Category Archives: Futurist

NASA is paying Boeing double what it's paying SpaceX for the same service. Expensive Tickets

NASA is will be paying Boeing twice as much for each Starliner seat to the International Space Station than it's paying SpaceX for equivalent Crew Dragon tickets, Ars Technica reports, in a price differential that's becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile as Boeing has yet to successfully launch a single astronaut into orbit.

This week, the space agency confirmed that it has awarded SpaceX with five additional crewed missions to the station, bringing the total up to 14 through 2030, at which point the station is scheduled to finally be retired.

Boeing was awarded contracts for six crewed flights throughout the same time period but is still getting almost as much funding from NASA as SpaceX.

That means, according to Ars' calculations, that NASA will spend $183 million for each seat on board a Boeing Starliner across all planned missions, while it's pay SpaceX just $88 million per seat which is less than half.

Given Boeing's plagued development of its Starliner the capsule failed to reach a stable orbit during its first catastrophic test flight back in December 2019 it seems like an awfully steep price that's becoming harder to justify with every delay.

The company has made little progress since then, limping into orbit during its second attempt in May while suffering engine failures along the way, but with no crew on board.

The first crewed Starliner mission is tentatively scheduled for early next year, with NASA assigning two brave souls to take the capsule for its inaugural crewed test ride back in June.

In the longer term, Boeing may also struggle finding available rockets to launch the spacecraft, with the United Launch Alliance (ULA) retiring its Atlas V rocket after six Starliner missions, Ars reports.

That means the company have have to turn to the ULA's other unproven Vulcan rocket, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin or even SpaceX for a rocket ride.

Since NASA's Commercial Crew program is fixed price, Boeing will likely have to shoulder the costs for any incurred budget overruns. In fact, sources told Ars the Starliner program has already proven to be a major money drain for the company.

In short, Boeing is far behind SpaceX's immense progress at this point, which means NASA will likely have even more difficulties justifying the billions of dollars it's spending to keep both companies in the running.

READ MORE: NASA will pay Boeing more than twice as much as SpaceX for crew seats [Ars Technica]

More on Boeing: Piece Falls Off Boeing Starliner as It Trundles Toward Launchpad

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NASA Paying SpaceX Half of Boeing's Price to Launch Astronauts - Futurism

We're still not entirely convinced he's real.Fool You Once

A college student and visual effects artist named Curt Skelton managed to convince countless users on TikTok that he was a fake character created by a different visual effects enthusiast, Input reports.

It's a fascinating and mind-bending prank that shows how difficult it's become to tell digital effects trickery from the real thing, especially given the rise of photorealistic deepfakes and AI image generators.

In a video that's been watched over 13.5 million times on the platform, Skelton claimed that he was a 21-year-old visual effects artist Zahra Hussain, arguing that he or rather she had used the AI-powered tool DALL-E to generate an image, which was then wrapped around a 3D frame and animated.

"Will artificial intelligence replace the role of visual effects artists?" Skelton asks rhetorically in the video. "It already has, I'm not real," the video continues, Curt's voice melting into that of another person, identified as Hussain. "Curt Skelton is a fake character I made using multiple AI-powered programs, and here's how I did it."

But the ruse proved to be just a little too convincing.

"I dont know what to believe," one user replied.

"I am having a crisis is she being honest or not," another chimed in.

As it turns out, both Hussain and Skelton are real visual effects artists. Skelton isn't a character created by Hussain, though they did collaborate on the prank.

"He had a full idea down ready to go," Hussain told Input, referring to Skelton coming to her with the idea. "He brought me onboard with his enthusiasm."

Skelton himself has some regrets about the whole thing.

"I dont blame the people who thought it was real," he told Input.

That's partially because it really started to escalate.

"People flooded my Instagram with comments asking if I was real and also my girlfriends Instagram, letting her know that I was in fact a robot," he added.

But at the end of the day, Skelton thinks it was all fair game.

"The goal was never to trick people," Skelton told Input. "They did that to themselves."

READ MORE: How one TikToker convinced folks he was an AI-generated character [Input]

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TikToker Fools Fans Into Thinking He Was Created With CGI - Futurism

A brand-new restaurant concept serving up a blast from the pastand from the futureis coming soon to Schumacher Place.

The Mercury Diner, a futuristic diner serving up throwback restaurant fare with a twist, is tentatively slated for an October opening at 621 Parsons Ave. The space, at the corner of Livingston Ave. and Parsons Ave., formerly housed The Crests second location.

