Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics – Page 150

We can’t turn back the clock, but neither is job insecurity inevitable. Just as the postwar period managed to make industrialization benefit industrial workers, we need to create new norms, institutions and policies that make digitization benefit today’s workers. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.

When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom. We are taught that technological innovation drove social change and radically reshaped the world of work.

Likewise, when we talk about today’s economy, we focus on smartphones, artificial intelligence, apps. Here, too, the inexorable march of technology is thought to be responsible for disrupting traditional work, phasing out the employee with a regular wage or salary and phasing in independent contractors, consultants, temps and freelancers — the so-called gig economy.

But this narrative is wrong. The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.

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Last week, NASA announced the awardees for an ongoing effort to foster commercial activity in space. This effort allows 13 companies to study the future of commercial human spaceflight in low-Earth orbit, including long-term opportunities for the International Space Station.

I’m pleased to share that NanoRacks is one of these awardees.

This study is not only a big step for NanoRacks, but a big step for the commercial space ecosystem. Today, we are the largest commercial user of the International Space Station and are proud of the impact we’ve made to help foster this ecosystem and bring customers from all over the world into to orbit. This study will allow us to take our vision to the next step and detail the viability for habitable and automated platforms for low-Earth orbit.

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It may seem off-putting to some, but human waste is full of nutrients that can be recycled into valuable products that could promote agricultural sustainability and better economic independence for some developing countries.

Cities produce and must manage huge quantities of . Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a model to clarify what parts of the world may benefit most from re-circulation of human-waste-derived nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus from cities and back into farm fields. They report their findings in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“We grow our in the field, apply nutrient-rich fertilizers, eat the crops, excrete all of the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and then those nutrients end up at the ,” said Jeremy Guest, a civil and environmental engineering professor and study co-author. “It is a very linear, one-directional flow of resources. Engineering a more circular nutrient cycle would create opportunities that could benefit the environment, economy and agriculture.”

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Imagine something similar to the Great Depression of 1929 hitting the world, but this time it never ends.

Economic modelling suggests this is the reality facing us if we continue emitting greenhouse gases and allowing temperatures to rise unabated.

Economists have largely underestimated the global economic damages from climate change, partly as a result of averaging these effects across countries and regions, but also because the likely behaviour of producers and consumers in a climate change future isn’t usually taken into consideration in climate modelling.

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Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston.

Scientists are already working to slow by removing dioxide from the atmosphere, but there are serious practical and economic limits on developing the technology. Now, for the first time, researchers have explained how magnesite forms at low temperature, and offered a route to dramatically accelerating its crystallization. A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the rate of formation is very slow.

Project leader, Professor Ian Power (Trent University, Ontario, Canada) said:

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A research analyst at Swiss investment bank UBS believes the cost of energy renewables could be so near to zero by 2030 “it will effectively be free,” according to a projections published on Monday. If renewables could soon be cheaper than all the alternative energy sources, and that this “is great news for the planet, and probably also for the economy.”

The analysis, published in the Financial Times, explains that solar and wind farms are getting bigger, and that the potential of this sort of cheap, green energy is far-reaching and will only get cheaper. “In 2010, using solar power to boil your kettle would have cost you about £0.03,” the analyst writes in FT. “By 2020, according to estimates by our research team at UBS, the cost will have fallen to half a penny.” And just ten years later, the costs will be so minuscule, it will practically be free.

See also: 7 Massive Corporations Going Green to Boost Their Bottom Lines.

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This story is brought to you by SynbiCITE, which is accelerating the commercialization of synthetic biology applications. To learn how SynbiCITE is nucleating a sustainable UK economy, visit www.synbicite.com.

Just as Henry Ford’s assembly line revolutionized the automobile industry, synthetic biology is being revolutionized by automated DNA assembly (see SynBioBetaLive! with Opentrons). The key features of an assembly line translate well into the field of synthetic biology – speed, accuracy, reproducibility and validation. Instead of welding chassis together, small robotic arms are lifting delicate plates holding dozens of samples, adding and removing miniscule amounts of fluid.

In 2014, Imperial College London received £2 million to develop a DNA Synthesis and Construction Foundry to operate with SynbiCITE, the UK Innovation and Knowledge Centre for synthetic biology. Speaking at the Foundry’s inception, SynbiCITE co-director Prof. Paul Freemont said, “Standardizing the methods for synthesising DNA is crucial if we are going to scale up efforts to design and create this genetic material. The new DNA Synthesis and Construction Foundry will streamline and automate the ‘writing’ of DNA at an industrial scale so that tens of thousands of designed DNA constructions can be built and tested.”

