My hero my love.
The SpaceX CEO now has 500 satellites orbiting earth, and primed for internet broadband trials in the northern hemisphere this summer.
Like many things about Elon Musk, Tesla’s approach to achieving autonomous driving is polarizing. Bucking the map-based trend set by industry veterans such as Waymo, Tesla opted to dedicate its resources in pursuing a vision-based approach to achieve full self-driving instead. This involves a lot of hard, tedious work on Tesla’s part, but today, there are indications that the company’s controversial strategy is finally paying off.
In a recent talk, Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy discussed the key differences between the map-based approach of Waymo and Tesla’s camera-based strategy. According to Karpathy, Waymo’s use of pre-mapped data and LiDAR make scaling difficult, since vehicles’ autonomous capabilities are practically tied to a geofenced area. Tesla’s vision-based approach, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence, is not. This means that Autopilot and FSD improvements can be rolled out to the fleet, and they would function anywhere.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to offer high-speed internet to Canadians living in remote areas by beaming it to them via satellites.
The Globe and Mail newspaper first reported that space exploration company SpaceX applied with Canada’s telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), for what’s known as a Basic International Telecommunications Services, or BITS, licence.
The rule of awkward silence is simple: When faced with a challenging question, instead of answering, you pause and think deeply about how you want to answer.
But make no mistake, this is no short pause. You might go five, 10, or even 15 seconds before offering a response. Which, if you’re not used to doing it, will feel very awkward—at first.
SpaceX software team members who helped “develop and deploy software that flew” the Crew Dragon capsule used to launch NASA astronauts into orbit in May, held a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session on June 6. They answered questions about how to land a job at Elon Musk’s rocket company.
Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging firm is currently completing a tunnel at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Elon Musk announced that his secretive brain-computer interface startup Neuralink is working on an “awesome” update of his brain implant technology.
Incredible Elon Musk
Could the least exciting bit of Elon Musk’s empire end up being the most transformative?
SpaceX could use the electric skateboard of the Cybertruck to build all the of vehicles that they need for a lunar mining operation. About twenty-five to thirty cybertrucks could be delivered to the moon with every SpaceX Starship.
A lunar base and mining operation would lower the cost for lunar operations by 70 times and by ten times for high earth orbit. A lunar mining operation would also lower the cost of operations to Mars and the SpaceX plans for a city on Mars. Before, Elon Musk makes a city on Mars using a dozen fleets of one hundred Starships he will build a mining town on the moon.
Hypebeast has rendered a Tesla Cybertruck as a six-wheel lunar rover.
Sending a handful of people certainly could serve as a proof of concept analogous to America’s Spanish and Portuguese outposts in the early 1500’s, or the English and Dutch settlements in the early 1600’s. In these instances the populations measured in the dozens and would not have amounted to a lasting European presence had they not been followed by thousands of new settlers over the next few decades. But, given our more advanced technology, our level of medicine, the idea that humans could have equipment that will utilize the Martian environment to produce food, air, and other consumables, and the certainty that settlers will not be at war with the Martian equivalent of the Aztecs or Incas—couldn’t a Martian settlement survive long term with just a low number of colonists?
The answer is no—not if the goal is a permanent human presence. Not if the goal is to provide our species with some kind of extinction insurance against planetary disaster on Earth, such as a mega-volcanic eruption, nuclear war, or some other existential threat. Mars setters can use technology to get air and food from the Mars environment, but early European explorers in the New World had access to one natural resource that mid-21st century Mars colonists will not be able to manufacture: a human gene pool.
If we really want Martian colonies, we can’t send just a few Adams and Eves. We can’t set-up a Martian Jamestown of 100 people. Long-term survival will depend on the genetic diversity of a large gene pool, and this means the Elon Musk plan of sending thousands might be the only colonization plan that could work.
