Lifeboat Foundation

No one can deny that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has thought a lot about how to transport humans safely to Mars with his Big Falcon Rocket. But when it comes to Musk’s highly ambitious plans to settle Mars in the coming decades, some critics say Musk hasn’t paid enough attention to what people will do once they get there.

However, SpaceX may be getting more serious about preparing for human landings on Mars, both in terms of how to keep people alive as well as to provide them with something meaningful to do. According to private invitations seen by Ars, the company will host a “Mars Workshop” on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the University of Colorado Boulder. Although the company would not comment directly, a SpaceX official confirmed the event and said the company regularly meets with a variety of experts concerning its missions to Mars.

This appears to be the first meeting of such magnitude, however, with nearly 60 key scientists and engineers from industry, academia, and government attending the workshop, including a handful of leaders from NASA’s Mars exploration program. The invitation for the inaugural Mars meeting encourages participants to contribute to “active discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions happen.” Attendees are being asked to not publicize the workshop or their attendance.

Continue reading “SpaceX organizes inaugural conference to plan landings on Mars” »

There is a 3-day conference in Brussels on November 8–10 for those of you in Europe interested in aging research.

The Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing (EHA) is an international event that provides a unique opportunity for researchers, government officials, biotech executives, entrepreneurs, and non-governmental institutions from around the world to meet, network, and forge new scientific collaborations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonising Mars, based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious but technically challenging in several ways. Planetary protection rules and the difficulties of terraforming (making the planet hospitable by, for example, warming it up) and dealing with the harsh radiation were quoted as severe obstacles.

Undeterred, Musk took a first step towards his aim in February this year with the launch of a Tesla roadster car into an orbit travelling beyond Mars on the first Falcon Heavy rocket. This dramatically illustrated the increasing launch capability for future missions made available by partnerships between commercial and government agencies.

The British government is preparing to launch its first commercial rocket from the country by 2021, and has upped its funding and partnerships with American companies to do so, reports CNBC.

The details: Lockheed Martin has already been allotted the largest chunk of UKSA’s (United Kingdom Space Agency) funding, receiving over $30 million “to develop an orbital launch site for small rockets in Melness, Scotland.” The company told CNBC, “[t]he launcher will be a flight-proven, dedicated small sat vehicle.” Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit also locked in a deal with UKSA “to launch its LauncherOne rocket from Cosmic Girl,” and plans to be the first to launch a commercial rocket from the island in the next three years.

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Continue reading “Britain looks to bring commercial rocket launches to home soil” »

The Egyptian government wants to get 42 percent of its energy sector powered by renewables by 2025, leaving a healthy 5-year window for their 2030 sustainability goals with the United Nations.

In the Western Desert, 400 miles south of Cairo, a solar energy company named KarmSolar is helping them do it. Founded by five friends in a cafe, the company is building what will become a hub of 30 individual power plants with a collective capacity of 1.8 gigawatts of electricity. Located near the Benban village near the Nile, KarmSolar’s complex already employs 4,000 people at the first of 30 facilities, which came online this past November. Once it’s completed, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Benban Solar Park will be the largest solar plant in the world.

845 pages in length, the report aims to outline the history, present state and future of the Longevity Industry in the United Kingdom, profiling hundreds of companies, investors, and trends, and offering guidance on the most optimal ways in which UK longevity industry stakeholders, as well as government officials, can work to strengthen the industry, and allow it to reach its full potential as a global longevity science and preventive medicine hub. The report uses comprehensive infographics to distill the report’s data and conclusions into easily understandable portions, and interested readers can get a quick understanding of the report’s main findings and conclusions in its 10-page executive summary.

This special regional case study follows-up on the content and general outline of the Longevity Industry made by our consortium in the previous Longevity Industry Landscape Overviews, including Volume I “The Science of Longevity” (750 pages), and Volume II “The Business of Longevity” (650 pages), published earlier this year.

These ongoing analytical reports are part of a collaborative project by The Global Longevity Consortium, consisting of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, Deep Knowledge Analytics, Aging Analytics Agency and the Longevity. International platform.

Continue reading “Deep Knowledge Analytics announces the publication of a new analytical report titled Longevity Industry in UK Landscape Overview” »

Looking to attend or speak at an event about Blockchain?

Join us at Navy Pier in Chicago on August 24th & 25th in bringing the LEADERS in blockchain, government, and business together with the VOICES to learn what is possible from the BUILDERS. 50+ Leaders (Speakers) 100+ Voices (Bloggers, Podcasters, Youtubers) 250+ Builders (Blockchain Projects) 5,000 Attendees.

An ambitious smart-city project spearheaded by Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs has run into local resistance, causing delays.

The backstory: Waterfront Toronto, a development agency founded by the Canadian government, partnered with the Google sister company in October 2017 to create a futuristic neighborhood on the Toronto waterfront. Sidewalk Labs plans to fill the 12-acre plot with driverless shuttle buses, garbage-toting robots, and other gadgets to show how emerging technologies can improve city life.

The problem: Sidewalk Labs’ connection to Google and vague descriptions of its business model alarmed privacy advocates and urban planners from the start. Local pushback has increased since, causing a key supporter to resign from the project and delaying the release of its final development plan to spring 2019.

Continue reading “Even Alphabet is having trouble reinventing smart cities” »

“We should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies—that is already done,” Assefa argues.

That makes sense to academics like Singh — though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. “But any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.”

A 2017 report (pdf) by the World Wide Web Foundation suggested that Ethiopian “intelligence services are using machine intelligence techniques to break encryption and find patterns in social media posts that can be used to identify dissidents.” And while mobile phone and internet penetration in Ethiopia is comparatively poor—a situation made worst amid widespread anti-government protests, which prompted an internet crackdown in February — the report added that government surveillance and oppression could increase as the use of smartphones expands.

Continue reading “Futurists in Ethiopia are betting on artificial intelligence to drive development” »