Source: Space.com
Top students from 35 nations around the globe have kick-started this year’s activities at Singularity University, taking on a set of humanity’s grand challenges — an agenda that includes recasting the future of space exploration.
Singularity University derives its name from the mind-bending book by American inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil: “The Singularity is Near.”
The term “singularity” has been used to refer to a future time of rapid and accelerating development of various science disciplines like biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics and genetics.
Kurzweil is co-founder of the Singularity University (SU), with one goal of the institution to show how these rapid developments occur today, sometimes so common that we do not see them for what they are. One example is when a graphics card of today is faster than any supercomputer of just a decade ago.
Singularity University is based at the NASA Ames Research Center campus in the Silicon Valley. It was established in September 2008 and gathers together leaders of various fields dedicated to technological advancement.
Among the university’s notable founders are: Georges Harik, a former Google, Inc., distinguished engineer; Haymar Hedge Fund founder Keith Kleiner; and author Sonia Senkut, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in California. Google, Inc., ePlanet Ventures and Autodesk are the university’s corporate founders.
To boldly stay in space
This year, one element of the university’s 10-week graduate studies program is titled: “To Boldly Stay — Extending Humanity into the Solar System.”
The other team projects are more anchored to Earth, tied to looks at sustainable water assets, food for cities, home energy use, and “upcycle” — waste reduction and reprocessing into useful products.
For the space project, students are addressing a range of issues, from the rapid and less-costly robot scouting of the moon, Mars, asteroids, and other deep-space destinations to new designs, to new materials and technologies that could transform not just where humans can go but what people can do when they get there.
“In space, we know how to ‘boldly go’ at this point, but we have very poor, demonstrated experience in staying there,” said Chris Lewicki, team leader of the SU space project and a top flight engineer with several NASA Mars missions among his space credits.
Get down to business
In shaping the SU space project, the “going-in” intention is also to focus on finding safe and interesting sites for humans to visit. Additionally, a key study task is to understand the space resources available to humans that permit “living off the land.”
There’s also need to appreciate the hazards that off-Earth destinations pose in terms of their local environment. Lastly, the study team is delving into synthesizing robotic and human exploration, how best to exploit the strengths of each.
Lewicki told SPACE.com that the 10-week study won’t engage just true-blue space cadets. It will also be fueled by entrepreneurial thinkers, information and bio-tech experts, computer and software specialists.
That mix, he said, is meant to get down to business in space, akin to the way that software and micro-electronics has gotten on the surface of the Earth where you have the benefit of a yearly product cycle.
Making the space enterprise sustainable and robust are the watchwords, Lewicki added.
“I’m looking for things where you can do something that’s adequate, not perfect, but allows you get to that next step,” Lewicki said. “What’s the simplest thing that we can do to answer question … so that the next thing we do is better.”
The space project study team is geared to identify little stepping stones, “things that mere mortals — not government agencies can do — that will move us incrementally forward,” Lewicki added.
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