Earth and Beyond
Today's Big Idea: Commodifying Space
Elon Musk is going to Mars, with or without NASA.
Musk also understands a suborbital adventure or even the two hundred mile trip to the International Space Station represent baby steps compared to a trip to Marts, which is millions of miles away.
Nevertheless, the launch of the SpaceX dragon this Saturday for its maiden voyage to the International Space Station is an important milestone and a helpful way to measure the progress of the ambitious commercial space industry.
Right now commercial space companies like SpaceX or feasting on NASA contracts. They plan to use these contracts to demonstrate their ability to steeply reduce costs. But if they want to realize their higher ambitions, like going to Mars, entrepreneurs like Musk realize they will probably need to work outside of NASA, and go it alone.
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A Great Leap for Capitalism: SpaceX Eyes Historic Launch, and Eventually Mars
The SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to make a demonstration launch this Saturday to the International Space Station, an important milestone in the private space race. And yet, SpaceX founder Elon Musk isn't content. He's eying Mars, with or without NASA.
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The Business of Mining Asteroids
Dr, Michio Kaku: Sadly, the US government will no longer boldly go into space. Its up to private enterprise to now pick up the slack and it appears that is exactly what its doing.
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China's Not-So-Civil Space Program
“The space program, including ostensible civil projects, supports China’s growing ability to deny or degrade the space assets of potential adversaries and enhances China’s conventional military capabilities."
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Bringing Commercial Space Fantasies Back to Earth
Neil deGrasse Tyson pours cold water on some of the dreams of the commercial space industry. He tells Big Think "from where I sit there is a lot of delusional thinking there."
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Meet the Urban Datasexual
Dominic Basulto
Digital Thinker, Electric Artists
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Braingasm: How Porn "Shuts Down" Women's Brains
Megan Erickson
Associate Editor, Big Think
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Killing Creativity: Why Kids Draw Pictures of Monsters & Adults Don't
Sam McNerney
Science writer
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A Marriage Ruined by Monogamy
Pamela Haag
Essayist
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563 - Pop by Lat and Pop by Long
Frank Jacobs
Author, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities
Latest
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What's the Latest Development? While the Kepler space telescope continues to find planets outside our solar system, the debate over extraterrestrial life, so to speak, rages on. Paul Davies, physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University, argues that even given recent discoveries, the ... Read More
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What’s the big idea? There is no shortage of online tools to help us research restaurants, track up-to-the-minute news and even plan out our zombie escape routes, yet there are very few tools that can help us research, track and plan our own happiness. One of the few that does exist is Happstr, an ... Read More
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Get this: there is a startup called I Dream of Space that is selling posters for $10 that also come with the chance to win a trip to space. In other words, your $10 ticket could be worth a $200,000 seat on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo or a $95,000 trip on XCOR Aerospace's Lynx. Apparently the ... Read More
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Big Think hits the streets (the intersection of Wall & Broad, NYC) this Friday, May 18th with a guerilla theater piece for Facebook IPO day. It's a funny, poignant clash between worldviews on the cultural and economic implications of the rise of the social web. Facebook's initial public ... Read More
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I hope that the US authorities are keeping a close eye on proceedings in little old London town involving Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and that of one of his former closest colleagues, the editor of the now closed News of the World newspaper, Rebekah Brooks. She and her husband have now been ... Read More
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Do you know what is in your digital dossier? Since you began to have a life on the Web, data has been accruing about the habits and interests of your online life. The generation of young people emerging in the digital age have the unique experience of having the entirety of their lives immersed in ... Read More
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So I'm sorry for yet another relatively pointy-headed post. I'm still thinking about the twin pillars of our modern, scientific self-understanding--Descartes and Darwin. For today, I'm thinking about how the right to same-sex marriage might emerge from a Constitution understood in a consistently ... Read More
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Here are hypotheses 10 through 18 on how social media might change your love life. Click here for Part 1… ASSORTATIVE MATING ON STEROIDS Like marries like today. “ Assortative mating” is one of the major marriage trends of the last 60 years. We marry people who are more like us in ... Read More
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The successful decoding of the human genome was a phenomenal scientific achievement. For the first time in the world’s history, the entire genetic code of the human species was fully available to scientific researchers. The fantastic accomplishment will provide untold advances in medicine and ... Read More
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It must be a terribly confusing time to be a member of the Vatican hierarchy. In an effort to stem the accelerating exodus of Catholic laypeople, they've been cracking down on suspected heretics left and right - on nuns who help the poor too much, on priests who want to change the rules of ... Read More
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Maps usually display only one layer of information. In most cases, they're limited to the topography, place names and traffic infrastructure of a certain region. True, this is very useful, and in all fairness quite often it's all we ask for. But to reduce cartography to a schematic of accessibility ... Read More
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Elon Musk is going to Mars. With or without NASA. Of course, the ambitious former PayPal entrepreneur who founded SpaceX in 2002 has to take one step at a time. A very important first step, indeed a milestone, will happen this Saturday, May 19 at 4:55 a.m, when the SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to ... Read More
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Creative Boosts
How to Build the USS Enterprise and Fly It to Mars
An engineer has released incredibly detailed technical specifications for builing a real Star Ship Entreprise which could take us to Mars in 90 days and to the Moon in just three.
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Space Resources
Call for Space Miners Met with 2,000 Resumes
We're sorry to inform you that the space mining position you were seeking has been filled. That's the message from Planetary Resources, who was inundated with resumes to mine space rocks.
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New Space Race
One Giant Leap for the Private Space Industry
This weekend, the company SpaceX is set to make a giant leap for the private space industry. It is scheduled to carry supplies--but no people--to the International Space Station.
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Rethinking the Workplace
Fast-Growing Companies Use Social Media Most
A new survey of corporate professionals across Europe shows that high-growth companies were the most likely to embrace social media, as were employees who were later promoted.
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big data
Why Power, Not Privacy, Is at Stake in Online Data Tracking
The degree to which companies can yield the power of individuals' data to explain societal behavior gives them unprecedented amounts of power. Privacy is a relatively minor concern.
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Smarter Cities
Online Social Networks and the Neighborhood Renaissance
A new online social network wants to bring neighborhoods together in ways that may agree with how people want to know their neighbors, i.e. semi-anonymously and at their convenience.