Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Andrew Skolnick drew my attention to this great article by John Eades, a CERN senior scientist, about antimatter engines and weapons.

Antimatter Pseudoscience by John Eades in the Skeptical Inquirer http://www.csicop.org/si/show/antimatter_pseudoscience/

We, Andrew Skolnick and I, did the calculations and showed that it would cost 42,876x our 2011 World GDP to use antimatter as a propulsion fuel to get to Alpha Centauri!!

John Eades goes one better and shows that it is not technologically feasible, ever. His article is facinating reading, and shows that we cannot base our hopes to leave Earth on antimatter drives.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative

The precursor to manned space exploration of new worlds is typically unmanned exploration, and NASA has made phenomenal progress with remote controlled rovers on the Martian surface in recent years with MER-A Spirit, MER-B Opportunity and now MSL Curiosity. However, for all our success in reliance on AI in such rovers — similar if not more advanced to AI technology we see around us in the automotive and aviation industries — such as operational real-time clear-air turbulence prediction in aviation — such AI is typically to aid control systems and not mission-level decision making. NASA still controls via detailed commands transmitted to the rover directly from Earth, typically 225 kbit/day of commands are transmitted to the rover, at a data rate of 1–2 kbit/s, during a 15 minute transmit window, with larger volumes of data collected by the rover returned via satellite relay — a one-way communication that incorporates a delay of on average 12 or so light minutes. This becomes less and less practical the further away the rover is.

If for example we landed a similar rover on Titan in the future, I would expect the current method of step-by-step remote control would render the mission impractical — Saturn being typically at least 16 times more distant — dependent on time of year.

With the tasks of the science labs well determined in advance, it should be practical to develop AI engines to react to hazards, change course of analysis dependent on data processed — and so on — the perfect playground for advanced AI programmes. The current Curiosity mission incorporates tasks such as 1. Determine the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near-surface geological materials. 2. Attempt to detect chemical building blocks of life (bio-signatures). 3. Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils. 4. Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) Martian atmospheric evolution processes. 5. Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide. 6. Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic radiation, cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons. All of these are very deterministic processes in terms of mapping results to action points, which could be the foundation for shaping such into an AI learning engine, so that such rovers can be entrusted with making their own mission-level decisions on next phases of exploration based on such AI analyses.

Whilst the current explorations on Mars works quite well with the remote control strategy, it would show great foresight for NASA to engineer such unmanned rovers to operate in a more independent fashion with AI operating the mission-level control — learning to adapt to its environment as it explores the terrain, with only the return-link in use in the main — to relay back the analyzed data — and the low-bandwidth control-link reserved for maintenance and corrective action only. NASA has taken great strides in the last decade with unmanned missions. One can expect the next generation to be even more fascinating — and perhaps a trailblazer for advanced AI based technology.

Whether via spintronics or some quantum breakthrough, artificial intelligence and the bizarre idea of intellects far greater than ours will soon have to be faced.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120819153743.htm

MIT developed microthrusters is a good example.

JD Williams of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, was doing work on this technology as far back as 2005, and I met him 2009 at the SPESIF 2009 conference, and was impressed by what he was doing. Search Colorado State University, Fort Collins, for ‘ceramic thrusters’ to get more information.

My question, how come he did not get media attention then and now when MIT says the same thing 3 to 7 years later they get media attention?

Is the science writers’ community biased? Or is this an editorial problem?

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative

http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/solar/concentrating-solar/ni…tinue.html

Cover the deserts in solar energy plants and use electric trains for our transportation infrastructure; the best future I can imagine. A favorite Einstein quote is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Perhaps the number we are counting that counts is the amount of energy it would require for a future population of 10 billion people to live like we do in the west.

I was surprised to find a statement to the effect that only one method of generating this energy is practical; solar energy beamed to Earth from the Moon; from wiki–

“In short, Criswell believes that lunar-solar energy is the only viable option for generating the massive amounts of electrical power that would be needed to raise the standard of living in third-world nations to that of first-world nations.

