In a 47-minute interview Christine Peterson discusses the future that science and technology is bringing over the next few decades, and how to get involved to push the future in a positive direction.

How and how soon will nanotechnology play a role in space commercialization?

In a lecture at Oxford Eric Drexler argued that atomically precise manufacturing will be the next great revolution in the material basis of civilization, and discussed how we can establish reliable knowledge about key aspects of such technologies.

We’re going to take a shot at doing a live webcast of Foresight@Google: 25th Anniversary Conference and Celebration. See this page for schedule and link: http://foresight.org/reunion/schedule.html It’s free so please have patience if we run into any technical difficulties. You can try sending questions to speakers by using this Twitter tag (though in-person participants get first [...]

Foresight@Google 25th Anniversary Conference Celebration and Reunion Weekend Google HQ in Silicon Valley, CA June 25-26, 2011 http://www.foresight.org/reunion Use code NANODOT for $50 off registration! You already know our Saturday program kicks off with a keynote by Zyvex founder/president JIM VON EHR Now Foresight is also proud to announce our Sunday keynote: BARNEY PELL, PhD [...]

Foresight is having our 25th anniversary conference and celebration at Google, and we want you there! Use code NANODOT for $50 off on: FORESIGHT@GOOGLE 25th Anniversary Conference Celebration & Reunion Weekend Google HQ in Mountain View, CA June 25-26, 2011 http://www.foresight.org/reunion Topics are emerging tech with special emphasis on transformative nanotech. A rockstar lineup of [...]

The CANEUS International Organization on “Micro-Nano Technologies for Aerospace Applications” will hold an intensive one-day course “Nanomaterials for Aerospace and Defense: Applications, Issues, Trends and Practices”

In a review of physicist and television host Michio Kaku’s latest book, Foresight advisor Glenn Reynolds finds reason for optimism, but also cause for concern in the career choices of today’s brightest minds.

The 4th International Conference on carbon nanotechnology and space elevator systems, Dec. 4-5, 2010, is available for remote participation or listening-in.

The Space Studies Institute will hold Space Manufacturing 14 on Oct. 30-31, 2010 at NASA Ames here in Silicon Valley.  Topics to be covered include: Session 1: Space Transportation Architecture Session 2: Closed Environment Life Support Systems Session 3: Robotics and Space Manufacturing Session 4: Extraterrestrial Prospecting Session 5: Engineering Materials from Non-Terrestrial Resources Session 6: Space [...]

If you can’t make it to Harvard this weekend, June 12-13, you’ll want to catch the live webcast of the H+ Summit: “Rise of the Citizen Scientist”.  No link yet, but presumably they’ll be putting it on the event homepage before it starts.  Also presumably they will post the videos somewhere for longer-term viewing. UPDATE: [...]

Robin Hanson comments on David Brin’s response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves.  This seems to me an instructive [...]

Just for fun, imagine you could build a tower up to geosynchronous orbital height. If you stepped off the top floor, you’d just hang there, in orbit. If the tower you build is shorter, you’d fall, since (a) you aren’t going quite as fast, and (b) orbital speed is faster as you get lower. However, [...]

Ted Greenwald posted yesterday at Wired about Foresight member Ralph Merkle’s presentation on nanotechnology at the Singularity University’s first Executive Program, which has just convened over at NASA Ames here in Silicon Valley: From there he skims through a catalog of progress — familiar example of pushing atoms into IBM logos and such on a [...]

An Interview with Peter Diamandis, Founder of X PRIZE: On Colonizing Space and Reinventing the Philanthropy Model | OppGreen Insights. The money quote: PD: So today, one of my companies, Space Adventures, sends people into orbit privately. A trip is $40 million. Our next customer goes up in 5 days, Guy Laliberté, the founder of [...]

The Space Review: The other 40th anniversary. Less than three months after billions of people were transfixed by “one small step” a Princeton physics professor named Gerard K. O’Neill walked into a classroom with less than a dozen undergraduates and asked a seemingly simple question: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place [...]

The word “planet” means wanderer. The ancients, with their lives lived largely outdoors and without artificial lighting, were much more intimately acquainted with the heavens than are we moderns, unless we specialize in astronomy. They noticed that although there was a fixed pattern of stars for the most part, some of them wandered around in [...]

It’s really amazing that Armstrong and Aldrin actually landed on the Moon. Not that they survived the trip in the huge rocket, nor the rigors of space travel, the radiation, the vacuum, the meteors. It was the software. Don Eyles, one of the programmers of the code that ran in the Lunar Module computer, has [...]

So suppose we get into space — by space pier, new private launch capabilities, or whatever. Then what? LEO is halfway to anywhere, but only halfway. Unlike the Earth, which is matter rich but energy poor, the inner solar system is the opposite — energy rich but not much matter. This ought to be a [...]

Let’s look at what nanotech could do — could be doing now if Feynman’s path had been taken — to make space travel more achievable and affordable — and therefore useful. It’s widely understood how lighter, stronger structures can make rockets more efficient, but that’s of limited use. The rocket equation is still a huge [...]