Lifeboat Foundation

Gould’s thesis has sparked widespread debate ever since, with some advocating for determinism and others supporting contingency. In his 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, science fiction author Ray Bradbury recounted how a time traveler’s simple act of stepping on a butterfly in the age of the dinosaurs changed the course of the future. Gould made a similar point: “Alter any early event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.”

Scientists have been exploring this problem through experiments designed to recreate evolution in the lab or in nature, or by comparing species that have emerged under similar conditions. Today, a new avenue has opened up: AI. In New York, a group of former researchers from Meta — the parent company of social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — founded EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology. The EvolutionaryScale Model 3 (ESM3) system created by the company is a generative language model — the same kind of platform that powers ChatGPT. However, while ChatGPT generates text, ESM3 generates proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life.

ESM3 feeds on sequence, structure, and function data from existing proteins to learn the biological language of these molecules and create new ones. Its creators have trained it with 771 billion data packets derived from 3.15 billion sequences, 236 million structures, and 539 million functional traits. This adds up to more than one trillion teraflops (a measure of computational performance) — the most computing power ever used in biology, according to the company.

Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% Off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world with Ground News.

The BBC claims that researchers have found the first evidence for string theory, citing a recent discovery of long-wavelength gravitational waves that might indicate the existence of so-called “cosmic strings.” Crazier still, they think that this could allow time travel! But do these gravitational waves actually mean that cosmic strings exist? And what, if anything, does it have to do with time travel?

Continue reading “Have Researchers Found The First Evidence For String Theory?” »

The grandfather paradox is just one of the thorny logical problems that arise with the concept of time travel. But one physicist says he has resolved them.

A new study explores the potential consequences of time travel, including the possibility of losing all your memories.

What if our understanding of time as a linear sequence of events is merely an illusion created by the brain’s processing of reality? Could time itself be an emergent phenomenon, arising from the complex interplay of quantum mechanics, relativity, and consciousness? How might the brain’s multidimensional computations, reflecting patterns found in the universe, reveal a deeper connection between mind and cosmos? Is it possible that advancements in our understanding of temporal mechanics could one day make time travel a practical reality rather than a theoretical concept? Could Quantum AI and Reversible Quantum Computing provide the tools to simulate, manipulate, and even reshape the flow of time, offering practical applications of D-Theory that bridge the gap between theoretical physics and transformative technologies? These profound questions lie at the heart of Temporal Mechanics: D-Theory as a Critical Upgrade to Our Understanding of the Nature of Time, my 2025 paper and book. D-Theory, also referred to as Quantum Temporal Mechanics, Digital Presentism, and D-Series, challenges conventional views of time as a fixed, universal backdrop to reality and instead redefines it as a dynamic interplay between the mind and the cosmos.

While classical physics presents a deterministic universe where cause must precede effect, quantum mechanics and relativity theory paint a more nuanced picture. There are already well-known examples from relativity theory like wormholes, which are valid solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations, and similarly in quantum mechanics the non-classical state of quantum entanglement—the “spooky action at a distance” that troubled Einstein—which demonstrates that quantum systems can maintain instantaneous correlations across space and, potentially, time.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the protocol suggests that quantum entanglement can be used to effectively send information about optimal measurement settings “back in time”—information that would normally only be available after an experiment is complete. This capability, while probabilistic in nature, could revolutionize quantum computing and measurement techniques. Recent advances in multipartite hybrid entanglement even suggest these effects might be achievable in real-world conditions, despite environmental noise and interference. The realization of such a retrocausal quantum computational network would, effectively, be the construction of a time machine, defined in general as a system in which some phenomenon characteristic only of chronology violation can reliably be observed.

This article explores the theoretical foundations, experimental proposals, significant improvements, and potential applications of the retrocausal teleportation protocol. From its origins in quantum mechanics and relativity theory to its implications for our understanding of causality and the nature of time itself, we examine how this cutting-edge research challenges our classical intuitions while opening new possibilities for quantum technology. As we delve into these concepts, we’ll see how the seemingly fantastic notion of time travel finds a subtle but profound expression in the quantum realm, potentially revolutionizing our approach to quantum computation and measurement while deepening our understanding of the universe’s temporal fabric.

Observations of the cosmic microwave background, leftover light from when the Universe was only 380,000 years old, reveal that our cosmos is not rotating. Infinitely long cylinders don’t exist. The interiors of black holes throw up singularities, telling us that the math of GR is breaking down and can’t be trusted. And wormholes? They’re frighteningly unstable. A single photon passing down the throat of a wormhole will cause it to collapse faster than the speed of light. Attempts to stabilize wormholes require exotic matter (as in, matter with negative mass, which isn’t a thing), and so their existence is just as debatable as time travel itself.

This is the point where physicists get antsy. General relativity is telling us exactly where time travel into the past can be allowed. But every single example runs into other issues that have nothing to do with the math of GR. There is no consistency, no coherence among all these smackdowns. It’s just one random rule over here, and another random fact over there, none of them related to either GR or each other.

If the inability to time travel were a fundamental part of our Universe, you’d expect equally fundamental physics behind that rule. Yet every time we discover a CTC in general relativity, we find some reason it’s im possible (or at the very least, implausible), and the reason seems ad hoc. There isn’t anything tying together any of the “no time travel for you” explanations.

Good news for anyone with a hankerin’ for going back in time to kill their grandfather before he had kids: a physicist named Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia says go for it since time travel paradoxes aren’t real. So feel free to kill your grandpappy without fear of deleting your own existence.

He didn’t explicitly frame it that way, but he does think that time travel paradoxes are bullshit. Tobar’s work uses Einstein’s theory of general relativity as a foundation and then builds from there. He says that, according to his calculations, events can exist both in the past and in the future simultaneously, independent of one another. Space-time will adjust itself to avoid paradoxes, thus allowing you to cause whatever mayhem you want throughout time without creating contradictions.

If true, famous time travel stories like The Terminator and Back to the Future wouldn’t be possible. A Terminator sent to the past to kill John Connor would not be killing John Connor in the future, theoretically. It would only kill John Connor in the past and space-time would find some way to adjust to ensure that John Connor is still alive in the future to continue to be a pain in every robot’s shiny metal ass.

However, Hassabis’ true breakthrough came just a month ago, when he and two colleagues from DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of AlphaFold, an AI tool capable of predicting the structure of the 200 million known proteins. This achievement would have been nearly impossible without AI, and solidifies Hassabis’ belief that AI is set to become one of the main drivers of scientific progress in the coming years.

Hassabis — the son of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother — reflects on the early days of DeepMind, which he founded in 2010, when “nobody was working on AI.” Over time, machine learning techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning began to take shape, providing AI with a significant boost. In 2017, Google scientists introduced a new algorithmic architecture that enabled the development of AGI. “It took several years to figure out how to utilize that type of algorithm and then integrate it in hybrid systems like AlphaFold, which includes other components,” he explains.

“During our first years, we were working in a theoretical space. We focused on games and video games, which were never an end in themselves. It gave us a controlled environment in which to operate and ask questions. But my passion has always been to use AI to accelerate scientific understanding. We managed to scale up to solving a real-world problem, such as protein folding,” recalls the engineer and neuroscientist.