Like The Crest and the nearby Alchemy Kitchen at 625 Parsons Ave., The Mercury Diner is owned by A&R Creative Group.

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The Mercury Diner will feature space-age interior decoration, complete with intergalactic murals, all while serving up variations on classic diner fare from eras past.

Inside it will feel like youre eating in 3022, but youre really eating in 1922, said Managing Partner Justin Wotring.

According to Wotring, A&R wanted to capitalize on the daytime traffic at the location from its proximity to Nationwide Childrens Hospital and German Village.

The Mercury Diner will function as more than just a restaurant, however.

The Parsons Ave. spot will likely host different after-dark pop ups and cook-off events, and it even boasts a small stage that Wotring envisions opening up to local creatives and musicians. It will also act as a restaurant incubator for A&R employees with food dreams of their own.

We have a lot of creative people working for us, a lot of people with ambition, Wotring said, And we wanted to give them a launching pad.

Want to read more? Check out our print publication, (614) Magazine. Learn where you can find a free copy of our new August issuehere!

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New futuristic diner replacing The Crest on Parsons - 614NOW

The groundbreaking 1964 New York Worlds Fair was a creative playground for Walt Disney and his Imagineers, a chance for the greatest visionaries of the time to experiment before a global audience.

Three of Disney parks most iconic attractions came from the event: Its a Small World, Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. A fourth Disney exhibit at the fair never fully made it to parks, but millions have passed by one of its most impressive elements every year at Disneyland.Primeval World, a diorama that is part of the historic Disneyland Railroad, is something that many casual guests pass by without a second thought. You cant miss the staggering heights and breathtaking size of these three-dimensional, audio-animatronic dinosaurs, but many overlook their historical significance.It all goes back to the 1964 Worlds Fair held in Queens, New York a hotbed of inspiration and a promising peek at the future where technology merged with creativity and passion. Fueled by some of the biggest corporations at the time, it was also a pivotal moment for Disney as it was his first big reach to the East Coast, years before Walt Disney World was built, and a chance to flex his creative muscles.At the Fair, Disney spearheaded the creation and design of four exhibits that would lay the groundwork for much of what Disney parks offer today. This ultimately set the trajectory for theme park innovation as we know it.During the planning stages of the Worlds Fair, Ford Motor Company was looking to partner with a pioneering visionary for a unique exhibit that would showcase its new automobiles. Naturally, they thought of Walt Disney and his Imagineers at WED Enterprises, who were making waves at the time for the technologies used at Disneyland.

Primeval World was taken from the 1964 World's Fair attraction Ford Magic Skyway.

They really wanted something to show off their cars particularly, said Ted Linhart, a Disney and Worlds Fair expert behind Disney Docs. This exhibit would also be the debut of the highly-anticipated Ford Mustang, which further solidified the pressure to make a big splash.

They needed a showman, Linhart added. Something to really make a pop.

The result was Ford Magic Skyway, an attraction narrated by Disney himself, that would transport guests aboard actual Ford motor vehicles as they time traveled to different periods, including the era of the dinosaur.The partnership at the Worlds Fair would not only prove to be beneficial for Ford, but for Disney as well. He used the opportunity for his Imagineers to research new technologies and never-before-seen storytelling methods, on the dime of the mega-corporation. It was a big undertaking for Disney, but allowed them to expand their Imagineer technology and audio-animatronic technology, Linhart said.His grandest display of showmanship? Forty-six towering dinosaurs, marking one of the earliest and grandest displays of audio-animatronics.Some 15 million people attended the show during its two-year run. For many, this was the first time they saw audio-animatronics with their own eyes. This new and groundbreaking entertainment medium showed guests the most life-like dinosaurs they had ever seen before, which moved and even grunted.

Walt Disney reportedly referred to these brontosauri as Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Walt realized that the Worlds Fair would be a great place to expand that technology, expose it to many more people, enhance it and get it more out there, added Linhart. The dinosaurs would revolutionize theme park technology as we know it, setting a precedent and introducing guests to figures on the grand scale that they would come to expect from Disney parks attractions.The use of synchronized movement and sound was first on display, although to a much smaller degree, with Walt Disneys Enchanted Tiki Room. The total immersion of the senses displayed in the dinosaur scenes on Ford Magic Skyway, though, was a new level of storytelling that would soon be used at forthcoming Disneyland attractions, like Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion.The dinosaurs were a big hit, Linhart said. They seemed realistic to people. The whole pavilion was a huge smash. Documents show that guests would wait hours to ride the attraction for a glimpse of the dinosaurs.

