Life Is Just A Force Of Nature

A few months back I came across this theory online. There is the law of entropy. Things move from a high energy state to a low energy state. There is this dispersion. If you add a living being to the process, entropy is faster. And so, life is just something nature has come up with to speed up entropy. 

I thought that was amazing. Not just life, but matter and energy are amazing too. Life is amazing, compared to what? It is not like life is this amazing thing in this ocean of not-amazingness. Not true. Life is special, but then so is gravity. Does it not blow your mind as to why the earth goes round the sun? That is not life. That is just gravity. 

I think life is as abundant in the universe as stars. Just like once we thought earth was the center of the universe, we think we are the only ones alive in the universe. 

Life is just one of the forces of nature. 

Outsourcing: I Hate The Term

If everybody (no pun intended) goes online to work, what difference does it make as to where their body is!

Hello

Middle Age

English: Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone 4 at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference Español: Presentación del iPhone 4 por Steve Jobs en la Worldwide Developers Conference del año 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why middle-aged entrepreneurs will be critical to the next trillion-dollar business

Steve Jobs was 52 when he announced the iPhone. That was in 2007. Years later, the Apple cofounder introduced the MacBook Air, App Store, and iPad. Tim Cook, who was 51 when he took over from Jobs, is building on his legacy. They both shattered a myth that the young rule the technology industry. ........ Research on successful technology firms by a team I led at Duke and Harvard in 2008 looked only at companies that had made it out of the garage and were generating at least $1 million in revenue. The research revealed that the average and median age of their founders was 39. Twice as many were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And twice as many were older than 60 as were younger than 20. In a follow-up project, we studied the backgrounds of 549 successful entrepreneurs in 12 high-growth industries. The average and median age of male founders in this group was 40, and a significant proportion were older than 50. ...... in every year from 1996 to 2013, Americans in the 55-to-64 age group started new businesses at a higher rate than those in their twenties and thirties. And the trend is building. Those ages 55 to 64 started 14 percent of all new businesses in 1996 but nearly 24 percent of them in 2013. ...... What makes entrepreneurs successful, as my team’s research revealed, is work and industry experience and management ability. These come with age. ..... The inexperience — and immaturity — of youth is one reason venture capitalists’ track record is so poor. In 2012, the Kauffman Foundation analyzed 20 years of investment data from nearly 100 venture funds. It found that the vast majority of them produced lower returns than did the public markets. ........ The experiment by Thiel to pay college students to drop out did not result in any world-changing startups. Most Thiel fellows joined other companies or went back to school. The Thiel Foundation quietly redesigned its program, which now provides an alternative education to children. Perhaps the realization set in that the innovation advantage isn’t provided by youth, but by knowledge, maturity, experience, and connections......... the average age at which Nobel laureates performed their prizewinning work and the average age at which inventors had their great achievement was 39. He also found that twice as many — 14 percent — were older than 50 as were younger than 26. Jones found that the average age of innovators is steadily rising, with the average age of greatest achievement for Nobel Prize winners and great tech inventors having increased six years, to 45, in the 20th century. ......... It also is easier to write code for a cellphone than to learn how to motivate and inspire employees, manage finances, and market products. But building a business requires all of those skills. That is why older entrepreneurs have more success. ...... A technology shift is happening that will dramatically alter the entrepreneurial landscape in the next few years. Several technologies — involving medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and nanomaterials — are advancing at exponential rates and are converging. This is the same type of advance that is occurring with computers — with processing power doubling every 18 months, prices falling, and devices becoming smaller. A $500 laptop today has more computing power than did a Cray 2 supercomputer that cost $17.5 million in 1985 and had to be housed in a large building. ........ These advances are making it possible to solve the global problems of health, energy, education, and hunger. Inexpensive sensor-based devices, for example, allow the continual measurement of heart rate, temperature, movement, pressure and light. They can be used to build devices that keep track of blood pressure, glucose and blood oxygen levels, respiration and even sleeping habits. They also can be used to improve agriculture, monitor the environment and reduce food spoilage. Systems based on artificial intelligence can be used to make medical diagnoses, to drive autonomous cars, and to predict traffic patterns, crime and trends. Robotic devices will allow us to care for the elderly and automate routine processes. Digital tutors will be able to transform education. .......... These technologies will make it possible to create the next trillion-dollar industries and to better our lives. But they require knowledge of fields such as medicine, biotechnology, engineering, and nanotechnology. They require experience, an understanding of the problems people face, and cross-disciplinary skills. All of these come with age and experience, which middle-aged entrepreneurs have in abundance. That is why we need to get beyond the stereotypes and realize that

older entrepreneurs are going to better the world

.

Space Based Solar Power

I myself am still pretty big on Sahara though. Space might be 10 times more efficient, but it might be 20 times more expensive, at least now. But I will go to space for clean, why not? Space based solar power also has potential for colonizations of the moon and Mars and beyond. It would make large scale 3D printing possible. Ocean covered moons of planets like Jupiter could give water if energy is plentiful. Water and solar and you are that close to growing food.

Space-based solar power

a higher collection rate and a longer collection period due to the lack of a diffusing atmosphere and night time in space

Space-based solar power: the energy of the future?

