Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Ebrima Ceesay of Booz Allen Hamilton, who consults on information security, forensics, data mining, and machine learning, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.

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  The Lifeboat Foundation now has a new official song! (You may also be cheered up by this song.)

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  The Lifeboat Foundation presented the Lifeboat to the Stars award to Kevin J. Anderson and Steven Savile for their collaborative book Tau Ceti. The authors split the $1,000 prize, and each received a handsome trophy in an hourglass design.
   
  This award honors the best work of science fiction of any length contributing to an understanding of the benefits, means, and difficulties of interstellar travel.
   
  Coordinating judge was Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell Award-winning science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, and the other judges were Catherine Asaro, Jason Batt, Sherry E. Bell, Kevin M. Berry, Brenda Cooper, Niklas Järvstråt, Jim Karkanias, Rouslan Krechetnikov, Eva-Jane Lark, Mike E. McCulloch, George Perry, John K. Strickland Jr., and Allen G. Taylor.

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  Our AIShield program is designed to protect against unfriendly AI (Artificial Intelligence).
   
  Why the first AGI is unlikely to be Friendly AI: Even if it was somehow possible with our primitive tools to design self-awareness into an AI, it is worth noting that the vast majority of AI under development is not being designed to be Friendly AI so we need to be prepared for the first AGI to not be inherently “friendly”.

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  The research paper Human Brain/Cloud Interface has been published by our Amara D. Angelica, Frank J. Boehm, Krishnan Chakravarthy, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Steven A. Garan, Tad Hogg, Mikhail A. Lebedev, Nuno R. B. Martins, Jeffrey V. Rosenfeld, Yuriy Svidinenko, and Melanie Swan.

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  Watch demonstration of the Z450 Full Color 3D Printer on our Videos page. (Real product that makes three dimensional objects.)

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  Our Roger Brent has authored the special report With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Time for the Synthetic Biology Community to Acknowledge Three Responsibilities.

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  We have College classroom tested coursework available which was developed by Gary Scott Danford, Ph.D., University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

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  Read SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS…Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory by David Brin.

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  Philippe Van Nedervelde joins the Lifeboat 500, becoming one of a few special individuals and organizations to make a meaningful, but affordable commitment of the price of a cup of coffee a day, in order to help us grow!

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  Aaron Balogun is one of our LinkedIn Managers. He is also Account Manager at Capitol Advantage and Director of Operations at Flanagan Consulting, LLC.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.