Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 9483

Updated at 6:40 a.m. Friday

You might think the world’s biggest bee would be easy to find. But that’s not the case: Until recently, the last time anyone had reported seeing a Wallace’s giant bee living in the wild was in 1981. That changed in January, when the rare bee was spotted on an island of Indonesia.

The Wallace’s giant bee — Megachile pluto — towers over European honeybees. The female’s size has been recorded as at least an inch and a half long, with a tongue that’s nearly an inch long. Add to that a pair of gigantic mandibles, and it’s a bee like no other.

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Very few people are going to want to leave this planet permanently — it’s just too amazing.

“Ultimately what will happen, is this planet will be zoned residential and light industry,” he said. “This is the gem of the Solar System. Why would we do heavy industry here? It’s nonsense.”

Bezos also referenced the work of physicist Gerard O’Neill, who came up with the idea of a cylinder-shaped space settlement design known as an “O’Neill cylinder,” in which two counter-rotating cylinders would provide gravity for human settlers while mitigating gyroscopic effects.

Similar space colonies have been depicted in popular sci-fi movies including “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos: In the Future, We’ll Live In “Giant Space Colonies”” | >

NASA is coming again… to the Moon!

NASA has selected 12 science and technology demonstration payloads to fly to the Moon as early as the end of this year, dependent upon the availability of commercial landers. These selections represent an early step toward the agency’s long-term scientific study and human exploration of the Moon and, later, Mars.

“The Moon has unique scientific value and the potential to yield resources, such as water and oxygen,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “Its proximity to Earth makes it especially valuable as a proving ground for deeper space exploration.”

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) initiated the request for proposals leading to these selections as the first step in achieving a variety of science and technology objectives that could be met by regularly sending instruments, experiments and other small payloads to the Moon.

Continue reading “NASA Selects Experiments for Possible Lunar Flights in 2019” | >

Dr. Marin and his group are creating some great simulations involving generation ships. I’ve been following the work for a while and you can learn more about the three major papers they’ve produced. The first paper uses a Monte-Carlo simulation to measure viability. The second paper uses the HERITAGE program developed for the first paper to calculate the minimum crew for a generation ship. The third paper uses the same program to calculate food production for three different methods of agriculture.

Dr. Frédéric Marin at the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg is doing some great research on the feasibility of Generation Ships. A generation ship is “a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels at sub-light speed.” He and his team have created a wide variety of research papers and projects, which includes developing their own Monte Carlo calculation program.

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Combining a first laser pulse to heat up and “drill” through a plasma, and another to accelerate electrons to incredibly high energies in just tens of centimeters, scientists have nearly doubled the previous record for laser-driven particle acceleration.

The -plasma experiments, conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), are pushing toward more compact and affordable types of to power exotic, high-energy machines—like X-ray free-electron lasers and particle colliders—that could enable researchers to see more clearly at the scale of molecules, atoms, and even subatomic particles.

The new record of propelling electrons to 7.8 billion electron volts (7.8 GeV) at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center surpasses a 4.25 GeV result at BELLA announced in 2014. The latest research is detailed in the Feb. 25 edition of the journal Physical Review Letters. The record result was achieved during the summer of 2018.

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