Lifeboat Foundation

And it wouldn’t actually be that expensive, thanks to robots, 3D printing, and SpaceX.

Life often imitates art, and the White House is hoping that theory can prevail when it extends to space travel.

As Gizmodo reports, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology brought together scientists, engineers, artists and policymakers as part of a workshop a few weeks ago to talk about what space colonization will look like and what it will mean for humanity. It was basically a “big idea” summit, with an interesting mix of perspectives imagining what a future in the stars might look like.

The summit was broken into several categories:

Continue reading “White House turns to science fiction for space colonization ideas” »

“A metaphorical chip holding all the programming for our universe stores information like a quantum computer.” This is the radical insight to the foundation of our Universe developed by Mark Van Raamsdonk, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia, that says that the world we see around us is a projection from a set of rules written in simpler, lower-dimensional physics—just as the 2D code in a computer’s memory chip creates an entire virtual 3D world. “What Mark has done is put his finger on a key ingredient of how space-time is emerging: entanglement,” says Gary Horowitz, who studies quantum gravity at the University of California Santa Barbara. Horowitz says this idea has changed how people think about quantum gravity, though it hasn’t yet been universally accepted. “You don’t come across this idea by following other ideas. It requires a strange insight,” Horowitz adds. “He is one of the stars of the younger generation.”

“We’re trying to construct a dictionary,” says Van Raamsdonk, that allows physicists to translate descriptions of our complex universe into simpler terms. If they succeed, they will have found the biggest jigsaw piece in the puzzle of a Grand Unified Theory—something that can describe all of the forces of our universe, at all scales from the atomic to the galactic. That puzzle piece is, specifically, something that can describe gravity within the framework of quantum mechanics, which governs physics on small scales. Such a unified theory is needed to explain the extreme scenarios of a black hole or the first moments of the universe.”

Continue reading “A Strange New Theory of How Space-Time is Emerging” »

Dubai’s skyline is an ever-growing collection of impressive towering skyscrapers, including the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. And you know what loves tall buildings even more than tourists do? Lightning.

Instagrammer faz3, also known as Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the Crown Prince of Dubai), captured this amazing lightning show over Dubai at 1,977 frames per second, turning what is normally a split second occurrence into a beautifully drawn-out ballet of bolts splintering their way across a dark stormy sky.

Google DeepMind’s machine-learning AlphaGo program has defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol in the first match of five historic matches between human and AI, taking place in Seoul.

Continue reading “AlphaGo machine-learning program defeats top Go player in first match” »

“There may well be approaches that don’t require Apple to build a custom firmware to defeat some of the iPhone’s security measures.”

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Thanks to a small group of Silicon Valley’s satellite startups, we may never look at our planet again the same way.

An interstellar precursor mission has been discussed as a priority for science for over 30 years. It would improve our knowledge of the interstellar environment and address fundamental questions of astrophysics, from the origin of matter to the evolution of the Galaxy. A precursor mission would involve an initial exploration probe and aim to test technological capabilities for future large-scale missions. With this survey we intend to identify potential backers and gauge the public’s interest in such a mission.

This survey is conducted by the International Space University (www.isunet.edu) in collaboration with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (www.I4IS.org). Your data will not be shared with any other organisation.

New to 3D-bioprinting: Blood vessels. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo