Category Archives: Transhuman News

But billionaires really dont want you to know that

You can hardly blameRichard Branson,Jeff Bezos,Elon Musk, and all their rich buddies for ditching planet Earth to have a hot billionaire summer in space.

After all, even rich people were stuck inside for a year while the COVID-19 pandemic raged its way around the globe. Who among us couldnt use an out-of-this-world vacation?

But it can be difficult not to feel a little saltyover the fact that us regular poor folk can only dream of leaving atmosphere. Meanwhile, Elon Musks out there planning exactly what the buildings will look like on Mars.

Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk)November 18, 2020

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Heres the thing though: those billionaires are almost certainly never going to live anywhere but on Earth. Its just too hard. Most of us are unlikely to ever visit space and pretty much none of us, in our lifetimes,will get the opportunity to live there permanently.

Like Musk says, humanity should probably become amulti-planet speciesASAP. The longer we sit around waiting for our planet to get destroyed by an asteroid, an alien species, or our own unchecked destruction, the more likely well end up joining the same club as the dodo and the dinosaurs.

But were going to need to fix the Earth if we hope tolive long enoughas a species to obtain the necessary technology itll take to make life possible in space.

Unfortunately, living in space isnt as simple as replicating life on Earth. The reason people get excited about the possibilities is because weve been inundated with pictures of smiling astronauts having fun floating around.

But compared to Earth, outer space, the Moon, and Mars are allhellishly harsh environments. Theres a laundry list of unresolved science problems restricting even the most basic of human life requirements from being met at any scale beyond a trained space station crew, and that makes colonization a far-away science fiction fantasy.

Each of the above line items are mission-stoppers when it comes to moving members of the general public off Earth.

We dont have the technology to build massive structures in space. And that limits our ability to resolve some of the most difficult problems with living in space.

In the movies, characters walk around on spaceships as if they were taking a stroll on Earth. But space doesnt work that way and artificial gravity remains science fiction.

One way in which we can use currently available technology to solve the gravity issue would be to develop huge cylinders and set them spinning in space. Thanks to centrifugal force, a space station rotating at sufficient velocity could theoretically create artificial gravity.

But were talkingmassivestructures here some scientists believe theyd have to beseveral miles across. And theres currently no feasible method by which we could build such a thing on Earth and get it up into space.

Just feeding, washing, clothing, and supplying oxygen for a handful of astronauts aboard the International Space Station costs millions of dollars per week.

In order to support human life beyond the scope of a spaceship crew, well need infrastructure in space we simply cant build or support with current technlogy.

There are literally no safe spaces in outer space. The moment we leave Earths atmosphere, were completely beholden to our technology. If your ship malfunctions in space, theres no pulling over to fix it.

Furthermore, none of the heavenly bodies near our planet offer the same protections as Earth. Temperatures on the Moon range from 260F to -280F daily. On Mars, the average temperature is -81F. And cosmic background temperature areas of space that arent being heated by nearby stars or other entities is around -455F.

What that means is, if you leave our planet, anywhere close enough for you to travel in your lifetime will be uninhabitable based on temperatures alone.

If you move to Mars or the Moon, youll never be able to stand outside and gaze up at the stars without a special suit to protect you again. And if you live on a giant spaceship or settle on a space station instead, youll spend the rest of your life looking at the cosmos through a window.

The technology it would take to terraform another planet or build giant domes to protect entire populations doesnt exist today.

The science behind making other planets habitable is purely speculative. Elon Musk honestly suggested we should considerdropping a nuclear bomb on Marsto kick start its atmosphere. That should tell you exactly how nuanced our ideas on off-world colonization are.

If we cannot solve Earths current climate crisis, it would be brilliantly stupid to think we can make the atmosphere and surface of Mars habitable for humans.

But with no atmosphere, life outside of Earth would be eternal confinement. The first civilians who try to live in space will be as much prisoners as they are pioneers.

We dont know exactly what effects long term exposure to space radiation will have on people, butwe know theyre going to be bad.

