Category Archives: Futurism

"Certainly, we support this effort and endeavor."To the Moon

Senate Democrats and the White House have reiterated their support for NASAs Artemis program, which has the goal of returning the first human astronauts to the surface of the Moon as soon as 2024.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said during a conference today that the government will work with industry leaders to send another man and a woman to the Moon, which is very exciting. Psakis also called the Moon a waypoint to Mars.

Certainly, we support this effort and endeavor, she added.

In a Wednesday letter signed by 11 Democratic senators, lawmakers urged the Biden administration to fully fund the human landing system initiative.

Developing the next generation crewed lunar lander is an essential step in returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time in half a century, including the historic milestone of landing the first woman on the Moon, reads the letter.

The senators also urged NASA to proceed with the planned selection and to include all necessary funding for [the Human Landing System] in your FY 2022 budget request.

Overall, significant budget constraints have put a squeeze on the space agencys efforts to develop a human landing system capable of lowering astronauts to the Moons surface, as Ars Technica reports.

That tracks with what the new head of NASA, Steve Jurczyk, told Futurism earlier this week: that without full funding for the human landing system, a 2024 Moon landing will be logistically challenging.

READ MORE: Senate Democrats send a strong signal of support for Artemis Moon program [Ars Technica]

More on Artemis: NASA Boss: We Have Every Indication That Artemis Is Safe Under Biden

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It's Official: Biden Admin Fully Supports the Artemis Moon Program - Futurism

The seas are rising faster than even the most pessimistic scientists estimated.High Tide

Bad news for the roughly 40 percent of humanity that lives near a coastline: A study shows that the sea level is rising faster than even the most pessimistic climate change models predicted.

Scientists from the University of Copenhagen and Norways Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research came up with a new way to measure the sea levels sensitivity to increasing temperature, which they published Tuesday in the journal Ocean Science. And looking ahead, they predicted that the water will rise far higher than experts expected it to, adding an even greater sense of urgency to the fight against climate change.

If we want to stay on track with existing climate models and forecasts, the global economy will need to reduce carbon emissions by an additional 200 billion metric tons which is roughly five years worth beyond what experts had already accounted for in order to meet climate goals over the next century, study coauthor and Copenhagen geophysicist Aslak Grinsted told Bloomberg.

It means our carbon budget is even more depleted, Grinsted said.

The new study says that the sea level could rise by half a meter by the end of the century if temperatures increase by just half a degree Celsius. At two degrees Celsius a level of warming thats likely at this point the seas could rise by a full meter.

The scenarios we see before us now regarding sea-level rise are too conservative the sea looks, using our method, to rise more than what is believed using the present method, Grinsted told Bloomberg.

READ MORE: Sea Levels Are Rising Faster Than Most Pessimistic Forecasts [Bloomberg]

More on sea level: A Melting Antarctica Could Raise the Sea Level More Than Expected

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The Ocean Is Rising Faster Than Anyone Feared - Futurism

Its biofuel can be grown on a farm.Astronaut Farmer

The space startup bluShift Aerospace successfully launched a low-flying rocket on Sunday using a kind of fuel that the company says can be grown on a farm.

The company plans to become the first private aerospace company to launch a single-engine biofuel-powered rocket, according to Space.com, though theres a long way to go in order to reach that point from its mile-high test. But if it works out, the more-sustainable rocket fuel could go a long way to helping clean up an environmentally-destructive industry.

As far as the test itself goes, Space News senior writer Jeff Foust tweeted that it took three tries to get the rocket off the ground. It never quite reached its goal of one mile in altitude, according to Space.com.

BluShift CEO Sascha Deri told reporters that he felt the flight went perfectly, according to Space.com. The company now wants to ramp up its tests and launch a suborbital rocket later on this year.

It landed right where we were hoping for and where we were planning for, Deri added. It couldnt have been better than that.

The tiny rocket carries just 17 pounds of cargo, according to Space.com, but the test is still a solid showing for the prospects of environmentally-friendlier biofuel. The company claims that its proprietary biofuel is non-toxic, carbon-neutral, and can be cheaply sourced from farms across America, according to Space.com.

Future tests will show whether the fuel and the rockets it propels are ready to make a dent in conventional rocket fuels, but Deri said that hes delighted with the recent test and remains optimistic for the next.