Industry standards were also set beyond the dinosaurs. Disney and Ford were tasked with learning how to manage the flow of people, marrying ride capacity with guests' demands. A new ride vehicle system was developed that would later be used at Disney parks. One of the technologies they created for the Fair would allow the car to move at the same speed as the track it was on so that people getting in it could get in the car without having injuries, shares Linhart. This vehicle propelling technology, developed for the Ford Magic Skyway, would be used with the now iconic PeopleMover attraction first at Disneyland and now at Walt Disney World.The success of Disneys dinosaurs and all of his exhibits collectively boded new confidence for the companys expansion to Florida and provided the groundwork for beloved attractions seen today. While the three other exhibits made their way to Disney parks fully intact, only Walts popular dinosaurs were rescued from the Ford exhibit.

The diorama culimnates in a fight between a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Stegosaurus.

They were brought to Disneyland in 1966, where they have entertained millions for the last 56 years. Guests experience these dinosaurs aboard the Disneyland railroad between the Tomorrowland and Main Street, U.S.A. stations.

On this journey, the train passes through the Grand Canyon before coming face to face with these figures in the multi-set Primeval World diorama. The cavernous scenes were inspired by the classic film Fantasia with a soundtrack provided by the roaring dinosaurs and the Primeval World Suite.

During the ride, guests can spot a brontosaurus and three babies; Walt playfully called them Huey, Dewey and Louie. After appearances by pteranodons and triceratops, the final scene finds two dinosaurs, a tyrannosaurus rex and a stegosaurus, battling it out before an erupting volcano.Today, paleontologists have questioned Disney for discrepancies found within the attraction, like the physical attributes of the dinosaurs and conflicting eating habits. What cant be disputed is their impact on theme park innovation and technology.While Primeval World never made it to Walt Disney World, it was reimagined at Tokyo Disneyland and similar life-like dinosaurs seemingly roam the earth or attractions in popular Universal Studios park rides today. It also inspired the now-defunct opening day Epcot attraction, Universe of Energy and Primeval Whirl, another defunct ride in the Dinoland area of Disneys Animal Kingdom in Orlando. (That park made much more realistic dinos on its Dinosaur ride, which uses the same ride track as Indiana Jones Adventure in Disneyland, although riders are escaping extinction, and not a giant stone ball.)The Ford show was designed as a time machine to immerse you in different parts of the past and the future, Linhart added. It does seem like theres a very strong connection from that ride to the iconic rides of today.

For now, the dinosaurs are safe and sound, remaining a beloved part of Disneylands colorful fabric. Only time will tell if they, like so many attractions of yesteryear, will one day roar into extinction.

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A prehistoric Disneyland attraction created futuristic technologies at the park - SFGATE

It's great that gardens with an eco-conscious aesthetic are popular. The harmony of a successful landscape with its surroundings, in terms of its flora, planting style, and general mood, is one of its defining characteristics.

However, it is important to be aware that the widespread interest in plant naturalism that exists now is a very new trend.

Gardeners have sought distinctly alien plants and strikingly unusual for at least a century; examples include non-native varieties of lilies, roses, azaleas, and hostas.

(Photo : Annie Spratt/Unsplash)

It's a rock garden that has been carried to the very limit; an extreme design that draws inspiration from improbable, dramatic locations like mountain peaks, windswept seacoasts, and sun-baked deserts, as per The New York Times.

To understand the underlying principle closer to home, all you have to do is glance down. See that lone dandelion with its grip in a tiny crevice between curbstones or sidewalk pavers, with no soil in sight? Its colorful blossoms shout in opposition to everything gardeners believe they know about what plants desire, just like a Saxifraga or Silene clinging to tiny crevices in a wide, rocky environment do.

The Crevice Garden: How to Make the Perfect Home for Plants from Rocky Places," a new book, exhorts us to imitate the processes that take place in such settings, both big and tiny.

Rock-garden designers Kenton J. Seth of Colorado and Paul Spriggs of British Columbia are its authors. They occasionally work together.

They have established themselves as de facto crevice gardening ambassadors, drawing in a larger and younger audience with their ambitious lecture schedule, their Facebook group, Modern Crevice Gardens, which has more than 5,000 members, and now a book.

In contrast to flat gardens, crevice gardens typically have berm-like contours that give the appearance of a natural outcrop and allow the roots of the plants to swell deeply (although not very far sideways).

These gardens may be scaled down to fit in a trough or up for a botanical garden or park. They range from naturalistic to high modernist art.

A preliminary design that the men are frequently requested to come up with is a little larger than a container garden. It's maybe a three by three-foot mound that Mr. Seth described as "a little garden" or Mr. Sprigg described as "a modest outcrop."

Instead of being an eyesore that you wish you didn't have to see, a crevice garden transforms this vacant area into a focus point.

No matter the scale, Mr. Seth suggested that the goal may just be to "create a lovely element in a xeric environment that can elevate plants a bit closer to the observer" or sustain plants that you would not otherwise be able to grow in your environment.

Read more:Species Biodiversity: Rare Plants in Urban Gardens Can Also Attract a Rare Biodiversity of Bees and Birds

In the early parts, they utilized very little soil and a lot of PermaTill, a horticultural-grade aggregate.

Many plants, including 588 hardy cactuses and agaves, did not survive the winter.

This caught everyone off guard because the only thing that keeps somewhat hardy plants alive over the winter is the lack of moist soil.

The growth medium was excessively open, and chilly air was penetrating the ground, Tony Avent and Jeremy Schmidt, the botanic garden's supervisor of grounds and research, and rock garden designer Kenton Seth, of Fruita, Colorado found.

Avent claims that the soil temperature in the crevice garden was just four degrees warmer than it was 18 inches below the surface when it was winter.

The growth mix was modified in later parts to incorporate compost and some native soil to address the issue.

More agaves, resilient cacti, delosperma, arabis, and draba are among the 1,500 species that are now flourishing in the garden; these plants would definitely not survive in typical garden beds in central North Carolina.

The waves created by the undulating crevice slabs lend motion to a rigid medium. Schmidt claims he used a skid-steer loader to lower them over their designated spot, then utilized gravity to assist position them.

There is a pleasant tension seeing seemingly fragile, unique beauty like globularia bloom against such imposing settings, with its chive-like flowers.

This served as an organizing principle for the design, but according to Avent, his fissure garden provides a paradigm of urban sustainability by bringing beauty to the wasteland of repurposed concrete.

According to Seth, it's a fantastic method to green cities, prevent waste from going to the landfill, and introduce people to a wide variety of new plants. "I'm hoping this will serve as an example for cities all across the world," as per Independent.

Related article:5 Essential Things for a Well-Kept Garden

2022 NatureWorldNews.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Crevice Gardens: A Futuristic Way To Save the Environment? - Nature World News

"Were species agnostic."Kingdom Come

A group of researchers are looking to use machine learning to translate animal "languages" into something humans can understand and they want to apply it to the whole animal kingdom, a highly ambitious plan to say the least.

AsThe Guardian reports, California-based nonprofit Earth Species Project (ESP) which was founded in 2017 with the help of Silicon Valley investorslike LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman plans to first decode animal communication via machine learning, and then make its findings available to all.

ESP co-founder and president Aza Raskin says that the group, which published its first paper in December 2021, doesn't discriminate and is looking to help humans communicate with, or at least understand, as many species as possible.

"Were species agnostic," Raskin told The Guardian, adding that the translation algorithms the ESP is developing are designed to "work across all of biology, from worms to whales.

In the interview, Raskin likened the group's ambitions to "going to the Moon," especially given that, like humans, animals also have various forms of non-verbal communication, like bees doing a special "wiggle dance" to indicate to each other that they should land on a specific flower.

Despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges the group is facing, the project has made at least some progress, including an experimental algorithm that can purportedly detect which individual in a noisy group of animals is "speaking."

A second algorithm reportedly can generate mimicked animal calls to "talk" directly to them.

"It is having the AI speak the language," Raskin told The Guardian, "even though we dont know what it means yet."

While there are certainly exciting implications to this kind of research, particularly when it comes to conservation and convincing skeptics that animals are worth saving, Raskin admits that AI likely won't be the only answer to saving them.

"These are the tools that let us take off the human glasses," he concluded, "and understand entire communication systems."

READ MORE:Can artificial intelligence really help us talk to the animals? [The Guardian]

More on animal AI:Smart Pet Door Uses Facial Recognition to Keep Strange Animals Out

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Ambitious Researchers Want to Use AI to Talk to All Animals - Futurism

Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere. For a small group of fervent futurists, it is their lottery ticket to immortality. What are the chances that these bodies will be reanimated? Will baseball legend Ted Williams frozen head be awakened to coach fighter pilots or fused to a robot body to hit .400 again?

Cryonics attempting to cryopreserve the human body is widely considered a pseudoscience. Cryopreservation is a legitimate scientific endeavor in which cells, organs, or in rare cases entire organisms may be cooled to extremely low temperatures and revived somewhat intact. It occurs in nature, but only in limited cases.

Humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads. Deprived of oxygen at room temperature, the brain dies within minutes. While the body may be reanimated, the person who lives is often in a permanent vegetative state. Cooling the body may give the brain a bit more time. During brain or heart surgery, circulation may be stopped for up to an hour with the body cooled to 20 C (68 F). A procedure to cool the body to 10 C (50 F) without oxygen for additional hours is still at the experimental research stage.

After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable.

This vessel lies within a second outer vessel, separated by a vacuum to avoid heat transfer from the outer room-temperature vessel wall to the cold inner vessel wall. Heat gradually transfers across anyway and boils away the LN, which must be periodically refilled. Bodies were originally, and may still be in some cases, cooled and frozen in whatever condition they were in at death, with better or worse preservation, as we shall see.

The early years of cryonics were grisly. All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.

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Small freezing operations began in the late 1960s. While the practice of storing bodies has become more sophisticated over the past 50 years, in the early days, technicians cooled and prepared corpses with haste on dry ice before eventually cramming them into Dewar capsules. By in large, these preservations did not achieve preservation. They were nightmarish, gruesome failures. Their stories were researched and documented by people within the field, who published thorough and frank records.

The largest operation was run out of a cemetery in Chatsworth, California by a man named Robert Nelson. Four of his first clients were not initially frozen in LN but placed on a bed of dry ice in a mortuary. One of these bodies was a woman whose son decided to take her body back. He hauled (his dead mother) around in a truck on dry ice for some time before burying her.

The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post.

Eventually, the mortician was not pleased with the other bodies sitting around on beds of ice, so a LN Dewar capsule was secured for the remaining three. Another man was already frozen and sealed inside the capsule, so it was opened, and he was removed. Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people who may or may not have suffered thaw damage into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a puzzle. After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

Another group of three, including an eight-year-old girl, was packed into a second capsule in the Chatsworth vault. The LN system of this capsule subsequently failed without Nelson noticing. Upon checking one day, he saw that everyone inside had long thawed out. The fate of these ruined bodies is unclear, but they might have been refrozen for several more years.

Nelson froze a six-year-old boy in 1974. The capsule itself was well maintained by the boys father, but when it was opened, the boys body was found to be cracked. The cracking could have occurred if the body was frozen too quickly by the LN. The boy was then thawed, embalmed, and buried. Now that there was a vacancy, a different man was placed into the leftover capsule, but ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape no pun intended from the get-go and was eventually thawed.

Every cryonic client put into the vault at Chatsworth and looked after by Nelson eventually failed. The bodies inside the Dewar capsules were simply left to rot. Reporters visited the crypt where these failed operations had taken place and reported a horrifying stench. The proprietor admitted to failure, bad decisions, and going broke. He further pointed out, Who can guarantee that youre going to be suspended for 10 or 15 years?

The worst fates of all occurred at a similar underground vault that stored bodies at a cemetery in Butler, New Jersey. The storage Dewar was poorly designed, with uninsulated pipes. This led to a series of incidents, at least one of which was failure of the vacuum jacket insulating the inside. The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post. Eventually the bodies had to be entirely thawed to unstick, then re-frozen and put back in. A year later, the Dewar failed again, and the bodies decomposed into a plug of fluids in the bottom of the capsule. The decision was finally made to thaw the entire contraption, scrape out the remains, and bury them. The men who performed this unfortunate task had to wear a breathing apparatus.

Out of all those frozen prior to 1973, one body remains preserved. Robert Bedford was sealed into a Dewar in 1967. Instead of leaving the body to meet a horrific fate under Nelsons care, Bedfords family took custody of the capsule, meticulously caring for it at their own expense. The body was handed off between professional cryonics operations, occupying multiple frozen tanks and facilities for 15 years or so. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the founders of Alcor a modern cryonics outfit one of whom wrote a heartfelt, slightly creepy piece about the body.

Credit: Jeff Topping / Getty Images

Alcor is the leading example of the current state of cryonics. While the ugly events above suggest that your remains might well end up as tissue sludge scraped out of a can, the professionalism of companies like Alcor may offer an increased chance for long-term preservation. This 501(c)(3) organization hosts researchers who work on methods to improve the freezing process, possibly increasing whatever slight odds exist that human popsicles will ever be brought back to life. At a more fundamental level, it appears to be stable and to have deep pockets, so there is a better chance that your corpse will be around long enough for some distant future doctor to recoil in horror at it.

The U.S. industry has consolidated around two main organizations. If not Alcor, your other choice is the Cryonics Institute, which has more than 200 bodies stored in giant tanks and accepts dozens more each year. Apparently, ten years ago, head storage alone at Alcor cost $80,000, while full body storage at the Cryonics Institute was only $30,000. There are international options as well. A Russian cryogenics company stores not only people but pets, including one entry under rodents, a deceased chinchilla named Button.

Modern cryonic preparations at Alcor employ a multistep process to prepare the body for storage. First, they begin to cool the body while anti-clotting agents and organ preservation solutions are injected into the bloodstream and circulated under CPR. The body is then transported to the companys main facility, where the original fluid is replaced with chemicals that vitrify turn to glass the bodys organs. This offers some hope for cutting down on structural damage during the subsequent cooling and storage. Then the body is entombed in its Dewar capsule.

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, its not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? Thats probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking.

Credit: Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think

While cryonic preparation is now more advanced, the laws of physics demand that the structure of the body will break down rapidly after death, catastrophically upon freezing, and gradually over time, even while frozen. Think of how badly frozen food ages in your freezer. If the medical technology of the future becomes advanced enough, perhaps these corpses can be revived. But thats a big if. Lets say your body remains frozen until the 25th century. Then, lets say that future doctors are interested in reviving you. How much work will they have to do to fix you once youre thawed? The answer lies in the condition of the bodies once theyre thawed. Strangely enough, we know something about this.

In 1983, Alcor needed to lighten three cryonauts, reducing them from bodies to simply heads. (In one transhumanist conception of the future, medical science will be able to revive the brain and then simply make a new body or robot to which to attach it. Neuropreservation is cheaper and easier too.) The three corpses were removed from their Dewar capsules so that the heads could be cut off still frozen, so requiring a chainsaw and stored separately. Once the heads were sawed off and put away, Alcor employees got to work medically examining the state of the bodies. They wrote up their findings in great detail.

At first, things looked reasonably good. While the bodies were still frozen, their skin was only moderately cracked in a few places. But once the bodies thawed, things started to go downhill.

The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured.

Cracks appeared in the warming bodies, cutting through the skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to the body wall or muscle surface beneath. One patient displayed red traces across the skin following the paths of blood vessels that ruptured. Two of the patients had massive cutaneous ruptures over the pubis. The soft skin in these areas was apparently quite susceptible to cracking.

While the external damage was extensive, the internal damage was worse. Nearly every organ system inside the bodies was fractured. In one patient, every major blood vessel had broken near the heart, the lungs and spleen were almost bisected, and the intestines fractured extensively. Only the liver and kidneys werent completely destroyed.

The third body, which had been thawed very slowly, was in better condition externally, with only a few skin fractures and no obvious exploded blood vessels. However, the inside was even more annihilated than the others. The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured. The examiners injected dye into an artery in the arm. Rather than flow through blood vessels and into muscles, most of it pooled under the surface in pockets and leaked out of skin fractures.

The medical examiners extensively detailed the content of the blood, the texture of the muscles, and the extent of the damage. They included pictures. And they earnestly stated their conclusion up front: The tremendous tissue deterioration will require incredibly advanced medical technology to fix. Worse, the probable destruction at the cellular level may require rebuilding the body at the molecular level. Perhaps future medicine might be able to inject swarms of nanobots into your body to repair every bit of tissue, but dont bet on it happening any time soon.

Modern cryonics practices may ward off the horrific failures of the past. And we cant entirely rule out future medicine somehow finding fixes for the terrific damage incurred by the body in freezing, sitting, and thawing. But theres one more hurdle for the future revivification of your frozen form, the last great danger to your immortality: your crazy relatives. Several cases demonstrate the problem.

