Currency of Space

Will regular money still work when we begin to build outside of earth. Its believable that someday, we may be able to live elsewhere. We definitely will have to if we are to survive as long as the universe is. Will the US Dollar continue to work across planets or space stations. My guess is we will begin to use a digital currency. Some systems are already in the making.


The two most popular are:

Bitcoins are a currency that are being mined by solving hard problems with extra computing power. There is a finite amount and mining should in about 100 years or so. The faster these things are mined, then the harder they are to receive. The price of bitcoins recently went to 200 US dollars per coin and dropped suddenly. At the time of this post, the price hovers around $100 a coin. A very volatile investment and is open to corruption but still a decentralized form of trade. It is anonymous and avoids fees that banks use so it has become popular with less than legal forms of trade.

Recently, new hardware has come out from butterfly labs that blows the old stuff away. Of course this means the complexity of the problems your hardware is given to solve will become extremely difficult and lower the amount of bitcoins you can get overall. You would almost have to have a large business mining bitcoins to make it profitable for you when these start rolling out full scale(more on this: Jumping in to Bitcoin Mining).

Litecoins are another viable alternative. These are similar to bitcoin and can be mined effectively with the GPU (video card) and processor you probably have already. You can even convert bitcoins and litecoins between each other for another form of currency trade. Which will win or will both succeed and fail? We will have to see.

No specialized hardware has been made specifically for litecoins as they are not as popular as bitcoins. Mining can still be done on a personal level. Like bitcoin there is only a finite amount, so mining faster yields a higher complexity and less coins for everyone. This could change someday and when it does, i would buy the equipment asap and be the first to raise that complexity.

The best part of trading with these digital currencies is that there is still money to be made. Even though they are 100 bucks a coin, you can still buy and sell with small fractions. The market is extremely volatile and experimental but the coins have been holding value. There are many places to trade the coins for services and goods. My favorite is where you exchange bitcoins for gold. You can obviously make more trading on mtgox but if the market begins to fall, trading in for gold may be a good idea fast.

Money that is all digital would be ideal in a space environment. It can be instantly transferred and holds value. If we could trade money in space, a non-physical currency may be necessary. Maybe the US government will jump on board and start making a digital version of the dollar. Time will tell.

NASA's Interest in Commercial Space Travel

Atlas 5

         More and more you hear about spaceflight taking off year after year. Someone always has some mission planned to go into space with civilians and not astronauts and scientist. There are entrepreneurs out there with the sole intention of taking the space market by storm. Businessmen always want the next big thing and I don’t know of a more interesting vacation then spending a little while in space. Just the fact that its soon becoming a reality that we can begin to capitalize spaceflight.

           The big names such as Boeing have been relentlessly trying to cut the cost of their Atlas 5 rockets to prevent being overrun by start up companies with newer more efficient ideas. One such man by the name of Elon Musk claims he is developing new ideas to take the industry by storm with cheaper and far more efficient means. It seems like having some new minds on the subject besides just the normal would be beneficial to our research in space.

          The whole idea behind this is NASA. They feel like if they can get the ball rolling, they can lower the cost of getting their stuff and crew to the International Space Station or ISS. In fact they have spent an awful lot of US taxpayer money on it. There is a strong possibility that this will work if you think about it. If companies start competing for the cheaper prices, it could allow NASA to use their equipment for things that are new to science. If taxpayers had the ability to rent a shuttle rather than buy one, they could spend much more of their money on newer research. Why spend so much when there already going there and you just have to buy the space.

International Space Station

          It all seems like an excellent idea, but there is a strong possibility it wont work out. Unfortunately I would hate to see all of that money go to a dead end. There are so many more things out there that can be learned with that cash. Although the risk is great, the reward would save so much more money for years to come. We all know eventually were going into space on a more frequent basis so we might as well give our country a kick start on an international industry!

When Black Holes Collide!

So we know that galaxies can collide in the universe and even our own is destined for collision, but what happens to those incredible black holes in the middle. Does one suck up the other? Actually according to the University of Texas, Austin, and E.W. Bonning, from Yale University, they create a powerful and messy recoil. The recoil could be seen a couple of tops spinning in opposite directions smacking into each other. One is sent off into nothingness and the other receives an enormous amount of energy which agitates the gas and debris around it. The result is an enormous x-ray flare that can last thousands of years!

Researchers believe that there could be around 100 collisions within 5 billion light-years of Earth. We detect this from the energy given from the result lasting in space. This is an extremely rare event however the effects are long lasting.

A photo visualizing a collision from NASA