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"Next Big Future" - 7 new articles
- Zubrin on Green Antihumanism and Paul Ehrlich repeats call for more Abortion and Birth control
- Quantum Hypercube Memory will Enable Parallel Small Quantum Computers to Provide Exponential Speed up over Classical Computing
- Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait Pakistan and Azerbiajan competing for the Next Worlds Tallest Building
- Search for Modifications and Alternatives after the NIF fusion laser missed key milestone
- Google Expanding the Googleplex
- Hint of 150 MHz radio emission from the Neptune-mass extrasolar transiting planet HAT-P-11b
- Exoplanet Habitability adjusted for atmospheric pressure and seasonality
- More Recent Articles
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Zubrin on Green Antihumanism and Paul Ehrlich repeats call for more Abortion and Birth controlOn February 11, 2013, the Denver Post ran a guest commentary of great clinical interest. In the piece in question, Colorado State University philosophy professor Philip Cafaro advanced the argument that immigration needs to be sharply cut, because otherwise people from Third World nations will come to the United States and become prosperous, thereby adding to global warming.
Cafaro says “And make no mistake: Immigrants are not coming to the United States to remain poor,” warns the philosopher. “Those hundreds of millions of new citizens will want to live as well and consume energy at the same rates as other Americans. . . . What climate change mitigation measures . . . could possibly equal the increased greenhouse gas emissions we would lock in by adding 145 million more new citizens to our population?”
Robert Zubrin notes that according to Cafaro’s liberal argument, the wretched of the Earth must be kept poor wherever they reside, because otherwise they will ruin the weather for the rest of us. Following this logic, the United States should adopt the role of the world’s oppressor, enforcing the continuation of poverty around the globe. The argument has always been the same: 1. There isn’t enough of x to go around. 2. Therefore human numbers, activities, or liberties must be severely constrained. 3. Those of us enlightened by wisdom must be empowered to do the constraining. 4. And having obtained such power, let’s make the best of it and stick it to those we despise anyway. All these cases were frauds. Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire “great famine,” the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn’t afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures. Germany never needed additional living space. It has a bigger population now than it did under the Third Reich, on much less land, yet it has a far higher living standard. Hitler just used the Lebensraum imperative as an excuse for genocide. Contrary to Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, the world was not overpopulated in 1967. In fact, since that time, as world population has doubled, average GDP per capita has nearly tripled. Yet, unfortunately, that did not stop population-control advocates from obtaining billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Third World regimes stop reproduction among their poor, in general, and despised national minorities, in particular. And there is certainly no moral case for limiting carbon emissions. Paul Ehrlich wrote the population bomb and has been wrongly predicting a starvation doom since the 1960s. Paul Ehrlich has again repeated his forecast of a food calamity and the only solution is for population control. Read more »          
     Quantum Hypercube Memory will Enable Parallel Small Quantum Computers to Provide Exponential Speed up over Classical ComputingA quantum computer doesn't need to be a single large device but could be built from a network of small parts, new research from the University of Bristol has demonstrated. As a result, building such a computer would be easier to achieve.
Many groups of research scientists around the world are trying to build a quantum computer to run algorithms that take advantage of the strange effects of quantum mechanics such as entanglement and superposition. A quantum computer could solve problems in chemistry by simulating many body quantum systems, or break modern cryptographic schemes by quickly factorising large numbers.
Previous research shows that if a quantum algorithm is to offer an exponential speed-up over classical computing, there must be a large entangled state at some point in the computation and it was widely believed that this translates into requiring a single large device. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Dr Steve Brierley of Bristol's School of Mathematics and colleagues show that, in fact, this is not the case. A network of small quantum computers can implement any quantum algorithm with a small overhead. The key breakthrough was learning how to efficiently move quantum data between the many sites without causing a collision or destroying the delicate superposition needed in the computation. This allows the different sites to communicate with each other during the computation in much the same way a parallel classical computer would do. Arxiv - Efficient Distributed Quantum Computing Read more »    
Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait Pakistan and Azerbiajan competing for the Next Worlds Tallest BuildingKuwait, China and Azerbaijan had already announced their plans for the tallest tower in previous years, now Pakistan has announced new plans.
Kingdom Holding Company that has commenced work on the 1,000-metre high Kingdom Tower in Riyadh, which is set to overtake Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest tower in the world, by 2017.
