Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has some advice for the people of Earth – it’s time to get off.

“I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” Hawking said to Big Think , a global forum that includes interviews with experts.

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

The physicist called humankind’s survival “a question of touch and go” and referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as one time people narrowly avoided extinction. He also referred to the 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons, including 7,770 still operational, scattered around the planet.

If that doesn’t drive us off, University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith said global warming may reach a point “where all of Earth’s water will simply evaporate.” He said life will disappear on Earth long before the 7.6 billion years some say the aging sun will expand and destroy Earth.

CNet news said that Hawking has concerns about how humans “are eating up finite resources” and has claimed man’s genetic code “carries selfish and aggressive instincts” that have helped humanity survive in the past.

Hawking suggests that if man can avoid disaster for the next two centuries “our species should be safe as we spread into space.”

According to the Daily Mail , Hawking warned earlier this year that humans should be cautious in trying to contact other alien life forms because there is no way to know if they will be friendly.

“If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue,” he said.

Vernos Branco, a Las Vegas Sun reader, suggested in a letter to the editor that it may not be that easy to escape. He wrote about how humans have continued to move from one place to another as they settle in an area, use all the resources, pollute the area and move on.

He said now that man has technology that can destroy the environment faster, we are running out of space to live in.

“The planet will be fine and heal; it is man who will vanish,” he wrote. “… If we develop the technology for space travel, we will do the same to that environment, until we learn not to. Man will become extinct due to his greed.”

It may not be that easy anyway to just hop to another planet. University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese told Big Think that the closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. That’s 4.2 light years away, which means man could reach the star in 4.2 years – if man could travel at the speed of light.

At this point man travels at about ten thousandth of light speed, which would make that journey about 50,000 years.

There is also the cosmic radiation danger unless man creates a warp drive or cryogenic freezing technology.

If man can develop the technology needed, she said, man could travel into the future.

Clever augmented reality applications are becoming the natural byproducts of our modern computers–computers that are tiny, have eyes and other location-aware sensors, and are able to place a synthetic layer of information on our view of the world around us.

The latest is this “invisible” block of solid concrete (shown in the video below) dreamed up by artists Daniel Franke and Markus Kison. So how does it work?

When a viewer approaches the fixed concrete block mounted at an angle on a pedestal in the middle of a gallery, a rotating cameras on top picks up his/her face and calculates the viewer’s exact line of sight. Custom software (written with the visually-oriented openFrameworks platform) then computes the exact angle and composition of the scene being blocked by the cube and projects it onto the face of the concrete. So, if you’re aligned properly, you see right “through” the block at the uninterrupted forms of the chair and bench on the other side.

[via:popsci]

Interplanetary adventurers must contend with deadly solar radiation – but the moon’s magnetic memories may hold the key to safe space flight

BORED on their six-month journey to Mars? Not a bit of it. Whenever the astronauts look out of the window, they find themselves mesmerised by the glowing, shimmering sphere of plasma that surrounds their spacecraft. Hard to believe that the modest electromagnet at the heart of their ship can produce something so beautiful.

Not that the magnet’s raison d’être is aesthetic, of course. Its main function is to keep the astronauts from a slow, horrible death by radiation sickness.

NASA is nervous about sending astronauts to Mars – and understandably so. Six months’ exposure to the wind of high-energy particles streaming from the sun could indeed prove deadly. But a team of researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, UK, has hit upon a phenomenon that might just solve the problem. They have shown that a magnet no wider than your thumb can deflect a stream of charged particles like those in the solar wind. It gives new life to an old idea about shielding spacecraft, and might just usher in a new era of space travel. “Space radiation has been called the only showstopper for the crewed exploration of space,” says Ruth Bamford of RAL. “Our experiment demonstrates there may be a way the show can go on.”

