Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks – Page 106

At one time or another, we’ve all been encouraged to “maximize our potential.” In a recent interview, Academic and Entrepreneur Juan Enriquez said that mankind is making progress toward expanding beyond its potential. And the changes, he believes, could be profound.

To illustrate the process, Enriquez theorized what might happen if we were to bring Charles Darwin back to life and drop him in the middle of Trafalgar Square. As Darwin takes out his notebook and starts observing, Enriquez suggested he would likely see what might appear to be a different species. Since Darwin’s time, humans have grown taller, and with 1.5 billion obese people, larger. Darwin might also notice some other features too that many of us take for granted — there are more senior citizens, more people with all their teeth, a lot fewer wrinkles, and even some 70-year-olds running in marathons.

“There’s a whole series of morphologies that are just different about our bodies, but we don’t notice it. We don’t notice we’ve doubled the lifespan of humans in the last century,” Enriquez said. “We don’t notice how many more informations (sic) come into a brain in a single day versus what used to come in in a lifetime. So, across almost every part of humanity, there have been huge changes.”

Part of the difference that Darwin would see, Enriquez noted, is that natural selection no longer applies as strongly to life and death as it once did. Further, random gene mutations that led to some advantages kept getting passed down to generations and became part of the species. The largest difference, however, is our ongoing move toward intelligent design, he said.

“We’re getting to the stage where we want to tinker with humans. We want to insert this gene so this person doesn’t get a deadly disease. We want to insert this gene so that maybe the person performs better on an 8,000 meter peak climb, or in sports, or in beauty, or in different characteristics,” Enriquez said. “Those are questions we never used to have to face before because there was one way of having sex and now there’s at least 17.”

According to Enriquez, the concept of evolving ourselves is an important one because we are the first and only species on earth that has deliberately taken control over the pattern of evolution of what lives and dies (Science Magazine seems to agree). The technologies we’re developing now towards this goal provide us with an instrument for the a potential longer survival of the species than might otherwise be possible.

Those notions, however, raise a number of moral and ethical questions. “What is humanity…where do we want to take it?” Enriquez poses. While he noted that it’s easy to project that tinkering with humanity will lead to a dystopic future, he remains cautiously optimistic about our potential.

“I think we’ve become a much more domesticated species. We’re far less likely to murder each other than we were 50 years ago, 100 years ago or 200 years ago. We have learned how to live together in absolutely massive cities,” Enriquez said. “I think we have become far more tolerant of other religions (and) other races. There are places where this hasn’t happened but, on the whole, life has gotten a whole lot better in the last two or three hundred years and as you’re looking at that, I think we will have the tolerance for different choices made with these very instruments, and I think that’s a good thing.”

As he looks at the future of evolving humanity, Enriquez sees reasons for a great deal of optimism in the realm of single gene modification, especially in the area of eradicating disease and inherited conditions. The consequences, however, are still an unknown.

“In the UK, there was a question, ‘Do we insert gene code into a fertilized egg to cure a deadly disease?’ That is a real question, because that would keep these babies from dying early from these horrendous diseases,” Enriquez said. “The consequences of that are, for the first time, probably in the next year, you’ll have the first child born to three genetic parents.”

The path toward evolving human intelligence in the near future isn’t as cut and dry, Enriquez said. Once we establish the implications and morality between governments, religious organizations, and the scientific community, there are still plenty of hurdles to clear.

“There have been massive studies in China and we haven’t yet identified genes correlated to intelligence, even though we believe intelligence has significant inherited capacity,” Enriquez said. “I think you have to separate reality from fiction. The ability to insert a gene or two, and really modify the intelligence of human beings, I think, is highly unlikely in the next decade or two decades.”

Blinded by the light of a falling meteor, David has a devastating car accident, leading to a profound discovery: an extra-terrestrial organism that may contain the secret of life itself. When David goes missing for two days, Annabelle searches for her father only to discover him wandering the forest, without so much as a scratch. David’s mysterious reappearance draws the attention of federal authorities and gives Annabelle reason to doubt his sanity. But David has a new sense of purpose, fueled by nightmarish visions. Driven by what he believes is an otherworldly purpose, David must convince Annabelle to believe him and complete his task before government agents can stop him, and before the world destroys itself.

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The “Fermi Paradox” and “The Great Filter.”

Our universe is huge and some parts are very old and if we somehow happen to live on a planet that’s fairly young, aliens must also exist somewhere. But where the hell are they? Kurz Gesagt tries to find an answer in this beautiful animation explainer that traces on The Fermi Paradox and different kinds of potential civilizations.

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Don’t panic.

Unless the dolphins start leaving the planet.

At that point, by all mean panic.

If you saw a fireball streaking across the skies of Georgia and other parts of the Southeast Thursday night, you’re not alone. NASA confirmed meteor sightings near Atlanta and other parts of southern states. No, it’s not Doomsday, the end of the world, and it wasn’t a UFO or signs of extraterrestrial visitors.

