Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Year: 2018

Lightyear One, a car whose ability to use solar power has been thought of as an impossible feat, just won a Climate Change Innovator Award.

Designed by the Dutch startup Lightyear, the “car that charges itself” can supposedly drive for months without charging and has a 400–800 km range. But is a solar-powered car feasible?

For years, the concept of “solar-powered cars” has loomed over the electric car industry as a hopeful, possible future. But there are many who argue that this concept is not only impractical, it is basically impossible.

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Today at CES, Samsung unveiled DRVLINE, a hardware and software platform that will allow car makers to create customized, technologically advanced autonomous vehicles. Many platforms are an all-or-nothing solution, which forces users to adopt the entire package en masse, without any sort of customization. DRVLINE, however, allows vendors to swap and customize individual components, building the vehicle to their specifications, as well as allowing for rapidly evolving technology.

“Building an autonomous platform requires close collaboration across industry, as one company cannot deliver on this enormous opportunity alone,” said Young Sohn, the president and chief strategy officer of Samsung. “The challenge is simply too big and too complex. Through the DRVLINE platform, we’re inviting the best and brightest from the automotive industry to join us, and help shape the future of the car of tomorrow, today.”

The first DRVLINE initiative will be a camera that features lane departure warnings, adaptive cruise control, collision warning and algorithms that can deliver warnings about pedestrians. The system will start shipping this year.

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Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real. This should not be surprising: compared with the breathtaking bridges that engineers build on Earth, asteroid-mining is a simple, small-scale operation requiring only modest technological advances. If anything is lacking, it is the imagination to see how plausible it has become. I am afraid only that it might not arrive soon enough to address the urgent resource challenges that the world is facing right now.

As an academic researcher, I work with several asteroid -mining companies to address that urgency. I depend on their funding, so there are trade secrets I cannot share. However, I can reveal the core reasons why I am optimistic about the business case for asteroid-mining, and what it will mean for our future.

Many people are skeptical of asteroid-mining because they imagine that the goal is to bring platinum back for sale in Earth’s metals market. Reporters repeatedly cite an irresistible statistic that the platinum in an asteroid can be worth trillions of US dollars, but anyone with an understanding of economics realises that bringing home a huge stash of precious metal would crash the market, reducing the valuation of the asteroid.

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I get this question a lot. Today, I answered it at Quora.com. But, here, in the Lifeboat Blog, I have more bandwidth to elaborate.

Question:

What if I make a typo when sending Bitcoin. The recipient address
may be invalid or it may belong to another individual. —But there
is a third possibility. Couldn’t it be a valid address, but without any
wallet that can receive it? I bet the blockchain catches these errors
—Right? Will I always get my money back?

The short answer: “Don’t worry, it cannot happen. That won’t happen either. Sure, it’s possible. That’s wrong, and You’re screwed!”

But let’s look at this a bit closer. A little knowledge goes a long way!

Incidentally, this answer gets into some gritty, esoteric details. It may lead you to believe that cryptocurrency is complicated, risky or not worthwhile. But, it only seems this way. With any new technology, standards and practices gradually flow into gadgets, apps and services. Early televisions required an expert operator. The next generation of owners dealt with vertical hold, contrast and antennae bolted onto the chimney. If your older than 55, you schlepped to a pharmacy with Dad to test a dozen or more vacuum tubes, just to find out if the circuitry was getting weak.

No one does these things anymore. TVs are flat and with a perfect picture. They are almost as easy to use as a toaster. (Except for the five remotes needed to choose a source and set up the sound! These ridiculous gadgets are only now being replaced with voice control and other smart technologies).

Back to square one: Can you send money to an invalid Bitcoin address due to a typing error? If you do, will you get it back?

It is not likely that you would do so in a hundred lifetimes. But if you succeed at creating what appears to be a valid address, you are screwed. Only a hundred million trillionths of valid addresses will ever have a wallet behind it. The blockchain does not record the creation of wallets. No one can know if there is anyone with the address and the keys to the apparently valid wallet address that you sent money into.

Addresses transfer things from one place to another. You enter a street address into your GPS expecting to be transported to a location. But, with everything else, an address moves value or sensitive information. So, let’s start with an absolute, inviolate rule: Never type an “address” into any system!

Instead, cut & paste the address from the source or—at least—from the message that delivered it. After all, you don’t want a note to your lover ending up on the mobile phone of your boss.