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We explore some of the ramifications arising from superflares on the evolutionary history of Earth, other planets in the solar system, and exoplanets. We propose that the most powerful superflares can serve as plausible drivers of extinction events, and that their periodicity corresponds to certain patterns in the terrestrial fossil diversity record. On the other hand, weaker superflares may play a positive role in enabling the origin of life through the formation of key organic compounds. Superflares could also prove to be quite detrimental to the evolution of complex life on present-day Mars and exoplanets in the habitable zone of M- and K-dwarfs. We conclude that the risk posed by superflares has not been sufficiently appreciated, and that humanity might potentially witness a superflare event in the next $\sim {10}^{3}$ years, leading to devastating economic and technological losses. In light of the many uncertainties and assumptions associated with our analysis, we recommend that these results should be viewed with due caution.

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By allowing them to launch higher-power small satellites on smaller rockets, as opposed to the larger, and more expensive rockets that current technology requires.

Made in Space is developing power systems for small satellites that can provide up to 5 kW of solar power and is enabled by the company’s Archinaut on-orbit manufacturing and assembly technology. Current small satellites are typically constrained to 1 kW of power or less.

Made in Space CEO Andrew Rush pictured next to a subscale version of a solar array that the company can produce in space. The golden Mylar pieces are physical mockups of what would be solar blankets. This solar array is over 3 m tall. (Made in Space) Made in Space CEO Andrew Rush pictured next to a subscale version of a solar array that the company can produce in space. The golden Mylar pieces are physical mockups of what would be solar blankets. This solar array is over 3 m tall. (Made in Space)

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Let us frame the question, by reviewing what miners really do…

Miners play a critical role in the Bitcoin network. Their activity (searching for a nonce) results in assembling an immutable string of blocks that corroborate and log the universal transaction record. They are the distributed bookkeepers that replace old-school banks in recording and vouching for everyone’s purchase or savings.

From the perspective of a miner, there is no obvious connection between their activity and the worldwide network of bitcoin transactions and record keeping. They are simply playing an online game and competing against thousands of other miners in an effort to solve a complex and ongoing math problem. As they arrive at answers to small pieces of the problem, they are rewarded with bitcoin, which can be easily translated into any currency.

What is the Problem?

One day, mining for rewards will no longer be possible. The fundamental architecture of Bitcoin guarantees that mining will end. The pool of rewards that were held in abeyance as incentives is small and will run out in 2140—about 120 years from now. So, this raises the question: How will we incentivize miners when there is no more reward? (Actually, they won’t really be miners anymore…They will more accurately be bookkeepers or ‘validators’)

Is there a Solution?

Fortunately, there are many ways to offer incentives to those who validate transactions and maintain the books. Here are just a few:

  1. There is a current mechanism in which transactions bid for priority (speed of validation). Today, this mechanism augments the mining reward—particularly during periods of network performance. For example, the extra payments rose to $30 and more for individual transactions just before lightning network was adopted. In the future, it could replace the reward as the basis of a reward system.
  2. At the 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, Andreas Antonopoulos proposed a reputation ranking & reward system based on gaming theory. The ideal is that would result in a sufficient reward to maintain continuous network operation. Reputation points are not just a bragging point, but is likely to translate into real-world gravitas and financial opportunities.
  3. I believe that, one day, every user will be a micro-miner, and this will address the issue of incentives. For example, if users can avoid all mining fees by validating one transaction for every 10 of their own, we might see the widespread adoption of wallets that are full or partial nodes, rather than limited to the function of key storage.In this vision, micro mining will be achieved on a phone, a wristwatch, or a linked device at home. It will not result in an escalating race for increased power consumption…

I believe in this last solution and I have proposed it as the path forward at crypto/blockchain conferences.

Today, this idea seems implausible, because of the memory and computational requirements for running a full node. But, there have been big advancements in the effort to support micro-mining—which does not require such resources. Additionally, it is likely that the current proof-of-work mechanism used to arrive at a distributed consensus will be replaced by another mechanism that does not result in a competition to see who can consume the most electricity.

More about the sunset of mining incentives:

Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He sits on the New Money Systems board of Lifeboat Foundation and is a top Bitcoin writer at Quora. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.