Lifeboat Foundation

A recent contest challenged participants to create utopian designs of future human Mars settlements, and their creations are stunning.

In the HP Mars Home Planet Rendering Challenge, over 87,000 people from all over the world flexed their creative muscles to design the perfect colony on the Red Planet. Last summer, when HP launched the challenge, the participants started working on their designs, and the winners were announced on Aug. 14.

This challenge wasn’t just about creating a pretty, futuristic-looking, idealistic Martian colony. Indeed, the designs also had to show how the settlements would support 1 million colonists. The surface of the Red Planet is harsh, with an extremely thin atmosphere, intense radiation and dust storms that occasionally envelop the planet. [Mars Ice Home: A Red Planet Colony Concept in Pictures].

Could a planet ever collide with Earth?

The universe is a big place, so when we get beautiful images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, they cover a very small spot in the sky that may not fully represent what the universe at large looks like. To change that, we’re expanding our view by significantly enlarging the area covered around huge galaxy clusters previously seen to get a better look at the universe. Take a look: https://go.nasa.gov/2QAw5hc

The jet’s apparent (but not actual) superluminal velocity provide new constraints on the merger and its aftermath.

• By Mike Wall, SPACE.com on September 7, 2018

SpaceX’s CEO shrugs off 20 years of NASA research.

SORRY, ELON. To be ready for human occupants, Elon Musk has long called Mars a “fixer-upper of a planet.” But according to a new NASA-sponsored study, a better description might be a “tear-down.” The scientists behind that project say it’s simply not possible to terraform Mars — that is, change its environment so that humans can live there without life support systems — using today’s technology.

BUILDING AN ATMOSPHERE. Mars has a super thin atmosphere; a human unprotected on the surface of Mars would quickly die, mostly because there’s not enough atmospheric pressure to prevent all your organs from rupturing out of your body (if you survived a little longer, you could also suffocate from lack of oxygen, freeze from low temperatures, or get fried from too much ultraviolet radiation).

Continue reading “Scientists Say We Can’t Terraform Mars. Elon Musk Says We Can” »

A $1 billion NASA mission that will use a laser to track changing ice levels on Earth soared into space early Saturday (Sept. 15), launching into a predawn California sky on a mission that also marked the final flight of a record-setting rocket.

A NASA satellite designed to precisely measure changes in Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice and vegetation was launched into polar orbit from California early Saturday.

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A Delta 2 rocket carrying ICESat-2 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 6:02 a.m. and headed over the Pacific Ocean.

Continue reading “NASA satellite launched to measure Earth’s ice changes” »

For decades, astronomers weren’t able to find all of the atomic matter in the universe. A series of recent papers has revealed where it’s been hiding.

Playlist Electronic Fusion #158, broadcast on 15 September 2018:

01. Plike — Holmesburg 02. Plike — The Monster Study 03. Plike — Subproject 68 04. Plike — Bluebird 05. Plike — Laboratory 12 (Feat. Digibilly) 06. Alpha Wave Movement — Herzschlag Des Universums 07. Alpha Wave Movement — Other Worlds 08. Chris Gate — This Is Syndae 09. Moonbooter — Syndae’s Theme (Boot From Moon Mix) 10. Stefan Erbe — GP 11. Arend Westra — Under The Milky Way 12. Broekhuis, Keller & Schönwälder — Frozen Nights 13. AndAWan — Time To Remember (Ft. Irene Makri) 14. Thought Guild — Tetrahedral Anomalies 15. Erik Seifert — ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) 16. Wolfgang Roth (Wolfproject) & Jens-H. Kruhl (Wiesenberg) — The Light Belongs To You.

Continue reading “Brainvoyager ‘Electronic Fusion’ #158 – 15 September 2018” »