Monthly Archives: June 2021

SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk visits the construction site of Tesla's gigafactory in Gruenheide, near Berlin, Germany, May 17, 2021.

Michele Tantussi | Reuters

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he will only publicly list satellite broadband service Starlink when its cash flow is more predictable.

Starlink, which is currently operated by space exploration firm SpaceX, allows people to connect to the internet via a satellite dish that is placed on or near their property. The internet is beamed down to the dish via Starlink satellites that have been put into orbit by SpaceX.

"Going public sooner than that would be very painful," Musk said in a tweet late Wednesday. "Will do my best to give long-term Tesla shareholders preference."

The billionaire's tweet came after a Twitter user asked him: "Any thoughts on Starlink IPO we would love to invest in the future. Any thoughts on first dibs for Tesla retail investors?"

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said last year that Starlink could be spun off from SpaceX for an initial public offering.

Starlink, which is based in Redmond, Washington, ultimately wants to provide the world with faster internet, starting by improving internet access in parts of the world that aren't currently served by broadband providers.

It plans to do this by putting thousands of small telecoms satellites into low-Earth orbit that can beam high-speed, low-latency internet to the ground.

Starlink is currently trialing its service with customers in 11 countries including the U.S. and the U.K.

Musk said in May that the company had received more than 500,000 preorders for its internet service and anticipates no technical problems meeting demand.

Starlink should be able to provide continuous global coverage by September, Shotwell said Tuesday.

"We've successfully deployed 1,800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe," she told a Macquarie Group technology conference via webcast, according to Reuters.

"But then we have regulatory work to go into every country and get approved to provide telecoms services."

Starlink has said it plans to launch 12,000 satellites in total at a cost of approximately $10 billion.

Musk said in May that Starlink will be a crucial source of funding for some of his other plans, including sending paying customers to Mars and colonizing Mars.

In an interview in March last year, Musk said SpaceX could make up to $30 billion a year by providing broadband. He said that Starlink will be "helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers" adding that 5G isn't great for the countryside because "you need range."

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Elon Musk says Starlink will go public when its cash flow is more predictable - CNBC

To date, five rovers made in America, at least partially, have been sent to the Red Planet. They are the Sojourner, Spirit,Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Of them, only two are presently still active, the Curiosity and the recently arrived Perseverance, and theyre accompanied by a tiny helicopter called Ingenuity.

Each of the five land-based pieces of hardware sent up there by the Americans is extraordinary in one way or another. A good chunk of them far exceeded their initial life expectancy, some have made discoveries no one expected, while others (or should we say pretty much all of them) have sent back precious data and images that kept keep scientists busy and the public in the loop.

Even if you personally are not all that interested in space exploration in general or the exploits of the human-made rover on Mars in particular, chances are you at least once saw a photo of the planet sent back by the said rovers or a selfie portraying one of them surrounded by the surreal Martian landscape.

Theyre extraordinary stills, revealing a world our race might eventually end up colonizing, a future home for the generations to come. They also reveal how, at times, the lack of an idea so simple it should seem obvious to all allows others to take the lead.

The American photos of Mars show just the desolate landscape, or the motionless rovers from awkward angles, at times weirdly distorted on account of a large number of shots being stitched together for a more panoramic look.

To date, despite decades of experience, American engineers didnt think of sending to the planet a wireless camera one of the rovers could plant in the soil and snap the first, proper photo of a human-made wheeled machine on Mars.

Also, despite decades of experience, the Americans didnt consider for one bit they could use that camera to snap an actual video of the rovers moving on the reddish surface of the neighboring piece of rock, making this entire Mars exploration thing much more real for us here on Earth.

The Chinese did both in the span of a single month.

As you might already know, back in May, the Asian nation became the second to land a rover on Mars. Zhurong is how its called, and while its not supposed to live for long, it has already made history.

Shortly after it came down from its lander, it planted a wireless camera in the Martian soil and moved away some 30 feet (10 meters) to take a photo of itself and the lander, Chinese flag includedthat reminds me, when's the last time you've seen the American flag on Mars?

That happened in mid-June, but now, as the month is drawing to a close, the Chinese released something even better: actual footage of the Zhurong moving away from the camera (check tweet attached below), which, if I am not mistaking, is the first time humans can experience a rover from this perspective.

