Posted in biotech/medical
Just before the 14 minute mark: “I believe that most people today have a respectable chance of living to 1,000, or indeed any other number you might think of.”
The Talk Spot is an interview show where we have guests of all backgrounds on. This episode features author and biomedical gerontologist, Aubrey de Grey.
VR and Interstellar Travel
Crew members in route to a distant planet may best be accommodated by full immersion VR. The actual spaceship could be reduced to a relatively simple, small, well-shielded vehicle. Inside the crew’s biological material could be supported by a simplified nutrition, waste and maintenance system. Their minds could inhabit a fully immersive VR environment that would provide them with all the luxuries of vast, diverse spaces and experiences — complete with simulated gravity, simulated pleasant nature-like and artificial environments, and simulated meals.
They could also engage in simulating the type of society they intend to build once they arrive in their new physical environment, using similar constraints to the ones they will encounter. This could allow many years for actual human experiences to test and refine what they will build and how they will interact in their new home.
Advances in maintaining biological material may even allow a single generation to survive the entire journey. They may adopt their own conventions for simulating death and birth for reasons related to simulating their new home or for maintaining psychological well-being over many centuries. Simulated death and reincarnation may allow a single crew to experience many childhoods and parenting situations without the need for actual procreation.
Another concern that this addresses is the need for massive funding for research and development as well as resource provisioning when building conventional spacecraft intended to deliver things like artificial gravity, agriculture and pleasant living spaces for large multigenerational populations — all while shielding them from radiation. Funding the development of fully immersive VR seems like a relatively easier to fund activity that has immediate uses here on earth and elsewhere. The types of ships that would be sufficient for sustaining and shielding humans living mostly in immersive VR would be so simplified that most of the fundamental research that would be specific to designing such crafts may have already occurred.
The national artificial intelligence strategy, which was unveiled in November, will focus on five key sectors — transport and logistics, smart cities and estates, safety and security, healthcare, and education.
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Posted in futurism
Ok… which one of y’all is this?
UPDATE 3: The man reportedly told bomb squad that he sustained “radio frequency burns” while working on a “quantum physics generator” in his garage, according to Battalion Chief Steve Martin, the Columbus Division of Fire spokesman, speaking to the Columbus Dispatch.
“We have no reason to believe that he was trying to make anything that would do anyone any harm,” Martin added.
UPDATE 2: Haley Nelson of WSYX-TV reports that a resident was working on a “quantum physics generator” at the home and was burned. The type of burns caused confusion among first responders, prompting a precautionary evacuation of about 40 homes.
One of the problems is how to overcome the strong electrical repulsion between atomic nuclei which requires high energies to make them fuse. But fusion could be initiated at lower energies with electromagnetic fields that are generated, for example, by state-of-the-art free electron lasers emitting X-ray light. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) describe how this could be done in the journal Physical Review C.
During nuclear fusion two atomic nuclei fuse into one new nucleus. In the lab this can be done by particle accelerators, when researchers use fusion reactions to create fast free neutrons for other experiments. On a much larger scale, the idea is to implement controlled fusion of light nuclei to generate power—with the sun acting as the model: its energy is the product of a series of fusion reactions that take place in its interior.
For many years, scientists have been working on strategies for generating power from fusion energy. “On the one hand we are looking at a practically limitless source of power. On the other hand, there are all the many technological hurdles that we want to help surmount through our work,” says Professor Ralf Schützhold, Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics at HZDR, describing the motivation for his research.
Yale and Oxford researchers say exercise is more important to your mental health than your economic status.
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO. — It’s not easy to get into the GPS room. A security cocoon typical of U.S. military installations protects Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, but the windowless home of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron (2SOPS) lies within the base’s “restricted access area.” A gatehouse, extra vehicle barriers, armed guards, monitored communication channels, and a total ban on smartphones stand between the outside world and the place where the U.S. Air Force operates the GPS satellite constellation.
Inside you’ll find a hallway lined with keypad-controlled doors. Behind each is a room with 10-person teams who fly satellites. The rooms are staffed around the clock. The 2SOP squadron not only runs the constellation that provides global navigation and precise time data to civilian and military users.
“Whether it’s the public or our other military users, they tend to think of space as a magic box that you turn on and everything just works,” says 1st Lt. Morgan Herman, Assistant Weapons & Tactics Flight Commander. “They don’t always realize how actively we have to manage the constellation.”
The personnel changes at Alphabet continue, this time with Mustafa Suleyman — one of the three co-founders of the company’s influential AI lab DeepMind — moving to Google.
Suleyman announced the news on Twitter, saying that after a “wonderful decade” at DeepMind, he would be joining Google to work with the company’s head of AI Jeff Dean and its chief legal officer Kent Walker. The exact details of Suleyman’s new role are unclear but a representative for the company told The Verge it would involve work on AI policy.
The move is notable, though, as it was reported earlier this year that Suleyman had been placed on leave from DeepMind. (DeepMind disputed these reports, saying it was a mutual decision intended to give Suleyman “time out … after 10 hectic years.”) Some speculated that Suleyman’s move was the fallout of reported tensions between DeepMind and Google, as the former struggled to commercialize its technology.
