Chinese Government launches in the coming weeks their new Quantum Satellite which advances their networks, communications, etc. The question remaining is with Chinese Government backed hackers; what will they do on this technology.
Discussion in ‘China & Far East’ started by onebyone, Jul 27, 2016 at 8:26 PM.
“An increasing number of US landowners want to build commune-style villages that are completely self-sufficient and have a low carbon footprint”
Russia has agreed to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier jointly with India.
According to sources close to the Indian Navy, Kremlin recently sent a letter to the Indian Defence Ministry in which the offer was made. A senior Navy officer told the press: “A Russian military delegation offered India the Project 23000E ‘Storm’ (E stands for export-oriented, Eksportny) heavy aircraft carrier several weeks ago.” The officer, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the Narendra Modi government was considering the offer and would make a final decision soon.
Speaking at a press conference in the Indian capital a couple of days ago, the officer said: “The surface combatant is known to have a full displacement of about 100,000 tonnes and a price of about USD 5.7 billion. The proposed carrier has been jointly developed by the Krylov State Research Centre (KGNC) and the Nevskoye Design Bureau (NPKB), a subsidiary of the United Shipbuilding Corporation. The building of the Project 23300 ‘Storm’ aircraft carrier is supposed to take about 10–11 years.”
Continue reading “Russia Ready To Build Nuke-Powered Aircraft Carrier For India” »
Powered by developments in exponential technologies, the cost of housing, transportation, food, health care, entertainment, clothing, education and so on will fall, eventually approaching, believe it or not, zero.
People are concerned about how AI and robotics are taking jobs, destroying livelihoods, reducing our earning capacity, and subsequently destroying the economy.
In anticipation, countries like Canada, India and Finland are running experiments to pilot the idea of “universal basic income” — the unconditional provision of a regular sum of money from the government to support livelihood independent of employment.
Continue reading “Why the Cost of Living Is Poised to Plummet in the Next 20 Years” »
Transhumanists will know that the science fiction author Zoltan Istvan has unilaterally leveraged the movement into a political party contesting the 2016 US presidential election. To be sure, many transhumanists have contested Istvan’s own legitimacy, but there is no denying that he has generated enormous publicity for many key transhumanist ideas. Interestingly, his lead idea is that the state should do everything possible to uphold people’s right to live forever. Of course, he means to live forever in a healthy state, fit of mind and body. Istvan cleverly couches this policy as simply an extension of what voters already expect from medical research and welfare provision. And while he may be correct, the policy is fraught with hazards – especially if, as many transhumanists believe, we are on the verge of revealing the secrets to biological immortality.
In June, Istvan and I debated this matter at Brain Bar Budapest. Let me say, for the record, that I think that we are sufficiently close to this prospect that it is not too early to discuss its political and economic implications.
Two months before my encounter with Istvan, I was on a panel at the Edinburgh Science Festival with the great theorist of radical life extension Aubrey de Grey, where he declared that people who live indefinitely will seem like renovated vintage cars. Whatever else, he is suggesting that they would be frozen in time. He may actually be right about this. But is such a state desirable, given that throughout history radical change has been facilitated generational change? Specifically, two simple facts make the young open to doing things differently: The young have no memory of past practices working to anyone else’s benefit, and they have not had the time to invest in those practices to reap their benefits. Whatever good is to be found in the past is hearsay, as far as the young are concerned, which they are being asked to trust as they enter a world that they know is bound to change.
Questions have been already raised about whether tomorrow’s Methuselahs will wish to procreate at all, given the time available to them to realize dreams that in the past would have been transferred to their offspring. After all, as human life expectancy has increased 50% over the past century, the birth rate has correspondingly dropped. One can only imagine what will happen once ageing can be arrested, if not outright reversed!
Experts at Adelaide’s Flinders University have made an Alzheimer’s breakthrough that may result in world’s first dementia vaccine. Developed by Australian and US scientists, this vaccine may not only prevent but also reverse early stages of Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.
The Alzheimer’s vaccine may be tested on humans within the next two to three years after being bankrolled by the US Government. Scientists from Flinders University and America’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and University of California developed the vaccine by targeting proteins in the brain that block neurons.
The formula targets tau proteins and abnormal beta-amyloid that cause Alzheimer’s. The scientists are confident that the vaccine would eventually be used as preventative vaccine. According to Flinders University medicine professor Nikolai Petrovsky, the proteins must be removed from the brain as Alzheimer’s, and dementia sufferers have lots of these broken down proteins inside.
Continue reading “Alzheimer’s breakthrough: Vaccine developed” »
I was asked this at Quora.com, where I answer questions under the pen name, ‘Ellery’. But the query deserves a companion question, and so I approached the reply by answering two questions.
You might have asked “Why was Bitcoin designed to have a cap?” But, instead, you asked “Why is the cap set at 21 million bitcoins”. Let’s explore both questions starting with the choice of a circulation cap…
Why set the cap at 21 million BTC?
The choice of a cap number is arbitrary and in fact, it could be 1 or it could be 1 hundred trillion. It makes no difference at all and it has no effect on the economy—even if Bitcoin were to be adopted as a currency all over the world. If it were set to 1 BTC, we would simply discuss nano-BTC instead of 1 BTC for amounts of about $650.