In space there's no atmosphere, it's never cloudy, and in geosynchronous orbits it's never night: a perfect place for a solar power station to harvest uninterrupted power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. ..... the concept is scientifically sound. ..... there was nothing wrong with the physics but the real question is the economics ...... With costs as high as $40,000 per kilogram for some space launches, the final price-tag for the first space-based solar power station could be as high as $20 billion. ........ the wars in the Middle East gave new impetus to the space-based solar power as scientific researchers with the military wrestled with the problems of delivering energy to troops in hostile areas. ........ Multiple, and potentially hidden, receivers could tap space-based solar power and relieve the military of the expensive and often dangerous task of supplying troops with generator diesel by either road or air ...... Two proven ways of getting the power to Earth exist in the form of either laser beams or microwaves. ...... laser transmitting satellites would have difficulty beaming power through clouds and rain. ...... The microwave option would have the advantage of uninterrupted transmission through rain, hail or any other atmospheric conditions and could provide gigawatts of power........ as early as 1964, scientists were able to power a helicopter using microwaves. Dr Jaffe said with a large receiving area the energy from the microwaves was so dissipated that it would present no danger to life. ......... as many as 100 launches into space would be required to construct the space stations with costs running into tens of billions. ...... space-based solar energy is like most novel ideas. "It's hard to tell if it's nuts until you've actually tried."

Space-Based Solar Power

Microwave transmitting satellites orbit Earth in geostationary orbit (GEO), about 35,000 km above Earth’s surface. Designs for microwave transmitting satellites are massive, with solar reflectors spanning up to 3 km and weighing over 80,000 metric tons. They would be capable of generating multiple gigawatts of power, enough to power a major U.S. city. ...... The long wavelength of the microwave requires a long antenna, and allows power to be beamed through the Earth’s atmosphere, rain or shine, at safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths. ........ The estimated cost of launching, assembling and operating a microwave-equipped GEO satellite is in the tens of billions of dollars. It would likely require as many as 40 launches for all necessary materials to reach space. On Earth, the rectenna used for collecting the microwave beam would be anywhere between 3 and 10 km in diameter, a huge area of land, and a challenge to purchase and develop.

What If Giant Space-Based Solar Panels Could Beam Unlimited Power To The Earth?

This idea may sound like science fiction, and at one time it was. ...... Asimov's 1941 story envisions a world where the Earth is powered by a beam of light that draws its energy directly from the sun..... Take New York City, for example, which requires 20 gigawatts of power. ...... The sandwich modules would be about 10 feet long on a side and about 80,000 would be needed. The array of sandwich modules would be about the length of nine football fields, or more than 1/2 a mile long. This is about nine times bigger than the International Space Station...... Back on Earth, the energy-containing radio frequencies from the space-based solar panels would be received by a special antenna known as a "rectenna," which could be as big as six miles in diameter............ the same beam would be able to provide power to Seattle and redirected to provide power to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil...... they could build receivers at remote operating bases and locations where it is logistically difficult and incredible costly to deliver diesel fuel....... the incredible heat of the sun in space

China considering space-based solar power station

Some believe a space-based solar collector could be launched as early as 2020 ..... a satellite that weighs more than 10,000 lbs., dwarfing anything previously placed into orbit, including the International Space Station ...... others place the launch date further out, as far away 2050. ...... "China will build a space station in around 2020, which will open an opportunity to develop space solar power technology" ...... China should begin with an experimental space-based solar power station by 2030, and build a commercially viable space power station by 2050. ....... "An economically viable space power station would be really huge, with the total area of the solar panels reaching five to six square kilometers" ....... Six square kilometers is nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park. ....... The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has proposed its own solar collector to be launched within the next 25 years. ...... "When space solar energy becomes our main energy, people will no longer worry about smog or the greenhouse effect" 

Space solar is a very real option, but it will not happen in time to tackle Climate Change. For that we need to rely on Earth Solar. Let's just use satellites for internet communication.

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Antarctica

The Year Of Pluto

Happy 4th

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Photo Album

Kurzweil's Schedule

Raymond Kurzweil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In his estimate, current exponential growth of computing will continue until human-level intelligence is achieved around 2029. Merging with artificial intelligence will then follow, sometime in the 2030s as humans will be "a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking," wherein we connect our brains to the cloud to harness massive computational power. Beyond that? "As you get to the late 2030s or the 2040s, our thinking will be predominately nonbiological. The nonbiological part will ultimately be intelligent and have such vast capacity it'll be able to model, simulate, and understand fully the biological part. We will be able to fully backup our brains."

Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have a fundamental disagreement. Kurzweil thinks Artificial Intelligence is a faster, better computer. Musk thinks it is a nuclear weapon.

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Longer Lives

Artificial Intelligence (John Cale album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Exponential Finance: Financial Advice In the Age of AI and Long Life

most financial advisors as we’ve known them won’t be around much longer. ...... in the next ten years, half of all the financial advisors in this country will be gone ...... Not unlike other industries, like medical diagnostics, for example, artificial intelligence may soon perform many of the technical skills of financial advice better than their human counterparts. ...... AI won’t soon replace the uniquely human relationships clients seek from the best advisors. ...... “We are therapists, counselors, marriage consultants, and psychologists as much as we are financial planners” ...... Charles Schwab disrupted the industry back in 80s, putting many traditional stock brokers out of business. But they reinvented themselves as wealth planners. ..... “You don't see financial planners and financial advisors using a slide rule or a calculator and a number two pencil and a yellow pad.” ..... one of the greatest challenges they face is convincing their clients that instead of planning to live to 95—which is as far as financial planning software goes at the moment—they should plan to live longer. Perhaps much longer. ...... the first person to reach age 150 has already been born ...... Chances are, if you make it another 30 years, you'll make it another 100 ...... Instead of the traditional linear progression—birth, school, job, retirement, death—our lives will become more cyclical. That is, we’ll go to school, get our first job, work for awhile, take a five- or ten-year break, and then go back to school to reinvent ourselves and start our next career cycle. Rinse and repeat. ...... Discrete college degrees, he thinks, will be replaced with lifelong learning.

A lot of that recycling needs to happen already even before people have started living longer.

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