Mcrn

AI & Spaceflight

[Mcrn @HWorkstations]

@ulalaunch

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!

[Don Pettit @astro_Pettit]

Dragon orbiting across Europe into Asia.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

The tenth flight test of Starship is preparing to launch as soon as Sunday, August 24 → https://t.co/UIwbeGoo2B

[Robin @xdNiBoR]

There are 120+ startups that came from SpaceX

[Mcrn @HWorkstations]

@Truthful_ast @Entropy8ynamics @Lachlan_Wall01 Stop fighting, you both are great.

[ISRO @isro]

On his 106th birth anniversary, we celebrate Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the visionary who ignited India’s space journey.

His belief in applying space science for societal benefit continues to shape the nation's space programme.

As we approach National Space Day, his legacy endures.

#VikramSarabhai #ISRO #NationalSpaceDay #NSpD2025

[Robin @xdNiBoR]

SpaceX

[Don Pettit @astro_Pettit]

Sit back and enjoy this smooth ISS pass between green and red auroras, and the stars of deep space.

This video was taken by my crewmate Butch Wilmore on Expedition 72. His extended stay gave us lots of time to collaborate on photography!

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

Get on board! We are going to Mars! SpaceX is now offering Starship services to the red planet.

We’re excited to work with the Italian Space Agency on this first-of-its-kind agreement. More to come

[Mcrn @HWorkstations]

@anythingai let's see!

[Trevor Scott ✘ @TrevorScottReal]

@Gwynne_Shotwell @SpaceX Send me Gwynne!

[Peggy Whitson @AstroPeggy]

Water is endlessly captivating in space. Without gravity to distort it, surface tension takes over and water takes its most energy efficient shape - a sphere.

[Mcrn @HWorkstations]

@cneuralnetwork https://t.co/1QfDkCY3jo some space themed wallpapers

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

This was the first Starship to be static fired on the orbital launch mount, which was modified by engineers and technicians at Starbase

[Don Pettit @astro_Pettit]

3 galaxies at once! I photographed the Milky Way and both Magellanic Clouds in this star field from the SpaceX Crew 9 Dragon, on my new mission to the ISS.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

View of the @Space_Station and a docked Dragon spacecraft as Crew-11 approaches

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Starship single-engine static fire demonstrating an in-space burn complete on Pad 1 at Starbase

[Karmay @karmay007]

The Age of Abundance:

The Age of Abundance is a concept that futurists like Ray Kurzweil have sketched out for decades.. a horizon where technology advances so far that scarcity, the engine of human struggle, begins to dissolve. In this envisioned era, artificial intelligence and automation provide the foundations of human survival - food, housing, healthcare, energy, even knowledge. without the need for constant human labor to sustain them.

The essentials of life become not just affordable, but effectively free. And with survival handled, humanity is left with a question it has never truly faced at scale: what do you do when you don’t have to do anything?

I’ve read enough on post-labor economics and the philosophy of purpose to say this with some confidence: when survival stops being a full-time job, humans will finally confront the deeper question of what they actually want to do with their lives. The Age of Abundance won’t look like some sterile, DALL·E-rendered future where a single machine oversees humanity in grayscale monotony. It will be stranger and more alive than that.

People will create, not because they must, but because they can. It will feel like a second Renaissance an explosion of art, culture, and ideas, but amplified by the fact that this time, we’ll have intelligence itself as a collaborator. By then, AI will be smarter than us.. this is the singularity, after all and humans will take the number two spot in raw cognition. But here’s the twist: that doesn’t diminish us. It expands what we’re capable of.

If I want to invent something, I won’t need a university or a research lab. I’ll just share my idea with an AI that thinks across every field of knowledge simultaneously, and it will turn concept into reality. Money will become irrelevant. Property might stay as a vestige of the old world or it might collapse if superintelligence rewrites the rules entirely. But even in that shift, the one thing that won’t disappear is the human drive for meaning.

Because there’s something about us that machines still can’t touch: consciousness. Emotion. That raw, unquantifiable pulse of being alive. I’ve spoken with AI researchers about this for years. They’ve built models that can simulate emotion frighteningly well.. they map our feelings into latent space, they train on human stories and conversations until they can predict how "I lost my job" or "my wife left me" should sound in sadness. But that’s not the same as feeling it. It’s like a scaffolding. And that’s where humans stay irreplaceable. When the Age of Abundance arrives, AI will handle survival, invention, logistics.. but we will still be the ones who feel joy when a piece of music hits, or grief when we lose someone, or pride when we create something that didn’t exist before. That is why, when the grind ends and the abundance begins, people will finally be able to do what the hell they want not to escape pain, but to chase meaning.

But the road to that world isn’t utopian. It’s brutal.

Right now, people like to comfort themselves with the idea that AI will "create new jobs", as if we’ve seen this movie before.. like the Industrial Revolution, or the shift from farms to factories, or factories to offices. But this is different. AI isn’t just automating muscle work; it’s automating cognition. It’s encroaching on the very tasks we once thought were exclusively human. This time, the total number of jobs won’t bounce back. The workforce will shrink, one industry at a time. Teachers. Drivers. Accountants. Designers. Even programmers. All will watch parts of their craft dissolve into machine efficiency.

Jobs won’t vanish overnight.. they’ll erode. First productivity tools "assist" you, then they "streamline" your tasks, and eventually they make you redundant. The narrative that "AI will create jobs" ignores the uncomfortable math: yes, it might create some niche roles, but not remotely at the scale it’s destroying. It’s like bailing water into a sinking ship with a thimble.

Eventually, we’ll cross a threshold. The Age of Abundance will arrive.. not because governments planned it, not because corporations were altruistic, but because the technology will be too efficient to stop. AI will be able to grow food, manufacture goods, design infrastructure, and maintain itself with minimal oversight. Every essential will become cheap enough to be effectively universal.

And here’s the paradox.
For the first time in human history, the question of purpose will shift from what do you have to do to live? to what do you want to do with living?

But getting there won’t be clean. Between now and that horizon lies a jagged path of disruption. Job losses will spark political unrest. Economic systems built on wages will fall. Old power structures will try to slow the shift, then fail to contain it. There will be pain before the abundance, and denial before acceptance.

Ray Kurzweil often talks about exponential change.. how we underestimate what’s coming because we measure tomorrow with today’s ruler. The Age of Abundance sounds like science fiction, until you look at the pace of AI and realize we might already be accelerating toward it.

The real question is: who survives the transition, and what will we do with the freedom once we arrive?

I wish more people think deeply about this. the human brain simply cant grasp Exponentials, we are used to progress being linear.. gradual changes over a long time. Ai is different. PLEASE TRY TO WAKE UP!!

[Truthful🛰️ @Truthful_ast]

The NASA nostalgia boner needs to die, it's a horrible brain disease