The family of a man frozen in 1978 eventually got tired of paying for him. The facility offered to cut off his head and store it for free, but the family turned them down. Instead, the body was thawed, submerged in a vat of formaldehyde like a laboratory specimen, and buried in that condition. Two further men were stored by their sons, one of whom had his father thawed, removed, and buried. The other son eventually buried his dads capsule in its entirety with the remains still inside.

Relatives can also go to court and battle over what happens to your corpse. Richard Orvilles family buried him against his wishes and was eventually forced by an Iowa court to dig up his body for preservation. A Colorado womans family went to court to fight Alcor for their mothers head. Alcor eventually got the head, to preserve as best they could. Conversely, another womans will stated that she did not want to be frozen. Her husband froze her anyway, and after a four-year court battle, the State of California ordered that she be thawed and buried.

One particularly well-known family affair is the story of a frozen Norwegian man who was initially stored at a California facility that worked with Alcor. He was removed by his daughter, who stored him in an ice shed behind her house in Colorado. The body was discovered when she was evicted from the property. The small town of Nederland, Colorado now has a Frozen Dead Guy Days celebration every year.

While the chances of immortality may be slim, dozens of people still commit their bodies or brains to cryonics each year. If their remains arent mismanaged or allowed to disintegrate, and if their relatives dont go to court over the body, there is now a good chance that they will remain frozen for decades. Unfortunately, they will come out of the process cracked into a million pieces, and the prospect of putting them back together again is purely science fiction for the foreseeable future. Its a grim practice with ghoulish results; at least it makes for some fascinating stories and a bit of dark humor.

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Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of frozen bodies - Big Think

Hyundai Motor Group has presented a dramatic vision for a smart city of the future where all the transport is automated.

The innovative concept was exhibited at the World Cities Summit in Singapore, developing an idea first explored by the automaker at CES in 2020.

The latest HMG Smart City is said to be inspired by a honeycomb pattern and is a hexagonal-shaped urban community with a human-centered surface layer and a function-centered underground layer.

Nature is prioritized in the human layer, with parks and forests at the center of the city encircled by buildings, which will decrease in density the closer they are to the greenery.

But its the underground layer where Hyundais thinking gets more radical. This is where the road infrastructure is located. The idea is that all goods and services are transported underground via autonomous mobility to a particular areas automated logistics hub, where autonomous robots make the final delivery.

Travel between respective smart cities is by advanced air mobility (AAM). AAM vehicles take off and land from a series of Hub 2.0 Towers, which combine residential and office areas with AAM ports at the top of the building.

According to Hyundai Motor Group President and Chief Innovation Officer Youngcho Chi, the smart city shows how urban communities can be rejuvenated. In the future smart cities, our ambition is for humankind to live with nature while embracing technology, he said. Our air and ground mobility solutions will redefine urban boundaries, connect people in meaningful ways, and revitalize cities.

We will continue to work with governments around the globe to bring our smart city vision to reality, while rapidly advancing capabilities in future mobility solutions.

The Smart City certainly provides added perspective to some of the ideas and tech announced by Hyundai in recent months as the company looks to a future where smarter, more sustainable mobility will be integral.

Driverless robotaxis are being aggressively pursued by the Group, with a self-driving Hyundai Ioniq 5 co-developed with Boston-based Motional due to start operations in Las Vegas next year and another Ioniq 5 featuring the brands own in-house autonomous tech recently undergoing tests in Gangnam, Seoul.

Its also earmarked billions of dollars to develop a new type of transport in so-called electric Purpose-Built Vehicles, which range in size from unmanned micro-sized vehicles for deliveries to larger shuttles.

In May, it announced a massive $5 billion investment in its U.S. operation to support its work in robotics, AI tech, AAM and autonomous driving.

And it is becoming an increasingly high-profile presence in the burgeoning eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) flying taxi industry via its AAM offshoot Supernal. It recently unveiled a concept eVTOL vehicle at Englands Farnborough International Airshow and at the same event confirmed a deal with Rolls-Royce to work on electric propulsion and fuel cell tech for air taxis.

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Hyundai Reveals Futuristic Smart City With Automated Transport - IoT World Today

He's not ready to give up.Get Over It

Moving on is hard.

Just ask UK-based IT engineer James Howells, who, almost a decade ago, accidentally threw away a hard drive containing over $180 million worth of Bitcoin and is still clinging onto hope that it's recoverable.

