Tag: video

Baby Driving

With a 6-month-old at the controls, researchers at the University of Delaware are encouraging underage driving. Conventional wisdom has held that because of safety issues, children aren’t considered ready for that until age 4 or 5; the earliest age doctors might recommend powered mobility is age 3.

Damn. I still don’t have a driver’s license. Should we increase the autonomy of babies by giving them scooters and HCI interfaces so they can tell us what they want? Or does that make them grow up too fast? Discuss.

Asteroid mining

A 0.5km diameter asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion in nickel, iron and platinum-group metals.

a few quintillion worth of elements up for grabs
This is what worthwhile start ups look like: solving hard problems, not trivial toys.

Great to see Planetary Resources — a company I invested in launch officially today. Their first mission: to mine asteroids for the benefit of humanity! Check out the video below. What could you do with a huge amount of currently rare materials on earth? Or a lot of raw material for building things in space?

this goes into considerable detail about the plans for asteroid mining.

why we need asteroids as gas stations. that is, until we can switch away from chemical propulsion.

Planetary Resources has shifted the company’s focus to a more mundane space resource: water. Water found on or near asteroids could be processed into fuel to extend the useful lives of aging commercial satellites. “I still consider that mining. We’re going to take the resources of space and turn them into a usable material.”