Astronauts operating just outside the Earths orbit require teams with hundreds of support personnel to keep them alive. They cant just rocket up into space and fly around willy-nilly.

Scientists have to monitor radiation constantly so astronauts can avoid bursts and protect themselves.Bursts of radiationcan disrupt communications and electronics and even prove instantly fatal to humans.

Furthermore, even if we manage to figure out how to shield humans during transport, theres nowhere safe for them to go except home. Humans will experience substantially more radiation on Mars and the Moon than they do on Earth, and thats likely to result in a severely decreased lifespan for anybody who lives off-planet.

The human body has evolved over millions of years. Where once we were single-celled organisms developing mutations such as flagella for locomotion, were now upright primates capable of creating nuclear reactors and episodes ofRick & Morty.

One of the quirks that comes with evolving to inhabit a gorgeous, lush planet, is thatwere built for gravity. Floating around in space might look like a lot of fun, but the human cardiovascular system is built to pump blood in a gravity-based environment. Our digestive system uses gravity. Our bones, muscles, tendons, and even our organs have all been designed and trained to function with a very specific amount of force pulling them in the general direction ofdown.

Removing us from the gravity we were designed to live inhas catastrophic effects. Itd be nearly impossible to maintain muscle mass. And theres not much research on what that would mean for our hearts and brains. We simply cannot exist in low gravity for long periods of time without expecting serious health risks including premature death.

Theres currently no solution to this problem. Functional artificial gravity in space or off-planet remains squarely within the realms of science fiction.

At the end of the day, living in space would be exponentially more difficult, boring, dangerous, harsh, and soul-suckingly awful than permanently relocating to Antarctica or establishing a human colony beneath the ocean.

No matter what the billionaires tell you, its going to be easier to fix the planet we live on than to find a new home. Theres only one Earth.

This story was written by Tristan Green for The Next web.

This article was originally published on The Next Web.

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5 reasons why living in space is way harder than solving climate change - Qrius

Jeff Bezos is going into space. Would you? Amol Rajan, of the BBC, asked Sundar Pichai, the C.E.O. of Google, last week. Well, Pichai said, smiling, Im jealous, a bit. I would love to look at Earth from space. Unlike most people, Pichai can probably afford to do so. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, sold a seat on his Blue Origin space companys New Shepard rocket, set to launch this Tuesday, to someone who bid twenty-eight million dollars for it in an online auction and then cancelled, citing scheduling conflicts. The eighteen-year-old son of a Dutch investment-firm executive will be joining Bezos as the first paying customer, instead.

The theatrics surrounding Bezoss tripwhich involves just a few minutes in spacecontribute to the impression that we are not so much in a space age as in an era of billionaire rocketeers. Right before Richard Branson, the Virgin entrepreneur, took off on his own near-space jaunt, on July 11th, Bezoss company tweeted that, among other things, its spaceship has bigger windows. (Bransons are airplane-sized, it said; but hes charging only a quarter of a million dollars per seat.) Elon Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and SpaceX, who has his own plans to leave the planet, has tweeted that Bezos is a copycat, using a cat emoji.

Yet it would be a misapprehension to think that, after centuries of humans dreaming about worlds beyond ours, outer space has been reduced to just another stage for rivalries among the super-richa Southampton in the sky. The larger and far more interesting story is that the planet has, somewhat abruptly, embarked on a new and rapidly accelerating space race. The protagonists include private companies and a growing number of nations, among them China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. As General John Raymond, the head of the U.S. Space Force, which Donald Trump designated a separate branch of the militarya decision that President Biden has affirmedsaid at a Council on Foreign Relations event last month, Space is a very dynamic domain right now. Theres a lot happening.

For a start, the most consequential conflict between Bezos and Musk is not about space tourism but about a nearly three-billion-dollar contract that NASA awarded SpaceX, in April, to build a human lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims, before the decade is out, to resume flying people to the moon for the first time since 1972. Blue Origin, which was part of a consortium that lost out to SpaceX, filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the process was unfair; a ruling is expected next month.

