Greetings and welcome to the Daily Article podcast. Today is Monday, December the 30th,

2024. I'm Chris Elkins of the Denison Forum, narrating today's daily article written by our co-founder,

CEO and friend, Dr. Jim Denison. Note, Jimmy Carter, the 39th U.S. president and Nobel Prize recipient,

died yesterday at his home in Plains, Georgia, at the age of 100.

We will be publishing a daily article special edition later this morning in response.

I am focusing today on hope that transcends every challenge we face,

but to get to the good news, we need to set the stage. Today's headlines illustrate the

fragility of life, from the passenger plane that skidded off a South Korean airport runway yesterday,

killing all but two of the 181 people on board to the Azerbaijan Airlines plane

crash, for which Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized, to a weekend storm system that killed

at least four people across the U.S. South, to the death of longtime sports announcer Greg Gumbull at the age of

78.

And there's this, Nobel Prize winning physicist Geoffrey Hinton, often called the

grandfather of artificial intelligence, is warning that AI could wipe out the human race within

the next decade.

He said the technology is developing much faster than he expected and could make humans the

equivalence of three-year-olds and AI the grown-ups. In his view, quote, we've never had to deal

with things more intelligent than ourselves before, end quote. Is that so? Scientists tell us that

the universe began around 13.8 billion years ago

with an event called the Big Bang that suffused space with light. In that moment, they say the universe

was a septillion, one followed by 24 zeros, times hotter than the center of our sun today. However, they still do not know

what caused the Big Bang, nor do they know how the universe will end. They also note that the

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