SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Essays reveal Stephen Hawking predicted race of 'superhumans'
The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children's DNA. Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.
[...] In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking's final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity. Hawking raised the prospect that breakthroughs in genetics will make it attractive for people to try to improve themselves, with implications for "unimproved humans". "Once such superhumans appear, there will be significant political problems with unimproved humans, who won't be able to compete," he wrote. "Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving at an ever-increasing rate."
Stephen Hawking's last paper on black holes is now online
Stephen Hawking never stopped trying to unravel the mysteries surrounding black holes -- in fact, he was still working to solve one of them shortly before his death. Now, his last research paper on the subject is finally available online through pre-publication website arXiv, thanks to his co-authors from Cambridge and Harvard. It's entitled Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, and it tackles the black hole paradox. According to Hawking's co-author Malcolm Perry, the paradox "is perhaps the most puzzling problem in fundamental theoretical physics today" and was the center of the late physicist's life for decades.
Black Holes and Soft Hair: why Stephen Hawking's Final Work is Important:
[Black holes] have a temperature and produce thermal radiation. The formula for this temperature, universally known as the Hawking temperature, is inscribed on the memorial to Stephen's life in Westminster Abbey. Any object that has a temperature also has an entropy. The entropy is a measure of how many different ways an object could be made from its microscopic ingredients and still look the same. So, for a particular piece of red hot metal, it would be the number of ways the atoms that make it up could be arranged so as to look like the lump of metal you were observing. Stephen's formula for the temperature of a black hole allowed him to find the entropy of a black hole.
The problem then was: how did this entropy arise? Since all black holes appear to be the same, the origin of the entropy was at the centre of the information paradox.
What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call "soft hair". This discovery allows us to question the idea that black holes lead to a breakdown in the laws of physics.
Stephen kept working with us up to the end of his life, and we have now published a paper that describes our current thoughts on the matter. In this paper, we describe a way of calculating the entropy of black holes. The entropy is basically a quantitative measure of what one knows about a black hole apart from its mass or spin.
So if black holes have soft hair, is it possible to give them a hair cut?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 18 2018, @01:53AM (3 children)
Except of course, for the many, many times that doesn't happen. I oppose tax breaks for the rich, but the other two you mention are desperately needed through large parts of the developed world.
And I don't hate the "super rich" because that's just a pretty bit of fiction.
Let us note that there are studies [foxnews.com] that reach different conclusions on tipping behavior.
Moving on:
Put a stop to the biggest improvement of the human condition ever [soylentnews.org]? Why would we want to?
Did you run that by the NSA before you posted it? Remember the governments of the world also tend to be the biggest corporations of the world with the most secure revenue streams!
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:29AM (2 children)
>studies
>posts link to Faux News
lol
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:33AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:57AM
Yes. Fullstop. Or it was completely fabricated. Fairly unbalanced. Why are you such a naif, khallow? Consider the source! (Does your dictionary have "faux" in it? I know it's a French word, but apropos in this case for the entrepreneurs that the French do not even have a word for. [wordpress.com] )