Visions of the Future

Leading theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku looks at the revolution in genetics and biotechnology, which promises unprecedented health and longevity but also raises the spectre of a Frankenstein future of genetically engineered people. Will we, as transhumanists expect, evolve into a new species? Dr Kaku warns that we may end up in a world divided by genetic apartheid.
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

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Heavy Watergate and Heavy Water

Two Documentaries in one Post!

Watch documentary; Heavy Watergate: The War Against Cold Fusion

On March 23, 1989, respected chemists, Dr. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleishman made an announcement that rocked the world of science.

Their tabletop experiments with heavy water, a renewable resource readily available in ocean water, yielded enormous amounts of heat energy. Appropriately named, “Cold Fusion,” this breakthrough challenged many basic scientific concepts.

In response, a group of powerful physicists, heavily reliant upon government funding for their hot fusion research, leveled an unprecedented smear campaign against Pons, Fleishman and the entire field of Cold Fusion science. Was the discovery of Fire From Water too good to be true? Or was it the discovery of the millennium? (text from epiphanypictures.com)

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl 

Buy DVD (below) - Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl

On April 26th, 1986, reactor four at Chernobyl nuclear power station explodes, sending an enormous radioactive cloud over Northern Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus. The danger is kept a secret from the rest of the world and the nearby population who go about their business as usual. May Day celebrations begin, children play and the residents of Pripyat marvel at the spectacular fire raging at the reactor. After three days, an area the size of England becomes contaminated with radioactive dust, creating a 'zone' of poisoned land. Based on Mario Petrucci's award-winning book-length poem, Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyll tells the story of the people who dealt with the disaster at ground-level: the fire-fighters, the soldiers, the 'liquidators', and their families. Poetry read by David Bickerstaff, Francine Brody, Juliet Stevenson, David Threlfall and Samuel West.

Watch Excerpts;

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Part One

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Part Two

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Part Three

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Part Four

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Part Five

Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Part Six

Mission Control Operations

Christopher C. Kraft Jr. November 8, 2005
Running Time: 2:00:32

About the Lecture
Chris Kraft manages to present in a single event the ultimate in engineering case studies, as well as an insider’s history of 20th century space missions and a pep talk for Aero-Astro students. This blunt raconteur describes the challenges of the earliest space pioneers. His story begins with Project Mercury in the 1950s, whose space task group of 35 included eight secretaries. “We were capable people but didn’t know a damn thing about how to fly in space,” recalls Kraft. How would they communicate with a man in orbit, or assess his health? Most doctors thought when an astronaut left earth’s atmosphere, “he’d be a blithering idiot.” Air to ground communication in those days consisted of 20 words of teletype. “How do you make real time decisions in those circumstances?” muses Kraft. He proudly describes assembling the Mission Rules book, “probably the smartest thing we ever did,” which attempted to address all conceivable malfunctions on a space mission. This was an early example of systems engineering, says Kraft.

When President Kennedy challenged NASA to get a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, “Chris Kraft did not know how to determine orbital mechanics from 30 seconds of radar at Cape Canaveral. I thought the president was a little daft.” Suddenly, there were a whole new set of problems, such as how to make sure a craft aimed at the moon did not just hit it. In the Gemini and then Apollo programs, Kraft’s team solved innumerable and breathtakingly difficult issues. “We did a lot of things by the seat of our pants because we didn’t know any other way. We did it by feel, by having seen the past and doing things the right way.”

Kraft has some harsh words for the current state of space exploration. He can’t countenance NASA’s abandoning the space shuttle. “We seem to have a great propensity in this country for building something wonderful, great and high performance and throwing it away….Golly, my mother would have gone bananas!” He believes that NASA could have made the shuttle much more efficient to fly, and used it as a key element in the new race back to the Moon and to Mars. Kraft doesn’t believe this program will get off the ground—mainly because NASA hasn’t built anything new in 25 years, “and they’ve forgotten what it takes to do it.” The next space mission, whatever it turns out to be, will depend on the current crop of young aerospace engineers. “Go do it, don’t be frightened to fail,” exhorts Kraft. “You learn more from your failures than from your successes.”

Link: mitworld.mit.edu

Robotics in Space Exploration

Robotics in Space Exploration

About the Lecture
As eager as he is to invent robots that can travel to a moon of Saturn or Jupiter, and function autonomously in these hostile environments, Rodney Brooks would love a shot to explore space himself. “I made an offer to Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergei Brin that if they would fund a one-way mission to Mars, I’d go on it,” says Brooks. But he knows that robots are cheaper to send than us, “big bags of skin with biological processes requiring replenishment of all sorts.” Under the Bush Administration, NASA first laid out an ambitious program in robotic technology, involving sending machines to reconnoiter the moon and Mars and prepare habitation sites for humans. “Robots would dig channels, then lower habitation modules into them, and when people come, they’d live like moles underground,” says Brooks. But why send people at all if these robots can accomplish so much? It turns out that there’s a dangerously long lag time between sending a command to a robot and having the machine perform a function. Ultimately, human senses and timing will be needed on site.