He once said, from the University of Houston, that “We are already well beyond what the biosphere can provide. We have to go outside to get something else.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Criswell

If that is the only way then that is the only way. We had better start asking ourselves what the cost of denial is going to be.

http://www.shimz.co.jp/english/theme/dream/lunaring.html

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre87f15x-us-california-gmo/

Filthy Lucre will certainly destroy us all if we cannot even pass a law that makes food companies tell us what they are feeding us.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815131137.htm

One more step has been taken toward making whole body cryopreservation a practical reality. An understanding of the properties of water allows the temperature of the human body to be lowered without damaging cell structures.

Just as the microchip revolution was unforeseen the societal effects of suspending death have been overlooked completely.

The first successful procedure to freeze a human being and then revive that person without damage at a later date will be the most important single event in human history. When that person is revived he or she will awaken to a completely different world.

It will be a mad rush to build storage facilities for the critically ill so their lives can be saved. The very old and those in the terminal stages of disease will be rescued from imminent death. Vast resources will be turned toward the life sciences as the race to repair the effects of old age and cure disease begins. Hundreds of millions may eventually be awakened once aging is reversed. Life will become far more valuable overnight and activities such as automobile and air travel will be viewed in a new light. War will end because no one will desire to hasten the death of another human being.

It will not be immortality, just parole from the death row we all share. Get ready.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120814121119.htm

Just as the tax incentives that expired after the Carter Administration destroyed a whole new industry, and just as bio fuels recently turned into the bio bomb, wind energy is poised to crash.

We just will not stop destroying our future.

A coal fired power plant runs for years with very little maintenance, without being shut down or started up- the boilers make steam and turn the turbines and we cannot see the stars because we might as well burn those city lights all night long. It is impossible to compete with black rock you dig out of the ground and put on a train and turn into dependable cheap electricity.

Bio fuel was a tax scam and wind energy will never be cheap, but if Germany is making solar work then by gosh we should be able to.

The only way we will stop burning is if it is legislated against. That’s it. Enough sunlight hits Nevada to power the whole country; that is a fact. We could cover the Mojave in solar thermal power towers and mirror fields for what we pay the military to keep the middle east oil flowing; that is a fact.

But we would have to change our lifestyle. The big corporations see no profit in this at all. So we watch dancing with the stars and drive our cars and wonder why everything get’s worse every year. It is no secret that they will take us for every cent they can until it is all gone and America becomes another third world slum.

A new corporation in Alameda California is pitching space tourism and the old Alameda Naval Air Station as America’s next spaceport.

Tritonian Cruises is seeking funding for a study of tourist submarine operations under the ice of the Neptunian moon Triton.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21851-astrophile-the-o…ystem.html

Modeled after successful tourist submarine businesses in Hawaii and other Pacific locations, the excursions under Triton promise to be exciting for adventurers and profitable. When asked about the distances involved, company representatives dismissed any difficulties as trivial. “Besides,” one remarked, “the taxpayers do not understand anything about space if they think we can go to Mars, so we should get funding.”

Over half a billion tax dollars have so far gone to commercial space companies developing private rockets for tourist purposes. Ostensibly for supplying the International Space Station, critics charge the ISS as a front and being “a useless collection of overpriced tin cans going in endless circles at very high altitude” and have also referred to these private inferior lift vehicles as “hobby rockets.”

Meanwhile, projects such as the sentinel warning satellite go begging for pennies.

http://gizmodo.com/5922374/how-this-one-little-satellite-cou…e-on-earth

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120814100302.htm

A couple months ago I was in the Seattle public library and overheard a pierced, tatooed, and quite smelly young man telling someone he was waiting for this F-d up civilization to collapse and hoping it would happen soon. The two most likely causes of such a collapse would be an asteroid or comet impact that would throw debris into the atmosphere and stop food production for several years, or a plague. A big impact or an engineered pathogen would be the extreme in this scenario and would not simply take us back to the stone age- it would render the human race extinct.

All the disenchanted Americans who look forward to surviving the collapse of the present world order might want to consider the less fortunate areas of this planet where there is no such rule of law or any agricultural or industrial infrastructure. North Korea has gone through the classic collapse cycle during recent bad winters and the government had to repeatedly deal with widespread cannibalism. It is one of those most perfect warnings where nothing could be more crystal clear to a race of intelligent and technologically advanced beings. And we ignore it.

Turn the sunlight off for a couple years in a row and everything we know would end because everything we eat would end. Think about it the next time you watch an episode of the Walking Dead or watch a movie like The Road. Not world war Z; world war C.