Our Man In Sudan

Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

An Ex-Wall Street Banker Jets Off To South Sudan To Show How Investors Are Rushing To Africa In A Modern-Day Land-Grab.

This film follows former Wall Street banker, Phil Heilberg, who reveals what goes on behind the scenes in the modern-day version of land grabs.

Since the collapse of the global financial markets, Western investors have been looking for lucrative opportunities, especially in countries with internal conflict, such as Sudan.

With an increasing world population and the high price of raw materials, agricultural land is seen as a safe bet.

But with so much cheap land on offer, foreign speculators are flocking to Africa.

Wanted: Mars Colonists To Explore Red Planet

If you think you have the right stuff to help colonize Mars, you'll soon get your chance to prove it.

The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which hopes to put the first boots on the Red Planet in 2023, released its basic astronaut requirements today (Jan. 8), setting the stage for a televised global selection process that will begin later this year.

Mars One isn't zeroing in on scientists or former fighter pilots; anyone who is at least 18 years old can apply to become a Mars colony pioneer. The most important criteria, officials say, are intelligence, good mental and physical health and dedication to the project, as astronauts will undergo eight years of training before launch.

"Gone are the days when bravery and the number of hours flying a supersonic jet were the top criteria," Norbert Kraft, Mars One's chief medical director and a former NASA researcher, said in a statement. "Now, we are more concerned with how well each astronaut works and lives with the others, in the long journey from Earth to Mars and for a lifetime of challenges ahead."

Mars One plans to launch a series of robotic cargo missions between 2016 and 2021, which will build a habitable Red Planet outpost ahead of the arrival of the first four colonists in 2023. More settlers will arrive every two years after that. There are no plans to return the pioneers to Earth.

The organization will fund most of its ambitious activities by staging a global reality-TV event that follows the colonization effort from astronaut selection through the settlers' first years on Mars.

Mars One, which transitioned from a private company to a nonprofit late last year, has already received a number of inquiries from prospective colonists, officials said.

"Well before the official Astronaut Selection Program, we received more than 1,000 emails from individuals who desire to go to Mars," Suzanne Flinkenflögel, Mars One's communications director, said in a statement. "We are working hard to launch our selection campaign as soon as possible, to open the doors to everyone who aspires to do something tremendous in their lifetime."

Final astronaut candidates will be selected after review by Mars One experts and a global TV event. Those chosen will be employed by Mars One during their Earth-based training and for the length of their time on the Red Planet, officials said.

To learn more about the selection process, go to The Next Giant Leap

Via: "Space"

A Martian Dream

The Mars we all know and love/hate (NASA)

Here's WhatTthe Red Planet Would Look Like With Earth-Like Oceans and Life

What if instead of dust and rocks, our planetary neighbor Mars were a bit more lush? What if it had oceans, an Earth-like atmosphere, and green life coating its land? These are the questions Kevin Gill, a software engineer living in New Hampshire, sought to answer with his project, A Living Mars.

Gill modeled the Mars terrain in an open-source learning program of his own creation, jDem846, and then set a sea level beneath which everything appeared flat and blue. Then, he brought that model into GIMP, where he painted features into the land based on NASA's Blue Marble: Next Generation imagery. He decided -- not all too scientifically, he admits -- which places seemed like they would be verdant, and which would be deserts. 

"For example," he explains, "I didn't see much green taking hold within the area of Olympus Mons and the surrounding volcanoes, both due to the volcanic activity and the proximity to the equator (thus a more tropical climate). For these desert-like areas I mostly used textures taken from the Sahara in Africa and some of Australia. Likewise, as the terrain gets higher or lower in latitude I added darker flora along with tundra and glacial ice. These northern and southern areas textures are largely taken from around northern Russia. Tropical and subtropical greens were based on the rainforests of South America and Africa."

Lastly, he brought the image back into jDem846 where he rendered it as a sphere and added clouds and tweaked the lighting. "This wasn't intended as an exhaustive scientific scenario," he writes, "as I'm sure (and expect) some of my assumptions will prove incorrect. I'm hoping at least to trigger the imagination, so please enjoy!"

Gill made two different projections. The first was of Mars' eastern hemisphere:

The second, playing with a slightly different palette, was of Mars's western hemisphere. You can see Olympus Mons on the horizon, and the Valles Marineris canyons near the image's center.

Looks like home, maybe a bit, just with a foreign geography. But more than that, what the images convey is a sense of Earth's uniqueness -- a reminder that as far as we have searched, we've yet to see anything that looks even vaguely like our planet, the only place we know of where life has taken hold.

Via: "The Atlantic"

Evacuate Earth

Courtesy Of "The National Geographic Channel"