Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine a future where there is no need to cut down a tree and and reshape that raw material into a chair or table. Instead, we could grow our furniture by custom-engineering moss or mushrooms. Perhaps glowing bacteria will light our cities, and we’ll be able to bring back extinct species, or wipe out Lyme disease—or maybe even terraform Mars. Synthetic biology could help us accomplish all that, and more.

That’s the message of the latest video in a new mini-documentary Web series called Explorations, focusing on potentially transformative areas of scientific research: genomics, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, transportation, space exploration, and synthetic biology. It’s a passion project of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of OS Fund and the payments processing company Braintree.

Continue reading “How Scientists Plan to Grow Cities Out of Living Organisms” »

If human beings are ever to colonise other planets – which might become necessary for the survival of the species, given how far we have degraded this one – they will almost certainly have to use generation ships: spaceships that will support not just those who set out on them, but also their descendants. The vast distances between Earth and the nearest habitable planets, combined with the fact that we are unlikely ever to invent a way of travelling that exceeds the speed of light, ensures that many generations will be born, raised and die on board such a ship before it arrives at its destination.

A generation ship would have to be a whole society in microcosm, with hospitals and schools, living quarters and perhaps entertainment districts, a security force, maybe even a judiciary. It would need to be able to provide food for its crew, and that might require agriculture or aquaculture, perhaps even domestic animals (which might also be needed for the colonisation effort). Its design therefore presents a major challenge: not just to engineers but also to social scientists. How should the crew be selected and the environment structured to minimise interpersonal conflict? What size of population is optimal for it to remain committed to the single overarching project of colonising a new planet without too much of a risk of self-destructive boredom or excessive narrowing of the gene pool? Does mental health require that a quasi-natural environment be recreated within the ship (with trees, grass and perhaps undomesticated birds and small animals)?

As well as the technological and social challenges confronting the designers of such ships, there are fascinating philosophical and ethical issues that arise. The issue I want to focus on concerns the ethics of a project that locks the next generation into a form of living, the inauguration of which they had no say over, and that ensures their options are extremely limited.

Continue reading “Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?” »

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning on going to Mars. NASA estimates that the cost will only be around $300 million.

Ever since Musk founded SpaceX is 2002, with the intention of eventually colonizing Mars, every move he has made has been the subject of attention. And for the past two years, a great deal of this attention has been focused specifically on the development of the Falcon Heavy rocket and the Dragon 2 capsule – the components with which Musk hopes to mount a lander mission to Mars in 2018.

Among other things, there is much speculation about how much this is going to cost. Given that one of SpaceX’s guiding principles is making space exploration cost-effective, just how much money is Musk hoping to spend on this important step towards a crewed mission? As it turns out, NASA produced some estimates at a recent meeting, which indicated that SpaceX is spending over $300 million on its proposed Mars mission.

Continue reading “NASA Estimates SpaceX 2018 Mars Mission Will Cost Only $300 Million” »

Thinking about Eugen Sänger’s photon rocket concept inevitably calls to mind his Silbervogel design. The ‘Silverbird’ had nothing to do with antimatter but was a demonstration of the immense imaginative power of this man, who envisioned a bomber that would be launched by a rocket-powered sled into a sub-orbital trajectory. There it would skip off the upper atmosphere enroute to its target. The Silbervogel project was cancelled by the German government in 1942, but if you want to see a vividly realized alternate world where it flew, have a look at Allen Steele’s 2014 novel V-S Day, a page-turner if there ever was one.

I almost said that it was a shame we don’t have a fictionalized version of the photon rocket, but as we saw yesterday, there were powerful reasons why the design wouldn’t work, even if we could somehow ramp up antimatter production to fantastic levels (by today’s standards) and store and manipulate it efficiently. Energetic gamma rays could not be directed into an exhaust stream by the kind of ‘electron gas mirror’ that Sänger envisioned, although antimatter itself maintained its hold on generations of science fiction writers and scientists alike.

Enter the Antiproton

Continue reading “The Evolution of Antimatter Propulsion” »

A new study—the result of a competition to design a century-long interstellar mission—has a possible solution to that problem.

The ISS has just installed a new technology known as Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, the first stage in a new mission that aims to allow the implementation of a Solar System-wide Internet in the near future.

As more investment and innovation is given to space exploration, the ISS is becoming a very busy place. And with Moon colonies and manned missions to Mars looking more and more like reality, the nearly-20 year old station is in dire need of an upgrade.

And its getting one. New technology has been installed in the ISS, and it is designed to form the basis of an internet-style network spanning the whole (or most of the whole) of our cosmic neighborhood. It’s called DTN, or Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking.

Continue reading “New Tech Installed on The ISS Set To Form Solar System-Wide ‘Internet’” »

Mars mission with plasma rockets concept. NASA

Continue reading “Traveling to Mars with Immortal Plasma Rockets” »

Russian development of a nuclear rocket engine for deep space exploration to the moon and Mars received a funding boost of about $60 for 2016–2018.

The next president needs to invest the damn money that’s needed to get this entire thing going. No more deferring. No more dithering. If this turns out to be an impossibility, then we should just privatize the entire production and design process, get rid of the red tape, and just get it DONE before we get delay after delay and then, when we finally DO get there, we find the Chinese have already built a damned settlement.

Scientific Method —

A new, independent review of the Orion spacecraft is pretty damning.

Continue reading “A new, independent review of the Orion spacecraft is pretty damning” »