Peter Diamandis, CEO of the , wants to use our competitive instincts to make the world a better place. After handing out $10 million to the first private team to achieve suborbital space flight, he’s extended his X-prize concept into earthly realms such as automotive engineering, genomics and health care. And while he still sends billionaires to the International Space Station as managing director of the firm , he’s lately teamed up with futurist Ray Kurzweil to create the , where young entrepreneurs are trained to think about global issues. Ivan Semeniuk spoke with Diamandis about his ongoing ventures on and above the planet.

Why do you think prizes work?

First, as humans, we’re genetically predisposed to compete; we do it in sports and in business. That’s what encourages us to take risks, which drives breakthroughs. Secondly, if you’re going to try to do something on your own that’s considered audacious or outlandish and you fail, people say, “Look at that stupid idiot who tried that crazy thing.” However, if a third party puts up, as an objective, a very difficult goal, which you attempt but fail to achieve, then it’s, “Good try old chap, too bad you didn’t make it.” The psychology of the prize changes the way society views you as a risk taker.

How do you scale up a prize into something that’s useful to society?

When we design a prize, it’s really important that the prize deliver a team and technology to a point where a business can then take off. It’s of zero interest to me to have a competition where the result ends up in a record book or on a museum shelf. For us, success means there’s an industry launched on the heels of a very visible achievement.

The Ansari X-prize was intended to launch a space tourism industry. As Apollo fades into history, are you worried that interest in space is diminishing?

I think I’m glad to see Apollo recede into the past because we’ve hung our hats on the Apollo legacy for far too long. It’s important to get people to relate to space in an exciting way today. I think that means making space a personal experience, not a third-hand experience. The other thing we need is to have the first “Netscape” event – the first company that makes a lot of money at it. That will bring in capital, and capital will fuel additional risk-taking that will drive us forward.

Speaking of risk, your business offers parabolic airplane flights for ‘space tourists’ who want to experience freefall – including Stephen Hawking in 2007. What was it like to put Stephen Hawking in zero g?

From the beginning, I thought it was going to be a great opportunity and that everyone would love it. Then I had people come to me and say, “You’re crazy. You’re going to kill Stephen Hawking and you’re going to destroy your company.” But when we did it, we planned it well, it was extraordinarily easy and it was really fulfilling. After the 11 years we worked to get the company operational, that was the payoff.

When is Peter Diamandis going to space?

That’s my question. When the suborbital flights go, I will hop on one of the first of those. I can afford the $100,000 for that. As for the $40 million to go to orbit – as soon as I can afford that, I’ll go – but I can’t yet.

Meanwhile, you’ve now set up a . How can you improve health care with a prize?

I was honestly dubious at first. You can’t change what you can’t measure and in health care, there is no real measurement of a community’s health. If you say a community is healthy, how do you know that? So we’ve created something called a community health index, which includes things like how many missed days of work, how many hospitalisations, how many deaths – concrete, objective measurements. What we’re inviting teams to do is demonstrate how they would improve a 10,000-person community health index by 50 per cent or more over a three-year period.

You’ve also started the Singularity University. How is it different from a conventional graduate school experience?

Instead of focusing on a particular DNA sequence or ion channel or piece of computer code, we take you way out of your depth so that you’re looking at global issues. You’ll be exposed to many other disciplines. You learn about AI and robotics and nanotech and human-machine interface. We ran our first class this summer and out of that class the students started six different companies, so it’s a real hotbed of entrepreneurship and big-picture thinking.

What do you hope to achieve with SU?

My hope is to create a network of people who are focused on the world’s problems and equip them to make transformational change. I want to spawn a new generation of young entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds that can approach these problems in ways that traditional institutional groups are not. Ultimately, while the X Prize Foundation sets the objective goals, I’m hoping that the Singularity University will generate the teams to compete for them.

Have you come across any problems that are not amenable to being solved with a prize challenge?

One of the fundamental problems on the planet is inequality. I haven’t figured out a prize for that one yet.

