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Category: space – Page 973

Air Force lieutenant general Steve Kwast believes a “Kitty Hawk” moment will begin a new era in space. But while the U.S. still leads every other country in space, Kwast cautions that edge is whittling away.

“In my best military judgement China is on a 10-year journey to operationalize space. We’re on a 50-year journey,” Kwast told CNBC.

Kwast, who is also the commander and president of Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, says the United States must “bring together the right talent to accelerate the journey” in a Manhattan Project-like meeting of minds. He says this would push the space industry to an moment like Wright Brothers had when they completed the first successful airplane flight in 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina…

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Humans have always hoped for life after death. The difference is that now our desire is becoming more achievable due to huge advances in science.

Cryogenics tanks for storing frozen bodies.

In the past, Egyptian slaves were executed to accompany their dead Pharaoh into the afterlife. Now, thousands of years later, an equally bizarre after death procedure is being carried out and all for the price of £5,000 for 250 years.

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A giant planet – the existence of which was previously thought extremely unlikely – has been discovered by an international collaboration of astronomers, with the University of Warwick taking a leading role.

exoplanet 1

New research, led by Dr Daniel Bayliss and Professor Peter Wheatley from the University of Warwick’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, has identified the unusual planet NGTS-1b — the largest planet compared to the size of its companion star ever discovered in the universe.

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I was thinking about this thing, and the one in Iceland. Maybe we could build giant blimps in the atmosphere of Venus, it would carry that machine on its belly, and on the back of the blimp super advanced solar panels. Then inside of the blimp the CO2 could be mixed into liquid crystals or something like that and be dropped like rain down on the surface, to eventually terraform it.

Global Engineering — a phrase that describes steadying the world’s climate with technical solutions. A Swiss company has received EU funding to develop a machine that captures CO2. Can it really make a difference?

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Dr. Aubrey De Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and the Chief Science Officer at SENS Research Foundation, a biomedical charity that funds research dedicated to combating aging. His research interests encompass the characterization of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging, and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. In line with his research, De Grey gave a talk at The Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Festival focusing on “Rejuvenating Biotechnology: Why age may soon cease to mean aging”.

In March 2017, the Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum welcomed some of the brightest and most interesting minds from the UAE and around the world to discuss four of the most important moonshot challenges facing our planet. The event was inspired by the world-famous Aspen Ideas Festival that has been taking place in Colorado since 2005, as a place for scientists, artists, politicians, business leaders, historians and educators to discuss some of the most fascinating ideas of our time. The 2017 Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum topics included: “System Shock: Calming the ‘politics of anger’”, “Beyond GDP: Targeting ‘all-in’ human welfare”, “Health: Extending the healthy human lifespan” and “Space: Living Sustainably beyond Earth”.

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Since emerging as a species we have seen the world through only human eyes. Over the last few decades, we have added satellite imagery to that terrestrial viewpoint. Now, with recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are not only able to see more from space but to see the world in new ways too.

One example is “Penny”, a new AI platform that from space can predict median income of an area on Earth. It may even help us make cities smarter than is humanly possible. We’re already using machines to make sense of the world as it is; the possibility before us is that machines help us create a world as it should be and have us question the nature of the thinking behind its design.

Penny is a free tool built using high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe, income data from the US census, neural network expertise from Carnegie Mellon and intuitive visualizations from Stamen Design. It’s a virtual cityscape (for New York City and St. Louis, so far), where AI has been trained to recognize, with uncanny accuracy, patterns of neighbourhood wealth (trees, parking lots, brownstones and freeways) by correlating census data with satellite imagery.

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Fully automated mining and factories and advanced robotics on the moon and asteroids could be leveraged for the exponential development of space. Here we review some of the developments of robotics for mining and factories on earth.

Robotic mining

Rio Tinto has 73 self driving trucks hauling iron ore 24 hours a day at four mines in Australia. They also use robotic rock drilling rigs. They are starting to use self driving trains that will be loaded and unloaded automatically. Driverless locomotives hae been tested extensively in 2017 and will be fully deployed by 2018.

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