Nuclear powers role in combating climate change is a contentious topic, but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur thinks he can sway the debate by releasing open-source designs for a small-scale reactor that could be built in two years for just $300 million.

The argument for making nuclear power part of our response to climate change is compelling: the fuel is abundant, it releases no greenhouse gas emissions during operations, and its capable of producing huge amounts of energy.

But safety concerns, cost, and the question of what to do with the radioactive waste produced mean its failed to capture the zeitgeist.

Bret Kugelmass wants to change that. After selling his drone company Airphrame in 2017 he decided to take on climate change, founding a non-profit research organization called the Energy Impact Center (EIC). And pretty quickly, he came to the conclusion that nuclear power is the way forward.

To advance his vision, last week EIC launched the OPEN100 project, which Kugelmass says will provide open-source blueprints for the design, construction, and financing of a 100-megawatt nuclear reactor. He claims the reactor can be built for $300 million in less than two years, significantly decreasing the per-kilowatt cost of nuclear power.

Nuclear power isnt just part of the solution to addressing climate change; it is the solution, Kugelmass said in a press release. OPEN100 will radically change the way we deploy nuclear power plants going forward, offering a substantially less expensive and less complicated solution.

The logic behind the idea is that the biggest barrier to the widespread use of nuclear is the cost of building reactors, which most experts would agree is a major problem for the industry. Kugelmass thinks thats because weve been focused on large, overly complicated reactors that take far too long to build. His solution is to go back to tried and tested pressurized water reactors from the previous century, and bring their cost down even further through standardization and a focus on speedy construction.

The path to this conclusion was a review of the nuclear industry by EIC staff involving 1,500 interviews with experts in everything from technology to economics and policy. The team used this analysis to put together an open-source template for designing and constructing a nuclear power plant.

Kugelmass isnt the only one convinced that shrinking reactors is the way to revive interest in nuclear power. Several companies are developing small modular reactors that promise to be both cheaper and safer. NuScale in the US is close to deploying its first plant, and Rolls-Royce in the UK and the Chinese and Russian governments are also working on designs.

But there are still plenty of unresolved questions. Any claims about how quickly and cheaply a reactor can be built should be taken with a grain of salt in an industry where costly overruns are the norm. At present, OPEN100s blueprints consist of simple 3D shells of components like reactor vessels or turbines, without any detail on how they workthough the organizations website says more detailed models will be released in the coming months.

Theres also widespread skepticism about how transformative the shift to smaller reactors would be, with many experts saying they face the same cost and safety concerns as their larger cousins. Kugelmass is bullish on the safety front, telling POWER that the low number of casualties from the Fukushima nuclear disaster showed that nuclear plants have similar risks of accidents as any other industrial plant, with similarly mild consequences.

But safety concerns dont only revolve around the risk of meltdown. All nuclear plants create large amounts of long-life radioactive waste that no country has yet worked out how to deal with. And regardless of what the facts are, public opinion is broadly unwelcoming to new nuclear development; the HBO series Chernobyl didnt help.

However, the costs of renewable energy are plummeting and advances in utility-scale energy storage are beginning to provide solutions to the intermittency of wind and sun. If these trends continue, they could call into question the rationale for a major investment in new nuclear technologythough by some estimates, even if the solar and wind intermittency problem is solved and battery storage capacity improves, solely relying on these sources wont be enough to meet future energy needs.

This doesnt seem to deter Kugelmass, though. To coincide with the launch of OPEN100 he also launched a for-profit EIC spin-off called Last Energy that will seek to connect private investors with opportunities to develop new nuclear projects around the world. We could soon be finding out whether open-source nuclear power has any legs.

Image Credit: Open100

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The World's First Open-Source Nuclear Reactor Blueprint Is Coming Online - Singularity Hub

There is a saying that has emerged among the tech set in recent years: AI is the new electricity. The platitude refers to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence for driving advances in everything from transportation to predicting the weather.

Of course, the computers and data centers that support AIs complex algorithms are very much dependent on electricity. While that may seem pretty obvious, it may be surprising to learn that AI can be extremely power-hungry, especially when it comes to training the models that enable machines to recognize your face in a photo or for Alexa to understand a voice command.

The scale of the problem is difficult to measure, but there have been some attempts to put hard numbers on the environmental cost.

For instance, one paper published on the open-access repository arXiv claimed that the carbon emissions for training a basic natural language processing (NLP) modelalgorithms that process and understand language-based dataare equal to the CO2 produced by the average American lifestyle over two years. A more robust model required the equivalent of about 17 years worth of emissions.

The authors noted that about a decade ago, NLP models could do the job on a regular commercial laptop. Today, much more sophisticated AI models use specialized hardware like graphics processing units, or GPUs, a chip technology popularized by Nvidia for gaming that also proved capable of supporting computing tasks for AI.

OpenAI, a nonprofit research organization co-founded by tech prophet and profiteer Elon Musk, said that the computing power used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time since 2012. Thats about the time that GPUs started making their way into AI computing systems.

While GPUs from Nvidia remain the gold standard in AI hardware today, a number of startups have emerged to challenge the companys industry dominance. Many are building chipsets designed to work more like the human brain, an area thats been dubbed neuromorphic computing.

One of the leading companies in this arena is Graphcore, a UK startup that has raised more than $450 million and boasts a valuation of $1.95 billion. The companys version of the GPU is an IPU, which stands for intelligence processing unit.

To build a computer brain more akin to a human one, the big brains at Graphcore are bypassing the precise but time-consuming number-crunching typical of a conventional microprocessor with one thats content to get by on less precise arithmetic.

The results are essentially the same, but IPUs get the job done much quicker. Graphcore claimed it was able to train the popular BERT NLP model in just 56 hours, while tripling throughput and reducing latency by 20 percent.

An article in Bloomberg compared the approach to the human brain shifting from calculating the exact GPS coordinates of a restaurant to just remembering its name and neighborhood.

Graphcores hardware architecture also features more built-in memory processing, boosting efficiency because theres less need to send as much data back and forth between chips. Thats similar to an approach adopted by a team of researchers in Italy that recently published a paper about a new computing circuit.

The novel circuit uses a device called a memristor that can execute a mathematical function known as a regression in just one operation. The approach attempts to mimic the human brain by processing data directly within the memory.

Daniele Ielmini at Politecnico di Milano, co-author of the Science Advances paper, told Singularity Hub that the main advantage of in-memory computing is the lack of any data movement, which is the main bottleneck of conventional digital computers, as well as the parallel processing of data that enables the intimate interactions among various currents and voltages within the memory array.

Ielmini explained that in-memory computing can have a tremendous impact on energy efficiency of AI, as it can accelerate very advanced tasks by physical computation within the memory circuit. He added that such radical ideas in hardware design will be needed in order to make a quantum leap in energy efficiency and time.

The emphasis on designing more efficient chip architecture might suggest that AIs power hunger is essentially a hardware problem. Thats not the case, Ielmini noted.

We believe that significant progress could be made by similar breakthroughs at the algorithm and dataset levels, he said.

Hes not the only one.

One of the key research areas at Qualcomms AI research lab is energy efficiency. Max Welling, vice president of Qualcomm Technology R&D division, has written about the need for more power-efficient algorithms. He has gone so far as to suggest that AI algorithms will be measured by the amount of intelligence they provide per joule.

One emerging area being studied, Welling wrote, is the use of Bayesian deep learning for deep neural networks.

Its all pretty heady stuff and easily the subject of a PhD thesis. The main thing to understand in this context is that Bayesian deep learning is another attempt to mimic how the brain processes information by introducing random values into the neural network. A benefit of Bayesian deep learning is that it compresses and quantifies data in order to reduce the complexity of a neural network. In turn, that reduces the number of steps required to recognize a dog as a dogand the energy required to get the right result.

A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has previously demonstrated another way to improve AI energy efficiency by converting deep learning neural networks into whats called a spiking neural network. The researchers spiked their deep spiking neural network (DSNN) by introducing a stochastic process that adds random values like Bayesian deep learning.

The DSNN actually imitates the way neurons interact with synapses, which send signals between brain cells. Individual spikes in the network indicate where to perform computations, lowering energy consumption because it disregards unnecessary computations.

The system is being used by cancer researchers to scan millions of clinical reports to unearth insights on causes and treatments of the disease.

Helping battle cancer is only one of many rewards we may reap from artificial intelligence in the future, as long as the benefits of those algorithms outweigh the costs of using them.

Making AI more energy-efficient is an overarching objective that spans the fields of algorithms, systems, architecture, circuits, and devices, Ielmini said.

Image Credit: analogicus from Pixabay

Original post:

AI Is an Energy-Guzzler. We Need to Re-Think Its Design, and Soon - Singularity Hub

A pioneer in materials, objects, and construction, Neri Oxman is showing work from her 20-year career as an architect, designer, and inventor at the Neri Oxman:Material Ecology exhibition currently on view until May 20 at New York Citys Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Curated by Paola Antonelli with help from curatorial assistant Anna Burckhardt, Oxmans work on display explores the intersection of the science of materials, digital fabrication, and organic design in pieces both extruded from and infused with the wisdom of nature. This is Oxmans seventh exhibition at MoMA, andMaterial Ecology is a magnifying glass for the vibrant microstructures that give shape to the world.

My team and I stand in the crossroads, challenging some of the processes that designers face at the intersection of biology and technology, nature and culture, Oxman said during a media preview of the show on February 20. There will come a moment where we will find material singularity [a state in which we cannot differentiate between what is man-made and what is grown]was this made, was this built, or was it grown? And does it matter?

As a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and founder and director of The Mediated Matter Group, Oxman observes naturally occurring structures, such as birch tree bark and crustacean shells, and routines, such assilkworm behavior, and presses them forward toward innovative building materials.

