Category Archives: Transhuman News

Enough is enough: They're making the canal wider.Knot Again

It happened again: Another gigantic shipping vessel temporarily blocked the Suez Cana on Thursday, temporarily stopping traffic at whats one of the most important waterways for global trade.

A ship from Panama called the Coral Crystal got stuck after traveling about 33 miles into the canal, as originally reported by the Arabic language news outlet Al-Ain, blocking one lane and forcing authorities to divert four ships that were stuck behind it. The temporary blockage was resolved thanks to the canals tugboats, according to Metro but not without serving as a brief reminder of how one glitch in the global shipping industry can cause a financially-devastating chain reaction.

Its a relief that the Coral Crystal didnt get stuck as badly as the Ever Given, the ship that blocked the entire canal for about a week back in March. Compared to that fiasco, the Coral Crystal seemed like a cakewalk not unlike when another ship called the Maersk Emerald got stuck in the canal in Maybut thankfully didnt block any others from passing by.

At 738 feet, the Coral Crystal is only about half as long as the Ever Given, making it far easier for authorities to refloat and send on its way. Thats even with its 43,000 tons of cargo, according to Metro.

Still, canal authorities seem to be fed up with this years string of ship failures and unintentional blockades. As Metro notes, theyre now working on a huge project to widen key parts of the canal in hopes that some of the larger ships passing through manage to avoid getting stuck and breaking down.

READ MORE: Deja vu as container ship runs aground in Suez Canal but is quickly refloated [Metro]

More on the Suez Canal: Watch the Amazing Moment as the Giant Ship Finally Gets Unstuck

Futurism Readers: Find out how much you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

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Oh Great, Another Giant Ship Blocked the Suez Canal - Futurism

In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew higher and orbited longer than Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos combined aboard Vostok 1, the worlds first piloted space flight. Upon his return to Earth, Gagarin became a global celebrity, traveling the world and recounting what it felt like to drift weightless and see the planet from above. For a brief moment, he transcended the boundaries of the Cold War, greeting cheering crowds in both Soviet and US-allied countries, capturing our collective fascination with the cosmos.

The Vostok mission was meticulously planned and engineered, its cosmonauts trained for years. Its successor, Soyuz 1, was a different story. The 7K-OK spacecraft had been hastily constructed, its three unmanned flight tests all ending in failure. According to one account, Gagarin helped detail over two hundred structural concerns in a report urging the flight be called off. Its rumored that he even tried to take his fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarovs place piloting the doomed mission. In the end Komarovs parachute failed to deploy and he burst into flames on reentry, plummeting at forty meters per second into the Earth.

In aeronautics, the margin between triumph and tragedy is narrow. While hubris may have been Soyuz 1s fatal flaw, the pursuit of profit has similarly incentivized corner cutting in the US space program. NASA, once the crown jewel of the public sector, has been slowly sold off to private contractors in the neoliberal era.

Since 2020, NASA astronauts have ridden SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets into orbit, a model that has raised safety concerns among engineers and logged more failures since its debut in 2006 than the space shuttle did in thirty years. Recently, another NASA contractor, Virgin Galactic, was grounded for investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration after its pilots failed to notify the agency that its celebrated Unity flight was veering into commercial airspace.

Mission objectives have changed as well. While perhaps always mythic, the once allegedly valiant aspirations of the space program have given way to openly touristic and militaristic goals. Corporations pursuing commercial space flight have received billions in public financing, and the US Space Force alone already has nearly three quarters the total budget of NASA.

The true ethos of space exploration, however, is one of public works and education. Peering into the void of space inspires the deepest questions facing humanity: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? While a space program catering to the science fiction fantasies of billionaires is decidedly dystopian, conceptualizing space exploration as an educational mission to remotely probe the depths of the galaxy can help animate a more equitable vision of futurism.

How can space exploration serve society?

Our first priority must be to decarbonize space flight. Without achieving this, the emissions that space flight generates are hardly justifiable given the state of our planet. Like the space blanket and cochlear implant, the applications of zero-carbon jet fuel would go far beyond the space program that developed it. Commercial aviation contributes an estimated 3.5 percent of effective radiative forcing a figure that space tourism could skyrocket.

