Lifeboat Foundation

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

There are so many places and things to explore in the universe! From distant.
exoplanets to faraway galaxies that might host intelligent life, to massive black holes, to.
bright stars. However, there is a problem with space exploration; distance! Everywhere.
you want to go in deep space is far! For example, Elon Musk wants to put humans on.
Mars permanently while NASA wants to send astronauts there. However, any traveler.
going to Mars has to endure a grueling trip through harsh space that lasts not less than.
five months, even with the most powerful rocket in history! If only we could find a faster.
way to travel through space! Also, the next star to us is about 4.5 light-years away.
making it impossible to visit with the current space technologies! However, an.
accidental discovery promises to fix that problem by enabling faster than the speed of.
light travel! What is the discovery, how does it affect space travel, and how does it affect.
you personally? Join us as we explore how NASA scientists accidentally discover the.
world’s first Warp Bubble!
Warp travel is not strange to fans of the Star Trek franchise. The warp drive is a.
charming futuristic technology from Star Trek Universe, which since its first episode in.
1966, includes ten television series and thirteen feature films. In these series and.
movies, characters explore the universe using powerful and fast spaceships, traveling.
from planet to planet and communicating with a crew of aliens. The torsion engine is the.
center of attraction because, without it, the story would be implausible. The universe is.
strange, unimaginable, and insanely large, and even if you want to visit the next star.
the immense cosmic distances create an almost impossible barrier!
Let’s take a look at the next star, Proxima Centauri, 4.5 light-years away. This distance.
means it takes 4.5 years to reach the star if you could manage to attain the speed of.
light! Light flies at full cosmic speed and acts as a sort of universal speed cap, so any.
other method takes longer! In fact, if you decide to use the fastest space probe ever.
built, the long journey through the interstellar void would take nearly eight thousand.
years! So, it makes sense to stay put to Earth and its immediate environment!
Of course, the Star Trek crew didn’t stay close to the Earth because they found a.
solution! This solution makes long-distance travel possible by shortening the distance!
The torsion engine, using warp drive tech, achieves this by juggling space and time.
making for great entertainment! Warp drive was destined to remain imaginary until a.
scientist suddenly realized that such an engine was really possible at the end of the last.
century!
The physicist was Miguel Alcubierre, and he came up with a theory that rocked the.
scientific community globally. In 1994, Alcubierre watched an episode of Next.
Generation while doing his Ph.D. research on Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
where heavy masses can curve space and time. And so Alcubierre picked up a scrap of.
paper, did the calculations, and laid the foundation for an article that appeared in the.
science magazine later that year!
In his paper, Alcubierre describes how you can compress space and time in front of a.
spacecraft and stretch it back behind the ship so that you have to travel a much smaller.
distance to the desired destination safely trapped in what he calls a torsion bubble! In.
visualization, the concept was compared to a surfer riding a wave and a metaphor often.
used to describe how a ship could travel the stars. There is, however, a problem with.
Alcubierre’s warp bubble! You see, the warp engine is tough to build in reality! You can’t.
just curve space forcefully with normal mass! To do so, you need exotic matter, which.
has negative gravity!
Dozens of Warp Engine publications would follow in the following decades. But they.
also remained theoretical exercises and thought experiments that manipulated the.
formulations of the theory of relativity in search of new insights. The need for the foreign.
matter remained!
That was until Eric Lentz, a physicist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the.
US, stepped in. He watched Star Trek as a kid. However, he has not been able to forget.

Summary: Researchers reveal how the brain creates an illusion of visual stability.

Source: The Conversation.

Our eyes are continuously bombarded by an enormous amount of visual information – millions of shapes, colours and ever-changing motion all around us. For the brain, this is no easy feat.

This authenticator app is designed to install bank info-stealing malware that could wipe you out.

This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.

One of the “holy grails” of spaceflight could hit the skies this decade.

Continue reading “New space plane would fly directly into orbit from a runway” »

A team of researchers from French, Israeli, and Australian universities has explored the possibility of using people’s GPUs to create unique fingerprints and use them for persistent web tracking.

The results of their large-scale experiment involving 2,550 devices with 1,605 distinct CPU configurations show that their technique, named ‘DrawnApart,’ can boost the median tracking duration to 67% compared to current state-of-the-art methods.

This is a severe problem for user privacy, which is currently protected by laws that focus on acquiring consent to activate website cookies.

Lecture 13: The self.
Instructor: Marvin Minsky.
View the complete course at: http://ocw.mit.edu/6-868JS07

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
More information at http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.
More courses at http://ocw.mit.edu

Dr. Marvin Minsky — A.I. Pioneer & Mind Theorist. Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT, Media Lab http://GF2045.com/speakers.

As soon as we understand how the human brain works, we should be able to make functional copies of our minds out of other materials. Given that everything is made of atoms, if you make a machine, in some sense it is made of the same kinds of materials as brains are made but organized either in very different ways or fundamentally the same ways.

Continue reading “Dr. Marvin Minsky — Facing the Future” »

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox.

Diver-X announced that it’s pulling the plug on HalfDive, announcing that all backers would not be charged for funds collected.

Continue reading “Sword Art Online-inspired VR Headset Cancelled Due to Niche Appeal, Manufacturing Issues” »

Ask 50 people what the metaverse means, right now, and you’ll get 50 different answers. If a metaverse is where the real and virtual worlds collide, then Instagram is a metaverse: you create an avatar, curate your image, and use it to interact with other people. What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that it’s worth money. Epic Games and the recently rebranded Facebook are investing billions a year in this idea. When Microsoft bought video game publisher Activision for $70bn last week, it was described as “a bet on the metaverse”.

The tech world seems to be leaning towards some kind of early 00s conception of wearing a VR headset and haptic suit and driving a flying car towards your perfect pretend mansion in a soothingly sanitised alternate reality, where you can have anything you want as long as you can pay for it. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s now-infamous presentation of the future of his company, with its bland cartoonish avatars and emptily pleasant environments. It is the future as envisioned by someone with precious little imagination.

I do not deny that some people want this vision. Ready Player One was a runaway hit. But the metaverse as envisioned by the people currently investing in it – by tech billionaires such as Zuckerberg and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, by techbro hucksters selling astonishingly ugly generative-art NFTs and using words like “cryptoverse” – can only be described as spiritually bereft. It holds no interest for me.