Street Fighter movie is likely getting a surprising but great pair of directors
Michael and Danny Philippou, the duo behind Talk to Me, are taking on the adaptation
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Michael and Danny Philippou, the duo behind Talk to Me, are taking on the adaptation
A Japanese company likely crashed a spacecraft into the moon as it attempted a soft landing Tuesday, causing an abrupt end to its five-month journey from launch pad to the lunar surface.
The company, ispace, invited the world to watch alongside its Tokyo-based mission control through a livestream of the event on April 25. The nail-biting landing sequence lasted about an hour as the robotic spacecraft performed a braking engine burn and followed automated commands to adjust the Hakuto-R lander’s orientation and speed to touch down.
As the spacecraft descended, mission control had communication with it. But after the maneuvers were completed, the team lost contact with the lander. With a room full of visibly disappointed engineers, ispace officials said they had to assume the landing was unsuccessful. But they’ll continue to investigate the status of the lander, said Takeshi Hakamada, CEO of ispace.
“At this moment, what I can tell is we are very proud of the fact that we have already achieved many things during this Mission 1,” he said. “We acquired actual flight data during the landing phase. That is a great achievement for the future missions.”
Though 60 years have passed since the first uncrewed moon landings, it remains a daunting task, with less than half of missions succeeding. Unlike on Earth, the moon’s atmosphere is very thin, providing virtually no drag to slow a spacecraft down as it approaches the ground. Moreover, there is no GPS system on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot. Engineers have to compensate for these shortcomings from 239,000 miles away.
“We cannot emulate all the environment of the moon on the Earth before the mission,” Hakamada told Mashable in an interview hours after the event, still without an update on the lander’s status. “So we have to rely on all the simulations and then a lot of assumptions.”
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This is not the first time the private sector has attempted to get to the moon. For example, in 2019 an Israeli nonprofit and company collaborated on the $100 million Beresheet mission, which crashed on the lunar surface after an orientation component failed. The mishap potentially scattered some intriguing artifacts on the lunar surface in the process.
For one of ispace’s payload customers, a failed landing would mean the indefinite postponement of another dream: the first Arab moon mission. The ispace lander was supposed to deliver the United Arab Emirates’ Rashid rover to the moon, which would explore the Atlas Crater. Along with the Emirati rover, a Japanese space program robot was on board.
Hakuto-R is the first of many other commercial missions that are expected to attempt this feat soon, many of which are an outgrowth of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. The program was established in 2018 to recruit the private sector to help deliver cargo to the moon. Ispace couldn’t directly participate in the NASA program because it isn’t an American company, but it is collaborating on one of the contracts led by Draper Technologies in Massachusetts, expected to land on the moon in 2025.
These upcoming missions will support the U.S. space agency’s lunar ambitions, shipping supplies and experiments to the surface ahead of astronauts’ arrival in 2025 or later. They’re also expected to kickstart a future cislunar economy, referring to the business potential of ventures on the moon and in the space between Earth and the moon.
“The environment has changed since I established this company 13 years ago,” Hakamada said. “This is a great market opportunity for a company like us.”
The executive said he wasn’t deterred by the uncertain outcome of the company’s first attempted landing. The data will help the business prepare for its next two upcoming missions, he said.
And he had no regrets about allowing the general public to watch the attempt in real time.
“We tried to be transparent to the world. That will, we believe, (help us) gain more trust in our business and technology,” Hakamada said. “Many people will be given the impression that this is real, and this will pave the way for the greater development of the cislunar ecosystem.”
Which will be the first to make the journey intact? The commercial race is on, with many more opportunities approaching.
“History can be made only by those who (face) challenges, and challenges will not be possible without taking a risk,” said Yuichi Tsuda, a professor of astronautical science at Tokyo University, during the live broadcast. “The risk can be taken only by those who dream. So ispace teams, you are all excellent dreamers.”
This story has been updated from a previous version to include an interview with ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada.
The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around.
Or at least that’s how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity’s own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity’s intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.
Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.
The way we imagine human progress — technology, advancement — seems inextricable from human culture. Superiority is marked by fast ships, colonial spread, or the acquisition of knowledge that fuels mastery of the physical world. Even in Star Trek, the post-poverty, post-conflict Earth is rarely the setting. Instead we spend our time on a ship speeding faster than light, sometimes solving philosophical quandaries, but often enough defeating foes. The future is bigger, faster, stronger — and in space.
Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev led the USSR’s first SETI initiatives in the early 1960s, and he believed that the galaxy might be home to civilizations billions of years more advanced than ours. Imagining these civilizations was part of the project of searching for them. So in 1964, Kardashev came up with a system for classifying a civilization’s level of technological advancement.
The Kardashev scale, as it’s called, is pretty simple: a Type I civilization makes use of all the energy available on or from its planet. A Type II civilization uses all the energy from its star. A Type III civilization harnesses the energy of its entire galaxy.
What’s less simple is how a civilization gets to any of those milestones. These leaps, in case it’s not clear, are massive. On Earth we’re currently grappling with how dangerous it is to try to use all the energy sources on our planet, especially those that burn. (So we’re not even a Type I civilization, more like a Type Three-quarters.) A careful journey toward Type I would involve taking advantage of all the sunlight falling on a planet from its star, but that’s just one billionth or so of a star’s total energy output. A Type II civilization would be harnessing all of it.
It’s not just that a Type II civilization would have to be massive enough to make use of all that energy, they’d also have to figure out how to capture it. The most common imagining for this is called a Dyson sphere, a massive shell or swarm of satellites surrounding the star to capture and convert all its energy. If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter. And then a Type III civilization would be doing that, too, but for all the stars in its galaxy (and maybe doing some fancy stuff to suck energy off the black hole at the galaxy’s core).
On the one hand, these imaginings are about as close to culturally agnostic as we can get: they require no alien personalities, no sociology, just the consumption of progressively more power, to be put to use however the aliens might like. But the Kardashev scale still rests on assumptions that are baked into so many of our visions of advanced aliens (and Earth’s own future as well). This view conflates advancement not only with technology but with growth, with always needing more power and more space, just the churning and churning of engines. Astrophysicist Adam Frank identifies the Kardashev scale as a product of the midcentury “techno-utopian vision of the future.” At the point when Kardashev was writing, humanity hadn’t yet been forced to face the sensitive feedback systems our energy consumption triggers. “Planets, stars, and galaxies,” Frank writes, “would all simply be brought to heel.”
Even in the Western scientific tradition, alternatives to Kardashev’s scale have been offered. Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin proposed one scale that measures planetary mastery and another that measured colonizing spread. Carl Sagan offered one that accounts for the information available to a civilization. Cosmologist John D. Barrow proposed microscopic manipulation, going from Type I–minus, where people can manipulate objects of their own scale, down through the parts of living things, molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, subatomic particles, to the very fabric of space and time. Frank proposed looking not at energy consumption but transformation, noting that a sophisticated civilization does more than bring a planet to heel, it must learn to find balance between resource use and long-term survival.
Of these — again, all white American or European men — only Sagan offers a measure of advancement that isn’t necessarily acquisitive. Even the manipulation of atoms, which may seem so small and delicate, requires massive amounts of energy in the form of particle accelerators, not to mention that this kind of tinkering has also unleashed humanity’s greatest destructive force. But Sagan’s super-advanced civilization could be nothing more than a massive, massive library, filled with scholars and philosophers, expanding and exploring mentally but with no dominion over their planet or star. (Yet, one has to ask: What is powering those libraries? The internet is ephemeral, but it is not free.)
