NextBigFuture.com

U.S. Air Force's B-21 Raider stealth bombers are now conducting test flights from Edwards Air Force Base in California. The first B-21 flew for the first time November, 2023. Six pre-production B-21 have been built and one flew a sortie from Edwards today. Edwards has also received significant physical upgrades in recent years to support ... Read more

BMW has chosen to use Figure AI humanoid robots in BMW car factories over the next 12-24 months.

Pakistan has launched missile strikes into Iran, killing nine people, after Iran carried out strikes in Pakistan late on Tuesday. Pakistan said its strikes had hit terrorist hideouts in Iran's south-eastern Sistan-Baluchestan province. Iran condemned the attack, which it said killed three women, two men and four children who were not Iranian. Pakistan's foreign ministry ... Read more

China's overall population fell by 2.08 million in 2023, while births declined by 5.6 per cent to 9.02 million. The population collapse is global. Over 80% of the world population is in countries with declining populations or where births have dropped below replacement. Even India and Bangladesh have dropped below replacement. Once a country drops ... Read more

Sam Altman believes that AGI will be created soon. He talked about a vision of an AGI World of More. He predicts AGI will not replace as many jobs as people believe and the world will change less than people believe. It will be an incredible tool for productivity and is magnifying what people can ... Read more

A few months ago, Nextbigfuture reported that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observed a planet, K2-18, showing the presence of chemicals that indicate possible life. The carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb's discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess ... Read more

Elon Musk says @SpaceX will release Starlink Mini later in 2024. It will be small enough to fit in your backpack. The outdoor use case also requires the power requirements for Starlink to be muchless. You will be able to pull the terminal out of your backpack in the middle of nowhere and connect to ... Read more

SpaceX's Starlink has launched a new Community Gateways program to deliver gigabit-speed and even 10 gigabit speed for internet connectivity to remote and underserved areas. It is for internet service providers (ISPs) and cost a $1.25 million upfront cost and $75,000 per month per gigabit per second. Ten gigabits per second would costs $750,000 per ... Read more

Joe Tegtmeyer spoke with Ellie in space about the SpaceX factory ramp. Joe has been a professional large project manager who has managed detailed management of large projects. He has been closely monitoring the construction and expansion of the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin. Joe gives his projection of how he expects the SpaceX Starfactory to ... Read more

Impulse Space has x-SpaceX founders and has $45 million of funding to develop space tugs that would move payloads to higher orbits. Founded in 2021, Impulse Space is providing agile, economical space logistics services. With a near-term focus on Low Earth Orbit (LEO), services include in-space transportation to custom orbits, in-space payload hosting and space ... Read more

Shell Oil and Southern Electric utility company had a 2021 research paper that explored if nuclear batteries could be economical for generating power. (Above - (a) MIT's conceptualization of a nuclear battery (NB) with integrated gas turbine; (b) LANL's Megapower; (c) NASA and LANL's KRUSTY/Kilopower reactor using Stirling engine technology for space applications; (d) Westinghouse's ... Read more

The Council of Foreign Relations states the difficulties that China would have attacking Taiwan. Taiwan is a nearly perfect island to defend. China would need to shift military assets to its eastern coast and undertake other visible preparations for an invasion, which Taiwan and the United States would likely be able to detect. Even if ... Read more

SpaceX is expanding the Starship Factory to increase production to one Starship every 72 hours. This would mean production would increase to over 100 per year. Elon has discussed the need to increase Starship production to over one per day.

Nextbigfuture has covered Elon mentioning that a future SpaceX Starship could be 20% longer BUT now it is reported that SpaceX is designing a 150 meter longer Starship. Felix Schlang at What about It? describes the new version 3 Starship work. This would be up to 95 feet longer than the current 120 meters. The ... Read more

CATL has new rectangular LFP batteries. The LFP EV battery price will be less than $56 per kWh within six months. It is a bigger rectangular battery with each one being like six Tesla 4680 batteries. The LFP battery price in China is currently $70 per kWh. China's EV makers (CATL, BYD) are targeting two ... Read more

Jan 8, 2024, China Startup Betavolt New Energy Technology announced the successful development of a miniature atomic energy battery. It uses nickel-63 nuclear isotope decay and China's first diamond semiconductor (4th generation semiconductor) module to successfully realize the miniaturization of atomic energy batteries. It has modularization and low cost. The battery can provide power for ... Read more

Most people do not contextualize what is happening in the Ukraine War or the Gaza War with what they expect to happen in a war between China and Taiwan. Ukraine and Russia have been fighting their larger expanded war for nearly 2 years. Both sides still have weapons and are continuing to hit each other ... Read more

Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO, Microsoft joins Bloomberg's Brad Stone for a conversation at Bloomberg House at Davos. Nadella talked about using AI to break the Google Search Monopoly and replace Apple iPhone and the entire app store. AI can be the Universal App. Currently, individual use dozens or even over a hundred apps. IF ... Read more

In an interview with Bill Gates, Sam Altman says he is super-excited for AI applied to robotics. Sam Altman - We have to go do this thing. This is now an UNSTOPPABLE technological course. The value is too great." Tens of billions of dollars are going into the effort to dominate technology and transform the ... Read more

Tesla Optimus cannot yet fold laundry autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment soon. Optimus folds a shirt pic.twitter.com/3F5o3jVLq1 - Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2024 Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in ... Read more

Falcon 9 delivered 23 @Starlink satellites to orbit from Florida which completed their 300th successful launch! Falcon 9 delivers 23 @Starlink satellites to orbit from Florida - completing our 300th successful launch! pic.twitter.com/uXQR5us7VV - SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 15, 2024

One of the biggest draws of the early crypto days was the feeling that a new, modern gold rush had been discovered. In 1848, miners traveled from all parts of the world to San Francisco after having sold everything to make the trip. They bought a pickaxe, a handful of basic supplies, and set off ... Read more

There was the battle control OpenAI. It was a fight about control of OpenAI, its board, and its direction. Now Elon wants to get more voting control of Tesla. He wants to go from 15% to 25% in order to be comfortable making Tesla the leader in AI and Robotics. I believe this is more ... Read more

In an interview with Bill Gates, Sam Altman says he is super-excited for AI applied to robotics. Sam Altman - We have to go do this thing. This is now an unstoppable technological course. The value is too great." Tens of billions of dollars are going into the effort to dominate technology and transform the ... Read more

We can calculate the travel times for the SpaceX Starship to reach Mars. It is relatively easy to get 90 day trips each way with SpaceX Starship. This is faster than the usual 180-270 one-way travel times. This can be faster because we will have a lot more fuel to enable more direct routes to ... Read more

People believe that exotic new propulsion systems are needed to reduce the one way trip times from Earth to Mars from 180-270 days down to 45 days each way. The slower mission times are for chemical rockets where we barely get out of Earth orbit with a small rocket engine. SpaceX Starship can refuel after ... Read more

After a series of small earthquakes starting around 03:00 Sunday morning, an eruption began in the Reykjanes peninsula just before 08:00 just north of the town of Grindavik. By that point all the people residing in the town, numbering about 200 in about 80 homes, had been evacuated. The erupting fissure was soon estimated to ... Read more

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took over on February 4, 2014, when Microsoft's stock price closed at $36.35. It is now worth $388 per share. This is a 10X. Apple was worth about $24 in 2014 and is now about $186. This was a 7-8 times gain. Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in August 2011. ... Read more

Paraterraforming (or World House Design) is a subset of Terraforming where we build huge structures which may cover a large fraction of a world's surface. A key advantage is that it is usually much faster than terraforming but it can enable larger habitable areas than just making capsules or buildings. LAVA architects and others have ... Read more

XPeng showed off an updated eVTOL flying car which is multiple helicopter like propellers that fold out of the back. During a press event held live at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, XPeng AeroHT shared significant updates on the progress of its flying car" technology. First, the Land Aircraft Carrier in the featured image above ... Read more

Wedbush Analyst Dan Ives believes the new technology bull market has begun. He thinks that AI technology spend will go from 1% of IT budgets to 8-10% in 2024. Dan was surprised by the number of executives and CEOs at the CES (Consumer Electronic Show) who were looking to acquire technology and companies. Dan believes ... Read more

Eventually, all that will matter to Tesla and others is changing civilization with Teslabot. All that will matter is the race to improve and use AGI and humanoid bot. This will be the driving purpose and generator of value for civilization and human economy. In chess - A forced move is one that a player ... Read more

Brian Wang and Randy Kirk have another video weekly review of the big stories in science, this episode takes a deep dive into the AI compute and the ramifications of the huge increases in compute that will be required. There is also more news out on the LK99 room temperature super conductor, and that is ... Read more

SpaceX Starship is about 120 meters tall or 65 times taller than the average person. The upper stage is as tall as the statue portion of the Statue of Liberty. The Human scale of the Starship is pic.twitter.com/BJ82Aqs3MW - Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) January 10, 2024

