1. category
  2. Transhuman News

Page 1,571«..1020..1,5701,5711,5721,573..1,5801,590..»

Category Archives: Transhuman News

Transhumanism: Can technology help mankind transcend its natural limitations? – Scroll.in

Posted: August 3, 2017 at 9:43 am

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedom we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence.

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, trans-humanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather, technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge.

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularity the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolution without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising ones spending power maximises ones ability to flourish hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman though very efficient technological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy and particularly our moral nature that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money...It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic society one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline is now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion, that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism. The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power effectively to serve god by becoming god. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0, Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.

The neo-liberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt simply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected.

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes.

Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questions it doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

Alexander Thomas, PhD Candidate, University of East London.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Excerpt from:
Transhumanism: Can technology help mankind transcend its natural limitations? - Scroll.in

Posted in Transhuman | Comments Off on Transhumanism: Can technology help mankind transcend its natural limitations? – Scroll.in

First human embryo editing experiment in US ‘corrects’ gene for heart condition – Washington Post

Posted: at 9:42 am

Scientists have successfully edited the DNA of human embryos to erase a heritable heart condition that isknown for causingsudden death in young competitive athletes, cracking openthe doors toa controversial new era in medicine.

This is the first time gene editing on human embryos has been conducted in theUnited States. Researcherssaid in interviews this weekthat theyconsider their work very basic. The embryos were allowed to grow for only a few days, and there was never any intention to implant them to create a pregnancy. But they also acknowledged that they will continue to move forward with the science, with theultimate goal of being able to correct disease-causing genes in embryos that will develop into babies.

News of the remarkable experiment began to circulate last week, but details became public Wednesday with a paper in the journal Nature.

The experiment is the latest example of how the laboratory tool known as CRISPR (orClustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a type of molecular scissors, is pushing the boundaries of our ability to manipulate life, and it has been receivedwith both excitement and horror.

The most recent work is particularly sensitive because it involves changes to the germ line that is, genes that could be passed on to future generations. The United States forbids the use of federal funds for embryo research, and theFood and Drug Administration is prohibited from considering any clinical trials involving genetic modifications that can be inherited. A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in February urged caution in applying CRISPR to human germ-line editingbut laid out conditions by whichresearch should continue. The new study abides by those recommendations.

This animation depicts the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedical research, including the potential to treat human genetic disease or provide cosmetic enhancements. (Feng Zhang/McGovern Institute for Brain Research/MIT)

Shoukhrat Mitalipov, one of the lead authors of the paper and a researcher at Oregon Health & Science University, said that he is conscious ofthe need for a larger ethical and legal discussion about genetic modification of humans but that his team's work isjustified because it involves correcting genes rather than changing them.

Really we didnt edit anything. Neither did we modify anything, Mitalipov said. Our program is toward correcting mutant genes.

Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who is co-chair of the National Academies committee that looked at gene editing,said that concerns about the work that have been circulating in recent days are overblown.

What this represents is a fascinating, important and rather impressive incremental step toward learning how to edit embryos safely and precisely, she said. However, no matter what anybody says, this is not the dawn of the era of the designer baby. She said that characteristics that some parents might desire, such as intelligence and athleticism, are influenced by multiple genes and that researchers don't understand all the components of how such characteristics areinherited, much less have the ability to redesign them.

The research involved eggs from 12 healthy female donors and sperm from a male volunteer who carries the MYBPC3 gene, which causes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. HCM is a disease that causes an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle butcan cause no symptoms and remain undetected until it causes sudden cardiac death. There's no way to prevent or cure it, and it affects1 in 500 people worldwide.

Around the time the sperm was injected into the eggs, researchers snipped out the gene that causes the disease. The result was far more successful than the researchers expected: As the embryo's cells began to divide and multiply, a huge number appearedto be repairing themselves by using the normal, non-mutated copy of the gene from the women'sgenetic material. In all, they saw that about 72 percent were corrected, a very high number. Researchers also noticed that theredidn't seem to be any off-target changes in the DNA, which has been a major safety concern ofgene-editing research.

Mitalipov said he hoped the technique could one day be applied to a wide variety of genetic diseases and that one of the team'snext targets may be the BRCA gene mutation, which is associated with breast cancer.

The first published work involving human embryos, reported in 2015, was done in Chinaand targeted a gene that leads to theblood disorder beta thalassemia. But those embryos were abnormal and nonviable, and there were far fewer than the number used in the U.S. study.

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a researcher at the Salk Institute who is also a co-author on the new study, saidthat there are many advantages to treating an embryo rather than a child or an adult. When dealing with an embryo in its earliest stages, only a few cells are involved, while in a more mature human being there aretrillions of cells in the body and potentially millions that must be corrected to eradicate traces of a disease.

Izpisua Belmonte said that even if the technology is perfected, it could deal with only a small subset of human diseases.

Idont want to be negative with our own discoveries, but it is important to inform the public of what this means, he said. In my opinion the percentage of people that would benefit from this at the current way the world is rather small. For the process to make a difference, the child would have to be born through in vitro fertilization or IVF and the parentswould have to know the child has the gene for a disease to get it changed. But the vast majority ofchildren are conceived the natural way, and this correction technology would not work in utero.

For years, some policymakers, historians and scientists have been calling for a voluntary moratorium on the modification of the DNA of human reproductive cells. The most prominent expression of concern came in the form of a 2015 letter signed by CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Laureate David Baltimore and 16 other prominent scientists. They warned that eliminating a genetic disease could have unintended consequences on human genetics, society and even the environment far into the future.

On Wednesday,Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, warned that the O.H.S.U. research would result in fertility clinics offering genetic upgrades to those able to afford them.

Once those commercial dynamics kick in, we could all too easily find ourselves in a world where some peoples children are considered biologically superior to the rest of us, she said in a statement. We need to ask ourselves whether we want to add that new kind of excuse for extreme social disparities to the ones we already tolerate.

Researchers who worked on the heart-condition experiment appear to have differing views on where their work is headed.

Paula Amato, a reproductiveendocrinologist with O.H.S.U., was excited about the idea of being able to editout diseases before birth. She said that while pre-implantation genetic screening of embryos is now available, it isn't perfect.She talked about how one of her patients went through three cycles of in vitro fertilizationbut all theeggs that were harvested hadthegene mutation that causes diseases.

With gene correction technology, Amatosaid, we could have rescued some of those embryos.

ButIzpisua Belmonte said he is focusing on using thefindings from this study to further research into gene modifications during a pregnancy or after birth into adulthood.

Ifeel that the practical thing to do is deal with the diseases people have, not with the disease they may have, he said.

Mitalipov said he hopes regulators will provide more guidance on what should or should not be allowed.

Otherwise, he said, this technology will be shifted to unregulated areas, which shouldnt be happening.

This story has been updated.

Read more:

A new CRISPR breakthrough could lead to simpler, cheaper disease diagnosis

Scientists debate the ethics of CRISPR

Ethicists urge caution in applying CRISPR to humans

Jennifer Doudna ponders 'what it means to be human' on the frontier of gene editing

See the original post here:
First human embryo editing experiment in US 'corrects' gene for heart condition - Washington Post

Posted in Post Human | Comments Off on First human embryo editing experiment in US ‘corrects’ gene for heart condition – Washington Post

Can Human Beings Survive The Impending Climate Crisis? – HuffPost

Posted: at 9:42 am

Although climate change may now rank alongside ISIS as the worlds most feared security threat according to a new Pew report, the horrors that global warming will unleash in the future, are far worse than you think warns David Wallace-Wells.

In his sobering piece in New York Magazine, he says that even within the lifetime of a teenager today .. parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable.

He cites the melting Arctic permafrost as one alarming example: It contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon. Thats twice as much CO2 that is currently trapped in our atmosphere from burnt fossil fuels. And, when it thaws, it will evaporate as methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of cooking the planet.

And, methane is not the only thing that will be released: hidden within the ice lie diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years. And, as human beings have never been exposed to them, our immune systems will be woefully unprepared to deal with such prehistoric plagues when they finally emerge from the ice.

If thats not terrifying enough, there are plenty of more recent viruses to contend, such as the 1918 flu which killed 100 million. Researchers discovered remnants of it in Alaska, and they suspect that the Siberian Ice holds both smallpox and bubonic plague.

And, to make matters worse, that permafrost may melt sooner than we think: the time scale on which climate change is happening only seems to grow faster and faster with each new report. According to the UNs latest climate survey, the gold standard in global warming analysis, the world is not only warming faster, but its impacts are much worse than originally thought.

