Lifeboat Foundation

The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around.

Or at least that’s how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity’s own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity’s intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.

Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.

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A Galaxy of trillion of worlds, all separated by vast gulfs of time and space, it is very easy for pioneers and colonists to disappear. But what happens to these lost space colonies?

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Continue reading “Lost Space Colonies” »

Machine learning and AI experts have been challenged to join astronomers in the hunt for planets outside the solar system as part of the Ariel Data Challenge 2023, launched on 14 April.

Frequencies of light invisible to the human eye reveal a vast amount of information about our universe. But it took decades for scientists to learn how to view this hidden cosmos.

Remark: This article is from The Conversation France written by Victor DOS SANTOS PAULINO & Nonthapat PULSIRI (V&N) — Experts from Toulouse Business School and The SIRIUS Chair (France)

Lorsque nous parlons d’espace, nous pensons aux étoiles que nous voyons la nuit ou à de bons films de science-fiction. Or, l’espace comprend également tous les satellites et engins qui sont lancés depuis la Terre. Dans certains engins spatiaux, il y a des astronautes, comme l’Américaine Christina Koch ou le Français Thomas Pesquet, qui voyagent pendant plusieurs jours ou mois pour de nombreuses missions.

Pendant ce temps, plus de 8 000 satellites non habités opèrent sur les orbites terrestres pour améliorer la vie quotidienne. Par exemple, les satellites de communication contribuent à améliorer l’accès à Internet dans les zones blanches, les satellites d’observation sont essentiels pour les prévisions météorologiques et les satellites de navigation (GPS) sont indispensables pour les besoins de transport actuels et futurs tels que les véhicules autonomes.

Les progrès dans le secteur spatial offrent aujourd’hui de nouvelles opportunités dans la mise en orbite de constellations de milliers de satellites (par exemple, la flotte Starlink lancée par SpaceX, la société de l’homme d’affaires américain Elon Musk) ou encore dans l’exploitation minière spatiale et le tourisme spatial. Certains pays (dont la France et les États-Unis) ont par ailleurs annoncé que soutenir leur écosystème spatial constituait une priorité pour dynamiser l’économie.

Continue reading “Comment les activités spatiales peuvent-elles évoluer vers plus de durabilité ?” »

Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is found everywhere from the dust filling most of outer space to the cores of stars to many substances here on Earth. This would be reason enough to study hydrogen, but its individual atoms are also the simplest of any element with just one proton and one electron. For David Ceperley, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, this makes hydrogen the natural starting point for formulating and testing theories of matter.

Ceperley, also a member of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center, uses computer simulations to study how hydrogen atoms interact and combine to form different phases of matter like solids, liquids, and gases. However, a true understanding of these phenomena requires quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanical simulations are costly. To simplify the task, Ceperley and his collaborators developed a machine learning technique that allows quantum mechanical simulations to be performed with an unprecedented number of atoms. They reported in Physical Review Letters that their method found a new kind of high-pressure solid hydrogen that past theory and experiments missed.

“Machine learning turned out to teach us a great deal,” Ceperley said. “We had been seeing signs of new behavior in our previous simulations, but we didn’t trust them because we could only accommodate small numbers of atoms. With our machine learning model, we could take full advantage of the most accurate methods and see what’s really going on.”

The gas giant, which orbits a bright A-type star 556 light-years away from Earth, has an equilibrium temperature of 2,250 K and a size of about 1.51 Jupiter radii. The researchers found rubidium and samarium in the planet’s atmosphere for the first time, alongside ions of titanium and barium.

The discovery of rubidium and samarium is particularly notable. With an atomic number of 62, samarium is the heaviest element ever detected in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

“Astronomers are struggling to keep up with the complexity and volume of incoming exoplanetary data. The challenge is an excellent platform to facilitate cross-disciplinary solutions with AI experts.”

Fancy winning a ticket to the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD) or a cash prize? Put forth your technical and artificial intelligence skills to help astronomers understand planets outside our solar system, and you just may.

The Ariel Data Challenge 2023, launched on 14 April, invites experts with an AI or machine learning background from industry and academia.

And it could fly to orbit, in only one launch, by the early 2030s.

European aerospace giant Airbus has just revealed a new concept space habitat called LOOP. The 26-foot-wide (8 meters) multi-purpose orbital module will feature three customizable decks, all of which will be connected by a tunnel overlooking a space greenhouse.

In a press statement, Airbus said its new space station design could accommodate up to eight crew members, and it could be deployed to orbit, in only one launch, by the early 2030s.

Continue reading “Meet LOOP: Airbus’ new space station includes sci-fi-like centrifuge” »