Due to the weight of batteries and other logistical challenges, hydrogen fuel cells are considered one of the few viable pathways to decarbonizing long-distance flight. While some private space corporations have begun incorporating hydrogen, the fuel production is likely emissions-intensive and the technology remains proprietary. A publicly directed moonshot research program, coupled with tight restrictions on fossil-fueled rocket launches, could greatly accelerate the implementation of green hydrogen fuel cells in aviation and other difficult-to-decarbonize sectors.

In addition to our atmosphere, we must respect the sanctity of orbital space, which we have littered with trash. The Defense Departments Space Surveillance Network currently estimates there are more than twenty-seven thousand pieces of debris orbiting Earth. Yet even as their own ships run a gauntlet of garbage, billionaires are trashing space more than ever.

While perhaps none match the vanity of the Tesla Roadster, competing commercial satellite networks like Musks Starlink and Bezos Project Kuiper actually pose a much greater collision threat and are also egregious sources of light pollution and electromagnetic interference. These redundant and dangerous monuments to the egos of oligarchs ought to be taken down from our skies along with other forms of space trash.

Rather than granting billions in subsidies to enable this pollution, governments should instead collect the taxes that corporations like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic have evaded and use them to create public sector careers cleaning up their mess. To the extent that it is useful, publicly sponsored infrastructure in private hands should be nationalized and made accessible to all.

The trade-offs between telecommunications infrastructure and preservation of dark skies highlight another core failure of NASAs past: the lack of a planetary internationalism. In 2013, the Bolivian Space Agency and the China National Space Administration collaboratively launched the Tpac Katari 1 satellite (TKSat 1), demonstrating how easy it could be to close the space infrastructure gap between the Global North and South.

The same year that the United States proposed to desecrate a Hawaiian sacred site for a telescope, Bolivia used space technology to bring internet and cell service for the first time to millions of Andean and Amazonian citizens. Since then, TKSat 1 has boosted education and development initiatives and even helped defend Bolivian democracy by relaying the transmissions of campesinos resisting the US-backed coup government in real time.

Satellites can serve many other public interests, such as facilitating research that helps scientists monitor problems like climate change, deforestation, and forced labor. While todays satellite infrastructure is used to commercialize communication and fuel mass surveillance, an international consensus to treat telecommunications and information access as public rights could instead provide free global broadband coverage with minimal infrastructure, balancing scientific advancement with our collective view of the stars.

Finally, a socialist vision for space exploration could enable us to reach our full potential to venture into the unknown. History enshrines the intrepid explorers, but the true heroes of the space age are the workers at ground control. Yuri Gagarin made it home safely because of his command crews stationed from Baikonur to Khabarovsk. Apollo 13 famously called on Houston when they had a problem. Today, many of our brightest astrophysicists and aerospace engineers are swept up by military departments and weapons manufacturers. We should use their talents for science and education instead.

That doesnt mean, however, colonizing Mars. The Red Planet is a cosmic wonder, but a dreadful place for Earthlings. It has very little carbon dioxide, and no amount of terraforming will reinstate the magnetic dynamo that once deflected the solar winds now stripping away its depleted atmosphere. In fact, everything we have learned from researching Mars has reinforced the importance of protecting the fragile atmosphere of our home planet. While piloted space flights may be useful in some situations, we should place far more emphasis on collaboratively building robots like the ones that have taught us about our planetary neighbors.

In todays space race, these initiatives compete for funding. By prioritizing cooperation over colonization, however, we could pursue them all. We could attempt to retrieve raw materials for green energy infrastructure from decommissioned satellites and uninhabited asteroids instead of mines in the Global South. We could search the solar system for extraterrestrial life by flying rotorcrafts into the hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere of Titan and boring submarines into the icy subsurface ocean of Europa. We could strive for the first landing on Pluto, Eris, or even beyond not to plant a flag, but seed a concept of what we can collectively achieve.

