Lifeboat Foundation

Our bodies are composed of 50 to 65 percent water. Without it – we die. Yet studies indicate that human beings are destroying  this precious resource that is so vital to our very existence.

The Pacific Institute, in a 2010 report issued for Global Water Day, reports that every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water — the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people.¹

The UN estimates that the amount of wastewater produced annually is about 1,500 km, six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. (UN WWAP, 2003) .¹  In fact, more people die from unsafe water annually than from all forms of violence, including war (WHO, 2002).² This Gallup World News report provides a summary of water problems worldwide:

Some think that safe drinking water is easy to find in nations where supermarkets are packed with bottled water – a multibillion-dollar-per-year industry. Yet if you want to drink water that does not have harmful contaminants, the challenge of finding it remains great.

In fact, the CR Way,  an international movement, whose members strive to extend their lives through low-calorie, optimal nutrition,  issued a warning when one of  our members found that the expensive, seductively packaged bottled water brand she was drinking had radioactive radium among its components. Another member found that his bottled water source contained minerals in concentration high enough to contribute to kidney-stone formation. So it became clear that finding pure, safe drinking water is essential for our anyone who strives for optimal health.

This motivated me to take a close look at the three sources people turn to for water: municipal, bottled, and well water. Fortunately, the Environmental Working Group (EWG)  – a Washington-based environmental activist organization that works to protect kids from toxic chemicals in food, water, air and the products people use – has done extensive research on  this subject:

Municipal Water in the U.S.

The EWG did a three-year study of water quality in U.S. municipalities of 250,000 or more. They gathered data from tests conducted by 47,667 utilities.

EWG found more than 300 contaminants, ranging from microorganisms capable of causing disease to radioactive substances – even rocket fuel known to be toxic to the thyroid gland. And only approximately one-third of the contaminants found are even regulated by the EPA.³

Then there is the addition of chlorine, the virtually ubiquitous anti-contaminant, as well as fluorine, which is added to 80% of the municipal drinking water in the U.S.  LivingTheCRWay Blog has reported on the danger of high amounts of fluorine ingestion since it is linked in some studies to brain damage,  Bromine and Fluorine — Thyroid Disruption , Living The CRWay Blog,  Paul McGlothin, Meredith Averill, 2012

Bottled water isn’t better.

Bottled water manufacturers are not required to release results of analysis of their water. In a 2008 EWG study of 10 bottled water brands – disinfection byproducts, fertilizer residue, and pain medication were detected – 38 pollutants in all.

The EWG also evaluated 163 brands of bottled water, finding no bottled water brand that merited their “A” ranking. Op. cit., EWG³

Well water has its own set of problems.

Well water is unregulated, so homeowners must take it upon themselves to test it.  Most do not test beyond the minimum requirements to get a certificate of occupancy. Yet naturally occurring contaminants, like arsenic and radioactive radon or radium, are not uncommon in well water. Nor are coliform bacteria, which cause gastrointestinal illness.

Assembling content that informs LivingTheCRWay members and the public of the problems with drinking water and how to solve them has taken several months. These resources provide more information:

Radioactive Drinking Water

Pure Water

Bromine and Fluorine — Thyroid Disruption . Living The CRWay Blog. Paul McGlothin, Meredith Averill, 2012

As a board member of the Lifeboat Foundation, I thought it important to write this blog post since the water on which our lifeboat floats needs protection desperately.

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1. UN World Water Assessment Programme, 2003, IN: World Water Quality Facts and Statistics. The Pacific Institute World Water Day 2010. Available at
http://www.pacinst.org/reports/water_quality/water_quality_facts_and_stats.pdf

2. World Health Organization research, 2002, IN: World Water Quality Facts and Statistics. The Pacific Institute World Water Day 2010. Available at http://www.pacinst.org/reports/water_quality/water_quality_facts_and_stats.pdf

3. Environmental Working Group (EWG), Health/Toxics: Our Water, 2012. Available at http://www.ewg.org/ourwater

What would it take to create and later revive a representative biosphere from frozen stores located on the Moon?

The costs of launchers is getting low enough that we can reasonably imagine the establishment of a lunar base well within NASA’s spaceflight budget.

