STEM Saturday on the Steem blockchain, Week #50: Ending the pandemic emergency; discovering oceans in the solar sysem; and AI as an evolutionary filter

STEM Saturday Digest - May 6, 2023

This week's topics come from the fields of health, space exploration, and technology.

Please visit the /promoted page to view this week's STEM Saturday post promotions.

This was the 50^th week of our post promotions for STEM Saturday on the Steem blockchain, and our little community now occupies the top of the /promoted page for the 50^th consecutive Saturday. This week, I promoted three Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) posts by two authors.

If you are a STEM enthusiast, please consider following the authors that you'll find in this article and also consider joining our community. If you would like your own post to be considered for STEM Saturday post promotion, please see the guidelines at the end of this post.

This week's promotions included the following posts (in alphabetical order, by author). Each author has been set as a 5% beneficiary on this post. All posts were passed through three different online plagiarism checks and three different checks for AI detection.

As an allusion to the Great Filter, @jorgebgt notes that mankind has already faced a series of possible extinction-level events, and has so-far survived. These range from nuclear weapons to global pandemics. The article argues that Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a new potential filter, with a unique twist. The twist is that AI could control nuclear weaponry, which may be a first-time combination of two human extinction-level technologies. For this reason, people have argued that AI should be prohibited from controlling nuclear weapons. The possibility of AI controlling weapons systems is not at all far-fetched, after AI beat human pilots in recent competitions held by both the US and China. The article contains a fascinating video embed from a 2020 AlphaDogfight Challenge that was hosted by DARPA. The article is timed against a backdrop where AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently resigned from Google and began making public statements along the lines that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.

Click through to read more from @jorgebgt and to view the embedded video.

Last week, @sarahjay1 wrote about how NASA had extended the lifespan of Voyager 2. This week, she tells us of a new way that the Voyager 2 data from the 1986 Uranus flyby is being used to make discoveries today. By reanalyzing this data, as well as data from ground-based telescopes, scientists have determined that four of Uranus' moons may have hypersaline liquid oceans that also contain ammonia. The four moons are: "Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon".

Read the rest from @sarahjay1, here.

Short and sweet. We can't let the week go past without noting that the World Health Organization declared an end to the three year old COVID-19 emergency. According to the declaration, COVID-19 is still a pandemic, but vaccination and other public health measures have made the virus less virulent and deadly, so it no longer constitutes a global emergency.

Visit the post from @sarahjay1, here.

The Community

The Popular STEM community is intended to be a place for accessible STEM conversations (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). If you have an interest in STEM topics, please come join us!

About STEM Saturday

If members would like to have your own STEM content considered for future promotions, please come join us and start contributing. I don't know how long I'll be continuing the tradition, but while I do, here are the minimum requirements for consideration (subject to change without notice ;-).

1. Original, plagiarism-free content
2. Minimum word count: currently 300 words, but this may be adjusted.
3. The content must not be cross-posted on other web sites or blockchains. Correct use of the #steemexclusive tag is encouraged.
4. English language. (sorry, it's the only one I know)
5. Because a post leaves /promoted at payout time, posts created shortly before STEM Saturday may be more likely to be chosen than older posts.

All community members are invited to create original and exclusive content that can be considered for future promotions.

Please help grow the science & technology audience on the Steem blockchain by following the Science and Technology on the Social Blockchain Facebook page then liking & sharing our links!

Visit the /promoted page and #burnsteem25 to support the inflation-fighters who are helping to enable decentralized regulation of Steem token supply growth.)