NASA also hired SpaceX to shuttle astronauts to and from the International Space Station on the companys reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft line. (The second such mission is currently under way, and this month Boeings Starliner is also set to dock at the station, for the first time.) NASA hasnt had its own means of getting people to the I.S.S. since the Space Shuttle program ended, in 2011. For years, it bought seats on Russian Soyuz rockets, an option that has become geopolitically untenable. Musklikes to play fast and loosesome of his tweets about Teslas stock prices have got him in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commissionbut hes more reliable than Vladimir Putin.

There may be an even tougher operator on the space scene: Xi Jinping. Last month, Chinawhose presence on the I.S.S. was vetoed by the U.S. a decade agosent the first crew to its own space station, named Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is still under construction. (The I.S.S., meanwhile, is nearing the end of its useful life.) In May, China successfully landed and deployed a rover on Mars. Also this year, it announced that it will send a human crew to Mars in 2033, and set up a base there; coperate with Russia to build a base on the moon (where it already has plans to send astronauts); and launch a spaceship that will reach a distance of a hundred astronomical units (about nine billion miles) away from Earth in time to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, in 2049.

That last plan recalls some of the suspicions that arise when billionaires and politicians rhapsodize about space travel: that it is all about projecting prestigeand power, and bringing our conflicts and dysfunctions into another arena. Some of the early rhetoric applied to spacecolonization, the final frontier, resource mining, conquesthas a more unsettling ring to it now. What may be worse is the impulse to sell space travel as a way to forget about Earths problems, as if the planet were disposable. One fear is that those who have the resources to help effect action on climate change will instead busy themselves with building their own escape pods. Taking that route would be a betrayal of what it means to be part of the human community. At the same time, the longing to explore and learn is quintessentially human. We can surely embrace space without abandoning one another.

It does seem incomprehensible that, while weve crammed orbital space with satellites, and had uncrewed triumphs such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we are only now matching human exploration milestones laid down two generations ago. Alan Shepard, for whom Blue Origins vessel is named, flew into space in 1961, right behind the Russian Yuri Gagarin. On Tuesday, when Bezos sets off on what is still a risky endeavor, Sothebys will conclude an auction on the theme of Space Exploration. Among the items is an unused spacesuit from the ill-fated N-1/L-3 Soviet lunar program, which was officially abandoned in 1976. Only twelve humans have ever walked on the moon; all were white men, and none of them were born later than 1935. No one has been to Mars. The upcoming American and Chinese lunar expeditions will have crews that look very different from their predecessors and, with any luck, will do much more.

But what have we been waiting foran invitation, perhaps? One of the more intriguing aspects of this summer of space was the release of a preliminary report by the office of the director of National Intelligence on unidentified flying objects, or, as the government now calls them, unidentified aerial phenomena. It turns out that, between 2004 and 2021, government sources reported a hundred and forty-four such sightings, only one of which it could definitively dismiss. But a deeper question than whether we have been visited by U.F.O.s may be why we ourselves havent been U.F.O.slooking down on some of the thousands of planets that astronomers have identified in other solar systems in the past three decades, and bringing them news from Earth.

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The Race to Leave Planet Earth - The New Yorker

Offworld Trading Companyis a real-time strategy business management sim, and its free for the week of July 16-22, 2021, on the Epic Games Store.

With Mars colonized, the biggest corporations on Earth now travel to the red planet to set up business there. Offworld Trading Company puts you at the helm of one of these corporations, with the intent of making a fortune out of Mars natural resources. Designed byCivilization IVLead Designer Soren Johnson, players will have a satisfying challenge of both strategy and tactics in this game.

The game features a single-player campaign mode where you get to decide the fate of the Martian colonization project. Use market forces to bend the will of opposing corporations, and make your corporation the biggest force in the market. Once youre done with the single-player campaign, head toOffworld Trading Companys multiplayer mode and compete against other Martian CEOs. Decide which resources to accentuate, which products to buy and sell, and grow your business into becoming Mars first business empire.