With the discovery of ices on the lunar poles, astronauts could provide their own life-support indefinitely (water, oxygen, food, and fertilizer). While living in a sheltered habitat, they then immediately proceed to establish other basic processes to step-wise become increasingly independent of supplies from Earth (e.g. producing their own metals and glass).

Given the increasing independence of the small colony, one begins to consider if additional steps could be taken to achieve a fully independent small colony to serve as a backup for the human species should a catastrophe destroy humanity (e.g. a large asteroid or our own self-replicating technology).

We wouldn’t want just for humans to survive, but that other species could eventually be reestablished as well. If species could be stored in their frozen single cell form, millions of individual organisms could be delivered to the Moon in each 5,000 kg payload delivery.

But this leads to some interesting questions:

1) We cannot save all species. There are just too many of them. So, which should we choose in order to have a broad representation of the biosphere?

2) In what biologic form should the frozen specimen be so that they can be most easily revived? Bacteria & protozoa — frozen. Fungi — spores. Plants — seeds. But what about birds, mammals, etc? We can freeze embryos, but how do we get the adult mother to gestate them?

3) How could we eventually establish Minimum Viable Populations? (say 1,000 individuals per species).

It seems to me that these questions could form the basis for interesting biology studies. The more these questions are studied, looking for plausible solutions, the more interest there would be for establishing actual terrestrial and lunar preserves for the biosphere.

Now, if you click on the BioPreserver link on this website, you will learn that the Frozen Ark is doing something rather similar to what is suggested above. However, they focus only on endangered species and not a representation of the whole biosphere. Despite significant affiliations, the rate at which they are securing different species is insufficient to imagine backing up the biosphere in any reasonable number of years.

So please comment on the above ideas and suggest how it could be advanced.

Executive summary. By increasing the biological productivity of the vast ocean waters, which cover 3/4 of the Earth’s surface, photosynthesis could remove a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to control global warming.

The nutrition problem. The main things vegetation needs – water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide – are readily available from the ocean and atmosphere. Nitrogen is critical as well, is present as 78% of the air, and can potentially be extracted from the air and chemically transformed into biologically usable form by advanced biochemical pathways. Legumes (such as beans) do that on land already with the assistance of special bacteria living in nodes on their roots. This helps to account for the success of the legume family. This proves it can be done and therefore that seaweed could potentially do it someday.

Iron. Smaller quantities of various minerals are also important. For example iron, an essential trace mineral for plants, is in short supply in many parts of the ocean and this limits algae growth. Indeed, it has been proposed that iron-containing fertilizer could be dispersed in iron-deficient ocean regions as a way to stimulate so much algae growth that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would be significantly affected, helping to control global warming. Since algae and other photosynthetic organisms take in carbon dioxide (and output oxygen) this is a sensible strategy. In fact, every naturally occurring element is present in sea water even if the concentration is too low, as in the case of iron in many areas. More gold than King Midas ever dreamed of is dissolved in every cubic mile of seawater! Not that vegetation needs gold, but everything it does need is there to be extracted from the water. The problem is that growth is limited by the low concentration of key substances. Vegetation will need to solve this if it is to become densely packed on the ocean surface, but it can be done.

Getting more nutrients. Reduced to the basics, the problem is that modern floating seaweeds can access dissolved nutrients only very close to the surface, because that is where the seaweed is. But if they could get to nutrients present down as far as 10x deeper than they can now, they could get 10x as much nutrients. What is needed are long, thin root filaments that descend into lower waters, take up the nutrients down there, and transport them up to the floating seaweed at the surface. Such roots will be genetically engineerable once the genetic coding language is deciphered and genetic engineering becomes a subfield of software engineering. (Alternatively they might evolve of their own accord, given enough millions of years.) What would it take to grow such roots? To get an estimate, suppose a root filament has a dry weight per inch which is the same as a human hair, roughly 0.05 milligrams per cm. Its thickness in water would be greater than the thickness of a hair, because to be alive the root filament would need to contain water as a large part of its volume. However, at 0.05 mg/cm of dry biomass, that is about half a gram for a root filament the length of a football field. Descending downward into the ocean, it would contact a lot of water from which nutrients could be extracted and transported upward to the seaweed. For a significantly sized floating seaweed clump, only half a gram of biomass (less than a fiftieth of an ounce) is not that expensive to grow, and may be well worth the effort considering the benefits even one such long root fiber would have for taking in nutrients. Of course, a root shorter than a football field would be even cheaper to grow, and probably still long enough.