READ MORE: Startup bluShift Aerospace launches its 1st commercial biofuel rocket from Maine [Space.com]

More on biofuel: The Worlds First US-to-Australia Biofuel Flight Was Powered by Mustard Seeds

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Startup Tests Spacecraft That Runs on Farm-Grown Rocket Fuel - Futurism

It was an otherwise non-notable day in October 2017 when Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk made an astonishing discovery.

Thanks to data from the University of Hawaiis Pan-STARRS1 telescope at the Kaleakala Observatory in Hawaii, Weryk spotted an unusual object, oblong and approximately the size of a football field, screaming through the solar system at 196,000 miles per hour. Strangest of all was that it seemed to be accelerating slightly, pushed by an invisible force that has yet to be fully explained.

Its highly unusual trajectory caused it to slingshot past our Sun, leading scientists to believe that the space object later dubbed Oumuamua, or scout in Hawaiian was the first ever visitor from outside our solar system to be observed directly.

Over the last three years, countless attempts have been made to explain Oumuamuas unprecedented characteristics. Some speculated that it was hydrogen iceberg, while others suggested it was a traveling space rock covered in a layer of organic sunscreen.

To Avi Loeb, astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University, the answer could be a tantalizing one. His controversial argument is that Oumuamua may have been a probe sent by an extraterrestrial civilization an explanation thats garnered enormous attention in the media and, unsurprisingly, proved divisive among experts.

In his new book, titled Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Loeb explores his provocative hypothesis, using the story of Oumuamua to lay the groundwork of a much greater conversation: the struggle to be taken seriously within a scientific community that has historically held the discussion surrounding the search for the existence of terrestrial intelligence at arms length.

During an interview with Futurism, Loeb argued that scientists explanations fell short of explaining Oumuamuas many quirks and eccentricities. The scientific community advocated for something that we have never seen before, he said.

One example of this was what Loeb referred to as the dust bunny hypothesis, which theorized that Oumuamuas odd trajectory could be explained by a very low density.

The problem with that is I dont think something of the size of a football field that is a dust bunny would survive a journey of millions of years through interstellar space, Loeb said, vacuuming up that hypothesis. I mean, I just dont think that it can hold itself together.

To Loeb, scientific explanations that attempted to squeeze Oumuamua into an existing scientific framework just didnt make sense.

The point is, you cant on the one hand say its natural, Loeb argued, and then whenever you try to actually explain it with natural processes, you come up with something that we have never seen before.

And thats how he ended up at aliens.

At the root of Loebs alien theory is that Oumuamua may have been a solar sail sent to us from another star system.

In the simplest terms, a solar or light sail is a form of spacecraft propulsion that turns the low pressure of solar radiation into movement. Earthling scientists have already experimented with the concept; in 2019, the non-profit Planetary Societylaunched a craft called LightSail-2,which uses 340 square feet of an extremely thin layer of reflective polyester film to gradually propel itself.

To Loeb, a solar sail being pushed by starlight could explain Oumuamuas unexpected acceleration. If its solid and isnt a dust bunny, the astrophysicist concluded that the interstellar visitor must also be shockingly thin perhaps, according to his calculations, less than a millimeter thick.

To the astronomer, the solar sail conclusion was following footsteps, just like detective Sherlock Holmes. When you rule out all other possibilities, whatever youre left with must be the truth.

That conclusion is a stretch to many astronomers in the field, who have repeatedly challenged Loebs conclusion.

In a 2019 study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers argued that they found no compelling evidence to favor an alien explanation for Oumuamua.

Oumuamuas properties are consistent with a natural origin, University of Maryland astronomer Matthew Knight, co-author of the study, toldReuters at the time, and an alien explanation is unwarranted.

Their argument was that Oumuamua is a planetesimal, or a small fragment of a planetary building block that just happened to drift through our star system.

Weryk,who discovered the object in the first place, had no kind words for Loebs hypothesis. Honestly, thats a bit of wild speculation, he told the CBC in 2018.

I think its a remnant from another solar system, Weryk added. Its just something that happened to run into us, and we were very lucky to have been operating the telescope that night and looking in that direction.

These rebuttals appear to have only emboldened Loebs investigations into the alien origins of Oumuamua as well as leading him to make a passionate plea to the scientific community, as outlined in his book, to take SETI research seriously.