Implicit in any vision of vast progress is not just longevity but continuity. The assumption of the ever upward-sloping line is bold to say the least. In the novella A Man of the People, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of one world, Hain, where civilization has existed for three million years. But just as the last few thousand years on Earth have seen empires rise and fall, and cultures collapse and displace one another, so it is on Hain at larger scale. Le Guin writes, “There had been…billions of lives lived in millions of countries…infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings…an endless repetition of unceasing novelty.” To hope for more than that is perhaps more optimistic than to imagine we might domesticate a star. Perhaps it’s also shortsighted, extrapolating out eons of future from just the last few centuries of life on two continents, rather than a wider view of many millennia on our whole world.
All of these scales of progress are built on human assumptions, specifically the colonizing, dominating, fossil-fuel-burning history of Europe and the United States. But scientists don’t see much use in thinking about the super-advanced alien philosophers and artists and dolphins, brilliant as they might be, because it would be basically impossible for us to find them.
The scientific quest for advanced aliens is about trying to imagine not just who might be out there but how we might find them. Which is how we end up at Dyson spheres.
Dyson spheres are named for Freeman Dyson, the physicist, mathematician, and general polymath. While most SETI scientists in the early 1960s were looking for extraterrestrial beacons, Dyson thought “one ought to be looking at the uncooperative society.” Not obstinate, just not actively trying to help us. “The idea of searching for radio signals was a fine idea,” he said in a 1981 interview, “but it only works if you have some cooperation at the other end. So I was always thinking about what to do if you were looking just for evidence of intelligent activities without anything in the nature of a message.” And you might as well start with the easiest technology to detect — the biggest or brightest. So the massive spheres Dyson popularized in his 1960 paper were the result of him asking What is the largest feasible technology?
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics,” the Enterprise finds itself caught in a massive gravitational field, even though there are no stars nearby. The source, on the view screen, is a matte, dark gray sphere. Riker says its diameter is almost as wide as the Earth’s orbit.
Picard asks, with hushed wonder, “Mr. Data, could this be a Dyson sphere?”
Data replies, “The object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.”
Commander Riker isn’t familiar with the concept, but Picard doesn’t give him any trouble for that. “It’s a very old theory, Number One. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it.” He tells him that a twentieth century physicist, Freeman Dyson, had proposed that a massive, hollow sphere built around a star could capture all the star’s radiating energy for use. “A population living on the interior surface would have virtually inexhaustible sources of power.”
Riker asks, with some skepticism, if Picard thinks there are people living in the sphere.
“Possibly a great number of people, Commander,” Data says. “The interior surface area of a sphere this size is the equivalent of more than two hundred and fifty million Class M [Earthlike] planets.”
In Dyson’s thinking, the goal wasn’t living space but energy — how would a civilization reach Type II? And Dyson’s writing was clearly speculative. In the paper, he wrote, “I do not argue that this is what will happen in our system; I only say that this is what may have happened in other systems.” Decades later, astrophysicist Jason Wright took up the search.
One of the great benefits to this approach, Wright told me, is that “nature doesn’t make Dyson spheres.” Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. But while the best known version of SETI is listening for radio signals (more on that in the next chapter), Wright focuses on looking for technosignatures — evidence of technology out among the stars. Technosignatures allow you to find those uncooperative aliens Dyson thought would make the best targets. We don’t even need to find the aliens, in this case, just proof they once existed. That could be a stargate, or a distant planet covered in elemental silicon (geologically unlikely, but technologically great for solar panels), or it could be a Dyson sphere.
Wright’s first big search for Dyson spheres was called Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, or G-HAT. Or, even better, Gˆ (because that’s a G with a little hat on it). The premise was simple: Dyson spheres don’t just absorb energy, they transform it, inevitably radiating some waste as heat which we can see as infrared radiation. So, from 2012 to 2015, Wright and his team looked at about a million galaxies, searching for a Type II civilization on its way to Type III, having ensconced enough of a galaxy’s stars in Dyson spheres that the galaxy might glow unusually bright in infrared. (They surveyed galaxies rather than individual stars because, as Wright writes, “A technological species that could build a Dyson sphere could also presumably spread to nearby star systems,” so it’s fair to think a galaxy with one Dyson sphere may have several, and several would be easier to find than just one. Might as well start there.) None were found, but you know that because you would’ve surely heard about it if Wright’s search had succeeded.
