Meet 2019: The Next Space Race — and the Bird Box Challenge?
It’s been just over a week into 2019, and we’ve already witnessed some exciting advances in humanity’s quest to explore the final frontier.
On January 1, we were treated to the first ever images of Ultima Thule, a snowman-shaped space rock in the Kuiper Belt some 6.4 billion kilometers (that’s a lot of Uber rides…) away from earth, making it the most distant celestial object we’ve explored so far.
Here’s the intrepid snowman (cue David Bowie’s Space Oddity…):
Then on January 2, China landed its Chang’e 4 probe on the moon, making it the third country to do so, and the first to land a probe on the far (or ‘dark’) side of the moon.
And here’s what the far side of the moon looks like:
These remarkable achievements herald a resurgence in space exploration — there’s even talk of a new space race that could catalyse significant investment and innovation in aerospace technologies.
On that front, the Australian government’s just established a $41-million dollar space agency headquartered in Adelaide, with the aim of tripling Australia’s space economy (and creating 20,000 new jobs) to $12 billion by 2030.
Australia’s emerging ‘newspace’ (or Space 2.0) industry players include Fleet Space Technologies, which just launched several communication nano-satellites to support its IoT analytics platform for agriculture and other regional industries.
Neumann Space is another innovative Australian start-up (backed by Airbus Defence) developing a Star-Trekky ‘solar-electric ion drive’, which is due to be launched for testing on the International Space Station!
2019 promises to be a year of many other firsts, from data-driven genomic medicine to prescription digital therapeutics, to valleytronics, air taxis, walking cars, electric Harleys, robotic bread-makers, wearables for non-invasive diabetes monitoring, ‘cross reality’ (XR), smart bottle openers, ‘fully-immersive’ smart toilets and even genetically-engineered spicy tomatoes.
With new technologies come new cyber risks, including hackers and other digital miscreants exploiting AI-generated ‘deep fake’ videos and audio, ‘poisoning‘ AI defenses, using quantum computers to break encryption, launching cyber-attacks using cloud computing, and hacking blockchain-enabled smart contracts.
The latter prediction isn’t far-fetched, with Ars Technica just reporting that cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has halted trading in Ethereum Classic (ETC) after discovering the cryptocurrency’s (theoretically immutable) blockchain had been re-written using a ‘rollback attack’.
On a lighter note (well, maybe not), Netflix kicked off the year with a few viral memes revolving around its recent hits, including the Bird Box, Bandersnatch and Tidying Up With Marie Kondo memes. The ‘Bird Box Challenge’ meme even crossed the cyber-physical barrier causing real-life injuries, prompting Netflix to issue this public health warning on Twitter:
While the Bird Box Challenge meme might end up being an apt metaphor for the rest of 2019, the optimist in me is hopeful it’s not a sign of more things to come this year.
Watch this ‘space’…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
About the author: Aamer Fattah is a medical scientist and a research and innovation expert with Munich Re.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency, organization, employer or company.