To Loeb, its all about reading the stars with an open mind.

My guiding principle is modesty, he told Futurism. If we are not arrogant, if we are modest, we would say that life, the way we have it, must be common.

We now know from the Kepler satellite data that about half of the Sun-like stars have a planet like the Earth, roughly at the same distance, so that it can have liquid water and the chemistry of life as we know it, Loeb said, referring to the habitable zone of a star system within which life can theoretically could be supported.

So we know that the dice was rolled billions of times in the galaxy, he said. And if you arrange for similar circumstances like we have on Earth, you would get a similar outcome.

To Loeb, this simple calculation is conservative, not speculative, and that it should be the mainstream view. But proposing that we are not alone in the universe is seen as a fringe view and the mainstream claims there should be a taboo.

The scientific community can address a topic even if other people address it in a way that is not scientific and doesnt make much sense, Loeb argued.

So my point is the existence of the literature on science fiction or the existence of unsubstantiated UFO reports should not eliminate this subject from being part of the mainstream discussion, he added.

In fact, Loeb contended that it is less speculative than other areas of study, from the study of dark matter to multiverse and string theories.

All of these hypothetical concept for which we have no basis, he said. And you have communities of hundreds of scientists working on giving each other awards and honors and so forth, he added in a slightly derisive tone.

To him, the refusal to believe we are not alone in the universe is a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

When you put blinders on, youre not searching for anyone else, you might think that youre special, he said.

The only way to break that taboo, to break that state of mind, is to find evidence for others, Loeb argued. But, if you dont search, you will never find it, closing the cycle.

Worst of all, a lack of funding for SETI research only ends up deterring young people from entering this field, Loeb said.

So the search for life beyond the Earth must go on and Loeb has plenty of ideas on how to do so.

Arguably the most ambitious plan hes involved with, a project called Breakthrough Starshot, is a proof-of-concept interstellar probe project by Breakthrough Initiativesthat involves sending an army of small light sails called Starchips as far as Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own at just over four light years away.

TheCentauri system contains a promising planetary candidate called Proxima b, a tantalizingly Earth-like planet.

Four light year may not sound like much on paper, but the distances that the sails would have to cover are immense. Rather than harnessing the solar radiation from the Sun, the project is investigating if we can shoot an extremely powerful laser at these spacecraft from here on Earth to provide enough acceleration.

Its an endeavor that involves near-insurmountable hurdles. In fact, Loeb isnt sure if the Starshot project will materialize in his lifetime and Breakthrough Initiatives estimates that it could take 20 years for the mission to reach Alpha Centauri after launch.

But I think we have to do it as a civilization, Loeb told Futurism. We have to go in that direction and consider how to visit other stars, because currently all our eggs are in one basket here on Earth and we cant ignore the risk from a catastrophe.

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Avi Loeb and the Great Unknown - Futurism

New York

These days when modernism is coupled with utopian or idealistic, its with a disparaging tone meant to emphasize the navet of the idea. Yet in the early 20th century, in a society transformed by the Russian Revolution and World War I, modernism seemed to embody hope for a better future and to repudiate a problematic past. For many artists, a new pared-down aesthetic and a bold, experimental embrace of the latest technologies, materials and techniques aptly expressed the aspirations of a startlingly altered world.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the ways, in the 1920s and 30s, adventurous art was put into the service of politics and social change in Soviet Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Futurism, and Dada are all represented by posters, advertisements, magazine layouts, books, typography, films, broadsides, theater design, and just plain propaganda, sparsely punctuated by paintings and prints that provide welcome refreshment from the commercial inclusions. Much of the exhibition celebrates the 2018 gift of more than 300 early 20th-century works on paper from the Merrill C. Berman collection, with selections of similarly functional works from MoMAs holdings.

We are reminded that after the cataclysms of revolution and war, some artists began to question not only the nature of what they did, but also its necessity. The pragmatic dominated. We learn that the Latvian graphic designer Gustav Klutsis posited an artist of an entirely new typea public person, a specialist in political and cultural work with the masseswhile the Russian painter Liubov Popova, who said she desired to translate the aesthetic to the production plane, abandoned the easel for agitprop theater sets, costume design, and other useful projects. (A couple of abstract, colored linoleum cuts, with bold jostling planes, make us wish she hadnt.)

