Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Elon Musk

(SpaceX) SpaceX launched 6,400 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station on Monday afternoon, and the roughly 100,000 people watching the live video online got to experience a rare shot of the reusable portion of the rocket sticking its landing in real time.

It was SpaceX’s 40th Falcon 9 mission and 11th rocket launch this year.

After the Dragon capsule full of materials for the ISS detached, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket — which Elon Musk’s rocket company reuses to dramatically cut down on costs — came hurtling back to Earth.

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This week electrovehicle and space transit magnate Elon Musk unveiled his master plan for the human race to become “a multi-planetary species”, starting with travel to Mars. But while I know it’s an act of remarkable hubris for me to even say this, I believe SpaceX’s plans for their Interplanetary Transport System have some pretty glaring flaws. The good news is they are flaws that are easily corrected by applying some decades-old solutions from the American and Soviet space-faring experience.

After going over the system architecture and basic spacecraft design, I think there are places where the system can be made to use less fuel, reduce manufacturing complexity, increase crew room, deliver more payload, and more.

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Tonight during Valve’s yearly Dota 2 tournament, a surprise segment introduced what could be the best new player in the world — a bot from Elon Musk-backed startup OpenAI. Engineers from the nonprofit say the bot learned enough to beat Dota 2 pros in just two weeks of real-time learning, though in that training period they say it amassed “lifetimes” of experience, likely using a neural network judging by the company’s prior efforts. Musk is hailing the achievement as the first time artificial intelligence has been able to beat pros in competitive e-sports.

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In step forward for Elon Musk’s neural lace and transhumanists everywhere, a new paper published this month by researchers at Harvard University reports on the successful implantation of an electronic neuromorphic mesh in the brains of mice without triggering an immune response.

Neuroprostheses show promise in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury and for the creation of brain-machine interfaces such as the neural lace, but a major stumbling block for researchers has been the propensity of these implants to induce an immune response, inflammation and scaring in the brain, severely limiting their potential use.

The Harvard team’s new neuromorphic mesh is delivered to specific brain regions via syringe injection and overcomes the problem of immune response in the brain. Their observations of the brain’s of the injected mice showed little to no immune response and they found the neuromorphic mesh had merged with the brain tissue.

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In a not-too-distant future city, superintelligent robots will carry out the majority of vital tasks. Driverless cars will ferry passengers to and from points of interest. Housing and healthcare will be affordable, if not free to all. Political leaders and technologists will speak the same language. And life is good.

Sam Altman, the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, has laid out this utopian vision over the years, and most definitively in a job listing posted on YC’s blog in June 2016.

“We’re seriously interested in building new cities and we think we know how to finance it if everything else makes sense,” the post read. “We need people with strong interests and bold ideas in architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning, and much more.”

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