SPACEX boss Elon Musk joined 27 other space experts in signing a document warning against the “consequences” of attempting to contact intelligent alien civilisations.
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Bioweapons have been around for centuries, but with advances in synthetic biology we’re now able to make them from scratch.
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‘Healthy Life Extension / Physical Immortality – the mass possibility ‘is presented as ’a symphony of voices’.
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the ages, pioneers have been questioning the accepted belief systems of the populace, and producing major evolutionary leaps: “The Earth is the centre of the Universe” gave way to the understanding that the earth revolves around the sun. “The Earth is flat” fell away when Columbus did not fall over the edge. The Wright Brothers also flew us into another reality as have countless others. I will be suggesting in the words to follow that the belief system “physical death is inevitable” may have a similar fate.
The current menu of space-friendly foods uses processing and water-reduction strategies to make these meals shelf stable. For example, a shrimp cocktail, mashed potatoes, and strawberries can be freeze dried; beef stew, candied yams, and brown rice can be thermostabilized; beef steak and turkey can be irradiated; and brownies, bread products, and beverage powders can be brought up in a low-moisture or dried form.
As tasty as this feast sounds, this packaged food system does not meet the five-year shelf life required for a Mars mission, nor will it feed generations there in the years to come. How will space food therefore have to change if we are ever to colonize other planets?
Using existing space technologies, it will take up to 32 months to travel to Mars. How can you feed a crew for that three-year trip?
The tradition of road rage on earth does not apply to space where someone can yell at you to move. There has to be a channel of communication form the earth’s control centres and even then, those emails can be missed. Well, this may have almost caused two assets to run into each other about 350 km above Earth last weekend. This involved a Starlink satellite belonging to SpaceX and the European Space Agency’s Aeolus satellite.
The incident actually started on Wednesday when the US Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron issued a risk warning to both organisations. The unit that monitors space vessels and debris warned that the collision might happen around September 2nd at 7 am ET, with a 0.1% probability.
Continue reading “A European Spacecraft Almost Collided With A SpaceX Satellite” »
Astronomers are closing in on a signal that has been travelling across the Universe for 12 billion years, bringing them nearer to understanding the life and death of the very earliest stars.
Another of those ‘new eras’ I talked about in yesterday’s post is involved in the latest news on gravitational waves. Let’s not forget that it was 50 years ago — on November 28, 1967 — that Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish observed the first pulsar, now known to be a neutron star. It made the news at the time because the pulses, separated by 1.33 seconds, raised a SETI possibility, leading to the playful designation LGM-1 (‘little green men’) for the discovery.
We’ve learned a lot about pulsars emitting beams at various wavelengths since then and the SETI connection is gone, but before I leave the past, it’s also worth recognizing that our old friend Fritz Zwicky, working with Walter Baade, first proposed the existence of neutron stars in 1934. The scientists believed that a dense star made of neutrons could result from a supernova explosion, and here we might think of the Crab pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula, an object whose description fits the pioneering work of Zwicky and Baade, and also tracks the work of Franco Pacini, who posited that a rotating neutron star in a magnetic field would emit radiation. Likewise a pioneer, Pacini suggested this before pulsars had been discovered.
Writing about all this takes me back to reading Larry Niven’s story ‘Neutron Star,’ available in the collection by the same name, when it first ran in a 1966 issue of IF. Those were interesting days for IF, but I better cut that further digression off at the source — more about the magazine in a future post. ‘Neutron Star’ is the story where Beowulf Shaeffer, a familiar character in Larry’s Known Space stories, first appears. If you want to see a neutron star up close and learn what its tidal forces can do, you can’t beat Niven’s tale.
“Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed,” said Noble Prize winning physicist Adam Riess in an interview. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”
Physicists have found that for the last 7 billion years or so galactic expansion has been accelerating. This would be possible only if something is pushing the galaxies, adding energy to them. Scientists are calling this something “dark energy,” a force that is real but eludes detection.
One of the most speculative ideas for the mechanism of an accelerating cosmic expansion is called quintessence, a relative of the Higgs field that permeates the cosmos. Perhaps some clever life 5 billion years ago figured out how to activate that field, speculates astrophysicist Caleb Scharf in Nautil.us. How? “Beats me,” he says, “but it’s a thought-provoking idea, and it echoes some of the thinking of cosmologist Freeman Dyson’s famous 1979 paper ”Time Without End,” where he looked at life’s ability in the far, far future to act on an astrophysical scale in an open universe that need not evolve into a state of permanent quiescence. Where life and communication can continue for ever.
REIKI translates as ‘Universal Spirit of Life’ – the energy that is continuously flowing through and around every living thing.
It is a gentle energy healing modality that is usually done by placing the hands in a series of positions over or slightly above the body. Reiki promotes healing by activating the relaxation response and helping to accelerate the bodies natural ability to heal itself.
This makes for a microcosm of people on the outside looking in who do not follow on a regular basis. A basic headline of living forever followed by comments of doubt or silliness and the heat death of the universe. Of the experts, I like Sinclair’s answer best.
What do hideous mall t-shirts, emo bands from the mid-aughts, and gorgeously-wrought realist novels about dissolving marriages have in common? Simply this assertion: Life Sucks. And it does suck, undoubtedly, even for the happiest and/or richest among us, not one of whom is immune from heartbreak, hemorrhoids, or getting mercilessly ridiculed online.
Still, at certain points in life’s parade of humiliation and physical decay almost all of us feel a longing—sometimes fleeting, sometimes sustained—for it to never actually end. The live-forever impulse is, we know, driving all manner of frantic, crackpot-ish behavior in the fringier corners of the tech-world; but will the nerds really pull through for us on this one? What are our actual chances, at this moment in time, of living forever? For this week’s Giz Asks, we spoke with a number of experts to find out.
‘Healthy Life Extension / Physical Immortality – the mass possibility ‘is presented as ’a symphony of voices’.
