All posts tagged: Humanitys

Moon dust could become the foundation of humanity’s first permanent lunar base

Moon dust could become the foundation of humanity’s first permanent lunar base

Published by Jenni Sidey

The dust under a moonwalker’s boots looks harmless from a distance. Up close, it is anything but. Lunar regolith, the blanket of pulverized rock and glass covering the moon, is abrasive, dangerous and unforgiving. In fact, it can tear through seals, wear down equipment and cling to surfaces in an airless environment. That environment is marked by radiation and violent temperature swings. That makes it one of the worst imaginable building materials. It may also be one of the most important. At Texas A&M University, researchers are treating lunar regolith not just as a hazard to survive. Instead, they see it as a resource to use. Their work is tied to one of the biggest practical questions in space exploration. That question is how to build a lasting human presence on the moon without hauling nearly everything from Earth. Researchers at Texas A&M are designing the blueprint for sustained human presence, and settlement, on the moon. (CREDIT: AI generated image / Texas A&M University) “We are moving past the era of ‘flags and footprints,’” said …

Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’

Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’

Published by skeptic

Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right. STEVEN LEVY: Deep Utopia is more optimistic than your previous book. What changed for you? NICK BOSTROM: I call myself a fretful optimist. I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things …

To the Moon and beyond: Artemis II and humanity’s reach into space

To the Moon and beyond: Artemis II and humanity’s reach into space

Published by Jenni Sidey

In April 2026, NASA’s Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the Moon and back, sending Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen farther from Earth than any humans before them. The Orion spacecraft, launched on the Space Launch System rocket, did not land on the lunar surface. It was not meant to. The mission was a test, built to find out whether Orion could safely carry people into deep space and bring them home again. Still, its biggest result was hard to miss. Artemis II reached about 252,756 miles from Earth’s surface, setting a new record for human distance from home and reviving a part of space travel that had gone quiet for more than half a century. That is why the mission feels bigger than a single flight. Artemis II did practical work, checking life support, navigation, and the demands of a trip around the Moon. It also did something older and more emotional. It made the history of space travel feel unfinished. One way to understand that history is to …

Humanity’s hopes ascended with Artemis II : NPR

Humanity’s hopes ascended with Artemis II : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

NASA’s Artemis II moon rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-B Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Chris O’Meara/AP hide caption toggle caption Chris O’Meara/AP The Artemis II mission rumbled, roared, and rocketed into the sky at dusk on Wednesday, beginning a journey around the moon and back. Four astronauts are aboard for the first human rendezvous with the moon since the last Apollo spaceflight in 1972. “We have a beautiful moonrise,” mission commander Reid Wiseman said shortly after liftoff. “We’re headed right at it.” The crew will travel more than 250,000 miles from Earth — farther than any other human beings in history. Our family watched the Artemis launch through glossy eyes. To see that rocket soar into the spring sky, bearing human beings into outer space, reminded us: while we see scenes every day of rockets that deliver destruction and death across the globe, human minds can also send rockets into the heavens on missions of discovery. The launch made us think of all the mechanics, physicists, …

Can the Drake equation’s final term predict humanity’s demise?

Can the Drake equation’s final term predict humanity’s demise?

Published by Jenni Sidey

One of the great mysteries in the Universe is that, in all the vastness of space, we have yet to detect any sort of life out there beyond our own planet. Whether microbial and simple, multicellular and complex, highly differentiated and intelligent, or technologically advanced, the only form of life we know of here in 2026 is terrestrial life that originated right here on Earth. Despite all of the discoveries and advanced that we’ve made in recent years, from the origins and scale of the Universe to thousands of confirmed exoplanets, we still have yet to detect even a single robust signature of a lifeform that originated from anywhere else. All we can do, at the present time, is to make the best use of the knowledge that we have. Because of all that we’ve learned about our galaxy and Universe, the history of stars and heavy elements, the properties and commonness of exoplanets, we can make very high-quality estimates about the abundance of potentially habitable planets. However, how many of them actually come to …

Humanity’s last exam, the test that modern AI still struggles to pass

Humanity’s last exam, the test that modern AI still struggles to pass

Published by Jenni Sidey

Artificial intelligence systems now breeze through many academic tests that once challenged both machines and people. That success created an unexpected problem. The benchmarks used to measure AI progress stopped being useful because top models were scoring too high. A massive international research effort set out to fix that. Nearly 1,000 experts from more than 50 countries collaborated to build a new assessment called Humanity’s Last Exam, or HLE, a 2,500-question test covering more than 100 subjects. The project, described in the journal Nature, aims to measure how far modern AI still falls short of expert human knowledge. “When AI systems start performing extremely well on human benchmarks, it’s tempting to think they’re approaching human-level understanding,” said Tung Nguyen, an instructional associate professor in computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University who helped develop the exam. “But HLE reminds us that intelligence isn’t just about pattern recognition — it’s about depth, context and specialized expertise.” The name sounds dramatic. The purpose is practical. Distribution of HLE questions across categories. HLE consists of 2,500 exam …

Yes, one image from space can change humanity’s perspective

Yes, one image from space can change humanity’s perspective

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. For as long as we’ve been human, we’ve turned our gaze skyward and marveled at all that there is to view beyond planet Earth. Even the recognition that Earth itself is merely one of many planets orbiting the Sun is profound, where the stars glittering up in the canopy of the night sky are just very distant analogues of our own Sun: with many of them likely having their own planets, and where some of those planets might even have life on them. However, arguably the biggest changes that result from viewing the Universe don’t come from merely the scientific knowledge we gain from those astronomical endeavors, but rather how they shift our perception of what reality is, and how we, as humans on Earth, fit into the grand cosmic story. The images we’ve taken of the Universe — originally merely in the forms of sketches, but later, with the advent …

Qwen3-Max Thinking beats Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2 on Humanity’s Last Exam (with search)

Qwen3-Max Thinking beats Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2 on Humanity’s Last Exam (with search)

Published by skeptic

Chinese AI and tech firms continue to impress with their development of cutting-edge, state-of-the-art AI language models. Today, the one drawing eyeballs is Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen Team of AI researchers and its unveiling of a new proprietary language reasoning model, Qwen3-Max-Thinking. You may recall, as VentureBeat covered last year, that Qwen has made a name for itself in the fast-moving global AI marketplace by shipping a variety of powerful, open source models in various modalities, from text to image to spoken audio. The company even earned an endorsement from U.S. tech lodgings giant Airbnb, whose CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky said the company was relying on Qwen’s free, open source models as a more affordable alternative to U.S. offerings like those of OpenAI. Now, with the proprietary Qwen3-Max-Thinking, the Qwen Team is aiming to match and, in some cases, outpace the reasoning capabilities of GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro through architectural efficiency and agentic autonomy. The release comes at a critical juncture. Western labs have largely defined the “reasoning” category (often dubbed “System 2” logic), …