Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.

Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.

Continue reading “Play the PC game Elon Musk wrote as a pre-teen” »

Since it was first suggested that the flickering star known as KIC 8462852 might be a Dyson Sphere, telescope-toting astronomers associated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have been scouring the system for signs of aliens. Now, the most well-funded SETI program on Earth— UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen —is getting in on the hunt, too.

BELGRADE – NASA’s ground-breaking voyager 2 probe is more than 3 decades into its epic journey towards deep space. On April 22nd, 2010 just as the craft prepares to cross the boundary to enter into interstellar space, it malfunctions, physics-astronomy.com reported.

As NASA’s planetary scientist, Kevin Baines said:

“Just about 10 billion miles away from the Earth and all of the sudden it starts sending data in the language we don’t understand. It can be called as an alien language”

Continue reading “Voyager 2 ‘hacked’ in deep space? NASA Scientist: It can be called an alien language” »

A new project would put a space telescope into orbit with eyes on our neighbor, Alpha Centauri, to search for an Earth-like planet.

World ring desighned to collect hellium 3?

The more scientists learn about “Tabby’s Star,” the more mysterious the bizarre object gets.

Newly analyzed observations by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope show that the star KIC 8462852 — whose occasional, dramatic dips in brightness still have astronomers scratching their heads — has also dimmed overall during the last few years.

Continue reading “‘Alien Megastructure’ Star Keeps Getting Stranger” »

A mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an “alien megastructure,” continues to confound researchers.

A study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal has only “deepened the mystery” surrounding the strange light pattern emitted from the star known as KIC 8462852.

Josh Simon of the Carnegie Institute and Ben Montet of Caltech analyzed data gathered by the Kepler space telescope during the four-year period the telescope observed KIC 8462852, Carnegie Science said in a statement.

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The world-renowned physicist’s alarmist warnings about extraterrestrials is illogical.

Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; and All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life.

Dyson is “a brilliant physicist and contrarian,” as the theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss recently told Nautilus. So I was waiting, as I read his review, to come across his profound and provocative pronouncement about these books, and it came soon enough: “None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species,” he writes. The books are limited in scope by looking at the future of space as a problem of engineering. Dyson has a grander vision. Future humans can seed remote environments with genetic instructions for countless new species. “The purpose is no longer to explore space with unmanned or manned missions, but to expand the domain of life from one small planet to the universe.”

Dyson can be just as final in his opinions on the destiny of scientific investigation. According to Krauss, Dyson once told him, “There’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons”—the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces—“because there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.” Dyson told Krauss that, in order to measure one, “you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement.” So, Dyson concluded, “There’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.”

Continue reading “Lawrence Krauss Versus Freeman Dyson on Gravitons” »

Jupiter’s moon Europa — a giant ice ball thought to hide twice as much liquid water as there is on Earth — just became an even hotter target in the search for aliens.

Scientists on Monday unveiled new photographs from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and they likely show ‘fingers’ of water vapour squirting out of Europa’s hidden ocean and into space.

The grainy Hubble photos, taken in 2014, suggest water plumes occasionally shoot 125 miles (200 km) into space, then rain back down on the surface. If true, this would be Hubble’s second time catching Europa’s water plumes since 2012.

Continue reading “Hubble might have just caught jets of water squirting out of Europa” »