Offworld Trading Company is developed by Mohawk Games and produced by Stardock Entertainment. Mohawk Games also made the recent 4X hit Old World, while Stardock Games published other space-setting classics such asGalactic CivilizationsandSins of a Solar Empire. Youre sure thatOffworld Trading Companyis a great game just based off this resume, in case youve never heard of it before. Dont miss the opportunity to get this game for free, which will be up untilJuly 22, 2021.

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Offworld Trading Company is the EGS free game of the week July 16 - 22 - ClutchPoints

While the space billionaire race takes place near Earth, at around 50 to 62 miles high (80-100 km) between Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson and Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos, Musk has bigger plans: Mars. Towards that goal, he is putting big money and resources into the Starship program, which aims to create a reusable and interplanetary launch vehicle.

To power the 120 meters (394 feet) long spaceship, he has designed the Raptors engines. These engines run on cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen rather than the RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen used in SpaceX's prior Merlin and Kestrel rocket engines. A Raptor is able to deliver more than twice the thrust of a Merlin that powers their current Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles.

The Raptor engine's first flight version arrived in McGregor, Texas, in January 2019 and was first flown on the Starhopper test vehicle later that year in July, making it the world's first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine. As of August 2020, Raptor also holds the record for the highest combustion chamber pressure ever produced by a working rocket engine.

Now, to colonize an alien planet, only three such powerful engines that'd be needed for a Starship spacecraft are certainly not enough. For an entire fleet, SpaceX would require hundreds of them to be able to carry an entire population and cargo to Mars.

A Twitter user asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk about the company's plans for a Raptor facility in South Texas on Saturday, July 10th. To that end, Musk announced that a second Raptor plant will"break ground" in Texas, focusing on Raptor 2 engines, while another branch in California will focus on Raptor Vacuum (a variant of Raptor with an extended, regeneratively-cooled nozzle for higher specific impulse in vacuum conditions) and "new, experimental designs."

Another user asked what volume production the billionaire is aiming for. He went on to reply that SpaceX will build "roughly 800 to 1000 per year."These numbers will be enough to create a fleet in 10 years that would construct a self-sustaining city on Mars.

"City itself probably takes roughly 20 years, so hopefully it is built by ~2050.", he added.

It's an ambitious goal that we have yet to see meet the expectations. This is not the first time Musk has said that he aims to put humans on Mars. Musk mentioned a few years ago that the first basecamp on Mars, named Alpha, should be operational by 2030. While that is unlikely to happen, we will have to wait and watch how the stars align for Mr. Musk.

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Elon Musk Hopes to Built a Self-Sustaining City on Mars by 2050 - autoevolution

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars, put Dogecoin on the Moon, and share his obsession with memes on Twitter. Musk, who is the Tesla boss and SpaceX CEO has always been very active on Twitter and has more often than not, changed the trends of the cryptocurrency markets with his tweets. Musks tweets have such a track record of manipulating markets that he has an Internet term named after him: The Musk Effect. Musks tweets, especially about cryptocurrency, also, have sparked curiosity and led to hundreds of people trying to decode what Musk is saying: From his use of popular crypto slang like diamond hands to to the moon to even repurposing Pinkfrogs popular song Baby shark to Baby Doge and even writing a haiku, at one point about space travel.

While Elon Musk stans follow every update of the billionaire on Twitter, Musks tweets do require some decoding. Owing to the vague, and sometimes hard-to-interpret nature of Musks tweets, theyre often analyzed, and sometimes even over-analyzed. A Dogecoin developer commented on this, saying that maybe if he started tweeting out cryptic things, and remained mysterious and outreach, this tweets could be interpreted as mysterious.

I need to start tweeting obtuse and vague things in the hopes that some people will interpret them as coded, meaningful, and mysterious," he wrote on Twitter.

To this, Musk replied with a series of numbers.

While it may not be as obvious to a normal person, a coder or a programmer would have been able to tell very easily what Musk wrote. Musks code is in hex. To convert Hex, you take the byte code (which Musk posted) convert it to decimal, get the character of decimal ASCII code from ASCII table, continue with next hex byte.

Or like Baby Doge(and us) you could use an online converter to see what it meant.

