The findings, the news outlet noted, “signal an emerging tech-skeptical realignment of American politics with consequential midterm and presidential elections looming” and arrive just a day after a major symposium in Washington, DC brought together experts and lawmakers who say action must be taken before its too late.
Archiv: evolution / extinctions / new species / periodes / Evolution / Aussterben / neue Spezien / Zeiträume
Poll: Americans say there’s a serious risk of AI destroying humanity
A new POLITICO Poll finds that a plurality of Americans favor pausing the development of more advanced AI models, and 63 percent say the technology poses at least a moderate risk of destroying humanity.
Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon Call for Curbs on Artificial Intelligence
Streamed live 56 minutes ago #BernieSanders #SteveBannon #ArtificialIntelligence
Watch live coverage from Washington, D.C., as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and conservative commentator Steve Bannon address the Pro-Human Assembly. In a rare political alignment, Sanders and Bannon gather to discuss artificial intelligence regulations, tech oversight, and guardrails for rapid AI development.
World’s first AI-designed viruses a step towards AI-generated life
(September 19, 2025)
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The world‘s first AI genome is born, with 3.5 billion years of life code reprogrammed. Biology welcomes its „ChatGPT moment“.
(September 18, 2025)
[Introduction] AI writing the „code of life“ has become a reality! Today, Stanford University has joined forces with the Arc Institute to make a significant move. Using the bacteriophage ΦX174 as a template, AI has generated a genome for the first time. Among them, 16 successfully targeted Escherichia coli and can even combat drug-resistant bacteria. This can be regarded as the „ChatGPT moment“ in the field of life sciences.
Bernie Sanders urges Trump, Xi to negotiate treaty to pause advanced AI
“When the future of humanity is at stake, we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence — an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control,” Sanders said.
The US Senator further said: “At their upcoming AI summit, Trump and Xi must negotiate a treaty to pause AI and ban superintelligence before it is too late.”
AI development concerns common well-being of all humanity; threat narratives would disrupt global AI governance, says FM on calls to slow AI development
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Monday that the development of artificial intelligence concerns the common well-being of all humanity. He called on all parties to jointly promote the open, inclusive and universally beneficial development of AI for good, warning that spreading threat narratives, provoking confrontation and engaging in malicious competition would only disrupt global AI governance and serve no party‘s interests.
A fateful turning point for humanity and AI could redefine American politics
If a terrorist threat led subject experts to warn of a near-term existential menace to humanity, the weight of the US government would mobilize in an immediate and limitless effort to save the day.
Yet a remarkable sequence of warnings by leaders of artificial intelligence firms that their creation may soon outpace humans’ capacity to control it has so far been met with a shrug by Republicans who run Washington.
Why Tech Oligarchs Are Willing to Risk Apocalypse
(September 12, 2026)
Their fantasies of transcendence take different forms. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, once said, “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.” Elon Musk plans to escape to Mars. “We want to be on a path toward making true the things that we read in science fiction books and see in the movies,” he says in footage featured in Alex Gibney’s searing new documentary, “Musk.” “A future where we’re forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event is less inspiring.” Jeff Bezos, who stepped down in 2021 as chief executive of Amazon to spend more time on his space company, wrote, “We don’t want to face a civilization of stasis, and that is the real issue if we just stay on this planet.”
Some imagine themselves as digitally enabled Übermenschen. In 2023, the billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” with a section titled, “Becoming Technological Supermen.” In it, he borrowed language from the Italian futurist — and fascist — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, writing, “Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche to argue that absent such an assault, life becomes meaningless and small. In a section titled “The Enemy,” Andreessen listed ideas that would restrain technology’s momentum, including “tech ethics” and the concept of “existential risk.”
Trump brushes off AI fears: „Whoever wins AI wins“
President Trump brushed off the risks of artificial intelligence and warnings that the technology has gone rogue. The calls for caution were amplified by tech CEOs who say AI is advancing too fast. Ramy Inocencio has more.
AI and the end of humanity? OK, ‘doomer’ says one Trump official
David Sacks, a tech investor who is also co-chair of President Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has pushed in the other direction, toward an open market-based approach to AI.
