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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 30 2017, @12:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the encouraging-women-in-science dept.

NASA is collaborating with a Mattel subsidiary to create Luciana, a character who wants to become the first human to step on Mars:

NASA is collaborating with a well-known doll and book company to inspire children to dream big and reach for the stars. Through a Space Act Agreement, NASA partnered with American Girl to share the excitement of space with the public, and in particular, inspire young girls to learn about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

[...] American Girl is known for their series of dolls created to encourage girls to think about who they want to be when they grow up. The focus of the collaboration is the Girl of the Year doll for 2018, an 11-year-old aspiring astronaut named Luciana who wants to be the first person to put boots on Mars. As NASA's human spaceflight focus shifts to deep space, including a return to the Moon, and ultimately, Mars, the collaboration with American Girl is timely.

The partnership with American Girl affords NASA an opportunity to educate through Luciana's story the value of learning from mistakes, teamwork and remaining goal-oriented even through challenging moments. Luciana's experiences may be familiar for many of the Women@NASA, including astronauts like Megan, who have overcome obstacles to pursue their dreams.

You can buy Luciana and whisper to her about all of the frightening health effects of long-term space travel outside the comfort of the Van Allen belts.

Remember that women are lighter and less metabolically active than men, which could translate into significant mass savings for a Mars-bound crewed spacecraft.

Also at Engadget and ABC.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 30 2017, @05:35AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday December 30 2017, @05:35AM (#615755) Journal

    If you find a time travel machine, you can jump a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years into the future, and it will not have changed. Around the time that man evolves into some other kind of creature, it may change. Of course, you're talking about millions of years, not mere thousands.

    Your timeline is just waaay off.

    Humans are already mostly artificially selected. Birth defects, pregnancy complications, and many illnesses that would have been a death sentence for most children are now treatable. Now we are beginning to move into the realm of genetic engineering. The scumbag Francis Collins put some feeble roadblocks in place, but research will continue and China and the rich will create designer babies with heritable genetic enhancements.

    The first designer babies will mostly be drawing upon known genes. Optimization rather than the creation of a new species. But if we wanted to create a new species of human with major changes, it could be done within 100 years. Not millions of years, not even thousands.

    That's not taking into account whatever computing advances we get within that timeframe. Stacked neuromorphic processors could enable a real intelligent machine. Quantum processors could also play a role. These advances will accelerate our ability to make genomes from scratch to create any life forms we want. And we'll see a convergence of human and machine intelligence in the form of cyborgs, brain-computer interfaces, and weirder forms of life.

    In the labs, we already seeing good progress towards creating synthetic embryos and artificial wombs. That would enable 1-2 men to have children without any female involvement, and of course females could do the same.

    This doesn't mean that men will be any less expendable. Instead, both men and women will be relatively expendable and the size of your wallet will determine your true worth as a human being. Part of Homo Sapiens 1.0? Upgrade with some gene therapy. Want intelligent and attractive designer babies? You can get them made, with no risk of paying any alimony or child support. Want to live indefinitely? Take your anti-aging treatments and make sure to hire physical security to prevent you from getting shot up.

    Everyone without inherited wealth or capital is expendable. Automation will continue wiping out jobs and the global population will increase by at least 3-4 billion despite less need for workers. Sure, plumbers and movie stars will still be around, although maybe a plumbing robot will come along and dead or fake movie stars can be brought to life by supercomputers. There will simply be a lot of people around that are expendable. Shipping them off to space to colonize or die is an interesting plan. It requires reusable SpaceX BFR/ITS to be realized with tens of thousands of routine launches to Mars or other locations, and a lot of funding from somewhere. And this would barely put a dent in Earth's population.

    There's a use case for extreme genetic engineering right there: optimize humans with gene therapy or edited babies to better adapt to lower gravity environments and much higher radiation. If you're willing to get rid of the human form entirely, the results could look a lot different.

    But back to the main point: artificial wombs will be incredibly transformative and erode the worth of women. Consider surrogacy [wikipedia.org]. While it has existed since ancient times, "gestational surrogate pregnancy" has only been around for 32 years. Now you can use some poor third world woman to endure the burden of childbirth. Designer babies are already technically in existence given that preimplantation genetic diagnosis is routinely used, but germline engineering will take that a step further. Synthetic embryos [technologyreview.com] are well on the way and could be the basis for creating a genetic child of two fathers, or of any DNA you have the ability to remix and synthesize. You could have a clone made this way, or a baby with you as the parent and various designer genes / virtual mother genes thrown in. Finally, the artificial womb takes the surrogate out of the picture. Some countries have cracked down on the practice. With the artificial womb perfected, it's like you are holding a surrogate mother hostage in your basement who can't say "no" and has zero claim over the embryo/child. If someone believes motherhood to be sacred, then the artificial womb is like the ultimate defilement of Gaia. I'm extremely bullish on my timeline for this set of advances. 100 years? Nah, maybe 50 at most, with significant improvements after the process is realized.