We envision these different objects that are processes and materials as tools for the future, Antonelli said. As tools for architects, designers, artists to make in a different way together with nature.

The exhibition includes demonstrations of what these processes could ultimately lead to one day, with tables arranged to resemble Oxmans lab, videos displaying the projects progressions, and the artifacts themselves. The works are categorized into Infusions and Extrusions:

Infusions

Totems is a series of 3D-printed photopolymer resin infused in melanin. The three 5 7/8 x 5 7/8 x 19 5/16 blocks are set within black columns, suggesting a future as a compressive building material. They stand in front of a rendering of an illuminated structure in Cape Town, South Africa, that employs Totems as walls.

Totems, 2018. Melanins are a group of pigments ranging in color from yellow to brown. The term melanin often refers to eumelanin, a particular type that is brown-black in color. However, other types, such as pheomelanin (yellow-red in color), also exist. This library represents the diversity of melanin, and includes constituent components of the reaction as well as melanin-containing natural materials, such as feathers and cuttlefish ink. (Courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group)

A collection of contemporary interpretations of ritualistic death masks made from photopolymer, Vespers are infused with natural minerals and bacteria. The 15 futuristic masks range from the size of a human head to nearly twice that and were created with spatial mapping algorithms. Some seem to be almost coral-like metallic kaleidoscopes, while others resemble opals with frozen whisps of color.

Vespers,2018. Series 1, Mask 5, front view. Designed for The New Ancient Collection. Curated and 3-D printed by Stratasys. (Yoram Reshef)

Imaginary Beingsare multicolored photopolymer interpretations of body armor inspired by Luis Borgess Libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967), which described 120 mythical animals from folklore. The creations range from protective helmets to breastplates resembling crystalline dragonfly wings.

Extrusions

Glass,pseudo-cylindrical printed structures, were created with The Mediated Matter Groups 2015 invention G3DP, or Glass 3D Printer. The exhibition includes smaller samples, roughly 8 inches in diameter as shown below, and larger columns of printed glass, reaching almost 10 feet high.

Glass I. 2015. (Courtesy The Mediated Matter Group)

As the focal point of the exhibition, Silk Pavilion IIis a suspended structure of water-soluble mesh stretched across an aluminum framework covered in silk spun by 17,532 silkworms. The twisted gossamer cylinder stretches almost 20 feet, nearly doubling the size of theSilk Pavilion I dome constructed at the MIT Media Lab in 2013. Through 3-inch-square studies (exhibited beneath the pavilion), Oxman and her team were able to pinpoint the geometrical situations in which silkworms spin flat sheets as opposed to three-dimensional cocoons, enabling the researchers to design a structure that could be spun by the silkworms themselves, rather than a machine that uses the silk. This discovery allowed for a fabrication process that works in harmony with nature rather than in dominance over it.

Silk Pavilion,2013. A Bombyx mori silkworm deposits silk fiber on a digitally fabricated scaffolding structure. (Courtesy The Mediated Matter Group)

Aguahoja I is a collection of objects printed from biopolymers, including wood-pulp cellulose, apple pectin, calcium carbonate, acetic acid, vegetable glycerin, and chitosan. The installation stretches across the wall of the gallery and consists of a library of fabricated pieces designed to be compatible with nature. The water-based objects are designed to decay over time, serving as a temporary alternative to plastics.

Aguahoja I. 2018. The Aguahoja Artifacts Display: A catalog of material experiments spanning four years of research shows the range of aesthetics and behaviors we have been able to elicit in medium-to-large-scale prints via performative geometric toolpaths, generative design, bio-composite distributions, and variable fabrication parameters. (Courtesy The Mediated Matter Group)

Oxman and her research team at the Mediated Matter Group operate through what they call the Krebs Cycle of Creativity, which is a framework that considers the domains for art, science, engineering, and design as synergetic forms of thinking and making in which the input from one becomes the output of another, as defined in the exhibitions catalog, designed by Irma Boom.

The input for science is information. Science converts information into knowledge. Engineering then takes knowledge and translates it to utility. Design then takes utility and places it in a cultural context, Oxman explained. Then art takes all things designed around us in the built environment and questions the perception of the world.

Funded by Allianz, MoMAs partner for design and innovation, Material Ecology embodies Oxmans Krebs Cycle with artifacts that are more grown than made, through a process called templating. The researchers and designers at the Mediated Matter Group used environmental, geometrical, chemical, and genetic influences to manipulate materials.

They are singular materials that differentiate their properties locally to accommodate for environmental and structural strengths, Oxman said. They are not made of parts. They are wholes that are bigger than the sum of their parts.

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Neri Oxman grows tools for the future at new MoMA retrospective - The Architect's Newspaper

Borderlands 3

There was an absolutely tremendous amount of Borderlands 3 news dropped yesterday, mostly focused on the new DLC, Guns, Love and Tentacles which features the wedding of Hammerlock and Jakobs with a bonus cameo by Gaige as the wedding planner.

I covered all of that in a post here, and yet there was something that happened yesterday in the actual game itself that probably flew a bit under the radar. There was a Borderlands 3 hotfix that buffed some of the weakest weapons in the game, which is always nice to see, rather than nerfing the strong things. Some of these weapons are so common and bad theyre memes, but now? Maybe, just maybe, theyll be okay.

Heres the full list of the buffed weapons:

The Lob

Now has a magazine of 12, not 4, and shoots three balls instead of one giant ball. Damage per tick has been greatly increased. I feel like this has already been buffed once before, but it didnt do the job, it seems. Curious to use it now.

Borderlands 3

DAHL Assault Rifles

I always thought these rifles were underperforming, and now they have received a 35% damage boost across the board.

Which Assault Rifles are DAHL, you ask? That would be Breath of the Dying, Kaos, Warlord and Star Helix as the most common ones, and Barrage and Good Juju as two of the more rare ones. So knock yourself out with these.

Woodblocker

If there ever was a meme weapon in the game, its this, which seems to have like a 50% drop rate from bosses. Well, now it has had its critical damage increased by 100% and it has better recoil.

Malaks Bane

And heres the other common Sniper Rifle you will find absolutely everywhere. The shotgun part of it now costs less ammo, but the only buff we know is greatly increased damage. By just how much? I guess we have to use it and find out.

Rubys Wrath

Forgot this even existed. No exact numbers here, just greatly increased damage and greatly increased the cooldown of the singularity grenade. Its still probably no ION Cannon, but these buffs should help.

The problem, of course is that these weapons have been terrible for so long that I have deleted practically all of them from my vault and characters unless they had some super good Anointment. I dont think I have a single Lob, Woodblocker or Rubys Wrath across all 300+ saved items in the game, so I guess its time to farm some. If their old drop rates are similar, this really shouldnt be much of a problem at all.

Love to see underused stuff buffed which Borderlands has been pretty good about lately. We still have a month until the DLC so not much going on until then except experimentation with some of these guns, perhaps.

Follow meon Twitter,FacebookandInstagram. Pick up my new sci-fi novelHerokiller, and read my first series,The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also onaudiobook.

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You May Have Missed Borderlands 3's Weapon Buffing Hotfix Yesterday - Forbes

PARIS, France Hedi Slimane is exactly where he was again. This season, Celine did not progress, showing the courage and the narrowness of the creative directors vision. Hedi does Hedi. In this sense, Slimane is brave: he believes is his ideas, no matter what. This season he moved a bit further into the Sixties and Seventies, but the root references did not change. And they are as literal as ever, from beatniks to bohemian ladies in capes or pleated silk dresses and large brim hats. There was strictness here, some sparkle there, a lot of velvet, unisex everything bags included and jewellery developed with the acclaimed French artist Cesar. But ultimately it was endless dj vu.

Sure, the tailoring was mean, and one has to commend the designer for sticking to his guns. But in a time of plurality, it was astonishing how much Slimane insists on singularity. His fashion calls for a specific body type, a specific attitude. You either like it or not, tertium non datur. The fact is, that skinny maudit thing does not look that cool anymore. It looks dated, in fact, like Slimane is trying too hard to deliver his ideal of what a youngster might like. This ultimate lack of coolness might actually be a kiss of death. Perhaps, its time to move on or not give a damn and stay singularly still.

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At Celine, Hedi Does Hedi | Fashion Show Review, Ready-to-Wear Autumn 2020 | BoF - The Business of Fashion

The rapidly falling cost of getting into orbit has spurred a boom in the space industry as a host of new applications become economical. Now a secretive startup plans to slash the cost to just $250,000 by flinging rockets into space rather than firing them.

Over the last decade, the pioneering work done by SpaceX has shown that getting stuff into orbit doesnt need to be so expensive and that there are viable business opportunities to be had in the private space industry. Combined with advances in satellite technology, theres now a thriving market for small, inexpensive spacecraft in low-Earth orbit doing everything from remote sensing to delivering broadband internet access.

But while costs have fallen dramatically, the cheapest option for reaching low-Earth orbita rideshare on SpaceXs Falcon 9still starts at $1 million, and launches only happen twice a month at best. California-based startup SpinLaunch says its technology will allow up to five launches a day for as little as $250,000.

The company has held its cards close to its chest since its founding in 2014, but last month it gave Wired a close-up look at its ambitious plans. The idea is to build a centrifuge the size of a football field that will spin a rocket around until it reaches a speed of 5,000 miles per hour and then release it into the void.

So far the company has built a prototype about 12 yards across that has managed to get an 11-pound projectile up to 4,000 miles per hour, but they are now in the process of building one three times bigger at New Mexicos Spaceport America. They hope it will be able to launch 110-pound test vehicles on suborbital flights by the end of this year.

The centrifuge consists of an electrical motor that spins a long arm made of kevlar and carbon fiber. A launch vehicle is attached to one end with a counterweight on the other side, and theyre spun around in a partial vacuum to avoid air resistance. The centrifuge slowly ramps up the speed over a few hours, and then when its at peak velocity, the rocket is released and an airlock opens for a fraction of a second to let it fly out of the launch tube.

Even these high speeds wont be enough to get all the way to orbit, so the rocket will have engines that will kick in at 200,000 feet. But because the air is so thin at this altitude, it will only require about a minutes worth of burn, drastically reducing the fuel bill. SpinLaunch has already built a 25-foot test model of the launch vehicle, which it says will be able to carry a 200-pound satellite.

The company has raised $80 million and has some big-name backers, including Airbus Ventures and Alphabets venture capital arm, GV. Its also secured a contract from the US Department of Defense under a program aimed at developing the ability to launch satellites at very short notice.

Unsurprisingly, though, theres considerable skepticism. Many of the engineers that Wired spoke to raised doubts over whether rockets and satellites would be able to withstand the incredible g-forces10,000 times stronger than gravitythat theyd be subjected to in the centrifuge. Others have suggested the transition from the centrifuges vacuum to the much denser atmosphere outside as the rocket is released could be like hitting a brick wall.

Founder and CEO Jonathan Yaney told Wired theyve tested all kinds of components in the centrifuge, including radios, batteries, GPS modules, and even an iPhone, and theyve all survived. He did admit that the launch vehicle will be more like a missile than a rocket and some components may need to be ruggedized, but Stanford aerospace engineer Juan Alonso, who did due diligence for one of the investors, says their math checks out.

Theres still a long way to go, though, and in the meantime there are plenty of other players trying to muscle into this space. The price of SpaceXs rideshares continues to fall and RocketLab already provides dedicated small-sat missions for as little as $5.7 million with a payload capacity of up to $500.

Startup Astra is also aiming to do daily launches of up to 450 pounds for just $2.5 million, and that price could fall to as low as $1 million. Thats not to mention Virgin Orbits LauncherOne, Fireflys Alpha, Ariane Groups Vega C rocket, and Indias Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, which could all debut this year.

Whoever the winners are, it looks like low-Earth orbit is going to be getting pretty crowded.

Image Credit: Rendering of the inside of a centrifuge. Image courtesy of SpinLaunch

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The Company That Wants to Fling Rockets Into Space With a Giant Centrifuge - Singularity Hub

Many Darwinists object to the sobriquet materialist they consider themselves physicalists. Responding to an article by Bernardo Kastrup, Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved, Darwinist Jerry Coyne explains:

Kastrup is dead wrong that materialism requires all entities to be measurable. [It is] is dead wrong that materialism requires all entities to be measurable. Heres a question: do you have a liver? The answer is based not on measurement, but on observation. I have never heard a definition of materialism that requires quantitative measurement, but it seems to be one [that is] confected to rule out consciousness as a material phenomenon, or the result of a material phenomenon. Unfortunately, [that] rules out a lot of material phenomena that cant be quantified as well, like love. (Ill let readers quibble about that one.)

Here, for instance, is the definition of physicalism (which is said to be the same as materialism) from [the] authoritativeStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(my emphasis):

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists dont deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance dont seem physical items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

That seems pretty accurate, especially with supervene on the physical at the end (for that is what consciousness is), and it says nothing about quantitative characterization.

The observation that materialism implies measurability derives from the Cartesian splitting of the world into res extense (extended stuff) and res cogitans (thinking stuff). Modern materialists are basically Cartesians who have jettisoned res cogitans. Everything, to materialists like Coyne, is extended stuff and the relationships between extended stuff. Everything is in some real sense measurable.

Obviously, this materialist view of reality leaves out much of reality (love, reason, mercy, truth, etc.) so skittish materialists like Coyne often call themselves physicalists, which means that they only accept as real things that can be observed and tested by physical science.

But with 20th-century science, even physicalism is untenable. For example, physics demonstrates the reality of singularities black holes and the Big Bang itself that are by definition not observable or testable by physical science. Singularities are undefined terms in Einsteins equations of general relativity terms in which the denominator goes to zero. They are quite real, but they are not physical in any sense they are undefined by the methods of mathematics and physical science. Now of course the consequences of singularities can be observed and defined the residual background radiation of the Big Bang, or the behavior of matter in the vicinity of a black hole are certainly observable. But the Big Bang singularity itself and the singularity at the core of each black hole are not natural they are not a part of the natural world, and they are not things that we can know by the methods of physical science. If we could know them, they wouldnt singularities they wouldnt be black holes or the Big Bang.

Some of the most important advances in modern science entail the recognition of the existence of very real things that are unknowable by natural science. The supernatural is very real, and the materialist/physicalist denial of this reality is a rejection of modern science.

Editors note: See also:

How Black Holes Figure in the Argument for Cosmic Intelligent Design

First Ever Black Hole Image Points to Cosmologys Big Message

Photo credit: Event Horizon Telescope [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Continued here:

Do Physicalists Believe in Black Holes? - Discovery Institute

The My Hero Academia anime has gotten into something of a filler stretch following the Overhaul arc, and the latest episode saw Shoto Todoroki, Bakugo and the Shiketsu High students stuck with them, trying to calm an entire class of young kids with powerful quirks, who wanted nothing more than to put the older class of students in their place. During the back-and-forth struggle between generations of quirk users, the teachers observing the exercise break down one the big problem staring them all in the face, and what a dark portent it is for the future.

So: Why is the next generation of My Hero Academia's quirk users so strong? It all goes back to the doomsday theory of "Quirk Singularity."

In the world of My Hero Academia the majority of society are born with "quirks," i.e. a unique superpower. In a whole society of superpowered individuals, the usual process of coupling and mating and producing children results in two quirks mixing together to form a more powerful quirk in their offspring. As that new generation of more powerful quirks eventually reaches maturity and breeds, the subsequent generation is born with even more powerful sets of quirks. The cycle goes on and on until the evolutionary process reaches what is known as the "Quirk Singularity" theory.

"Quirk Singularity" posits that after enough generations of increasingly powerful quirks, we'll reach a generation whose quirks are so powerful that they cannot be controlled by the users. The theory was presented by Dr. Ujiko, who observed the red flags of quirk singularity in the fourth generation of quirk users. At the time, no one believed Ujiko except for One For All, who took the doctor under his wing. However, as the generations continue to show increased quirk power, even the Pro Hero world is starting to take notice.

This "Quirk Singularity" theory has major implications for the future of My Hero Academia, as the new generation of quirk users clearly has much more power than discipline and control. That's a trait that lends itself more toward the villain side of the fence than the lives of Pro Heroes, meaning the future that All For One wants is more likely to come to pass, than not.

My Hero Academia was created by Kohei Horikoshi for Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 2014. The story follows Izuku Midoriya, who lives in a world where everyone has powers, even though he was born without them. Dreaming to become a superhero anyway, he's eventually scouted by the world's best hero All Might and enrolls in a school for professional heroes.

The rest is here:

Why Is The Next Generation Of My Hero Academia So Strong? - Comicbook.com

GREENSBORO, N.C. In the hunt for love, theres so much competition. Thats why a Greensboro guy built a dating app where hes the only man allowed. Guess what?! He got a girlfriend. And they seem like a really good match.

It was 90 percent a joke and 10 percent a Hail Mary," said Aaron Smith.

A Hail Mary to one day hopefully getting married. Aaron created the app Singularity where hes the only single man allowed on it. His best friend and computer programmer helped him build the app. Then the two created a Youtube commercial to get the word out. That's when WFMY News 2 picked up the story back in November.

RELATED: Greensboro Man Creates Dating App Where He's The Only Guy Allowed

Since we were the first to tell you about the app, coverage has exploded.

I saw articles about it in Polish and Mandarin. Newsweek, People's website. There was a Youtube outlet that made a 3-D animation of me," Aaron said. "The response has been pretty crazy, but I kinda expected it because people are looking for a chuckle when everything is so doom and gloom nowadays."

Hes gotten about 100 Facebook friend requests.

And messages from a lot of guys wanting me to build them an app," Aaron said.

Mixed in with all of that was an e-mail from Abi.

Who is your future wife, you ask? Lucky for you, Im an eccentric, socially anxious cat lady," she wrote.

Abi lives in Eugene, Oregon. That's 2,800 miles away from Aaron. The two video chat pretty much every day. She says his idea for a one-man dating app made her smile.

People have to be creative. Online dating does suck," Abi said. "It was like something I would do. Also, he has good eyebrows. Very expressive.

Behold said eyebrows:

Abi says Aaron's eyebrows are a big reason why she contacted him.

WFMY

After a few weeks of getting to know each other, Aaron booked a flight to Oregon.

Whats the worst that could happen? Murder?" Aaron wondered.

Abi made this sign to pick Aaron up at the airport.

WFMY

Abi met him at the airport with a sign reading: The Aaron Smith of my dreams

She promptly shook my hand and then said fun fact, were holding hands. I thought that was adorable," Aaron said.

WATCH THEIR DATE IN THE MAIN VIDEO AT THE TOP OF THIS STORY!

The two picnic in the rain.

Aaron Smith

The two went on a picnic, but it rained, so they ate in the car. They tried Zumba for the first time, and talked about the important stuff.

Where do you like to put the thermostat at?" Aaron asked on their date.

"Off. Its cheaper. I just do jumping jacks to stay warm," Abi answered.

We had a lot of fun. Neither one of us robbed each other," Abi said.

"No one died," Aaron added.

All pluses.

It might have changed the trajectory of my life (shoulder shrug). So I mean thats pretty cool, Aaron said.

The date must have struck a chord with Abi too. She wrote him a song.

"The first time I saw your eyebrows on your face, I knew you were the one," her lyrics said. "And if your eyebrows ever get burnt off in a horrible accident then were through. But until then, Im with you.

An old-fashioned love story set to a modern tune.

EDITOR'S NOTE: We asked whats next for the couple, Abi says there are going to have a destination wedding in Kansas halfway between their two homes. It was a joke, or at least we think it was. Kinda hard to tell with these two, which makes them such a great pair.

Make sure not to miss any more updates on this story by liking @WATCHDOGBEN on Facebook

Ben Briscoe. 2,921 likes 237 talking about this. Weekend anchor/investigative reporter in North Carolina for WFMY News 2. Murrow winner and always on the hunt for a story which could make a difference.

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He made a dating app where he's the only guy allowed. He got a girlfriend! - WFMYNews2.com

New Survey asks Participants to Guess When Big Changes will Become Part of their Everyday Lives

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 12, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- When will we be able to hail an autonomous robo-taxigrow great-tasting steak from stem cells in a labconnect the human brain to the cloud so you can Google just by thinking?

Significant numbers of Americans are less than optimistic that these capabilities will be possible anytime soon or even in their lifetimes, even though some of these technologies are already available in limited capacities. Authors of the new book, The Future is Faster Than You Think. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler conducted a survey to determine whether Americans are ready for the technological shifts that are rapidly progressing and, in some cases, already here.

Among the findings:

These views contradict the realitywhich is one of the key takeaways in The Future is Faster Than You Think. The book demonstrates how major technological innovations like flying cars and virtual shopping malls will likely become a reality within the next decade, if not sooner.

"Disruption and democratization of technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality will lead to extraordinary growth and transformation," said Diamandis, who is also founder of several innovative businesses and organizations, including XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. "These converging technologies will transform every industry and create tremendous opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of it."

For the 10-question survey, the 2,663 total participants were asked to predict when a certain milestone would take placedrones will deliver a McDonald's meal to your home; the average healthy lifespan will increase from mid-70s (today) to 100+ years old. Participants had the option to pick one of the following answers: now, by 2030, by 2040 or not in my lifetime.

"We want what's in this book to serve as a warning shot to business leaders who like many American adults don't realize how fast technology will transform the world we all inhabit," said Kotler, the book's co-author who is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist and founder and Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. "Business leaders and the rest of us can either learn how to ride the tsunami of change or get crushed by it."

For more information about The Future is Faster Than You Think, contact Terri Kayden at 973-850-7310 or tkayden@jconnelly.com.

About The Future is Faster than You ThinkThe Future is Faster Than You Thinkoffers a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next 10 years of rapid disruption. Written by New York Times bestselling authors Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, The Future is Faster Than You Think explores how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will reinvent every part of our livestransportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food and financetaking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.

About The Future is Faster SurveyA Google survey of U.S.-only users was conducted between Friday, January 17, 2020 through, Monday, January 20, 2020. There were 2,663 total participants who responded to some or all of 10 multiple-choice survey questions in this period. The 10 questions tasked participants to choose whether certain technological advancements would be readily available to them at some point between now and beyond their lifetimes. Participants surveyed were all 18 years of age or older and varied by race/gender.

Contact: Terri Kayden JConnelly973-850-7310tkayden@jconnelly.com

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SOURCE The Future is Faster Than You Think

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Flying Cars? Future Is Faster Survey Finds Many Americans Doubt They Will Live To See The Sky Replace Highways Despite Rapid Technological...

In a lengthy profile by New Yorker contributor Ian Parker, historian and Israeli public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari speaks out on his theories, his personal life and his predictions for how the world will come to an end. Harari, the author of Sapiens, an international bestseller covering the entirety of world history, serves as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Core theory: Harari argues that humanity faces existential threats from nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. In Sapiens he makes the case that, due to technological and scientific advances, we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world me, you, men, women, love and hate will become irrelevant and humans may disappear entirely. But Harari stops short of offering concrete proposals to address this, aside from international cooperation and focus.

Famous fans: President Barack Obama has recommended Hararis Sapiens, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has purportedly also read the book. Hararis husband and manager Itzik Yahav told Parker that Sapiens convinced the prime minister to cut back on his consumption of meat.

Connections with the rich and powerful: Harari once attended a dinner party at billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs home. The professor and author said he thinks many of the social issues that companies like Facebook cause are bugs, which the companies are trying to correct. Last year, he had a run-in with billionaire investor David Rubenstein at a conference in Ukraine, where Rubenstein gave Harari his business card.

Pessimistic about Mideast peace: Harari sees no motivation among Israelis to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, saying that especially with new surveillance technology the current situation could persist for centuries. He said only a war, a catastrophe a couple of thousand people die, something was likely to break the deadlock.

Read the full profile here.

Read the rest here:

worthy read Yuval Noah Harari reflects on life and the end of the world - Jewish Insider

A singularity is where conventional physics breaks down, including if you're talking about the very... [+] beginning of the Universe. However, there are consequences to achieving arbitrarily hot, dense states in the Universe, and many of them fail to hold up to observations.

The Universe we know today, filled with stars and galaxies across the great cosmic abyss, hasn't been around forever. Despite the fact that there are approximately 2 trillion galaxies visible to us spanning distances of tens of billions of light-years, there's a limit to how far away we can look. That isn't because the Universe is finite in fact, it may well be infinite after all but because it had a beginning that occurred a finite amount of time ago: the Big Bang.

The fact that we can look at our Universe today, see it expanding and cooling, and infer our cosmic origins is one of the most profound scientific achievements of the 20th century. The Universe began from a hot, dense, matter-and-radiation filled state some 13.8 billion years ago, and has been expanding, cooling, and gravitating ever since. But the Big Bang itself doesn't work the way most people think. Here are the top 5 myths that people believe about the Big Bang.

The first stages of the explosion of the Trinity nuclear test, just 16 milliseconds after... [+] detonation. The top of the fireball is 200 meters high. If it weren't for the presence of the ground, the explosion itself wouldn't be a hemisphere, but rather a near-perfectly symmetric sphere.

1.) The Big Bang is the explosion that began our Universe. Every time we look out at a distant galaxy in the Universe and try to measure what its light is doing, we see the same pattern emerge: the farther away the galaxy is, the more significantly its light is systematically shifted to longer and longer wavelengths. This redshift that we observe for these objects follows a predictable pattern, with double the distance meaning that the light is shifted by twice as much.

Distant objects, therefore, appear to be receding away from us. Just as a police car speeding away from you will sound lower-pitched the faster it moves away from you, the greater we measure an object's distance to be from us, the greater the measured redshift of its light will be. It makes a lot of sense, then, to think that the more distant objects are moving away from us at faster speeds, and that we could trace every galaxy we see today back to a single point in the past: an enormous explosion.

The 'raisin bread' model of the expanding Universe, where relative distances increase as the space... [+] (dough) expands. The farther away any two raisin are from one another, the greater the observed redshift will be by time the light is received. The redshift-distance relation predicted by the expanding Universe is borne out in observations, and has been consistent with what's been known all the way back since the 1920s.

But this is a total misconception about what the Big Bang actually is. It isn't that these galaxies are moving through the Universe itself, but rather that the fabric of space that makes up the Universe itself is expanding. Just as raisins appear to recede in proportion to their distance in a leavening ball of dough, the galaxies appear to recede from one another as the Universe expands. The raisins aren't in motion relative to the dough; the action of the expanding dough itself simply appears to drive them apart.

It wasn't an initial explosion that causes galaxies to move away from one another, but rather the physics of the expanding Universe as governed by Einstein's General Relativity that causes space (with galaxies contain within it) to expand. There was no explosion, just a rapid expansion thathas been evolving based on the cumulative gravitational effects of everything contained within our Universe.

Artists logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. Note that we're limited in how far... [+] we can see back by the amount of time that's occurred since the hot Big Bang: 13.8 billion years, or (including the expansion of the Universe) 46 billion light years. Anyone living in our Universe, at any location, would see almost exactly the same thing from their vantage point.

2.) There is a point in space that we can trace the Big Bang 'event' back to. Similarly, there's no "center point" to the event of the Big Bang. You might initially think that if everything appears to be expanding away from everything else, then we can extrapolate everything back to when they all originated at the same location. Just as a grenade has a central location from where all the shrapnel must have originated, it makes sense to think the Universe must have had a similar point of origin.

But the Universe didn't explode; it just expanded.In an expanding Universe, every location in space looks the same, when you consider a large-enough volume of it. On the large-scale average, the Universe appears to have the same density, the same temperature, and the same number of galaxies everywhere. And if you extrapolate it back in time, it will appear hotter and denser, but that's because space itself is evolving and expanding, too.

The observable Universe might be 46 billion light years in all directions from our point of view,... [+] but there's certainly more, unobservable Universe, perhaps even an infinite amount, just like ours beyond that. Over time, we'll be able to see more of it, eventually revealing approximately 2.3 times as many galaxies as we can presently view.

When we extrapolate the Universe backwards in time, we can calculate that it must have been smaller and denser in the past, but that applies to all of space for all observers. Every single observer at every point has equal claim to being at the center, just as every region of space has the same large-scale properties as every other similarly sized region of space.

The Big Bang didn't happen at one single point, but rather occurred everywhere at once, and did so a finite amount of time ago. When we look back at the more distant regions in the Universe, we are looking back in time, and so is every other observer from every other perspective the Universe offers. The fact that the Universe has no repeating structures, shows no identifiable edge, and has no preferred direction all offer evidence that there is no specific origin point for the Big Bang: it happened everywhere at once, with no preferred central location at all.