The inspiration behind the idea is as old as the Earth. Life thrives on our planet because its core is a churning cauldron of molten iron. The result is our magnetosphere, the magnetic field that wraps itself around the Earth and deflects the solar wind. Without this shield some of the particles spat out by the sun would charge through our bodies, shattering the machinery of our cells. In the absence of our protective magnetic field, complex life on Earth would probably be unsustainable. … Continue Reading

Rare Earth Elements

Most people have no idea what rare earth elements are, but a wide array of the technologies that we use every single day are dependent on them.  Without rare earth elements, we would have no hybrid car batteries, flat screen televisions, cell phones or iPods.  Without rare earth elements, the entire “green economy” would not be able to function, because almost all emerging green technologies use them.  Not only that, but rare earth elements are used by the U.S. military in radar systems, missile-guidance systems, satellites and aircraft electronics.  Without rare earth elements, the U.S. military (and militaries all over the globe) would not be able to function.  There are 17 key rare earth elements that we rely on every day.  But there is a huge problem.  China owns more than 85 percent of the known global reserves of rare earth elements.  Right now, the rest of the world is absolutely dependent on China’s exports of these metals.  Without these Chinese exports, the western world would quickly run out of these precious resources.  But in just a few years, the rapidly expanding Chinese economy will gobble up the entire domestic production of Chinese rare earth elements.  So what will the rest of the world do at that point?

This is a major problem that you aren’t hearing a lot about in the mainstream news.

But analysts are now predicting that by 2012 this could be a tremendous crisis.

So exactly what are rare earth elements?

Well, rare earth elements are a group of 17 relatively rare chemical elements that you can find on the periodic table.  These rare metals have names you may not be familiar with such as lanthanum, cerium, tantalum, neodymium and europium.  As mentioned above, they are used in products that we use every day such as laptop computers, iPhones, magnets, catalytic converters, night vision goggles and wind turbines.  These metals are not well known, but they are absolutely crucial to our way of life.

So what is going to happen when we start running out of them?

According to The Independent, the move towards “green technology” will cause a dramatic increase in demand for rare earth metals in the years ahead.  In fact, it is being projected that the world will need 200,000 tons of rare earth elements by the year 2014.

But analysts fear that China may drop exports of rare earth elements to exactly zero tons by 2012.

Can anyone else see a problem forming?

Last summer, one leaked report indicated that Chinese authorities were already considering a complete export ban of the most critical of the rare earth elements.

But while we may speculate when the complete ban is coming, the truth is that China has already moved to dramatically cut back exports of the metals.

China recently announced that they have cut export quotas for rare earth elements by 72 percent for the second half of 2010.  The U.S. government reacted quite angrily to this news and warned that this could potentially cause a trade war.

TechNewsDaily recently quoted W. David Menzie, chief of the international minerals section at the U.S. Geological Survey, regarding the coming shortage of rare earth elements….

“Countries and companies that have or plan to develop industries that need rare earth minerals to make products are concerned about China’s growing consumption, which they fear will eliminate China’s exports of rare earths.”

So what needs to be done?

Well, nations and corporations that use rare earth elements need to start weaning themselves off the supply coming from China.

But there is a huge problem.

That cannot be done overnight.

According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, building an independent U.S. supply chain for rare earth elements could take up to 15 years.

So what in the world will we do until then?

That is a very good question.

The truth is that those running the U.S. government are just not very good at thinking strategically.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office report mentioned above lists Mountain Pass, California as perhaps the largest non-Chinese rare earth deposit in the world.

But it almost fell into Chinese hands unnoticed.

You see, the mine in Mountain Pass is owned by Unocal, and in 2005 a Chinese bid for Unocal almost succeeded.

Yes, the Chinese were trying to strengthen their monopoly on rare earth elements and it almost worked.

Not that they don’t have the rest of the world in a very difficult situation already.

The truth is that if China cut off the export of all rare earth elements to the rest of the world tomorrow, it would throw the global economy into absolute chaos.

That is a lot of power for China to have.

Let’s just hope they don’t use it any time soon.

[Via: Theeconomiccollapseblog]