Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Lifeboat Foundation congratulates Guardian Award Winner Elon Musk and SpaceX on their latest accomplishment with the Starship, the world’s first reusable space vehicle. The Starship will transform our world, starting with making Starlink the first non-bankrupt LEO constellation, later bringing us to the Moon and then hopefully Mars.

We recommend that NASA redirect their funds from the dead-end SLS system towards Starship. Even if NASA continues to waste tens of billions of dollars on SLS, it is unlikely that it will ever do more than a handful of launches as the low-cost Starship program makes it obsolete.

Also, here’s an appeal to Guardian Award Winner Elon Musk:

Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness, we would like to pass on a few thoughts on matters that have been of deep concern to us over recent months. 1) A Great Filter stands in the path of Human Civilization 2) The lack of a fast Nuclear Thermal Engine will stop us from building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars for the foreseeable future.

Since no one is putting a lot of resources into completing a Nuclear Thermal Engine and you are now a huge success with a lot of resources, it is time for SpaceX to build such an engine and get us past this Great Filter. SpaceX could easily handle any financial challenges or legal challenges that stand in the way. Do we want to get a self-sustaining civilization on Mars or not?

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Boston Dynamics Atlas robot.

Hyundai Motor will acquire Boston Dynamics. The acquisition will be finalized at Hyundai’s December 10 board meeting. News about the deal was first reported by The Korea Economic Daily, which said the deal is for $921 million (1 trillion won). The Robot Report has also confirmed the news with a source familiar with the deal. The source said the acquisition is for about $1 billion.

The Robot Report has reached out to Boston Dynamics but has yet to hear back. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.

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The observation of a chemical reaction at the molecular level in real time is a central theme in experimental chemical physics. An international research team has captured roaming molecular fragments for the first time. The work, under the supervision of Heide Ibrahim, research associate at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), was published in the journal Science.

The research group of the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre of INRS, with support of Professor François Légaré, has used the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS). They have succeeded in shooting the first molecular film of “roamers”—hydrogen fragments, in this case—that orbit around HCO fragments) during a chemical reaction by studying the photo-dissociation of formaldehyde, H2CO.

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For decades, one material has so dominated the production of computer chips and transistors that the tech capital of the world—Silicon Valley—bears its name. But silicon’s reign may not last forever.

MIT researchers have found that an alloy called InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide) could hold the potential for smaller and more energy efficient . Previously, researchers thought that the performance of InGaAs transistors deteriorated at small scales. But the new study shows this apparent deterioration is not an intrinsic property of the material itself.

The finding could one day help push computing power and efficiency beyond what’s possible with silicon. “We’re really excited,” said Xiaowei Cai, the study’s lead author. “We hope this result will encourage the community to continue exploring the use of InGaAs as a channel material for transistors.”

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Ever wondered if your urine could help with food security in Africa? We go to Malawi this week to hear how a ‘magic liquid’ is helping farmers cope with the high cost of synthetic fertilisers, while keeping the marketplaces cleaner and smelling fresher.

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Space manifolds form the boundaries of dynamic channels to provide fast transport to the innermost and outermost reaches of the solar system. Such features are an important element in spacecraft navigation and mission design, providing a window to the apparently erratic nature of comets and their trajectories. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Nataša Todorović and a team of researchers in Serbia and the U.S. revealed a notable and unexpected ornamental structure of manifolds in the solar system. This architecture was connected in a series of arches spreading from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. The strongest manifolds were found linked to Jupiter with profound control on small bodies across a wide and previously unknown range of three-body energies. The orbits of these manifolds encountered Jupiter on rapid time-scales to transform into collisional or escaping trajectories to reach Neptune’s distance merely within a decade. In this way, much like a celestial highway, all planets generate similar manifolds across the solar system for fast transport throughout.

Navigating chaos in the solar system

In this work, Todorović et al. used fast Lyapunov indicator (FLI); a dynamic quantity used to detect chaos, to detect the presence and global structure of space manifolds. They captured the instabilities acting on orbital time scales with the sensitive and well-established numerical tool to define regions of fast transport in the solar system. Chaos in the solar system is inextricably linked to the stability or instability of manifolds forming intricate structures whose mutual interaction can enable chaotic transport. The general properties can be described relative to the planar, circular and restricted three-body problem (PCR3BP) approximating the motion of natural and artificial celestial bodies. While this concept is far from being fully understood, modern geometric insights have revolutionized spacecraft design trajectories and helped build new space-based astronomical observatories to transform our understanding of the cosmos.

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