Lifeboat Foundation

Since emerging as a species we have seen the world through only human eyes. Over the last few decades, we have added satellite imagery to that terrestrial viewpoint. Now, with recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are not only able to see more from space but to see the world in new ways too.

One example is “Penny”, a new AI platform that from space can predict median income of an area on Earth. It may even help us make cities smarter than is humanly possible. We’re already using machines to make sense of the world as it is; the possibility before us is that machines help us create a world as it should be and have us question the nature of the thinking behind its design.

Penny is a free tool built using high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe, income data from the US census, neural network expertise from Carnegie Mellon and intuitive visualizations from Stamen Design. It’s a virtual cityscape (for New York City and St. Louis, so far), where AI has been trained to recognize, with uncanny accuracy, patterns of neighbourhood wealth (trees, parking lots, brownstones and freeways) by correlating census data with satellite imagery.

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Fully automated mining and factories and advanced robotics on the moon and asteroids could be leveraged for the exponential development of space. Here we review some of the developments of robotics for mining and factories on earth.

Robotic mining

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Pope Francis made a phone call to the International Space Station today (Oct. 26) to ask its six occupants deep questions about humanity’s place in the universe.

Calling from the Vatican in Rome, Pope Francis spoke with Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency along with three NASA astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts.

“Your little glass palace in totality is greater than the sum of its parts, and this is the example that you give us,” Pope Francis said through a translator. [Space Station Photos: The Expedition 53 Crew in Orbit].

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A team of researchers with Università degli Studi di Padova and the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory in Italy has conducted experiments that add credence to John Wheeler’s quantum theory thought experiment. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their experiment and what they believe it showed.

The nature of light has proven to be one of the more difficult problems facing physicists. Nearly a century ago, experiments showed that light behaved like both a particle and a wave, but subsequent experiments seemed to show that light behaved differently depending on how it was tested, and weirdly, seemed to know how the researchers were testing it, changing its behavior as a result.

Back in the late 1970s, physicist Johan Wheeler tossed around a thought experiment in which he asked what would happen if tests allowed researchers to change parameters after a photon was fired, but before it had reached a sensor for testing—would it somehow alter its behavior mid-course? He also considered the possibilities as light from a distant quasar made its way through space, being lensed by gravity. Was it possible that the light could somehow choose to behave as a wave or a particle depending on what scientists here on Earth did in trying to measure it? In this new effort, the team in Italy set out to demonstrate the ideas that Wheeler had proposed—but instead of measuring light from a quasar, they measured light bounced from a satellite back to Earth.

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Human settlement of the moon may go through Hawaii.

Earlier this month, an International MoonBase Summit (IMS) brought together representatives from academia, government and the private sector to help lay the groundwork for a base on the lunar surface.

“Because of its geography, geology and culture, Hawaii is the perfect place to build a MoonBase prototype,” said Henk Rogers, an entrepreneur based in Hawaii and the organizer of the IMS. [Lunar Colony: How to Build a Moonbase in Images].

Should definitely be worked on. Eventually the same stuff could be used to reverse engineer/terraform Venus.

When politicians talk about the Paris Climate Agreement, it’s usually framed in terms of restrictions on emissions for states and businesses. But the Paris Agreement wasn’t just an agreement to regulate — it was also an agreement to innovate. That’s because most experts agree that the world won’t be able to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, unless there’s a way to physically remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

A Swiss startup called Climeworks has made that their goal, developing the most advanced carbon-capture technology to date. VICE News went to Switzerland to see how the technology works and hear how the business plans to tackle climate change. Problem is, what Climeworks is doing isn’t cheap.

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China’s FAST radio telescope has spotted a pair of pulsars thousands of light years away. The find heralds a new era in radio telescopes.

Japanese scientists discover 50km-long cave beneath #moon’s surface http://bit.ly/2ipl0mx @JAXA_en

Ecns.cn is the official English-language website of China News Service (CNS), a state-level news agency sponsored and established by Chinese journalists and renowned overseas Chinese experts on October 1, 1952.As an English-language website, Ecns.cn aims to provide all aspects of online news, including in-depth coverage, feature stories and visual content, with topics such as current events, art, lifestyle, people and travel.

“Scientists and philosophers… had always assumed that the world worked by physical laws, and if you could measure initial conditions accurately enough, those laws would let you predict the future indefinitely. As James Gleick described it in his book Chaos: Making a New Science, this view was very wrong.”

“There was always one small compromise, so small that working scientists usually forgot it was there, lurking in a corner of their philosophies like an unpaid bill. Measurements could never be perfect,” he wrote. “Scientists marching under Newton’s banner actually waved another flag that said something like this: Given an approximate knowledge of a system’s initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behaviour of the system. This assumption lay at the philosophical heart of science.”

“Today we know how wrong this assumption was. The Three Body Problem is now recognized as a classic example of a chaotic system. Like the butterfly that causes a hurricane by flapping its wings, it is exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. The tiniest tweak can have massive consequences down the line.”

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