Black Holes and The Edge of Tomorrow
The other day I sat down and watched "Black Holes and The Edge of Tomorrow,” which was released on Netflix on June 1st . You might remember a couple of yeas ago newspapers showed the first ever image of a black hole splashed across front pages across the world. The late Stephen Hawking hypothesized their existence and now evidence of its actual presence was found.
The film shows two different teams, one team using the Event Horizon telescope for image capturing and another team of theoretical physicists who were writing a paper about black holes. Stephen Hawking is one of those physicists. The Event Horizon team was attempting to use a network of telescopes here on Earth to capture a black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy. The film didn't go too in-depth in explaining the science of the black holes but it did show a rarely seen perspective of how scientists, theoretical physicists, and mathematicians work through their different processes to come together and achieve their goal of imaging the black hole.
Stephen Hawking passes away on March 14, 2018 before the completion of the project. The documentary covered four years of the project interviewing many different scientists along the way. I found the documentary and all of the different perspectives to be interesting and provided a lot of information and insight. They are all working at an exciting time in science and recognize that. These scientists know that they don't have all of the answers, that some of the answers could change with new information, that they're going to possibly get things wrong and have to go back to the drawing board. No matter, they keep going.
I can apply that a little to cybersecurity and safety. As technology evolves, we push the limits every day. Some people are worried about singularity, worried about AIs taking over the world. Were we ever really prepared for how technology crept into every aspect of our lives? With so many positives and just as many dangers? Yet, we keep moving forward, no stop, technology evolves, new technologies emerge, sometimes faster than the world can pivot to accommodate. Laws and policies trail needing to catch up but the the pull forward is endless... it's its own gravity with unknown horizons.