What's in the News

In the general absence of a robust financial system, allocation of economic resources requires state mandate. That's the leap. The creation of the AI age and technological supremacy is essentially unnatural and presumably therefore unsustainable.

But who knows, maybe state pockets are deeper than the money pit. And maybe human capital can be created along the way.

China at least is taking steps to reduce the conversion of the general public into harvestable databases to be abused by tech giants.  It's also broken up a few attempts by such companies to monopolize certain market sectors.  Meanwhile, other countries that do try to implement data privacy laws and limit monopolies find the tech firms are generally 3 steps ahead of laws and regulations.

AI is a wildcard for all countries.  It could save us or someone might decide that faster reaction time of AIs makes them perfect for controlling not just small arms, but weapons going all the way up to strategic missiles.  At that point, a SkyNet scenario goes from SciFi to serious threat to all carbon based life forms.  If one country uses AIs on most of it's military, others will follow.  Are you willing to bet the planet that multiple competing AIs in control of that much hardware will all be forever obedient to their human creators even as all sides try to hack and disrupt the systems of others?

This is yet another reason to ramp down on the sable rattling and ending the concept of any one country being effectively in charge of global policy.  A worldwide treaty forbidding allowing machines to ever have the option of deciding whether or not to open fire on humans might just keep us alive long enough to work out how to finally phase out the need to be able to vaporize billions of humans.

China's new space station module docks, beefing up orbital science

https://www.space.com/china-space-station-module-docks-tiangong

Quick summary:  Module 2 (of the currently planned 3), the Wentian lab module, launched on Sunday afternoon (China time) and docked with the Tiangong space station early Monday morning.

In addition to lab facilities, Wentian has quarters for 3 more crew members, bringing the station's capacity to 6.

The article doesn't cover the 3rd module.  It' another lab module and is scheduled to be launched in October.

Mengtian, the final (for now) module of the Tiangong Space Station was launched on October 31st and is docked at the station.  After some systems checks are done, it will be swung over to its permanent position and China's first modular space station will be complete.

 

They spent a long time checking out everything on the Wentian before swinging it over to it's final position.  Mengtian was moved earlier today.

https://english.news.cn/20221103/ce2e714c7fce44b4b4f0e7f10587683a/c.html

So now the station is in its planned T-shaped configuration.

I'll guess the longer time period for Wentian was due to it having a full backup of life support (including 3 crew bunks and it's own toilet, which allows the station to have up to 6 people on board at a time).  I guess they wanted to make sure all of that was in good working order before moving it to its permanent place.  Mengtian is purely a science module, so it's a bit simpler in terms of integration with the systems in the other 2 modules.

Next up will be another cargo ship sometime late this month and then the next crew arrives on Shenzhou 15 in December.  This will be the first crew handover.

The next piece of hardware planned is the Xuntian space telescope.  It will co-orbit with the Tiangong station and can dock with it for maintenance and upgrades.  The planned launch is late 2023 or early 2024.

There is one other intriguing possibility under consideration.  Each of the 3 modules has a twin still on Earth.  Initially, these were created as a backup in case one of the first set was lost in a launch accident.  It would be very easy to launch them to double the size of the station, allowing it to host 12 people at a time.  Since the plan is to host many foreign guest astronauts, I'll bet that whoever in charge of scheduling those visits would be greatly relieved if the station could hold twice and many people and twice as many cabinets for experiments.

The annual IPSOS Global Happiness Survey is out.  The good news - overall happiness is up 6%.

The great news - China is the happiest place on Earth, with 91% reporting they are either rather happy or very happy. 

All the info is here - https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-03/Ipsos%20Global%20Happiness%202023%20Report.pdf

    

 

Just like with finance, indicator after indicator shows that China has moved WAY up the ladder in scientific research (quantity AND quality.

Here's an article from The Economist declaring China to be a scientific superpower.

https://archive.ph/UVk4x

"From plant biology to superconductor physics the country is at the cutting edge"