The mobility problem. To have a hope of covering any ocean surfaces, floating seaweeds will need to confront the fact that anything floating on the ocean surface is subject to motion from currents and winds. Any such forces that lead to steady motion in one direction will result in landfall in too short a time for floating seaweed to grow in massive quantities. Thus floating prairies will only appear in locations that either remain stagnant, unaffected by currents and winds, or circulate in a repeating loop (called gyres). The most obvious qualifying body of water is the Sargasso Sea. Other areas are known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, and the Indian Ocean Garbage Patch. These are oceanic areas where a high concentration of small particles of plastic accumulate in the water where they are deposited by surrounding currents. If plastic trash can build up, the water is stable enough for seaweed to accumulate as well. Thus floating prairies of seaweeds or other vegetation (such as salt-resistant water hyacinths created by genetic engineering soon, or eventually evolving naturally over the vastness of time) could develop in those areas, reaching out of the water to form apparently solid meadows that hide the water beneath. Colonization by the smaller land creatures would follow naturally, as they could climb among the prairies without falling through and drowning.

Conclusion. By increasing the biological productivity of the vast ocean waters, which cover 3/4 of the Earth’s surface, photosynthesis could remove a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to control global warming.

Reference: “To get an estimate, suppose a root filament has a dry weight per inch which is the same as a human hair, roughly 0.05 milligrams per cm.” M. Legrand, C. Passos, D. Mergler and H. Chan, Biomonitoring of mercury exposure with single human hair strand, Environmental Science and Technology, 2005, vol. 39, pp. 4594 – 4598. www.unites.uqam.ca/gmf/caruso/doc/caruso/passos/legrand_2005.pdf

There’s the Fermi Paradox and the Drake equation, which many readers are familiar with. There is also lots of action in the astronomy community currently on discovery of new planets. Potentially habitable ones in the “Goldilocks zone” (not too hot, not too cold, juust right!), are hitting the national news periodically these days. For example Kepler-22b, Gliese 581 d (only 20 light-years away which is really close but, also, really far…), HD 85512 b, and some “KOI” planets are pretty intriguing.

Really, astronomy is just getting started. Now we know there are many billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be lots that *could* support life. Even Titan (a moon of Saturn) might possibly have life of some sort; at least it has lots of organic molecules and more petroleum than we could ever burn, and we have actually landed there and taken pictures from the surface! (See http://www.astronomy.org/StarWatch/January/1-05-titan-huygens.jpg.) I keep one of those pics framed in my office.

In my view the next major step in habitable planet discovery is to detect oxygen in their atmospheres. That is a sure-fire sign of photosynthesis, i.e., extraterrestrial life.

Twenty years ago, way back in the primordial soup of the early Network in an out of the way electromagnetic watering hole called USENET, this correspondent entered the previous millennium’s virtual nexus of survival-of-the-weirdest via an accelerated learning process calculated to evolve a cybernetic avatar from the Corpus Digitalis. Now, as columnist, sci-fi writer and independent filmmaker, [Cognition Factor — 2009], with Terence Mckenna, I have filmed rocket launches and solar eclipses for South African Astronomical Observatories, and produced educational programs for South African Large Telescope (SALT). Latest efforts include videography for the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town October 2011, and a completed, soon-to-be-released, autobiography draft-titled “Journey to Everywhere”.

Cognition Factor attempts to be the world’s first ‘smart movie’, digitally orchestrated for the fusion of Left and Right Cerebral Hemispheres in order to decode civilization into an articulate verbal and visual language structured from sequential logical hypothesis based upon the following ‘Big Five’ questions,

1.) Evolution Or Extinction?
2.) What Is Consciousness?
3.) Is God A Myth?
4.) Fusion Of Science & Spirit?
5.) What Happens When You Die?