Wright prides himself on the agnosticism of this approach. He doesn’t need aliens to be looking for us or to have any certain sociological impulses. They just need technology. “Technology uses energy,” he told me. “That’s kind of what makes it technology. Just like life uses energy.” That view makes demolishing a Jupiter-sized planet to build a star-encompassing megastructure seem almost comically simple, but Wright doesn’t even see the existence of a Dyson sphere as requiring massive coordination or forethought on the aliens’ part. It is truly, in his view, a low-intensity ask. He compared it to Manhattan, a fair example of a human “megastructure,” a massive, interconnected, artificial system. “It was planned to some degree, but no one was ever like, ‘Hey, let’s build a huge city here.’ It’s just every generation made it a little bigger.” He thinks a Dyson sphere or swarm could accumulate in a similar manner. “If the energy is out there to take and it’s just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn’t someone take it?”
Wright knows the objections: that this imagines a capitalist orientation, a drive to “dominate nature” that is by no means universal, not even among human societies. But for his research to work, this drive doesn’t need to be universal among the stars. It just has to have happened sometimes, enough for us to see the results. As he put it, “There’s nothing that drives all life on Earth to be large. In fact, most life is small. But some life is large.” And if an alien were to come to Earth, they wouldn’t need to see all the small life to know the planet was inhabited. A single elephant would do the trick.
Some hypothetical alien technosignatures might be less definitive. In 2017, astronomers detected a roughly quarter-mile-long rocky object slingshotting through the solar system. They realized that this object, called ‘Oumuamua, came from outside the system — because of its speed and the path it took. It was the first interstellar object ever detected in our system. While hopes or fears that it was an alien probe were not realized, it was a reminder that alien technology could be found closer to home, lurking around our own sun.
“We don’t know that there’s not technology here because we’ve never really checked,” Wright said. “I mean, I guess if they had cities on Mars, we would notice—if they were on the surface, anyway.” But, he pointed out, much of the Earth’s surface doesn’t have active, visible technology. The same could go for the solar system beyond Earth, too. There could be alien probes or debris, like ‘Oumuamua but constructed, moving so fast or so dark that we don’t see them. Maybe there’s an alien base on the dwarf planet Ceres, or buried under the surface of Mars. The lunar monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wright reminded me, was buried just under the surface of the moon. All those ancient interstellar gates sci-fi is fond of have to be found before they can be used. Don’t forget, until 2015, our best image of Pluto was a blurry blob. So much of what we know about even our own solar system is inference and assumption.
Skeptics love to ask Okay, so where is everyone? But we don’t know for sure that they aren’t — or haven’t been — here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-possibility-of-life-jaime-greene-hanover-square-press-113047089.html?src=rss
Speaking on the latest episode of The MacRumors Show, Gurman explained that while he still expects the new Mac Pro to launch this year, it is unlikely to emerge at WWDC in June. This is a significant delay over when the machine was originally expected to launch.
He added that the next-generation Mac Studio will likely not contain M2-series chips, with Apple postponing a refresh of the device until the M3 generation to avoid cannibalizing the new Mac Pro.
Gurman also said that the new 15-inch MacBook Air, which will contain an M2 chip, was originally supposed to launch last year. This apparently means that the 13-inch MacBook Air could run on a separate chip upgrade cycle to the 15-inch model, with the smaller device potentially set to receive the M3 chip well before it comes to the larger model. How Apple plans to align the chip upgrade cycle of the two devices in the long term remains to be seen.
Following up on an earlier report, Gurman said that he now expects the “in-air typing” text input method to be present on Apple’s mixed-reality headset when it launches, despite its “finicky” experience. He added that the device’s two-hour battery life may be likely to remain through successive generations of the mixed-reality headset, much like how the two standard Apple Watch model sizes have had no battery life improvements since their announcement in 2014.
For more of Gurman’s latest thoughts on Apple’s upcoming hardware announcements, listen to the latest episode of The MacRumors Show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast player.
