Lifeboat Foundation

A realistic and desirable human destination would produce a different space program than what we have today.

“We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.” This is NASA’s Vision Statement. This is NASA’s reason for being, its purpose. This is a vision statement for science and knowledge. This vision statement was crafted in a solar system that has only one planet that is environmentally friendly to human life.

Thanks to the ongoing search for exoplanets, we’ve identified several planets in our galaxy that are Earth sized and in their star’s habitable zone. Based on statistics, potentially billions more are waiting to be found. We are just now developing the technology to detect them. But we’re nowhere near having the technology needed to get to visit them. They are simply too far away.

Now here is where I’d like to pose a what if question: What if there was another habitable planet just like Earth, right here in our own solar system? What would Earth’s space programs look like, if anyone with a good telescope could look up and see another world with oceans, and continents, and clouds, and green forests? I think that it is safe to say that space programs in this imaginary solar system would be vastly different than ours today. This is conjecture, but it seems likely that the vision statement above, would be more in line with making that new world available for humanity.

Continue reading “What If We Had Another Earth?” »

By Rich McCormick — The VergeFacebook’s ambitious plan to bring internet to the entire world with a fleet of broadband-beaming unmanned aerial vehicles has taken a step closer to fruition. The company’s vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh, told The Wall Street Journal that Facebook is planning “a real test flight” of its solar-powered internet drone this summer. A smaller version of the drone, one tenth the size of the planned product, was tested earlier this month.

The scheduled test flight would be the first time the full-sized internet drone — called Aquila — will take to the skies. Facebook says the vehicle will have the wingspan of a commercial passenger jet and the length of “six or seven [Toyota] Priuses,” but will only weigh as much as four car tires. The lightweight build should help the craft stay flying for weeks, months, or years at a time, using solar energy to keep itself aloft. Google, also in the process of developing its own internet-proliferation project, is using a different approach. The company’s Project Loon uses a swarm of balloons to disseminate broadband to unconnected portions of the world.Read more

By Davide Sher — 3DPrintingIndustry.com
The true implementation of wearable, 3D printed clothes is a gradual process that began with accessories (jewelry, eye-wear) and is now moving on to extremities, to eventually cover the entire body (a little bit like Siberian-style tattoos). After insoles, custom 3D printed shoes are now taking on momentum, going from an experimental novelty to something truly accessible. Especially with new announcements from such start-ups as Feetz and 3D Shoes.

When speaking with the founder of the Nrml store in Manhattan, Nikky Kaufmann, she explained how, in her business of creating custom 3D printed earphones, the idea of custom clothing and accessories was, in fact, very “normal”, hence the name of her shop. The idea is that custom wearable products are not something strange, as much as they have always been part of our human culture: before the assembly line industrial revolution, every article of clothing was tailor made. Now, consumers can return to the tailor-made goods, but with new methods that can make these products accessible to everyone at higher quantities.Read more

By Sarah Kessler — Fast Company
On Thursday morning, a handful of anti-gun-violence activists realized there is an app in the Google Play Store with their names on it—literally. The app, Gunfree Geo Marker, features a map pinpointing the home and work addresses of politicians, gun control organization employees, and “random anti-gun trolls” who “push the anti-gun agenda in any way, shape or form.”

Clicking on a person’s name in the menu reveals their address on a Google map, along with the app creator’s reasons for including that person in the app.Read more

By Nick Ellis — SingularityHub

Years ago, my brother, Matt, explained to me that there are three ways to push out the productivity curve: technology, capital, or people.

When we increase productivity, we increase wealth. However, when we discuss how these three forces impact the labor market, we often focus singularly on how technology either creates or destroys jobs and wealth.

Our fear – not entirely misplaced – is that robots will render most of us useless, and in doing so, cleave society into those who control the machines (educated titans of industry), and those who fall victim to them (uneducated poor workers). In this future, the majority of humans – helpless and tired – fall by the way-side on the road to progress.

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Kat McGowan — Aeon
Every modern generation has had its own idiosyncratic obsession with telepathy, the hope that one human being might be able to read another person’s thoughts. In the late 19th century, when spiritualism was in vogue, mind-reading was a parlour game for the fashionable, and the philosopher William James considered telepathy and other psychic phenomena legitimate subjects of study for the new science of psychology. By the 1960s, the Pentagon was concerned about Soviet telepathy research and reports that they had established remote communications with submarine commanders. In the 1970s, one ambitious Apollo 14 astronaut took it upon himself to try broadcasting his brainwaves from the moon.

In our technologically obsessed era, the search for evidence of psychic communication has been replaced by a push to invent computerised telepathy machines. Just last year, an international team of neurobiologists in Spain, France and at Harvard ­set up systems that linked one brain to another and permitted two people to communicate using only their thoughts. The network was basically one massive kludge, including an electroencephalography cap to detect the sender’s neural activity, computer algorithms to transform neural signals into data that could be sent through the internet and, at the receiving end, a transcranial magnetic stimulation device to convert that data into magnetic pulses that cross another person’s skull and activate certain clusters of neurons with an electrical field. With this contraption, the researchers were able to send a signal of 140 bits (the word ‘ciao’) from one person’s brain to another.Read more

by Sean Gallagher — ars technica
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that has been on the cusp of becoming the next big thing for over 20 years. But the technology—the projection of data or digital imagery over real-world objects—has largely remained the stuff of fighter cockpits at the high end and of mobile games and art projects on the low. The promise of Google Glass—real augmented reality for the masses—failed to materialize.

That doesn’t mean the technology won’t fly at all. While many organizations experimented with Glass, other devices already in the hands—and on the heads—of companies and software developers have been pushing forward augmented reality in multiple industries. Work is being done today to integrate corporate cloud applications and data from intelligent machines connected to the “Internet of Things” into applications for mobile and wearable devices. And all this could help make humans on the factory floor, on the flight line, in hospitals, and in the field more effective and efficient. With Microsoft’s HoloLens promising a standard development platform for AR, the cost of building those applications could plummet in the next few years.Read more

MIT Technology Review -

In the world of Internet marketing and clickbait, the secret of virality is analogous to the elixir of life or the alchemy that turns lead into gold. It exists as a kind of Holy Grail that many search for and few, if any, find.

The key question is this: what is the difference between stories that become viral and those that don’t?Read more

By Elizabeth Dwoskin — Wall Street Journal

Dozens of smartphone apps collect so much location data that their publishers can plot users’ comings and goings in detail, a forthcoming peer-reviewed study found.

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University concluded that a dozen or so popular Android apps collected device location – GPS coordinates accurate to within 50 meters – an average 6,200 times, or roughly every three minutes, per participant over a two-week study period.

The research comes at a time of increasing concern about electronic privacy. A 2014 Pew survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans feel they’ve lost control over personal data. While savvy users understand that using mobile devices entails some privacy tradeoffs – for example, a navigation app will reveal their location to the app’s publisher – most don’t realize the extent to which such information is collected and distributed, the researchers said.
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