Lifeboat Foundation

A new update to the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array radio telescope will let scientists see the universe as it was 13 billion years ago.

While we are used to much of our tech getting smaller, telescopes seem to be embracing the philosophy of bigger is better. The HERA (Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array) radio telescope is among those massive arrays peeking not only to far distances, but also through billions of years.

The new vehicle is 28 feet long, 13 feet wide, 11 feet tall, weighs about 5,000 pounds, and is designed for the punishment of Mars.

Florida-based Moon Express is among several private companies gearing up to harvest resources from the moon and asteroids.

The Chinese have plans to hunt, mine and even build a space station on asteroids, but are decades away from most ambitions.

A new story out on #transhumanism:

In the Basic Income America Facebook group, Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist who recently ran for president, shared his Wired article, Capitalism 2.0: the economy of the future will be powered by neural lace. He (along with many others) argues Wall Street, law offices, engineering firms, and more will soon be mostly void of humans.

I think I mostly agree with him. Algorithms will far surpass human ability to achieve the best possible outcomes (Nash equilibrium). Having read Super Intelligence, the Master Algorithm, The Age of Em, books on evolution, lectures, interviews, etc… I think we’re approaching an important moment in human history where we have to figure out morality so we can build it into the proto-AI children we are giving birth to. I’ve even toyed around with a fun idea related to the simulation hypothesis. Maybe we exist as a simulation, repeating the birth of AI over and over again until we figure out a way to do it without destroying ourselves or turning the universe into computonium.

Continue reading “Are You Drinking the Transhumanist Kool-Aid?” »

IN AN effort to mine precious metals potentially worth trillions of dollars and aid interstellar travel, China has unveiled plans to build a base on an asteroid, likely to happen “in the near future”.

Ye Peijian, the chief commander and designer of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, revealed details that could potentially put an unmanned craft on an asteroid and mine the rock for metals like palladium, platinum and others that are used in items such as smartphones and cars.

“In the near future, we will study ways to send robots or astronauts to mine suitable asteroids and transport the resources back to Earth,” Peijian said in comments reported by China Daily.

Continue reading “A single asteroid could contain $50 billion worth of precious minerals” »

Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” persists even at high accelerations, researchers of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna were able to show in a new experiment. A source of entangled photon pairs was exposed to massive stress: The photons’ entanglement survived the drop in a fall tower as well as 30 times the Earth’s gravitational acceleration in a centrifuge. This was reported in the most recent issue of Nature Communications. The experiment helps deepen our understanding of quantum mechanics and at the same time gives valuable results for quantum experiments in space.

Einstein’s theory of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics are two important pillars of modern physics. On the way of achieving a “Theory of Everything,” these two theories have to be unified. This has not been achieved as of today, since phenomena of both theories can hardly be observed simultaneously. A typical example of a quantum mechanical phenomenon is entanglement: This means that the measurement of one of a pair of light particles, so-called photons, defines the state of the other particle immediately, regardless of their separation. High accelerations on the other hand can best be described by the theory of relativity. Now for the first time, quantum technologies enable us to observe these phenomena at once: The stability of quantum mechanical entanglement of photon pairs can be tested while the photons undergo relativistically relevant acceleration.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/spacetech-we-quite-yet-brett-gallie on @LinkedIn

I was recently at NASA’s annual SpaceApps Hackathon and the focus this year was climate change and our team brainstormed solutions to track the causes of devastating Twisters and we noted that technology had not progressed far enough to build our tracking probes but was close to being developed.

Massive technological advances need to be made if we are going to Mars and beyond.

A lunar colony seems an obvious choice for space colonization. It’s relatively close to Earth and we won’t get homesick that easily, right? You’d be surprised to learn the exact opposite. Given its atmosphere is almost non-existent, an underground facility would be in dire need. The settlement on moon should be about 4 meters or 13 feet deep. Do you still want to go there?

Maybe you should read further now and decide for yourself as nine space-age designs have finally been revealed as the winners of the Moontopia competition. Visualizing a decent life on the moon has become the main objective for many architects and designers who submitted their very own proposal to the design magazine Eleven. The competition ran from August to November 2016 and a jury of NASA designers, space-architects, academics and the editorial team at Eleven themselves selected the top nine entries these days.