Lifeboat Foundation

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.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity” »

Between the solar wind stripping its atmosphere and these horrific dust towers bleeding its water into space, Mars may not have ever had a chance at a stable climate.

NASA reports that these are the result of observations by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s heat-sensing Mars climate sounder instrument which can easily penetrate this dusty haze.

We’re not yet able to understand how much these towers contributed to Mars’ past water loss, David Kass, a planetary scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory and the Mars Climate Sounder instrument’s principal investigator, told me by phone. But they are telling us that the simple extrapolations that we were doing before to explain Mars’ water loss has limitations, he says.

Continue reading “Massive Dust Towers Are Linked To Mars’ Ancient Water Loss, Says NASA” »

New research results show how sound below the range of human hearing can help scientists predict and track tornadoes.

Predicting tornadoes is crucial for saving lives. Today, meteorologists rely on Doppler radar signatures as well as context clues, combined with reports from eyewitnesses on the ground. The technology has led to a major increase in warning time around tornadoes over recent decades. But the National Weather Service still reports at least a 50 percent false alarm rate for issued tornado warnings as of 2014, and the rate might be even higher. Now, scientists are getting serious about using infrasound—sound with a frequency lower than human ears can hear—as a means to supplement present-day methods for tornado detection.

Daily sun, earth and science news

Need to Catch Up?
CLIMATE FORCING: https://youtu.be/rEWoPzaDmOA
CLIMATE FORCING [Short]: https://youtu.be/tul07hx8V8w
PLASMA COSMOLOGY: https://youtu.be/E4pWZGBpWP0
PLASMA COSMOLOGY [Short]: https://youtu.be/G48V-Fmh4uc
COSMIC DISASTER: https://youtu.be/B_zfMyzXqfI

Continue reading “Coronal Holes, Cosmic Collision, Big Announcement | S0 News Nov.14.2019” »

An astrobiologist argues that lightning should also be prevalent on planets around other sunlike stars.

Diamonds as big as jewels fall as “rain” on Saturn and Jupiter, seeded by giant lightning storms, according to new calculations by US scientists.

Banner Image: The 2019 ozone hole reached its peak extent of 6.3 million square miles (16. 4 million square kilometers) on Sept. 8. Abnormal weather patterns in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica dramatically limited ozone depletion this year. Credit: NASA

By: Ellen Gray NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Continue reading “2019 Ozone Hole is the Smallest on Record Since Its Discovery” »

From tiny snowflakes to the jagged fork of a lightning bolt, it’s not hard to find examples of fractals in the natural world. So it might come as a surprise that, until now, there have remained some places these endlessly repeating geometrical patterns have never been seen.

Physicists from MIT have now provided the first known example of a fractal arrangement in a quantum material.

The patterns were seen in an unexpected distribution of magnetic units called ‘domains’, which develop in a compound called neodymium nickel oxide — a rare earth metal with extraordinary properties.

The material has two major benefits for the climate.