While Musks current tweet is cryptic, he has been very open and upfront about his ideas: of both space and cryptocurrency. While talking about his mission to Mars, Musk has mentioned a time-line to get humans on the red planet. Five and a half years," Musk revealed in February this year. While thats not a hard deadline. Musk listed a number of caveats theres a raft of technological advances that must be made in the intervening years. The strange thing is the deadline may be a little ambitious, as even USAs leading space agency, NASA, had a much more different date, one which is seven years after Musks time. The Perseverance uncrewed rover will arrive later this month to take rock samples and search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet - but the first humans arent due to arrive on a NASA funded rocket until at least 2033.

With Dogecoin, Musk has said this cryptocurrency may be the future. In the interview, he says that There is a good chance that crypto is the future currency of the world. Then the question is which won is it going to be? It could be multiple," he said. He then explains the origins of how Dogecoin was invented as a joke, essentially to make fun of cryptocurrency, and thats the irony, explains Musk. That the currency that began as a joke, becomes the real currency." However, he does add that, Dont invest your life savings into cryptocurrency. Thats unwise."

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Elon Musk Tweeted a 'Cryptic' Message in Hex. Here's What It Says - News18

Another week, means yet another few free games to join the Epic Games Store roster! Last week, the team brought on both the 2D puzzler Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead alongside puzzle battler Ironcast, which offered plenty of critical thinking for those who appreciate those sorts of things. In all honesty. its for a very niche crowd, but for those who did try either game, I hope you ended up getting something out of it. This week though, the team is giving two very different experiences for players to get their hands on. Both Obduction and Offworld Trading Company are now free on the Epic Games Store, followed up next week by both Defense Grid: The Awakening and Verdun.

Starting with our first Epic Games Store free title, Obduction sees players minding their own business on an unknown planet when something begins falling from the sky. All of the sudden, youre transported to an unfamiliar place, filled with many different remnants of home, presumably joining you for the ride. With nothing more than that to go on, its up to you to explore this otherworldly planet, discover its secrets, and find your way back home. With high critical acclaim, Obduction is sure to offer something unique for those who love a good sci-fi adventure.

In a same atmosphere, completely different sort of deal, Offworld Trading Company sees players run just that. As humanity has finally dominated the distant red planet of Mars, many trading companies are attempting to make their mark and utilize the planets various resources. Whether exploring the true motives of other companies colonizing mars in a wonderful single-player campaign or battling others for domination of Mars in multiplayer, Offworld Trading Company should bring all you could ask for in an RTS and even more!

Both Obduction and Offworld Trading Company will be free on the Epic Games Store until this time next week, so get in there and grab the titles while you can. If you do, be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below.

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Obduction and Offworld Trading Company are Now Free on the Epic Games Store - The Nerd Stash

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By David M. Greenwald

Does anyone seriously question whether climate change is happening at this point? Maybe I will rephrase that slightly, does anyone, who is serious, question whether climate change is happening at this point?

If you want an illustration of how bad things are likely to getyou dont have to look far. Try the Pacific Northwest. The temperature hit 121 in British Columbia in June.

The Seattle numbers are telling. The temperature hit 104, which was an all-time record. It then hit 108 the next day, obviously an all time record. But the astonishing piece of datain the previous 126 years, Seattle had only hit 100 degrees three times. It reached that mark in three consecutive days in June.

Then there was Quillayute, Washington. A coastal town, it reached 110 degrees. That was 45 degrees above normal for the day and broke the previous hottest temperature by a mind-boggling 11 degrees.

Then there is the article this week on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. CNN reports, Its level today is inches away from a 58-year low, state officials say, and Western drought conditions fueled by the climate crisis have exacerbated conditions.

Worse yetIts only July, and the lake historically doesnt reach its annual low until October.

Scientists are not only worried about the collapse of an ecosystem, but the toxic potential of the exposed lake bed.

This lake could become one of the larger dust emission sources in North America as well, one scientist warned. Right now, the lake bed is protected by a fragile crust, and if that crust is disturbed or erodes over time, then this lake could start to emit a lot more (dust).