Even if you believe that imagination is more important than knowledge, you’ll need a full deck to solve the ‘Arab Spring’ epidemic, which may be a logical step in the ‘Global Equalisation Process as more and more of our Planet’s Alumni fling their hats in the air and emit primal screams approximating;
“we don’t need to accumulate (so much) wealth anymore”, in a language comprising of ‘post Einsteinian’ mathematics…

Good luck to you if you do…

Schwann Cybershaman

I am taking the advice of a reader of this blog and devoting part 2 to examples of old school and modern movies and the visionary science they portray.

Things to Come 1936 — Event Horizon 1997
Things to Come was a disappointment to Wells and Event Horizon was no less a disappointment to audiences. I found them both very interesting as a showcase for some technology and social challenges.… to come– but a little off the mark in regards to the exact technology and explicit social issues. In the final scene of Things to Come, Raymond Massey asks if mankind will choose the stars. What will we choose? I find this moment very powerful– perhaps the example; the most eloguent expression of the whole genre of science fiction. Event Horizon was a complete counterpoint; a horror movie set in space with a starship modeled after a gothic cathedral. Event Horizon had a rescue crew put in stasis for a high G several month journey to Neptune on a fusion powered spaceship. High accelleration and fusion brings H-bombs to mind, and though not portrayed, this propulsion system is in fact a most probable future. Fusion “engines” are old hat in sci-fi despite the near certainty the only places fusion will ever work as advertised are in a bomb or a star. The Event Horizon, haunted and consigned to hell, used a “gravity drive” to achieve star travel by “folding space.” Interestingly, a recent concept for a black hole powered starship is probably the most accurate forecast of the technology that will be used for interstellar travel in the next century. While ripping a hole in the fabric of space time may be strictly science fantasy, for the next thousand years at least, small singularity propulsion using Hawking radiation to achieve a high fraction of the speed of light is mathematically sound and the most obvious future. That is, if humanity avoids an outbreak of engineered pathogens or any one of several other threats to our existence in that time frame.

Hand in hand with any practical method of journeys to other star systems in the concept of the “sleeper ship.” Not only as inevitable as the submarine or powered flight was in the past, the idea of putting human beings in cold storage would bring tremendous changes to society. Suspended animation using a cryopreservation procedure is by far the most radical and important global event possible, and perhpas probable, in the near future. The ramifications of a revivable whole body cryopreservation procedure are truly incredible. Cryopreservation would be the most important event in the history of mankind. Future generations would certainly mark it as the beginning of “modern” civilization. Though not taken seriously anymore than the possiblility of personal computers were, the advances in medical technology make any movies depicting suspended animation quite prophetic.

The Thing 1951/Them 1954 — Deep Impact 1998/Armegeddon 1998
These four movies were essentially about the same.…thing. Whether a space vampire not from earth in the arctic, mutated super organisms underneath the earth, or a big whatever in outer space on a collision course with earth, the subject was a monstrous threat to our world, the end of humankind on earth being the common theme. The lifeboat blog is about such threats and the The Thing and Them would also appeal to any fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Blood Rites. It is interesting that while we appreciate in a personal way what it means to face monsters or the supernatural, we just do not “get” the much greater threats only recently revealed by impact craters like Chixculub. In this way these movies dealing with instinctive and non-instinctive realized threats have an important relationship to each other. And this connection extends to the more modern sci-fi creature features of past decades. Just how much the The Thing and Them contributed to the greatest military sci-fi movie of the 20th century (Aliens, of course) will probably never be known. Director James Cameron once paid several million dollars out of court to sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison after admitting during an interview to using Ellison’s work– so he will not be making that mistake again. The second and third place honors, Starship Troopers and Predator, were both efforts of Dutch Film maker Paul Verhoeven.

While The Thing and Them still play well, and Deep Impact, directed by James Cameron’s ex-wife, is a good flick and has uncanny predictive elements such as a black president and a tidal wave, Armegeddon is worthless. I mention this trash cinema only because it is necessary for comparison and to applaud the 3 minutes when the cryogenic fuel transfer procedure is seen to be the farce that it is in actuality. Only one of the worst movie directors ever, or the space tourism industry, would parade such a bad idea before the public.
Ice Station Zebra 1968 — The Road 2009
Ice Station Zebra was supposedly based on a true incident. This cold war thriller featured Rock Hudson as the penultimate submarine commander and was a favorite of Howard Hughes. By this time a recluse, Hughes purchased a Las Vegas TV station so he could watch the movie over and over. For those who have not seen it, I will not spoil the sabotage sequence, which has never been equaled. I pair Ice Station Zebra and The Road because they make a fine quartet, or rather sixtet, with The Thing/Them and Deep Impact/Armegeddon.

