Following several launch delays last week, the week of Aug. 21 through Aug. 27 is set to see seven launches marking the 129th through 135th orbital launch attempts of 2023.
Starting the week off, SpaceX will launch two back-to-back Starlink missions from Space Launch Complex (SLC) 4 East at the Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) and from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). Next, Russia will launch its Progress resupply mission, followed by Rocket Lab’s launch of “We Love the Nightlife.” SpaceX will then launch the Crew-7 mission from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A); JAXA will launch the SLIM and XRISM mission; SpaceX is expected to end the week off with another Starlink mission from SLC-40.
A type 5 civilization often seen as unattainable is actually quite possible. We could have computers to use a developer mode to solve all sorts of problems like the entropy of the universe and even stop the entropy of the earth or stop meteorites from hitting earth with a computer click. This could easily be attainable with technological singularities leading to a new understanding of our universe but should be considered to essentially stop almost any problem to earth and beyond.
Type 1 civilization designation on the Kardashev scale may be possible in the next 100 years, which could influence the survival of mankind.
Texas A&M University’s board of regents voted to approve the construction of a new institute in Houston that hopes to contribute to maintaining the state’s leadership within the aerospace sector.
This week, the Texas A&M Space Institute got the greenlight for its $200 million plan. The announcement follows a $350 million investment from the Texas Legislature. The institute is planned to be constructed next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“The Texas A&M Space Institute will make sure the state expands its role as a leader in the new space economy,” John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M System, says in a news release. “No university is better equipped for aeronautics and space projects than Texas A&M.”
The universe is not static or silent, as is commonly believed. It moves, expands and… vibrates. And this is where gravitational waves play an important role: tiny ripples in the fabric of space and time that occur when massive objects accelerate or collide.
Gravitational waves are generally very difficult to detect because they are usually very short and weak, and get lost in the background noise of the universe.
For this reason, until now only some of them have been captured with very sensitive instruments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which measures the distortions caused by the waves in two laser light beams separated by kilometers.
Conference presentation of “Process Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.” As presented at the Whitehead Psychology Nexus Workshop Conference held in Fontareches, France, March 27-30th, 2015 (with some minor adjustments). For full published paper, see: https://tinyurl.com/yc9r6kys (date of publication: October 18, 2017).
Abstract:
Process Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.
Author: Jeroen B. J. van Dijk, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Ever since Einstein’s arrival at the forefront of science, mainstream physics likes to think of nature as a giant 4-dimensional spacetime continuum in which all of eternity exists all at once – in one timeless block universe. Accordingly, much to the dismay of more process-minded researchers, the experience of an ongoing present moment is typically branded as illusory. Mainstream physics is having a hard time, though, to provide a well-founded defense for this illusoriness of time. This is because physics, as an empirical science, is itself utterly dependent on experience to begin with. Moreover, if nature were indeed purely physical – as contemporary mainstream physics wants us to believe – it’s quite difficult to see how it could ever be able to give rise to something so explicitly non-physical like conscious experience. On top of this, the argument of time’s illusoriness becomes even more doubtful in view of the extra-ordinary level of sophistication that would be required for our conscious experience to achieve such an utterly convincing, but – physically speaking – pointless illusion. It’s because of problems like these that process thought has persistently objected against this ‘eternalism’ of mainstream physics. Just recently, physicist Lee Smolin even brought up some other major arguments against this timeless picture in his controversial 2013 book ‘Time Reborn’. And although he passionately argues that physics should take an entirely different direction, he admits that he has no readily available roadmap to success. Fortunately, however, over the last 15 years or so, a neo-Whiteheadian, ‘neurobiologically inspired’ way of doing foundational physics, namely Reg Cahill’s Process Physics, has been making its appearance on the scene. Process Physics aims to model the universe as an initially orderless and uniform process plenum by setting up a stochastic, self-referential modeling of nature. In Process Physics, all self-referential and initially noisy activity patterns are “mutually in-formative” as they are actively making a meaningful difference to (i.e. “in-forming”) each other. Due to this mutual in-formativeness, the stochastic activity patterns will act as “start-up seeds” that become engaged in self-renewing update iterations. In this way, the system starts to evolve from its initial featurelessness to then “branch out” to higher and higher levels of complexity – all this according to the same basic principles as a naturally evolving neural network. Because of this “neuromorphic” behaviour, the process system can be thought of as habit-bound with a potential for creative novelty and open-ended evolution. Furthermore, threedimensionality, gravitational and relativistic effects, nonlocality, and classical behaviour are spontaneously emergent within the system. Also, the system’s constantly renewing activity patterns bring along an inherent present moment effect, thereby reintroducing time as the system’s ongoing change. As a final point, subjectivity – in the form of mutual informativeness – is a naturally evolving, innate feature, not a coincidental, later-arriving side-effect.
Ashwin Sawant runs Scientific Hydroponics, a research lab that has innovated a low-cost model to help farmers harvest more fodder in limited space and using less water.