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Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented Review: Modernists of the World, Unite! - The Wall Street Journal

Virgin Hyperloop has released a new video showing what the experience of being shot inside a pod down a vacuum tube at breakneck speeds could one day look and feel like.

Its an ambitious vision of the future of transportation. The concept video goes through each step in the travel process, from check-in to disembarking.

The experience seems reminiscent of going to an airport to catch a plane. The interior of the shuttle, however, feels more inspired by rail travel, with wide open cabins and face-to-face seating.

The biggest difference, however, is that there are no windows except for what appears to be a generous skylight above. Thats because the magnetically levitating pod is racing through an vacuum tube at speeds of up to 760 mph.

To make it feel less claustrophobic, the design team is focusing on bringing the outside in. Bands of greenery and wood textures subvert the aesthetic of typical mass transit materials with something optimistic and fresh, John Barratt, CEO and president of design company Teague, which designed the pod interiors, said in a statement.

All lighting in the pod including the unassuming information displays are dynamic and adjust based on traveler activity and journey milestones, Barratt said.

Its a futuristic mode of transportation that wont begin commercial operations until at least 2030, according to Virgin.

But it has made some headway with the technology. A first passenger test of the system back in November managed to accelerate two Virgin Hyperloop execs to a speed of 107 mph in just 6.25 seconds.

It felt not that much different than accelerating in a sports car, Virgin Hyperloop co-founder and first passenger Josh Giegel told The New York Times at the time.

In the future, Virgin Hyperloop is hoping to transport thousands of passengers an hour inside large convoys of 28-passenger-capacity pods. The individual pods will be within milliseconds of each other during travel, according to the company.

The company is now trying to figure out a way to drive down costs to make it more affordable than flying. Its simple. If its not affordable, people wont use it, Jay Walder, CEO of Virgin Hyperloop, said in the statement.

Daily high-speed transport is currently not feasible for most people, but we want to change that notion, Walder said. Imagine being able to commute between cities that are currently hours apart in minutes and the endless possibilities that opens up.

READ MORE: Virgin Hyperloop outlines how it thinks journeys will actually work in 2030 [Gizmodo]

More on Virgin Hyperloop: The First-Ever Passengers Just Rode a Functional Hyperloop

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Here's What Traveling By Hyperloop Could Look Like - Futurism

Spacetime Modification Weapon

According to documents obtained by The War Zone, the US Navy performed experiments on far-fetched technologies including a spacetime modification weapon which, researchers claimed internally, could revolutionize power and propulsion systems.

The mysterious technologies were meant to take advantage of the Pais effect, patented by American aerospace engineer Salvatore Cezar Pais and which could end up pushing the boundaries of conventional science if, that is, they are ever proven to actually work.

Pais says the tech could enable a propulsion system that defies gravity, as well as even more eccentric claims. In a January 2020 correspondence with The War Zone, Pais even laid out plans for a hybrid aerospace-underwater craft that he claimed was able to engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level.

Needless to say, these dubious theoretical devices have yet to be demonstrated in any meaningful way but, at the same time, the fact that the US military is funding their development does lend them a veneer of credibility.

According to the newly obtained documents, the Navy took Paiss ideas seriously enough to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into their development.

The spacetime modification weapon, based on a Pais patent for a Plasma Compression Fusion Device, is supposed to release extremely high energy levels and make the Hydrogen bomb seem more like a firecracker, in comparison, according to the documents.

The experiments sound inconclusive, though. The elusive Pais effect was neither observed nor disproven, according to The War Zone.

In other words, it remains unclear whether the Navy still believes Pais is onto something or whether his work is a neglected line item in the Defense Departments vast budget.

READ MORE: Navy UFO Patent Documents Talk Of Spacetime Modification Weapon, Detail Experimental Testing [The War Zone]

More on Pais effect: Navy Scientist Known For UFO-Like Tech Patents Fusion Reactor

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The Navy Reportedly Experimented With a "Spacetime Modification Weapon" - Futurism

Hard Deadline

General Motors, the largest legacy automaker in the United States, announced on Thursday that it plans to stop selling all gasoline or diesel-powered cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs by the year 2035.