China is a very propaganda-conscious nation and one that has ambitions of colonizing the solar system. It has these ambitions since about the same time as the Americans, but it is only in the past two decades or so that they have really taken off.

Thats because China is pumping huge amounts of resources into space exploration. In the span of a few short years, the country sent its people to space, landed on Mars, and sent a crew to a space station it just began building in orbit this month.

The scary (or encouraging, depending on which side of the fence you're on) part is that this whole space thing seems to come natural to the Chinese, who make it look all easy and simple.

It might be a big gamble, but if I were a betting man, Id put my money on China becoming the first to send people to Mars, and who knows, even set up a colony there.

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At the Rate Things Are Going, American Rovers Might Find Chinese Cities on Mars - autoevolution

This idea was not new. Plato believed society functioned best when it was run by experts. Technocracys focus on engineers was rooted in the conviction that there was a technological fix to almost all of societys problems.

Today, the idea that governments are too slow, too inefficient, too lacking in expertise to solve hard problems is widely shared among the engineers and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.

This libertarian impulse has always been part of the ethos of Silicon Valley. One of its first and most forceful expressions came in 1995, when tech pioneer John Perry Barlow delivered his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, the Declaration began. I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Silicon Valleys attitude towards government has become more accommodating since Barlow delivered his declaration, both out of choice and necessity. But there remains a conviction that, left to their own devices, tech companies are better able to solve problems in areas like transportation, education and health care, where decades of government regulation have put a break on innovation.

Theres a lack of focus on efficiency, lamented former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on a panel about government and technology in 2019. The reason there's no innovation in government is there's no bonuses for innovation. In fact, if you take a risk and it fails, your career is over.

This is the kind of overblown rhetoric weve come to expect from engineers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and their insistence that governments should step aside in favour of true problem-solvers is clearly self-serving. But the idea that we should be looking to experts rather than politicians for solutions to massively complex problems like a deadly pandemic or a climate emergency is gaining traction everywhere.

The idea of an apolitical world is appealing more and more to people, argues Eri Bertsou, a senior researcher at the University of Zurich and co-editor of a 2020 book called The Technocratic Challenge to Government.

People are tired, and they are put off by the commotion and the disagreement of representative politics, Bertsou said. So it's this appeal of an efficient machine-like system where problems can be identified through evidence, facts, reason, rather than ideological beliefs. I think that a lot of people find that appealing.

Bertsou has been studying the rise of technocratic governments around the world, especially in Europe. In February 2021, Mario Draghi, an economist and former president of the European Central Bank who had never held political office, was named Italian prime minister to help manage the countrys post-pandemic economic recovery.

Draghi is a technocrat, chosen for the specific experience he brings to the job. Italians are fond of technocrats, especially when times are tough, and Draghi is the fourth technocrat prime minister there since 1993. You can also find cabinet-level technocrats in Greece, France and Lebanon, among other countries. But none of them would be embraced by Technocracy, because they are still operating within the price system, still treating symptoms, not the disease.

While the number of technocrats in government is on the rise, so, too, is the number of populist politicians who wear their lack of expertise like a badge of honour.

During the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for saying he would listen to the scientists when it came to managing COVID-19. If I listened totally to the scientists, Trump proclaimed, wed have a country right now that would be in a massive depression.

But theres been a price for not listening to the experts. Countries run by populist leaders of various shades particularly the U.S., Brazil and the U.K. have recorded among the highest COVID-19 death rates.

For longtime Technocracy Incorporated supporters like Ed Blechschmidt, the idea that anyone would question the science around the pandemic, or anything else, is mystifying.

You cant argue with science and technology, he insisted. Science exists and scientific fact is fact. You cant have a political position about it. You have to recognize it and implement science.

But as weve discovered during the pandemic, science can sometimes speak with many voices, and by definition, representative democracy requires a constant balancing act among competing interests. Governments have to listen to the scientists but also to business people, parents and others.

Bertsou believes that by insisting on finding the one correct solution to every problem, Technocracy has presented a false dichotomy. There is not one type of scientific knowledge, and no one way of governing social problems.

Technocracy Incorporated began nearly a hundred years ago by seeking answers to two important questions: Why on a continent so rich in natural resources, energy and industrial capacity, were so many people suffering? And how could democracy, with all its obvious imperfections, continue to function effectively in a world where science and technology played an ever more dominant role?

