Lifeboat Foundation

Neo-Democracy: The Evolution of the Democratic Republic

Dustin Ashley

Abstract

This essay presents a new political paradigm based upon concepts that originate from direct democracy, meritocracy, technocracy, and egalitarian ideology. I systematically redesign the common political system to where these concepts can complement each other and work as a synergistic whole. The main idea is to recreate the direct democratic system made famous by the ancient Athenians while repurposing it for use in this current era in human history and for many generations to come.

Continue reading “Neo-Democracy: The Evolution of the Democratic Republic” »

Containing more than 160 essays from over 40 contributors, this edited volume of essays on the science, philosophy and politics of longevity considers the project of ending aging and abolishing involuntary death-by-disease from a variety of viewpoints: scientific, technological, philosophical, pragmatic, artistic. In it you will find not only information on the ways in which science and medicine are bringing about the potential to reverse aging and defeat death within many of our own lifetimes, as well as the ways that you can increase your own longevity today in order to be there for tomorrow’s promise, but also a glimpse at the art, philosophy and politics of longevity as well – areas that will become increasingly important as we realize that advocacy, lobbying and activism can play as large a part in the hastening of progress in indefinite lifespans as science and technology can.

The collection is edited by Franco Cortese. Its contributing authors include William H. Andrews, Ph.D., Rachel Armstrong, Ph.D., Jonathan Betchtel, Yaniv Chen, Clyde DeSouza, Freija van Diujne, Ph.D., John Ellis, Ph.D., Linda Gamble, Roen Horn, the International Longevity Alliance (ILA), Zoltan Istvan, David Kekich (President & C.E.O of Maximum Life Foundation), Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., Maria Konovalenko, M.Sc. (Program Coordinator for the Science for Life Extension Foundation), Marios Kyriazis, MD, M.Sc MIBiol, CBiol (Founder of the ELPIs Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans and the medical advisor for the British Longevity Society), John R. Leonard (Director of Japan Longevity Alliance), Alex Lightman, Movement for Indefinite Life Extension (MILE), Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., Tom Mooney (Executive Director of the Coalition to Extend Life), Max More, Ph.D. , B.J. Murphy, Joern Pallensen, Dick Pelletier, Hank Pellissier (Founder of Brighter Brains Institute), Giulio Prisco, Marc Ransford, Jameson Rohrer, Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., MBA, JD., Peter Rothman (editor-in-chief of H+ Magazine), Giovanni Santostasi, Ph.D (Director of Immortal Life Magazine, Eric Schulke, Jason Silva , R.U. Sirius, Ilia Stambler, Ph.D (activist at the International Longevity Alliance), G. Stolyarov II (editor-in-chief of The Rational Argumentator), Winslow Strong, Jason Sussberg, Violetta Karkucinska, David Westmorland, Peter Wicks, Ph.D, and Jason Xu (director of Longevity Party China and Longevity Party Taiwan).

Available on Amazon today!

Just over three months ago I found an organization called “Lifeboat.” I’d been interviewing experts from a variety fields about the issues and opportunities of moving beyond our present human potential (technologically or otherwise), and decided to reach out to a community with many perspectives and different areas of expertise. When I emailed Eric Klein at Lifeboat, my message was something as simple as:

Daniel: “Might it be possible to connect with one of your experts for 15–20 over the course of the coming month? I didn’t want to email them without contacting your Foundation itself, first.”

Eric: “This is fine.”

Little did I know that a message would be cast out to the vast network of Lifeboat members, and the next three months would be a flurry of back-and-forth emails, fascinating conversations, and writing new articles.

Continue reading “Building a Better Future — Lessons from 3 Months of Lifeboat Foundation Expert Interviews” »

The Lifeboat Foundation is Media Partner of the RE.WORK Technology Summit which will be held September 19th in London. This summit is a one day event that brings together entrepreneurship, science, and technology to re-work the future and tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges. Our Rachel Armstrong, Stuart Armstrong, Aubrey de Grey, and Randal Koene will be speaking. RE.WORK is led by our Nikita Johnson. Use the discount code lifeboat25 to receive 25% off standard passes or startup/student passes.

More info:

The RE.WORK Technology Summit is a one day event that brings together entrepreneurship, science, and technology to re-work the future and tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges. The event will showcase the opportunities of breakthrough technologies and their potential for a positive impact on business and society. Emerging technology is providing an unprecedented era of opportunity for entrepreneurs and scientists to progress business and solve global challenges. By 2050 there will be around 9 billion people on the planet, so understanding, knowledge and collaboration is vital to help steer the way to a better world. RE.WORK is focused on generating innovative ideas and encouraging collaboration to solve big, global problems in areas such as increased urbanisation levels, efficient healthcare, sustainable energy solutions, and equal opportunities for all. Technology can have a revolutionary impact on these issues and some of the new products and advances explored at RE.WORK will include progress in the internet of things, sensors, 3D printing, wearable technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

My last twenty-five years as a futurist have conditioned me to search for weak signals of what may be emerging in all areas of society that will impact our Communities of the Future work seeding transformational ideas and methods in local communities to help leaders and citizens prepare themselves for a future that will be increasingly fast paced, interdependent and complex. I always look for some gem of a new idea that is hidden in the context of an article, novel or web journal that causes me to go hmmm? and think about how this new idea connects with our COTF approach to community transformation.