Its a huge commitment for an automaker, especially because the vast majority of GMs sales currently come from gas-burning cars rather than electric vehicles, Axios reports. In GMs case, success will depend on rapidly improving and ramping up production for electric vehicles. And for everyone else, seeing that increased attention on zero-emission transportation is great news for the future of our planet.

GMs CEO Mary Barra specifically announced that the company aims to be carbon neutral by 2040. And given that 75 percent of its emissions come from vehicle tailpipes, according to Axios, ceasing gas-burning car sales seems like a reasonable place to start.

General Motors plans to be carbon neutral by 2040 which means removing emissions from all our products, including every vehicle we produce, and all of our global operations in the next twenty years, Barra wrote on LinkedIn.

GMs decision is particularly significant because most of the deadlines to stop selling gas-burning cars have been set by governments, like the state of California banning new gas-powered car sales by 2035 or President Bidens call to electrify all federally-owned vehicles.

Now that the call is coming from the automotive industry itself especially one of the largest companies in the industry its possible that we could finally start to see some real momentum in the push to decarbonize the ways we get from point A to B.

READ MORE: GM plans to end sales of gasoline powered cars by 2035 [Axios]

More on electric cars: California Is Banning All Sales of New Gas-Powered Cars in Just 15 Years

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GM Commits to Ending Sales of Gas-Powered Cars by 2035 - Futurism

Splash Zone

Ever since they discovered that the Moon wasnt bone dry, scientists have been trying to figure out where all that lunar water came from.

Past guesses include bombardment by water-carrying asteroids or that solar winds blasted the Moon with ionized molecules that eventually formed water. But it turns out the moisture may have actually come from the Earths magnetosphere, according to research that was recently accepted for publication by the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. The study actually aligns with the solar wind hypothesis, but explains how that lunar water keeps being replenished instead of evaporating away a dynamic system that could have implications for the future of human exploration on our planets natural satellite.

The idea that lunar water comes at least in part from solar winds is now pretty widely accepted among experts in the field, according to a UCLA press release on the study. But models suggest that those same solar winds should actually evaporate half of the Moons water on a roughly monthly basis, coinciding with the full moon.

But the new analysis shows that the lunar water doesnt actually vanish. Instead, its replenished by planetary magnetic winds, created by the interactions between solar winds and the Earths magnetic field, that blast the Moon with even more ionized particles.

Its a fascinating and almost poetic revelation that the Earth helps supply its natural satellite with water. But aside from abstract scientific awe, learning about the impacts of Earths magnetosphere could help space agencies better protect astronauts from cosmic radiation, according to the press release.

And, its worth noting, water is turning out to be abundant on other worlds and figuring out how it arrived at the Moon can help us figure out what happened on distant planets as well.

READ MORE: First evidence that water can be created on the lunar surface by Earths magnetosphere [UCLA Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences]

More on lunar water: NASAs Big Moon Surprise Is That Lunar Soil Contains Water

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Study: The Moon's Water Came From Earth's Magnetic Field - Futurism

The investigators dispatched to China by the World Health Organization to investigate the coronaviruss origins are finally getting to work.

Two weeks after entering the country which was a whole can of worms in itself the team has emerged from the Wuhan hotel where it quarantined, the Associated Press reports. Now, finally, thescientists can get to work and try to figure out where, when, and how the COVID-19 outbreak first began.

For now, the teams plans are being kept under wraps, according to the AP. However, there are some locations the team will likely visit, including the Wuhan seafood market where the outbreak is widely believed to have originated and the mine shaft 1,000 miles away where scientists found the closest known relative to the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

But the trajectory and ultimate outcome of the investigation still relies heavily on Chinas cooperation. As the AP notes, top officials have been reluctant to allow access to anything that might result in criticism against how China handled the coronavirus, especially during the earliest months as it grew from a local outbreak to a full-blown pandemic.

Wherever they end up going, the goal is to collect samples from key locations in and around Wuhan to try and eventually piece together COVID-19s history.

If history is any example, though, it will likely be years before we know how and when the coronavirus first began infecting people if we ever get a satisfying answer. Tracking down the origins of SARS, for example, took decades, and scientists still arent positive where Ebola came from. But that said, the formal beginning of the investigation is a crucial first step toward getting some answers.

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WHO Team Hits the Streets to Investigate COVID Origins in China - Futurism