In his final years of reflection on our Pale Blue Dot, astronomer Carl Sagan pondered, Where are the cartographers of human purpose? Where are the visions of hopeful futures of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads? Sagans legacy including the worlds first and only interstellar mission offers a glimpse of this vision.

We can choose to collaboratively probe into the depths of the cosmos, conveying collections of human knowledge, or to taxi billionaires to spend four minutes at the edge of space, indulging their fantasy of escaping the planet theyre poisoning with the very fuel propelling them. In either case, the financial, intellectual, and human costs will be borne by the public.

Fortunately, if theres one thing that space exploration has taught us, its that fate isnt written in the stars. That happens down here on Earth.

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We Need a Socialist Vision for Space Exploration - Jacobin magazine

SACRAMENTO, Calif. Climate change scientists don't like to use the term "prediction." Rather, they're making "projections" about the future of the planet as sea levels rise, wildfires sweep the West and hurricanes become more ferocious.

There's a good reason for that.

In a world awash in misinformation about medicine, politics and climate, and pretty much everything else part of a scientist's job now involves teaching the public about how science works. Convincing the public to have faith in science means making precise, measured projects about the future.

They've got to overcome the big question: Can you really make accurate projections about what the planet will look like in 50 years, a century from now?

Climate scientists think they can, based on the past five decades of climate science that has proven accurate. Futurists, such as Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow for the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit foresight group based in Silicon Valley, study present trends and available data to lay out plausible outcomes for the future.

Today, a lot of Cascio's work is centered around climate change, helping people prepare for the future and make informed decisions for a warming world.

"Everything in the world," Cascio said, "every future outcome will have to be examined through the lens of climate."

In the future, climate change may only get worse. But how much worse will it get?

Scientists have relied on climate models for over 50 years. To people who aren't scientists, it's challenging to understand the calculations that go into these projections. So, what exactly is a climate model?

Meteorologists can make weather predictions for the next hour, or even week, based on weather data and forecast models that use humidity, temperature, air pressure, wind speed, among other current atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions. But with climate, a specific region's weather averaged over decades, is a little more challenging to project and understand.

An extension of weather forecasting, climate models factor in even more atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions to make longer-term forecasts. Using mathematical equations and thousands of data points, the models create representations of physical conditions on earth and simulations of the current climate.

Climate models predict how average conditions will change in a region over the coming decades as well as how the climate appeared before humans recorded it.

Researchers can then understand how these changing conditions could impact the planet, which is useful especially for understanding climate change, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center based in the Bay Area.

"Perhaps the most important (purpose) is to try to suggest the types of changes that might occur as the world continues to emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases," Hausfather said.

The first climate model, developed over 50 years ago in the early days of climate science, helped scientists gauge how the ocean and atmosphere interacted with each other to influence the climate. The model predicted how temperature changes and shifts in ocean and atmospheric currents could lead to climate change.

Today, these models are much more complicated and run on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A decade ago, most models broke up the world into 250-kilometer segments, but now the models are 100 square kilometers. More regional patterns emerge when simulations are at a finer scale.

"People aren't drawing a picture of temperature and carbon dioxide and drawing a line through it and then extrapolating that into the future," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a senior climate adviser at NASA.

Through these advancements in technology, these models are becoming even more useful to scientists in understanding the climate of the past, present and future.

"Fortunately, they don't do such a terrible job," Schmidt said.

All of this works toward convincing the public and businesses to take action.

A majority of Americans already notice the effects of climate change around them, according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2020. But individuals, businesses and politics must "adapt to a radically and dangerously changing climate," Cascio said.

On the individual level, people must consider the climate in all of their monumental decisions: whether to have children; which car to buy; how to invest; when and where to buy a house. Governments are tasked with climate decisions that impact the future of entire nations, such as whether to invest in alternative energy or write policy curbing emissions.

Are climate models useful?

Instead of thinking about climate models as whether or not they are right, Schmidt said climate models should be considered as to whether they provide useful forecasts.

"Do they tell us things? Do they get things right more than you would have done without them?" Schmidt said.

Usually, the answer is yes, and what these models inform scientists is crucial for their understanding of the future climate.