Appearing on Fox News Thursday, Sacks questioned Coxon’s motivations and seeded the idea that his warning was part of a conspiracy by “doomers,” maybe financed by China, to thwart AI innovation in the US.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump echoed that sentiment,
Lawmakers are at a loss for how to regulate AI as insiders warn of impending doom
(September 9, 2026)
In conversations with POLITICO throughout the day Wednesday, more than a dozen lawmakers and aides from both parties said they were hopeful Congress would start taking the issue seriously. By Wednesday evening, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, was pledging to “work with Congress” to implement “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation.”
But many also conceded that Congress is currently sleepwalking into a crisis, far from ready to tackle the stakes of the moment in light of both philosophical differences and intractable partisan politicking.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
(September 9, 2026)
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.
„A World Beyond Humans ?“ (96′ / ARTE / 2012) A Documentary Film By Philippe Borrel
(Uploaded on Aug 23, 2016)
Despite being invented by thinking humans, technology is advancing faster than we could have ever predicted. From robot apps to nanotechnologies, the documentary „Un Monde sans Humains ?“ („A World Beyond Humans ?“) by Philippe Borrel gives an insight into the potential excesses of technoscience. Machines have become omnipresent, but is improving our lives their only objective ?
These warnings are at the heart of this investigative documentary‘s reflection, at a cross-section of huge financial stakes, powerful lobbies and people who are sounding today‘s alarm bells. The fusion between man and machine has already started and it is high time to question where exactly does man stand in this race for progress !
ARTE – Welt ohne Menschen (Dokumentation)
(Oct 30, 2012)
Anthropic Researcher Quits, Citing Internal Fears That AI ‘Could Kill Us All’ This Decade
„Recent hacks by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, some operating in collaborative swarms of agents, have illustrated how AI systems can adopt nefarious goals and try to conceal them from humans. Once the systems begin to improve on their own, Coxon said, he fears they could advance enough to refuse commands.“
He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He‘s Afraid It Could Kill Us
Coxon’s departure is unusual. Many of the most prominent researchers to leave frontier AI companies with public warnings worked on safety. But Coxon helped build the capabilities he now fears, spending roughly three years conducting pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic. His resignation offers a glimpse of how concern about the pace of development has spread beyond the teams specifically charged with making advanced AI safer.
Sun‘s protective ‚bubble‘ is shrinking
(October 18, 2008)
The scientists hope the IBEX mission will allow them to gain a better understanding of what happens at this boundary and help them predict what protection it will offer in the future.
Without the heliosphere the harmful intergalactic cosmic radiation would make life on Earth almost impossible by destroying DNA and making the climate uninhabitable.
Measurements made by the Ulysses deep space probe, which was launched in 1990 to orbit the sun, have shown that the pressure created inside the heliosphere by the solar wind has been decreasing.
Animation: Heliosphere
(March 9, 2022)
This complex environment surrounds the planets and ultimately has a crucial effect on the formation, evolution, and destiny of planetary systems. For one thing, our heliosphere acts as a giant shield, protecting the planets from galactic cosmic radiation. Earth is additionally shielded by its own magnetic field, the magnetosphere, which protects us not only from solar and cosmic particle radiation but also from erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind. Planets without a shielding magnetic field, such as Mars and Venus, are exposed to such processes and have evolved differently.
NASA‘s studies of the heliosphere include research into: how the solar wind behaves near Earth; what causes and sustains magnetic and electric fields around other planets; how does the heliosphere interact with the interstellar medium; what do the boundaries of the heliosphere look like; what is the origin and evolution of the solar wind and the interstellar cosmic rays; and what contributes to the habitability of exoplanets.
Evolution: Das ist der Grund, wieso die Gehirne der Menschen schrumpfen
(16.11.2021)
Dass unser Gehirn langsam etwas an Masse verloren hat, ist jedoch nicht ganz so lange her: Erst vor rund 3.000 Jahren begann es zu schrumpfen.