With a total construction area of over 500,000 square meters, the Kingdom Tower will be a mixed-use building, featuring a Four Seasons Hotel, Four Seasons serviced apartments, office space, luxury condominiums and an observatory at higher level than the world's current highest observation deck. The Kingdom Tower complex will contain 59 elevators, including 54 single-deck and five double-deck elevators, along with 12 escalators. Elevators serving the observatory will travel at a rate of 10 meters per second in both directions. Another unique feature of the design is a sky terrace, roughly 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter, at level 157. It is an outdoor amenity space intended for use by the penthouse floor. The Kingdom Tower was previously known as Mile-High Tower It is a supertall skyscraper proposed for construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at a preliminary cost of SR4.6 billion (US$1.23 billion). It will be the centerpiece and first phase of a SR75 billion (US$20 billion) proposed development known as Kingdom City that will be located along the Red Sea on the north side of Jeddah. If completed as planned, the tower will reach unprecedented heights, becoming the tallest building in the world, as well as the first structure to reach the one-kilometer mark. The tower was initially planned to be 1.6-kilometre (1 mi) high; however, the geology of the area proved unsuitable for a tower of that height.  China’s Broad Group is waiting for government approval to build the 220-storey Sky City in Changsha, 10 meters taller than the 828-metre Burj Khalifa. The tower will be standing tall in mere three months.  The 838-meter high Sky City is expected to have residences, offices, elementary and secondary schools, kindergarten, old people’s home, healthcare hospital, store, hotel, sports and entertainment centre, 17 helipads and house nearly 30,000 people. Sky City will use BSB modular technology which features 95 per cent factory prefabrication with a construction pace of five storeys a day. Plans for 2000 meter 636 Story follow up to Skycity Pinned up on the office wall of Broad Groups CEO Zhang Yue are plans for a project even more audacious building that is two kilometers high. When asked to estimate the odds of this 636-floor giganto-scraper ever being built, Zhang responds without hesitation, "One hundred percent! Some say that it's sensationalism to construct such a tall building. That's not so. Land shortages are already a grave problem. There's also the very serious transportation issue. We must bring cities together and stretch for the sky in order to save cities and save the Earth. We must eliminate most traffic, traffic that has no value! And we must reduce our dependency on roads and transportation." Nextbigfuture has discussed what it would mean to have 600-700 story buildings Higher density and larger cities would boost the per capita GDP of a city Sky City Skyscrapers (200-300 stories) and robotic cars (4 times the density of road traffic) will make certain megacities (future New York, Shanghai, Tokyo etc...) one third to one half of the overall world population and they would have 75% more GDP per capita than they do today. There would be rural, regular urban then super-urban. Research shows that doubling population and increased urban density boosts productivity by about 15%. Read more »     
Search for Modifications and Alternatives after the NIF fusion laser missed key milestoneThe world's biggest laser missed a key target date on the road to producing clean energy via nuclear fusion, an independent review panel says the technology holds enough promise to continue the quest – with a few modifications.
NIF's approach was to fire a 192-beam laser at a metal shell the size of a pencil eraser, holding a ball of frozen hydrogen. This produces a burst of X-rays that heats and compresses the hydrogen, fusing the nuclei in a brief implosion. When NIF was being built in the 1990s, computer models predicted that short laser pulses delivering 1.8 megajoules of energy would create the pressures needed for ignition. The giant laser surpassed this energy level last year but still wasn't achieving enough pressure. Until we know why NIF fell short, the panel recommends trying out other options, such as shifting to a different type of laser. For instance, firing an electron beam through a mixture of krypton and fluorine produces bright laser pulses at a shorter wavelength. This technology is less mature, but if it works it could implode the targets more uniformly than NIF's lasers. Read more »     
Google Expanding the GoogleplexVanity Fair reports Google is planning to launch a second campus neighboring its current Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
The 1.1-million-square-foot campus, dubbed "Bay View," will eat up around 42 acres of space with its nine different buildings.  Read more »     
Hint of 150 MHz radio emission from the Neptune-mass extrasolar transiting planet HAT-P-11bSince the radio-frequency emission from planets is expected to be strongly influenced by their interaction with the magnetic field and corona of the host star, the physics of this process can be effectively constrained by making sensitive measurements of the planetary radio emission. Up to now, however, numerous searches for radio emission from extrasolar planets at radio wavelengths have only yielded negative results. Here we report deep radio observations of the nearby Neptune-mass extrasolar transiting planet HAT-P-11b at 150 MHz, using the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT). On July 16, 2009, we detected a 3σ emission whose light curve is consistent with an eclipse when the planet passed behind the star. This emission is at a position 14′′ from the transiting exoplanet’s coordinates; thus, with a synthetized beam of FWHM∼16′′, the position uncertainty of this weak radio signal encompasses the location of HAT-P-11. We estimate a 5% false positive probability that the observed radio light curve mimics the planet’s eclipse light curve. If the faint signature is indeed a radio eclipse event associated with the planet, then its flux would be 3.87 mJy±1.29 mJy at 150 MHz. However, our equally sensitive repeat observations of the system on November 17, 2010 did not detect a significant signal in the radio light curve near the same position. This lack of confirmation leaves us with the possibility of either a variable planetary emission, or a chance occurrence of a false positive.
Read more »    
Exoplanet Habitability adjusted for atmospheric pressure and seasonalityA new Energy Balance Model (EBM) provides more insight into the habitability of extrasolar planets. It also has a seasonal model of planetary climate, with new prescriptions for most physical quantities. Researchers use the EBM to investigate the surface habitability of planets with an Earth-like atmospheric composition but diff erent levels of surface pressure. The habitability, defi ned as the mean fraction of the planet's surface on which liquid
water could exist, is estimated from the pressure-dependent liquid water temperature range, taking into account seasonal and latitudinal variations of surface temperature. By running several thousands of EBM simulations they generated a map of the habitable zone (HZ) in the plane of the orbital semi-major axis, a, and surface pressure, p, for planets in circular orbits around a Sun-like star. As pressure increases, the HZ becomes broader, with an increase of 0.25 AU in its radial extent from p=1/3 bar to p=3 bar. At low pressure, the habitability is low and varies with a; at high pressure, the habitability is high and relatively constant inside the HZ. We interpret these results in terms of the pressure dependence of the greenhouse e ffect, the effi ciency of horizontal heat transport, and the extent of the liquid water temperature range. Within the limits discussed in the paper, the results can be extended to planets in eccentric orbits around non-solar type stars. The main characteristics of the pressure-dependent HZ are modestly aff ected by variations of planetary properties, particularly at high pressure.  Read more »     
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