It’s not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: “What keeps you awake at night?”

The discussion was part of ““, a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.

While most panelists professed to sleep very soundly, here are seven key conundrums that emerged during the session, which can be viewed .

Why this universe?

In their pursuit of nature’s fundamental laws, physicists have essentially been working under a long standing paradigm: demonstrating why the universe must be as we see it. But if other laws can be thought of, why can’t the universes they describe exist in some other place? “Maybe we’ll find there’s no other alternative to the universe we know,” says of Caltech. “But I suspect that’s not right.” Carroll finds it easy to imagine that nature allows for different kinds of universes with different laws. “So in our universe, the question becomes why these laws and not some other laws?”

What is everything made of?

It’s now clear that ordinary matter – atoms, stars and galaxies – accounts for a paltry 4 per cent of the universe’s total energy budget. It’s the other 96 per cent that keeps University of Michigan physicist engaged. Freese is excited that one part of the problem, the nature of dark matter, may be nearing resolution. She points to new data from experiments like NASA’s that are consistent with the notion that dark matter particles in our own galaxy are annihilating with one another at a measurable rate, which in turn could reveal their properties. But the discovery of dark energy, which appears to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, has created a vast new set of puzzles for which there are no immediate answers in sight. This includes the nature of the dark energy itself and the question of why it has a value that is so extraordinarily small, allowing for the formation of galaxies, stars and the emergence of life.

How does complexity happen?

From the unpredictable behaviour of financial markets to the rise of life from inert matter, , physicist and applied mathematician at the University of Chicago, finds the most engaging questions deal with the rise of complex systems. Kadanoff worries that particle physicists and cosmologists are missing an important trick if they only focus on the very small and the very large. “We still don’t know how ordinary window glass works and keeps it shape,” says Kadanoff. “The investigation of familiar things is just as important in the search for understanding.” Life itself, he says, will only be truly understood by decoding how simple constituents with simple interactions can lead to complex phenomena.

Will string theory ever be proved correct?

Cambridge physicist is passionate about the mathematical beauty of string theory – the idea that the fundamental particles we observe are not point-like dots, but rather tiny strings. But he admits it once brought him to a philosophical crisis when he realised he might live his entire life not knowing whether it actually constitutes a description of all reality. Even experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Planck satellite, while well positioned to reveal new physics, are unlikely to say anything definitive about strings. Tong finds solace in knowing that the methods of string theory can be brought to bear on less fundamental problems, such as the behaviour of quarks and exotic metals. “It is a useful theory,” he says, “so I’m trying to concentrate on that.”

What is the singularity?

For cosmologist and Perimeter Institute director , the biggest mystery is the one that started it all, the big bang. Conventional theory points back to an infinitely hot and dense state at the beginning of the universe, where the known laws of physics break down. “We don’t know how to describe it,” says Turok. “How can anyone claim to have a theory of everything without that?” Turok is hopeful that string theory and a related development known as the “holographic principle“, which shows that a singularity in three dimensions can be translated into a mathematically more manageable entity in two dimensions (which may imply that the third dimension and gravity itself are illusory). “These tools are giving us new ways of thinking about the problem, which are deeply satisfying in a mathematical sense,” he says.

What is reality really?

The material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, but , professor of physics at the University of Vienna, is profoundly hopeful that physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. “Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realise the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions,” he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

How far can physics take us?

Perhaps the biggest question of all is whether the process of inquiry that has revealed so much about the universe since the time of Galileo and Kepler is nearing the end of the line. “I worry whether we’ve come to the limits of empirical science,” says of Arizona State University. Specifically, Krauss wonders if it will require knowledge of other universes, such as those posed by Carroll, to understand why our universe is the way it is. If such knowledge is impossible to access, it may spell the end for deepening our understanding any further.

Turok says that’s exactly why the Perimeter Institute exists, to harness the thinking of the world’s brightest young minds in an unrestrained environment. By optimising conditions for creative thinking, it may be possible to avoid such an impasse.

