Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks

NASA finally approves the launch of an infrared asteroid hunting space telescope able to locate threats 30M miles away…

NASA has approved the Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope to help the space agency be better prepared for future asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth.

The 20-foot-long infrared telescope would help astronomers and planetary scientists find ‘most’ of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit, also known as near-Earth objects (NEOs).

According to NASA, there are just over 25000 NEOs, but many more are waiting to be discovered.

Continue reading “NASA approved a space telescope that could save Earth from an asteroid” | >

Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.

Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.

In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.

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A new topic a new challenge for future civilizations.

I won’t write an introduction I will ask couple of questions to make you think about it.

In the forth industrial revolution are we going to change the way we reproduce? Could be the first step for post-human era in 2040?

How can we change the way we deal with economics? Because economy depends on population grow. In a way or another world population will stop at 11 billion so it is necessary to change the economy.

Continue reading “Spermageddon: are humans going extinct?” | >

DNA was personified in Jurassic Park, where the animated double helix that called himself Mr. DNA took you and a group of skeptical scientists through the oversimplified (and obviously fictional) steps to creating dino DNA — but there is some reality in this.

For all you dinosaur enthusiasts out there, synthesizing DNA can’t bring T.Rex and Brachiosaurus back from extinction. Though creating genes in a lab sounds like the original eureka moment of Jurassic Park, synthesizing human DNA has done everything from genetic sequencing and editing to detecting diseases like the current plague we are living through. There is just one step that has always been problematic.

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An “Other” that poses an existential threat to Humanity or a collective enhancement to assure our survival?

On June 4th, 2021 leading researchers in AI, ASI and AGI will come together to discuss Collective Super-Intelligence in general and the world’s first human-mediated Artificial Super-Intelligence called Uplift in particular.

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They suggest that over the past millennium, the human gut has experienced an “extinction event,” losing dozens of species and becoming significantly less diverse, says lead author and Harvard Medical School microbiologist Aleksandar Kostic. “These are things we don’t get back.”

First DNA from paleofeces show people 1000 years ago in U.S., Mexico had much more diverse gut microbes.

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Scientists around the world have been bamboozled this week by a fictitious asteroid heading toward Earth.

A group of experts from US and European space agencies attended a week-long exercise led by NASA in which they faced a hypothetical scenario: An asteroid 35 million miles away was approaching the planet and could hit within six months.

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In this nearly 4-hour SPECIAL EPISODE, Rob Reid delivers a 100-minute monologue (broken up into 4 segments, and interleaved with discussions with Sam) about the looming danger of a man-made pandemic, caused by an artificially-modified pathogen. The risk of this occurring is far higher and nearer-term than almost anyone realizes.

Rob explains the science and motivations that could produce such a catastrophe and explores the steps that society must start taking today to prevent it. These measures are concrete, affordable, and scientifically fascinating—and almost all of them are applicable to future, natural pandemics as well. So if we take most of them, the odds of a future Covid-like outbreak would plummet—a priceless collateral benefit.

Rob Reid is a podcaster, author, and tech investor, and was a long-time tech entrepreneur. His After On podcast features conversations with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists on topics including synthetic biology, super-AI risk, Fermi’s paradox, robotics, archaeology, and lone-wolf terrorism. Science fiction novels that Rob has written for Random House include The New York Times bestseller Year Zero, and the AI thriller After On. As an investor, Rob is Managing Director at Resilience Reserve, a multi-phase venture capital fund. He co-founded Resilience with Chris Anderson, who runs the TED Conference and has a long track record as both an entrepreneur and an investor. In his own entrepreneurial career, Rob founded and ran Listen.com, the company that created the Rhapsody music service. Earlier, Rob studied Arabic and geopolitics at both undergraduate and graduate levels at Stanford, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Cairo. You can find him at www.after-on.

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