The stars and galaxies we see today didn't always exist, and the farther back we go, the closer to... [+] an apparent singularity the Universe gets, as we go to hotter, denser, and more uniform states. However, there is a limit to that extrapolation, as going all the way back to a singularity creates puzzles we cannot answer.

3.) All of the matter and energy in our Universe was compressed into an infinitely hot, dense state at the Big Bang. If the Universe is expanding and cooling today, then it must have been smaller, denser, and hotter in the past. You can imagine, in fact, going all the way back, as far as your imagination can take you, until you've achieved a size that gets infinitesimally small, leading to arbitrarily high densities and temperatures. Perhaps that was the "instant" of the Big Bang: an infinitely hot, dense state.

Only, we have a few ways to test that hypothesis out!First off, the temperature fluctuations that we see today, left over in the cosmic microwave background, would have fluctuations that were as large as the maximum temperature compared to the Planck energy scale. Those fluctuations would appear only up to the scale of the cosmic horizon (and smaller). And there ought to be even left-over relics that only appear at high energies, like magnetic monopoles, filling our Universe.

The fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background are of such small magnitude and of such a... [+] particular pattern that they strongly indicate the Universe began with the same temperature everywhere and only had 1-part-in-30,000 fluctuations, a fact that is irreconciliable with an arbitrarily hot Big Bang.

In the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, respectively, humanity received our major results from the COBE, WMAP, and Planck missions. They probed the fluctuations in the leftover glow from the Big Bang: the cosmic microwave background, and helped look for these exact signatures. What they found, along with other experiments (like direct searches for magnetic monopoles), demonstrated that the Universe never reached temperatures that were greater than ~0.03% of the Planck energy scale.

The temperature fluctuations are only 1-part-in-30,000, thousands of times smaller than an infinitely hot state predicts. Fluctuations appear on scales larger than the cosmic horizon, robustly measured by both WMAP and Planck. And the constraints on magnetic monopoles and other ultra-high-energy relics strongly disfavor an ultra-high-energy past to our Universe. The conclusion? The Universe had a temperature cutoff in its past, never rising above a critical threshold.

Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only because we understand the... [+] theory of gravitation that underlies it, and because we know the Universe's present expansion rate and energy composition. Light will always continue to propagate through this expanding Universe, and we will continue to receive that light arbitrarily far into the future, but it will be limited in time as far as what reaches us. We still have unanswered questions about our cosmic origins, but the age of the Universe is known.

4.) The Big Bang makes it inevitable that our Universe began from a singularity.Even if the Universe reached a maximum temperature in the early stages of the hot Big Bang, there still needed to be a phase that preceded and set up that hot phase. In order to be consistent with what we observe, it must have:

The theory that sets up all of these initial conditions for the Big Bang is known as cosmic inflation, and has been verified by multiple lines of evidence.

Blue and red lines represent a traditional Big Bang scenario, where everything starts at time t=0,... [+] including spacetime itself. But in an inflationary scenario (yellow), we never reach a singularity, where space goes to a singular state; instead, it can only get arbitrarily small in the past, while time continues to go backwards forever. Only the last minuscule fraction of a second, from the end of inflation, imprints itself on our observable Universe today. The Hawking-Hartle no-boundary condition challenges the longevity of this state, as does the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, but neither one is a sure thing.

But one of the key surprises that inflation brought along was the following realization: if inflation precedes the Big Bang, then it won't lead to a Universe that reaches an infinitesimal size at a finite point in the past. The Universe expands exponentially during inflation, which means that it will double in size on a certain timescale if you run the clock forward, but will only halve and halve in size on that same timescale if you go backwards. No matter how many "halves" you take, you never reach zero.

It's still possible that there was a separate phase that existed before cosmic inflationtook place, and if so, perhaps the Universe did begin from a singularity after all. But we can only state, based on the observational evidence we have, that inflation lasted at least some tiny fraction of a second, didn't lead to a singularity itself or at the start of the hot Big Bang, and we do not know what came before inflation began.

The different ways dark energy could evolve into the future. Remaining constant or increasing in... [+] strength (into a Big Rip) could potentially rejuvenate the Universe, while reversing sign could lead to a Big Crunch. Under either of those two scenarios, time may be cyclical, while if neither comes true, time could either be finite or infinite in duration to the past.

5.) Space, time, and the laws of physics did not exist prior to the Big Bang.If you had reached a true singularity, or a place where you reached infinite densities and temperatures, the laws of physics would break down. In General Relativity, singularities are where spacetime can either enter or exit existence, and without spacetime, there are not even necessarily rules that govern the physical Universe that could exist within it.

But those laws must certainly have existed during the inflationary phase that set up the Big Bang itself.With the knowledge we have of inflation, and the observational confirmation of its predictions, however, new questions arise. These include:

The three major possibilities for how time behaves in our Universe are that time has always existed... [+] and will always exist, that time only existed for a finite duration if we extrapolate backwards, or that time is cyclical, and will repeat, with no beginning and no end. The Big Bang looked like it provided an answer for a time, but has since been superseded, plunging our origins back into uncertainty.

The truth is that it's possible, but we don't know for sure. Only the final fraction-of-a-second of inflation imprints itself on our Universe, and anything that occurred before that moment has had its observable signatures literally inflated away. Even theoretical attempts toargue about the complete/incomplete nature of inflationary spacetimes aren't concrete; it's possible that inflation didn't last forever, and had a singular beginning, but it's also possible that it either endured eternally or even had a cyclic character, with space and time looping back on itself eventually.

Thousands of years ago, there were three main possibilities for how time began: it has always existed, it began a finite duration in the past, or it's cyclical in nature. Even with all we've learned about the Big Bang and what set it up, it's impossible to draw a robust conclusion. We don't have sufficient information in our observable Universe to know whether time is finite or infinite; whether it's cyclical or linear. But even before the Big Bang, we can be certain that space, time, and the laws of physics themselves definitely existed.

That's 5 common Big Bang misconceptions, all thoroughly dispelled.

More:

Don't Believe These 5 Myths About The Big Bang - Forbes

Yup, were not going to survive BTS next comeback, and the reaction to Jimins blue hair which coincidentally matches the Map of the Soul: 7 album cover proves it. Recently, Big Hit Entertainment dropped new concept photos depicting the septet RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook as black and white swans. Then a few hours later, the band was spotted at an airport in South Korea after promotions in the United States. In both cases, Jimin appeared with dark blue locks, subsequently sending many BTS fans down the rabbit hole of excitement about the new era.

For the past few weeks, BTS has been busy with promotions in the U.S. First up, the group performed at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. They then ran the media circuit to discuss Map of the Soul: 7, including guest spots on iHeartRadio and The Late Late Show with James Corden. The band will also appear on a special BTS-centric episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, which will air sometime in the near future.

Now, according to videos published by Newsen and Stark on Feb. 10, BTS landed at the Incheon International Airport, where they were surrounded by a sea of onlookers, paparazzi, and security.

The South Korean publications also captured the seven members walking out in their airport fashion outfits. And per usual, Jimin popped out dressed in all-black. But this time, the Serendipity singer who was last seen with platinum blonde hair while performing Black Swan on Jan. 28 sported blue-black hair.

Following the medias release of BTS airport arrival, many fans gushed over Jimins blue hair on social media.

GOOD MORNING TO JIMINS DARK BLUE HAIR ONLY, a fan wrote on Twitter.

JIMINS HAIR IS DARK BLUE CONFIRMED, another fan tweeted alongside a photo of the music artists hair color change.

It seems Jimins dark blue airport hair was a teaser for what was to come. Soon after BTS returned to Korea, the second wave of Map of the Soul: 7 concept photos dropped online.

The first version illustrated the seven members as white swans with the desire for perfection, according to Billboard. Then the second version of the new concept photos portrayed BTS as black swans with an unquenchable thirst. The theme also appears to tie into Vs Singularity outfit during Love Yourself, Speak Yourself [The Final].

Regardless, many BTS fans were captivated by Jimins midnight blue hair featured in the singer-dancers solo and group shots.

HOLY CRAP THESE ARE SO GORGEOUS JUST LOOK AT THEM WITH THE BLACK HAIR AND JIMIN WITH THE DARK BLUE, one fan wrote on Reddit.

Jimin just emits power. His whole look, this hair, that corset. Also, peep that black feather pinned to his shirt, a fan wrote on Twitter.

And of course, many members of ARMY pointed out Jimins hair matches the blue in Map of the Soul: 7, similarly to how the Lie crooner previously colored his hair Map of the Soul: Persona pink.

Jimin really be matching his hair colour with album covers, a fan tweeted.

Its pretty clear BTS fans are eager to see what the band has in store for Map of the Soul: 7. And now, as Jimin commits to blue locks, the new era feels closer than ever. So stay tuned. Feb. 21 is just around the corner.

Read more: BTS Reveals the Powerful Meaning Behind Map of the Soul: 7

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BTS: Jimin's Blue Hair in the New Concept Photos and at the Airport Will Stop You in Your Tracks - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

HONG KONG, Jan. 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Singularity Financial Limited ("SFL"), Hong Kong's leading financial and technology marketplace, announced today that Dr. Mark Chen, former fund manager and research head of alternative investmentfrom Haitong International Asset Management Limited, joined the company as a co-founder and director to lead the company's green finance and ESG efforts.

Mark has over 20 years of experience in asset management, macro analysis, equity/bond research, and financial reporting. He has a PhD in Accounting and Finance from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a Master of Economics from University of International Business and Economic in China.

Prior to joining SFL, Mark was managing director for Zhengqi International Asset Management Limited, as well as investment director for Zhengqi(HK) Financial Holdings Limited, a financing platformof China's leading investment firm Legend Holdings Corporation. Before that, he was a fund manager and head of research of alternative investment for Haitong International Asset Management Limited, a subsidiary of Haitong International Securities Group,the largest mainland-backed stockbroker in Hong Kong by net assets. Before starting his investment career, Mark received more than five years of investment analyst training through Vision Finance Asset Management Limited and ABCI Securities Company Limited.

