Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability

As ESA’s ɸ-week continues to provoke and inspire participants on new ways of using Earth observation for monitoring our world to benefit the citizens of today and of the future, it is clear that artificial intelligence is set to play an important role.

Taking place at ESA’s centre of Earth observation in Frascati, Italy, on 12–16 November, ɸ-week has drawn hundreds of people from numerous disciplines to explore innovation, new technologies and cross disciplinary cooperation – to see how satellite data coupled with new technologies such as artificial intelligence can bring benefits to science, business, the economy and society at large.

One might initially associate artificial intelligence and machine learning with robots and science fiction. However, it is, without question, seeping into our everyday lives through, for example, digital advertising, speech recognition tools and innovations such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

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Today, Volkswagen is announcing that it is converting two more factories to electric vehicle production and it is partnering with SK Innovation for battery cells.

Earlier this year, VW announced that its Zwickau factory will be the first to go all-electric.

The German automaker plans to produce 1,500 electric cars per day at the plant.

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The very same guy, who invented PayPal, created the Tesla Cars, plans to create “SolarCities” and developed cars that will make money for you when you don’t use them, has ANOTHER brilliant idea. Elon Musk plans to launch 4,000 low-orbit satellites in order to give free internet access worldwide, two of them has already been launched a month ago.

The billionaire’s company, SpaceX, revealed the initial framework of the plan in January, with the official request being submitted to the Federal Communications Commission.

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California, Tesla’s home state, is currently on fire as the current wildfire season is proving to be particularly devastating.

CEO Elon Musk has authorized Tesla employees to provide assistance for the wildfires and not worry about payment.

Several wildfires have been extremely destructive in California this week.

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No matter how abundant or renewable, solar power has a thorn in its side. There is still no cheap and efficient long-term storage for the energy that it generates.

The solar industry has been snagged on this branch for a while, but in the past year alone, a series of four papers has ushered in an intriguing new solution.

Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade.

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On Wednesday, November 7, NASA will launch its Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) spacecraft to study the ionosphere. This boundary lies between space and Earth, being home to a “sea” of charged electrons and ions; it reacts to both lower atmosphere weather and solar energy, the result being space weather. NASA’s ICON will study this, offering unprecedented scientific data.

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Ha…which would be the bigger challenge? 🤔.

The growing mistrust and hostility towards global intuitions must be overcome if the world is to successfully tackle the environmental challenges it faces, the head of the University of Sussex’s global sustainability research centre has warned.

Professor Joseph Alcamo, Director of the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP), said high-quality research and closer engagement with citizens around the world was needed to overcome the growing zeitgeist that viewed organisations such as the UN as meddling amid a geopolitical backdrop of cancelled treaties, neglected obligations and frozen negotiations.

Delivering his keynote speech at the 2018 Utrecht Conference on Earth System Governance this morning, Prof Alcamo said: To many people earth system governance is not beautiful, it is worrisome, it means loss of control over their lives, and this mistrust is a big part of the national retrenchment going on.

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