Two degrees of warming used to be regarded as the acceptable threshold for climate calamity: never mind that it will unleash tens of millions of climate refugees upon an unprepared world, writes Wallace-Wells. But, now there is only a small chance that we will stay under the 2C ceiling enshrined in the Paris climate deal. And, those odds are even bleaker since Donald Trump pulled the US out of the accord two months ago.

In fact, according to research out this week, there is only a 5 percent chance that Earth will stay under the 2C mark by centurys end: Were closer to the margin than we think. If we want to avoid 2C, we have very little time left, warns Adrian Rafters, a University of Washington academic: The public should be very concerned.

According to the UNs report, we will hit 4 degrees of warming within the next 80 years, and such a temperature rise will usher in changes not seen since the last Ice Age. And, to make matters worse, 4C is only the median projection: the upper end of the curve goes as high as 8C.

And, that doesnt even include the impacts of permafrost melt; or the fact that less ice means that there will be less sun reflected and thus more warming; or that more cloud cover will trap more heat; or that forest dieback will mean that less CO2 is absorbed:

Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperatures can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years, says Wallace-Wells.

At 4C, the deadly 2003 European heat wave which killed 2,000 people a day, will be just a normal summer. At 7C of warming, it would be impossible to go outside, especially in the tropics where humidity routinely tops 90 percent:

In the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, simply moving around outside would be lethal, writes Wallace-Wells: And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out. At 11 or 12C of warming, more than half the worlds population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat.

And, its not just the heat that we have to contend with. For every degree that the planet warms up, food production falls by 10 - 15 percent. That means that if its 5C warmer by 2100, there will be 50% less food for a world population that has doubled in size.

Moreover, drought will only turn todays lush agricultural lands into parched desert. Unless there is a dramatic fall in emissions by 2080, Southern Europe, most of the Middle East, parts of Australia, Africa, South America and China will all be in a permanent state of drought, drier than the American dust bowl.

There are already 800 million people starving across the globe today. Imagine what that number will be in 60 years time.

And, if thats not alarming enough, warmer temperatures will also bring about more wars as people are forced to migrate from their homes whilst growing hungrier, thirstier, and more irritable in general with the heat. According to experts, every half-degree of warming will lead to a 10 to 20 percentincrease in the chance of armed conflict.

That means that social conflict could more than double this century.

All of this begs the question: can we as a species survive this impending catastrophe?

In the past, the planet has witnessed five mass extinction events which have effectively wiped the evolutionary slate clean.And, all of them, except for the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, were caused by climate change, the most notorious of which happened 252 million years ago.

That episode started when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by 5C, triggered by melting permafrost, culminating in the destruction of 97 percent of all life on Earth. And, according to scientists, this is the future that we are fast heading towards. Whilst this may smack of irrational panic to some, many of the most credentialed scientists that Wallace-Wells interviewed have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too.

Some have suggested that the lifespan of a civilization may only be several thousand years, and that of an industrial civilization only be a few hundred.Wallace-Wells muses whether this is why weve never found intelligent life from other galaxies:

In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another... the mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun.

Although global warming started in England at the dawn of the Industrial Age, more than half of that carbon dioxide has been released in the past three decades. That means that climate change has brought us to the brink of planetary collapse within the span of a single generation.

And yet, in spite of all of this, many of the scientists that Wallace-Wells interviewed are optimists, asserting that humans will find a way to stop this madness simply because we must: our very survival depends on it. After all, as the old cliche goes: necessity is the Mother of all invention.

The Morning Email

Wake up to the day's most important news.

Link:
Can Human Beings Survive The Impending Climate Crisis? - HuffPost

Posted in Post Human | Comments Off on Can Human Beings Survive The Impending Climate Crisis? – HuffPost

The milk of human kindness – The Jerusalem Post

Posted: at 9:41 am

La Vache. (photo credit:Courtesy)

If youve ever longed to see a feel-good road movie about a man bringing a prize cow from Algeria to Paris, your wait is over.

Mohamed Hamidis La Vache (its English title is the overly literal One Man and His Cow) is a charming, old-fashioned story that, at its best, recalls the classic Hollywood road comedies, in the Frank Capra mode. Are there surprises along the way? No, not really. Will you enjoy the trip anyway? If youre not too cynical, its quite likely that you will. This is the kind of gentle comedy where even the bad guys are not really that bad, which used to be a mainstay of movies.

