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Real intent may be to usher in lunar ownership claims.

Bao Weimin, a Director of the Science and Technology Commission of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has been reported in Chinese and Russian state media as suggesting that China would benefit from establishing an “Earth-Moon Special Economic Zone”.

Bao said that Beijing is considering creating the first Earth-Moon economic zone by 2050. According to him, China is planning to invest in studies on how much it would cost for the idea to come to fruition, as well as for the deployment of a transportation system linking Earth and its natural satellite.

Two of SA’s most promising female technology entrepreneurs have this year raised millions from astute local and international investors for their global-impact businesses in healthcare and space.

Presagen, co-founded by Dr Michelle Perugini, raised a total of $4.5 million from Jungle Capital group in Australia and US private investor 3Lines Venture Capital, with the SA Government also pitching in.

The funding will help commercialise its Life Whisperer artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Life Whisperer uses AI to identify healthy embryos in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) with the aim of improving pregnancy outcomes for infertile couples globally.

Nuclear physics usually involves high energies, as illustrated by experiments to master controlled nuclear fusion. One of the problems is how to overcome the strong electrical repulsion between atomic nuclei which requires high energies to make them fuse. But fusion could be initiated at lower energies with electromagnetic fields that are generated, for example, by state-of-the-art free electron lasers emitting X-ray light. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) describe how this could be done in the journal Physical Review C.

During nuclear fusion two atomic nuclei fuse into one new nucleus. In the lab this can be done by particle accelerators, when researchers use fusion reactions to create fast free neutrons for other experiments. On a much larger scale, the idea is to implement controlled fusion of light nuclei to generate power – with the sun acting as the model: its energy is the product of a series of fusion reactions that take place in its interior.

For many years, scientists have been working on strategies for generating power from fusion energy. “On the one hand we are looking at a practically limitless source of power. On the other hand, there are all the many technological hurdles that we want to help surmount through our work,” says Professor Ralf Schützhold, Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics at HZDR, describing the motivation for his research.

VR and Interstellar Travel

Crew members in route to a distant planet may best be accommodated by full immersion VR. The actual spaceship could be reduced to a relatively simple, small, well-shielded vehicle. Inside the crew’s biological material could be supported by a simplified nutrition, waste and maintenance system. Their minds could inhabit a fully immersive VR environment that would provide them with all the luxuries of vast, diverse spaces and experiences — complete with simulated gravity, simulated pleasant nature-like and artificial environments, and simulated meals.

They could also engage in simulating the type of society they intend to build once they arrive in their new physical environment, using similar constraints to the ones they will encounter. This could allow many years for actual human experiences to test and refine what they will build and how they will interact in their new home.

Advances in maintaining biological material may even allow a single generation to survive the entire journey. They may adopt their own conventions for simulating death and birth for reasons related to simulating their new home or for maintaining psychological well-being over many centuries. Simulated death and reincarnation may allow a single crew to experience many childhoods and parenting situations without the need for actual procreation.

Another concern that this addresses is the need for massive funding for research and development as well as resource provisioning when building conventional spacecraft intended to deliver things like artificial gravity, agriculture and pleasant living spaces for large multigenerational populations — all while shielding them from radiation. Funding the development of fully immersive VR seems like a relatively easier to fund activity that has immediate uses here on earth and elsewhere. The types of ships that would be sufficient for sustaining and shielding humans living mostly in immersive VR would be so simplified that most of the fundamental research that would be specific to designing such crafts may have already occurred.


After 200,000 years or so of human existence, climate change threatens to make swathes of our planet unlivable by the end of the century. If we do manage to adapt, on a long enough timeline the Earth will become uninhabitable for other reasons: chance events like a comet strike or supervolcano eruption, or ultimately — if we make it that long — the expansion of the sun into a red giant in around five billion years, engulfing the planet completely or at a minimum scorching away all forms of life. Planning for potential escape routes from Earth is, if not exactly pressing, then at least a necessary response to a plausible threat.

The most obvious destination is our nearest neighbor, Mars. We’ve already sent multiple probes there, and NASA is planning another moon landing in 2024 with the eventual plan of using it as a waypoint on a mission to Mars. Elon Musk’s Space X claims to be aiming for a crewed trip to Mars in the same year. But Mars is a desert planet, cold and barren, with no atmosphere save for a thin blanket of CO2. Sure, we could survive there, in protective suits and hermetically sealed structures, but it’s not a great place to truly live.

Some scientists have another favorite relocation candidate: Proxima b, a planet that orbits a star called Proxima Centauri, some 4.24 light years distant from our sun. Located in the triple-star Alpha Centauri solar system, Proxima b has a mass 1.3 times that of Earth and a temperature range that allows for liquid water on the surface, raising the possibility that it could support life.

An international group of scientists, including Andrey Savelyev, associate professor of the Institute of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and Information Technologies of the IKBFU, has improved a computer program that helps simulate the behavior of photons when interacting with hydrogen spilled in intergalactic space. Results are published in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Andrey Saveliev states, “In the Universe there are extragalactic objects such as blazars, which very intensively generate a powerful gamma-ray flux, part of photons from this stream reaches the Earth, as they say, directly, and part are converted along the way into electrons, then again converted into photons and only then get to us. The problem here is that say that a certain number of photons should reach the Earth, and in fact it is much less.”

Scientists, according to Andrey Savelyev, today have two versions of why this happens. The first is that a , after being converted into an electron (and this, as is known, in contrast to a neutral photon, a charged particle) falls into a , deviates from its path and does not reach the Earth, even after being transformed again into the photon.