Recently I have read Zoltan Istvan’s novel, The Transhumanist Wager, and found myself often stopping and going hmmm? Although an oversimplification (with apologies to Zoltan), the central theme of the novel is the coming existential crash of science and radical technologies and religion at some point after my life that now registers 71 years on the ageometer.

Although I could present my thoughts about whether humanity should attempt god-like actions to evolve life extending discoveries leading to downloading consciousness into machines to live forever, I would not be objective…feeling the increasing need of a long rest from overactivity during 71 years (-:

There are so many “access” points in Zoltan’s book for thought provoking ideas, that I found myself moving from thinking about the impact of emerging radical technologies on our society and communities to wondering how society was going to be able to develop the resiliency required to be able to adapt to whatever emerges.…whether the mysteries of religion and our existence become encased within a deeper understanding of quantum theory as time moves exponentially, or whether we reach the point of singularity and beyond and become transhuman.

Continue reading “Moving Beyond Ubiquitous Sheepishness” »

By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham

In his essay “Fifty Years Hence”, Winston Churchill speculated, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

At an event in London today, the first hamburger made entirely from meat grown through cell culture will be cooked and consumed before a live audience. In June at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Andras Forgacs took a step even beyond Churchill’s hopes. He unveiled the world’s first leather made from cells grown in the lab.

These are historic events. Ones that will change the discussion about lab-grown meat from blue-skies science to a potential consumer product which may soon be found on supermarket shelves and retail stores. And while some may perceive this development as a drastic shake-up in the world of agriculture, it really is part of the trajectory that agricultural technology is already following.

Continue reading “Meat grown in labs is the next logical step for food production” »

A full view of the future has to consider a huge range of time scales. Freeman Dyson pointed this out (as D. Hutchinson alerted me). I borrowed his idea in the following passage from my book, The Human Race to the Future, published by the Lifeboat Foundation.

—
Our journey into the future begins by asking what the next hundred years will be like. Call that century-long time frame the “first generation” of future history. After a baker’s dozen or so chapters we then move to the second generation — the next order of magnitude after a hundred — the next thousand years. The seventh generation then has a ten million year horizon, the very distant future. Beyond the seventh generation are time horizons above even ten million years. This “powers of ten” scaling of future history was used by well-known physicist Freeman Dyson in chapter 4 of his 1997 book, Imagined Worlds.
—

Technical update on the ebook edition: Many Kindle devices and reader software systems have a menu item for jumping to the table of contents, and another menu item for jumping to the “beginning” of a book, however that is defined. I found out how to build an ebook that defines these locations so that the menu items work. You can use basic html commands. To define the location of the table of contents, you can insert into the html code of the book, right where the table of contents begins, the following html command:

<a name="toc"></a>

Continue reading “The future in 100...1,000...10,000...etc. years” »

The arXiv blog on MIT Technology Review recently reported a breakthrough ‘Physicists Discover the Secret of Quantum Remote Control’ [1] which led some to comment on whether this could be used as an FTL communication channel. In order to appreciate the significance of the paper on Quantum Teleportation of Dynamics [2], one should note that it has already been determined that transfer of information via a quantum tangled pair occurs *at least* 10,000 times faster than the speed of light [3]. The next big communications breakthrough?

In what could turn out to be a major breakthrough for the advancement of long-distance communications in space exploration, several problems are resolved — where if a civilization is eventually established on a star system many light years away, for example, such as on one of the recently discovered Goldilocks Zone super-Earths in the Gliese 667C star system, then communications back to people on Earth may after all be… instantaneous.

However, implications do not just stop there either. As recently reported in The Register [5], researchers in Israel at the University of Jerusalem, have established that quantum tangling can be used to send data across both TIME AND SPACE [6]. Their recent paper entitled ‘Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted’ [7] describes how photon-to-photon entanglement can be used to connect with photons in their past/future, opening up an understanding into how one may be able to engineer technology to not just communicate instantaneously across space — but across space-time.

Continue reading “Quantum Entanglement in Future Communication Technologies” »

Originally posted via The Advanced Apes

Through my writings I have tried to communicate ideas related to how unique our intelligence is and how it is continuing to evolve. Intelligence is the most bizarre of biological adaptations. It appears to be an adaptation of infinite reach. Whereas organisms can only be so fast and efficient when it comes to running, swimming, flying, or any other evolved skill; it appears as though the same finite limits are not applicable to intelligence.

What does this mean for our lives in the 21st century?

Continue reading “The Post-Human World” »