 The setting for many of the scenes in these movies are a wasteland of ice, desert, cometoid, or dead forest. While Armegeddon is one of the worst movies ever made on a big budget, The Road must be one of the best on a small budget– if accuracy is a measure of best. The Road was a problem for the studio that produced it and release was delayed due to the reaction of the test audiences. All viewers left the theatre profoundly depressed. It is a shockingly realistic movie and disturbed to the point where I started writing about impact deflection. The connection between Armegeddon and The Road, two movies so different, is the threat and aftermath of an asteroid or comet impact. While The Road never specifies an impact as the disaster that ravaged the planet, it fits the story perfectly. Armegeddon has a few accurate statements about impacts mixed in with ludicrous plot devices that make the story a bad experience for anyone concerned with planetary protection. It seems almost blasphemous and positively criminal to make such a juvenile for profit enterprise out of an inevitable event that is as serious as serious gets. Do not watch it. Ice Station Zebra, on the other hand, is a must see and is in essence a showcase of the only tools available to prevent The Road from becoming reality. Nuclear weapons and space craft– the very technologies that so many feared would destroy mankind, are the only hope to save the human race in the event of an impending impact.

Part 3:
Gog 1954 — Stealth 2005
Fantastic Voyage 1966 — The Abyss 1989
And notable moments in miscellaneous movies.

This week Reuters reported:

“As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized under a past North Carolina program should be compensated $50,000 each, a panel voted on Tuesday, the first time a state has moved to pay victims of a discredited human selection program.”

There approximately 2000 living victims of the eugenics experiment conducted between 1929 and 1974 in the State of North Carolina. The short report released at a late hour of the business day (3:26PM) in a non-graphic format only commanded ‘24’ tweets by the time that I wrote this article some 24 hour later. These are extremely small viewership numbers for the magnitude of this article.

Governor Beverly Perdue provided political backing for the aforementioned compensation derived by a five member task-force. While this information may just seem as common as Interpol discovering some Waffen SS General in his late 90’s, it is not. The political and legal implications of this executive decision are wide spread. It is not the normal protocol of any government to give legal and financial incentive to its constituencies to demand (and receive) any type of indemnification. A greater question for the NC-Governor and the task force is: Why? While I’d expect to see some District and possibly even the Supreme Court push back on this legislation, there is a real opportunity posed to the pseudo-democratic body that is the United States from a legal, socio-cultural, and technological standpoint. Of course there is a real threat posed from an economic standpoint. Every affected entity (individual or institution) seeking reparations for their abuse, from slavery to agriculture subsidies, has some new grounds for argument; and further, in the fashion of capitalistic we should assume that every ambitious attorney is paying attention.

Pandora’s passions for chaos provides all the incentives that federal, state, and local governments need to keep denying the need to even consider reparations for the many socio-cultural, ethnic, gender, and preference groups that are deemed “undesirable” by the most conservative and elitist of us all. Transhumanists have long had ties to eugenics,but ideas on how to improve the genetic composition of a population have to ensure that individual choice to (or not to) participate at their own risks/reward.

The lack of ethics that human-kind has witnessed by technological elites will over the others has been consistently dangerous to the optimal operation efficiency and effectiveness of our species. While it is likely impossible philosophically for human’s to actually have a nature about themselves, the one thing that we’ve always tried to do is control our situation to better manage the risks of uncertainty. It’s not an ill mission, but the pathology of our altruism often shows that it is our most stifling virtue. Projecting our idea of greatness onto the entire population is not progressive, even as technology progresses. As we merge away from the socio-cultural conservatism of the past century(s) and our diverse preferences become cliché, let’s be conscious to honor and protect choice, and continue to scale the distribution of information to individuals and institutions alike.

– originally from Integrationalism

The Journal for Biological & Health Innovation is accepting papers for peer review now. This journal is specific to Africa and our thoughts, theory, research, practice could have a huge impact on the expeditious development of the rest of the world technologically.