Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Our LifeShield Bunkers program is a compliment to our Space Habitats program. It is a fallback position in case programs such as our BioShield and NanoShield fail globally or locally.

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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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  Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, the only major IM client that both securely authenticates conversation participants and encrypts the communication, donates over $10,000 to Lifeboat Foundation.

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  Dante S. Lauretta joins our Space Settlement Board.
   
  Dante is Principal Investigator of OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer), a NASA asteroid study and sample return mission.

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  The Lifeboat Foundation and its donors sponsored our board member Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka into Zero G.
   
  After experiencing Zero G, Wole said: “Hitchless flight. Thank you again for the remarkable experience which I’m still digesting.”
   
  Watch Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Winner Stephen Hawking also enjoy Zero G!

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  Buzz Aldrin joins our Space Settlement Board.
   
  On July 20, 1969, Buzz and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. An estimated 600 million people — at that time, the world's largest television audience in history — witnessed this unprecedented heroic endeavor.

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  Read Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web by Nova Spivack.

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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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  Henry Markram, director of IBM’s Blue Brain Project, joins our Neuroscience Board. The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the human brain onto a massive supercomputer.

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  Jody Westby, CEO and Founder of Global Cyber Risk, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. She chairs the American Bar Association’s Privacy & Computer Crime Committee and represents the ABA on the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists.

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  Lijie “Grace” Zhang, coauthor of The Role of Tissue Engineering in Articular Cartilage Repair and Regeneration and Carbon Nanofibers and Carbon Nanotubes in Regenerative Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.

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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.