Lifeboat Foundation

This plane will go to space and back in 5 hours.

NASA has tested a tiny reactor that could power homes on Mars.

The Chinese “Micius” satellite has successfully set up the world’s most secure video conference, using quantum cryptography to connect scientists in Europe and China for an unhackable, intercontinental chat.

The feat marks another milestone for the satellite, officially called Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QESS), which only last year was making headlines for transmitting an “unbreakable” quantum code to the Earth’s surface.

The moon will glow big, bright—and red.

As artificial intelligence advances at an unprecedented pace, we tend to see its arrival in emotional terms — usually, either excitement or fear. But Noumena, a collective of designers, engineers and architects, is looking at AI and robots more practically. What form will they take, how will they survive and develop, and where will they live? It aims to explore those idea with an exhibition entitled “Robotic Habitats.”

Noumena’s project assumes that deep learning systems will grow out of their narrow Go-playing abilities and soon match humans at many, if not most, tasks. While that would put them on par with us, it doesn’t mean they would live the same way, though. “Society will need to develop a framework for both to thrive,” explains Neumena on its website. “A new form of artificial life will emerge, finding space at the peripheries of humanity in order to not compete for human-dominated resources.”

Continue reading “‘Robotic Habitats’ imagines a self-sustaining AI ecosystem” »

A few ideas I had, feel free to review and shoot down on them if you think they suck.

Ceres as Jupiters’ old moon.

A model that ties together disparate ideas in astronomy from the past centuries.

Expansion tectonics and a new model for planet-formation.

Food for astronauts during future deep-space missions may be produced from their own waste, a new study suggests.

Chinese students spent 200 continuous days in a “lunar lab” in Beijing, state media said Friday, as the country prepares for its long-term goal of putting people on the moon.

Four students crammed into a 160-square-metre (1,720-square-foot) cabin called “Yuegong-1”—Lunar Palace—on the campus of Beihang University, testing the limits of humans’ ability to live in a self-contained space, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The volunteers lived in the sealed lab to simulate a long-term space mission with no input from the outside world.

Continue reading “Chinese volunteers spend 200 days on virtual ‘moon base’” »