Predictions over the long term: AI, climate change: Looming disasters humanity can’t ignore

What if we could have stopped catastrophic disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the threat of Islamic State?

Two national security and counter-terrorism experts believe governments were warned about some of the world’s most horrific events. Not only that, they say there are new predictions about the future we should not ignore.

R.P. Eddy, a former director of counter-terrorism at the White House National Security Council, and Richard Clarke, who served more than a decade in the White House as national co-ordinator for security and counter-terrorism, said for nearly every catastrophe in the world, there was an expert who said it would happen but was ignored.

In 2012, then ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, warned the White House a group similar to Al-Qaeda would form and take over large areas of land and even major cities.

He made the prediction after seeing the conflict that began to arise on the ground in Syria.

His views were ignored and then Islamic State began to propagate, becoming more dangerous and causing global terror. Just last month Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Manchester attack at the Ariana Grande concert, which killed 22 people. Yesterday, the group claimed responsibility for a bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 90.

The first person to ever win the Polk, Pultizer and Peabody awards, Laurie Garrett, predicted the devastating rise in HIV/AIDS. She, too, was ignored.

“She saw these men dying of a disease called ‘gay related immune deficiency’, ‘GRID’, or ‘gay cancer’,” Mr Eddy told the Huffington Post.

“They didn’t know what it was. Gay men didn’t think they had a transmissible disease. They thought they were sharing a cancer somehow, but just by looking at them and seeing the hypocrisy sarcoma on their face, Laurie Garrett knew this was a contagious illness and started getting the media to pay attention.”

Mr Eddy and Mr Clarke have released a new book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes, to pre-empt future disasters and warn those in power not to hide away from the inevitable.

For the complete report click here: : AI, climate change: Looming disasters humanity can’t ignore

Outer Space: A Nearby Neutron Star Collision Could Cause Calamity on Earth - by John Wenz

A long time ago in a galaxy far away—NGC 4993, to be exact—two neutron stars collided and created a spectacular light show.
After billions of years spent slowly circling each other, in their last moments the two degenerate stars spiraled around each other thousands of times before finally smashing together at a significant fraction of light-speed, likely creating a black hole. The merger was so violent it shook the universe, emitting some 200 million suns' worth of energy as perturbations in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves. Those waves propagated out from the merger like ripples on a pond, eventually washing over Earth—and into our planet's premiere gravitational-wave detectors, the U.S.-built LIGO and European-built Virgo observatories.

Yet gravitational waves were not the merger's only products. The event also emitted electromagnetic radiation—that is, light—marking the first time astronomers have managed to capture both gravitational waves and light from a single source. The first light from the merger was a brief, brilliant burst of gamma rays, a probable birth cry of the black hole picked up by NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope.

Hours later astronomers using ground-based telescopes detected more light from the merger—a so-called "kilonova"—produced as debris from the merger expanded and cooled. For weeks much of the world's astronomical community watched the kilonova as it slowly faded from view.

According to a 2016 study, supernovae occurring as close as 50 light-years from Earth could pose an imminent danger to Earth's biosphere—humans included. The event would likely shower us in so much high-energy cosmic radiation that it could spark a planetary mass extinction. Researchers have tentatively linked past instances of spiking extinction rates and plummeting biodiversity to postulated astrophysical events, and in at least one case have even found definitive evidence for a nearby supernova as the culprit. Twenty million years ago, a star 325 light-years from Earth exploded, showering the planet in radioactive iron particles that eventually settled in deep-sea sediments on the ocean floor.That event, researchers speculate, may have triggered ice ages and altered the course of evolution and human history.

The exact details of past (and future) astrophysical cataclysms' impact on Earth's biosphere depend not only on their distance, but also their orientation. A supernova, for instance, can sometimes expel its energy in all directions—meaning it is not always a very targeted phenomenon. Merging black holes are expected to emit scarcely any radiation at all, making them surprisingly benign for any nearby biosphere. A kilonova, however, has different physics at play. Neutron stars are a few dozen kilometers in radius rather than a few million like a typical stars. When these dense objects merge, they tend to produce jets that blast out gamma rays from their poles.

"[W]hat it looks like to us, and the effect it has on us, would depend a lot on whether or not one of the jets was pointed directly at us," Frank says. Based on its distance and orientation to Earth, a kilonova's jets would walk the fine line between a spectacular light show and a catastrophic stripping away of the planet's upper atmosphere. If a jet is pointed directly at us, drastic changes could be in store. And we probably wouldn't see them coming. A kilonova begins with a burst of gamma rays—incredibly energetic photons that, by definition, move at light-speed, the fastest anything can travel through the universe. Because nothing else can move faster, those photons would strike first, and without warning.

Don't let all this keep you up at night. Kilonovae are relatively rare cosmic phenomena, estimated to occur just once every 10,000 years in a galaxy like the Milky Way. That's because neutron stars, which are produced by supernovae, hardly ever form as pairs. Usually, a neutron star will receive a hefty "kick" from its formative supernova; sometimes these kicks are strong enough to eject a neutron star entirely from its galaxy to hurtle at high speeds indefinitely through the cosmos. "When neutron stars are born, they're often high-velocity. For them to survive in a binary is nontrivial," Fruchter says. And the chances of two finding each other and merging after forming independently are, for lack of a better term, astronomically low.

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New Scientist: How your brain creates God - by Michael Brooks

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How your brain creates God - by Michael Brooks

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance. This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.Note EU-Digest: Rom.1:22 Professing to be wise, they became fools,

The Independent: Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled? - by Paul Vallely

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Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled? - by Paul Vallely

''A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation – it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently. The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago – and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points.The idea that science and religion are incompatible is a fairly recent import into contemporary culture. It has been given huge credence by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The pronounced motivation of Islamic fundamentalists in 2001 hammered home that some people are prepared to inflict outrageous acts of inhumanity in the name of religion.