Artificial Intelligence in Science and Society: The Vision of USERN
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-06-15T07:17:05Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description | A. THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE Thanks to a series of groundbreaking discoveries in exo planetology, during the past thirty years we have gradually come to realize that planets similar to our own, where we may speculate that there be a significant possibility of emergence of carbon-based life forms such as those inhabiting Earth, are relatively common, with more than ten thousand candidates cataloged as of January3,2024.1 Indeed, a handful of such candidates have already been identified within 120 light years of distance from us, and their number keeps growing as we improve our detection technologies. A recent estimate combining data from Kepler and Gaia missions using Bayesian inference [1] assesses in the range of 0.17 to 0.83 the number of planets in the habitable zone with massesbetween 1.0and 1.75 Earthmassesand orbital periods around stars of type F, G, or K between 237 and 500 days (see Fig.1).Eventhoughaffectedbysignificantuncertainties, these numbers imply that several billion earth-like planets exist in our galaxy alone. FIGURE 1. Inferred occurrence rate density (Γ⊕) of habitable-zone planets estimated by various studies. Displayed posterior densities for orbital periods of 237-500 days and different radius ranges refer to radii Rp =1−1.75R⊕ (where R⊕ is the Earth radius) in solid black, and Rp =0.75−1.5 R⊕ in dotted black. Reprinted from [1]. On the other hand, geological studies indicate that planet Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago [2], when it with stood gradual accretion through gravitational interactions 1A comprehensive list is in https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/discovery/ exoplanet-catalog/ 15994 from a disk of debris in orbit around our early Sun. Although less precisely, geological rock records indicate that only four billion years later did pluricellular life start to flourish on it [3], when a wealth of different creatures progressively inhabited its seas and later its lands. On such a time scale, the emergence of biological intelligence —which we here generically associate with biological life forms endowed with acquired self-awareness and entertaining communication and craftsmanship skills2—is a very recent phenomenon and might constitute only a brief parenthesis in the history of our planet. In light of the aboveconsiderations, the Fermiparadox (the contrast between the high probability of life emergence and the absence of its evidence, famously introduced by Enrico Fermi to question the hypothesis of widespread life in the universe) appears to have no objection to this line of reasoning. When considering the universe from the point of view of its intelligence content, armed with estimates of the number of habitable Earth-like planets and knowledge of what happened on our planet until now, we are forced to assess what phenomena have the potential to cause mass extinctions. Many reasonably well-understood events of cataclysmic nature, from collision with asteroids and comets to solar flares, super-volcano eruptions, or nearby supernovae explosions, as well as slower evolutionary processes such as planetary motion instabilities, should then be assessed for their expected rates, which contribute to reduce the expected duration of our life span as a species, while also providing possible ‘‘restart’’ conditions to make the environment more suitable for life evolution. One must add several potential anthropogenic occurrences to those phenomena, including nuclear or biological warfare, climate change, and ecological collapse. In the category of anthropogenic threats of relevance, | |
| dc.description.abstract | Therecent rise in relevance and diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems and the increasing number and power of applications of AI methods invites a profound reflection on the impact The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Derek Abbott | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://demo.dspace.org/handle/10673/1410 | |
| dc.title | Artificial Intelligence in Science and Society: The Vision of USERN | |
| dc.type | Article |
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