Fatah (Fatsah Bouyahmed) is a nebbish who lives in a small village in Algeria, where he gets pushed around by Naima (Hajar Masdouki), the strong-willed, beautiful wife he adores but fears, and he dotes on his two young daughters. But the one in whom he confides, the one he feels most comfortable with, is his prize cow, Jacqueline. If ever a cow could act, its this one. Fatah has always dreamed of entering her in the agricultural fair in Paris, and finally he gets invited to go.

This opportunity exposes the different ways the villagers relate to the outside world and to Western culture in general. Some encourage him, wishing that they could go, too, while others caution that he will be corrupted by the experience.

Obviously, he goes, and its a daunting journey. You cant Fedex a cow, so they take a boat to Marseilles, and he plans to walk all the way to Paris. The movie really hits its stride once he and Jacqueline are on French country roads. Wherever they go, they meet people who are kindly and eccentric. And although Fatah is far from home, the villagers get to follow his every move through social media.

Thinking he is drinking pear juice, he gets drunk and is photographed in what looks like an embrace with a woman.

Naturally, he worries about what will happen when he heads back home. But no matter how he feels, he still has to get Jacqueline to Paris.

There are various subplots along the way, notably when he stops to watch an antigovernment demonstration and gets arrested. Some French people express anti-Muslim feelings, but Fatahs charm resolves that pretty quickly. This movie doesnt really have much to say about politics; the closest it gets to political commentary is to show that his Algerian small town is much the same as the French small towns he stops in i.e., that everyone and every place is basically the same.

A movie like this rises or falls on the performances, and in Fatsah Bouyahmed, the director found the perfect actor to embody Fatahs sweetness. Bouyahmed is a combination of a stand-up comedian and a modern-day Chaplin. I could believe in his simplicity and modesty without finding him cloying, quite a feat.

In addition to Bouyahmed, La Vache makes good use of some of the best supporting actors in France. Britain has always been known for its character actors, but France has some terrific ones, too.

Lambert Wilson, an extremely handsome man, often gets fairly dull leading-man roles. Here, he has the chance to be a bit quirkier in the role of the debt-ridden aristocrat who helps Fatah realize his dreams. Jamel Debbouze, who plays Fatahs brother-in-law, an Algerian who is proud of the life he has made for himself but who also tries to hide it from his family back home, brings real conviction to the part.

And, of course, Jacqueline the cow steals most of her scenes.

La Vache is beautifully photographed, and both its Algerian and French locations look so lovely that it would be a shame to see the film anywhere other than in a theater.

Share on facebook

See more here:
The milk of human kindness - The Jerusalem Post

Posted in Post Human | Comments Off on The milk of human kindness – The Jerusalem Post

A Star System Only 10 Light-Years Away is Our … – futurism.com

Posted: at 9:41 am

In BriefOnly a little more than 10 light-years away is a glimpse intothe past of our solar system. The nearby star system resembles anapproximation of what our solar system may have looked like in itsearly development.

Astronomers are understandably fascinated with the Epsilon Eridani system. For one, this star system is in close proximity to our own, at a distance of about 10.5 light-years from the Solar System. Second, it has been known for some time that it contains two asteroid belts and a large debris disk. And third, astronomers have suspected for many years that this star may also have a system of planets.

On top of all that, a new study by a team of astronomers has indicated that Epsilon Eridani may be what our own Solar System was like during its younger days. Relying on NASAs Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft, the team conducted a detailed analysis of the system that showed how it has an architecture remarkably similar to what astronomer believe the Solar System once looked like.

Led by Kate Su an Associate Astronomer with the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona the team includes researchers and astronomers from the Department of Physics & Astronomy of Iowa State University, the Astrophysical Institute and University Observatory at the University of Jena (Germany), and NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ames Research Center.

For the sake of their study the results of which were published in The Astronomical Journal under the title The Inner 25 AU Debris Distribution in the Epsilon Eri System the team relied on data obtained by a flight of SOFIA in January 2015. Combined with detailed computer modeling and research that went on for years, they were able to make new determinations about the structure of the debris disk.

As already noted, previous studies of Epsilon Eridani indicated that the system is surrounded by rings made up of materials that are basically leftovers from the process of planetary formation. Such rings consist of gas and dust, and are believed to contain many small rocky and icy bodies as well like the Solar Systems own Kuiper Belt, which orbits our Sun beyond Neptune.

