April 2018 – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Fri, 04 May 2018 18:14:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 Blue Origin Is Testing Reusable Rockets. Here’s Why You Rarely See Them https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/blue-origin-is-testing-reusable-rockets-heres-why-you-rarely-see-them Tue, 01 May 2018 05:02:21 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/blue-origin-is-testing-reusable-rockets-heres-why-you-rarely-see-them

Rough translation: Blue Origin doesn’t give a damn about SpaceX’s media circus. It’s not trying to outdo competitors with each subsequent project — the company is working on just two rockets (New Shepard and New Glenn) with hopes to launch a manned flight before the end of 2018. Blue Origin is worrying about Blue Origin. That’s it.

It’s a bit too early to tell whether Blue Origin’s strategy is any better than SpaceX’s, or vice versa. Competition is a powerful force for innovation. But with the commercial space industry quickly growing (and SpaceX threatening to monopolize it), it’s easy enough to keep innovating in an effort to one-up the competition, losing sight of the main goal in the process.

One way to judge who wins? Whoever sends humans farther than they’ve ever gone. In that sense, the companies are striving for the same goal in the long term, and those that keep their eyes on the prize might fare best. In her interview with Engadget, Blue Origin’s Dietrich said that the company’s vision of millions of people living and working in space meant that they “are applauding all launch operators that are building new and more capable systems.”

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Earth’s Terrifying Magnetic Field Reversal Just Got a New Timeline https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/earths-terrifying-magnetic-field-reversal-just-got-a-new-timeline Tue, 01 May 2018 01:23:00 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/earths-terrifying-magnetic-field-reversal-just-got-a-new-timeline

Scientists say the South Atlantic Anomaly, a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field, doesn’t indicate that it’s about to reverse polarity. By studying past geological scenarios, researchers conclude that the current weirdness in Earth’s magnetic field most likely won’t result in an excursion or even a full reversal.

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The US lags behind 8 other countries in AI and automation readiness https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/the-us-lags-behind-8-other-countries-in-ai-and-automation-readiness Tue, 01 May 2018 01:22:46 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/the-us-lags-behind-8-other-countries-in-ai-and-automation-readiness

The United States trails key global players in preparing its workers for the upcoming artificial intelligence takeover. It’s time to get to work.

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Virgin Hyperloop One wants to cut 4-day cargo truck trips to 16 hours https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/virgin-hyperloop-one-wants-to-cut-4-day-cargo-truck-trips-to-16-hours Tue, 01 May 2018 01:22:33 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/virgin-hyperloop-one-wants-to-cut-4-day-cargo-truck-trips-to-16-hours

Virgin Hyperloop One and trade logistics company DP World have created a new cargo brand “built for an on-demand world.”

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Astronomers See a Pileup of 14 Separate Galaxies in the Early Universe https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/astronomers-see-a-pileup-of-14-separate-galaxies-in-the-early-universe Tue, 01 May 2018 01:22:19 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/astronomers-see-a-pileup-of-14-separate-galaxies-in-the-early-universe

Looking deep into the observable Universe – and hence, back to the earliest periods of time – is an immensely fascinating thing. In so doing, astronomers are able to see the earliest galaxies in the Universe and learn more about how they evolved over time. From this, they are not only able to see how large-scale structures (like galaxies and galaxy clusters) formed, but also the role played by dark matter.

Most recently, an international team of scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the Universe when it was just 1.4 billion years old. What they observed was a “protocluster”, a series of 14 galaxies located 12.4 billion light-years away that were about to merge. This would result in the formation of a massive galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the known Universe.

The study which described their findings, titled “A massive core for a cluster of galaxies at a redshift of 4.3”, recently appeared in the journal Nature. The study was led by Tim Miller – an astronomer from Dalhousie University, Halifax, and Yale University – and included members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Canada’s National Research Council, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and multiple universities and research institutions.

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Deepcric – Deep learning and Cricket https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/deepcric-deep-learning-and-cricket Tue, 01 May 2018 01:02:41 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/deepcric-deep-learning-and-cricket

Deepcric is a deep learning system for cricket. It looks at cricket video and does scene segmentation, scene classification, automatic commentary generation, targeted highlights generation, player identification, and player stats extraction.


