Cities in Autonomous Cars

The world of 2118 will have improved infrastructure and better ways of getting around. Our automobiles are becoming smarter and greener; by 2118, there’s a good chance that electric cars will be able to drive themselves, along with those most in need. The current consensus in the automotive industry is that fully autonomous vehicles are still theoretical at best (and may not be possible at all), but Tesla alone aims to achieve so-called level 5 autonomy — a world in which our cars would drive us — by about 2019.

In some parts of the world, cities themselves are also becoming more sophisticated. In China, a solar-powered highway could one day charge electric cars as they drive. Cities of the future could also fix themselves — engineers today are busy designing self-healing concrete structures and potholes that fill themselves.

AI Will Change How Humans Work

In the decades to come, technology that’s changing our homes, our devices, and our vehicles is also going to change our lives in other major ways. Artificial intelligence (AI) will almost certainly automate some jobs, particularly those that rely on assembly lines or data collection. To offset the unemployment of human workers that would result from automation, some nations may adopt a universal basic income (UBI), a system which regularly pays citizens a small stipend with no requirement to work.

Indeed, some places have already begun small-scale experiments with UBI, and a report from the Roosevelt Institute in November 2017 predicted the U.S. could see a $2.48 trillion increase in the nation’s GDP within just eight years if it implemented UBI.

In some fields, such as medicine, robots probably won’t completely replace humans. The more likely scenario, some experts predict, is that AI will continue to augment the work experience for humans — even augmenting us physically. AI technology has already been paired with wearable exoskeletons, giving factory workers superhuman strength — perfect for those whose jobs require heavy lifting, which could increase their risk of job-related accident or injury.

3D Printing the World

3D printers are already being used in labs around the world and, increasingly, by consumers. While the printers may be costly up front, they are often seen as a long-term investment, since they can often print their own replacement parts.

Image Credit: Getty Images

As 3D printers become capable of printing everything from viable organs to buildings, we’ll likely find use for them in different aspects of our lives, as well as many different fields of industry.

Medicine Gets a High-Tech Upgrade

New procedures, aided by technological advances, are poised to transform medicine. Using a precision medicine approach (which uses a patient’s genetic data, lifestyle, and environmental surroundings to inform treatment), scientists are developing treatments for cancer that are tailored to an individual patient’s genes.

Oncology is not the only area with potentially life-saving (or in some cases, life-giving) applications; the evolution of reproductive medicine has already begun right before our very eyes. In 2017, researchers grew lamb fetuses in what could be the first prototype of an artificial womb, one woman gave birth after a uterus transplant for the first time, and another to a baby that began as an embryo frozen 24 years ago. The much-hyped gene editing technology CRISPR could mean that by 2118, many genetic diseases could become a thing of the past: scientists used CRISPR to edit the gene for a fatal blood disorder out of human embryos. Stem cells continue to prove useful for developing novel treatments, even for conditions that were once believed to be untreatable.

A century from now, major diseases such as cancer, immune and inflammatory disorders, and genetic conditions “will very likely be long gone by either prevention or effective therapy,” Phil Gold, a professor at the McGill University Clinical Research Centre, told Futurism.

But that’s not to say we’ll live in a future of perfect health — external factors, from global warming to infectious diseases and even warfare, could depress the life expectancy of people in 2118.

The good news is, diagnostic technology is also dramatically improving. Shu Chien, bioengineer and winner of National Medal of Science at the University of California, San Diego, told the San Diego Tribune that he predicted that scientists would invent Star Trek‘s famous medical tricorder, capable of “non-invasive early detection of cancer,” in the next century. He’s not the first to make the prediction over the last few decades, but this time could be different: Science and technology have delivered on some other sci-fi tech, such as super-materials and object replicators.

The Planet Will Get a Lot Hotter

Climate change is already transforming our world. One 2015 study predicted that Greenland’s usually cold summers could become completely ice-free by 2050. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and fatal. The world’s sea levels are on track to rise 2 to 3 feet (0.6 to 0.9 meters) by 2100, which could displace up to 4 million people worldwide.

