Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11377

Aircraft manufacturing company Airbus is looking to the skies for a solution to the growing traffic problem. They intend to send out a prototype for their self-flying taxi by next year.

For those of us who live in crowded cities, rush hour traffic is a daily struggle we aren’t likely to get used to. The past few years have seen an ever-lengthening travel time in different cities all over the world.

Nobody is immune, not even the most innovative minds of the world. Aircraft manufacturing company Airbus notes the irony that techies in Silicon Valley come up with all sorts of innovation every day, yet none of them has solved one of their own biggest problems: traffic congestion. “Silicon Valley may pride itself on speed, but during rush hour, everything around the IT Mecca grinds to a halt,” they wrote on their website. “The situation is even worse in cities such as Mumbai, Manila, or Tokyo,” they added. In the Philippines, an estimate says PHP 2.5 billion ($57 million) of potential income is lost to traffic every day, and will rise to P6 billion daily by 2030. In the US, this loss is estimated at $160 billion a year.

Read more

It’s like he knew what the main problems of work-cultist capitalism and its socially irresponsible job automation were going to be before the whole mess even got started.

This video is a piece selected from watercourseway1’s longer version called “Alan Watts — Money and Guilt” (account since deleted). Closest copy I can see now is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbVsvtKstyw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbU1TEvXtI8

Continue reading “Alan Watts on Socially Responsible Automation and an Unconditional Basic Income Guarantee” | >

Alrobot would not be the first robot to hit the sands of Baghdad, but it might become the first to actually fire a weapon.

Back in 2007, the U.S. Army deployed three armed ground robots called the Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS, from weapons maker Foster-Miller (now owned by Qinetiq). SWORDS basically consisted of a Foster-Miller TALON robot armed with a machine gun. But the SWORDS were pulled off the battlefield before they were able to take a single shot.

Kevin Fahey, the Army’s program executive officer for ground forces, explained why the following year at a RoboBusiness Conference in Pittsburgh: “The gun started moving when it was not intended to move.”

Read more

More on China’s race on Space. Last Tuesday, China launched the 1st Quantum Satellite. In 2017, China is planning to be the dominant force in mining of Space. First stop — mining the dark side of the moon. Given China’s own history with environmental pollution plus mining’s damaging effects to the environment when not properly managed; etc. one must ponder how will space and Earth itself be impacted by such mining.

Before this decade is out, humanity will go where it’s never gone before: the far side of the moon. This dark side — forever facing away from us — has long been a mystery. No human-made object has ever touched its surface. The mission will be a marvel of engineering. It will involve a rocket that weighs hundreds of tons (traveling almost 250,000 miles), a robot lander, and an unmanned lunar rover that will use sensors, cameras, and an infrared spectrometer to uncover billion-year-old secrets from the soil. The mission also might scout the moon’s supply of helium-3 — a promising material for fusion energy. And the nation planting its starry flag on this historic trip will be the People’s Republic of China.

Read more

# Venus # Oxygen – Venus’ ‘Twin Planet’ Could Still Have Oxygen, Scientists Say : Nine months ago, astronomers announced that they were able to discover a planet that is said to be a twin to Venus. Today, it seems that a new study raises the possibility of the said planet to have oxygen in its atmosphere – don’t mistake it for the next livable planet though – it is said to have hellish temperatures, which automatically rules out the possibility of life.

Dubbed the GJ 1132b, IFL Science noted that it is larger than Earth in size and mass. Temperature-wise, it is considerably hot at 120 to 320 degrees Celsius, but it is still considered cooler than most of the rocky planets previously detected.

The GJ 1132b orbits around 2.2 million kilometers from its star, about 1.5 percent of the Earth-Sun distance. Its parental star, the GJ 1132, is a red dwarf planet just a fifth of the sun’s mass, but is more exposed to light than the earth. While undoubtedly hot, wide estimates of its temperature show that it could reflect a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect.

Read more

Wild stuff.

Somewhere on the other side of the sun, almost directly opposite to Earth, a NASA spacecraft has drifted aimlessly through the void since Oct. 1, 2014, unable to establish contact with our planet.

At least that was the depressing situation until Sunday night.

In a statement posted Monday (scroll down for the full version), the space agency says it has finally contacted the STEREO-B solar observatory — an identical twin of another sun-monitoring robot, called STEREO-A — after nearly 2 years of effort.

Continue reading “A lost spacecraft is talking to NASA again after nearly 2 years in the void” | >

And, a few words from Ray.

According to Ray Kurzweil, we’re approaching a time when humans will begin to radically extend their lifespans. This sounds good on the surface, but will we have enough resources to support everyone? And won’t living indefinitely get boring eventually? Not so much, Kurzweil says.

Kurzweil suggests that by the time we’ve significantly extended our average lifespan, we’ll no longer be in a scarcity-driven world competing for finite resources. Take energy, for example. Kurzweil notes solar is on an exponential curve and has been doubling every two years.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil Explains Why Radical Life Extension Will Be Better Than You Think” | >

The first stage launches the rocket off of the pad and continues firing for about four minutes. Once the first stage is out of fuel, it separates, and if it’s a SpaceX Falcon 9, flies back home to be reused. If it’s anything else, including the Atlas V, the first stage crash lands in the ocean and sinks. Meanwhile, the second stage fires up its own engine (or engines) to boost the payload the rest of the way into orbit. On the Atlas V, the second stage is called Centaur. Once Centaur gets its payload where it needs to go, it separates, and then suicides down into Earth’s atmosphere.

Getting a payload into space is so expensive because you have to build up this huge and complicated rocket, with engines and guidance systems and fuel tanks and stuff, and then you basically use it for like 15 minutes and throw it all away. This is why SpaceX is trying so hard to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9. But what about the second stage? You’ve got a whole bunch of hardware that made it to orbit, and when getting stuff to orbit costs something like $2,500 per kilogram, you then tell it to go it burn itself up in the atmosphere, because otherwise it’s just useless space junk.

Read more