Beyond portfolio and risk management, Mark took on a few leading positions in China's leading financial news agencies such as China Business News, 21st Century Business Herald and Securities Daily; today he is a popular influencer for Chinese financial media such as Sina and Tsinghua Financial Review, and a frequent contributor to international publications such as Journal of Corporate Finance, Frontier of Business Research in China. Mark published a series of best-selling financial books covering subjects such as "Cryptocurrency and Virtual Assets," "Buying China, Investment Thesis from a Hedge Fund Manager," "Winning Strategies in the Stock Market," and "Entrepreneurial Drive Research."

"Mark is a fantastic addition to our team with a wealth of operational and financial management experience,"said Ada Zhao, Managing Director of Singularity Financial."With the introduction of green finance and fast-moving disruptive technologies, we are looking forward to benefiting from his decades of expertise providing analytic solutions and strategic planning to our customers."

About Singularity Financial

Singularity Financial Limited("SFL") is Hong Kong's leading marketplace providing tools and services to support disruptive technologies and sustainable investments. For more information, please go to http://www.sfl.global.

Press Contact Carl Huang Singularity Financial Limited +852 9623 6835 233185@email4pr.com

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SOURCE Singularity Financial Limited

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Former Fund Manager from Haitong International Asset Management Joins Singularity Financial Executive Team - Yahoo Finance

Tout Comprendre, cest Tout Pardonner.

Translated from French to English:

To Understand All, is to Forgive All.

Humanity is richer and more advanced than ever, yet we are more divided than ever. Why?

I believe the root cause is a lack ofTrust,Compassion, andUnderstandingof each other.

In the words ofJaggi VasudevorSadhguru, Founder of Isha Foundation (for which I am a volunteer), there are no Good or Bad people, just Happy and Miserable people.

People oscillate between Good and Bad, and in fact, by making the Duality of Good vs. Bad, one inherently places oneself in the Good bucket, and in doing so, implicitly create a Bad bucket with Bad people.

This process where humans create these types ofDualitiescreates a vicious cycle that has plagued humanity since the dawn of our existence. Duality is inherent to any intelligent species like Humans, but disastrous when also coupled with theHuman Ego.

Duality is the Fundamental Source of all Human Suffering outside of our Control.

Id argue the distinction Good vs. Bad is the worst duality created by mankind. Across religion, politics, media, and personal relationships this duality is the fundamental source of allhuman sufferingthat is within our control, a philosophy shared by the Stoics of Greece.

Dont choose to be Good over Bad; Choose to be Happy over Miserable.

I believe there will be a fundamental shift in this next decade of the Roaring 2020s, largely driven bydeep technologieslike machine learning,blockchain technology,andquantum computing. This will be the first step towards the inevitableTechnological Singularitythat will forever change humanity as a species.

Through a series of articlesyet to be published, andstaggered over a long period of time, on seemingly diverse and unrelated subject matters, I wish to convey my deductive reasoning why I believe theSingularity may be the key to solving World Peace.

I understand the claim is quitebold(and may perhaps appear nonsensical), but I promise to share with you my lifes understanding of these matters in a completely, logical manner.

From Singularity to World Peace

As this publication and the series of articles to published may be contrary to popular belief, I ask that you please suspend your disbelief before you have read the entire series, and ask any questions right away where you dont follow the logic or dont understand the subject matter.

If you find any gap in what I am saying because, in a brief amount of words, I am trying to convey some very profound things. The subject matters highlighted are all quite complex and still active areas of human research, so dont confuse lack of my knowledge with lack of truthfulness.

1. Technology: Quantum Computing

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutIBM Quantum Qhereand theSchrdinger equationhere.

2. Religion: Heros Journey, The Bible, and Reality as a Dream

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theTwo Great Mythologieshere, theBible Projects missionhere,Samsarahere, Mayahere,Brahamhere,Karmahere, theKalpaunit of timehere, the scientificAge of the Earthhere, andNature of Realityas aLucid Dreamhere.

3. Physics: Quantum Mechanics, M-Theory and Gravity

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutSchrodingerhere,M-Theoryhereand theHolographic Principlehere.

4. Chemistry: Lipid Bilayers and Pi Resonances

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutLipid Bilayershereand the significance ofPi Resonanceshere.

5. Language: Chomsky Hierarchy and A.I. Storytelling

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theChomsky Hierarchyhereand AI-written novel1 the Roadhere.

6. Literature: Infinite Jest, Poetry, and the Iliad and the Odyssey

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutInfinite Jestby David Wallace, theSierpinski Trianglehere,Homers the Iliad and the Odysseyand its connection to the theOrigin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mindby Julian Jayneshere.

7. Neuroscience: Delta Brainwaves, Pineal Gland, and Orch OR

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about moreRen Descartesviews on thePineal GlandhereandOrchestrated Objective ReductionorOrch ORmodel forHuman Consciousnesshere.

8. Music: Lyre of Greece, Resonance, and Chinese Wuxing

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutResonanceinWavelet Transformshereand the ChineseWuxinghere.

9. Math: Quantum Particle Spins and Constants of Nature

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theRational Numbershereand theStandard Model of Physicshere.

10. Philosophy: The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theHard ProblemofConsciousnessandQualia / Experiencehere.

11. Biology: Darwinian Evolution and Artificial Intelligence

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutDarwins Lifehereand the self-taught AI programAlphaGohere.

12. Computer Science: Machine Learning

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutDeep LearninghereandArtificial Neural Networkshere.

13. Meditation: Spirituality, Yoga, and Understanding

Understanding or Awakening is the Journey from Duality to Nonduality.

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more aboutSamadhihereand practitioners ofTranscendental Meditationhere.

14. The Stimulation Argument

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theSimulation Argumenthere, theFine-tuned Universehere, Adinkra Symbols inAfrican Arthere, Adinkra Symbols inSupergravity Theoryhere,Error Correcting Codeshereand its connection to theNature of Realityhere.

15. Towards the Technological Singularity

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theTechnological Singularityhere.

16. Towards World Peace: the United Nations

Article to be publishedhere.

Learn more about theDalai Lamahereand theUnited Nationsmissionhere.

Ending exactly where we started, asMother Naturehad always intended.

Tout Comprendre, cest Tout Pardonner.

A New G10 must form to include Switzerland, China, the European Union, Australia, Japan, Israel, the South/North Korean Union, Iran, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Humanity must unite as One for us to survive as a species on Earth, for us to avoid the the probable exinction of Humans by the disastrous effects of human-inflicted Climate Change that will materialize this century.

I will leave this space below open for your own interpretation of the readings.

Y O U R S T R E A M O F C O N S C I O U S N E S SHEREO R N O W H E R E

Finally, I want to share this Singular ad fromCoca-Colaaired during the 60s aboutUNITY.

We are all Brothers and Sisters deep down; Trust, Compassion, and Understanding will be the key to World Peace, and will save Humanity from its self-destructive behavior.

On a hilltop in Italy,

We assembled young people

From all over the world

To bring you this message

From Coca-Cola Botters

All over the world.

Disclaimer: the views expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of Aidos Inc., Hydra Capital Advisers LLC., Radna Intellectual Ventures LLC., or Sustainable Media Corp. Aidos Inc., All Rights Reserved.

The rest is here:

Why the Singularity may be the key to World Peace? - Thrive Global

Some of the most potent innovation taking place today does not involve breakthrough technologies, but rather the creation of fundamentally new business models. For most of history, these models were remarkably stable, dominated by a few key ideas, upgraded by a few major variations on these themes.

In the 1920s, it was the bait and hook models, where customers are lured in with a low-cost initial product (the bait: a free razor) and then forced to buy endless refills (the hook: blade refills).

In the 1950s, it was the franchise models pioneered by McDonalds. Or take the 1960s, where we got hypermarkets like Walmart.

But with the internets arrival in the 1990s, business model reinvention entered a period of radical growth. In less than two decades, weve seen network effects birth new platforms in record time, bitcoin and blockchain undercut existing trusted third party financial models, and crowdfunding and ICOs upend the traditional ways capital is raised.

We are now witnessing seven emerging models slated to redefine business over the next few decades. And today, while countless businesses are anchored by a mentality of maintainingcompeting solely on operational executionit is more vital than ever to leverage these business models for success in the 2020s.

Each is a revolutionary new way of creating value; each is a force for acceleration. Lets dive in.

(1)The Crowd Economy:Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, ICOs, leveraged assets, and staff-on-demandessentially, all the developments that leverage the billions of people already online and the billions coming online.

All have revolutionized the way we do business. Just consider leveraged assets, like Ubers vehicles and Airbnbs rooms, which have allowed companies toscale at speed. These crowd economy models also lean on staff-on-demand, which provide a company with the agility needed to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. And its everything from micro-task laborers behind Amazons Mechanical Turk on the low end, to Kaggles data scientist-on-demand services on the high end.

Example: Airbnb has become the largest hotel chain in the world, yet it doesnt own a single hotel room. Instead, it leverages (that is, rents out) the assets (spare bedrooms) of the crowd, with more than 6 million rooms, flats, and houses in over 81,000 cities across the globe.

(2)The Free/Data Economy:This is the platform version of the bait and hook model, essentially baiting the customer with free access to a cool service and then making money off the data gathered about that customer. It also includes all the developments spurred by the big data revolution, which is allowing us to exploit micro-demographics like never before.