Careful measurements of the disks motion has also indicated that a planet with nearly the same mass as Jupiter circles the star at a distance comparable to Jupiters distance from the Sun. However, based on prior data obtained by the NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists were unable to determine the position of warm material within the disk i.e. the dust and gas which gave rise to two models.

In one, warm material is concentrated into two narrow rings of debris that orbit the star at distances corresponding respectively to the Main Asteroid Belt and Uranus in our Solar System. According to this model, the largest planet in the system would likely be associated with an adjacent debris belt. In the other, warm material is in a broad disk, is not concentrated into asteroid belt-like rings, and is not associated with any planets in the inner region.

Using the new SOFIA images, Su and her team were able to determine that the warm material around Epsilon Eridani is arranged like the first model suggests. In essence, it is in at least one narrow belt, rather than in a broad continuous disk. As Su explained in a NASA press release:

The high spatial resolution of SOFIA combined with the unique wavelength coverage and impressive dynamic range of the FORCAST camera allowed us to resolve the warm emission around eps Eri, confirming the model that located the warm material near the Jovian planets orbit. Furthermore, a planetary mass object is needed to stop the sheet of dust from the outer zone, similar to Neptunes role in our solar system. It really is impressive how eps Eri, a much younger version of our solar system, is put together like ours.

These observations were made possible thanks to SOFIAs on-board telescopes, which have a greater diameter than Spitzer 2.5 meters (100 inches) compared to Spitzers 0.85 m (33.5 inches). This allowed for far greater resolution, which the team used to discern details within the Epsilon Eridani system that were three times smaller than what had been observed using the Spitzer data.

In addition, the team made use of SOFIAs powerful mid-infrared camera the Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST). This instrument allowed the team to study the strongest infrared emissions coming from the warm material around the star which are otherwise undetectable by ground-based observatories at wavelengths between 25-40 microns.

These observations further indicate that the Epsilon Eridani system is much like our own, albeit in younger form. In addition to having asteroid belts and a debris disk that is similar to our Main Belt and Kuiper Belt, it appears that it likely has more planets waiting to be found within the spaces between. As such, the study of this system could help astronomers to learn things about the history of our own Solar System.

Massimo Marengo, one of he co-authors of the study, is an Associate Professor with the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Iowa State University. As he explained in a University of Iowa press release:

This star hosts a planetary system currently undergoing the same cataclysmic processes that happened to the solar system in its youth, at the time in which the moon gained most of its craters, Earth acquired the water in its oceans, and the conditions favorable for life on our planet were set.

At the moment, more studies will need to be conducted on this neighboring stars system in order to learn more about its structure and confirm the existence of more planets. And it is expected that the deployment of next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in October of 2018 will be extremely helpful in that regard.

The prize at the end of this road is to understand the true structure of Epsilon Eridanis out-of-this-world disk, and its interactions with the cohort of planets likely inhabiting its system, Marengo wrote in a newsletter about the project. SOFIA, by its unique ability of capturing infrared light in the dry stratospheric sky, is the closest we have to a time machine, revealing a glimpse of Earths ancient past by observing the present of a nearby young sun.

Read the original here:
A Star System Only 10 Light-Years Away is Our ... - futurism.com

Posted in Futurism | Comments Off on A Star System Only 10 Light-Years Away is Our … – futurism.com

In Less Than 2 Days, Bitcoin Cash Becomes Third Biggest Cryptocurrency – Futurism

Posted: at 9:40 am

In Brief Barely 48 hours since its spin-off from the Bitcoin blockchain, Bitcoin Cash has already surged past other cryptocurrencies to become the third-biggest in terms of market capitalization. How the currency will fare over time is still up for debate, as it still lacks support from several mining pools and major exchanges. [Un]Expected Boom

Less thantwo days aftersplitting from the main Bitcoin network, Bitcoin Cash[BCC] now ranks third amongst the worlds most valuable cryptocoins. The budding cryptocurrency has reached a market cap of more $7.7 billion as of this writing, overtaking Ripples $6.7 billion market cap.

With a market cap of alittle more than $44 billion, the original Bitcoin currency is leading the market, while Ethereum comes in second at $20.9 billion. In terms of value per coin, Bitcoin Cash is even ahead of Ethereums current valuation of $223.54, with a per unit value of $470.27.

The surge in Bitcoin Cash comes despite a lack of support from several mining pools and major exchanges like Coinbase and BitMEX. Some Coinbase users are eventhreatening to sue the exchangefor not recognizing the currency.

