Lifeboat Foundation

Back-of-the-envelope math suggests interstellar probes get faster every year.

Despite the 10-second lag, two astronauts had a lot to say about tech for space at CES 2023.

Today (Jan. 06), the International Space Station (ISS), which is the only location where people can investigate the long-term effects of living without gravity, completed the first call ever made in 4K to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023.

In the first instance, the discussion was unsurprisingly focused on what it’s like to be living in space now. After all, it’s not every day you get to watch two astronauts in real-time casually floating a mic between each other to answer our pressing earthly questions.

An exploration of ten far future ways we might colonize the Milky Way.

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These new views of familiar space sights reveal details never before seen.

In other words, what appears to be emergent to us today, with our present limitations of what its within our power to compute, may someday in the future be describable in purely reductionist terms. Many such systems that were once incapable of being described via reductionism have, with superior models (as far as what we choose to pay attention to) and the advent of improved computing power, now been successfully described in precisely a reductionist fashion. Many seemingly chaotic systems can, in fact, be predicted to whatever accuracy we arbitrarily choose, so long as enough computational resources are available.

Yes, we can’t rule out non-reductionism, but wherever we’ve been able to make robust predictions for what the fundamental laws of nature do imply for large-scale, complex structures, they’ve been in agreement with what we’ve been able to observe and measure. The combination of the known particles that make up the Universe and the four fundamental forces through which they interact has been sufficient to explain, from atomic to stellar scales and beyond, everything we’ve ever encountered in this Universe. The existence of systems that are too complex to predict with current technology is not an argument against reductionism.

Comet C/2022 E3 will be visible in the northern sky this month.

Comet C/2022 E3 hasn’t been seen for 50,000 years, but now’s your chance.

New James Webb observations reveal massive Milky Way-like structures that scientists didn’t expect to find in the early universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to alter our understanding of the universe.

The $10 billion space observatory has observed Milky Way-like galaxies much further back in time than previously thought possible, a press statement reveals.

Summary: Time spent in a novel environment causes neural representations to grow in a surprising way.

Source: Salk Institute.

Young children sometimes believe that the moon is following them, or that they can reach out and touch it. It appears to be much closer than is proportional to its true distance. As we move about our daily lives, we tend to think that we navigate space in a linear way.

Nothing personal, the Sun is just going through a phase right now. On Jan 4, 2023, our planet reached the closest point to the Sun in its orbit and is expected to be hit by the wake of a coronal mass ejection (CME) coming from the Sun, Live Science reported.

IStock/cokada.

Solar activity has been picking up pace in the past few months as the Sun approaches the peak of its solar cycle. Every 11 years or so, the poles on the Sun switch their positions, sending our star into a tizzy of activity, marked by the appearance of sunspots and darker areas on the solar surface.