Howells mistakenly chucked the hard drive, which allegedly contains about 8,000 Bitcoin, back in 2013, well before the cryptocurrency shot up in both popularity and value.

By today's standards, whatever's on that hard drive if it even turns on is worth a lot, just under $184 million to be precise.

Since early last year, Howells has been lobbying the Newport city council to let him comb through all of the landfill's trash in order to find it.

Most recently, he claimed to have secured funding and a top-notch, trash-digging team to support the hunt but as the BBC reports, the council has once again rejected his search citing environmental concerns.

Among claims that his newly-assembled team boasts environmental experts, Howells' most recent plea to the council outlined plans to incorporate assistive AI and robot dogs in the effort.

"We've basically got a well-rounded team of various experts, with various expertise, which, when we all come together, are capable of completing this task to a very high standard," the IT tech told the BBC.

To sweeten the pot, Howells offered to put ten percent of the recovered Bitcoin into crypto-based town projects, including a clean energy-powered crypto mining site, a one-time handout to all residents of $61 worth of crypto, as well as access to crypto-based sales terminals in all local shops.

But that's all predicated on Howells finding the damn drive and discovering that it still works. Then there's the fact that the outlook of the crypto market is looking less than stellar these days.

Shockingly, the city still won't let Howells' team dig up the town's landfills.

"Part of this is managing the ecological risk to the site and the wider area," a council spokesperson told the BBC. "Mr. Howells' proposals pose significant ecological risk which we cannot accept, and indeed are prevented from considering by the terms of our permit."

READ MORE: Bitcoin: Missing hard drive could fund Newport crypto hub [BBC]

More on crypto woes: Man Wakes Pregnant Wife to Tell Her He Lost $100,000 on Crypto

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Man Who Lost $180 Million Bitcoin Hard Drive 9 Years Ago Still Trying to Dig Through Trash - Futurism

Googling the term real estate financing metaverse will provide approximately 8.8 million hits. The results are a mishmash of companies that provide financing for metaverse real estate deals, as well as articles ranging from skepticism (Investing in Metaverse Real Estate: Mind the Gap Between Recognized and Realized Potential) to enthusiasm (The Coming Boom in Metaverse Lending for Banks). Previous Weekender articles have also chimed in on the topic, most recently with Buying and Financing LandIn the Metaverse.

But is the industry really at the point in which virtual real estate and financing deals can or even should take place? Not just yet.

In a recent Walker Webcast, Walker & Dunlop chairman and CEO Willy Walker acknowledged that the metaverse is gaining traction. However, Ive been asked whether Walker & Dunlop is thinking about financing real estate in the metaverse, Walker commented. I will be so long gone when Walker & Dunlop starts financing real estate in the metaverse.

According to L.D. Salmanson, CEO of New York Citys real estate data and insight firm Cherre, in the short term two or three years, (metaverse) is a buzzword that provides zero value to real estate owners and operators. He told Connect CRE that at this point, scammers will use it to raise money for nonsense, and visionaries will use it to raise money for things that are too early.

One reason is because of the current state of hardware and software. Salmanson explained that Apple, Meta and Google have their own hardware and software ecosystems and their own virtual reality and augmented reality environments. Using video games as an example, Salmanson said that shared universes are possible across different hardware types if and only if the software developer decides to make this universe accessible from multiple hardware environment.

The metaverse, as it currently stands, isnt a whole lot different. Even if virtual locations are accessible from different platforms, software vendors build their own, non-converging environments. I cant really picture one metaverse, Salmanson said. Rather, I see multiple, siloed hardware and software environments.

Additional challenges include current battery technology that is far behind what we need for this reality to exist, Salmanson said. The costs are also high, and current central processing units (CPUs) and graphic processing units (GPUs) arent advanced enough to support a meta world. The power consumption for these devices is astronomical, Salmanson added.

All told, the idea of buying and financing anything, let alone real estate, in the metaverse is a nice fantasy, but far from applicable right now. As operators and investors, we need to be grounded in reality, Salmanson said. We dont have the luxury of futurism for futurisms sake. Thats for science fiction writers to delight us, not for the immediate reality.

But technology isnt static, and its likely the metaverse wont stay static, either. Salmanson said that as hardware capabilities advance and AR and VR moves beyond the cartoon stage of quality, this could begin to provide rich experiences that can start replacing or enriching every day experiences, he said. But penetration here will be slow.

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Metaverse: The Gap Between Reality and Futurism - Connect CRE