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Category: futurism – Page 526

Colonizing Giant Stars

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Giant Stars are often considered too hot and short lived to colonize, but it may be that they shall be the most powerful and pivotal systems in a future galaxy.

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Credits:
Colonizing Giant Stars.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 279, February 25, 2021
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:
Darius Said.
Jason Burbank.
Keith Blockus.

Cover Art:

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Using an acoustic field to create a liquid metal conductive network inside a polymer

A team of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with a colleague from Institute for Basic Science, both in the Republic of Korea, has found an easy way to create an electronic network inside a polymer. They used an acoustic field to connect liquid metal dots.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their technique and its possible uses. Ruirui Qiao and Shi-Yang Tang with the University of Queensland in Australia and the University of Birmingham, in the U.K., respectively, have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal outlining the work done by the team.

As have become mainstream, consumers have demanded more ease of use. One such call is for devices to be bendable and/or stretchable. It is believed such a change would make them fit more easily and naturally in pockets or purses—and they might be more comfortable in the hands, as well.

How reality is shaped by the speed of light

But it gets weirder.

The light from the table sitting just one meter away from you is also taking some time to reach you. Since its half as far away as the chair, you are seeing it as it was 330 picoseconds ago. That’s half as far back in the past as the chair. Ok, fine, but they both appear to you in the now. What you perceive as the “now” is really layer after layer of light reaching your eye from many different moments in the past. Your “now” is an overlapping mosaic of “thens.” What you imagine to be the real world existing simultaneously with you is really a patchwork of moments from different pasts. You never live in the world as it is. You only experience it as it was, a tapestry of past vintages.

My Robot Wife

My AI Girlfriend won’t talk to me unless I renew my annual Netflix subscription.

— You in five years

Everyone has written about the dangers of AI and the uncertain future of humanity, and many of these worries focus on large scale issues like disinformation, democracy, wartime decision making by computers, etc. However, it is the small and personal changes to human life that tend to create the biggest effects down the line. If we assume that a sizeable portion of the population will have, at some point, some form of AI assistant, friend, companion, etc. and that these AI assistants are designed by for-profit companies to perfectly press our psychological buttons, then we are in serious danger of handing ourselves over to the whims of those companies, or governments.

Magnetic Field Heats Up Fusion

A magnetic field can significantly boost the performance of a large-scale fusion experiment that may lead to a future source of clean power.

Nuclear fusion could provide a clean power source, but one of the technological challenges is maintaining the fuel at a high enough temperature for a long enough time. In a technique called inertial confinement fusion (ICF)—where lasers initiate the nuclear reaction—a magnetic field has been shown to improve heating. Now researchers have shown that a magnetic field can also help in a large-scale experiment with a more complicated design that produces far more energy [1]. The applied field increased the fuel’s temperature by 40% and tripled the fusion reaction’s efficiency. The work provides a step toward increasing the robustness and energy output of the fusion reaction and provides the first proof of concept of magnetization-assisted fusion in a large-scale experiment.

In the simplest version of ICF, synchronized laser pulses hit a capsule filled with cold hydrogen fuel, causing it to implode. The implosion heats the fuel and creates a spot of burning plasma (see Viewpoint: Fusion Turns Up the Heat). The “hot spot” serves as a spark that initiates burning throughout the fuel, driving a self-sustaining fusion reaction that releases energy. However, these implosions can fail to generate significant fusion energy if the fuel pellet has small imperfections on its surface or if the lasers are not perfectly timed. But if the fuel could be heated to temperatures higher than was possible in recent experiments, there would be more margin for error, which could alleviate the sensitivity to such details.