California is in the midst of a severe drought and scientists are warning that it could get far worse.

As temperatures climb to the triple digits, the sun will bake out what little moisture there is in the ground, worsening the Wests unprecedented drought. Scientists say heat and drought are inextricably linked in a vicious feedback loop that climate change makes even harder to break: heat exacerbates the drought, which in turn amps up the heat, CNN reports.

As were getting these very extreme heat waves, its just making the drought even worse, even though drought is initially caused by the lack of precipitation, Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, told CNN. But during the dry months of much of the West, these heat waves just continue this drying throughout the summer and into the fall.

In a previous article, they warned: Climate change is playing a key role in these compounding crises: Drought and extreme heat are fueling wildfires; reduced snowpack and the lack of substantial precipitation are exacerbating water demands for millions of people, as well as agriculture, ecosystems and deteriorating infrastructure.

Then theres Siberiathe symbol of the frozen wasteland, now baking in 100-degree days and forest fires.

Reports the NY York Times: They endure the coldest winters outside Antarctica with little complaint. But in recent years, summer temperatures in the Russian Arctic have gone as high as 100 degrees, feeding enormous blazes that thaw what was once permanently frozen ground.

The worse news: Scientists say that the huge fires have been made possible by the extraordinary summer heat in recent years in northern Siberia, which has been warming faster than just about any other part of the world. And the impact may be felt far from Siberia. The fires may potentially accelerate climate change by releasing enormous quantities of greenhouse gases and destroying Russias vast boreal forests, which absorb carbon out of the atmosphere.

Not just fires of course. We saw what happened this week in Germany and Belgium.

The NY York Times warns, No One Is Safe: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World.

They write: Floods swept Germany, fires ravaged the American West and another heat wave loomed, driving home the reality that the worlds richest nations remain unprepared for the intensifying consequences of climate change.

We were unprepared for the pandemic. We have had 40 years to prepare for climate change, but have wasted much of it debating over whether it was going to happen.

The consequence of that shorted-sightedness is only now coming into focus. Remember, its only 2021. Its going to get worse. Those who thought that climate alarmists were overstating the problem may take solace in the fact that those alarmists may actually prove to be wrongthey may have understated the problem.

Some of Europes richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction, the Times writes.

The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it, they continue. The weeks events have now ravaged some of the worlds wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.

I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien, said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. Theres not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples lives.

The NY Times editorial board argues: Bidens Made Progress on Climate, Even if Activists Cant See It.

The board notes that, while environmentalists were happy to see Biden replace Trump as President, most are disappointed by the limited progress.

The Times finds he has achieved more than people on the left give him credit for, but still well short of his own hopes.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Biden took seriously the scientific consensus that the world needs to keep greenhouse gas emissions from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in order to avert irreversible planetary damage, they write. Mr. Biden pledged to cut Americas emissions in half by 2030, eliminate fossil fuel emissions from power plants by 2035 and zero out all greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury, which is pretty much what scientists recommend for the entire world.

How we get there is going to be difficult. As the Times notes: That, in turn, would require a vastly different energy landscape massive investments in wind and solar power, a rebuilt electric grid, millions of electric vehicles.

Can we get past this stagnation? If you are not convinced of climate change now, you probably also believe a number of other unsupported notions about the world. For the rest of us, we are running out of time.

David M. Greenwald reporting

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Sunday Commentary: It's Happening, It's Bad Is There Anything We Can Do at This Point? - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis

The hashtag "ElonMuskJustAnnounced" went viral Monday afternoon after the account encouraged users to guess what the billionaire's next big move or announcement would be.

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July12, 20212 min read

Elon Musk was the topic of conversation on Twitter today as a viral new hashtag took over that was started by popular Twitteraccount Insomnia Tags.

The hashtagElonMuskJustAnnouncedwent viral Monday afternoon after the account encouraged users to guess what the billionaires next big move or announcement would be.

Some took the game seriously, predicting that hes building a satellite or that hes the new person in charge of the Mars mission.

