h+ Magazine

Before oblivion, before geology or cosmology; before Minimalism, Pink Floyd, Quantum Physics, Mind Control, Math Rock, Electronic Imaging; before Buddha, even before the cosmic microwave frequency; you only have to pose a single question;

“What was there before the Big Bang?”

Ask that and you’re immediately in trouble.

I have long had misgivings about large aggregations of computing nodes forming a mind because of speed-of-light delays. That will reduce “thinking speed,” since a mind cannot “be of one mind” if much it is not aware of the current situation due to speed-of-light delays.

We live on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy has 200‐400 billion stars spread out across 100,000‐120,000 light years. We are on the edge, where stars are far apart. If we can get from here to the nearest one, then we can star‐hop throughout the entire galaxy.

Science news overview: new neutrino detector taller than Dubai tower, Jupiter’s core is liquefying, antimatter sail for space missions, and more.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced the 100 Year Starship Study, an effort to encourage long-term thinking about the realistic prospects of interstellar travel, specifically with the goal of devising a workable mission-plan within the next century. This bold call to action is exciting, but let us consider the more plausible scenarios under which such a venture might eventually occur.

Imagine living on another planet as part of a small colony, gazing out over mountainous rock formations and traversing open fields of red dirt and clay as you start a new life in a land foreign in almost every way, living like the first settlers to explore North America in the 1700s. That’s what Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies propose in their article “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars” in the October-November 2010 issue of the Journal of Cosmology.

When examining the delicate balance that life on Earth hangs within, it is impossible not to consider the ongoing love/hate connection between our parent star- the sun- and our uniquely terraqueous home planet.

On one hand, Earth is situated so perfectly, so ideally, inside the sun’s habitable zone, that it is impossible not to esteem our parent star with a sense of ongoing gratitude. It is, after all, the onslaught of spectral rain, the sun’s seemingly limitless output of photons, which provides the initial spark to all terrestrial life.

In January 2009, I moved from Los Angeles to New York City to begin a new career in finance. My former business partner made a similar move in 2006 and in three short years was making more than $300k per year as a financial planner for JP Morgan Chase. She gave me plenty of advice and I was happy to take it. I slept on her couch for my first two weeks in the city.

 "We choose to go to the moon," President Kennedy famously said in 1962. Today, in 2010, NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden says let’s go to the stars.

Edgar Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the moon.  He was on the Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 14 flight crew, spending a total of 9 hours on the lunar surface, in the Fra Mauro Highlands.  He retired from NASA in 1972.  In 1973, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to probe what he considers to be one of the deepest mysteries of the universe — consciousness itself.  His book, The Way of the Explorer, published in 2008, explained his life, his missions, and how he was affected by the experience of being in space.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.