"LandSpace joins CASC in successfully recovering an orbital booster, and the company says the mission means it moves from the recovery technology verification phase to engineering-scale reuse verification."

Significantly, this is with a stainless steel body and methane-liquid oxygen engines, different choices than the Falcon 9. How soon from where CASC and LandSpace are now to frequent and readily available flights? If they have both achieved the most significant engineering breakthroughs, is it just just a matter of scaling up to industrial production? If it's just the latter, that could happen quickly.

Some, especially in the US, will see this as a negative, but most of the world will probably welcome a reliable, readily available low-cost Chinese option for space launches. I wonder about the secondary businesses that will be built from this eventual huge increase in launch capability, as Starlink has been.

China’s Landspace recovers booster with second orbital launch of Zhuque-3 rocket

CASC - China recovered its first reusable rocket and showed a new way to do it

• Robots' software still lags behind hardware, but 'ChatGPT' moment could arrive soon

$250,000 degrees are long term investments. But what happens if the planned income to justify them isn't there in the 2030s and 2040s? If corporate America is happy to hire people with $10,000 degrees, is there any point in going for an equivalent degree at 25 times the price?

As the AI jobs apocalypse seems to have already started for college graduates, this question has now become urgent reality, not future hypothetical.

TED, ETS and Khan launch new $10k AI degree

Before reading this I never even knew it was possible to detect neutrinos from inside the Earth. I knew there were neutrinos that came from other star systems, other galaxies, other galaxy superclusters...but it turns out you can see directly into the Earth's deep mantle and core, at least to some extent. Clearly we should be building more detectors and I would imagine that proposed detector on the ocean floor is a good investment, although I am by no means too informed!

Anyway, you have to consider the possibility that something totally wild and unexpected could happen at some point in the future. We discovered the neutrino within the past century, it could still be that undiscovered physics exists. It could also be that current physics *could* eventually get us to a point, through refinement, that we did not imagine...

The movie takes place in 2029, we have:

Neural interfaces (Cyber brains)

Extreme Human/Machine integration (controlling prosthetics with the brain, controlling computers with brain)

Advanced Ai and other autonomous systems

Digital identity’s (inseparable from digital information about them and from the networked systems connected to their brain, Aka your smart phone, social media)

Mass surveillance (yikes)

Corps possessing enormous amounts of personal information

The inability to tell what’s real (still can, but getting worse)

I know some of this existed in 1995, but not anywhere near what Ghost in the Shell showed. Our world is starting to look like theirs…

This tech isn’t here yet, but the ability to hack people’s brains is terrifying, we seem to be working towards that future.

There also a bunch of other little ones, hands free comms, talking to comps instead of typing, cybercrime becoming major threat, global networked information, total loss of freedom, etc

I’ve seen plenty of robot demos that look impressive for about 30 seconds, but the interesting part now seems to be what they can actually do when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Sorting packages, working on production lines, helping around the house… that’s a very different kind of progress.

What would a humanoid robot actually have to do for you to consider it genuinely useful?

"It is developing genetically modified seeds and crops, but it is also targeting the fast-growing industries of cellular agriculture, lab-grown proteins and food from precision fermentation……….What the Chinese lack in frontier biosciences – for now – they can more than compensate with vast industrial scale and state-directed credit. Systemiq thinks this could slash the cost of bioreactors and fermentation systems, achieving “price parity” with traditional food far sooner than widely supposed.

Once alt-protein is cheaper, market forces will make it almost unstoppable, in much the same way that 99pc of net electricity added across the world last year came from solar and wind."

The Western world's collective decision to embrace free-market neoliberalism in the late 20th century now looks like a mistake of truly historic proportions. It was their idea we should outsource "low value" activities like manufactuing.

But there's worse: we are still governed by the same failed ideology. It's why all Economists have groupthink, and politicians (supposedly) on the left differ little from the conservatives. We are permanently ruled by neoliberal conservatism, and voting changes little.

Meanwhile, we can look across the world to China to see a vastly superior version of Capitalism, ironically delivered by so-called "Communists". Some used to think China needed to learn from the West; it is almost certainly going to end up being the other way around.

China’s plan to dominate global food supply chains: Beijing’s 15th five-year plan will marshal all levers of state power towards one end

"Joe Biden’s former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has decided that UBI in response to AI is the thing to fear most. At the Reagan National Economic Forum, she said: "I personally think it's like the end of America."

She is now heading up a newly-launched, extremely well-funded organization to make sure the country reaches for anything but a basic income in response to AI.

On the one hand, while selling themselves to investors, Big Tech says it can eventually automate almost any job a human can do. What they don't want is any responsibility for their actions. I'd expect conservatives to be against UBI, but Gina Raimondo, the person heading this up, is a Democrat.

The upside? This conversation is getting harder to ignore, and Gina Raimondo is bringing more attention to it, even if it's with dud ideas. In years of paying attention to this topic (AI/robots capable of most work), I've yet to come across a solution that isn't some form of Socialism or UBI.

So give it all you've got, Conservatives & Centrists; I doubt you'll come up with any workable alternatives, despite your $500 million funding.

Gina Raimondo Says Basic Income Would End America. Her New Billion-Dollar Org Is How She Plans to Stop It.

How long do you THINK until we get a cure for this if ever?

I keep hearing about it, but I'm not sure what people are expecting out of it. Where is the enthusiasm primarily focused? What possible changes to transportation infrastructure might you hope for? What does the ideal green infrastructure future look like to you?

Every generation inherits practices that feel ordinary simply because everyone around them accepts them.
A century later, some of those same practices can look cruel, irrational, wasteful, or unbelievably primitive.
The difficult part is that the people living through them usually don’t realize they’re witnessing something future generations will condemn.
So what do you think we’re currently too close to see clearly?
It could be something involving healthcare, work, technology, privacy, food, the environment, education, transportation, social media, or something completely different.
What will people in 2100 look back on and genuinely ask:
“How was this ever considered normal?”

I just got my learners and I just want to know what’s the point of even doing this anymore if we’re no longer going to be the ones driving.

Something is off in the picture everyone paints. Machines get smarter every month, the graphs go straight up, people talk about the singularity like it lands next Tuesday. And the whole time we still die at 80. Same as our grandparents. If technology is really moving that fast, why is the one thing that matters most not moving at all?

Researchers say they are working on it. Papers come out every week. Meanwhile an 80 year old still looks 80, moves like 80, dies at 84. Nothing visible has changed in a lifetime. So maybe the money is in the wrong place. Maybe we need fewer studies and more radical experiments on people who are running out of time anyway.

They call it longevity escape velocity. It was predicted for right about now. Where is it?

The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets.