Around the World of Science in 80 seconds

While on Earth we are expecting the next-generation 1.3 Gbps router by Netgear at the beginning of 2013 and are also excited to see the new step on evolution of processors as Intel’s Ivy Bridge with its 37 percent more processing speed with the use of just half the energy, outside our cozy planet, science is getting ready to enter a new era.

Welcome to the new God Rush; this one is going to happen far away from California – actually, far above.

Did you ever dreamed about being an astronaut or a miner when you were a kid? Maybe even a combination of both as a space miner? Well, today is your lucky day.

The visionaries from Planetary Resources figured that our planet resources are scarce and they are not gonna last for longer if we keep this rhythm of exploitation – not breaking news, but who’s doing anything about it? – and had a good idea: hey; if there are lots of asteroids floating out there, why don’t we start digging them? After all, all you need is some hundreds millions of dollars to generate tens of billions annually.

“Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space. As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications.”

Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc. says that one single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid may contain the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history, for example.

And it is not just about platinum; they may possibly find new materials, develop new technologies, definitely make some pressure on the global economy and hopefully not get any dangerous space bacteria.

We know about approximately 9,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and there are more than 1,500 that are energetically as easy to reach as the Moon. The company has developed a spacecraft named Arkyd-100 Series that will be used in low-Earth orbit and ultimately help prioritize the first several NEA targets for the company’s follow-on expeditions.

Meanwhile, in the University of Cambridge, astronomers are now initiating a European-wide program, hailed as the premier European astrophysics space mission of the decade, to create the first 3D map made of a colossal picture of our Milky Way Galaxy that reveals the details of a billion stars, BBC News reports. Thanks to the Gaia satellite, due to be launched into space in August 2013 and whose heart is the largest digital camera ever built, they’ll be able to gather billion-pixel video data in three dimensions of a billion stars, galaxies, quasars, and solar system asteroids –which may be useful for our entrepreneurship in asteroid mining.

Gaia’s installation consists of an amazing cluster of 108 identical servers used for the bulk of the data processing, and 9 additional servers used for monitoring, backup and control. The individual servers are connected by a high-speed 40 gigabit Infiniband network to allow rapid communication and transfers of large data volumes and each of the 108 servers have powerful 2 6-core CPUs, 48 gigabytes of RAM and 9 terabytes of hard-disk storage. Therefore, the whole bulk processing system has 1296 processing cores, around 5 terabytes of RAM and nearly 1 petabyte of hard-disk storage for use during the active processing.

Here on Earth, I would be happy just by having a car with anti-fogging and self-cleaning windshields, but who’s inventing that? Oh, the guys from MIT. Thank you!

Smart Cities, Smart Life

After smart phones, now come Smart Cities.

We are so used to have technology in our daily lives, either in form of comfort appliances or security measures. Internet is something so intrinsically connected to our professional and personal life that it is inevitable its use in research, monitoring and control of people - according to Mindflash.com, roughly 45% of employers now reportedly use social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to screen potential employees (and, of course, keep monitoring them); The Telegraph says that Britons spend an average of 15 hours a week online, and the average American spent 32 hours per month in 2010 (note that by average there’s no distinction of online activity by age group or gender).

Both the Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council - among the smallest local authorities in the UK - have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department. The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras - 1,113 - is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined.

Ok; the Big Brother is watching us, but what else?

Cities tend to reach for progress and the use of technology is inexorable in the pace for the future.

Vehicle-interlock systems that disable automobiles when sensors detect an inebriated driver have been around for some years now and, because people cheat the system (of course they do), a face recognition program is being developed by engineers of the University of Windsor with the use of biometrics.

In Paris, three years ago, 100 people volunteered under the Citypulse project to monitor ozone and noise levels of different areas in order to gather data to prevent and solve present and future problems, making the city a better place to live.

In U.S.A., a new bill (Senate Bill 1813, known as MAP-21) passed by the U.S. Senate in March calls for “mandatory event data recorders” to be installed in all new passenger motor vehicles sold in the U.S. from 2015 on, for recording data before, during, or after a crash.

Everything seems wonderful so far; what’s the matter?

As Amara Angelica eloquently explained on her article about these black boxes, “Maybe the black box in the future will eventually monitor everything happening in the car, with real-time feeds to Homeland Security?” That’s when I ask: where is the limit between security monitoring and privacy invasion? I remember the airport full-body X-ray scanners polemic – I still travel by plane and, every time, it is still uncomfortable.

I am a big fan of science fiction predictions of the future, and there are two that come to mind about that: one is Spielberg’s film Minority Report and the police division of Pre-Crime and the other is the book 1984 by George Orwell which coined the so common term Big Brother (which I have even used on this very article).

Am I going too far by making a link here?

Smart Cities will collect data of all kinds - cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines etc - and use it to connect and control every aspect of life with massive operating systems that will run these cities in their entirety; now, who’s gonna provide all this apparatus and withdraw its benefits? The market is estimated to be worth $16 billion by the end of the decade and big companies like IBM and Cisco are already on it. Yep; the future is going to be owned by monopolies – not breaking news in any society, either capitalist or socialist.

So, technology came to help us to live a better life, I agree; everyone wants some degree of comfort and to be at ease. The problem comes when you get too dependent on it, or when it controls you. How smart are You?

A world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness

That is perhaps one of the greatest speeches of all times…  Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin was more than an actor; he was a great compositor, musician, writer and director, and a human being full of passion.  

In times of change when the world of cinema turned into the period of sound films, Chaplin delivered this masterpiece for the delight of audiences of all generations.  Let the speech motivates you if what you have rushing through your veins is blood.

..................................................................................................................................................

I'm sorry but I don't want to be an Emperor, that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate;
has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in:
machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical,
our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little:
More than machinery we need humanity;
More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.

Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say "Do not despair".

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish. . .

Soldiers: don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate, only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers: don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written:
"The kingdom of God is within man"
Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men; in you, the people.

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let's use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

. . .

Look up! Look up! The clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world. A kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality.

The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up. Look up.

You know you're in the future when...

Today I heard someone saying: “I got an appointment to replace my left knee…” and I thought to myself, “That’s how you know you’re in the future. Then, it occurred to me…

You know you're in the future when parallel parking can occur automatically.

You know you’re in the future when your cell phone has more processing power than your computer, more mega pixels than your camera and you can talk to it.

You know you're in the future when it only costs $15.50 to get corporate secrets, but a bottle of water costs $40.

You know you’re in the future when you can buy a high resolution plasma TV of 59” -- which also happens to be 3D -- for $2.000, but the warranty is for only one year, and it probably won’t last for two.

You know you’re in the future when you read about electronics made of nanomaterials that can rewire themselves on the fly, when a high-school student finds a possible cure for cancer, but you turn on the TV and they are showing “Keeping up with the Kardashians” (sorry, I refuse to link that).

You know you’re in the future when people want to build a space elevator, but there are still people dying by starvation in the world.

You know you’re in the future – and getting older – when kids don’t know the connection between a pencil and a tape.

You know you’re in the future when people go for a break and do nothing but texting, unaware of the world that surrounds them.

You know you’re in the future when you can buy online a personal submarine with over 250hp that looks like a killer whale.

You know you’re in the future when you can buy a car with over 130hp that runs 50mpg.

You know you’re the future when scientists trap antimatter for over 15 minutes and the majority of the world doesn’t give a damn about it.

And what about you? How do you know you’re in the future?

The Poetry in Science

What’s closest to Science than Poetry?  “All other things”, you may say.  I’ll tell you may be wrong, my friend! 

As the Canadian poet Christian Bok said, there’s a long relation between science and poetry since Newton.  Alexander Pope would write “God said let there be Newton and All was Light,” celebrating with his generation the beauty of the new physics changing the view of the world.

The British poet Ruth Padel says eloquently in her article for The Guardian, the science of poetry, the poetry of science: “Scientia means "knowledge:" science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts.”  As she also clarifies, poetry and science, both, share the need of an abstract insight to be worked though precision in order to explain the details of a particular idea or point of view.

Poetry was first written to express such questions as why are we here, and what is the world that surrounds us made of?  All the modern science derivates from philosophy and the base was exactly the same – this inherent characteristic of mankind that is the curiosity that brings us beyond where our feet touch.  Metaphors are commonly used as a tool to scientific discovery and to lyric.  Einstein himself would say that imagination is more important than knowledge, and I have to agree that it is the main reason for why we are still here, lingering through the average expectation of the extinction rate of our species and, even better, evolving.

A good scientist and a good poet have one more trace in common that, perhaps, is the most important: both of them know that they might be proved wrong, that their suppositions are only the best explanation for what they are living at the moment.  This self knowledge allows them to question answers and correct mistakes, and that is what takes mankind further than we could only imagine. 

Antonio Ereditato, on his Cern presentation of how they have measured neutrinos traveling above the speed of light – an experiment that could tumble down the pillars of modern science, – said carefully as every scientist should do: “When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this '.  Despite the large significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects."

Everything starts with a question, so the joy is in the journey of the search for truth – we probably will always get very close to it, but never there; and that’s exactly the beauty of it.

21st Century Life

I have been talking about the future, about how we are evolving at a fast pace, and how that implicitly boosts our ability to good and evil et cetera; so, here is a song about a man who realizes that; it is also a criticism of how mankind still faces so many social problems, despite all its advances.  The song is 21st Century Life by Sam Sparro, and I'm not gonna say I agree with all of what has been suggested here, but for the bass players, check out that bass line – Dave Wilder did a very good job of almost forcing the audience to play air bass.

21st Century Life by Sam Sparro

Songwriters: ROGG, JESSE / FALSON, SAM

When I was a little boy living in the last century

I thought about living in the future then it occurred to me

I turned around the future was now, the future was all around me

Nothing like I had imagined, it was totally confounding

21st century life, I got swept away

I got 21,000 things that I gotta do today

21st century life, well what can I say?

The new world's got me feeling so dirty

Think I need to get down and play

Well, now I turned on the TV just in time enough to hear

What the Pope said, the Pope said

And just a few tiny words later somebody wants the man dead

What about famine and disease, well they said it's too bad, oops

Because I'm never alone, it's not just a phone, it's a stereo

21st century life, I got swept away

I got 21,000 things that I gotta do today

21st century life, well what can I say?

The new world's got me feeling so dirty

Think I need to get down and play

Now I'm not a little boy, I'm in the 21st century

Well, you might think we've come a really long way

But there's still no equality

I watched the news on my computer screen

Talking about buying my weed out of a vending machine

You tell me I'm free but how can it be

When you're always watching me on the CCTV

21st century life, I got swept away

I got 21,000 things that I gotta do today

21st century life, well what can I say?

The new world's got me feeling so dirty

Think I need to get down and play

21, 21, 21

I'm talking about 21, 21