“We’re used to thinking of theoretical physics as accidental,” says Turok. “We need to ask whether there’s a more strategic way to speed up understanding and discovery.”

Perhaps then all those troubled physicists can finally get some rest – or at least switch to more mundane worries.

The “Quantum to Cosmos” festival can be

Update: On 16 October, NASA released an image of a faint ejecta plume observed by the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft. See Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all

Weeks before NASA’s LCROSS mission crashed into the moon, some scientists involved with the mission were predicting very little, if anything, would be seen from the impact – despite a well publicised observing campaign.

Others now say the $79 million mission was ill conceived and will not deliver a meaningful result even if it manages to find evidence for water on the moon.

LCROSS ended on Friday morning when a two-tonne Centaur rocket hit the floor of a perpetually shadowed crater near the lunar south pole.

��è����Ƶs hoped that dust and vapour kicked up by the impact would climb high enough to catch sunlight, allowing a satellite that trailed behind the rocket to hunt for traces of lunar water in the ejected debris. The Hubble Space Telescope and many Earth-based observers were recruited to watch for a plume of debris rising from the impact site.

But while scientists voiced disappointment when no obvious plume was spotted from any vantage point, some were not surprised.

“We had a meeting in August where we reported what we thought would be the scenario,” says LCROSS team member of Brown University.

He said the new estimate for the mass that would be lofted to a visible elevation was 100 to 1000 times lower than estimates that had originally informed the mission.

Sideways spray

Schultz and his team derived their numbers from projectile experiments using a .

Their results differed strikingly from models that assumed debris would fly outward from the impact site a 45° angle.

Instead, the team found that the fastest debris, ejected at the initial stages of crater formation, tended to depart at an angle closer to 30° – more of a sideways spray than an upward trajectory. “That’s not going to see sunlight,” Schulz told ��è����Ƶ.

Rocket orientation

Another potential problem is that the 10 metre-long rocket was expected to produce a crater only 20 to 30 m in diameter. That crater size is small enough for the shape and orientation of the rocket to have played a role in how the debris was ejected, confounding expectations.

“Under those circumstances, the usual scaling relations may not have applied as well as we thought, even though we tried to take that into account,” says LCROSS team member of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

So was it a waste of time for professional and amateur astronomers who tried to observe what may have been, in principle, unobservable? Probably not, says Schultz, because the risk of missing something valuable, however unlikely, outweighed the cost of looking.

‘PR stunt’

But some question whether the LCROSS mission made any sense at all.

“LCROSS was not a sound strategy to pursue if your objective was to answer the question, is there water ice on the moon? And if so, where is it and what is its state?” says of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

If LCROSS is unsuccessful in finding water, says Spudis, it will not say anything definitive about the moon because it could simply mean that scientists were unlucky in hitting a dry patch.

On the other hand, a positive detection of water would not provide any information about the extent and distribution of ice on the moon’s surface, which Spudis says is the point of looking in the first place. “That tells me the fundamental rationale behind the mission was flawed.”

A better, though admittedly more expensive, alternative would be a series of missions culminating in a rover, he says. The rover could move from sunlit to dark regions near the poles in order to compare lunar environments and characterise any ice found. “Instead, [NASA] came up with a PR stunt, and it kind of backfired,” he says.

See also: Hunting for water on the moon: a brief but splashy history

Update: On 16 October, NASA released an image of a faint ejecta plume observed by the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft. See Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all

In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it – and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact. But scientists remain puzzled about why the event did not seem to generate a visible plume of debris as expected.

As hundreds of telescopes and observers watched, the highly publicised NASA mission to search for water on the moon reached its grand finale at 0431 PDT (1131 GMT) with a pair of high-speed crashes into a lunar crater named Cabeus.

During the crucial moments at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, scientists and engineers with LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) peered in silent concentration as successive images of the crater grew larger on their screens.