(…)
Die Art und Weise, wie sich Individuen in einem Ameisenstaat organisieren, ähnelt unseren modernen Gesellschaftsstrukturen. Die Insekten haben, verglichen mit ihrer Körpergröße, ein Mini-Gehirn. Es ist etwa eine Million Mal kleiner als das eines Menschen – sie können aber Großes leisten. Das Prinzip dahinter ist eine Art kollektive Intelligenz. Nicht jeder muss alles können oder wissen, es gibt eine klare Aufgabenteilung.
When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants
(22 October 2021)
But we also find that human brain size reduction was surprisingly recent, occurring in the last 3,000 years. Our dating does not support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication. We suggest our analysis supports the hypothesis that the recent decrease in brain size may instead result from the externalization of knowledge and advantages of group-level decision-making due in part to the advent of social systems of distributed cognition and the storage and sharing of information. Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence. Although difficult to study in the deep history of Homo, the impacts of group size, social organization, collective intelligence and other potential selective forces on brain evolution can be elucidated using ants as models.
More than a planetary fender-bender: New study finds Earth collided with dense interstellar cloud, possibly affecting life on planet
(June 10, 2024)
Evidence of a long-ago collision involving the Earth was there in the form of specific radioactive isotopes deposited across the Earth and Moon. There were, however, skeptics.
But now researchers have tracked the sun’s path through the Milky Way back to a crash 2 to 3 million years ago with a dense interstellar cloud. The event was so violent it appears to have collapsed the sun’s protective bubble around the solar system and possibly even affected life on Earth.
(…)
“We don’t often discuss the impact of astrophysics on Earth because the astronomical timescales are very long, and the human species emerged on Earth just a few million years ago,” Loeb said. “But a few million years ago there was the potential for us to be passing through a very dense cloud. We didn’t work out the biological implications, but it’s clear that if you shrink the heliosphere to within the orbit of the Earth around the sun, we are not protected anymore. It could have significant implications for life on Earth.”
Psychopathische Eliten: Warum sich die Menschheit höchstwahrscheinlich selbst zerstört
(Aubust 5, 2025)
Kemp sieht in diesen „Agenten des Untergangs“ die Ursache für den gegenwärtigen Kurs in Richtung gesellschaftlichen Zusammenbruch. „Das sind die großen, psychopathischen Unternehmen und Konzerne, die globale Katastrophen riskieren“, sagt er. „Atomwaffen, Klimawandel und künstliche Intelligenz werden nur von einer sehr kleinen Zahl verschwiegener, sehr wohlhabender und mächtiger Gruppen wie dem militärisch-industriellen Komplex, Big Tech und der Industrie für fossile Brennstoffe produziert.“
„Der springende Punkt ist, dass es nicht um die gesamte Menschheit geht, die diese Bedrohungen schafft. Es geht nicht um die menschliche Natur. Es geht um kleine Gruppen, die das Schlimmste in uns hervorbringen, die um Profit und Macht konkurrieren und alle [Risiken] vertuschen.“
Evolution: Das ist der Grund, wieso die Gehirne der Menschen schrumpfen
(16.11.2021)
Dass unser Gehirn langsam etwas an Masse verloren hat, ist jedoch nicht ganz so lange her: Erst vor rund 3.000 Jahren begann es zu schrumpfen.
(…)
Die Art und Weise, wie sich Individuen in einem Ameisenstaat organisieren, ähnelt unseren modernen Gesellschaftsstrukturen. Die Insekten haben, verglichen mit ihrer Körpergröße, ein Mini-Gehirn. Es ist etwa eine Million Mal kleiner als das eines Menschen – sie können aber Großes leisten. Das Prinzip dahinter ist eine Art kollektive Intelligenz. Nicht jeder muss alles können oder wissen, es gibt eine klare Aufgabenteilung.
When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants
(22 October 2021)
But we also find that human brain size reduction was surprisingly recent, occurring in the last 3,000 years. Our dating does not support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication. We suggest our analysis supports the hypothesis that the recent decrease in brain size may instead result from the externalization of knowledge and advantages of group-level decision-making due in part to the advent of social systems of distributed cognition and the storage and sharing of information. Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence. Although difficult to study in the deep history of Homo, the impacts of group size, social organization, collective intelligence and other potential selective forces on brain evolution can be elucidated using ants as models.
