Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Do you have free or inexpensive space available for an entertaining Lifeboat Foundation volunteer? If so, send a message to [email protected] with the subject “Lifeboat Foundation Space”.

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  Famous YouTube personality Scott Manley joins our Space Settlement Board. Scott makes videos discussing space-related topics and news, mainly concerning up-to-date rocket science developments. In recognition of his work as a popular science communicator, asteroid 33434 Scottmanley was named after him.
   
  Author Anne McCaffrey consulted with Scott on the effects of asteroid impacts while writing The Skies of Pern, determining the orbit of the comet and providing advice on how the event sho$
   
  Watch Scott’s YouTube channel!

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  We now have quotes by Ray Kurzweil on our Quotes page. Ray Kurzweil has donated more than $10,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation.

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  Jill Tarter joins our Astrobiology/SETI Board. Jill is known for her work on the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). She holds the Emeritus and Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and is the former director of the Center for SETI Research and has been with SETI since 1984.
   
  Jill’s astronomical work is illustrated in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. In the film version of Contact, the protagonist Ellie Arroway is played by Jodie Foster. Jill conversed with the actress for months before and during filming, and Arroway was largely based on her work.

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  Read the AsteroidShield program completed by our Scientific Advisory Board. Learn about the dangers caused by asteroids and proposed solutions to this problem.

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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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  Teachers in Space won our Dream Project contest. We then worked with them to fund classroom experiments that flew aboard the Perlan II stratospheric glider which just set the world altitude record.
   
  The experiments that we flew with the Perlan II are from the Ashford School in Connecticut (dual geiger counter radiation level testing), Cazenovia School in New York (effects of radiation on plant seeds), and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (marshmallows at high altitude / low pressure). Learn more details of these and of experiments flown in previous years.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Brave New World? A Defense Of Paradise-Engineering.
   
  In the future, it will be feasible technically — at the very least — for pharmacotherapy and genetic medicine to re-engineer us so that we can become — to take one example among billions — a cross between Jesus and Einstein. Potentially, transhumans will be endowed with a greater capacity for love, empathypsychopaths by comparison; and posterity will be right.
   
  In contrast to Brave New World, however, the death of ageing won’t be followed by our swift demise after a sixty-odd year life-span. We’ll have to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of living happily ever after. Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting bliss isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.

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  Lifeboat Foundation launches 3 books! The Lifeboat Foundation has launched three books. They are: The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do, Fourth Edition by Daniel Berleant, Visions of the Future, Second Edition edited by J. Daniel Batt (with 42+ authors!), and Prospects for Human Survival by Willard H. Wells.