Monthly Archives: May 2018

May 31

Via Rita de Heer.

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Via Rita de Heer.

For your starship, airship, and ocean-going ship inspiration.

Originally shared by Malcolm Torres

Here we have an excellent drawing of the Royal Rotterdam Lloyd ship MS Willem Ruys (1947 to 1965) later completely remodelled and recommissioned as the Achille Lauro (1965 to 1994). It’s quite a large picture which is only fitting because it’s quite a large ship with a long and wonderful history. She went round the world many times as a luxury cruise liner between Europe and Indonesia. Thank you to Rita de Heer for this picture. If you would like more information, read the colourful history of this glorious vessel here: http://www.ssmaritime.com/willemruys-part-one.htm

May 31

Afrofuturism, anyone?

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Afrofuturism, anyone?

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“Assefa is a computer scientist, a futurist, and a utopian — but a pragmatic one at that. He is founder and chief executive of iCog, the first artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Ethiopia, and a stone’s throw from the home of Lucy. iCog Labs launched in 2013 with $50,000 and just four programmers. Today, halfway up an unassuming tower block, dozens of software developers type in silence. Their desks are cluttered with electronic components and dismembered robot body parts, from a soccer-playing bot called Abebe to a miniature robo-Einstein. An earlier prototype of Sophia, a widely recognized humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics (she appeared with late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon last year) is here too. Arguably the world’s most famous robot of her kind, Sophia’s software was partly developed here in Ethiopia’s capital.

In stark contrast to the famine-stricken images that linger in the minds of many Westerners, Addis Ababa has, in recent years, become a hub for international business and diplomacy. Glitzy new office blocks and hotels continue to rise across the sprawling capital, and while Ethiopia is still ranked among the world’s poorest countries in terms of GDP per capita, it is also among the fastest growing.

[…]

Artificial intelligence is the latest technology sweeping the world, and consultancy firm McKinsey predicts that up to 30 percent of the global workforce could be displaced by 2030 because of advances in AI, robotics, and digitization. And that’s why Assefa and other stakeholders think Ethiopia would do better to skip the manufacturing stage of development and invest instead in a high-tech workforce — including one that at the cutting edge of AI. This, he argues, would help Ethiopians find a new path to development by riding the wave of technological disruption.

“We should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies — that is already done,” Assefa argues.

That makes sense to academics like Singh — though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. “But any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.””

https://undark.org/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-ethiopoia/

May 30

Women showed, in some ways, better astronaut potential than men, but various combinations of prejudice and politics…

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Women showed, in some ways, better astronaut potential than men, but various combinations of prejudice and politics prevented this early (privately funded) program from leading to actual female astronauts.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“In April, Netflix debuted Mercury 13, a documentary about a trailblazing group of 13 women in the 1960s who could have been the first US female astronauts, if their training program hadn’t been cancelled. The doc is a touching portrait of the women pilots, but it leaves some questions unanswered.

The Mercury 13 program was not officially run by NASA. It was created by NASA physician William Randolph Lovelace, who developed the physical and psychological tests used to select NASA’s first seven male astronauts for Project Mercury. The women completed physical and psychological tests, but before they could complete the training, the privately funded program was cancelled. Why did that happen?

In the Netflix documentary, one of the female pilots says NASA had “no need for women astronauts.” The space agency “didn’t want this program, pure and simple,” says Jackie Lovelace Johnson, Lovelace’s daughter. The documentary doesn’t provide NASA’s take, or feature interviews with historians. Directors David Sington and Heather Walsh tell the story through sit-down interviews with some of the Mercury 13 women and their relatives. The doc also leaves unclear why exactly one of the women, famous pilot Jacqueline Cochran, eventually testified against the program when the case was brought before Congress in 1962.

To answer these questions, and get more context, I spoke with Margaret Weitekamp, a historian at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and author of the book Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program. Weitekamp hadn’t seen the documentary when I talked to her, but she did tell me right away that the women shouldn’t be called the Mercury 13. “It is ahistorical and misleading,” she told me.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17393698/netflix-documentary-mercury-13-women-space-astronauts-margaret-weitekamp-interview
May 29

My mind immediately (before I’d read the article) went to the idea of coming across empty terraformed planets that a…

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My mind immediately (before I’d read the article) went to the idea of coming across empty terraformed planets that a forerunner race had seeded with engineered microbes but never used.

That’s not in the piece. But a lot of great space applications of biotech are, including making fuel (as in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet).

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Microbes in Space: Bioengineered Bugs Could Help Colonize New Planets https://suhub.co/2LDnDLM

May 28

I’ve had an idea for a while for a setting in which hollowed-out asteroids at the Lagrange points are “extensions”…

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I’ve had an idea for a while for a setting in which hollowed-out asteroids at the Lagrange points are “extensions” of terrestrial cities: High New York, High Hong Kong, High Tokyo…

Via Isaac Kuo.

Originally shared by Troy

I agree with Bezos. Nobody lives in Antarctica besides visiting scientists and workers. But at any one time, nearly a million people are in the air at any one time. So a million people in space is hardly a stretch of the imagination (though it still sounds crazy to say it). Nobody has to go to Mars and give birth to babies amidst radiation and dust storms and await the apocalypse on Earth, which may or may not come. If you’re going to live in space, it ought to be pleasant.

What is the MacGuffinite we could use to justify living out there? This is crazy now, but how about office space. A square metre of Hong Kong real estate costs $3 000 a year. Now, if you take the ISS, its operating costs are on the order of $2 million a year per square metre* of office space: $3 to $4 billion total.

If you drop launch costs to 1% of what they are now, let’s say you can have 600 people in an equivalently large station, giving you $20 000 a year office space.

Now the interesting thing is this. How expensive is your HK real estate in 30 years, when the big cheap rockets like New Armstrong and BFR are flying? $30 000 a year, assuming 8% growth.

Now, this is a very simplistic treatment, but imagine now that a space station is zoned as an extension of Singapore. Singapore has run out of space (no pun intended), and is busy trying to cram all its business and residential areas into a tiny island, building up and dredging to make additional land. How long before there are some operations that start becoming worthwhile? Tech and research comes first, but then as the station gets bigger, other business opportunities appear, more people are needed and the station gets bigger again – only without any limits to expansion. This is what Bezos has in mind. Mines aren’t settlements. Settlements arise from continual opportunities to make money, and also simply because they are there. People move there because they want to be there, and they will find some way to engage in economic activity in order to do so.

*1 cubic metres of pressurised volume to 2 square metres of floor space, because the floor and ceiling also provide work space

Via Robbie Yarber. Cheers mate.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-space-colonies-oneill/