Continue reading “Meteor Fireball Terrorizes Georgia Residents: NASA Confirms Asteroid Chunk Flying Near Atlanta, Other Sightings” | >

It seems like every day we’re warned about a new, AI-related threat that could ultimately bring about the end of humanity. According to Author and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, those existential risks aren’t so black and white, and an individual’s ability to influence those risks might surprise you.

Image Credit: TED
Image Credit: TED

Bostrom defines an existential risk as one distinction of earth originating life or the permanent and drastic destruction of our future development, but he also notes that there is no single methodology that is applicable to all the different existential risks (as more technically elaborated upon in this Future of Humanity Institute study). Rather, he considers it an interdisciplinary endeavor.

“If you’re wondering about asteroids, we have telescopes, we can study them with, we can look at past crater impacts and derive hard statistical data on that,” he said. “We find that the risk of asteroids is extremely small and likewise for a few of the other risks that arrive from nature. But other really big existential risks are not in any direct way susceptible to this kind of rigorous quantification.”

In Bostrom’s eyes, the most significant risks we face arise from human activity and particularly the potential dangerous technological discoveries that await us in the future. Though he believes there’s no way to quantify the possibility of humanity being destroyed by a super-intelligent machine, a more important variable is human judgment. To improve assessment of existential risk, Bostrom said we should think carefully about how these judgments are produced and whether the biases that affect those judgments can be avoided.

“If your task is to hammer a nail into a board, reality will tell you if you’re doing it right or not. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a Communist or a Nazi or whatever crazy ideologies you have, you’ll learn quite quickly if you’re hammering the nail in wrong,” Bostrom said. “If you’re wrong about what the major threats are to humanity over the next century, there is not a reality click to tell you if you’re right or wrong. Any weak bias you might have might distort your belief.”

Noting that humanity doesn’t really have any policy designed to steer a particular course into the future, Bostrom said many existential risks arise from global coordination failures. While he believes society might one day evolve into a unified global government, the question of when this uniting occurs will hinge on individual contributions.

“Working toward global peace is the best project, just because it’s very difficult to make a big difference there if you’re a single individual or a small organization. Perhaps your resources would be better put to use if they were focused on some problem that is much more neglected, such as the control problem for artificial intelligence,” Bostrom said. “(For example) do the technical research to figure that, if we got the ability to create super intelligence, the outcome would be safe and beneficial. That’s where an extra million dollars in funding or one extra very talented person could make a noticeable difference… far more than doing general research on existential risks.”

Looking to the future, Bostrom feels there is an opportunity to show that we can do serious research to change global awareness of existential risks and bring them into a wider conversation. While that research doesn’t assume the human condition is fixed, there is a growing ecosystem of people who are genuinely trying to figure out how to save the future, he said. As an example of how much influence one can have in reducing existential risk, Bostrom noted that a lot more people in history have believed they were Napoleon, yet there was actually only one Napoleon.

“You don’t have to try to do it yourself… it’s usually more efficient to each do whatever we specialize in. For most people, the most efficient way to contribute to eliminating existential risk would be to identify the most efficient organizations working on this and then support those,” Bostrom said. “The values on the line in terms of how many happy lives could exist in humanity’s future, even a very small probability of impact in that, would probably be worthwhile in pursuing”.

Now there’s a lifeboat. However my life may be extended, if anyone lives that long or some future generation has to deal with it, at some point this universe will be far less friendly to life than it already is. So, a way out?

Billions of years from now, the universe as we know it will cease to exist. The good news is, that gives us a lot of time to prepare, and maybe even figure out a way to cheat cosmic death. Here are some possible ways our descendants might survive a cosmological apocalypse.

The Universe, like the organisms that reside within it, is a mortal entity. Born in the Big Bang, it will eventually meet its fate through an equally cataclysmic process, whether it be in the form of a Big Rip, a Big Crunch, or an eternal deep freeze. Regardless, all life as we know it will be extinguished.

Unless, of course, our highly advanced offspring can find a way to escape the confines of the cosmos—or more radically, change the rules of the cosmological game.

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Equal parts interesting and disturbing.

Mass extinctions occurring over the past 260 million years were likely caused by comet and asteroid showers, a new study concludes. An artist’s illustration of a major asteroid impact on Earth. (credit: NASA/Don Davis)

Mass extinctions occurring over the past 260 million years were likely caused by comet and asteroid showers, scientists conclude in a new study published in an open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For more than 30 years, scientists have argued about a controversial hypothesis relating to periodic mass extinctions and impact craters — caused by comet and asteroid showers — on Earth.

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Today on Far Future Horizons we present another exciting episode of the acclaimed documentary series How the Universe Works ~ Weapons of Mass Extinction.

The Universe is a very dangerous place to live. Death and destruction lie all around us. The Cosmic Grim Reaper lies in wait; scythe in hand, in some dark corner of the universe ever ready to bestow some dark faith upon us.

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