Blockchain Globals recently re-opened Australian Cryptocurrency Exchange, on the other hand, is confirming Bitcoin Cash trades and claims to have seen a huge demand for the currency. We are receiving a lot of off-market orders for bitcoin cash theyre exploding! venture partner Sebastian Quinn-Watson told Business Insider.

The creation of Bitcoin Cash was the result of anongoing debate regarding how to scale Bitcoin blockchain transactions, and experts are currently dividedon how the split will ultimately play out.

For now, this sudden increase in value is understandable. Bitcoin Cash carries all the history of the original Bitcoin platform up until the fork on August 1, which means anyone with Bitcoin now has an equalamount of Bitcoin Cash.

Eventually, Bitcoin Cash should be able to stabilize itself for market exchanges, but right now, speculation is causing a surge in initial interest. People are selling their Bitcoin positions and buying Bitcoin Cash as a proposition that it is the new coin that has more value in the future, explainedQuinn-Watson. Its a bit speculative.

No one knows for surehow long Bitcoin Cash can sustain this upshot. As with other digital currencies, Bitcoin Cashs value depends mainly on how much value investors assign to it and how easily it can be used for real-world transactions.

Theres no infrastructure available out of the box to support BCC, Fran Strajnar, co-founder and CEO of Brave New Coin,told CNBC. The network needs further support and infrastructure needs to be as easy as Bitcoin; otherwise, its over for BCC.

Disclosure: Several members of the Futurism team, including the editors of this piece, are personal investors in a number of cryptocurrency markets. Their personal investment perspectives have no impact on editorial content.

Here is the original post:
In Less Than 2 Days, Bitcoin Cash Becomes Third Biggest Cryptocurrency - Futurism

Posted in Futurism | Comments Off on In Less Than 2 Days, Bitcoin Cash Becomes Third Biggest Cryptocurrency – Futurism

First US Human Embryo Gene Editing Experiment Successfully Corrects a Heart Condition – Futurism

Posted: at 9:40 am

In BriefA study published today in the journal Nature confirms earlierreports of the first-ever successful gene-editing of embryos in theU.S. Though controversial, the treatment could one day be used toaddress any of the 10,000 disorders linked to just a single geneticerror. Correcting Mutant Genes

Last week, reports circulated that doctors had successfully edited a gene in a human embryo the first time such a thing had been done in the United States. The remarkable achievement confirmed the powerful potential of CRISPR, the worlds most efficient and effective gene-editing tool. Now, details of the research have been published inNature.

The procedure involved correcting the DNA of one-cell embryos using CRISPRto remove the MYBPC3 gene. That gene is known to cause hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart disease that affects 1 out of 500 people. HCM has no known cure or treatment as its symptoms dont manifest until the disease causes sudden death through cardiac arrest.

The researchers started with human embryos created from 12 healthy female donors and sperm from a male volunteer who carried the MYBOC3 gene. The defective gene was cut out using CRISPR around the time the sperm was injected into the eggs.

As a result, as the embryos divided and grew, many repaired themselves using the non-edited genes from the genetic materials of the female donors, and in total, 72 percent of the cells that formed appeared to be corrected. The researchers didnt notice any off-target effects on the DNA, either.

The researchers told The Washington Postthat their workwas fairly basic. Really, we didnt edit anything, neither did we modify anything, explained Shoukhrat Mitalipov, lead author and a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University. Our program is toward correcting mutant genes.

Basicor not, the development is remarkable.By using this technique, its possible to reduce the burden of this heritable disease on the family and eventually the human population, Mitalipov said in an OHSU press release.

However, gene editing is a controversial area of study, and the researchers work included changes to the germ line, meaning the changes could be passed down to future generations. To be clear, though, the embryos were allowed to grow for only a few days and none were implanted into a womb (nor was that ever the researchers intention).

In fact, current legislation in the U.S. prohibits the implantation of edited embryos. Thework conducted by these researchers waswell within the guidelines set by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the use of CRISPR to edit human genes.

University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethicist Alta Charo thinks that the benefits of this potential treatment outweigh all concerns. What this represents is a fascinating, important, and rather impressive incremental step toward learning how to edit embryos safely and precisely, she told The WashingtonPost. [N]o matter what anybody says, this is not the dawn of the era of the designer baby.

