Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space

How space settlement can challenge consumerism

Apparently public interest in extraterrestrial settlement is steadily increasing.

It is impossible to think that anyone involved in thinking about the future of humanity in space can fail to be alarmed by the extent of overemphasis on technical requirements versus the lack of consideration of other key issues.

Space settlement should be developed by following or avoiding certain sets of ideas, doctrines, and philosophical guidelines. In other words, space settlement is in need of an ideology in order to be put in practice. The qualifications of such an ideology can enable us to foresee what a human society would look like, what its social structure and moral values would be, and ultimately whether or not they could survive.

This article is devoted to casting light on how the predominant ideology of consumerism will be challenged by human colonies in space, and in which ways extraterrestrial human culture might affect or reshape our way of thinking here on Earth.

Cosmic curveball: Distant system challenges planet-formation theory

An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how planets form. Across our galaxy, astronomers routinely observe a characteristic pattern in planetary systems: rocky planets orbiting close to their host star with gas giants farther away. Our own solar system follows this rule, with the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, composed of rock and iron, and the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune being predominantly gaseous.

This pattern stems from a well-established theory of planet formation: intense radiation from the host star strips away gas accumulated by close-in planets, leaving behind bare rocky bodies. While further from the star, cooler conditions allow thick atmospheres to build, forming gaseous planets.

But a newly discovered planetary system orbiting the star LHS 1903 breaks this rule. The findings are published in Science.

‘Learn-to-Steer’ method improves AI’s ability to understand spatial instructions

Researchers from the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University and from NVIDIA’s AI research center in Israel have developed a new method that significantly improves how artificial intelligence models understand spatial instructions when generating images—without retraining or modifying the models themselves. Image-generation systems often struggle with simple prompts such as “a cat under the table” or “a chair to the right of the table,” frequently placing objects incorrectly or ignoring spatial relationships altogether. The Bar-Ilan research team has introduced a creative solution that allows AI models to follow such instructions more accurately in real time.

The new method, called Learn-to-Steer, works by analyzing the internal attention patterns of an image-generation model, effectively offering insight into how the model organizes objects in space. A lightweight classifier then subtly guides the model’s internal processes during image creation, helping it place objects more precisely according to user instructions. The approach can be applied to any existing trained model, eliminating the need for costly retraining.

The results show substantial performance gains. In the Stable Diffusion SD2.1 model, accuracy in understanding spatial relationships increased from 7% to 54%. In the Flux.1 model, success rates improved from 20% to 61%, with no negative impact on the models’ overall capabilities.

Phonon lasers unlock ultrabroadband acoustic frequency combs

Acoustic frequency combs organize sound or mechanical vibrations into a series of evenly spaced frequencies, much like the teeth on a comb. They are the acoustic counterparts of optical frequency combs, which consist of equally spaced spectral lines and act as extraordinarily precise rulers for measuring light.

While optical frequency combs have revolutionized fields such as precision metrology, spectroscopy, and astronomy, acoustic frequency combs utilize sound waves, which interact with materials in fundamentally different ways and are well-suited for various sensing and imaging applications.

However, existing acoustic frequency combs operate only at very high, inaudible frequencies above 100 kHz and typically produce no more than a few hundred comb teeth, limiting their applicability.

Atom-thin electronics withstand space radiation, potentially surviving for centuries in orbit

Atom-thick layers of molybdenum disulfide are ideally suited for radiation-resistant spacecraft electronics, researchers in China have confirmed. In a study published in Nature, Peng Zhou and colleagues at Fudan University put a communications system composed of the material through a gauntlet of rigorous tests—including the transmission of their university’s Anthem—confirming that its performance is barely affected in the harsh environment of outer space.

Beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, the electronic components of modern spacecraft are extremely vulnerable to constant streams of cosmic rays and heavy ions. While onboard systems can be shielded with radiation-protective materials, this approach takes up valuable space and adds weight to spacecraft.

That extra mass drives up launch costs and can limit the payload available for scientific instruments or communications hardware. A far better solution would be to fabricate the electronics themselves from materials that are intrinsically resistant to radiation damage.

Supercomputer simulations reveal rotation drives chemical mixing in red giant stars

Advances in supercomputing have made solving a long‐standing astronomical conundrum possible: How can we explain the changes in the chemical composition at the surface of red giant stars as they evolve?

For decades, researchers have been unsure exactly how the changing chemical composition at the center of a red giant star, caused by nuclear burning, connects to changes in composition at the surface. A stable layer acts as a barrier between the star’s interior and the outer connective envelope, and how elements cross that layer remained a mystery.

In a Nature Astronomy paper, researchers at the University of Victoria’s (UVic) Astronomy Research Center (ARC) and the University of Minnesota solved the problem.

Webb maps the mysterious upper atmosphere of Uranus

For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet. Using Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, the team observed Uranus for nearly a full rotation, detecting the faint glow from molecules high above the clouds.

These unique data provide the most detailed portrait yet of where the planet’s auroras form, how they are influenced by its unusually tilted magnetic field, and how Uranus’s atmosphere has continued to cool over the past three decades. The results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, offer a new window into how ice-giant planets distribute energy in their upper layers.

Led by Paola Tiranti of Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, the study mapped out the temperature and density of ions in the atmosphere extending up to 5,000 kilometers above Uranus’s cloud tops, a region called the ionosphere where the atmosphere becomes ionized and interacts strongly with the planet’s magnetic field. The measurements show that temperatures peak between 3,000 and 4,000 kilometers, while ion densities reach their maximum around 1,000 kilometers, revealing clear longitudinal variations linked to the complex geometry of the magnetic field.

Quantum entanglement could link distant telescopes for sharper images

To capture higher-definition and sharper images of cosmological objects, astronomers sometimes combine the data collected by several telescopes. This approach, known as long-baseline interferometry, entails comparing the light signals originating from distant objects and picked up by different telescopes that are at different locations, then reconstructing images using computational techniques.

Conventional long-baseline interferometry methods combine the light signals collected by different telescopes using an interferometer. To do this, however, it relies on delicate optical links that bring light beams together and that are difficult to establish when telescopes are located at long distances from each other.

Researchers at University of Arizona, University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center recently proposed an alternative approach to achieve higher resolution telescopy images that leverages a quantum effect known as entanglement. Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, allows distant entangled telescopes, which share a unified quantum state irrespective of how distant they are, to extract the same information about a given scene or cosmological image.

/* */