But now NASA’s grand robotic research plans are on hold, says Brooks, blocked by the difficulties and enormous expense of designing a new launch vehicle. The future of sophisticated robotic work seems earthbound, says Brooks. First, there are military innovations -- Congress has mandated that by 2015, 1/3rd of all US military missions should be unmanned. Also, the oil industry is pushing for machine-based solutions to such gritty problems as deep-ocean drilling and oil-well maintenance. And don’t forget the new billionaire space cowboys, who dream of mining platinum fields on asteroids (for fuel cells on earth), or building space tourism businesses. But, Brooks reminds us, we have a way to go: After 40 years of research, “the generic object recognition that a two-year-old child could do, we can’t do with our robots.”

Link: mitworld.mit.edu

Future Human Space Exploration

Developing the Hardware for Future Human Space Exploration

About the Lecture
While Michael Griffin sees a wealth of reasons for space exploration in general and returning to the moon in particular, NASA must still manage on a tiny portion of “the national treasure.” This 7/10th of a percent of the national budget – the equivalent of each American paying 15 cents every day – “is not an expenditure we should do without,” Griffin asserts. We are driven to investigate beyond earth because curiosity and the desire to master new territory are “wired into our DNA.” But Griffin finds great value in the “opportunity for benign cooperative American leadership.” Space exploration strengthens the nation, society and the human species, he says.

Developing a foothold on the moon will afford humans experience in operating away from earth’s environment, helping to develop the technology needed for opening the space frontier -- practice for Mars and beyond. Griffin provides details on emerging models for a new crew exploration vehicle and booster rockets. NASA is attempting to take advantage of earlier designs for the sake of economy and speed – “architecture with as little fuss and bother as possible, maximizing the use of things we already own.” There will be plenty of commercial opportunities in these public missions, with NASA seeking to purchase launch and communication services as soon as available. And he envisions promoting international cooperation by offering seats in the lunar lander in exchange, in one example, for help in setting up a lunar habitat. “We don’t want to return to the days where NASA does everything,” says Griffin.

Link: mitworld.mit.edu

The Mysterious Field of Engineering Systems

Norman Augustine June 16, 2009 Running Time: 0:51:40

About the Lecture
One of the nation’s revered technology leaders dispenses anecdotes and wisdom on the slippery subject of engineering systems (or systems engineering). Norm Augustine just can’t get a handle on the discipline: “No one agrees on what it is, or what it does.” After years in industries like Lockheed Martin, Augustine has come up with “Norm’s Rules,” and can at least define ‘system’ as “having two or more elements that interact,” and ‘engineering’ as “creating the means for performing useful functions.” But these definitions don’t get you too far in the real world.

Augustine shows a fuel control system, which some engineers might view as part of a propulsion system. In turn, aeronautical engineers might think of the entire airplane as a system, and transport engineers view aircraft as merely components in systems incorporating airports, highways, shipping lanes. Augustine continues up the ladder until “our system that started as a fuel controller…seems to have the whole universe as a system.” Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, systems can always be embedded within larger systems. Even if you try to simplify a system in terms of just a few objects with a binary, on-off interaction, things can get complex very quickly. Five elements in a system can exist in more than a million possible states. Says Augustine, “A typical earth satellite has nearly one million parts; a 747 over 5 million. How does that make you feel about flying?”

Distinguishing the significant interactions and the important external influences on a system are central to designing and problem solving. And these days, engineers must include politics, public policy and economics as part of their systems. “The trick is to bound the scope of the system so it’s not too large to be analyzed and not too small to be representative.” Doing this right is “why systems engineers should be paid so much.”

Augustine concludes with his “Dirty Dozen” systems engineering traps, which have led to embarrassing bust-ups, monumental failures, and real tragedies. Notable among these: “the ubiquitous interface,” (or absence thereof). He describes how two flight control groups used different metric units and accidentally sent a Mars-bound spacecraft whizzing off into deep space. There’s the “single-point failure,” exemplified by the collapse of a football field-sized satellite dish due to a poorly designed bracket. There’s software, “which like entropy, always increases:” a Mariner spacecraft headed in the wrong direction due to a missing hyphen in 100 thousand lines of code. The problem with most systems ultimately is that they “contain human elements … and humans sometimes do irrational things.
Link: mitworld.mit.edu

Human 2.0

Watch Human 2.0



Meet the scientific prophets who claim we are on the verge of creating a new type of human – a human v2.0.
It’s predicted that by 2029 computer intelligence will equal the power of the human brain. Some believe this will revolutionise humanity – we will be able to download our minds to computers extending our lives indefinitely.
Others fear this will lead to oblivion by giving rise to destructive ultra intelligent machines.
One thing they all agree on is that the coming of this moment – and whatever it brings – is inevitable. (Excerpt from bbc.co.uk)