Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology – Page 152

Humanity’s brutal and bellicose past provides ample justification for pursuing settlements on the moon and Mars, Elon Musk says.

The billionaire entrepreneur has long stressed that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help make humanity a multiplanet species — a giant leap that would render us much less vulnerable to extinction.

Human civilization faces many grave threats over the long haul, from asteroid strikes and climate change to artificial intelligence run amok, Musk has said over the years. And he recently highlighted our well-documented inability to get along with each other as another frightening factor. [The BFR: SpaceX’s Mars Colony Plan in Images].

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China’s defunct space station Tiangong-1 will soon plummet toward Earth, likely this weekend. You will almost certainly not be harmed in any way by it—the odds of it striking an individual person are worse than winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. You should not worry about it.

But we’re humans. We’re all probably wondering, what happens if it becomes clear that pieces of the debris will strike a populated area? This is a long discussion that far predates Tiangong-1.

China launched the house-sized Tiangong-1 space station in 2011. It was a prototype that could only hold a three-person crew, and the plan was for it to fall back to Earth in a controlled reentry, meaning scientists would get to pick where it lands. In 2016, China informed the UN that the satellite was no longer functioning, but denied that it lost control of the ship in some more recent reports. Tiangong-1’s orbit is decaying as the craft slowly succumbs to Earth’s gravity.

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Scientists have discovered 15 new planets, including a “super-Earth” that may have liquid water on its surface.

The planets are orbiting small, cool stars near our solar system that are known as “Red Dwarfs.”

One of the brightest Red Dwarfs, K2-155, has three “super-Earths,” one of which, K2-155d, could be within the star’s habitable zone. K2-155d, which has a radius 1.6 times that of Earth, may harbor liquid water, according to three-dimensional global climate simulations.

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“A few months from now, a group of people will come here with something called an electric car. I need to know whether or not you have the right voltage connection for them to plug in their vehicles. Do you understand what I’m asking for?”

Mr. Dev Reddy, manager of a gas station in rural Anantapur district of India’s Andhra Pradesh looked at me as if he understood. It was 2008, and most people in India had never seen an electric car, but without flinching he took me to a shed to reveal a large plug point, which was used to power an electric sugar cane juicing machine. One look at it and I knew that there was sufficient voltage coming through the connection to be able to charge the lithium-ion battery in the REVA electric vehicles my friends and I would be driving 3,500 kilometers across India.

In 2008, it was folly to imagine India creating new technological solutions to address the climate crisis. For decades India had called itself a victim of climate change and thus incapable of acting to reduce emissions; what’s more, 400 million Indians had no access to electricity at all.

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Last year, scientists took a big step towards creating the next generation of computers.

For the first time ever, they stored light-based information as sound waves on a computer chip — something the researchers compared to capturing lightning as thunder.

While that might sound a little strange, this conversion is critical if we ever want to shift from our current, inefficient electronic computers, to light-based computers that move data at the speed of light.

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Scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University have created, for the first time a three-dimensional skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally.

In an extremely sparse and cold , the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of , which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of . The persistence of such knots could be the reason why ball lightning, a ball of plasma, lives for a surprisingly long time in comparison to a lightning strike. The new results could inspire new ways of keeping plasma intact in a stable ball in fusion reactors.

‘It is remarkable that we could create the synthetic electromagnetic knot, that is, quantum ball lightning, essentially with just two counter-circulating electric currents. Thus, it may be possible that a natural ball lighting could arise in a normal ,’ says Dr Mikko Möttönen, leader of the theoretical effort at Aalto University.

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Scientists create ‘quantum ball lightning’ in the lab in breakthrough that could pave the way for stable fusion reactors…

In the new research, led by scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University, the team created a three-dimensional skyrmion in an extremely cold quantum gas.

The three-dimensional particle consists of knots made from the spin fields of a Bose-Einstein condensate – or, atoms cooled to a point just above absolute zero.

According to the researchers, this bizarre tangle may share some of the characteristics of ball lightning.

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Antimatter is notoriously tricky to store and study, thanks to the fact that it will vanish in a burst of energy if it so much as touches regular matter. The CERN lab is one of the only places in the world that can readily produce the stuff, but getting it into the hands of the scientists who want to study it is another matter (pun not intended). After all, how can you transport something that will annihilate any physical container you place it in? Now, CERN researchers are planning to trap and truck antimatter from one facility to another.

Antimatter is basically the evil twin of normal matter. Each antimatter particle is identical to its ordinary counterpart in almost every way, except it carries the opposite charge, leading the two to destroy each other if they come into contact. Neutron stars and jets of plasma from black holes may be natural sources, and it even seems to be formed in the Earth’s atmosphere with every bolt of lightning.

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