Lifeboat Foundation

“We are absolutely losing some science,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells The Register. “How much science we lose depends on how many satellites there end up being. You occasionally lose data. At the moment it’s one in every ten images.”

Telescopes can try waiting for a fleet of satellites to pass before they snap their images, though if astronomers are trying to track moving objects, such as near-Earth asteroids or comets, for example, it can be impossible to avoid the blight.

“As we raise the number of satellites, there starts to be multiple streaks in images you take. That’s no longer irritating, you really are losing science. Ten years from now, there may be so many that we can’t deal with it,” he added.

Recently, the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, released an application called SETI AT HOME, which allows any regular computer to help the SETI researchers find alien intelligence. This idea is brilliant since it saves an enormous amount of money by distributing processing power throughout computers all around the globe instead of buying super expensive supercomputers. So, anyone can go to their website and download this application to help the SETI researchers crunch data to find extraterrestrials. This way, the entire internet can be turned into a giant supercomputer! But what if we needed a processing capacity that far exceeded all the computers on Earth used in conjunction? Well, for such vast computational power, we may have to look beyond our planetary resources, directly to the stars! This is where the idea of the Matrioshka Brain proposed by Robert J. Bradbury comes in!

In his 1960 paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation”, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of a megastructure. Now commonly known as a Dyson Sphere, it was conceived to spot other advanced civilizations in the universe, particularly, Kardashev Type 2 civilizations that are capable of controlling all of the available energy in their stellar system! Dyson believed that a Type 2 civilization should be able to build this hypothetical megastructure around its star which would completely encircle it and harness all its energy.

According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR follows the first, second, and third Industrial Revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence; machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including “what it means to be human.”

The specific applications that make up the 4-R are too numerous and sundry to treat in full, but they include a ubiquitous internet, the internet of things, the internet of bodies, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and more.

While Schwab and the WEF promote a particular vision for the 4-IR, the developments he announces are not his brainchildren, and there is nothing original about his formulations. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (or prophets of the technological singularity), such as Ray Kurzweil and many others, forecasted these and more revolutionary developments,. long before Schwab heralded them. The significance of Schwab and the WEF’s take on the new technological revolution is the attempt to harness it to a particular end, presumably “a fairer, greener future.”

Physicists have created a modem for the quantum internet of the future, giving powerful quantum computers a way to share information.

Adding another dimension to the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk rivalry.

Amazon will launch the first two of its Project Kuiper internet satellites in the fourth quarter of 2,022 in a bid to tap the market for internet satellite constellations, a press statement from the delivery giant reveals.

Amazon announced Project Kuiper last week, alongside a partnership with Verizon, which will provide its telecommunications expertise. The two firms are following in the footsteps of SpaceX’… See more.

Yahoo has shut down access to its services in China, becoming the latest American tech company to exit the country.

It pulled the plug “in recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in a statement.

“Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support.”

Over 3,500 WiFi networks in Tel Aviv have been cracked by Israeli researchers.

The change occurs as SpaceX prepares for a nationwide rollout of Starlink before the end of the month.

Google has been building a network to connect its data centers for two decades. Now it’s coming in handy for a cloud deal with SpaceX.