But you didn’t ask about best practices—you asked about checksums…

1. Invalid Address (No wallet could exist for what you typed)

Bitcoin addresses include a 32 bit checksum, which makes the possibility of typing a valid address by mistake about 1 in 4.3 billion. So don’t worry, a mistyped address will be caught by your own wallet or service, before anyone even peeks at the blockchain.

But what if—somehow—you manage to enter an address that seems valid (it passes the checksum test), but there is not yet a wallet created with that address?

2. Address Appears Valid (But there is no wallet, or they belong to the wrong person)

You might think that the transaction gets staged, but eventually fails, because the wallet address is unlikely to have ever been created. But there is a problem with that theory: Wallets can be created off-line and remain dormant for years. The block chain does not know which wallet addresses exist. It only knows which appear to be valid addresses.

For this reason, sending bitcoin to an address that is entered in proper form, but does not belong to anyone will result in permanent loss. Technically, the money exists, but no one has the private keys to spend it. Any effort to recover the loss would better be spent on a good therapist and searching for a job in the sunset years of your life.

It would be nice if you could create a wallet that matched the receiving address. Sadly, this is impossible, because wallets are created through a random one-way process.

This ends an answer to a straightforward question. But, now, let’s have some fun…

Let’s figure out what are the chances that someone actually does have a wallet that matches a valid address that you typed by accident. (After all, you already beat odds of 1-in-4.3 billion by typing an address that satisfied the checksum!)

A Bitcoin wallet address is a string of 34 characters (letters and numbers).* From the full set of 10 digits and of 52 upper/lower case western characters, four are excluded to reduce the chance of entry error (O, 0, I, L). This means that the number of possible wallet addresses is 5834 = 1060 *

The human brain has between 100 and 1000 trillion synapses. Yet, 1060 is:

  • More than the synapses in all brains of every animal that ever lived
  • More than every atom in our planet, solar system and galaxy
  • More than—Well, you get the point!

Even if everyone on earth creates a new Bitcoin wallet every single minute and all wallets are valid for life, the chances of accidentally typing the valid address of another user is very nearly zero.

* Interesting caveats and notes:

  1. Bitcoin addresses are currently generated via an algorithm called RIPE-MD160. This further limits the number of possible wallet addresses to 2160 = 1.4×1048). But this reduction is caught when sending, because the checksum uses the same algorithm to validate against a properly formed address.
  2. Checksums aren’t just for catching a typing error. In addition to 34-character addresses, Bitcoin supports 33 characters and even some 26 character addresses. The checksum ensures that shorter addresses are not actually longer addresses that with leading zeros (transcribed as blanks) or that have dropped a digit.

Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, publishes A Wild Duck and hosts the New York Bitcoin Event. He is keynote speaker at the Cryptocurrency Expo in India this month. Click Here to inquire about a presentation or consulting engagement

TUESDAY, Jan. 9, 2018 — In a potential advance for medical research, scientists say they’ve created the first functioning human muscle from skin cells.

The breakthrough could lead to better genetic or cell-based therapies, as well as furthering investigations into the causes and treatment of muscular disorders, the Duke University team said.

“The prospect of studying rare diseases is especially exciting for us,” Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering, said in a university news release.

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We have all heard that exercise is good for our health. However, it can not only keep you healthy, it can also slow down some aspects of aging. Some researchers even think that it might be possible to use this knowledge to develop new therapies against aging. While waiting for that to happen, we need to exercise in order to slow down the effects of aging.

How important is it to keep fit?

So, how beneficial is exercising? Well, one of the best studies conducted on this subject showed that women will live 5.6 years longer and men 6.2 years longer if they exercise between 1 and 2.5 hours per week[1]. This makes exercise a better lifestyle choice than any other, at least as long as you’re not counting avoiding downright dangerous behavior, such as smoking.

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Here, $$$$, turn that thing off, you’re making too much cheap power.

New figures show £53m was given to the wind industry last year to keep turbines switched off to regulate electricity supplied to National Grid.

Since wind farms first started receiving constraint payments five years ago, more than £100 million has been handed over in compensation for switching off. Photo: PA

By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter

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New story in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jan/09/how-close-are-we-black-mirror-style-digital-afterlife #transhumanism

One of the threads running through the sci-fi series’ latest season concerns digital versions of ourselves who live on after we die … it could happen sooner than we think.

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