Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks – Page 83

In the future, we may have to deal with biological weapons that target specific groups of people, passing over everyone else.

That’s according to a new report out of Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk reviewed by The Telegraph. In it, the Cambridge researchers argue that world governments have failed to prepare for futuristic weapons based on advanced technology like artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation — or even a killer pathogen designed to kill only people of a particular race.

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The asteroid managed to get within just 73,000 kilometers of our planet without anyone noticing. The miss lends a new sense of urgency to preparations for a potential collision one day.

The news: On Thursday July 25 an asteroid dubbed “Asteroid 2019 OK”, measuring 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), got uncomfortably close to Earth, according to NASA’s near-Earth objects database. It was less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon away, making it a very close call in space terms. If it had landed on a populated area it could have caused major damage, although this outcome is statistically quite unlikely.

Should we worry? It’s hard not to feel concerned that a “city-killer” sized asteroid wasn’t detected further ahead of time. It was announced just hours before it passed by Earth, after being detected just a few days beforehand by teams in the US and Brazil. Its relatively small size, unusual orbit, and fast speed all conspired to make it tough to spot, researchers told the Washington Post.

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Now, it seems this nascent industry’s time has come. A growing demand for batteries to power electric cars and to store wind and solar energy has driven up the cost of many rare-earth metals and bolstered the business case for sea-bed mining. What’s more, the industry’s long-awaited regulations — in the form of a mining code — are due to be finalized by 2020, putting in place a process whereby contractors can apply for 30-year licences to mine assigned ‘claim areas’ in parts of the international sea bed such as the CCZ. Already, miners are exploring the potential wealth of these claim areas, but no commercial extraction will begin until the regulations are in place. Investments in this industry are now growing.

Plans are advancing to harvest precious ores from the ocean floor, but scientists say that companies have not tested them enough to avoid devastating damage.

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It appears that the physics of information holds the key to the solution of the Fermi Paradox — indications are that we most likely live in a “Syntellect Chrysalis” (or our “second womb”) instead of a “cosmic jungle.”

Within the next few decades, we’ll transcend our biology by leaving today’s organic Chrysalis behind, by leaving our second womb, by leaving our cradle, if speaking in tropes.

This particular version of “human universe” is what we “see” from within our dimensional cocoon, it’s a construct of our minds but by no means represents objective reality “out there” including our most advanced models such as M-theory that are only approximations at best.

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I used to think that we live in some sort of a “cosmic jungle”, so the Zoo Hypothesis (like Star Trek Prime Directive) should be the correct explanation to the Fermi Paradox, right? I wouldn’t completely rule out this hypothesis insofar as a theorist Michio Kaku allegorically compares our earthly civilization to an “anthill” next to the “ten-lane superhighway” of a galactic-type civilization. Over time, however, I’ve come to realize that the physics of information holds the key to the solution of the Fermi Paradox — indications are we most likely live in a “syntellect chrysalis” instead of a “cosmic jungle.”

Just like a tiny mustard seed in the soil, we’ll get to grow out of the soil, see “the light of the day” and network by roots and pollen with others, at the cosmic level of emergent complexity — as a civilizational superorganism endowed with its own advanced extradimensional consciousness. So, one day our Syntellect, might “wake up” as some kind of a newborn baby of the intergalactic family (or multiversal family, for that matter – that remains to be seen) within the newly perceived reality framework. Call it the Chrysalis Conjecture, if you’d like.*.

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