Spectroscopic hints

Nearby, some 500 bleary-eyed visitors that had gathered overnight outside mission control were watching the same pictures on a giant outdoor screen.

Yet, immediately after the scheduled impact time, there was no obvious sign of the spectacular explosion that many were expecting. “Impacting into the moon is an unpredictable business at best,” Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, said in a post-impact briefing.

Colaprete did not offer definitive word as to why the visual camera apparently did not detect the event but added there were interesting changes in spectroscopic data taken by the spacecraft that might have been produced by a debris cloud. “I’m not convinced that the ejecta is not in the data yet,” he said.

Sodium flash

A worst-case scenario would have occurred if the rocket hit bedrock rather than loose, gravelly soil. In that case, the debris plume might not have reached the minimum 1.5-kilometre altitude needed to catch the sunlight and be seen by LCROSS.

Because of the angle of the crater, the plume would have needed to rise to 2.5 to 3 km in order to be seen by telescopes on Earth. A 10-km-high plume was expected.

The impact was monitored by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has not yet delivered its data. Several major observatories were also watching for signs of impact, including the Keck and Canada-France-Hawaii telescopes on Mauna Kea, neither of which saw a plume. One positive report came from Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, where a flash of visible light revealing the presence of sodium was recorded during the impact.

“I think we’re all a little bit disappointed that we didn’t see anything,” David Morrison, director of NASA’s , told ��è����Ƶ.

Neither here nor there

Regardless of its ultimate scientific return, today’s outcome will likely go down as one of the more bemusing episodes in NASA’s long history of lunar missions. While the spacecraft appeared to be working as expected and in contact with mission controllers, it clearly did not deliver the views that scientists and spectators were hoping for.

Unlike a catastrophic failure, such as Mars Polar Lander in 1999, or a euphoric success, such as the spectacular 2005 collision of the Deep Impact mission with Comet Tempel 1, the non-detection seemed to leave officials unsure of how to react.

The big question that planetary scientists hope will be answered is: are there significant quantities of water ice on the moon? Last month, water was discovered in the lunar soil, but the amounts detected were relatively small.

Cold traps

A long standing mystery is whether dark craters such as Cabeus could act as cold traps, capturing water molecules that are liberated when comets strike the moon. Data from the Lunar Prospector mission, which flew in the late 1990s, indicate high concentrations of hydrogen in Cabeus. The hydrogen could belong to water ice mixed in with the rock and soil in the crater’s depths.

LCROSS was designed to look for the signature of water and other molecules as it flew into the debris plume of the rocket impact. It should also have executed a sideways turn one minute prior to its own impact to see the molecular constituents of the impact backlit by the sun.

Without a plume to study, scientists will have less of a handle on the question but Colaprete says the spectroscopic data may be enough to spy the constituents of water. “It will probably take two weeks to get a yes or no answer on water,” said Michael Bicay, director of science at Ames.

See a gallery of other attempts to divine water on the moon

If there is life on Saturn’s bizarre, water-spewing moon Enceladus, it’s about to spend a lot of time in the freezer.

So concludes Norman Sleep of Stanford University, who says a perpetual cycle of melting and refreezing may offer the best explanation for why Enceladus seems so active today. In Sleep’s scenario, Enceladus is now heading back into a long cold phase after a comparatively brief warm spell.

For any potential life on Enceladus, “it’s boom and bust”, says Sleep.

Sleep raised the idea at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto, Canada, after researchers learned that Enceladus is pouring out 15 gigawatts of heat – more than double earlier estimates. The new number makes matters worse for scientists trying to explain where all the heat comes from. It far exceeds what can be accounted for by the decay of radioactive elements and tidal stress – strains induced by Saturn’s pull on the moon.

The effects of the heat are dramatic: Enceladus is one of the most active bodies in the solar system, with vast plumes of water molecules streaming from cracks in its icy crust. There are also hints of a subsurface ocean below.