Before the technique could be truly beneficial, regulations must be developed that provide clearer guidelines, according to Mitalipov. If not, this technology will be shifted to unregulated areas, which shouldnt be happening, he explained.

More than 10,000 disorders have been linked to just a single genetic error, and as the researchers continue with their work, their next target is BRCA, a gene associated with breast cancer growth.

Mitalipov hopes that their technique could one day be used to treat a wide-range of genetic diseases and save the lives of millions of people. After all, treating a single gene at the embryonic stage is far more efficient that changing a host of them in adults.

See more here:
First US Human Embryo Gene Editing Experiment Successfully Corrects a Heart Condition - Futurism

Posted in Futurism | Comments Off on First US Human Embryo Gene Editing Experiment Successfully Corrects a Heart Condition – Futurism

Buzz Aldrin: We Will Have Humans on Mars in the Next 20 Years – Futurism

Posted: at 9:40 am

The Quest For Another Earth

Humankind is eager to step out into the cosmos and wander across the deserted plains of the Red Planet. According to most reports, Elon Musk is leading the way with SpaceX; however, a number of other orginizationsNASA, Chinas Space Agency, The Mars Societyare training, deploying prototypes, and working on the plethora of questions and challenges that we will face when attempting to bring the first human beings to Mars.

But, as much as it might seem natural to get entrenched in the details of how we will actually get humans off of planet Earth (and keep them mentally and physically healthy throughout the duration), it is critical that we remember why were going in the first place.

In a recent interview, Buzz Aldrinthe renowned astronaut, engineer, and (of course) the second human to ever step foot on the Moonexplained why exploration and discovery are so important, touching upon why we should (and why we will) have humans on Mars in 20 years

Aldrin begins by stating that, from both a scientific and technological perspective, we are at the perfect juncture to push the boundaries of exploration. He asserts that, thanks to recent advancements, for the first time in human history, voyaging to other worlds is truly within our reach: Now is the time to start thinking seriously about what life on Mars might look like. We have never been closer to knowing and exploring another planet.

When asked just how close we really are to achieving this feat, Aldrin was quick to respond with his timeline, saying that we could have the first Human Martians at Mars by 2040.

Aldrin continued by segueing into a discussion of why venturing to other worlds is important, noting that, in many ways, our planet is ancient and familiar and the other bodies in our solar system are, for all intents and purposes, virgin territory: Space travel and exploration represents the final frontier weve now surveyed and scrutinized almost every inch of this planet, but there is so much we have yet to learn.

However, Aldrin states that the most notable aspects of this quest are about far more than just acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge or conquering new worlds. The journey to Mars will bring with it reignited excitement for science and innovation,creating a generation of young people who have ingrained within them a thirst for understanding and exploration.

When Buzz stepped onto the Moon in 1969, countless youth were captivated by the story and went on to pursue careers in STEM fields, hoping to achieve monumental feats of similar proportions.

Indeed, Aldrin is very aware of the impact that action in science has on the youth, stressing that, we can only get there [to Mars] if we start investing in future generations. Ultimately, as previously noted, he says that this investment is the key to long-term success: In 1903, man learned to fly airplanes. Only 66 years later, we walked on the Moon. In order to help the next generation to make giant leaps like these, we must educate, enable and inspire them to be passionate about subjects like science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

Aldrin notes that he has devoted himself to helping foster such a desire in young people, saying, Thats the mission of the SpaceShare Foundation, and its one I wholeheartedly support.

Aldrins Space Share Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to inspiring childrens passions for science and technology by providing educational tools to educators across the country at no cost. The goal of this work is to ensure that all young people are given the resources that they need to live up to their potential. After all, one never knows who the next Carl Sagan could be.

As Former President Barack Obama noted in a speech at the Frontiers Conference, America is about Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothersbut were also the place you can grow up to be a Grace Hopper, or George Washington Carver, or a Katherine Johnson, or an Ida B. Wells. We dont want somebody with a brilliant idea not in the room because theyre a woman. We dont want some budding genius unavailable to cure cancer or come up with a new energy source because they were languishing in a sub-standard school as a child. Because were going to be a better team if we got the whole team.

Aldrin echoes these ideas, noting that, while reaching Mars in the next 20 years is extremely likely, it will only happen if we ensure that young people are given every opportunity to be the best that they can be: Sometimes I cant believe this lucky kid from New Jersey got to land and walk on the Moonwork hard and keep reaching for the stars.

