Defense Intelligence Agency Sponsored Report: Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum Engineering
Link to book on Amazon: UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites (2017) SYNOPSIS: The reality of UFO incursions at American nuclear weapons facilities has been convincingly established. Hundreds of U.S. military veterans now openly discuss these ominous incidents and thousands of declassified government documents substantiate their revelations. Over the past four decades, renowned researcher Robert Hastings has interviewed more than 150 of those veterans regarding their involvement in these astounding cases.
Intelligence chief Chris Mellon reveals he provided the NY Times with three infamous UFO videos published in 2017—after being handed clips in a Pentagon parking lot
Navy Pilots Were Seeing UFOs on an Almost Daily Basis in 2014 and 2015: Report
Multiple F/A-18 Pilots Disclose Recent UFO Encounters, New Radar Tech Key in Detection
Recent UFO Encounters With Navy Pilots Occurred Constantly Across Multiple Squadrons
Glowing Auras and Black Money: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program
UFOs are real, feds’ cover-up fueled by fear: ex-Pentagon whistleblower
How Betty and Barney Hill’s Alien Abduction Story Defined the Genre
Grey Alien (yes, a Wikipedia entry, but a fair summary)
Is Artificial SuperIntelligence (ASI) dangerous to humanity?
In Unidentified, I mention in passing that neither the Federation nor the Swarm would ever allow their AIs to self-evolve, and thereby achieve runaway evolution and artificial superintelligence. So I thought I’d elaborate on this a bit more.
For those of you who’ve read my earlier novels, consider skipping this section, as I’ve touched upon this subject more thoroughly in previous novel notes. In fact, my novel, Infinity Born, explores ASI in great depth.
I briefly mentioned AlphaZero in Unidentified, and have repeated the passage in question below. In my view, computer systems of this ilk are both glorious and frightening.
In 2017, a program called AlphaZero, using something called reinforcement learning, taught itself to play chess with superhuman skill—in less than a day. Programmers simply input the rules and told it to try to win, without providing any strategy or tactics.
After playing many millions of games—in only four hours!—it destroyed the world’s best chess players, computer and human alike, using a style of play that had never been seen before in the history of the game.
This performance was as alarming as it was stunning, because the programmers had no idea how AlphaZero was choosing its moves. It had grown far beyond its creators’ ability to fathom.
Scientists disagree over the question of ASI’s danger to humanity. Some believe we have nothing to fear from our transcendent creations. Others believe there is no way to predict how such an intelligence—as far above ours as ours is above an insect—will behave, and the dangers it might pose.
Optimists believe that we’ll be able to create ASI and wield it as the ultimate tool without obsoleting ourselves or going extinct in the process. These scientists bristle at any alarmist attitudes, believing those who espouse them are nothing more than Chicken Littles screaming that the sky is falling.
Mark Zuckerberg is an optimist, whereas Elon Musk and Bill Gates are very much the opposite, as was the late Stephen Hawking.
For those of you interested in a very thorough, complex, and scholarly treatment of the subject matter, I would recommend the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) by Nick Bostrom, a Professor at Oxford.
For those wanting an easier read, I recommend a book entitled, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the end of the Human Era (James Barrat, 2013). Below are a few quotes from the Barrat book I found interesting.
Page 61—But what if there is some kind of category shift once something becomes a thousand times smarter than we are, and we just can’t see it from here? For example, we share a lot of DNA with flatworms. But would we be invested in their goals and morals even if we discovered that many millions of years ago flatworms had created us, and given us their values? After we got over the initial surprise, wouldn’t we just do whatever we wanted?
Page 123—We’ve got thousands of good people working all over the world in sort of a community effort to create a disaster.
Page 242—There is no purely technical strategy that is workable in this area because greater intelligence will always find a way to circumvent measures that are the product of a lesser intelligence.
The Goldilocks Zone for life
I’ve long been familiar with the concept of a Goldilocks Zone for life within given solar systems. Until I did further research for this novel, however, I hadn’t been familiar with the concept as it might apply to the entire galaxy. The information I provided in Unidentified with respect to the most hospitable places in our galaxy is accurate—at least given our current understanding of the requirements for life.
With respect to solar systems, the more formal name for the Goldilocks Zone is the Circumstellar Habitable Zone, or CHZ. Planets that orbit within this zone at least have the possibility of supporting liquid water (and thus life), given that they aren’t too close to their sun, aren’t too far away, but are just right—as Goldilocks herself might have put it.