This article, “Apple Silicon Mac Pro Reportedly Not Coming at WWDC, Mac Studio Refresh Likely Delayed Until M3” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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According to the latest Global Cyber Crime Report produced by SEON, a global company focused on detecting and preventing financial crime, internet users…
The post Report Ranks UK As 9th Least Likely Nation To Experience a Cyber Attack in 2023 appeared first on TechRound.
On Apr. 15, 2023, Hafthor Björnsson attempted a 252.5-kilogram (556.7-pound) raw bench press during a powerlifting competition held at Thor’s Power Gym in Kópavogur, Iceland. The athlete would not finish the repetition as he appeared to injure his left pectoral muscle immediately upon touching the barbell to his chest, leading him to grimace in pain while yelling to…
The post Hafthor Björnsson Says His Pec Injury Will Likely Require Surgery appeared first on Breaking Muscle.
Were you using Facebook sometime between the dates of May 24, 2007 and December 22, 2022?
If so, there’s a good chance the company, now known as Facebook’s parent company Meta, owes you money!
And who would turn down free money, right? So, here’s what’s going on and how you can find out if you’re eligible.
Over the years, Meta has faced quite a few lawsuits from Facebook users who allege that the company allowed their user data to be accessible to third-parties without users’ permission.
These lawsuits, which were ultimately consolidated into a class-action lawsuit, Facebook allowed this unauthorized access for users’ friends data too. Furthermore, the lawsuits claim that Facebook also did not “sufficiently monitor” or enforce its rules on third-parties who had access to user data.
One such prominent issue from these lawsuits is in regard to the data Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s campaign, to access.
Meta has now agreed to settle the class action lawsuit. In doing so, the company admits to no wrongdoing. However, as part of the settlement, Meta also agrees to pay out a total of $725 million to affected users.
One addendum to add here is that the total also covers various legal and administrative fees, so the sum total of the payout to users will be considerably less. And, of course, the amount users receive will depend on how many people submit an eligible claim.
But, hey! Whatever you get, it’s still free money!
In order to get cash from the settlement, eligible Facebook users between the dates of May 24, 2007 and December 22, 2022 can file a claim here. Users must submit a claim by August 25, 2023.
However, users who object to the settlement and plan on filing a lawsuit against Meta for these issues, must opt-out and do so by July, 26, 2023. If a user does not file either a claim or objection by those deadlines, they forfeit their right to the settlement and further legal action as well.
If you’d like more information, feel free to visit the website set up for the class action settlement at FacebookUserPrivacySettlement.com.
The new hybrid technology reportedly combines rigid OLED glass substrates with flexible OLED thin-film encapsulation (TFE), making the panels thinner than rigid OLED panels. The process also incurs lower production costs than flexible OLED panels because it doesn’t require a backlighting layer.
Conventional rigid OLED panels use two glass substrates, but in a hybrid OLED panel the top glass substrate is replaced with TFE. This makes the panel thinner, while the remaining bottom glass substrate is etched even thinner from 0.5mm to 0.2mm.
The resulting “ultra-thin glass” is more vulnerable to breaking while being moved to the next process in the production line, therefore LG is developing a simultaneous etch-and-cut process to mitigate risk.
Reference to the hybrid OLED technology first appeared in an August 2022 report from The Elec, which said Apple could adopt it in iPads by 2024. Today’s report suggests that for now LG will only apply the new technology in its Gen 8 OLED line, while its current Gen 6 OLED line will continue to be used to produce iPad models into next year.
According to the report, Samsung began developing the hybrid technology earlier than LG and will deploy it immediately for the OLED iPad panels it will manufacture on its Gen 6 OLED line. The report does not mention which iPad models will be first to benefit, but according to display industry consultant Ross Young, Apple plans to introduce its first 11-inch iPad Pro and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with OLED displays in 2024.
This article, “2024 iPad Pro Models Likely to Debut Thinner Hybrid OLED Panel Tech” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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