Example: Facebook, Google, Twittertheres a reason this model has transformed dorm room startups into global superpowers. Googles search queriesper dayhave risen from 500,000 in 1999, to 200 million in 2004, to 3 billion in 2011, to5.6 billiontoday. While more users are becoming aware of the valuable data they exchange in return for Googles free search service, this tried-and-true model will likely continue to succeed in the 2020s.

(3)The Smartness Economy:In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all you needed was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to itthus creating a power drill or a washing machine.

In the 2020s,AI will be the electricity. In other words, take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness. So cell phones became smartphones and stereo speakers became smart speakers and cars become autonomous vehicles.

Example: We all know the big names incorporating AI into their business modelsfrom Amazon to Salesforce. But more AI startups arise each day: 965 AI-related companies in the US raised $13.5 billion in venture capital through the first 9 months of last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The most highly valued of them all is Nuro, a driverless grocery delivery service valued at $2.7 billion. Expect AI to continue transforming most businesses in the 2020s.

(4)Closed-Loop Economies:In nature, nothing is ever wasted. The detritus of one species always becomes the foundation for the survival of another species. Human attempts to mimic these entirely waste-free systems have been dubbed biomimicry (if youre talking about designing a new kind of product) or cradle-to-cradle (if youre talking about designing a new kind of city) or, more simply, closed-loop economies. These models will grow increasingly prevalent with the rise of environmentally-conscious consumers and the cost benefits of closed-loop systems.

Example: The Plastic Bank, founded in 2013, allows anyone to pick up waste plastic and drop it off at a plastic bank. The collector is then paid for the trash in anything from cash to WiFi time, while the plastic bank sorts the material and sells it to the appropriate recyclerthus closing an open loop in the life cycle of plastic.

(5)Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): At the convergence of blockchain and AI sits a radically new kind of companyone with no employees, no bosses, and nonstop production. A set of pre-programmed rules determines how the company operates, and computers do the rest. A fleet of autonomous taxis, for instance, with a blockchain-backed smart contracts layer, could run itself 24-7, including driving to the repair shop for maintenance, without any human involvement.

Example: While DAOs are just beginning to emerge, the platform DAOstack is working to provide these businesses with tools for success, including reliable crypto-economic incentives and decentralized governance protocols. DAOstack aims to create businesses where the only external influence is the customer.

(6)Multiple World Models:We no longer live in only one place. We have real-world personae and online personae, and this delocalized existence is only going to expand. With the rise of augmented reality and virtual reality, were introducing more layers to this equation. Youll have avatars for work and avatars for play, and all of these versions of ourselves are opportunities for new businesses.

Example: Second Life, the very first virtual world created in 2003, gave rise to a multimillion-dollar economy. People were paying other people to design digital clothes and digital houses for their digital avatars. Every time we add a new layer to the digital strata, were also adding an entire economy built upon that layer, meaning we are now conducting our business in multiple worlds at once.

(7)Transformation Economy:The Experience Economy was about the sharing of experiencesso Starbucks went from being a coffee franchise to a third place. That is, neither home nor work, but a third place in which to live your life. Buying a cup of coffee became an experience, a caffeinated theme park of sorts. The next iteration of this idea is the Transformation Economy, where youre not just paying for an experience, youre paying to have your life transformed by this experience.

Example: Early versions of this model can be seen in the rise of transformational festivals like Burning Man, or fitness companies like CrossFit, where the experience is generally bad (you work out in old warehouses), but the transformation is great (the person you become after three months of working out in those warehouses). Consumers are no longer searching for merely pleasurable experiencesthey are looking for challenges that transform.

What all this tells us is that business as usual is becoming business unusual. And for existing companies, as Harvards Clayton Christensen explained, this is no longer optional: Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.

And for those of us on the outside of these disruptive models, our experience will be better, cheaper, faster.

Bettermeaning new business models do what all business models dosolve problems for people in the real world better than anyone else.

Cheaperis obvious. With demonetization running rampant, customersand that means all of usare expecting more for less.

But the real shift is the final shift:faster. New business models are no longer forces for stability and security. To compete in todays accelerated climate, these models are designed for speed and agility.

Most importantly, none of this is in any danger of slowing down.

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If youd like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: Ive also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity Universitys onramp for exponential entrepreneursthose who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity Universityyour participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared ondiamandis.com. Read theoriginal article here.

Image Credit: Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

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7 Business Models Reshaping How We Work, Live, and Create Value - Singularity Hub

LOS ANGELES Peter Diamandis is a friend who happens to also be a serial entrepreneur, medical doctor and aeronautical engineer who founded the XPRIZE Foundation, Singularity University, Human Longevity, Planetary Resources, Space Adventures, and biotech Celularity, among others.

We live in the most extraordinary time in history, he said recently at his Abundance360 annual conference for high-net-worth entrepreneurs. The next 10 years will see more changes than occurred in the past 100 years.

His latest book was released this week, The Future is Faster than You Think, and is a survey of how the world will be reinvented, industry by industry. He draws historical comparisons to make the case for optimism: In 1920, we could only find four innovations: the first commercial radio station, the hand-held hairdryer; the Band Aid; and traffic lights. By contrast, last year saw tens of thousands of technological and scientific breakthroughs.

He believes the world is entering a new roaring twenties which will result in transformative goods, devices, services, business models and human behaviour. In a chapter called the Acceleration of Acceleration, he lists some principal accelerants that have been, and will be, behind ongoing and rapid change.

For example, huge savings for people in developed countries, in terms of time and money, occurred with the invention of Google search, iPhones and massive data storage capability. This time and money has been reinvested to execute more of the same types of time and money saving innovations. For instance, the cost of sequencing the genome in 2001 was US$100 million and now it can be done for only US$100. And the value, in 2012 dollars, of all equipment contained in todays iPhone in 2012 dollars is US$1 million the cameras for photos and video, storage, facial recognition, telephones, laptops, search and artificial intelligence capability.

Crowdfunding, underpinned by blockchain technology, is enabling the raising of billions for more research and development. And brain enhancement techniques to boost memory and concentration will also improve research outcomes.

Augmented reality will go mainstream and allow consumers to play, learn and shop via headsets, glasses or implants. Robots and toys or appliances will remember our faces and voices and preferences. Drones will babysit and take videos. Voice commands will replace typing and predictive algorithms will anticipate our needs.

By 2029, co-founder of Singularity University Ray Kurzweil says artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans. This will provide smart collaborative tools for workers, professionals, analysts and leaders to enable them to find smarter solutions to their challenges. Put another way, this decade will offer Alexa and Siri on steroids that will act as personal executive assistants to anyone at an affordable price.

Advancements in renewable energy, batteries and local power grids will accelerate leading to lower costs and higher performance, democratizing power globally.

Besides flying cars and the Hyperloop, space travel will become a tourism and commercial option. The future of food, finance, education, shopping and real estate will profoundly change. As more people have access to technology, more problems can be solved and the more capital is available to find those solutions, he said.

Diamandis is an inveterate optimist but realizes that technology in the wrong hands has and can create new problems. To be clear, there will still be terrorism, war, and murder. Dictatorship and disease wont go away. But the world will quietly continue to get better, he concludes in his book.

He also cites one of his favourite books, The Better Angels of Our Nature by Harvards Steven Pinker, whose figures demonstrate progress and that war, strife, disease and poverty are at historical lows.

To him, technology is part of a continuous march toward abundance to meet the needs of all humanity.

Financial Post

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Diane Francis: The future is faster and better than ever as tech reinvents the world - Financial Post

Few times in history has mankind ever united to solve a single goal. Even the ultimate moonshot in historyputting a man on the moonwas driven by international competition rather than unification.

So its perhaps fitting that mankind is now uniting to understand the organ that fundamentally makes us human: our brain. First envisioned in 2016 through a series of discussions on the grand challenges in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, the International Brain Initiative (IBI) came out this week in a forward-looking paper in Neuron.

Rather than each country formulating their own brain projects independently, the project argues, its high time for the world to come together and share their findings, resources, and expertise across borders. By uniting efforts, the IBI can help shape the future of neuroscience research at a global scalefor promoting brain and mental health, for stimulating international collaboration, for ethical neuroscience practices, and for crafting future generations of scientists.

It takes a world to understand the brain, said Caroline Montojo of the Kavli Foundation, which offered support to the project. When we have the best brains and the best minds working together, sharing information and research that could benefit us all.

The initiative, at the time of writing, includes Japans Brain/Minds, Australian Brain Alliance, the EUs Human Brain Project (HBP), Canadian Brain Research Strategy, the US BRAIN Initiative (BRAINI), the Korea Brain Initiative, and the China Brain Project.

The IBI comes at a time when global research divisions are prominent. Established national projects, such as the BRAINI and the HBP, have notably different goals at the operational level. The BRAINI, for example, prominently champions developing new tools to study brain functions, whereas the HBPs ultimate goal is to recreate the function of a human brain inside machines.

Even within single countries, divisions in practical paths forward have been, mildly put, chaotic. Chinas Brain Project, announced officially in 2016 and kicked off two years later, was plagued by different opinions on focus: should it be on solving brain disorders, or understanding the neurobiology behind cognition, or focused on engineering problems that more intimately link human brains with AI?

Then theres the underlying political milieu, where certain countries are cracking down on international researchers for fear that they may be stealing or selling trade secrets. To all these divisions, the IBI took a stance and said noits time to work together.

The biggest challenge that were facing is to really understand how the brain works, the mystery of the brain, to crack the code, said Dr. Yves De Koninck of the Canadian Brain Research Strategy. If were going to make the really big leap changes in the level of understanding of how the brain works in health and disease, we need to have global collaboration, I mean thats just absolutely vital, added Dr. Linda Lanyon at the IBI Data Standards and Sharing Working Group.

