Gary Scott Danford, Ph.D., University at Buffalo, The State University
of New York, has developed Lifeboat related course materials suitable
for college work which he has already successfully used in his classes.
To get a complete copy of the course materials, contact
education@lifeboat.com with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation
Coursework".
Below is part of the project description of the course.
Following the most recent round of terrorist attacks, the federal Office
of Homeland Defense began soliciting terrorism scenarios from movie
producers for closer study by teams of analysts representing agencies
ranging from private think tanks to the federal government's own
security and intelligence communities.
The first movie scenario came from the film Outbreak (1995). It
demonstrated, in chilling detail, how even a single incident could
easily eradicate the entire population of a country the size of the
United States in mere days. The second movie scenario came from 12
Monkeys (1995) which illustrated how even a single person with access to
the right materials could exterminate over five billion people in a
matter of weeks.
These scenarios raised possibilities that the Office of Homeland Defense
had not anticipated in their media hyped "war on terrorism". What if
the threat wasn't from an organized group or state? What if the threat
came from a single incident caused by a single person — an incident
that, once initiated, spread so rapidly there wouldn't be enough time to
defend against it?
The response of the majority of the staff in the Office of Homeland
Defense was that it would be nearly impossible to provide defense
against such a prospect. And so, the scenario was hastily buried.
There was a dissenting minority response, however. Certain analysts
from two of the federal government's intelligence communities —
specifically the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) — were not convinced that such scenarios
were beyond our defense capabilities.
So when the Office of Homeland Defense decided not to pursue such
possibilities, these analysts took their arguments back to their own
agencies. In response, the NSA and CIA quietly formed a joint project
team whose charge was to develop a plan to ensure the survival of the
human race in the event that it were to be threatened by an abrupt
extinction level event. This project was code-named "Memento Mori"
(translation: "a reminder of mortality").
This collective identified six potential plans that offered hope for the
survival of the human race in the face of such a precipitous event. In
late December, the NSA and CIA secretly began contacting a small number
of individuals to task them with the responsibility of developing
detailed proposals for each of these strategies over the next three
months.
As a free-lance contractor to both of these agencies for a number of
years, I was one of the individuals contacted. Because of my classified
experiences with the programming and design of isolated and confined
environments in hostile settings (i.e., my two year stint with the Ames
Research Center in California and the Johnson Space Center in Texas
examining "Psychosocial Factors" as Prime Drivers for the Design of
NASA's Space Station), I was entrusted to develop the strategy
code-named "Battlestar" — a plan to produce a virtual "Noah's ark"
in
space.
After necessarily brief and often heated negotiations over one long
weekend in early January, I was ultimately granted unprecedented
security concessions that would permit me to develop the "Battlestar"
plan in a totally unique manner. Given the compelling advantages of
hiding this project in plain sight (which included giving the NSA and
CIA "plausible deniability" since they would "obviously" never undertake
such a classified project in this matter), I was authorized to conduct
this three month project completely in the open as an "academic
exercise" associated with a course here at the university. After giving
it additional thought, I decided to conduct this project by making "the
planning, programming and design of a space settlement" into a group
project assignment for all students registered in this semester's
course.
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