Here is the original post:
Buzz Aldrin: We Will Have Humans on Mars in the Next 20 Years - Futurism

Posted in Futurism | Comments Off on Buzz Aldrin: We Will Have Humans on Mars in the Next 20 Years – Futurism

Hyperloop One Passes Second Full System Test Faster Than Ever Before – Futurism

Posted: at 9:40 am

In Brief Hyperloop One has just put its tech through another test, which it passed with flying colors by going 308 km/h (192 mph) faster than ever before. So, how long until we see the technology implemented, and what challenges will it have to overcome to get to this stage? Hyperloop One tests are growing ever more impressive, reaching faster speeds and, in the process, showing us what the technology is really capable of. During thelatest evaluation, on Saturday, the pod reached speeds of 308 km/h (192 mph) down the companys 500-meter (1,640-foot) test track in Nevada, before gliding to a graceful halt.

This is a remarkable improvement on the companys first full system test earlier this summer. During this outing, it traveled farther by a factor of 4.5 times, reached speeds 2.7 times faster, and achieved 3.5 times the horsepower.

Shervin Pishevar, Hyperloop One co-founder, told CNBC, Weve got the Hyperloop working. Its the dawn now [] of the commercialization of the hyperloops. Weve got conversations and dialogues with governments around the world.

Pishevar was referring to the worldwide travel he has been undertaking recently. The company is currently looking at various cities in the U.S. to build a loopand is also planning on installing the system in Europe. In fact, Hyperloop One is alreadyundertaking feasibility studies in Finland, Moscow, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.K.

Despite these successes, there are still hurdles that need to be overcome before we see the transportation system of the future. Most prominently, it will need to achieve the right-of-way allowances, land acquisitions, and regulatory approvals that other means of transportation like the railway enjoy.

However, this announcement gives us a reassuring reminder that the future of transport isnt far away.

See the original post:
Hyperloop One Passes Second Full System Test Faster Than Ever Before - Futurism

Posted in Futurism | Comments Off on Hyperloop One Passes Second Full System Test Faster Than Ever Before – Futurism

New Research Suggests We Can Stop Human Cells From Aging – Futurism

Posted: at 9:40 am

In Brief A study by a team from the Houston Methodist Research Institute showed the potential of a treatment that targets telomeres in chromosomes to reverse cellular aging. Lab tests using cells from patients with genetic disease causing accelerated aging proved to be promising. The Mechanisms of Aging

For a phenomenon that affects all living beings, theres nothing simple about aging. Experimentsthat focus on understanding aging are as numerous and varied as the aspects of the subject itself. Some look at the roles that the brain or the mitochondria have on aging, while others examine some protein or another. A study from the Houston Methodist Research Institute(HMRI) is focusing on chromosomes.

Specifically, the team led by cardiovascular sciences department chair John Cooke, looked at telomeres the region located at the tip of every chromosome, thelength of which supposedly corresponds to age. Cookes team studied the cells of children with a fatalgenetic disease called progeria that causes rapid aging.

In their study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the researchers discovered that extending the shortened telomeres effectively halted aging in the isolated sample cells taken from the patients with progeria. What weve shown is that when we reverse the process of the telomere shortening in the cells from these children and lengthen them, it can reverse a lot of the problems associated with aging, Cooke said in an HMRI press release.

Cookes team isnt the first to associate telomeres with aging. The field, however, isnt considered that precise yet. Medical genetics professor Peter Lansdorp at the University of British Columbia told Motherboardthat theres still a lot to learn in this area. It is not hard to find a 70-year-old with longer telomeres than a teenager, he said, noting that the decline in telomeres works as a tumor suppression mechanism for the body.

Furthermore, since the study was limited to cell samples taken from just 17 patients on a lab dish, the researchers still need to see if it could work in cells functioning inside the body. The next step is to deliver the same treatment directly into patients, beginning with children suffering from progeria.

Still, Cooke is hopeful. We can at least stall or slow down accelerated aging, and thats what were working toward, he said in the press release. I want to develop a therapy for these children. Its an unmet need.

Go here to read the rest:
New Research Suggests We Can Stop Human Cells From Aging - Futurism

Posted in Futurism | Comments Off on New Research Suggests We Can Stop Human Cells From Aging – Futurism

Page 1,571«..1020..1,5701,5711,5721,573..1,5801,590..»

  1. category
  2. Transhuman News