Earth is in the midst of a climate crisis that will not improve without deliberate and sustained action.

Over the past few decades, that progress has been slow. When it was developed in 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement aimed to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). Recent research from the University College of London revealed that we could have a 66 percent chance of hitting the 1.5-degree C target in 2100 — but we’d need to limit our carbon pollution to 240 billion tons to pull it off. Hopefully we will be able to quit our carbon habit over a longer period of time instead of making drastic cuts immediately, which would not be an easy feat to achieve in either the technical or political sense.

In the U.S., one of the biggest carbon contributors in the world, some fear we’re not doing our part. In June, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. In an interview with Futurism last year, Al Gore said the Trump administration’s environmental policies are “reckless and indefensible.”

But he is not devoid of hope. Gore told Futurism that he believes in the strength of the grassroots movement toward a more sustainable future, and that “we can and will win” the fight if we stay committed to the cause.

If humanity wants to remain on Earth, it’s a cause worth fighting for. We are beyond the point of preventing it from happening, but we can take steps to slow it down.

Humans Will Explore Our Solar System and Beyond

Although we’ve made monumental progress since 1918, we are still endlessly fascinated (and vaguely terrified) by the prospect of what might exist in space. Over the next century, perhaps nothing will thrill, challenge, and transform humanity more than the advances we make in space exploration.

Big-idea people, from Elon Musk to Donald Trump, are loudly planning to send humans to Mars and beyond, potentially setting up colonies on the Red Planet in the next century. One hundred years is not a long time to prepare for such a move, however, especially when we’re still not that sure what our living situation would be on Mars. While terraforming may allow us to adapt the planet to better suit our needs, we still have to get there first.

First, we’ll catch a better glimpse of distant celestial bodies through increasingly powerful infrared telescopes here on Earth. As space travel becomes more affordable (and even a tourist destination), we’ll be able to use what we see from down here on Earth to traverse the universe. The biggest question is, what — or who — might we meet when we do?

“By the year 2118, extraterrestrial life won’t be news but historical fact,” Jaymie Matthews, astrophysicist and professor at the University of British Columbia, told Futurism. “What’s harder to predict is how humanity will respond, and adapt, to knowing we are not alone in the Universe. Will it make us humbler? (“We are one of many.”) More arrogant? (“We are the peak of evolution in the Galaxy.”) More fearful? (“Microbes are just the tip of the alien iceberg. And Earth is the Titanic!”) Or will it help us to better understand and appreciate our own origins?”

War in the Fifth Domain

In the months running up to the 2016 election, the Democratic National Committee was hacked. Documents were leaked, fake news propagated across social media — the hackers, in short, launched a systematic attack on American democracy.

Whether or not that’s war, however, is a matter for debate. In the simplest sense, an act of cyber warfare is defined as an attack by one nation on the digital infrastructure of another.

These threats are what Samuel Woolley, research director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at Institute for the Future, calls “computational propaganda,” which he defines as the spread of disinformation and politically motivated attacks designed using “algorithms, automation, and human curation,” and launched via the internet, particularly social media. In a statement to Futurism, Woolley added that these attacks are “assailing foundational parts of democracy: the press, open civic discourse, the right to privacy, and free elections.”

Attacks like the ones preceding the 2016 election may be a harbinger of what’s to come: We are living in the dawn of an age of digital warfare — more pernicious and less visible than conventional battles, with skirmishes that don’t culminate in confrontations like Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Our definitions of warfare — its justifications, its tactics — are transforming. Already, there’s a blurry line between threats to a nation’s networks and those that occur on its soil. As Adrienne LaFrance writes in The Atlantic: an act of cyber warfare must be considered an act of war.

