Deep Space Drones

The deep space drones podcast has been fun to make, and I, Claude Chateauvert, have learned a lot. But this your podcast, not mine. It’s on your device. It gets copied and redistributed from one site to another, bouncing all over the Internet. It’s open source soundware. Just about 10 thousand of you are now following Deep Space Drones on Twitter. It’s time to pivot the podcast, to you.   Tell us about yourself. Who are you? What do you do? When do you listen to the deep space drones podcast? Where are you when listening to it? Why do you listen?   You don’t have to answer any or all of these questions. Pick one or two if you like.   Would you like to contribute, as in have your thoughts read on air, be interviewed?   If so, what would you like to say. Keep this context in mind. The deep space drones podcast is about space exploration and disruptive technology.   As always, thank you for listening.

For life to exist as we know it, there must be an ocean and a source of energy, no sun required. Deep in the Earth's oceans, where there is no sun, hot vents provide the energy for life. So, find an ocean, with hot vents, find life, Simple. So where are these oceans worlds? Find out, in this episode.

Elon Musk Tweeted on Friday, saying he had a good level of confidence that they could reuse the upper stage too by the end of next year to achieve 100% re-usability.

In an unprecedented discovery, scientists have discovered an atmosphere around a planet outside our solar system. It's called GJ 1132b. GJ is in orbit around a red dwarf star 39 light years away. It's a little bit bigger than Earth, with a radius of 1.4 times more and 1.6 Earth masses.

A new startup is receiving $8 million in funding from investors including Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android and the former head of Google's robotics division. It's called RightHand Robotics out of Somerville, Massachusetts.  Their new robot with it's head in the cloud is called RightPick. They say it can pick up and sort small objects, under five pounds, 500 to 1,000 times an hour. The bot uses machine learning to figure out how to handle various items on the fly.

March was not without incidents for UBER. An UBER driver plowed into a gas pump causing it to explode. A human was driving though. Last week a self-driving UBER SUV was also involved in an accident. UBER shut down the self-driving program at that point in Arizona, San Francisco and Pittsburgh while investigated the accident. Google self-driving cars have also been involved in accidents. According to their own accident reports, their self-driving cars were involved in 14 collisions. Out of 14 crashes their test cars were at fault only once, when they dinged the back of a bus at 5 miles per hour. Still, this technology is getting better every day. This will cause a massive disruption sooner than you might think. This episode looks at what self-driving cars will be like.  

Elon Musk is executing the integration of human intelligence with artificial intelligence he once referred to as neural lace, to save us from the impending AI planetary hostile takeover. On Monday he announced the new company, Neuralink. The idea is to create a new brain to computer interface. It isn't news that Elon is worried about AI. He thinks it will turn us into pets. He said that with artificial intelligence, we are summoning a demon. It's our biggest existential threat. What will creating a strong AI will result in? It could make our world a paradise, or Skynet will decide to terminate us. Find out more, in this episode.

There are a number of reasons to create a human outpost on Titan instead of Mars. For one, Mars is a very inhospitable lifeless place, 1% Earth's atmosphere, and few resources. Although it once had more water than the Arctic ocean, it's lost 87% into space. Going there would be like going to a freezing desert with no air. On Titan however, there is an atmosphere, and hydrocarbons everywhere. Liquid Methane lakes could be used to fuel anything we bring or build there. It' the only place in the solar system, other than on Earth has lakes. There may even be methane based life there. Please visit http://deepspacedrones.com for more content.

The Australian National University (ANU) is looking for people to help find the elusive planet 9. Although there was a ninth planet discovered in 1930, it has been since then demoted to a dwarf planet. This new hypothetical planet 9 could be a Super Earth, about ten times more massive. It would be somewhere between two to four time the diameter of the Earth.

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. It was considered the ninth planet from the Sun. In 1992 however, this became a question after several other objects similar in size to Pluto were discovered beyond it's orbit in what's known as the Kuiper belt. The International Astronomical Union, the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies made the controversial call, and destroying Pluto as a planet.  

So far, the biggest advance in Augmented Reality has been from Pokemon GO. Some don't even consider that to even be AR. AR is Virtual Reality blended with the real world. Apple's CEO Tim Cook envisions the next generation of smartphones to be loaded with AR capabilities. Apple has assembled a team to not compete with next gen devices, but to dominate the market.

Bixby is the name, the New Samsung Galaxy S8 launching next week is the game. This new AI assistant is going head to head with Amazon Echo and Apple Siri. Of course there are other AI's out there, like Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, IBM Watson, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Jarvis. What Samsung says is different about Bixby will be it's ability to work across multiple applications at the same time.

Microfossils called Hematites have been discovered in northern province of Quebec, Canada. Laser imaging showed that the may be the oldest form of life ever found. These creatures are tiny, with a diameter half of a human hair, and up to half a millimeter in length. There is a debate between scientists on the matter. Some are saying that the rocks these microfossils were found in are 3.77 billion years old, but other say they could be as old as 4.28 billion years. That would put them on Earth a few 100 million years after the sun and Earth formed, before oxygen was present in Earth's atmosphere.

Not sure what the price of the ticket is, but considering the implication, does price really matter? No one has been to the moon in over forty years. A lot of people don't even believe anyone has even been there at all. NASA is currently studying the possibility of sending two people around the moon next year, well before they have planned. Coincidently, one business day after NASA announced the plan to look at sending two people around the moon in 2018, Elon Musk announces the plan to send two tourists around the moon. Who would bankroll such a trip? Who could? Is it even possible?

The Sun is a 4.6 billion year old yellow dwarf star at the center of the Solar System. Although it's a dwarf, compared to the Earth, the sun is huge. You would need to line up 109 Earths, side by side to equal the Suns diameter. It has the mass of 330,000 Earths. It formed from a molecular cloud that collapsed under gravity, into a nearly perfect sphere, made of hot plasma. It contains 99.86% of the mass of entire Solar System. The rest of the stuff flattened into a disk that formed the planets. The center became so hot and dense that it initiated nuclear fusion. It's 73% hydrogen and 23% helium. The rest is a mix of heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron, stuff that people are made of.

The solar system is about to become our new back yard. Nobody has traveled beyond Earth's orbit in 40 years. This may be about to change. NASA is looking at sending us around the moon. This would be step one to getting us to Mars. The planning has just begun. Expect further details next month. The objective is to explore deeper space, with a more ambitious plan to "Unlock the mysteries of space." The Space Launch System, SLS, is the next generation of space travel since the space shuttle program, which ended six years ago.

Earth may have more siblings than once thought. Known as TRAPPIST-1, this star system holds seven Earth sized planets, three of which may be in the habitable zone, the goldilocks zone, where liquid water can exist, where life could survive, and evolve. These three may have surface oceans like Earth.

Europa, second closest moon to Jupiter, is slightly smaller than Earth's moon, and one of the most smoothest objects in the solar system. It's thought to harbour a global ocean 100 Km thick. That's twice as much water than on Earth. It's covered with ice 25 KM thick. The surface ice has cracked like an eggshell all around the surface. Just like we learned through astronomy that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, odds are good that we will discover that the Earth is not the center of all life in the Universe either. Life can be transported from one planet to another, no space ship required.

Shortest podcast ever...

We can tweet 140 characters around the world at the speed of light to everyone that is listening. That's great 'cause the better we communicate, the better we all can just get along. But where are those flying cars that were promised nearly a century ago?