Lifeboat Foundation

Lucid Motors, the electric car startup that aims to compete with Tesla, will receive an eye-popping $1 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the kingdom announced on Monday. The investment will finance Lucid Motor’s 2020 commercial launch of its first electric vehicle, the Lucid Air. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock dipped by as much as 2 percent in early trading on news of the investment.

The deal is a major win for Lucid, which has languished over the last year as it failed to secure the funding necessary to start making its luxury electric cars. News of the talks comes weeks after Saudi Arabia purchased 5 percent of Tesla and emerged as a central player in Elon Musk’s failed effort to take the company private again. Musk cited conversations with the director of the Saudi fund as the impetus for his push to take Tesla private.

The SpaceX CEO is also showing photos of its BFR rocket, which could eventually go to Mars.

SpaceX is set for a surprise event that is expected to revolve the announcement of a newly-contracted launch planned to send a private individual around the Moon with BFR, potentially queuing up a true race (back) to the Moon between SpaceX and NASA sometime in the early to mid-2020s.

Alongside the official announcement and a fascinating render revealing a dramatically-updated iteration of BFR’s spaceship upper stage, CEO Elon Musk cryptically hinted on Twitter that the private customer could be Japanese, as well as confirming that the spaceship as shown was indicative of a new BFR design.

The SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to blast a tourist around the moon in a new launch system called Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR: a giant spaceship and rocket…

SpaceX’s CEO shrugs off 20 years of NASA research.

SORRY, ELON. To be ready for human occupants, Elon Musk has long called Mars a “fixer-upper of a planet.” But according to a new NASA-sponsored study, a better description might be a “tear-down.” The scientists behind that project say it’s simply not possible to terraform Mars — that is, change its environment so that humans can live there without life support systems — using today’s technology.

BUILDING AN ATMOSPHERE. Mars has a super thin atmosphere; a human unprotected on the surface of Mars would quickly die, mostly because there’s not enough atmospheric pressure to prevent all your organs from rupturing out of your body (if you survived a little longer, you could also suffocate from lack of oxygen, freeze from low temperatures, or get fried from too much ultraviolet radiation).

Continue reading “Scientists Say We Can’t Terraform Mars. Elon Musk Says We Can” »

DARPA is funding development of high resolution brain interfaces. At the same time there are two companies who have breakthrough technology for higher resolution brain interfaces. The two companies are Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mary Lou Jepsen’s Openwater red light scanner. The Neuralink and Openwater systems will be described after the DARPA project and its goals.

From the perspective of critics, there are many reasons to be concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence.

Billionaire inventor Elon Musk — perhaps the world’s most vocal AI antagonist — has warned that the technology could become “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.”

Several years before his death, Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist, said artificial intelligence could bypass biological evolution, leaving humans unable to compete.

Continue reading “Prince Charles Says He ‘Utterly Objects’ to The Idea of People Becoming Part Human, Part Machine” »

Elon Musk is a business magnet, investor and engineer.

In a several-hour live interview on September 6–7, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk managed to slip in a few words about Neuralink, a side-project company formed by Musk for the purpose of bridging the gap between potential superhuman AI and the human brain itself.

Although the eccentric CEO/CTO wouldn’t say much more, he did tease a potentially revolutionary update from the fully-stealthed startup “in a few months”.