With the ESA supplying the spacecraft, most of the software is likely to be competently written and/or open-source. This will prove to the Martians that there is indeed intelligent life on Earth.

It's a good question and one I'm working on trying to get an answer to. By giving AI hard, complex engineering problems, and then getting engineers to look at the output to determine if that output is meaningful or just expensive gibberish.

By doing this, I'm trying to feel around the edges of what AI could reasonably be used for. The trivial engineering problems usually given to it are problems that can usually be solved by people in a similar length of time. I believe the typical savings from AI use are in the order of 15% or less, which is great if you're a gecko involved in car insurance, but not so good if you're a business.

If the really hard problems aren't solvable by AI at all (it's all just gibberish) then you can never improve on that figure. It's as good as it is going to get.

I've open sourced what AIs have come up with so far, if you want to take a look. Because that is what is going to tell you if good can come out of AI or not.

I would think it goes further. If the company has already failed (ie: no longer exists) then the action is not taken by the company but a former employee of that company (even if said former employee was the CEO). Former employees are not granted special authority over PII or over company-owned information.

Irrelevant. PII protections are not subject to company discresion.

The conversations are not private, but PII laws nonetheless still apply. Anything in the messages that violates PII privacy laws is forbidden regardless of company policy. Policy cannot overrule the law.

Now, in the US, where privacy is a fiction and where double-dealing is not only perfectly acceptable but a part of workplace culture, that isn't too much of an issue. The laws exist on paper but have no real existence in practice.

However, business these days is international and American corps tend to forget that. Any conversation involving European computers (even if all employers and employees are in the US) falls under the GDPR and is under the aspices of the European courts and the ECHR, not the US legal system. And cloud servers are often in Ireland. Guess what. That means any conversation that takes place physically on those computers in Ireland plays by European rules, even if the virtual conversation was in the US.

This was settled by the courts a LONG time ago. If you carry out unlawful activities on a computer in a foreign country, you are subject to the laws of that country.

Secretary of War is a more accurate description. I agree that legally it's Secretary of Defense, but that has always been a misnomer.

Generating bad pathogens is quite plausible. Generating narrowly targeted ones that will stay narrowly targeted is currently implausible, and probably will remain so until well after the singularity. It would require designing genomes that were strongly error correcting. Elephants and naked mole rats do a reasonable job of that, but I don't think it's plausible for bacteria.

We can't do that yet, and may never be able to be that specific. Trying to do it, however, could be exceedingly dangerous.

N.B.: All bacteria and viruses have a very high mutation rate.

> One of those s[c]ents that everyone is programed instinctively to move away from.

If that were true Antifa riots wouldn't be a thing.

How many supervillain plots in comics, TV or movies started with the villain's corporation introducing some kind of tech like this, only to later use it to manipulate people?

It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

They may not be, but you can bet that SOMEONE is.

Over evolutionary time, starvation was a major killer. It may be rare today (comparatively), but it used to be a real threat. Even today it's not insignificant. And it directly selects for the ability to eat whatever's available.

I think it's more "environmentally induced epigenetic modifications", which *are* a real thing, and sometimes can be inherited...but I don't think inheritance is needed for this argument, as the environment has kept chaning in the same direction. I.e. more fine muscle movement in the upper body, less massive physical effort.

It depends on how you define the term. I tend to consider any choice an act of reasoning (including a simple if test). I know that most people have a different definition, but I can rarely get them to define what they mean by the term. I tend to suspect it's an "I know it when I see it" kind of thing.