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Category: Elon Musk – Page 259

Elon Musk thinks we need to build a base on the moon if we are going to stoke public interest in space travel.

Speaking at the International Space Station (ISS) Research & Development Conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the SpaceX founder and leader spoke about the various opportunities space offers for business and innovation. He also lamented that many people seem to be unaware of the International Space Station, or do not seem to fully understand “how cool the ISS is.”

Asked what opportunities space affords, Musk cited several things, but said, “If you want to get the public fired up, you’ve got to put a base on the moon,” adding that it would be the “continuance to the dream” of the Apollo missions.

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(This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months, the third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs. I try to get it right but I mainly enjoy the idle speculation).

I was recently in San Francisco and had a very random number of drinks with two very friendly employees of US telco AT&T. As is often the case I turned the conversation towards autonomous vehicles, and more specifically two of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

I was curious about how cars, such as a Model S, have much greater data connectivity needs than ever before. Right now, Teslas connect to AT&T’s network and it seems clear that data needs will only increase for data hungry vehicles that drive themselves. Already Tesla cars consume quite a few gigabytes of data per month.

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Breaking : Elon Musk’s ideas on SpaceX DeepMind Tesla and The Dangers of #AI #Robots #Armageddon caused by AI & ideas for NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration (starts at 42mins in video).

Closing Plenary Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”

Speaker: Elon Musk
Governor Terry McAuliffe, Virginia, Chair.
Governor Brian Sandoval, Nevada, Vice Chair.

Keynote speaker: • elon musk, CEO of tesla and spacex

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Continue reading “NGA 2017 SUMMER MEETING — Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”” | >

Hyperloop One this week announced that it completed the first full-scale test of its high-speed transportation system, a move the company hailed as the burgeoning technology’s “Kitty Hawk moment.”

The test vehicle only reached 70 miles per hour, a tenth of the company’s eventual target speed. But the firm felt assured enough to set another phase of testing for later this year, when they hope to reach 250 miles per hour. Eventually, the system could reach a top speed of 700 miles per hour, nearly the speed of sound.

The Hyperloop’s potential velocity has helped it captivate the public’s imagination ever since Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk popularized the concept in 2012. But the proposed system, a sort of high-speed train that uses aerodynamic pods propelled through a vacuum cylinder, is not just about speed, according to many of the people developing it since Musk open-sourced the idea. It’s about changing how we think about moving people and cargo, a $1.48 trillion industry in the United States alone.

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My new article from Vice Motherboard on liberty and privacy. This is one of my most ambitious philosophical works yet: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx5y5/liberty-mi…th-privacy #Libertarian

If tech is surveilling us constantly, we need the ability to use it to watch the watchers.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.

The constant onslaught of new technology is making our lives more public and trackable than ever, which understandably scares a lot of people. Part of the dilemma is how we interpret the right to privacy using centuries-old ideals handed down to us by our forbearers. I think the 21st century idea of privacy—like so many other taken-for-granted concepts—may need a revamp.

When James Madison wrote the Fourth Amendment—which helped legally establish US privacy ideals and protection from unreasonable search and seizure—he surely wasn’t imagining Elon Musk’s neural lace, artificial intelligence, the internet, or virtual reality. Madison wanted to make sure government couldn’t antagonize its citizens and overstep its governmental authority, as monarchies and the Church had done for centuries in Europe.

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It may have a boring name, but it is getting exciting boring done. The aptly yet ironically named company has just reached an important milestone in fulfilling Elon Musk’s newest moonshot. The visionary and entrepreneur extraordinaire took to Twitter to almost nonchalantly revealed that boring machine Godot has just completed the first segment underneath LA, while still leaving plenty of room for mystery and suspense.

Musk is anything but boring, of course, as can be seen by his ambitions turned into successful companies. His latest endeavor, however, is probably one of the most debated. It came out of the blue and, given the tongue-in-cheek name, not everyone might have taken it seriously at first. And some of those that did though Musk had finally lost it. Of course, it had its fair share of fans who shared a dream of escaping traffic congestion.

Musk’s plan to solve the traffic problem wasn’t simply to bore tunnels that cars and all sorts of vehicles would simply fill up again. Instead, the tunnels would ferry these vehicles on sleds traveling at 200 km/h. Back in April, that was nothing more than a pretty rendered animation, but last month Musk showed off a demo of just how fast that sled really is.

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Elon Musk’s concept of solving traffic congestion by digging networks of tunnels may have a fan in Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Speaking about the city’s transit issues Sunday morning on ABC 7‘s “Eyewitness Newsmakers,” Garcetti mentioned the possibility of tunneling: “Like many other cities have, I’d love to see maybe even with the new tunneling technology that people like Elon Musk is looking at, whether we could have a quick and direct route from LAX to Union Station.”

There could be an #express train @unionstationla to @flyLAXairport –Here’s @MayorOfLA @ericgarcetti on #Newsmakers. #WATCH 11AM Sun @ABC7 pic.twitter.com/zJAFTge2VO — Adrienne Alpert (@abc7adrienne) June 17, 2017

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They say everything’s sweeter the second time around, and that seems to be the case for SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars. Last year, Musk unveiled his plans to colonize the Red Planet and make it fit for human habitation. Now, that version of the plan has been published and made available for free— with a few notable updates.

In the paper, the focus is on affordability, as that is the primary factor in making life on Mars a reality. As Musk notes, “You cannot create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion per person.” In order for it to be viable, Musk asserts that the cost should be about $200,000—equivalent to the median price of a house in the United States. In the paper, Musk outlines the steps he considers essential to ensuring this relative affordability.

But this is just the beginning. Musk posted a tweet today hinting that this version one is already being reviewed…and version 2 is on its way.

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Elon Musk’s paper on, available for free below.

This paper is a summary of Elon Musk’s presentation at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, September 26–30, 2016. In February 2017, SpaceX announced it will launch a crewed mission beyond the moon for two private customers in late 2018.

Used with permission from SpaceX.

By talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture, I want to make Mars seem possible—make it seem as though it is something that we can do in our lifetime. There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to.

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