~nextbigfuture-com | Bookmarks (309)

There have been two studies disprove the hypothesis infinite monkeys could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. For number-crunching purposes, the researchers assumed that a keyboard contains 30 keys including all the letters of the English language plus common punctuation marks. As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current ... Read more

Journey through Star Trek’s history and lore with John de Lancie (Star Trek’s beloved character “Q”), on a deep dive of the Roddenberry Archive’s recreations of historic ships, locations and settings across the final frontier.

OTOY unveiled an all new non-commercial documentary that explores the making ofA 2001: A Space Odyssey and its lasting impact in the history of space exploration, artificial intelligence, and visual effects. Directed by acclaimed documentarian Roger Lay, Jr., “2001: Creating Kubrick’s Space Odyssey” immerses viewers into the making of the visual universe in Stanley Kubrick ... Read more

Tesla FSD 13.2 can reverse, park and unpark itself. This means far more complete no intervention drives. It does three point turns. The Tesla fleet can talk to each other. FSD improvements over the last ~60 days: • FSD v13 with ~5-6x improvement in miles between necessary interventions • Unpark, Park, and Reverse in FSD ... Read more

Trump says he wants the Ukraine war and the Israel war over before he takes office. Vlodymr Zelensky said he is willing to cede territory to Russia to end the war for the first time. The Ukrainian president said his country could give up land temporarily in exchange for a ‘Nato umbrella’ over the territory ... Read more

The Space Entanglement and Annealing Quantum Experiment (SEAQUE) on the space station tests two technologies that could advance the field of quantum communications. The first technology is a novel method to transmit quantum data. This method could make way for a scalable quantum information network and provide the foundation of quantum cloud computing, a technology ... Read more

Brian Wang had an interview with Tesla Youtuber Herbert Ong. Herbert interviews dozens of experts about Tesla robotaxi and full self driving every month and publishes about 60 videos a month on Tesla. Brian gave two major insights about robotaxi and Tesla full self driving that literally left Herbert speechless. One is xAI will help ... Read more

Renault is selling its 36% share of Nissan and without a new major investor Nissan will go bankrupt in 12-14 months. At its news conference, Nissan’s Chief Monozukuri Officer (Head of Manufacturing) Hideyuki Sakamoto described major cost cutting moves. Nissan’s current plan is to reduce the operational maximum capacity of these 25 production lines by ... Read more

The SpaceX Starship 33 will be the first block 2 design. Block 2 will have more payload mass capacity. It will have a lower launch cost than the block 1 design. SpaceX Starship 33 should fly around January 11, 2025. There are approvals for up to 25 launches of SpaceX Starship in 2025. SLS: • ... Read more

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tested the feasibility of a mission concept called SWIM, short for Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers. The project envisions a swarm of dozens of self-propelled, cellphone-size robots looking for signs of life on ocean worlds. SWIM is funded by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program under the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA ... Read more

Rep. Kiley has introduced legislation to make the Office of Commercial Space Transportation report directly to the Secretary of Transportation. This comes after Rep. Kiley questioned Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Michael Whitaker before the Aviation Subcommittee with respect to the FAA’s decisions with SpaceX launches in September. The bill streamlines the oversight process by ... Read more

Firefly Aerospace successfully completed environmental testing on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander ahead of its first mission to the Moon supporting NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Firefly is now preparing to ship the lander to Cape Canaveral, Florida, in mid-December for launch on Following launch and vehicle separation, Blue Ghost will begin its ... Read more

Eric Berger expects NASA and the public support for the SpaceX Mars city will surge with the first unmanned landings on Mars. Erc X rendered an Earth Orbit SpaceX Refueling depot. Elon has talked about sending a fleet of five Starships to Mars in October-December 2026. Refueling and orbital propellant transfer is key to this ... Read more

Eric Berger is the Ars Technica, senior space editor and author of Reentry, a book about the behind the scenes SpaceX development of Falcon 9. Berger’s primary focus is on NASA and private aerospace companies. He authored Liftoff, which was published by William Morrow and Company and released in March 2021. The book chronicles the ... Read more

On September 29, 2013, SpaceX performed the first supersonic retropropulsion (SRP) maneuver to decelerate the reentry of the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket. NASA asked if their EDL (entry, descent, and landing) engineers could watch and study SpaceX’s data, and SpaceX agreed. Beginning in 2014, NASA and SpaceX worked together for three years. ... Read more

Centrifugal Magnetic Mirrors could enable commercial nuclear fusion reactors on Earth and are also promising for next level propulsion in space. There is funded near term work for both goals. An early Centrifugal Magnetic Mirror propulsion concept could achieve 1 to 10 newtons of thrust with 10,000 to 30000 ISP. This would be propulsion that ... Read more

There has been huge progress on laser pushed sails. Laser pushed sails appear to be a path to sending probes up to 20% of the speed of light when we can make 1 gram sails that are one to two meters on a side. There is still work needed to make the sail area about ... Read more

Elon Musk has said that SpaceX will send five unmanned Starships to Mars in 2026. The launch window is about October 2024 to January 2025. The 1000 tons of payload will include thousands of Teslabots and dozens of cybertrucks. What will this mean for Tesla, SpaceX and the future. What will the Teslabots build on ... Read more

Smart money is selling Uber and buying Tesla for the bet that 2025 will be the year of Tesla robotaxi. Brad Gerstner sold over $1 billion of Uber in his Altimeter Capital fund and bought Tesla in the last weeks. Altimeter reported over $1 billion in Uber as of September 30, 2024 in their 13F ... Read more

Altimeter Capital ($20 Billion Venture Capital company) thinks Tesla FSD 13 has caught up to Waymo, one critical disengagement every 15000 miles and will reach one critical disengagement every 100,000 miles in Q1 2025. Altimeter Capital has sold all of its Uber holdings to buy Tesla. Brad Gerstner explained the sale of Uber by the ... Read more

Super Venture Capitalists Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner analyze the future of AI. The rate of improvement of large language models is slowing for pre-training. However, it is still improving and AI intelligence is improving with post-training and test time training. OpenAI and Microsoft announced a major AI advancement for 2025, featuring models with infinite ... Read more