the future of work

INTERSTELLAR PANSPERMIA HUNTERS

An excerpt from the latest (De)Extinction Club Newsletter: It’s tough times if you’re a crater hunter. The glory days are gone. On Earth at least. All the major impact sites that can be found have been found. All the big game are gone. Nothing but small fry left. Oh sure, there’s plenty of those around. […]

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Gregory Benford’s Guide to Terraforming the Moon

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

When it comes to remaking a celestial body in Earth’s image—“terraforming” it—the moon has clear advantages: It gets twice the sunlight of Mars. It’s a three-day trip with current technology, while getting people to Mars would take six months. Furthermore, the moon is dead and it’s small, so it…

Stick with me kids and you could have a job in the Kuiper Belt firing comets into the Moon, making it rain there for ten thousand years. In your new space-hardened, posthuman body. Would you like to know more?

MORE – Gregory Benford’s Guide to Terraforming the Moon

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About a year ago, the retailer quietly began staffing up Lowe’s Innovation Labs, a group meant to lead innovation by testing and creating technologies, as well as partnering with startups. Kyle Nel, executive director, leads the labs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as another under construction in Boulder, Colo. The labs focus on “uncommon partnerships” with Singularity University and SciFutures, for example.

“A lot of companies have outside spaces, but we approach it in a different way, through science-fiction prototyping,” said Mr. Nel, who reports to Lowe’s Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay. “You take all of your market research, all of your trend data and hire professional science-fiction writers. And they write real stories with conflict and resolution and characters. We turned it into a comic book and created possible stories or visions of the future.”

One of those visions involved giving homeowners the ability to envision remodeling projects with augmented reality. “Because it was a sci-fi story, it really opened up people’s imaginations to understand what was possible,” Mr. Nel said. “Now that we’ve gone through it, it seems weird we wouldn’t work in this way.”

“We look at emerging tech, consumer insights, unmet needs and pain points, give them to sci-fi writers and create preferred futures,” said Ari Popper, founder and co-CEO of SciFutures, a self-described “technology, research and foresight agency” that counts Hershey, Del Monte and PepsiCo among its clients. “Technology removes a lot of the barriers and unmet needs and pain points associated with the visualization of home improvement.”

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What happens in a world, or at least a nation, where most of the population lives semi-comfortably (by historical standards) off a basic income, supplemented by occasional temporary gigs, thanks to the economic output of tomorrow’s technology; a small middle class works at the diminishing number of jobs which can’t be handled by technology; and a smaller-yet minority of the ultra-rich actually design the tech, and/or live off their inheritances a la Piketty? Call it a “low-scarcity” future, as opposed to the full-on Singularitarian “post-scarcity” future.

It seems to me that such a world would be extremely fertile ground for the rise of — you guessed it — a reputation economy. The key is that it wouldn’t outright replace a traditional monetary economy, at least not for some quite considerable time; rather, it would begin to thrive parallel to, and independent of, its capitalistic counterpart. Eventually, though, as I’ve argued before, since we are fundamentally social creatures, in the long run, “at some point it will be better to be awesome than to be rich.”

* this feeds nicely into that Star Trek as LARP idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395). The Star Fleet ranks as a reputation economy. Social capital etc.

I like to think on a good day that’s what we’re doing in these spaces. Bootstrappin’ the internet into a Type 1 Civ communication system. Negotiating a new culture, a new societal operating system. Eating the old world. Folding in the machines. Neotany on a global scale. Cyborg Gaia.

We definitely need new mythologies, patched out of whatever is at hand.

LLAP.

After Technology Destroys Capitalism (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)
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Researchers at Caltech and several other institutions have used a new technique to analyze the gaseous atmospheres of such extrasolar planets and have made the first detection of water in the atmosphere of the Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the nearby star Tau Booetis.

With further development and more sensitive instruments, this technique could help researchers learn about how many planets with water — like Earth — exist within our galaxy.

…

Although the technique promises to augment how planetary scientists analyze the properties of extrasolar planets, it has limitations, the researchers say.

For example, the technique is presently limited to so-called “hot Jupiter” gas giant planets like Tau Booetis b — those that are large and orbit very close to their host star.

“The technique is limited by the light-collecting power and wavelength range of the telescope, and even with the incredible collecting area of the Keck mirror on the high, dry summit of Mauna Kea we can basically only analyze hot planets that are orbiting bright stars, but that could be expanded in the future as telescopes and infrared spectrographs improve,” Lockwood says.

In the future, in addition to analyzing cooler planets and dimmer stars, the researchers plan to continue looking for and analyzing the abundance of other molecules that might be present in the atmosphere of Tau Booetis b.

“While the current state of the technique cannot detect Earth-like planets around stars like the Sun, with Keck it should soon be possible to study the atmospheres of the so-called ‘super-Earth’ planets being discovered around nearby low-mass stars, many of which do not transit,” Blake says.

“Future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will enable us to examine much cooler planets that are more distant from their host stars and where liquid water is more likely to exist.”

The findings appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in a paper titled “Near-IR Direct Detection of Water Vapor in Tau Booetis b.”

http://astrobiology.com/2014/02/water-vapor-detected-in-the-atmosphere-of-a-hot-jupiter.html
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Until recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did humans systematically take up seashore living—eating shellfish, devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.

But that picture, Erlandson and others say, is badly flawed, due to something researchers once rarely considered: the changes in sea level over time. Some 20,000 years ago, for example, ice sheets locked up much of the world’s water, lowering the oceans and laying bare vast coastal plains—attractive hunting grounds and harbors for maritime people. Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. “So this shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing when sea level was lower than at present,” says Geoff Bailey, a coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. “And that is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of prehistory.”

Concerned that evidence of human settlement and migration may be lost under the sea, researchers are finding new ways of tracking ancient mariners. By combining archaeological studies on remote islands with computer simulations of founding populations and detailed examinations of seafloor topography and ancient sea level, they are amassing crucial new data on voyages from northeast Asia to the Americas 15,000 years ago, from Japan to the remote island of Okinawa 30,000 years ago, and from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago. New evidence even raises the possibility that our modern human ancestors may have journeyed by raft or simple boat out of Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, crossing the mouth of the Red Sea. “If they could travel from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago, the question now is, how much farther back in time could they have been doing it?” Bailey asks. “Why not the Red Sea?”

Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat? | DiscoverMagazine.com
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