Related:Elon Muskexplains Tesla's price increases, removal of lumbar support

But some of the best responses to the hashtag were farfetched, creative and, much like Musk himself, conversation starters.

Here were some of our favorites:

Musk himself has been known to cause a stir on Twitter, drawing harsh criticism after many said that he was responsibile for the whiplash volatility of certain crypto coins (mainly Bitcoin and Dogecoin) based on his tweets.

The billionaire has yet to get in on the game himself, his last tweet being on Sunday where he posted a picture of Raptor engines.

Tesla was up over 128% year-over-year as of late Monday afternoon.

Related:Elon MuskContinues to Back Dogecoin Over Its Competitors

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Twitter Has a Field Day Predicting What Elon Musk Will Announce Next - Entrepreneur

Summer is always a great time to check out a new book! One of my favorite genres to read during the summer is science fiction, in which, more often than not, the plot takes place in space and usually a few centuries into the future.

The genre itself is so dynamic that you can go from reading some fantastical simple heros journeys to thoughtful meditations on technology and humanity, and their relationship with nature.

The original heros journey-style plots from the Amazing Stories pulp fiction magazine inspired the 1950s and 1960s aesthetic of classic drive-in films. These stories are always fun and usually straightforward. Books by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein also utilize this structure.

At the same time, science fiction has the ability to produce very thoughtful works that present moral ambiguity and question the nature of humanity. Hence there is a science fiction novel for everyone at the Tyrrell County Public Library! The genre is indeed so diverse that you can check out books by both Jules Verne and Cornwainer Smith out of the same section. Since the range of options can be a bit confusing, here are some of my personal favorites that make great summer reads!

One of my favorite authors from the tail end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction is Philip K. Dick. His stories usually have complicated and strange names such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Despite these elaborate and often strange names, his short stories and novels play with the concept of the artificial, and at what point is the artificial as real as the original or even better?

In his short story The Golden Man, Philip K. Dick constructs a world where mutants (imperfect humans) have become a problem and the government is attempting to sterilize or outright eliminate them. By the end of the story, the protagonists and the reader are left wondering whether this imperfect being is the next stage of human existence.

Dicks most famous work is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is probably better known by the film adaptations Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. In the novel, the world is a post-nuclear wasteland where actual living animals are nearly non-existent and, as a result, human beings begin to adopt realistic artificial pets (i.e. the electric sheep in the title) as a cultural and status symbol. From this concept, Dick produces a world where it is near impossible to distinguish the latest versions of androids from human beings, and one is left to question whether the androids are persons.

While many authors like Dick play with the concept of humanity and its relationship with technology, science fiction also serves as a place for environmentalism and exploring humanitys impact on nature.

The first to really tackle this was Frank Herbert with his book Dune and its subsequent sequels. Herbert imagines a distant future where interstellar travel is possible not with machines but with the mind-altering spice mlange only found on the planet of Arrakis. The conflict that unfolds across his story deals with resource dependency, dynastic rivalry, and a planetary environment changed by the greed of man as well as war.

On a more detailed scale, the hard science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson embraces science and environmental advocacy completely. In his Red Mars trilogy, Robinson imagines the terraformation of Mars and asks the question of whether or not it is ethical to change a planet for the needs of humanity before even confirming if there is native life.

A more recent book series, The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey (the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) imagines a future where humans have colonized Mars, the Moon, asteroids, and the moons surrounding Saturn and Jupiter. As war and politics ravage space, this society is contrasted with the impact humanity has placed on its solar system and each other.

I love this genre because the medium of science fiction offers the space for science, technology, comedy, tragedy and philosophy to intersect. On the one hand you can read casual stories with heroes, aliens, and rocket ships; yet on the other hand, you can find tales and authors that explore deep questions and push the reader to think about larger concepts.

If you want to try science fiction, go ahead! It is worth it. If it is not your style, that is OK, there are tons of other stories out there to explore! Have a great week, and we hope to see you at the Library!

Jared Jacavone is the librarian at the Tyrrell County Public Library.

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Science fiction: From hero's tales to deep thoughts - The Daily Advance