NextBigFuture.com

The historical trend is that people are busier and richer now than they were in the past. People have become busier in most everything except how much they farm, walk or have hard manual labor. The...

SpaceX Starship will be a fully reusable rocket. It will be able to fly 6000-8000 miles on Earth which is the same as long-range commercial passenger planes. It will do this in a single stage. It...

Science Fiction, scenarios and visions of the future often emphasize fears and risks of collapse or depressions. Science fiction usually focuses on civilizations with major problems so that stories...

SLS (Space Launch System) is up over 8 minutes in its full-duration test engine test fire. It then had a safe engine shutdown. The first SLS green run test fire cut off after about 67 seconds. The...

Nextbigfuture interviewed Tom Noel, ColdQuanta’s Director of Quantum Computing and Interim CEO Dan Caruso. ColdQuanta is using neutral atoms instead of trapped ions as the basis for its quantum...

Researchers estimated 16 million people in the United States may have had undiagnosed, asymptomatic COVID-19 as of September 2020 and this was double the 7.5 million confirmed cases. Testing has...

The UK COVID variant has brought a new surge in infections. The number of cases is increasing in several European countries (Italy, France, Germany, etc…). Coronavirus restrictions were...

Urban areas are richer and more productive. Research shows that doubling the population and increasing urban density boosts productivity by about 15%. Roman cities were connected by the distance...

NASASpaceflight reports that SpaceX is targeting a July 1st, 2021 orbital flight with Super Heavy BN3 and Starship SN20. NASASpaceflight believes SpaceX is not on pace for July 1st but sometime in...

Ark Invest is forecasting that EV car batteries will drop in price by 28% for every doubling of EV cars produced. Ark forecasts that a suitable electric vehicle will drop from about $30000 now to...

In order to see if there is significant global and economic acceleration there needs to be a baseline to compare against. This is unambiguous technological wealth standard to measure world-changing...

The UK Variant of COVID is up to twice as deadly as the previous version of COVID and the CDC says the UK variant will be the dominant version in the US by end of March or mid-April. The latest...

The Semiconductor industry started in the 1970s and 1980s with all major players having vertical integration and operating their own semiconductor fabs. Semiconductor fabs have become more expensive....

World PPP GDP is about $130 trillion today. In 2011 dollars World GDP PPP is about $110 trillion. The per-person GDP PPP (2011 dollars) is about $13,600. Around 1940, the average national per capita...

The Limiting Factor explains Volkswagen’s Power Day. Volkswagen was vague about how they would achieve electric car battery improvements compared to Tesla at Battery Day. Volkswagen is starting...

Volkswagen sources EV batteries from LG Chem, Samsung SDI, SK Innovation and CATL. VW expects annual demand in Europe to be more than 150 GWh from 2025 and to be at a similar level in Asia....

In October 2017 Nvidia and partner development companies announced the Drive PX Pegasus system, based upon two Xavier CPU/GPU devices and two post-Volta (Turing) generation GPUs. The companies stated...

There is some suggestive evidence that lowering the cost and barriers to trade and increasing the volume of trade will boost GDP. It is difficult to isolate cause and effects. Past major examples of...

Peter Thiel makes the case that the world has had relatively stagnated technology over the past 50 years. We have 15 times more oil and steel production than existed in 1940. We make more steel and...

Which of the major new rockets (SpaceX Starship, Blue Origin New Glenn or United Launch Alliance SLS) will reach orbit first? Below are the current target dates. Obviously I believe SpaceX Starship...

Starship SN11 is performing a cryogenic fuel proof test. This verifies that there are no flaws in the construction that would say cause it to blow up when loaded with fuel.The post SpaceX Starship...

A commenter complained that he would not want to sleep on a one-gravity loop system on Mars, the Moon or elsewhere in space with low gravity or no gravity. The other complaint was that it would be...

Many in the space community are very concerned about low-gravity, no-gravity and radiation for people living for long durations in space colonies on planets, moons, asteroids or orbital bases. These...

The technology that we long believed would characterize the future has not just gotten billions in investment but there are many companies with multi-billion valuations to transform the world to...

eHang, Volocopter and Archer Aviation are each billion-dollar or multi-billion valuation companies that are racing to establish the commercial VTOL air taxi industry in the 2021-2024 timeframes....