The IBI is best viewed as a grassroots organization driven by the views of neuroscientists across the globe, rather than a bureaucratic entity following the views of a select few. In a way, the IBI organizes itself similar to the United Nations, with a five-year strategic plan, multiple working groups, and a governance structure.

Its clear that the IBI benefited from a global recognition, and subsequent establishment, of large-scale neuroscience projects to understand the brain. Yet any single initiative is like the blind men and the elephant parabledespite millions (or even billions) of dollars in investment, due to the brains complexity each can only probe a small part of human brain function.

However, even with different end goals, findings from each project will likely benefit each otherif properly shared in an easily-interpretable manner (the Kavli Foundation also backs a standardized format for neuroscience data called Neurodata Without Borders 2.0). Tools developed from BRAINI, for example, will likely benefit brain mapping initiatives around the world, and neural simulations can inspire insights into brain disorders or better paths towards brain-machine interfaces. A synergistic international effort could provide greater overall impact and better utilization of precious research funding, the authors argued.

Working across political aisles is already tough; now imagine sharing terabytes of data across international borders to someone you hardly know. The IBI aims to provide a platform that explores new models of collaboration among scientists so that, to put it bluntly, no one gets screwed out of their recognition. In addition, the IBI also works outside the ivory tower with private and public funding bodies, industry partners, and government-related agencies on the social, economic, and ethical impacts of neuroscientific discoveries and their translation.

Thats huge. The initiative comes at a time when technological advances are increasingly making it easier to skirt ethical considerations and move forward with iffy research projects. Making human-animal hybrid embryos to understand the roots of intelligence? Conducting brain stimulation trials that may slowly change a persons personality? Linking multiple human minds into computers by probing their brain waves? These futuristic projects abound and will only grow in number as our ability to crack the neural code improves.

The IBI argues that neuroscientists across the globe need to take a moral stancesimilar to emerging projects for ethical AIto guide research in an ethical manner. With several countries infamous for pushing moral boundaries also joining the alliance, the IBI may put an international leash on less-savory projects going forward, while respecting diverse cultural frameworks.

IBI group members stressed that the initiative isnt meant to be bureaucratic. Rather, its adaptive and allows the organization to be shaped by the scientific community over time, the authors said. Integrating multiple goals of various brain projects together, the IBI serves as meta-middleman to promote coordination, share resources, and help unite different ideas on the future of neuroscience.

This IBI is quite unique in trying to go from the very microscopic scale of the synapses that encode information within the brain, all the way up to how the information manifests itself in human cognition and animal behavior, said Dr. Linda Richards of the Australian Brain Alliance.

Despite being years in the making, the initiative is just crossing the starting line. With a solid infrastructure now in place and enthusiasm amassed, an immediate focus for the IBI is to establish and develop the core working groups that are making progress toward short-term deliverables, the authors said. The execution of a five-year plan to propel neuroscience research forward will need considerable debates on specific aims, approaches, and technologies, but will also add to a foundation for collaboration and priority-setting across the world, they added.

This is a new era of neuroscience, where neuroscientists will have access to large datasets and new ways of sharing in a collaborative manner internationally, said Richards.

Is IBIs vision nave? Maybe. The most impactful technological advancements of our ageflight, nuclear weapons, conquering space, the Internethave all stemmed from the minds of a relatively small group of people working under duress from other people. But when it comes to truly understanding the brain, the basis of who we are and what we believe, the root cause of divided opinions and worldviews, the organ that could one day be directly manipulated and fundamentally alter humanity as a speciesfighting for a global consortium is the least we can do.

Image Credit: adike/Shutterstock.com

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Decoding the Brain Goes Global With the International Brain Initiative - Singularity Hub

Space and time are intertwined, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time. Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation. The more mass an object has, the more it stretches and slows down time.

For example, Sagittarius A* the gigantic black hole at the centre of the galaxy would almost be able to stretch time to a point where it almost comes to a complete standstill.

Sagittarius A* has a radius of 22 million kilometres and a mass of more than four million times that of the Sun.

In other words, it is very dense.

And because it is so heavy, it has the ability to completely stretch out space-time, and travelling towards its centre means time would almost come to a standstill for you.

However, if you were somehow able to travel back out of a black hole, you could theoretically reverse the arrow of time.

Jeff Koch, a former physics professor, wrote on Q&A site Quora: Time does lose its arrow in a black hole. You could move back and forth in time.

But there is a major stumbling block if you were trying top achieve this.

The gravitational pull of a black hole is so immense that not even light can escape its grasp, so once you are closing into the singularity, a one-dimensional point where gravity becomes infinite and space and time become curved, there is no turning back.

READ MORE:Black hole mystery: Could discovery be a massive neutron star?

Prof Koch continued: But you cant avoid the singularity, because you are always forced to move forward in the radial space direction towards the singularity. You can not stay in one place or move away from the singularity.

Getting to a black hole would also be a major stumbling block.

In fact, the nearest black hole to our planet is located 6,523 light-years away. One light-year is 5.88 trillion miles.

The farthest humans have been from Earth is 248,655 miles (400,171 km) in 1970 as part of NASAs Apollo 13 mission when the craft swung around the far side of the moon it took almost three days to get there.

DON'T MISSTHIS is where you will travel to if you fall into a black hole[INSIGHT]First photographed black hole producing jets near to speed of light[STUDY]Scientists stunned by monster black holes in dwarf galaxies[ANALYSIS]

There are a few ways in which a black hole can form.

Scientists believe the most common instance is when a star, thousands of times the size of the Sun, collapses in on itself when it dies - known as a supernova.

Another way is when a large amount of matter, which can be in the form of a gas cloud or a star collapses in on itself through its own gravitational pull.

Finally, the collision of two neutron stars can cause a black hole.

The gist of all three ways is that a massive amount of mass located in one spot can cause a black hole.

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Time travel discovery: THIS is how you could move back and forward in time in a black hole - Express.co.uk

Like the settlers of old, space explorers will live off the land. But if self-sufficiency on Earth is difficult, its orders of magnitude more challenging in space, where there are no trees to build shelter, no plants and animals to eat, no water to drink, and no breathable air.

Like The Martians Mark Watney, future space explorers will have to use a heavy dose of science-y resourcefulness to survive hostile environments on the moon and Mars. Luckily, also like Mark Watney, theyll have access to some of the brightest brains on the planet.

Some of those brains, currently working at the European Space Agency, are making a machine that transmutes moon dust into oxygento breathe and make rocket fuel withand metal for building.

Truly, the surface of the moon is a barren wasteland. Its like being exposed to the vacuum of deep space with the modest benefit of a little ground under your feet and dust on your boots.

Its this dust, fine, grey, and bone dry, that may prove to be an invaluable resource for lunar homesteaders. Known as lunar regolith, moon dust is 40-45 percent oxygen by weight. Bound up in mineral and glass oxides, oxygen is the most abundant element on the moons surface.

Oxygen is also, obviously, necessary for breathable air, and its a key ingredient in rocket fuelbut you cant breathe or fuel ships with moon dust. Which is where ESA comes in.

The ESA team, led by University of Glasgow PhD candidate and ESA researcher Beth Lomax and ESA research fellow Alexandre Meurisse, is adapting an industrial method developed by UK company, Metalysis.

Called molten salt heat electrolysis, the process involves heating up a basket of simulated moon dustwhich is a close approximation to the real thingand calcium chloride salt to 950 degrees Celsius. The researchers then split off the oxygen with an electric current, leaving behind a pile of metal alloys.

The process can separate 95 percent of the oxygen in 50 hours, but in a pinch, 75 percent can be extracted in just the first 15 hours.

The team unveiled a proof-of-concept last October, which they said was a significant improvement on other similar processes that produce less oxygen or require far higher temperatures. And theres room for improvement. To that end, the team announced last week theyre setting up a new oxygen plant in the Netherlands to further refine things.

A key goal is to reduce the temperature. The higher the temperature, the more energy you need. And energy will be in finite supply on the moon. The team doesnt have a target temperature in mind, Meurisse told Singularity Hub in an email, but they believe they can do better. How much better depends on how lower temperatures affect other aspects of the process (like efficiency).

In addition to oxygen bound up in lunar dust, we know the moon has water. Though the details are still somewhat shrouded in mystery, scientists believe the moons water takes the form of ice in permanently shadowed areas at the poles.

Well need water to drink, of course, but we can also separate it into its elemental components, hydrogen and oxygen, by electrolysis. Provided we can get to the moons ice, how does the ESA processs energy requirements stack up to the electrolysis of water?

Meurisse said the two resources will likely have different trade-offs to consider (though we may well need need both to support a sustainable presence on the moon).

Because ESAs process involves high temperatures, its very energy intensive compared to water electrolysis which can be done at room temperature. But moon dust covers the entire surface as far as the eye can see. Grab a shovel and bag some up. The moons ice, on the other hand, will be rarer and much more difficult to mine, and we arent sure of its composition or what kind of processing itll require to make it usable.

Theres also something else to considerthat pile of metal left over once the oxygen has been pulled off and siphoned away. This metal may prove to be a reliable building material, something the ESA team will also look into exploiting in the coming years.

Could [the metals] be 3D printed directly, for example, or would they require refining? Meurisse asked. The precise combination of metals will depend on where on the Moon the regolith is acquired fromthere would be significant regional differences.

Next, the team will build a pilot plant that could operate on the moon (but wont be sent there yet) by the mid-2020s.

In the longer term, if the technology proves scalable and space-worthy, it could help make the moon into a gas station for spacecraft in Earth orbit and beyond. Manufacturing fuel on the lunar surface may prove more cost-efficient than dragging it up from Earth. Ultimately, explorers may use moon dust to breathe, build, and fuel missions across the solar system.

Image Credit: NASA

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This Marvelous Machine Splits Moon Dust Into Oxygen and Metal - Singularity Hub