    All the pieces of the puzzle are in place for an extreme transformation of the species. Too many deadbeat humans around, females made relatively powerless (although we could argue that there will still be higher demand for female rather than male sex workers......... assuming the wealthy still get off on sexploitation and don't turn to advanced sex robots instead), complete mastery over the human genome. The only thing that would make your timeline feasible would be a series of Dark Ages in which the poor terrorists manage to claw back power from the rich and wreck technological civilization...... but without destroying everything entirely. Maybe some nukes will go off, but a significant amount of humans will make it through the turmoil and start over. This scenario can be partially averted by the rich getting into the doomdsday prepper trend or sending their handiwork to space or Mars.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:23AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:23AM (#615771) Journal

    Science and science fiction, together and separately, make for some very interesting possible futures. But, I think that some people make some unwarranted assumptions. Will society accept all of these things you envision? Will society accept that it's proper role is to support those rich people who can afford all of the rich people who will benefit from your vision? You don't foresee villagers with torches and pitchforks having a say in matters? And, where do philosophy, religion, and law all fit into this?

    It is true that mankind - rather, western society - has just blindly followed along wherever research has led, so far. Personally, I don't think the masses are going to just follow along with the vision you see.

    Of course, you and I are just like all of our great-great-greats-ad nauseum. We can't see the future, and we can't know where our descendants are going. It's only safe to say that I don't like the future you see. Only time will tell what our descendants have to say on the matter.

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday December 30 2017, @07:06AM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday December 30 2017, @07:06AM (#615781) Journal

      Will society accept all of these things you envision?

      Maybe not, but the explosion of capability could overwhelm society's ability to stop it. Bioengineering-related technologies are getting very cheap and the expectation is that it will continue to become cheaper and easier to do many incredible things.

      Will society accept that it's proper role is to support those rich people who can afford all of the rich people who will benefit from your vision?

      Rich people own the government and set most of the rules. If setting or relaxing the rules is impossible, they simply need to set up shop in Bermuda or somewhere [techcrunch.com].

      You don't foresee villagers with torches and pitchforks having a say in matters?

      I think this is an important question. We live in age where if you really wanted to go full Bond villain, you could procure snipers, anti-personnel mines, infra-red sensors, and whatnot. The peasants with torches and pitchforks may have upgraded to handguns and Molotov cocktails, but they are no match for a machine gun. Their best chance at offing someone is to catch them unaware, and they have to know this evil person exists first. There are many multimillionaires and billionaires out there. Good luck keeping track of what all of them are doing in the back of their mansion, or why their kids grow up to be supermodels and geniuses.

      The Unabomber looked at the world, hated what technology was doing to mankind, and tried to change it... with a series of bombs that killed a small handful of targets. He severely injured a single geneticist. A few biotech and nanotech scientists got killed in Mexico [wired.com] by ecoterrorists. That's about as successful as I see the backlash being. Because despite there being so many unneeded people in a country like the U.S., many of them have access to cheap calories, air conditioning, television, and Facebook. They are increasingly obese. They need to do some real legwork if they want to burn the system down. But they are easily distracted and will probably get caught up in the culture wars or some other outrage while missing the biotech trends going on right in full public view.

      And, where do philosophy, religion, and law all fit into this?

      Philosophy: Bioethicists continue to screech, and are ignored or routed around.

      Religion: Continually marginalized. The power of Christianity is weakening in the West, and in the U.S., despite some Evangelical high points like the elections of George W. and Trump, the religious are going to find it difficult to stifle the relevant research until it's too late. You see it already with the first human embryo editing and various chimeral experiments. Islam's power is mostly elsewhere; it doesn't control much of the world's science output.

      Law: Go global. Find somewhere that is either not restrictive or looks the other way often despite laws in the books. China might be a good choice, but smaller countries might be better.

      We can't see the future, and we can't know where our descendants are going.

      Look to the almighty trends. Cheaper, faster computers. Cheaper, better gene sequencing and synthesis. More advanced technology over time, not less. And a number [soylentnews.org] of [soylentnews.org] fertility [soylentnews.org] advancements [soylentnews.org] that I've reported on. I prefer to make guesses that are obvious.

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