Lifeboat Foundation

A new dimming signal makes the famous star even more challenging to explain, but astronomers aren’t claiming that it’s aliens… yet.

Humanity has long dreamed of establishing itself on other worlds, even before we started going into space. We’ve talked about colonizing the Moon, Mars, and even establishing ourselves on exoplanets in distant star systems. But what about the other planets in our own backyard? When it comes to the solar system, there is a lot of potential real estate out there that we don’t really consider.

Well consider Mercury. While most people wouldn’t suspect it, the closest planet to our sun is actually a potential candidate for settlement. Whereas it experiences extremes in temperature – gravitating between heat that could instantly cook a human being to cold that could flash-freeze flesh in seconds – it actually has potential as a starter colony.

Hopes for the imminent discovery of a particle that might fundamentally change our understanding of the Universe have been put on hold.

Results from the Large Hadron Collider show that a “bump” in the machine’s data, previously rumoured to represent a new particle, has gone away.

The discovery of new particles, which could trigger a paradigm shift in physics, may still be years away.

“Instead, Descartes relies on 4 petabytes of satellite imaging data and a machine learning algorithm to figure out how healthy the corn crop is from space.”

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Hmmmm; ok.

Finally, lasers will figure out what the deal with wind is.

Exciting news today about the new smaller reprogrammable QC discovery; however, in China.

Scientists in China are set to launch the world’s first ‘quantum satellite,’ which could one day make for an ultra-secure global communications network.

Continue reading “China to launch unbreakable quantum spy satellite” »

Great news!

Moon Express gets federal OK to try first private flight to moon in 2017.

Reason number 9,000 not to colonize Jupiter’s moon Io: not only is it a frigid hellscape covered in eruptive ice volcanoes and lashed by the gas giant’s powerful radiation belts, but the atmosphere just collapsed.

In fact, it collapses all the time, according to observations by astronomers at the Southwest Research Institute that are published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It turns out that every time Io is eclipsed by mighty Jupiter (which happens for about 2 hours a day), the surface temperature plummets and the moon’s sulfur dioxide (SO2)-rich atmosphere begins to deflate.

By the time Io is in full shadow, the atmosphere is like a punctured balloon, blanketing the moon’s surface in a thin coating of SO2 frost. As Io migrates back into the sun, this frost layer re-sublimates, and a new atmosphere develops.

Continue reading “Io’s Atmosphere Just Collapsed” »

National Geographic’s scripted/unscripted hybrid series Mars gives viewers both a real and dramatized quest to colonize the planet. The combination present-day documentary and scripted look at the future is what director Everard Gout described as a process in which “one hand fits in the other in terms of the knowledge and in terms of the emotion.” “It’s electrical” he added, “because you have that level of truthfulness on the documentary side but you also have an equal amount of beauty and truthfulness on the scripted side. It’s a very visceral experience.”