Lifeboat Foundation

A flight during the first quarter of 2020 is the best-case scenario.

When Elon Musk announced the launch of SpaceX ($SPACEX) in 2002, comparisons to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin ($BLUEORIGIN) surfaced seemingly within seconds, and a private space war was born. As both companies engage in their own space race, and compete for private and government launch contracts, they’ve both been on hiring sprees virtually since the day they were born.

Blue Origin’s head start remains intact, and is manifested in its hiring patterns that have shown the company adding more people at any one time than SpaceX. But that lead, at least according to trends we’re now seeing with enough data, may end in the next year or two.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a weak spot for potty humor.

First, the carmaker introduced a “fart app” for its electric vehicles, which generates rude bathroom sounds.

Now, Musk says Teslas will soon be getting “customized horn and movement sounds,”— including “goats” and “farts,” according to a emoji-laden Sunday tweet.

SPACEX STARSHIP is Elon Musk’s ambitious plan to carry crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Now, the SpaceX CEO has revealed significant tweaks to the Starship’s extraordinary design.

Space bacteria — they’re tiny, invisible, and potentially harmful; even if no one is sure that they actually exist. But for most of the Space Age, NASA and other agencies have treated the possibility of pathogens from space carefully, both during our exploration of other worlds and because of the havoc they could conceivably wreak on Earth. Nowadays, though, there’s a new factor: Elon Musk.

The billionaire entrepreneur dreams of settling thousands of humans on the planet Mars and, oh yeah, he happens to own a rocket company that is slowly building the capability to do so. Musk and other leaders in the commercial space industry are looking at opening up previously unexplored possibilities — asteroid mining, private space stations, package delivery to the moon’s surface. Laudable as these goals are, they are also forcing governments around the world to rethink their space regulations and consider whether they’re up to these impending challenges.

As ever more players enter the space arena it’s time to make sure that everybody is following the best planetary protection practices. Exploring the universe should happen for the benefit of all, including future generations.

Following Elon Musk’s presentation about SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the company posted a 2-minute video showing how it’d refill the system in orbit.

The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by “having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence.”¹ To this end, he’s founded a company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop “neural lace,” an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers. Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one’s digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available.

For many transhumanists, uploading is key to the mind-machine merger.

Perhaps these sorts of enhancements will turn out to be beneficial, but to see if this is the case, we will need to move beyond all the hype. Policymakers, the public, and even AI researchers themselves need a better idea of what is at stake. For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being. You’d become what philosophers call a “zombie”—a nonconscious simulacrum of your earlier self. Further, even ifmicrochips could replace parts of the brain responsible for consciousness without zombifying you, radical enhancement is still a major risk. After too many changes, the person who remains may not even be you. Each human who enhances may, unbeknownst to them, end their life in the process.

#Space_Aus 🛰️ 🇦🇺.

ELON Musk and his SpaceX team want to get its new rocket, which will one day ferry humans to the Moon, Mars and “beyond” into orbit within just six months.