Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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I just read an incredible post about Transhumanism by Francesco Neo Amati, CM of Transhumanism: The Future of Humanity.

What an excellent representation of how pragmatic and collaborative our community can be. People like Francesco Neo Amati are the reason why I call myself a Transhumanist…

“Community Announcement:

The following will address the purpose of our community as outlined in the Pinned Post and to dispel common misconceptions of Transhumanism by clarifying what it is and what it isn’t.

I have no desire in being a ‘leader’ in the Transhumanism community. I merely hope to be and remain a credible educator/resource, passionate advocate, and a voice of reason for the movement.

ICYDK:

I’m the founder and CM of our community. I started it in 2014 after being interested in Transhumanism since 2010, which complemented my passion for the philosophy of Self-Actualization/Transcendence (i.e. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Bruce Lee’s Self-Actualization, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, Plato’s Realm of Forms, Aristotle’s Metaphysics on Being/Becoming, Emerson’s Transcendentalism, etc.).

Continue reading “Stephen Langevin” | >

The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disc.

The exoplanet HD106906 b was discovered in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. However, astronomers did not then know anything about the planet’s orbit. This required something only the Hubble Space Telescope could do: collect very accurate measurements of the vagabond’s motion over 14 years with extraordinary precision.

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Easy Aerial claims its Albatross UAS is a tethered machine that has an unbreachable data connection.

Drone startup Easy Aerial has launched a new unmanned aerial system (UAS), called Albatross, a tethered device with unlimited flight time and an unbreachable data connection.

The drone hexacopter can carry an 8.5 lb payload capacity with three hardpoints, two on the side that can carry up to 4 lb and the bottom hardpoint that can carry payloads of up to 8 lb. The side payload stations feature standard mounting as well as Picatinny rails that support a wide range of applications such as floodlights, communications relays, loudspeakers and cyber-related and other commercial and military electronic systems. The bottom hardpoint is designed for gimbaled cameras or large ISR loads such as radar or communication jammers.

Because of these features, the system works in applications such as commercial, public safety, firefighting, military, border patrol, perimeter, and infrastructure overwatch and surveillance operations.

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Once running at full capacity by the end of next year, its creators say, the facility will be able to generate a ton of food. Produce can be harvested up to 15 times a year without needing any soil or daylight.

Automated robots will be used to both plant seeds and check in on them later as well.

Nordic Harvest envisions that other massive facilities like it could have a major impact on the global fresh food supply. In fact, vertical farms covering an area of 20 soccer fields could grow enough greens for the entirety of Denmark, the startup argues, as reported by Fast Company.

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Computer models of merging neutron stars predicts new signature in the gravitational waves to tell when this happens.

Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe. If our Sun, with its radius of 700,000 kilometers were a neutron star, its mass would be condensed into an almost perfect sphere with a radius of around 12 kilometers. When two neutron stars collide and merge into a hyper-massive neutron star, the matter in the core of the new object becomes incredibly hot and dense. According to physical calculations, these conditions could result in hadrons such as neutrons and protons, which are the particles normally found in our daily experience, dissolving into their components of quarks and gluons and thus producing a quark-gluon plasma.

This simulation shows the density of the ordinary matter (mostly neutrons) in red-yellow. Shortly after the two stars merge the extremely dense center turns green, depicting the formation of the quark-gluon plasma.

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Circa 2009

Present ultrafast laser optics is at the frontier between atto- and zeptosecond photon pulses, giving rise to unprecedented applications. We show that high-energetic photon pulses down to the yoctosecond time scale can be produced in heavy-ion collisions. We focus on photons produced during the initial phase of the expanding quark-gluon plasma. We study how the time evolution and properties of the plasma may influence the duration and shape of the photon pulse. Prospects for achieving double-peak structures suitable for pump-probe experiments at the yoctosecond time scale are discussed.

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The history of the Universe thus far has certainly been eventful, marked by the primordial forging of the light elements, the birth of the first stars and their violent deaths, and the improbable origin of life on Earth. But will the excitement continue, or are we headed toward the ultimate mundanity of equilibrium in a so-called heat death? In The Janus Point, Julian Barbour takes on this and other fundamental questions, offering the reader a new perspective—illustrated with lucid examples and poetically constructed prose—on how the Universe started (or more precisely, how it did not start) and where it may be headed. This book is an engaging read, which both taught me something new about meat-and-potatoes physics and reminded me why asking fundamental questions can be so fun.

Barbour argues that there is no beginning of time. The Big Bang, he maintains, was just a very special configuration of the Universe’s fundamental building blocks, a shape he calls the Janus point. As we move away from this point, the shape changes, marking the passage of time. The “future,” he argues, lies in both directions, hence the reference to Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions.

Barbour illustrates his main points with a deceptively simple model known as the three-body problem, wherein three masses are subject to mutual gravitational attraction. In this context, the Janus point occurs when all three masses momentarily occupy the same point, in what is called a total collision. The special shape at the Janus point, explains Barbour, is an equilateral triangle, which is his model’s version of the Big Bang. I found this imagery helpful when trying to understand the more abstract, and necessarily less technical, application of this concept to general relativity.

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