Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: military – Page 243

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military got is first big taste of artificial intelligence with Project Maven. An Air Force initiative, it began more than a year ago as an experiment using machine learning algorithms developed by Google to analyze full-motion video surveillance.

The project has received high praise within military circles for giving operators in the field instant access to the type of intelligence that typically would have taken a long time for geospatial data analysts to produce.

Project Maven has whetted the military’s appetite for artificial intelligence tools. And this is creating pressure on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to jump on the AI bandwagon and start delivering Maven-like products and services.

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Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow’s interest in exotic subjects was as obvious as his company logo. He’d spent years — and millions of dollars — on his own scientific study of UFOs and related topics. For the DIA contract, he created BAASS, a seperate entity housed within his aerospace plant. He hired a team of 46 scientists and investigators, along with dozens of other support personnel.

LAS VEGAS — UFO investigators are hoping to obtain a treasure trove of Pentagon documents that were generated by a once-secret military study of flying saucers and other weird aircraft.

The government confirms there was a UFO program. It supposedly ended in 2012, but the Pentagon has not yet released any reports or files.

The I-Team gives the first look at documents which prove the UFO study was real and was based in southern Nevada.

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The facility, which was originally used by the US military to spy on Soviet satellites during the Cold War, is undergoing a major overhaul to attract tourists and researchers alike. In search of inspiration, Snøhetta’s designers took astronomy classes and were captivated by the architecture of the galaxy.

“We learned about the eight shaped analemma diagram that the moon and the sun makes if you watch them from the same point over 365 days,” says Skaare. “We were especially inspired by the ‘ugly moons’ of Mars, with its funny shape,” she says referring Phobos and Deimos, the red-planet’s two lumpy satellites.

Mars’s lumpy-potato moons, in fact, inspired the shape of Solobservatoriet’s visitor cabins. Surrounding the planetarium are several imperfect-sphere rooms for stargazers who want to spend the an evening in the forest—perhaps to catch the spectacular Northern Lights. Designed to accommodate groups of two to 32, the cabins will be loosely scattered around the planetarium, by design.

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The battlefields of the future look set to be the province of robots duking it out on the field as their operators sit pretty, miles away. Russia is moving in leaps and bounds towards fielding its own unmanned forces.

Modern robots are nothing like the Terminator: Fielding human-shaped automatons for combat is much more trouble than it’s worth, so most ground robots are more or less tank- or car-shaped. They aren’t fully controlled by an artificial intelligence, either – not just yet, at least.

With its enormous war budgets and military industrial sector, it’s no surprise the US has been at the forefront of unmanned combat vehicle development. Its Predator drones have been raining death on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen for over 15 years now, and it has been employing small, ground-based firing platforms like SWORDS for years, not to mention the multitude of bomb disposal and surveillance robots.

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For one thing, it appears to violate international law, according to Congressional testimony by Joanne Gabrynowicz, a space law expert at the University of Mississippi. Before NASA’s moon landing, the United States—along with other United Nations Security Council members and many other countries—signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies,” it states, “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” The 1979 Moon Agreement went further, declaring outer space to be the “common heritage of mankind” and explicitly forbidding any state or organization from annexing (non-Earth) natural resources in the solar system.

Major space-faring nations are not among the 16 countries party to the treaty, but they should arguably come to some equitable agreement, since international competition over natural resources in space may very well transform into conflict. Take platinum-group metals. Mining companies have found about 100,000 metric tons of the stuff in deposits worldwide, mostly in South Africa and Russia, amounting to $10 billion worth of production per year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. These supplies should last several decades if demand for them doesn’t rise dramatically. (According to Bloomberg, supply for platinum-group metals is constrained while demand is increasing.)

Palladium, for example, valued for its conductive properties and chemical stability, is used in hundreds of millions of electronic devices sold annually for electrodes and connector platings, but it’s relatively scarce on Earth. A single giant, platinum-rich asteroid could contain as much platinum-group metals as all reserves on Earth, the Google-backed Planetary Resources claims. That’s a massive bounty. As Planetary Resources and other U.S. and foreign companies scramble for control over these valuable space minerals, competing “land grabs” by armed satellites may come next. Platinum-group metals in space may serve the same role as oil has on Earth, threatening to extend geopolitical struggles into astropolitical ones, something Trump is keen on preparing for. Yesterday he said he’s seriously weighing the idea of a “Space Force” military branch.

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