Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: military

The DARPA Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program is exploring ways to speed up skill acquisition by activating synaptic plasticity. If the program succeeds, downloadable learning that happens in a flash may be the result.

In March 2016, DARPA — the U.S. military’s “mad science” branch — announced their Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program. The TNT program aims to explore various safe neurostimulation methods for activating synaptic plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to alter the connecting points between neurons — a requirement for learning. DARPA hopes that building up that ability by subjecting the nervous system to a kind of workout regimen will enable the brain to learn more quickly.

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The US Marines could one day use amphibious tanks and robots with machine guns to storm beaches.

Researchers are quietly testing around 50 weaponised robots at the Navy’s Camp Pendleton base in California.

Using high-tech drones and weaponised robots on the front line could help protect the lives of soldiers, the US Navy said.

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Increasingly human-like automated weapons demand an honest accounting of our emotional responses to them.

The audience of venture capitalists, engineers and other tech-sector denizens chuckled as they watched a video clip of an engineer using a hockey stick to shove a box away from the Atlas robot that was trying to pick it up. Each time the humanoid robot lumbered forward, its objective moved out of reach. From my vantage point at the back of the room, the audience’s reaction to the situation began to sound uneasy, as if the engineer’s actions and their invention’s response had crossed some imaginary line.

If these tech mavens aren’t sure how to respond to increasingly life-like robots and artificial intelligence systems, I wondered, what are we in the defense community missing?

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Ice-nine is a fictitious alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature. When a crystal of ice-nine contacts liquid water, it becomes a seed crystal that makes the molecules of liquid water arrange themselves into the solid form, ice-nine. Felix Hoenikker’s reason to create this substance was to aid in the military’s plight of wading through mud and swamp areas while fighting. That is, if ice-nine could reduce the wetness of the areas to a solid form, soldiers could easily maneuver across without becoming entrapped or slowed. (Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle

Jim Rickards uses ICE 9 in his latest work “The Road to Ruin” to warn investors of a potential ICE 9 event in which the financial system literally freezes up in a domino type event as he describes in a recent interview:

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Excellent idea! but we need to point the weapons away from earth to shoot down Asteroids / bad aliens and form The Earth Defense Directorate. (The Earth Defense Directorate is the ficticious unified military command of the planet Earth in the 25th century. (Buck Rogers) It encompasses both ground forces (who wear white uniforms and use traditional army ranks, such as Major and Colonel) and a naval force which operates Earth’s starships (such as the Searcher) and whose officers and crew wear blue uniforms and have naval ranks.)

The U.S. military is preparing for IRL Star Wars.

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The United States Air Force may become a sort of space cop in the not-too-distant future.

An off-Earth economy cannot truly take off unless moon miners and other pioneering entrepreneurs are able to operate in a safe and stable environment, said Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Schilling, of Air University.

“The [U.S.] Navy secures the freedom of action for commerce globally for the good of all humankind, and I think it’s going to take a force very similar to that to provide the predictability and security that the marketplace of space will need,” Schilling said Tuesday (April 4) during a panel discussion at the 33rd National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “I think that would be the role of the United States Air Force moving into the future.” [Home on the Moon: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Infographic)].

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Big Dog marches again.

The US Marine Corps is preparing to resume testing on its four-legged robot, “Spot.”

A project of the Corps’ Warfighting Lab, the dog-sized device is slated to re-enter developmental testing in the fall.

Capt. Mike Malandra, who heads the Warfighting Lab’s science and technology branch, said that Spot’s hydraulic legs may make it more maneuverable than the small, unmanned Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, which features treads similar to a tank rather than limbs.

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