Technocracys answers to both those questions were bold, radical, overly complicated and wildly impractical. Today, no one is talking about a North American Technate or a 16-hour work week or replacing money with energy certificates. But it would be wrong to dismiss Technocracy Incorporated as just another failed utopian scheme not while the answers to those two questions remains so elusive.

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In science we trust | CBC News - CBC.ca - CBC.ca

Biography author Walter Isaacson has been in touch with Tesla Inc(NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk to discuss the possibility of penning a biography of the billionaireentrepreneur, as per a Fox Business report.

What Happened: As per the report, Isaacson, whose biography on late Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs sold over 3 million copies, has spoken with Musk over the telephone in recent weeks; the two plan additional conversations before a final decision is made.

Musk is known to have shown interest in having someone of Isaacson's stature write his biography but a final decision is still pending, the report said citing sources.

Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews and spent two years writing his most popular biography on the iconicAppleco-founder.

The author of "The Code Breaker," "Leonardo da Vinci," "Benjamin Franklin," and "Einstein" in an interview with Yahoo Financein Marchcalled Musk in some ways Steve Jobs of our time because hes crazy enough to think he can change the world.

See Also: Did Billionaire Elon Musk Sell All His Mansions To Live In A $50,000 House?

Why It Matters: In February, Musksaid on Twitter that he is writing a book on Tesla and SpaceX. The renowned entrepreneur and innovator who wants to colonize Mars, has created a unique legacy of his own with a mix of invention and entrepreneurial spirit.

Price Action: Tesla shares closed 1.17% lower at $671.87 on Friday.

For news coverage in French, Italian, or Spanish, check outBenzinga France,Benzinga Italia, orBenzinga Espaa.

Photo by Heisenberg Media on Flickr

2021 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Elon Musk Said To Have Talked With Walter Issacson Over A Biography - Benzinga

With a temperature of about 500 degrees Celsius, the surface of Venus is hostile to life but the higher temperatures in the planets atmosphere are much lower. Could microorganisms colonize this area? My research team has now answered this question with a resounding refusal. According to scientists in the journal Nature Astronomy, there is not enough water for life. Mars offers better prospects. Lakes on the Red Planet have not only provided sparse conditions, but have also been life-friendly for millions of years, a second team also reports in Nature Astronomy.

Only recently has the supposed discovery of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus sparked discussions about life on the planet. However, research on this matter has so far overlooked the role of aquatic activity in ecological livability, explain John Halsworth of Queens University Belfast and colleagues. Biologists use water activity to describe the proportion of unconstrained water, that is, water that is available for life processes. This value can range from 0 to 1, but life is only possible if the water activity is greater than 0.585.

Hallsworth and his team have now analyzed conditions in the highly volatile region of Venuss atmosphere. It turns out that the value of water activity in this area is less than 0.004 water is rarely available for life there. According to scientists, this is caused by large amounts of sulfuric acid droplets. This means that there are no microbes there.

The situation is different with Mars: Hallsworth and colleagues have determined a water activity of 0.537 for its thin atmosphere just below the limit allowed for a life-friendly environment. Since the climate on the Red Planet has changed dramatically during its history, the atmosphere may have been more favorable for life in the past.

This is also supported by the findings of a study by Elizabeth Lusa Adams and colleagues from the University of Vigo in Spain. The team analyzed X-ray measurements taken by the Curiosity rover on sediment deposits in Gale crater. Curiosity has been traveling in this Martian crater since 2012, where there was a lake in the early days of Mars. Until now, we did not know whether the sediments were formed by the slow process of deposition or by short-term selective floods, Losa-Adams and colleagues explain.

With the help of X-ray measurements, the researchers were able to examine the crystalline structure of the sediment and learn how it was deposited. Their finding: The sediment must have been deposited in calm waters over a long period of time. So the lake in Gale Crater was not a short-lived body of water, but rather provided life-friendly conditions for a much longer period of time perhaps up to ten million years. The temperatures should also have been suitable for the emergence of life during this epoch, because the water did not freeze into ice and did not evaporate very quickly. Unlike the atmosphere of Venus, it is possible that life may have arisen in the water-rich environment of the young planet Mars.

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There is no life in the atmosphere of Venus - Tech News Inc