NASA Is Looking for Life on Venus

Jeff Brown
|
Sep 22, 2020
|
Bleeding Edge
|
8 min read
  • Extraterrestrial life may be closer than we thought
  • 5G is already reaching emerging markets…
  • One day soon, our packages will come from the sky…

Dear Reader,

As regular readers know, it deeply bothers me that average retail investors have been locked out of the best technology investments of the last decade.

Sure, hot tech companies like Uber, Slack, and Zoom finally went public last year. Those initial public offerings (IPO) gave retail investors a chance to buy shares.

But the problem is, these were large-cap companies by the time they went public. While the media touted them as the hottest small-cap tech stocks on the planet, the reality is that insiders had already pocketed the big gains. Retail investors got the leftovers.

To me, that’s just not right.

More than five years ago, I set out to solve this problem. I wanted to find a way to deliver venture capital-like gains to normal investors – the people for whom 1,000% gains can be life-changing.

And I’m happy to say that I’ve found it.

I discovered a secret class of “Penny IPO” stocks that go public 100–300 times cheaper than most tech stocks today. In fact, some of these Penny IPOs go public at levels even cheaper than Amazon did way back in 1997… before it delivered gains of as much as 180,000% to average retail investors.

And best of all, these Penny IPOs are too small for Wall Street to take notice of them yet. That’s right – we can buy these companies before the insiders get in.

Then, when they finally pop up on Wall Street’s radar, we can multiply our money in droves. And that’s not a hypothetical – my first Penny IPO delivered gains of 432% in just 41 trading days.

In short, Penny IPOs are one of the last avenues that everyday investors have to generate life-changing gains from early stage companies. They are the closest thing I’ve found to “turning back the clock” to a time when technology companies went public during their early years.

And even more exciting, these companies are heading for the “4X Window,” which will send them into overdrive…

Tomorrow evening at 8 p.m. ET, I’m going to share my research on “Penny IPOs” with the world.

I’ll reveal what the 4X Window is… and why these companies go public so early. I’ll show how retail investors can buy them easily from their online brokerage accounts. And I’ll explain why they can surge hundreds of percent in days or even hours.

For readers who would like to learn more about the best way for normal investors to trade early stage companies, this presentation is for you. Simply go right here for all the details.

Now let’s turn to today’s insights…

Have we discovered life on Venus?

Incredible research was just published in Nature Astronomy.

A team from Cardiff University in the U.K. used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to analyze the atmosphere of Venus.

And what they discovered was a shock – high levels of phosphine gas.

On Earth, phosphine gas is produced when organic matter breaks down. In other words, we find phosphine gas where living organisms decay.

Phosphine gas can also come from inorganic material. But the researchers determined that the sheer amount of phosphine observed in Venus’ atmosphere could not be explained by any known process other than that of organic matter breaking down.

So this raises an incredible question. Could there be life on Venus?

This is something we never thought possible.

Temperatures on Venus can get up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And the atmosphere is heavily composed of sulfuric acid, which blocks out the Sun and leads to acid rainstorms on the surface of the planet. How could anything survive in those conditions?

But this research means it is possible organisms may exist in Venus’ atmosphere. They would most likely be small, primitive organisms living in the clouds where the temperatures are close to what we have on Earth.

Talk about an exciting development! We have long assumed that if we found life in space, it would be on another planet in our galaxy or even further afield. It wasn’t expected that there may be life on the planet next door.

In a matter of days, the discovery has reignited discussion of a mission to Venus. Two are being discussed right now at NASA:

  • DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) – this would involve sending a spacecraft through Venus’ atmosphere to better understand its composition.

  • VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) – this spacecraft would orbit Venus and map its surface with radar.

And that’s not all.

Yuri Milner, the founder of Russia’s Mail.ru (Russia’s equivalent of Yahoo), announced that his organization, Breakthrough Initiatives, would be funding research to study the possibility of life in Venus’ clouds.

