Via GeekPress, Nick Bostrom has a fascinating essay at Technology Review in which he lays out his case for hoping that we don’t find evidence that life ever existed on Mars or that it exists elsewhere in the universe. Why would we not want to find evidence of life? According to Bostrom, the apparent silence […]

Years ago I remember reading a book by Isaac Asimov (one of his many collections of essays) in which — if I recall correctly — he provided answers to questions that he had never addressed before, or that wouldn’t have been a good fit for any of his other books. One of these questions was, […]

Now this is just darned interesting: The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10^122. Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number — which is bigger than the number of particles in the […]

I know. You’re supposed to start these things with the bad news so as to make the good news seem better, but believe me, it’s just more fun to approach this one the other way around. So with that in mind… The good news: You know that whole mysterious thing about how the most distant […]

There’s some good discussion here on Nick Bostrom’s argument concerning whether our universe is or is not a simulation. We discussed that idea here. A quick recap of Bostrom’s argument: Bostrom argues that one of the following three propositions is most likely true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching […]

Awhile back I fumbled around with the ultimate question – why does anything exist? Wouldn’t it have been easier for nothing to exist? No matter how dogmatic some people seem to be on this issue – both those who believe in God and those who don’t – the truth is nobody knows. That being the […]

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy gives us the run-down on Martin Bojowald’s Big Bounce Theory of how our universe came into being: What Bojowald’s work does, as I understand it (the paper as I write this is not out yet, so I am going by my limited knowledge of LQG and other theories like it) […]

In our recent discussion about whether this universe is a simulation (and what use intelligent beings might make of simulated universes), Stephen wrote the following: Why not bring the simulated minds into their world at that point? In fact, wouldn’t that be an efficient way to keep the exponential progress of a Singularity going? A […]

I wonder what the relationship is between Gardner’s Intelligent Universe and Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument. A quick recap of the latter: Bostrom argues that one of the following three propositions is most likely true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely […]