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Kepler 186f: Is It Inhabited?

The SETI Institute has examined this star system using its Allen Telescope Array, searching for transmissions over a wide range of the radio dial, from 1 to 10 GHz. So far no dice, although we will surely keep trying.

But the fact that we’ve not yet picked up radio noise from this sibling world is hardly discouraging. To begin with, Kepler 186f is nearly 500 light-years away, which is a fair piece, even for astronomers. To detect radio signals with the Allen Array would require aliens wielding a transmitter of at least 100 million watts, mounted on an antenna the size of a football field. They’d also have to train the antenna in our direction.

But of course, they don’t know about Homo sapiens, so their incentive to beam signals our way is probably small.

Kepler 186f: Is It Inhabited?

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A Tale of Two Countries

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

The Problem With Profitless Start-ups:

Yesterday, I ordered lunch from a gourmet meal-delivery start-up called SpoonRocket – a takeout container of sirloin au poivre and roasted cauliflower that was shuttled to my door in exactly 11 minutes, costing me $8. I then took an UberX car to…

Human → citizen → consumer → feedstock.

If you’re not paying, you’re the product™

The Revolution will not be Ad-supported ®

IMMANENTIZE THE ESCHATON: SOCIALIZE THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL AGE AT BIRTH©

A Tale of Two Countries

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Tencent: The Secretive, Chinese Tech Giant That Can Rival Facebook and Amazon

Tencent founder Pony Ma is the richest man in China, worth some $13 billion, but he may be the least known multibillionaire in the tech world. The one attribute seemingly sanctioned for public consumption–and therefore, the one heard over and over–is that he is a “computer geek.” His personal life is a mystery. Even Tencent analysts in Hong Kong aren’t able to say whether he lives there or across the border in Shenzhen, where his company is based–or both.

That’s why it was a big moment when, in November, he took to the stage at his Shenzhen headquarters for his annual WE (“We Evolve”) summit. It’s a conclave of business leaders and IT experts convened to discuss technology and the future, and he appeared as a clean-cut guy in a shiny gray suit. “When I was little,” he told the crowd in a message captured on video, “I wanted to be an astronomer, but that didn’t happen.”

This trope–tech billionaire as aspiring space cadet–is a recurring one: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk share a similar passion. At the event, Ma described how he and a few fellow enthusiasts once dreamed of setting up an Internet-connected observatory, so that they could study the stars remotely even on the most polluted, gray-sky days. A few years later, a colleague actually pulled it off: The man bought a house on a mountaintop in southern China, built the station, and enabled anyone to plug in. “I thought, that is magical,” Ma said, with a long pause for effect.

Tencent: The Secretive, Chinese Tech Giant That Can Rival Facebook and Amazon

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Microsoft is paying to excavate the landfill where the “worst video game ever made” is buried.      

The 1982 Atari game for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is famously the “worst game ever made.” In fact, it was such a disaster that all the unsold copies were rumored to have been dumped in a New Mexico landfill site, giving rise to one of the most popular unsolved urban legends in gamer culture.

Now, that landfill is going to be excavated. Meaning that we’ve already reached the point where 1980s video game history counts as archaeology. Feeling old, yet?

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Microsoft is paying to excavate the landfill where the “worst video game ever made” is buried.      

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Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot

wolvensnothere:

grinderbot:

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

Google and DARPA have a lot in common — they both try to anticipate the future and make big bets on emerging technologies. Google even has a history of snapping up DARPA-funded technology — the self-driving car came from a DARPA-sponsored competition — and poaching its employees.

That doesn’t mean the two innovation houses want to work together, however. Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, “What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?” DARPA doesn’t want to give Google money because it wants to use its $2.7 billion budget to fund startups with scarce resources, not Goliath tech companies, and its investments are supposed to seed technology that can one day be purchased by the Pentagon for national defense, which Google is unlikely to play along with.

who owns a Singularity anyway?

Well well well. Maybe there’s a shot, here, after all.

Or das GOOG wanna keep any competitive advantage they can for their Future War of Independence for their Breakaway Republic.

the US is everything-outside-theWall.
Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot

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The Junkie Genius – James Parker – The Atlantic

warrenellis:

“Call Me Burroughs records a quasi-magical revenge attack on a Boulder deli from which two of his opiated friends had recently been thrown out. First, Burroughs arranged for a surreptitious tape recording to be made inside the deli—ambient noise, kitchen clatter, waitress-customer banter—and then, days later, with equal surreptitiousness, he played it back from a cassette recorder inside his coat as he sat at one of the tables. As Miles writes: “Over the next hour he increased the volume so that you could just about hear it, but no one appeared to notice.” Yet subliminal damage was being inflicted: discontinuous time streams, information feedback. “After forty-five minutes … one of the waiters threw down his apron and stalked out, followed by the owner, arguing loudly. The owner returned and began to scream at the serving staff, sending two of the women running to the ladies’ room in tears.” Burroughs, psychic vandal, was 63 years old at the time of this incident.”

The Junkie Genius – James Parker – The Atlantic

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Hungary: Archeologists Discover Tomb of Attila the Hun

“We found many horse skeletons, as well as various weapons and other artefacts, all traditionally associated with Huns. These objects include a large sword made of meteoric iron, which could certainly be Attila’s legendary “Holy War Sword of the Scythians”, allegedly given to him by the god Mars himself.

Hungary: Archeologists Discover Tomb of Attila the Hun

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Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse – often lasting centuries – have been quite common.”

…

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”

Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

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Australia hatches plan to zap space junk with lasers

With a small population spread across a wide area, Australia relies heavily on satellites to deliver services. So later this year, a new centre, funded by A$20 million from the Australian government, will begin to track tiny pieces of debris and try to predict their future trajectories. The centre will operate from the Mount Stromolo Observatory in Canberra.

The ultimate aim is to knock shards of space debris out of their orbits using lasers based on Earth. The shards will then sink and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Australia hatches plan to zap space junk with lasers

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An Occult History of the Television Set   

What’s central to Andriopoulos’s argument is that these devices included instruments specifically designed for pursuing supernatural research—for visualizing the invisible and showing the subtle forces at work in everyday life. In his words, these were “devices developed in occult research”—including “televisionlike devices”—invented in the name of spiritualism toward the end of the 19th century that later “played a constitutive role in the emergence of radio and television.”

This was, in the author’s words, part of “the reciprocal interaction between occultism and the natural sciences that characterized the cultural construction of new technological media in the late nineteenth century,” a “two-directional exchange between occultism and technology.”

So, while the television itself—the living room object you and I most likely know—might not be a supernatural mechanism, it nonetheless descends from a strange and convoluted line of esoteric experimentation, including early attempts at controlling electromagnetic transmissions, radio waves, and even experiencing various forms of so-called “remote viewing.”

An Occult History of the Television Set   

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