Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 122] »

1 hour 19 minutes

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Suppose I wanted to store digital data in a way that would be accessible to archeologists 10,000 years in the future. How could I achieve this? The best I can come up with is the awkward thin aluminum or titanium punch cards. Obviously, there would also be sheets of metal with plain writing on them including very clear and detailed explanations of how to build a card reader. I wonder how vinyl would hold up? Could Earth ever get a second moon? What kind of effects could this have on Earth? What should we do today to help survivors reboot civilization after a cataclysmic event? I always liked the idea of putting all of Wikipedia and other literature in glass and sending it on a 1,000-year orbit for future generations. Is the fact that the Moon exactly covers the Sun during an eclipse just a coincidence? Detecting the signatures of technology of other civilizations will be very difficult/impossible if they don't want them to be seen easily. Stealth/camouflage is a survival tactic in the wild. The topic of consciousness should be explored further. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 121] »

1 hour 31 minutes

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Could every exoplanet have a habitable zone if one could get just far enough away from the star? What makes a planet habitable? Why do we measure sound using decibels? What advances in synthetic biology do you think will happen in the short term, the long term and the very long term? Have you visited Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston? AI-designed proteins that do biocomputation These processes, in the case of life, exist in a coevolved physiochemical balance. That would be hard to reproduce. How do you think space travel will change/improve as technology advances? Will it become a regular form of transportation sometime in the future? When helicopters were first developed, people thought they would transform cities and be our new taxis. But they're too expensive. On the subject of shorter travel times, I remember Heinlein suggesting in his books using suborbital rockets to travel between destinations. Would such an idea be too expensive for companies to run? Or would such an idea be feasible to cut travel time? I think the cost and safety risks associated with space and underwater ocean tourism will keep them from ever being commonplace. Now your perspective on what's possible for travel is different than the younger generations'. In relation to what you are saying about air travel, cellphones and computers, all of those technologies went through a long period (10+ years) of being luxury goods that only the richest people on Earth could use. The same will probably be true for space travel. Do you think that problem will get better or worse over time? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 120] »

1 hour 19 minutes

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Is there a way to digitize DNA sequences and examine them? Is a complete family tree of humanity with billions of connections a realistic possibility? Is DNA a tree or a semi-lattice? How likely is it that genetic engineering can create many mammalian species with superhuman intelligence? Can you speak on epigenetics? Has this effectively resolved the nature vs. nurture question by turning it into an invalid question? Do viruses play an important part in evolution? How does the brain distinguish signals coming from different senses? What is the difference between the signals coming from the eye vs. the ear? If everything is ultimately an electrical signal, is this not a difference in degree instead of kind? What are the implications regarding the ability for the brain to acquire another sense that is unlike the five senses we already have? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 119] »

1 hour 13 minutes

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How do we predict weather? Basically, weather forecasting is an excellent example of computational irreducibility. Can you discuss your recent blog on the second law of thermodynamics? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 118] »

1 hour 14 minutes

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Do you think it's possible to sustain life on Mars? How far into the future do you see this happening? Maybe biological switches would change everything for a biological machine. Could you explain the fundamental principles of biology? Aren't neurons the biological analog of switches? Can machine learning help solve inverse scattering problems where the forward scattering problem is highly nonlinear? How do x-rays work to see only the bones and ignore skin? I think bone opacity also comes down to water contents (there is just more water in tissue). Can those x-rays be used for automatic detection of changes within the molecule structure of crystallized solids as well? Do you think ecology will play an important role in understanding molecular computation? Ecology is a complex system. Physics is easy: just analyze a single particle's or body's motion. Ecology has vast interconnections and mechanisms. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 117] »

1 hour 39 minutes

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Can you talk a bit about Pangaea? How do continents shift? Is it possible to reform Pangaea? Is there technology that could prevent this? How does ChatGPT work? Could you say that Chat GPT has made a graph of the space of words or ideas? I'd love to see a thesaurus based on vectors into semantic space, so you could ask it to give you a word with a meaning close to "A" but heading in the direction of "B." How well does ChatGPT handle slang or figures of speech? Does it understand text as literal, or is it capable of picking up these notes? Could it be that ChatGPT isn't accurate because its training data is text, which may or may not correspond to the real world? Shouldn't we use only real-world data, such as sensory information of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell? With all the new "AI" tools rolling out, what do you think will be the effect on "truth" and "facts" as we know them? Does ChatGPT's ability to mimic emotions means that it is able to feel anything, and how much consciousness does it have? Do you believe physics boundaries need to be coded explicitly, or do you think enough data will result in the model learning principles? How does a neural network experience time? How do all these threads of computation combine to form a whole from its parts? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (152 videos)