A War of 0s and 1s

A little over a decade ago, the United States Cyber Command began developing what would become the world’s first digital weapon: a malicious computer worm known as Stuxnet. It was intended to be used against the government of Iran to stymie its nuclear program, as The New York Times reported. In the true spirit of covert operations and military secrecy, the U.S. government has never publicly taken credit for Stuxnet, nor has the government of Israel, with whom the U.S. reportedly teamed up to unleash it.

Stuxnet’s power is based on its ability to capitalize on software vulnerabilities in the form of a “zero day exploit.” The virus infects a system silently, without requiring the user to do anything, like unwittingly download a malicious file, in order for the worm to take effect. And it didn’t just run rampant through Iran’s nuclear system — the worm spread through Windows systems all over the world. That happened in part because, in order to enter into the system in Iran, the attackers infected computers outside the network (but that were believed to be connected to it) so that they would act as “carriers” of the virus.

As its virulence blossomed, however, analysts began to realize that Stuxnet had become the proverbial first shot in a cyber war.

Like war that takes place in the physical world, cyber warfare targets and exploits vulnerabilities. Nation-states invest a great many resources to gather intelligence about the activities of other nations. They identify a nation’s’ most influential people in government and in general society, which may come in useful when trying to sway public opinion for or against a number of sociopolitical issues.

image credit: pixabay

Gathering nitty-gritty details of another country’s economic insecurities, its health woes, and even its media habits is standard fare in the intelligence game; figuring out where it would “hurt the most” if a country were to launch an attack is probably about efficiency as much as it is efficacy.

Historically, gathering intel was left to spies who risked life and limb to physically infiltrate a building (an agency, an embassy), pilfer documents, files, or hard drives, and escape. The more covert these missions, and the less they could alarm the owners of these targets, the better. Then, it was up to analysts, or sometimes codebreakers, to make sense of the information so that military leaders and strategists could refine their plan of attack to ensure maximum impact.

The internet has made acquiring that kind of information near-instantaneous. If a hacker knows where to look for the databases, can break through digital security measures to access them, and can make sense of the data these systems contain, he or she can acquire years’ worth of intel in just a few hours, or even minutes. The enemy state could start using the sensitive information before anyone realizes that something’s amiss. That kind of efficiency makes James Bond look like a slob.

In 2011, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta described the imminent threat of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” in which an enemy state could hack into digital systems to shut down power grids or even go a step beyond and “gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals.” In 2014, TIME Magazine reported that there were 61,000 cybersecurity breaches in the U.S that year; the then-Director of National Intelligence ranked cybercrime as the number one security threat to the United States that year, according to TIME.

Computer viruses, denial of service (DDS) attacks, even physically damaging a power grid — the strategies for war in the fifth domain are still evolving. Hacking crimes have become fairly common occurrences for banks, hospitals, retailers, and college campuses. But if these epicenters of a functioning society are crippled by even the most “routine” cybercrimes, you can only imagine the devastation that would follow an attack with the resources of an enemy state’s entire military behind it.

image credit: pixabay

Nations are still keeping their cards close to their chest, so no one is really certain which countries are capable of attacks of the largest magnitude. China is a global powerhouse of technology and innovation, so it’s safe to assume its government has the means to launch a large-scale cyber attack. North Korea, too, could have the technology — and, as its relationship with other countries becomes increasingly adversarial, more motivation to refine it. After recent political fallout between North Korea and China, Russia reportedly stepped in to provide North Korea with internet— a move that could signal a powerful alliance is brewing. Russia is the biggest threat as far as the United States is concerned; the country has proven itself to be both a capable and engaged digital assailant.

The Russian influence had a clear impact on the 2016 election, but this type of warfare is still new. There is no Geneva Convention, no treaty, that guides how any nation should interpret these attacks, or react to them. To get that kind of rule, global leaders would need to look at the ramifications for the general population and determine how cyberwar affects citizens.

At present, there is no guiding principle for deciding when (or even if) to act on a perceived act of cyberwarfare. A limbo that is further complicated by the fact that, if those in power have benefitted from, or even orchestrated, the attack itself, then what incentive do they have to retaliate?