While this has raised excitement over Enceladus as a potential place to search for life, it is becoming clear that something is awry. Enceladus cannot have been as it is now throughout its whole existence – it would have lost 20% of its mass via its geysers if that had been the case, for example (see Geyser teaser: The moon that should be colder).

Runaway melting

“It appears that we are really looking at Enceladus at a special time,” James Roberts of Johns Hopkins University told colleagues.

For researchers, this conclusion is far from satisfying. While it’s possible that a one-time episode, such as a giant impact, may have delivered the excess heat that Encledus is releasing now, such an explanation would mean that events have conspired to show us Enceladus at a unique moment.

Instead, Sleep proposes a scenario in which Enceladus is frozen most of the time but thaws repeatedly. Over hundreds of millions of years, an existing gravitational interaction with the moon Dione causes the orbit of Enceladus to grow increasingly more elongated, or eccentric.

This produces much more tidal stress than Enceladus experiences today and eventually causes wide-scale fracturing and friction within its icy crust. The friction leads to runaway melting and produces an ocean and eruptions of water on the surface.

Watery pockets

The trick is that in its fluid state, Enceladus can more easily dissipate energy, which weakens the effect that drove up its eccentricity to begin with. The eccentricity returns to normal and then Enceladus refreezes, starting the cycle anew.

“This has probably happened a few times before,” says Sleep.

While no one at the meeting was prepared to endorse the idea without further analysis, researchers said Sleep’s suggestion is consistent with other details emerging from Cassini spacecraft data.

“What strikes me about it is that you can start with Enceladus cold and re-melt it,” says of the Southwest Research Institute. “Until now that’s been the problem. If it’s frozen, it’s very hard to get the activity to start up.”

As to whether life can survive on such a schizophrenic moon, Sleep says it depends on whether Enceladus freezes completely during the cold spells or retains a few watery pockets where microbes can eke out an existence in the lean times.

“If so, then fluctuations may not be a bad thing,” says Sleep.

Mars may have had a wet, life-friendly past without ever getting warmer than the freezing point of water.

So concludes a new study that investigates what would happen to various mineral solutions on Mars. Researchers found that solutions containing certain combinations of sulphur, silicon and other ions stay liquid even down to -28 °C – a much more plausible temperature for early Mars than one above 0 °C.

“The results were a happy surprise,” says Ricardo Amils of the Astrobiology Centre in Madrid, Spain. “The concentrations you need are not much higher than seawater.”

In the study, he and colleagues led by Alberto Fairén of NASA’s in Moffett Field, California, used models to determine what would have happened to water loaded up with generous helpings of calcium, sodium, silicon, iron and sulphur ions, among others.

The relative concentrations of the ingredients matched mineral compositions sampled by four Mars probes: the landers Viking 1 and Mars Pathfinder, and the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

In many cases, the water not only remained liquid at extremely low temperatures but precipitated minerals as it got colder, including jarosite, haematite and gypsum – all present on Mars today.

Water, water everywhere

The study may resolve a conundrum about water on Mars: despite much evidence that suggests water was once present on the surface, it has proven virtually impossible to come up with a Martian climate model in which liquid water remains stable for long. In addition, different carbon dioxide levels in Fairén’s models make little difference to the results, which suggests that only modest amounts of greenhouse gases may have been required to maintain standing water on ancient Mars.

Significantly, the solutions modelled by Fairén ranged in concentration between 5 and 6 per cent; Earth’s seawater, for comparison, has a concentration of 3.5 per cent. Such concentrations are well within the comfort zone of numerous families of microbes on Earth, which suggests a cold, wet Mars may have been just as hospitable to life as a warm one.

The results could explain the water droplets apparently clinging to and even rolling down the landing struts of the Mars Phoenix lander in images from the spacecraft. The water is assumed to have come from ice melted by Phoenix’s thrusters at the landing site, but it was thought it could only remain liquid on Mars if it contained extremely high concentrations of salt.

“They may not need a lot of salt,” says Amils.

Journal reference: Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature07978)