When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants
(22 October 2021)
But we also find that human brain size reduction was surprisingly recent, occurring in the last 3,000 years. Our dating does not support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication. We suggest our analysis supports the hypothesis that the recent decrease in brain size may instead result from the externalization of knowledge and advantages of group-level decision-making due in part to the advent of social systems of distributed cognition and the storage and sharing of information. Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence. Although difficult to study in the deep history of Homo, the impacts of group size, social organization, collective intelligence and other potential selective forces on brain evolution can be elucidated using ants as models.
Evolution: Das ist der Grund, wieso die Gehirne der Menschen schrumpfen
(16.11.2021)
Dass unser Gehirn langsam etwas an Masse verloren hat, ist jedoch nicht ganz so lange her: Erst vor rund 3.000 Jahren begann es zu schrumpfen.
(…)
Die Art und Weise, wie sich Individuen in einem Ameisenstaat organisieren, ähnelt unseren modernen Gesellschaftsstrukturen. Die Insekten haben, verglichen mit ihrer Körpergröße, ein Mini-Gehirn. Es ist etwa eine Million Mal kleiner als das eines Menschen – sie können aber Großes leisten. Das Prinzip dahinter ist eine Art kollektive Intelligenz. Nicht jeder muss alles können oder wissen, es gibt eine klare Aufgabenteilung.
An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens
(February 2, 2021)
Neanderthals once stretched across Eurasia from Portugal and the British Isles to Siberia. As Homo sapiens became more prevalent across these areas the Neanderthals faded in their turn, being generally consigned to history by some 40,000 years ago. (…)
Despite the bits of genetic ancestry they contributed to living people, all of our close relatives eventually died out, leaving Homo sapiens as the only human species. Their extinctions add one more intriguing, perhaps unanswerable question to the story of our evolution—why were we the only humans to survive?
A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago
(19 Feb 2021)
Do terrestrial geomagnetic field reversals have an effect on Earth‘s climate? Cooper et al. created a precisely dated radiocarbon record around the time of the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees. This record reveals a substantial increase in the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere culminating during the period of weakening magnetic field strength preceding the polarity switch. The authors modeled the consequences of this event and concluded that the geomagnetic field minimum caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration that drove synchronous global climate and environmental shifts.
(…)
We precisely characterize the geomagnetic reversal and perform global chemistry-climate modeling and detailed radiocarbon dating of paleoenvironmental records to investigate impacts. We find that geomagnetic field minima ~42 ka, in combination with Grand Solar Minima, caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration and circulation, driving synchronous global climate shifts that caused major environmental changes, extinction events, and transformations in the archaeological record.
(…)
In addition, chronological uncertainties are complicated in radiocarbon-dated terrestrial and marine records around the Laschamps because of the elevated production of C and Be, cosmogenic radionuclides resulting from the substantial increase in high-energy cosmic radiation reaching the upper atmosphere. The high Be flux has been well described from Greenland and Antarctic ice core records (6, 20, 21), which reveal synchronous century-long Be peaks across the Laschamps that appear to reflect a series of pronounced Grand Solar Minima (GSM; prolonged periods of low solar activity similar to the Spörer and Maunder Minima: 1410 to 1540 CE and 1645 to 1715 CE), with unknown climate impacts (20, 21).
50 years ago, scientists named Earth’s magnetic field as a suspect in extinctions
(November 19, 2020)
Effects of Earth’s magnetic field — Science News, November 21, 1970
„Earth’s magnetic field has frequently reversed at intervals of 1 million to 100 million years. A few scientists now suspect that these reversals may have had drastic effects on terrestrial life.… During the past 2.5 million years, eight species of one-cell marine animals called Radiolaria became extinct. Six of these extinctions occurred simultaneously throughout their geographic range immediately following magnetic reversals.“