If cyber war is still something of a Wild West, it’s clearly citizens who will become the casualties. Our culture, economy, education, healthcare, livelihoods, and communication are inextricably tethered to the internet. If an enemy state wanted a more “traditional” attack (a terrorist bombing or the release of a chemical agent, perhaps) to have maximum impact, why not preface it with a ransomware attack that freezes people out of their bank accounts, shut down hospitals and isolate emergency responders, and assure that citizens didn’t have a way to communicate with their family members in a period of inescapable chaos?

As cybersecurity expert and author Alexander Klimburg explained to Vox, a full-scale cyber attack would result in damage “equivalent to a solar flare in terms of damaging infrastructure.” In short, it would be devastating.

A New Military Strategy

In summer 2016, a group called the Shadow Brokers began leaking highly classified information about the arsenal of cyberweaponry at the National Security Agency (NSA), including cyber weapons actively in development. The agency still doesn’t know whether the leak came from someone within the NSA, or if a foreign faction infiltrated Tailored Access Operations (the NSA’s designated unit for cyber warfare intelligence-gathering).

In any case, the breach of a unit that should have been among the government’s most impervious was unprecedented in American history. Aghast at the gravity of such a breach, Microsoft President Brad Smith compared the situation “to Tomahawk missiles being stolen from the military,” and penned a scathing blog post calling out the U.S. government for its failure to keep the information safe.

The last time such a leak shook the NSA, it was in 2013, when Edward Snowden released classified information about the agency’s surveillance practices. But as experts have pointed out, the information the Shadow Brokers stole is far more damaging. If Snowden released what was effectively battle plans, then the Shadow Brokers released the weapons themselves, as the New York Times analogized,

Earlier this year, a ransomware attack known as “WannaCry” began traversing the web, striking organizations from universities in China to hospitals in England. A similar attack hit IDT Corporation, a telecommunications company based in Newark, New Jersey, in April, when it was spotted by the company’s global chief operations officer, Golan Ben-Oni. As Ben-Oni told the New York Times, he knew at once that this kind of ransomware attack was different than others attempted against his company — it didn’t just steal information from the databases it infiltrated, but rather it stole the credentials required to access those databases. This kind of attack means that hackers could not only take that information undetected, but they could also continuously monitor who accesses that information.

WannaCry and the IDT attack both relied upon the cyber weapons stolen and released by the Shadow Brokers, effectively using them against the government that developed them. WannaCry featured EternalBlue, which used unpatched Microsoft servers to spread malware (North Korea used it to spread the ransomware to 200,000 global servers in just 24 hours). The attack on IDT also used EternalBlue, but added to it another weapon called DoublePulsar, which penetrates systems without tripping their security measures. These weapons had been designed to be damaging and silent. They spread rapidly and unchecked, going undetected by antivirus software all over the world.

The weapons were powerful and relentless, just as the NSA intended. Of course, what the NSA had not intended was that the U.S. would wind up at their mercy. As Ben-Oni lamented to the New York Times, “You can’t catch it, and it’s happening right under our noses.”

“The world isn’t ready for this,” he said.

The Best Defense

The average global citizen may feel disenfranchised by their government’s apparent lack of preparedness, but defending against the carnage of cyber warfare really begins with us: starting with a long overdue reality check concerning our relationship with the internet. Even if the federal agencies aren’t as digitally secure as some critics might like, the average citizen can still protect herself.

“The first and most important point is to be aware that this is a real threat, that this potentially could happen,” cybersecurity expert Dr. Eric Cole told Futurism. Cole added that, for lay people, the best defense is knowing where your information is being stored electronically and making local backups of anything critical. Even services like cloud storage, which are often touted as being safer, wouldn’t be immune to targeted attacks that destroy the supportive infrastructure — or the power grids that keep that framework up and running.

“We often love going and giving out tons of information and doing everything electronic,” Cole told Futurism, “but you might want to ask yourself: Do I really want to provide this information?”

