The Shanzhai Sun

"Shanzhai" means "counterfeit goods," which is China's way of saying "Made In China"

Let's start with the story from a few months ago, where China plans to make artificial moons for nighttime illumination. Mirrors in outerspace that redirect sunlight from low earth orbit. Now they're looking pretty good on the nuclear fusion front, i.e., artificial suns.

Granted, you must take every headline about nuclear fusion as fake news, because we are unlikely to see its boundless surplus of power in our lifetime. Depends on who you ask though. At this point, a Chinese reactor is reaching 100 million degrees, which is way more than the Sun itself, but still only enough to maintain such a nuclear meltdown for 10 seconds.

Regardless of "when," folks like the futurist Isaac Arthur do a good job of explaining how this major shift in energy production can be used to transform our world. Megastructures that surround our entire Earth, or spaceships that span the Milky Way, all these things are possible with nuclear fusion as an energy source (some faster than light travel wouldn't help).

Bottom line, this gives a different meaning to the idea of China Fake. Also wondering what the plans look like for Fake Earth and Fake Humans.

Notes:
China's 'artificial sun' reaches 100 million degrees Celsius marking milestone for nuclear fusion
Nov 2018, ABC News

China is launching artificial moons in urban areas
Oct 2018, Astrononmy.com

Isaac Arthur's Science and Futurism Channel

Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, 2008
Chinese Science Fiction

China-Fake
2013, Network Address

Headlines from Outerspace

Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem, but are in fact useless.

There are times when too many good headlines pop up all at once. Here's a sampling of what's going on circa 2018. In 2028, will this all be passé? In 2008, would it have been unfathomable?

On-chip excitation of nanodiamonds embedded in plasmonic waveguides
Oct 2018, phys.org

No clue, just headline wordporn.

Bitcoin miner sent to prison for stealing electricity from train network in China
Oct 2018, The Independent

A man in China has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after stealing electricity from a train network in order to mine bitcoin.

Two Companies Are Going to Manufacture Optical Fibers in Space
Sep 2018, Futurism

Eventually we will all live in computers orbiting the Earth. For now, this is an early example of otherworldly computer manufacturing.

Building a better brain-in-a-dish, faster and cheaper
Sept 2018, phys.org

"What we've done is establish a proof-of-principle protocol for a systematic, automated process to generate large numbers of brain organoids," said Alysson R. Muotri, Ph.D., professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.


Image source: Gee, I sure wish I could attribute a source to this image, but it's been fetched by my "generic search engine" from pinterest (go figure, right?). In case readers here don't know what pinterest is, it's a way for image users to short-circuit Google's own copyright policies (under firm guidance by Getty) by taking images out of their source page and placing them on another page with way higher "finding power," as you might expect by any page owned by the search engine itself. 

Smoke and Mirrors

Diamonds are forever.

If you don't know what a deep learning neural network is by now, I can no longer tell you, because there's enough buzz out there already.

If you like the idea of neural nets, quantum mechanics, photons, and metamolecular diamonds are going to take over our world and our bodies in the next 20 years, then you're in the right place, at the right time.

Because today makes an appearance of a neural net that uses light instead of electricity, and they even have a new name for their proof-of-concept device - a diffractive neural net. So get with it.

Image Source: The Crystal Dome at Swarovski in Kristallwelten, Austria


Notes:
Xing Lin et al. All-optical machine learning using diffractive deep neural networks, Science (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8084 

A neural network that operates at the speed of light
July 2018, Techxplore.com

Drones and Dreams of the Future

958 drones create a 400-foot tall Time cover in lights instead of pixels

First it happened at the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Pyongyang, and then for the cover of TIME magazine. Drones are here, and we haven't even seen anything yet.

Let's take a walk down memory lane. An organization working on behalf of drone manufacturers try to influence all major journalism outfits to use the term "unmanned aerial vehicle" (UAV) instead of "drone" because America was making a bad name for drones by using them to kill civilians by mistake. (Obviously that didn't work.) Then at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference we learn how to jam drones to make them think they're flying forward when they're really speeding right into the ground (and then find out Iran has been doing this to US drones for a while already). Don't forget inmates getting contraband flown over the barbed-wire fence in the yard. Fast forward to people in Nordic countries combining snowboarding and kiteboarding to do droneboarding. And then comes the holy grail - synchronized drones.

As if the concept of a drone wasn't enough, you combine that sh** with a centralized brain that knows where every drone is and where it's going, and has a grand plan in its head about what they should all be doing together, and you get this - they can build bridges. They can make a computer monitor in the sky where the pixels are individual drones.

I had a dream a few years ago, you know how at times dreams can have this deep foreboding sense to them, like something ultimately omniscient is happening. I felt like I had really been transported to the future, seeing into a crystal ball. There were drones everywhere, everywhere. The further I looked to the horizon, the more I saw, all sizes, shapes, speeds, all doing different things. And there, just over the edge of my field of vision, like a flock of birds, I saw a scrolling ribbon of text, it was The Government (my dreams trying hard to create "omniscience") and they were talking to me via these drone-ribbon-text-messages-in-the-sky. Today as I write it, it doesn't sound too crazy, but at the time I was speechless, breathless, and scared, a feeling omniscience tends to elicit. I thought I was seeing the distant future. And yet, here we are.

Let's put things in perspective with some caveats from a paraglider photographer [based in NJ] who wrote an article on drones for TIME: "In the U.S., they can’t legally be flown over 400 ft. or out of the pilot’s line of sight, and their batteries are typically only good for about twenty minutes of flight time."

Notes

TIME's Drones Issue: Go Behind the Cover
May 2018, TIME

Drones Are Changing How We See the World
May 2018, Author, Paraglider and Photographer George Steinmetz for TIME

Ripe Not Hype

MCEscher envisions Dyson Spheres long before graphene.

Slowly but surely, the promise of the metamaterial graphene is being fulfilled.

MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

Meanwhile, check out Isaac Arthur's far out futurism videos for ideas on what to do with all that magical metamaterial.

Scalable manufacturing process spools out strips of graphene for use in ultrathin membranes.
Apr 2018, MIT News