SpaceX will have 1200 Starlink satellites in orbit after 21 successful launches. They launched 1265 satellites. After another five launches, SpaceX should have the first 1,440 of the 260 kg (570 lb)...

Cairn Energy Research Advisors reports that Tesla has the lowest cost batteries by at least 10% and over 24% versus other car companies. This is before the cost reductions that Tesla is implementing...

Researchers can move microscopic particles and droplets into precise patterns by harnessing the power of sound in air. The implications for printing, especially in the fields of medicine and...

Plus, a self-driving truck technology, announced today that it will equip the next generation of its autonomous truck driving system with the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin™ system-on-a-chip (SoC). The company...

An AI optical circuit has been made with a neural density equal to 1/400 of human brain. The circuit is trained to process information through unpowered all-optical inference at the speed of light...

In February, 2021, 97,000 electric cars were sold in China according to China Passenger Car Association ( CPCA). This was up 7X from COVID February 2020 but a 38% decline from January. Tesla sold...

Could space tourism enable lunar and orbital colonization to reach critical mass? I view colonization critical mass to be over 300k people. Around 1745, the American colonies passed a population of 1...

IonQ trapped ion quantum computer is completing a $2 billion SPAC merger which will give it about $600 million in cash to fund its quantum computer developments. IonQ indicates that its 32 qubit...

60 graphical processing units (GPUs) have been used to solve the Google quantum supremacy computer problem. Researchers generated one million correlated bitstrings with some entries fixed, from the...

IonQ will merge dMY Technology Group III, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. The deal will close in a few months after a review by the SEC and a shareholder vote. IonQ will be worth an estimated...

Honeywell has upgraded the commercial trapped ion quantum computer System Model H1 and achieved a quantum volume of 512. This is four times higher than when it was released in September 2020 with a...

True commercial success is clearly emerging for the space industry. Space enthusiasts are fortunate that Elon Musk and other true believers in the future of space are leading the way. From the late...

Saudi Arabia was able to protect its oil tank farm from a five drone and additional missile attack from Yemen. A 2019 attack on Saudi Oil facilities halved their oil production for a few weeks. This...

Robert Zubrin has proposed using rotating membranes to create Enormous Space Telescopes (ESTs) that can scale to over 1000 meter diameter or match current space telescopes for thousands of time lower...

SpaceX has applied to operate Starlink in moving vehicles like cars, boats and planes. This means we will have gigabit internet in our self-driving cars, cruise ships and passenger planes....

Outbreak.info reports that as of March 1, 2021, 28% of the COVID in the world is the B.1.1.7 (UK) variant of the disease. I was first identified in the UK in September 2020 and has since been...

SpaceX has had monthly test launches every month for the past three months. The Space Launch System (SLS) program started in 2011. They have never launched. The first launch has been delayed over...

COVID has caused an official global count of nearly 2.6 million deaths but there are also indirect excess deaths. Excess mortality is a more comprehensive measure of the total impact of the pandemic...

Only eight African countries record and their dead which means there are no good tracking of COVID or any other cause of death. Only Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia, Algeria, Cape Verde, São Tomé and...

China is one of the only countries increasing its construction of nuclear power. China will have more nuclear energy than the USA by 2030. In 2020, nuclear is still the second-largest source of...

There is an update of a mathematical and physical model for a warp drive. The Alcubierre warp drive is an exotic solution in general relativity. It allows for superluminal travel at the cost of...

The SpaceX SN10 Starship explooded minutes after a successful landing. Starship SN10 landed in one piece! https://t.co/lO4AF47MaN — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2021 UH NEVER MIND...

There is a report that an electric car company has acquired land beside Gigafactory Shanghai. The amount of land is about 50% of the current size of Gigafactory Shanghai land. land rights’ transfer...

SpaceX has launched the SpaceX Starship SN10. There is venting and increasing activity. It appears refueling is happening. A launch attempt in 1 minutes seems possible. SpaceX SN10 has reached the...

Turntide’s Smart Motor System, a hyper-efficient motor controlled precisely by sensors and software that optimizes every watt, has the potential to reduce global electricity consumption by 25%....