Some experts, however, argue that your run-of-the-mill cyber attack against American businesses and citizens should not be considered an act of war. The term “war” comes with certain trappings — governments get involved, resources are diverted, and the whole situation escalates overall, Thomas Rid, professor and author, recently told The Boston Globe. That kind of intensity might, in fact, be counterproductive for small-scale attacks, ones where local authorities might be the ones best equipped to neutralize a threat.

As humans evolve, so too do the methods with which we seek to destroy each other. The advent of the internet allows for a new kind of warfare — a much quieter one. One that is fought remotely, in real time, that’s decentralized and anonymized. One in which robots and drones take the heat and do our bidding, or where artificial intelligence tells us when it’s time to go to war.

Cyber warfare isn’t unlike nuclear weapons — countries develop them in }and, should they be deployed, it would be citizens that suffer more than their leaders. “Mutually assured destruction” would be a near guarantee. Treaties mandating transparency have worked to keep nuclear weapons in their stockpiles and away from deployment. Perhaps the same could work for digital warfare?

We may be able to foretell what scientific and technological developments are on the horizon, but we can only guess at what humanity will do with them.

Humans made airplanes. These allowed them to fly above the clouds…and they used it to drop bombs on each other.

AI brain implants tested on humans by US military

15-01-2018 om 20:50 geschreven door peter

Aliens, Autonomous Cars, and AI: This Is the World of 2118

Learning From the Past

Quantum Computing Will Come Of Age

We’ll Hack Our Brains

We’ll Zoom Around Our Revamped Cities in Autonomous Cars

AI Will Change How Humans Work

3D Printing the World

Medicine Gets a High-Tech Upgrade

The Planet Will Get a Lot Hotter

Humans Will Explore Our Solar System and Beyond

11-01-2018 om 23:33 geschreven door peter

Artificial Intelligence can tell you your blood pressure, age, and smoking status — just by looking at your eye

05-01-2018 om 23:07 geschreven door peter

IN BRIEF

POSTBIOLOGICAL LIFE

EXTRATERRESTRIAL, POSTBIOLOGICAL AI

31-12-2017 om 19:51 geschreven door peter

Yes! Time Travel Is “Technically Possible”

28-12-2017 om 23:10 geschreven door peter

25-12-2017 om 00:19 geschreven door peter

Humans Attack Security Robot in San Francisco

19-12-2017 om 14:58 geschreven door peter

16-12-2017 om 15:28 geschreven door peter

15-12-2017 om 18:55 geschreven door peter

Scientists turn DNA into virtually any 3D shape imaginable

13-12-2017 om 23:17 geschreven door peter

NVidia Can Change Day To Night On Video With Artificial Intelligence

AI Can Guess How A Street Would Look Covered With Snow Or Rain

In The Future People Will Not Be Able To Distinguish Between Fake And Real

12-12-2017 om 21:07 geschreven door peter

First AI with Imagination Could Mean ‘End of Reality As We Know It’

12-12-2017 om 20:20 geschreven door peter

Advancements in AI Are Rewriting Our Entire Economy

ADVANCEMENTS IN AI

MONEY MAKERS

11-12-2017 om 00:52 geschreven door peter

Welcome to the Age of Digital Warfare

War in the Fifth Domain

A War of 0s and 1s

A New Military Strategy

The Best Defense

11-12-2017 om 00:39 geschreven door peter

09-12-2017 om 15:35 geschreven door peter

08-12-2017 om 12:36 geschreven door peter

Researchers 3D-print shockingly realistic human organ models

08-12-2017 om 00:39 geschreven door peter

Robot learns like a toddler to predict future outcomes in its environment

Teaching a robot how to play

06-12-2017 om 23:12 geschreven door peter

3D-printed “living tattoo” turns bacteria into sensors and computers you can wear

Why bacteria?

Gettin’ inked

06-12-2017 om 22:24 geschreven door peter

06-12-2017 om 18:36 geschreven door peter

MUFON’s New Social Network