Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Elon Musk – Page 284

There’s a rift emerging among the members of the tech super-geniuses club. It’s not about matters of human intelligence, though. Physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla /SpaceX founder Elon Musk have both recently warned that our sci-fi nightmares about artificial intelligence could actually come true in our lifetimes.

Here’s what Musk, for instance, said during a recent stop at MIT:

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. Our biggest existential threat is probably that … There should be some regulatory oversight at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently did an interview in Denmark where he talked about all sorts of topics. Naturally, he spoke about where he see the future of the EV market going. The big problem that EV buyers have today are relatively short driving ranges offered. Tesla has the best driving range with its Model S able to go several hundred miles on a charge.

Musk answered a question from the interviewer on when we can expect to see EVs able to drive 1000km per charge, which is about 612 miles. Musk said that a Model S has already gone 500 miles on a charge, at low speeds.

He thinks that the Model S might be able to go 500 miles per charge by next year, but definitely by 2017. By 2020 Musk thinks that a driving distance of 1200 km, or about 746 miles, will be possible per charge. It’s unclear if Musk was talking about normal driving distance or hypermiling the EV.

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Right now, Mars is a frozen, lifeless, and entirely inhospitable place.

Yet the Red Planet holds great promise, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently discussed its future with comedian and television host Stephen Colbert.

Musk, who hopes to build a colony of 1 million people on Mars, told Colbert that there are two ways to warm the global temperatures on Mars, which would help transform it from a barren wasteland into a hospitable, Earth-like planet.

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Making spaceships and electric supercars isn’t enough for Elon Musk. Meghan Daum meets the entrepreneur who wants to save the world.

The name sounds like a men’s cologne. Or a type of ox. It sounds possibly made up. But then, so much about Elon Musk seems the creation of a fiction writer—and not necessarily one committed to realism. At 44, Musk is both superstar entrepreneur and mad scientist. Sixteen years after cofounding a company called X.com that would, following a merger, go on to become PayPal, he’s launched the electric carmaker Tesla Motors and the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, which are among the most closely watched—some would say obsessed-over—companies in the world. He has been compared to the Christian Grey character in the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, though not as often as he’s been called “the real Tony Stark,” referring to the playboy tech entrepreneur whose alter ego, Iron Man, rescues the universe from various manifestations of evil.

The Iron Man comparison is, strangely, as apt as it is hyperbolic, since Musk has the boyish air of a nascent superhero and says his ultimate aim is to save humanity from what he sees as its eventual and unavoidable demise—from any number of causes, carbon consumption high among them. (As it happens, he met with Robert Downey, Jr., to discuss the Tony Stark role, and his factory doubled as the villain’s hideaway in Iron Man 2.) To this end he’s building his own rockets, envisioning a future in which we colonize Mars, funding research aimed at keeping artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity, and making lithium-ion electric batteries that might, one day, put the internal-combustion engine out to pasture.

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Hyperloop, dubbed “the fifth mode of transport,” is real. At least, that’s what the introductory video released this week on YouTube is trying to communicate.

Hyperloop is a project envisioned by engineer and inventor Elon Musk. In short, the goal is to build a high-speed transportation system using a low-pressure tube train, with a top speed of 800 miles per hour (1,300 km/h). Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are both research companies looking to turn Musk’s vision into reality. The former company has undergone a seed round led by SherpaVentures, while the latter is crowdsourced.

Hyperloop Technologies — that’s the funded company — uploaded this video on Tuesday:

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Elon Musk has officially requested permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a 4000 strong flotilla of satellites into orbit.

Elon Musk’s space company ‘SpaceX’ announced their primary plans in January with the official request coming early last week. If all goes to plan the satellites could be in orbit and the Internet operational within five years.

While satellite internet is not new technology, SpaceX plans to reduce the enormous latency over a space connection by launching the satellites into a low Earth orbit at around 650km. The low orbit and slower speeds mean 4000 satellites are needed to cover the earth, far more than necessary for higher orbit networking.

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