Google Billionaires Want to Mine Asteroids

Google Billionaires Want to Mine Asteroids Read Post

billionaire, google, space travel

Google Billionaires Want to Mine Asteroids

also related: peter thiel building his own city in the ocean

Space travel sadly turned out to be something of a passing fad -- we got all worked up about the moon landing and then quickly figured out there wasn't anything there.

Let's face it: The reason America isn't full of people screaming for a manned trip to the stars is that space just doesn't seem to have anything useful. Well, if Google billionaires Larry Page and Eric Schmidt have their say (and they usually do), we're about to start plundering the living hell out of our solar system's vast trove of riches

The dynamic duo, who collectively are worth about $33 billion, teamed up with filmmaker James Cameron and X-Prize founder (and possible Watchmen villain) Peter Diamandis to fund "a venture to survey and eventually extract" valuable minerals from asteroids that pass near the Earth.

No strangers to thinking big (Page has been a driving force behind Google Glass , and Schmidt has been helping to launch Kenya, Africa, as a tech center similar to Silicon Valley), mining asteroids is just the latest in a string of interesting innovations. Why mine precious metals? It's because precious metals are used in just about every technology we enjoy, and are also important accessories to even low-level hip-hop artists.

Comets and meteors are full of these metals, as well as water, but the last time one of these space-banks paid us a visit, it added only a little bit of gold and water, and subtracted a whole lot of dinosaurs.

While no one attached to the project volunteered how much was invested, consider that they're ready to do this damn thing way sooner than NASA is. Led by Diamandis' organization, Planetary Resources, they're not only competing with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, they're beating them to the asteroids (although to NASA's credit, they did smash the ever-loving crap out of one with an aimed projectile).

Their plan is to use robots for all the mining. A good idea, although imagine how much action one would get if "asteroid miner" was a human job. Most interesting of all, this project is well along in development . It met its fundraising goal this summer and will kick off in late 2013 or early 2014, when Planetary Resources plans to launch a few Verne Troyer-size telescopes into orbit.

These satellites will survey our immediate cosmic surroundings and catalog different pieces of space rock based on potential value. The probes will ascertain the components of asteroid belt objects so we can target the most metallurgically potent specimens.

Water is equally important, as it can be turned into jet fuel upon separation of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Once extracted, this water can then be used to power other crafts, as they would be able to refuel at what would be the first ever gas station in space

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Peter Thiel Is Building His Own City in the Ocean

Peter Thiel Is Building His Own City in the Ocean Read Post

billionaire, paypal, peter thiel, wealthy

Peter Thiel Is Building His Own City in the Ocean

also related: google billionaire wants to mine asteroids.

also read: billionaire who wants to make you immortal

Billionaire Peter Thiel likes to dream big: He tried to create a global currency, which hasn't worked out so well (yet) . Then he created PayPal, which worked out famously, because people need to transfer money around online and also sometimes buy illicit things from strangers.

He went on to become one of Facebook's first investors, with a half-million- dollar cash injection .

Today Thiel is worth about $1.6 billion, and now he wants to build his own city on the open ocean. No potential dangers we can think of here ... And he's not going to stop at just one; he wants many micro-nations that will usher in a new way of living.

He plans to launch the first of these floaters just off the coast of San Francisco as soon as possible to test the concept. Ultimately, Thiel hopes to see millions upon millions of people living out at sea by mid-century. It'll be a boon for pirates, if nothing else. These communities would be situated on giant, several-thousand-ton rig structures that would be diesel-powered and therefore free to move around if pesky clouds are "blocking out Peter's sun." And just to be clear about the real benefits, these floating communities would be an exercise in unconventional forms of small-scale government .

Since the communities would exist outside the borders of any and all recognized nations, the micro-nations would be libertarian utopias: no welfare, no minimum wage, light regulations, and, we assume, re- heeeeeallly lax drug laws.

Furthermore, with more than hundreds of miles of uninterrupted sea between you and civilization, you'd be privy to the most depraved sex acts ever concocted inside a human brain.

Today the project has officially been named Blueseed, and they are actively doing environmental impact studies, conducting sustainability research, designing the ships/ countries, and raising funds. And raising funds. And raising funds. Apparently building a floating country is expensive. But work is moving forward, and they recently just received a major investment in the form of Bitcoins.

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billionaire Dmitry Itskov Wants to Make You Immortal

billionaire Dmitry Itskov Wants to Make You Immortal Read Post

billionaire, research, wealthy

billionaire Dmitry Itskov Wants to Make You Immortal

you may also like:BILLIONAIRE PETER THIEL IS BUILDING A CITY UNDER THE OCEAN

also: google billionaire wants to mine asteroid

With a net worth of over a billion dollars and at the tender age of 31 , Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov decided he was going right for the big one: immortality.

Well, shit, it kind of makes dudes who blow their money buying professional sports franchises look like a bunch of douchebags. He's assembled a team of 30 scientists (presumably mad) to pioneer a multistage project that would slowly turn you into a biological robot. The last phase is set for completion in 2045, at which point your brain will have been downloaded into an undying avatar, and we mean "avatar" as in the movie Avatar.

The first stage, supposedly to be completed by 2020, offers you a robot version of yourself, controlled by a brain-computer interface -- what experts often call the "RoboCop" phase.

The second stage is set to go into effect within five years of the first; this is the money shot of immortality, as it looks to actually transfer your human consciousness into an artificially created representation of your former biological glory.

The third stage would give our new cyborg overlords the ability to emote, possibly gambling on the fact that they'll allow us to live once they know mercy. The final stage is the marriage of each individual facet, resulting in a holographic representation of our former selves, complete with emotions, memories, and (hopefully) empathy.

So, yes, this guy is using his millions to bring Avatar to life, where a race of 'roided-out Smurfs are remote-controlled via someone else's brain, and our lives are almost exactly like a bad grad student cultural studies research paper and/or the plot to Disney's Pocahantas.

The movie Avatar ends with genocide, but let's hope we can control ourselves a little better in real life. Itskov's 2045 initiative produced a nifty inspirational video, claiming the project will lead us into a new way of life, devoid of violence and prejudice (he somehow thinks war will become a thing of the past, rather than simply being far more awesome).

Once we make the switch to non-physical forms of existence, we'll be able to pool our collective mind-power to achieve hippie-inspired ends, such as spiritual self-improvement.

Hey, laugh all you want; the point is that the guy is spending his cash on this instead of, say, a giant hot tub in the shape of his own penis. Which is understandable since the accident. And yes, the goal is to make this technology available to everyone, granting even the working man equal opportunity at immortality -- Itskov believes the price will come down as mass production is achieved. So you too will be able to live as a cyborg for the price of an automobile.

Today, Itskov is making presentations to billionaires and is attempting to raise funding for the first practical application of the avatar project: an artificial body controlled by the mind that he says can be ready in just three to five years with proper funding, which would immediately be great for, say, rescuers and firefighters.

Yes, he's talking about technology we saw in Iron Man 3 . Jesus, nobody show this guy a copy of Beyond Thunderdome.

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