Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space travel

With a growing number of Earth-like exoplanets discovered in recent years, it is becoming increasingly frustrating that we can’t visit them. After all, our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system would be pretty limited if it weren’t for the space probes we’d sent to explore them.

The problem is that even the nearest stars are a very long way away, and enormous engineering efforts will be required to reach them on timescales that are relevant to us. But with research in areas such as nuclear fusion and nanotechnology advancing rapidly, we may not be as far away from constructing small, fast interstellar space probes as we think.

There’s a lot at stake. If we ever found evidence suggesting that life might exist on a planet orbiting a nearby star, we would most likely need to go there to get definitive proof and learn more about its underlying biochemistry and evolutionary history. This would require transporting sophisticated scientific instruments across interstellar space.

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You might not know it, but you’re really just one Kickstarter away from launching your own satellite. CubeSats and other small, cheap spacecraft platforms have reduced the cost of getting to orbit by a huge margin, allowing for a more democratized age of space exploration.

As exciting as this populist spaceflight movement is, there is still one major technological hurdle it has to clear before it will meet its full potential: Propulsion.

Take CubeSats—cubic nanosatellites that typically weigh around three pounds. These modules are extremely popular with both professionals and hobbyists, and hundreds of them have been launched since 2003.

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Luv the whole beautiful picture of a Big Data Quantum Computing Cloud. And, we’re definitely going to need it for all of our data demands and performance demands when you layer in the future of AI (including robotics), wearables, our ongoing convergence to singularity with nanobots and other BMI technologies. Why we could easily exceed $4.6 bil by 2021.

From gene mapping to space exploration, humanity continues to generate ever-larger sets of data—far more information than people can actually process, manage, or understand.

Machine learning systems can help researchers deal with this ever-growing flood of information. Some of the most powerful of these analytical tools are based on a strange branch of geometry called topology, which deals with properties that stay the same even when something is bent and stretched every which way.

Such topological systems are especially useful for analyzing the connections in complex networks, such as the internal wiring of the brain, the U.S. power grid, or the global interconnections of the Internet. But even with the most powerful modern supercomputers, such problems remain daunting and impractical to solve. Now, a new approach that would use quantum computers to streamline these problems has been developed by researchers at MIT, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Southern California…

Continue reading “Big Data And Quantum Computers” | >

So, here is a question that many AI experts are and have been asking themselves for a while; “as humans create robots and have other humans; what will the world look like when Humanoid Robots and other types of robots create their own?”

NASA is in the process of developing a humanoid robot that could help astronauts in risky and extremely hazardous expeditions in the future.

The six-feet tall, 131.5 kg heavy humanoid robot called R5 will work as a ready-to-assist machine in every dangerous task of the utmost importance during long-lasting journeys beyond the Earth, Astrowatch.net reported on Sunday. The robot was previously known as Valkyrie.

“NASA is counting on robots to set up and care for deep space exploration facilities and equipment pre-deployed ahead of astronauts. Robots are also excellent precursors for conducting science missions ahead of human exploration,” Sasha Congiu Ellis of NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia, said.

Continue reading “NASA to develop humanoid robot to help in deep space missions” | >

Dreaming of wormholes: Kaku said “The only feasible way to break the light barriers is through general relativity and warping of space-time”. We call this warping as wormholes, theoretically, these allow something to break the cosmic speed limit by travelling huge distance in a short time. These wormholes have some exotic matter, holding them open. This exotic matter has been made in laboratories but in a small quantity. In 1988, Kip Thorne proposed a theory of Stable Wormholes to find out the possibility of a wormhole in the presence of that exotic matter (like the one in Interstellar Movie). Thorne says “After 30 years, the answer is still unknown and we are still away from the final answer.”

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Glad to see The Martian get some Academy Award action; as much as I liked the novel, I found the film to be as good or better, which is rare. And I also found it to be personally inspiring in a way that few science fiction films are. But the point I’m trying to make here is that; we aren’t that far from Hermes-type spacecraft for interplanetary transfer. It’s not out of the realm of possibilities. I wonder if any of you feel the same way.

With six Academy Award nominations, the celebrated film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel “The Martian” has been the perfect tonic for rousing interest in human missions to Mars.

But as good as the book truly is, the film transcends its source material about a stranded Mars astronaut with some practical takeaways that are as inspiring as any out there. They include:

Duct tape goes a long way –

Throwing money at a problem, particularly in aerospace, can often lead to little of real use.

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Blue Origin just launched and landed its suborbital rocket New Shepard — the same vehicle the company flew and then landed in November. The booster reached a maximum altitude of 333,582 feet, or 63 miles, above the Earth’s surface, before landing gently back at Blue Origin’s test facility in Texas. That makes it the first commercial vertical rocket to launch into space a second time.

It also means Blue Origin has seemingly beaten rival SpaceX yet again in the race to reuse rockets. SpaceX successfully landed one of its Falcon 9 rockets post-launch back in December for the first time, just a month after Blue Origin did. However, CEO Elon Musk said that particular rocket will never be launched again, as the company considers it too special to reuse. SpaceX tried to land another rocket last week, but the vehicle ultimately fell over and exploded, making it impossible to fly again.

SpaceX and Blue Origin may be working toward the same goal, but the companies do have two very different vehicles. Blue Origin’s New Shepard is designed to take future passengers into suborbital space, where they will experience four minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is made to launch payloads and cargo into orbit and beyond; the rocket goes much faster and to a much higher altitude before returning to the ground.

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