The Team Project Solutions for Construction of a Lunar Base" was the product of 9 intense weeks of collaboration during the Space Studies Program 2021 - Strasbourg, at the International Space University. I had written about their concept to lay a SpaceX Starship flat on the moon to start a moonbase. I did not know ... Read more

NVIDIA Vice President of Robotics and Edge Computing Deepu Talla detailed how NVIDIA and its partners are bringing generative AI and robotics together. They have a growing roster of partners - including Boston Dynamics, Collaborative Robotics, Covariant, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics and others - embracing GPU-accelerated large language models to bring unprecedented levels of intelligence ... Read more

Highlights of Elon Musk SpaceX Plans for 2024 and Beyond: They have already increased the communication bandwidth of Starlink v2 mini to 188 Gbps. There will be 150 launches of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy in 2024 Increase the speed and cadence of Starship launches. Deploy Version 3 Starlink satellites via Starship in 2024. Start ... Read more

The USA intelligence agencies determined that China had uncovered major corruption in it military. Xi Jinping purged many Generals and top military leaders. It was found out that there was water instead of fuel in missiles and the lids of missile silos are not reliable. This could be just the tip of the iceberg of ... Read more

2024 and every year going forward will have more and better AI. This intelligence explosion is attracting funding and resources exponentially and it revenue will go exponential. AI expert, Dr Alan Thompson, expects OpenAI to release GPT 4.5 in days and it will exceed human experts in most intelligence tests. A survey of thousands of ... Read more

NASA's rolled out the new X-59 Quesst supersonic aircraft live from Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. Quesst is NASA's mission to demonstrate how the X-59 can fly supersonic without generating loud sonic booms, and then survey what people hear when it flies overhead. Reaction to the quieter sonic thumps will be shared ... Read more

Smart home robots and smart home hubs are striving to be the center of the smart home. LG wants to create the Zero Labor home using these devices. The new robot devices from LG, Samsung and many others add mobility, environmental awareness, cameras and sensors. They will have superior AI that will leverage large language ... Read more

BlackFly is Pivotal's eVTOL aircraft and at CES Pivotal revealed the fourth generation aircraft, Helix. It is now available to all eligible customers. Helix is basically a flying car. It is electric. Over twelve years in the making, the Helix is Pivotal's first aircraft to be produced at scale, created to bring the wonder of ... Read more

Prototypes, slideware and vaporware is easy. LG showed a cool prototype self driving concept car at CES 2024. There was also new AI marketing buzzwords and AI promises. The concept car has swiveling seats so that passengers can look at any direction. There were also great LG screens to immerse passengers with video. Real AI ... Read more

Joe Tegtmeyer described the Telsla 4680 battery chemistry upgrade. At the end of 2023, the 4680 battery chemical composition ratios in Cathode material was NMC 811 (80% Nickel, 10% Lithium, 10% Cobalt). However, Tesla is finishing the process of transitioning over to NMC 955 now that we are in 2024. They are also trialing asymmetric ... Read more

An Alaska Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after the door plug failed. The Boeing 737-MAX 9 had 174 passengers and six crew members aboard. *Airplane door blown in the air!!* The plane's door blew off at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Due to this incident, the crew made an emergency landing. ... Read more

Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, said securing an updated Federal Aviation Administration launch license was the key factor driving the schedule for the third Starship test flight. The third flight should be sometime in February 2024. From a hardware readiness perspective, we are targeting to be ready in January," ... Read more

Here is a verified transcription of the Seokbae Lee, leader of the original korean LK99 teams talk from three days ago. I would also like to thank Yonsei University and Director Lee Hak-bae of QILI (Quantum Industry Convergence Leading Institute) for making this announcement possible today. Uh.. the details of our participation in this, uh.. ... Read more

Main combat operations in the north of the Gaza Strip have come to an end, with the focus shifting to central and southern Gaza. In central Gaza, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has advanced and encircled the Al Bureij camp. They have also advanced south along the Salah Al Deen road. The IDF has continued ... Read more

The US and Britain began launching strikes Thursday against Houthis-linked targets in Yemen - just days after the Iran-backed rebels carried out their largest attack to date on shipping vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis had targeted 27 commercial ships to date. The most recent (on Tuesday) Houthis attack used 18 drones and three ... Read more

Researchers at Delft University of Technology, led by assistant professor Richard Norte, have unveiled a remarkable new material with potential to impact the world of material science: amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC). Beyond its exceptional strength, this material demonstrates mechanical properties crucial for vibration isolation on a microchip. Amorphous silicon carbide is therefore particularly suitable for ... Read more