Lifeboat Foundation

I had a great time at APS 2013 held April 13 — 16, 2013. I presented my paper “Empirical Evidence Suggest A Different Gravitational Theory” in track T10, Tuesday afternoon. A copy of the slides is available at this link.

http://www.iseti.us/WhitePapers/APS2013/Solomon-APS-April(20…45;15).pdf

Have fun.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification

A Point too Far to Astronaut
It’s cold out there beyond the blue. Full of radiation. Low on breathable air. Vacuous.
Machines and organic creatures, keeping them functioning and/or alive — it’s hard.
Space to-do lists are full of dangerous, fantastically boring, and super-precise stuff.

We technological mammals assess thusly:
“Robots. Robots should be doing this.”

Enter Team Space Torso
As covered by IEEE a few days ago, the DLR (das German Aerospace Center) released a new video detailing the ins & outs of their tele-operational haptic feedback-capable Justin space robot. It’s a smooth system, and eventually ground-based or orbiting operators will just strap on what look like two extra arms, maybe some VR goggles, and go to work. Justin’s target missions are the risky, tedious, and very precise tasks best undertaken by something human-shaped, but preferably remote-controlled. He’s not a new robot, but Justin’s skillset is growing (video is down at the bottom there).

Now, Meet the Rest of the Gang:
NASA’s Robonaut2 (full coverage), the first and only humanoid robot in space, has of late been focusing on the ferociously mundane tasks of button pushing and knob turning, but hey, WHO’S IN SPACE, HUH? Then you’ve got Russia’s elusive SAR-400, which probably exists, but seems to hide behind… an iron curtain? Rounding out the team is another German, AILA. The nobody-knows-why-it’s-feminized AILA is another DLR-funded project from a university robotics and A.I. lab with a 53-syllable name that takes too long to type but there’s a link down below.

Continue reading “Keeping Humans Safe in Space: Meet Robot Torsos Justin, Robonaut, SAR-400, & AILA” »

May peace break into your home and may thieves come to steal your debts.
May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills.
May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips!
May happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy
May the problems you had, forget your home address!

In simple words .….….……May 2013 be EXTRAORDINARY … the best year of your life!!! Simply the best New Year greeting anyone has sent to me. This was from Robert White of Extraordinary People.

This morning I checked the Lifeboat stats for 2012. When I started blogging for Lifeboat at the end of July, we ended July 2012 with 42,771 unique visitors. We closed 2012 with 90,920 unique visitors for the month December. Wow! Our blogging has become more relevant, and more thought provoking. As a community of bloggers (with the exception of one) we have moved away from the 3 Cs of pseudoscience. Clouding the field. Confusing the public’s perception. Chasing away talent.

How did we do this? By backing up our discussions with hard facts, robust debate and real numbers. From years if not decades of investigation in our field of research. By speaking from our own unique experience. By sharing that unique experience with our readers.

Continue reading “2012 was Great and may 2013 be Extraordinary” »

Congratulations Skydiver Felix Baumgartner, on the success of your 24 mile skydive. You proved that it is possible to bail out of a space ship and land on Earth safely.

The records are nice to have but the engineering was superb!

Tim Ventura told me 2 days ago that American Antigravity is back. Congratulations Tim. Yours was a very popular site and it was a loss when it went dark.

Welcome back Tim. I look forward to more scoops from American Antigravity.

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Continue reading “American Antigravity is Back!” »

Here is my attempt at interstellar black hole jokes. With the 2nd and 3rd I was attempting humor with a minimum number of words. I’ve managed a 2 word joke. I hope you finds these funny and please contribute your version of these interstellar black hole (family friendly) jokes.

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The Mechanic & The Owner

Spaceship owner tells spaceship mechanic, “I lost my black hole. Can you help me find it?”

Continue reading “Interstellar Black Hole Jokes” »

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland co-authored the paper Are Black Hole Starships Possible? (http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803) that suggested that one could use Small Black Holes to propel starships close to the velocity of light for interstellar travel. To give them credit, they stated that this is at the “edge of possibility” and would only be possible in the very distant future:

“The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is possible to build artificial BHs of the appropriate size, and to employ them in powerplants and starships. The conclusion we reach is that it is just on the edge of possibility to do so, but that quantum gravity effects, as yet unknown, could change the picture either way… Many questions which arise in this program lead to calculations in general relativity which have not been done. Whatever the other merits of our proposal, we are confident it will pose many interesting problems for classical and quantum relativity.”

Note, BH = Black Holes

That is it. Crane & Westmoreland were presenting an academic exercise to pose “many interesting problems for classical and quantum relativity”.

Continue reading “Debunking the Black Hole Interstellar Drive” »

Andrew Skolnick drew my attention to this great article by John Eades, a CERN senior scientist, about antimatter engines and weapons.

Antimatter Pseudoscience by John Eades in the Skeptical Inquirer http://www.csicop.org/si/show/antimatter_pseudoscience/

We, Andrew Skolnick and I, did the calculations and showed that it would cost 42,876x our 2011 World GDP to use antimatter as a propulsion fuel to get to Alpha Centauri!!

John Eades goes one better and shows that it is not technologically feasible, ever. His article is facinating reading, and shows that we cannot base our hopes to leave Earth on antimatter drives.

Continue reading “New Findings on the Antimatter Drive” »