Lifeboat Foundation

In Brief:

• Expensive, unsustainable rockets have served as our primary means to exit Earth, but space elevators present a cheaper way to enter outer space.
• Although new materials are needed, space elevator missions are in motion and we could see the first elevator constructed in the next several decades.

Getting into space with rockets is ridiculously expensive. A NASA Inspector General report says the agency will pay Russia $491.2 million to send six astronauts into space in 2018. That’s almost $82 million a seat.

Last week my presidential candidacy (an openly nonreligious and transhumanist one) got a big boost when it was added to ISideWith, the most popular site for helping to match you with your best candidate. They currently only have 8 candidates featured still running. Take the 3-minute survey on their site to see who you side with now that I’ll be in the results. https://www./ And, I also participated alongside Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Eric McMullin and others in their online debate in real time that tracked the 3rd Clinton/Trump debate last Wed. (I didn’t give many answers as I was in the middle of a campaign event that exact same moment in Baltimore, but I still chimed in some supporting science and reason). My answers start about 15 min into the debate:

http://secure.isidewith.com/debate-stream/20161019

ISideWith shows which political parties, candidates, and ballot initiatives match your beliefs based on the 2016 issues that are most important to you.

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Time now for a very cute video about a rather terrible prospect—the very grim possibility of the universe spawning a lethal bubble of pure vacuum that expands in all directions at the speed of light.

Artificial intelligence is a “momentous development,” said George Lee, co-chairman of the global technology, media and telecom group at Goldman Sachs.

“As awesome as the internet has been, it will be best remembered as really the predicate for machine learning,” said Lee, who’s also chief information officer of Goldman’s investment banking division. He appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Wednesday from Goldman’s Builders + Innovators Summit in Santa Barbara, California.

The internet enabled computing scale in a network and serves as a way to “collect data that’s used to train all these algorithms,” Lee said, predicting machine learning will “change our world … and even the course of our species in ways that are hard to predict today.”

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence will change the ‘course of our species’: Top Goldman tech banker” »

Maanasa Mendu thinks she’s cracked the code on how to make wind and solar energy affordable.

On Tuesday, Mendu, a 13-year-old from Ohio, won the grand prize in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for her work in creating a cost-effective “solar leaves” design to create energy. In addition to winning the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist,” she gets $25,000 for her achievement.

The leaves, designed to help developing areas in need of cheaper power sources, cost roughly $5 to make.

Continue reading “This brilliant 13-year-old figured out how to make clean energy using a device that costs $5” »

In Brief:

• At the launch of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), the famed scientist warned of a potentially grave future given the rise of AI.
• The work done at CFI could have far-reaching implications for the future of AI, helping shape how the technology is used and regulated.

Check out the world from a drone’s perspective.

Sergei lost his arm when his son was four years old.

His son is now an engineer, and he built this for his dad.