Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Elon Musk – Page 272

You may be thinking this is not a big deal but u would be wrong. Competition DRIVES INNOVATION!

Competition breeds progress, so it’s a bit thrilling to hear Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg say that he’s going to beat SpaceX to Mars in terms of delivering real humans to the surface of the red planet.

Muilenburg said that he’s “convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,” speaking at a conference in Chicago Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. Boeing is working on a heavy-lift rocket project called the Space Launch System which would aim for a similar goal to what SpaceX is hoping to achieve with its Interplanetary Transport System, the details of which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared in a keynote presented at an international aeronautics convention last week.

Boeing and SpaceX are already close competitors when it comes to commercial spaceflight contracts from NASA, and the company’s approach to its system designed for reaching Mars reflects similar tensions to those present in the ongoing battle between the two for space missions closer to home. Boeing’s plan involves at least $60 billion in NASA-funded development prior to a human-crewed Mars mission in the late 2030s at the earliest.

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A new survey of existing and planned smart weapons finds that AI is increasingly used to replace humans, not help them.

The Pentagon’s oft-repeated line on artificial intelligence is this: we need much more of it, and quickly, in order to help humans and machines work better alongside one another. But a survey of existing weapons finds that the U.S. military more commonly uses AI not to help but to replace human operators, and, increasingly, human decision making.

The report from the Elon Musk-funded Future of Life Institute does not forecast Terminators capable of high-level reasoning. At their smartest, our most advanced artificially intelligent weapons are still operating at the level of insects … armed with very real and dangerous stingers.

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Elon Musk doesn’t want to simply send humans to Mars. The SpaceX CEO has bigger ambitions. He wants us to be an “interplanetary species,” which means creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, which means living and dying on Mars — which at some point might mean sex and pregnancy on Mars.

So how would that work?

Given that Musk hasn’t figured out how to keep people alive on the trip to the Red Planet, it’s unlikely he has details on how people will make more people once they’re there. We don’t have any data on how human bodies will work on Mars specifically, but we have enough information to know that sex in space could be a real hassle.

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Tech billionaire Elon Musk is convinced that we must colonise Mars with a million people if the humanity is to survive long-term. To that effect in 2008, he almost went broke funding SpaceX – his then-new aerospace company – to keep developing next-generation rockets.

And on Tuesday, at a challenging moment in the 14-year-old company’s history, Musk plans to unveil his grand vision: to turn Mars into a “backup drive” and save humanity.

The big announcement is scheduled for Tuesday, September 27 at 2:30pm EDT during the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico. (Watch it live at the end of this post.)

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Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s future Mars vehicle and discusses the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The presentation focuses on potential architectures for sustaining humans on the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.

Overview:
00:00. Why Mars and become a multi-planetary civilisation.

05:55. Early exploration missions.

09:15. Challenge 1: Full re-usability

11:17. Challenge 2: Refilling in orbit

12:31. Challenge 3: Mars propellant production.

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In Brief.

Tesla and SolarCity are working on making their cars capable of powering a household, and even the entire grid. Using vehicle-to-grid technology, Tesla may be on to something here, and its more than just saving on your electric bills.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk bought SolarCity for at least $2.6 billion, merging the solar engineering company with Tesla. Since then, both have been busy working on a few things. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the promise to cut down on your household electric bill.

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