Hausfather knows this better than anyone, as he led a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters analyzing the accuracy of early climate models. Some of the findings were included in the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in August.

Hausfather, along with co-author Schmidt, compared 17 model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007 with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017.

Hausfather and his colleagues found promising news: Most of the models have been quite accurate. More specifically, 10 of the model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four projected more warming than observed while three projected less warming than observed.

But Hausfather and his colleagues realized this wasn't telling the whole story. After accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors driving the climate, it turns out 14 of 17 model projections were "effectively identical" to warming observed in the real world.

"That was strong evidence that these models are effectively right," Hausfather said. "They're doing a very good job of predicting global temperatures."

The accuracy was particularly impressive in the earliest climate models, Hausfather said, especially given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time.

But not all of the early models were error-free. One of the first climate models, created in 1971 by climate scientists Rasool and Schneider, projected that the world would cool due to the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols.

"(The researchers) thought that the cooling effect of these aerosols from burning fossil fuels that would reflect sunlight back to space would be much stronger than the warming effects of the greenhouse gas," Hausfather said.

While the 1970s were still in the early days of climate research, most of the scientific literature of the time was still pointing toward a warming future as much more likely. Yet, Rasool and Schneider's model still spurred a slew of news stories about a potential ice age. Even today, the model "still gets trotted out every now and then by folks trying to discredit climate science today," Hausfather said.

Now the model is proven to be wrong. It's a consensus among climate scientists that the planet is not cooling instead it's warming at an alarming rate.

Even today, despite the promise of climate models shown by Hausfather's study, these models still have their limitations, especially with regard to the uncertainty of future emissions. Climate scientists are physicists not economists or political scientists, and it's challenging to understand how policy will shape emissions standards.

"We don't have a crystal ball that can predict the future human behavior in terms of how much our emissions will change," Hausfather said. "We can just predict how the climate will respond to the emissions."

Issues of accuracy in climate models also still arise when models are pushed outside of their specific parameters. To combat this, climate models focus their projections on physical conditions seen in the natural world, instead of statistical probability, Schmidt said.

Researchers have more confidence in the predictability of physics than statistics, because physics doesn't change into the future. Researchers can have confidence that they can use these models outside of the time period where they have observational data, such as looking at climate during the last ice age, Schmidt said.

"How things get expressed might be different but the basic physics ... the underlying processes don't really change," Schmidt said.

Hausfather said there's still a lot of work still to improve climate models, but they are consistently getting better over time. Simulations of the Earth become sharper as more physical processes are added and computer power grows.

Why make projections for the future?

While climate scientists focus on physics to make forecasts for the future climate, Cascio and other futurists place scientific data in a larger context, making foresight based on climate change, new technological developments, as well as political and social movements. Futurism is "essentially anticipatory history," Cascio said.

"The idea is to take the science and embed it into a historian's understanding of how the world works to try to get a sense of what are the possible outcomes that we see going forward," Cascio said.

But, just like with climate models, uncertainty is inherent to the nature of projections. Futurists do not want to over-promise, but they provide a forecast of what could happen and reasons why it could happen, Cascio said.

Most of Cascio's work with climate change projects a grim future. In his perspective, an "absolutely radical" and "transformative" climate plan is necessary to make the necessary change. Plans that are "sensible and acceptable (are) almost definitely not enough."

"I really want to be wrong about all of this stuff," Cascio said, "because there are no futures that are not really depressing for the next generation."

Despite the despair projected by many climate scientists and futurists, there's still hope. If global emissions can be brought down to zero, Hausfather said the best climate model estimates illustrate that the world will stop warming.

"It's not too late to act," Hausfather said. "The world is not locked into a particular amount of warming."

Cascio still tries to consider himself a long-term optimist for the future, because the changes necessary to mitigate climate change will also lead to a much more "transparent and equitable" world, he said.

"If we can make it through the second half of this century, there's a very good chance that what we'll end up with is a really wonderful world," Cascio said.

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What will the planet look like in 50 years? Here's how climate scientists figure it out - The Bakersfield Californian