Deep learning has been applied everywhere. From imagenet [1] to disease identification [2] to large-scale video classification [3] to text classification [4], there are barely any areas where people have not applied deep learning. But interestingly, there has been very little work in applying data science and deep learning to the game of cricket. This post is a detailed overview of my final year project at the FAST National University. We have developed a deep learning based system that is able to do many tasks in cricket in an automated way. Some of these tasks are:

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Exploration of transhumanism movement wins Wellcome book prize https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/exploration-of-transhumanism-movement-wins-wellcome-book-prize Mon, 30 Apr 2018 21:02:23 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/exploration-of-transhumanism-movement-wins-wellcome-book-prize

Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine, about humanity’s attempts to conquer death through technology, wins £30,000 prize.

Mon 30 Apr 2018 13.59 EDT Last modified on Mon 30 Apr 2018 17.00 EDT.

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Futurist Gray Scott https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/futurist-gray-scott Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:22:23 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/futurist-gray-scott

https://www.patreon.com/GrayScott
Newsletter — https://www.grayscott.com/newsletter
Twitter: @grayscott
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gray_scott/

Transcript:

We are headed towards a post Singularity simulated future and everything points towards us becoming a simulated species and being able to upload our consciousness quantify our consciousness and put that into a simulation.

And I don’t necessarily think it’s us that may control it.

I think it’s going to be the AI systems, the quantum computers of the future, those systems will create the simulations, they will draw us in, some may do it on purpose and some by accident. Whether that’s a choice that we make or whether a choice the machines make is something we’ll have to find out when we get to the future.

I wrote about the Sim Generation in a book called The Future of Business, and the idea was that this generation that we are seeing right now, they are the simulated generation, so by the time that they reach their early twenties living inside of simulated virtual reality for those kids, it’s not going to be uncommon, it’s not going to be foreign to them.

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Humanity’s ‘Final Institute’ (Part 1) https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/humanitys-final-institute-part-1 Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:02:49 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/humanitys-final-institute-part-1

The concern for the future of humanity is becoming more imperative as exponential technology brings us to the brink of the most fragile time in human history. Existential risk is a matter that is necessary to contemplate proactively rather than in a reactionary state, especially if intentions are to ensure continuance into the far future; a sort of insurance for humanity. However, what is mankind really trying to do? It is commonly advised to begin with the end in mind, however, there doesn’t seem to be a legitimate end goal besides a desperate cling to survival. Living without a purpose is simply existing, which seems to be the current state of our species. What are we existing for?

If we are referring to the whole of mankind rather than the specific individual, it can be commonly agreed upon that we simply have no concrete conclusion for why we are even here; or why anything should exist at all. This is in part due to the fact that we don’t even seem to have a complete understanding of what the universe actually is; why things behave the way they do. The fact that this is unknown would, by definition, imply that the relevance of everything that we do is also currently unknown. Thus, the logical progression would begin with acquiring the information necessary to discover what this nature is that existence seems to abide by. Then we can assemble the right question pertaining to the reason behind this phenomenon that we refer to as the “universe.”

By starting with this end question in mind, we can identify to the best of our current knowledge, the information that would be necessary to know before answering it. Regardless if it seems possible or not, we must consider it necessary for the time being. This would likely result in a series of questions, pushing the boundaries of our scientific and philosophical capabilities. This process would certainly be subject to change as new breakthroughs advance our understanding of the universe. However, the fact of the matter remains; it would be the most efficient direction relative to our maximum capability.

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Futurism Youtube Channels https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/futurism-youtube-channels Mon, 30 Apr 2018 17:42:23 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2018/04/futurism-youtube-channels

List. The Best Futurism Youtube Channels from thousands of Futurism Youtube Channels in our index using search and social metrics. We’ve carefully selected these youtubers because they are actively working to educate, inspire, and empower their audience with frequent updates and high-quality videos.

These Youtube Channels are ranked based on following criteria.

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