The project will be led by Sara Seager, professor of planetary science, physics, and aerospace engineering at MIT.

Milner’s involvement isn’t to be taken lightly. He is well known for bold investments in many of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies. He is also dedicated to funding projects that answer one simple question… “Are we alone?”

While I am 100% certain the answer is “No,” I’m sure glad that he is helping find the evidence to empirically prove it.

Unleashing 5G on the world…

And now, we’ll look at the progress of fifth-generation wireless technology (5G).

New research was just published showing that the current growth rates of 5G in emerging markets are on par with the growth we are seeing in developed countries.

This is a first.

Historically, emerging markets have trailed developed markets in the adoption of next-generation wireless technology by several years. The reason for this is twofold…

First, it is expensive to build out the new wireless infrastructure. New fiber must be laid. New towers must go up. New base stations and new internet routing equipment must be installed in data centers around the country. It is a capital-intensive process that takes time to complete.

And whenever a new generation of wireless technology has rolled out, the first mobile phones designed for it have always been expensive, high-end phones.

Wireless operators in emerging markets know that most of their consumers can’t afford these high-end phones, so they wait for less costly models to come out before building the next-generation wireless infrastructure.

But this time around, we already have low-end smartphones designed to operate on 5G. That’s never happened so early in a technological upgrade cycle.

Since consumers in emerging markets can afford these phones, wireless operators are already working hard to build out 5G around the world.

And the fact that most consumers in emerging markets live in densely populated urban areas makes it much easier to deploy 5G. Operators can build infrastructure in a relatively small geographic area and still cover most of the population.

That’s not the case here in the U.S., where our population is spread out over a large landmass.

The bottom line is that 5G is being unleashed on the world right now. We are going to see faster global adoption than we have ever seen before.

Historically, it has taken about a decade for next-generation wireless tech to spread across the globe.

With 5G, that cycle will be compressed.

And that means we’ll see quicker, more explosive gains with the top 5G stocks. We can think of it like a super cycle. If you want to know the best way to invest in 5G, you can go right here to find out more about my top 5G recommendations.

Walmart is getting in on drone deliveries…

Earlier this month, we talked about how Amazon had received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to start testing drone deliveries here in the United States. Not to be left out of the fun, Walmart just announced that it too will offer drone deliveries.

Walmart is going to partner with an early stage drone company called Zipline to make drone deliveries a reality.

Zipline has focused on the contactless delivery of medical supplies since 2016. In that time, the company has delivered more than 200,000 medical products to health facilities in multiple countries.

And to say Zipline’s approach is unique would be an understatement.

Where Amazon is employing rotor-propelled drones, Zipline has designed fixed-wing drones that look like small airplanes. But unlike planes, these drones don’t need a runway to take off. Check this out…

Zipline’s Drones Take Off

Source: CNBC

Zipline’s drones are launched into the air using what they call a “zip.” What a neat approach.

And the landing process is just as interesting.

When the drone is flying back to its launch location, the zip is elevated so that it dangles a string in the drone’s flight path. As it approaches, the drone deploys a tailhook so that it is “caught” as it flies past the zip. Then the drone just hangs in the air while the team gradually lowers it to the ground.

Here’s what that looks like:

Zipline SkyHook Recovery System

Source: AiirSource Military

What a slick system for launching and landing the drone without a runway! It’s certainly a novel approach.

Now, Walmart hasn’t released details on how it will make sure the packages get delivered to the right place when the drone is in flight. Up to this point, Zipline’s drones have simply dropped medical supplies with little parachutes on them. The packages just float down to the ground.

That works fine for large, remote health facilities. But it’s not hard to imagine this being problematic for packages dropped into neighborhoods. I’ll be interested to see what the team comes up with here.

So Walmart is clearly making a concerted effort to keep up with Amazon using this program. However, my bet is still on Amazon becoming the top drone delivery service in the U.S. Its logistics expertise is second to none.

Either way, this is just more proof that one day soon our packages will come from the sky, not a truck.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge


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