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Carlos Sánchez

AI and The Future Of Civilization - 1 views

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    What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars-our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history. The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes-execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate.
Marcus Maertens

The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in t... - 1 views

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    A NASA study which is concerned with the question whether we could detect lost industrial civilizations on earth by analyzing the climate fingerprints.
ESA ACT

Transvision 2007 - Transforming Humanity: Innerspace to Outerspace - 0 views

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    Three full days of compelling dialogue with the greatest minds of today about creating the civilizations of tomorrow.
jaihobah

[1701.01109] Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails - 2 views

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    "We examine the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations"
Marcus Maertens

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? - 4 views

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    Scary. Maybe we should start to consider what to do after things go bad. Some kind of Asimov'ian Foundation?
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    Sooner or later we'll have to infect other planets with our dumb selves - there is no way around that. Until then we have to delay the collapse by deploying local rules which emerge in a globally more responsible behavior of mankind.
Nicholas Lan

Ancient language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle Ea... - 1 views

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    archaeology for a bit of a change of pace. "The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history's first 'barbarians' - mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world's first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq."
johannessimon81

Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? - 4 views

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    Sounds relevant. Does ESA need to have a position on this question?
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    This was on Slashdot now, with a link to the paper. It quite an iteresting study actually. "The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see section 5.3), where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."
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    Interesting, but is it new? In general, I would say that history has shown us that it is inevitable that civilisations get replaced by new concepts (much is published about this, read eg Fog of War by Jona Lendering on the struggles between civilisations in ancient history, which have remarkably similar issues as today, yet on a different scale of course). "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing." I guess this bang on it, the ones that can change the system, are not benefitted by doing so, hence enrichment, depletion, short term gain remain and might even accelerate to compensate for the loss in the rest of the system.
Joris _

French Bond Issue To Fund Rocket Satellite Projects | SpaceNews.com - 1 views

  • France is focusing on a modular rocket whose different versions would carry government satellites into low Earth orbit and commercial telecommunications satellites weighing up to 6,000 kilograms into geostationary-transfer orbit
Joris _

ATK Proposes Satellite To Fight Space Debris | SpaceNews.com - 0 views

  • The goal is to turn large debris particles that pose a threat to spacecraft into much smaller pieces that can be deflected by exterior shielding.
Joris _

Astrium To Manage Atomic Clock Demo on Station | SpaceNews.com - 1 views

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    cool! i will be working on the link and the data!
duncan barker

World Mysteries - Strange Artifacts, Baghdad Battery - 1 views

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    read this
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    " However, Dr. Konig also found copper vases plated with silver in the Baghdad Museum, excavated from !!!Sumerian!!! sites in southern Iraq, dating back to at least 2500 BCE. When the vases were lightly tapped, a blue patina or film separated from the surface, which is characteristic of silver electroplated onto copper base. It would appear then that the Parthians inherited their batteries from one of the earliest known civilizations." ... they just mistyped the name ...
Juxi Leitner

NASA Plans for Nonprofit To Manage Station Research | SpaceNews.com - 0 views

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    "competitively select a domestic nonprofit organization to manage experiments aboard the international space station (ISS)" nice
Joris _

Panel Picks 3 Finalists for ESAs Cosmic Vision M class Missions | SpaceNews.com - 3 views

  • “superb from a science standpoint,” but beyond Europe’s current budget
  • There was some questioning of the cost estimate for Euclid, but at some point you have to decide: Either you don’t believe the estimates that [ESA science program managers] produced, or you assume their estimates are credible. Euclid was the one mission where costs were debated, but the consensus was to use the cost estimates presented to us.
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    finally cross-scale is not selected, it was the only cosmic vision mission with multi-satellites formation flying, since the concept for Xeus has changed. There is still Swarm but it's not really formation flying... So ESA is missing something here...
LeopoldS

Spaceflight Now | Atlas Launch Report | Air Force spaceplane is an odd bird with a twis... - 3 views

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    Juxi are you following this one? any idea on its purpose?
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    Not that I'm an expert in the field in any way, but there are two things I could think of: 1) possibility of bringing the payload back means that it can collect huge amounts of data which wouldn't be possible to be transferred via radio in reasonable time and/or you can bring back data you don't want to be intercepted by enemy 2) I remember reading somewhere that possibility of re-entry from orbit means you can strike any country without violating the airspace of the neighbouring countries. As the project is now managed by military, a purely civil purpose can be safely ruled out in my opinion.
LeopoldS

NASA Budget Outlook Relegates Flagship Probes to Back Burner | SpaceNews.com - 1 views

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    not so good news for science ...
Joris _

The Associated Press: Daunting space task _ send astronauts to asteroid - 1 views

  • NASA leaders say civilization may depend on it
  • NASA is thinking about jetpacks, tethers, bungees, nets and spiderwebs to allow explorers to float just above the surface of it while attached to a smaller mini-spaceship.
  • At the moment, there are only a handful of asteroid options and they all have names like 1999AO10 or 2009OS5.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • NASA is pursuing its concept for a mini-spaceship exploration vehicle, about the size of a minivan. And it's planning an underwater lab for training, an effort to mimic an asteroid mission's challenges
  • "There's a lot of things we need to invent and build between now and then."
Francesco Biscani

Hubble Snaps Sharpest Image Yet of Jupiter Impact | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • If whatever hit Jupiter — and astronomers might never know what it was — had instead struck Earth, it would have caused catastrophic damage to human civilization.
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    Thanks for taking the hit for us, big J!
Juxi Leitner

The Great Restructuring and the Great Innovation Civilization - 2 views

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    quite interesting, a bit fluffy but well
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