Lifeboat Foundation

But the grand work-changing projects of A.I., like self-driving cars and humanoid robots, are not yet commercial products. A more humble version of the technology, instead, is making its presence felt in a less glamorous place: the back office.

Artificial intelligence software is making its presence felt in subtle ways, in an unglamorous place: the back office.

Thirteen companies, including Boeing and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, will be doing studies for NASA on the future of commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit.

All of the studies are due in December, and are supposed to cost no more than $1 million each. NASA still has to negotiate the contract amounts with the study groups, but it expects the total cost of the effort to come in at around $11 million.

Continue reading “NASA picks 13 companies to envision the future of orbital human spaceflight” »

This may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever seen and I love it.

Over a million satellites working together to unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Watch this preview of the Perseid Meteror shower that’ll blaze through the sky this weekend.

Transhumanity.net Social Futurism & the Zero State.

This article is part of a series about the Mythos (worldview-narrative) underlying the Zero State (ZS). Part 1 is about our highest concept, ideal, and level of organization, which we call The Array. Part 2 explains the Sections & Sessions our core activity revolves around, and Part 3 (below) covers the Twelve Foundation Stones that form the basis of our story.

A previous article I wrote for Tnet mentioned the need for entertainment that gives people a strong sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, and introduced an idea known as the twelve “Foundation Stones” of the ZS-ARG Mythos. The Foundation Stones are the seeds of our unifying narrative. Each is the fragmentary initial story of one of the twelve ZS Houses, outlined very briefly below and spelled out in full in the forthcoming Black Book.

Continue reading “ZS Mythos (3a/3): Twelve Foundation Stones” »

CAIRO (Reuters) — A group of Egyptian students has designed a vehicle they say will battle rising energy prices and promote clean energy by running on nothing but air.

Electric vehicles are unlikely to create a power-demand crisis but could reshape the load curve. Here’s how to bend that curve to your advantage.

Could electric vehicles (EVs) soon face a different kind of gridlock? With the electrification of mobility accelerating, energy producers and distributors need to understand the potential impact of EVs on electricity demand (Exhibit 1). The good news: McKinsey analysis suggests the projected growth in e-mobility will not drive substantial increases in total electrical-grid power demand in the near to midterm, thus limiting the need for new electricity-generation capacity during that period.

By pure coincidence, the article by Seth Baum was published just 5 days after a small asteroid exploded over early warning Tule station in Greenland.

This paper studies the risk of collision between asteroids and Earth. It focuses on uncertainty in the human consequences of asteroid collisions, with emphasis on the possibility of global catastrophe to human civilization. A detailed survey of the asteroid risk literature shows that while human consequences are recognized as a major point of uncertainty, the studies focus mainly on physical and environmental dimensions of the risk. Some potential human consequences are omitted entirely, such as the possibility of asteroid explosions inadvertently causing nuclear war. Other human consequences are modeled with varying degrees of detail. Direct medical effects are relatively well-characterized, while human consequences of global environmental effects are more uncertain. The latter are evaluated mainly in terms of a global catastrophe threshold, but such a threshold is deeply uncertain and may not even exist. To handle threshold uncertainty in asteroid policy, this paper adapts the concept of policy boundaries from literature on anthropogenic global environmental change (i.e., planetary boundaries). The paper proposes policy boundaries of 100 m asteroid diameter for global environmental effects and 1 m for inadvertent nuclear war. Other policy implications include a more aggressive asteroid risk mitigation policy and measures to avoid inadvertent nuclear war. The paper argues that for rare events like large asteroid collisions, the absence of robust data means that a wide range of possible human consequences should be considered. This implies humility for risk analysis and erring on the side of caution in policy.