NASA’s 1970s-era Voyager 2 is slowly dying in interstellar space, but engineers have devised a new plan to squeeze more life out of the spacecraft.
The Galaxy is approximately 13 billion years old, which makes one wonder — just how many civilizations could have come and gone across that ocean of time? Today, we try something a little bit different for this channel, and imagine when and how the first civilization could have lived. The story is a fiction, but it provides a narrative around which we can more viscerally experience the conditions of the early cosmos, and the fragility of life itself.
Written & presented by Prof David Kipping.
Continue reading “The First Civilization to Emerge in the Galaxy” »
Humanity has had a sustained human presence in space for decades now. Traveling the world can be done in mere hours, and each of us carries within our pockets a supercomputer that is linked to all of human knowledge. Our fingertips are now more powerful than the kings or queens of centuries past. For all of our flaws and challenges, we live in the protopia today.
Not dystopia, not utopia, but something else.
Cryptocurrency mining is only accessible to those with access to highly discounted energy. The newly-developed low-energy chips will make it possible for everyone to participate in mining profitably.
If you were to ask anyone their feelings about cryptocurrency in 2020, chances are they would respond along the lines of “to the moon”(Crypto investors often use the phrase when they believe that certain cryptocurrencies will rise significantly in price). However, a year later, those sentiments seemed to have jaded. A sense of negativity — FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), as crypto-sympathizers would call it — seemed rife.
Stanford University.
A Japanese startup attempting the first private landing on the Moon said Wednesday it had lost communication with its spacecraft and assumed the lunar mission had failed.
Ispace said that it could not establish communication with the unmanned Hakuto-R lunar lander after its expected landing time, a frustrating end to a mission that began with a launch from the United States over four months ago.
“We have not confirmed communication with the lander,” a company official told reporters about 25 minutes after the expected landing.
Japan’s ispace could become the world’s first private company to perform a successful lunar landing.
Japan’s Hakuto-R lander, developed by private space firm ispace, will soon attempt a Moon landing. Last month, ispace announced that Hakuto-R successfully performed a lunar insertion maneuver. That was a crucial step ahead of its historic lunar landing attempt.
Continue reading “Japanese private space company to attempt historic Moon landing today” »
The Japanese company Ispace could be the first to safely touch down on the moon’s surface, with more spacecraft following later this year.
With Starlink now profitable, SpaceX’s need for launches is now virtually infinite. So they just got permission to create a fourth tower for Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy which means that at least one more drone ship is under construction.
Col. Rob Long, Space Launch Delta 30 commander, signed a statement of support on April 21, 2023, granting SpaceX permission to lease Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) for Falcon rocket launches.
SLC-6 previously supported the Delta IV vehicle family and has remained vacant since the final Delta IV Heavy launch on Sept. 24, 2022.
Continue reading “Space Launch Delta 30 to Lease Space Launch Complex 6 to SpaceX” »
Last time, we talked about the concept of Speed Superintelligence as proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford. If you haven’t seen the previous videos on this topic, do check them out, the link is in the description below. Today, we will be looking at a different kind of superintelligence known as Collective Superintelligence and some of its defining characteristics!
A collective superintelligence according to Bostrom is a form of superintelligence that is a system achieving superior performance by aggregating large numbers of smaller intelligences. So, he formally defines collective superintelligence as “a system composed of a large number of smaller intellects such that the system’s overall performance across many very general domains vastly outstrips that of any current cognitive system.” Now, Collective superintelligence may be less conceptually clear-cut than speed superintelligence, however, it is more familiar empirically. For example, firms, work teams, academic communities, countries, and even humankind as a whole, can fall under collective superintelligence. Since these loosely defined “systems” are capable of solving classes of intellectual problems by breaking them into parts that can be pursued in parallel and verified independently. Tasks like building a space shuttle or operating a hamburger franchise offer many opportunities for division of labor: different engineers work on different components of the spacecraft, and different staff members operate different restaurants for the smooth operation of the whole franchise.
