Lifeboat Foundation

Allen McDuffee

Spying could become much easier if a new lightweight, folding satellite concept gets off the ground.

Darpa, the military’s futuristic research agency, says it has plans to “break the glass ceiling” of space telescopes by shooting a new design into orbit that’s made of plastic and unfolds into a mammoth satellite that would dwarf the world’s most famous telescopes.

Continue reading “DARPA designs giant foldable satellite capable of surveiling 40% of Earth (VIDEO)” »

Ian Sample and agencies

A soldier whose arm was blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan has become the first person in the UK to master a prosthetic limb controlled by thought.

Corporal Andrew Garthwaite, 26, has spent two years learning how to move the arm and grip objects after a six-hour operation to have the limb wired into his body at a medical facility in Vienna.

Continue reading “Soldier controls bionic arm using power of thought” »

This is an excerpt from the conclusion section of, “…NASA’s Managerial and Leadership Methodology, Now Unveiled!..!” by Mr. Andres Agostini, that discusses some management theories and practices. To read the entire piece, just click the link at the end of this illustrated article and presentation:

In addition to being aware and adaptable and resilient before the driving forces reshaping the current present and the as-of-now future, there are some extra management suggestions that I concurrently practice:

1. Given the vast amount of insidious risks, futures, challenges, principles, processes, contents, practices, tools, techniques, benefits and opportunities, there needs to be a full-bodied practical and applicable methodology (methodologies are utilized and implemented to solve complex problems and to facilitate the decision-making and anticipatory process).

The manager must always address issues with a Panoramic View and must also exercise the envisioning of both the Whole and the Granularity of Details, along with the embedded (corresponding) interrelationships and dynamics (that is, [i] interrelationships and dynamics of the subtle, [ii] interrelationships and dynamics of the overt and [iii] interrelationships and dynamics of the covert).

Continue reading “NASA's Managerial and Leadership Methodology” »

Continue reading “US Navy launches drone from submerged submarine” »

By Paul Rosenzweig
Monday, December 2, 2013 at 7:00 AM

For those who haven’t been following along, this recent story about 3D printing of plastic guns should be a revelation. 3D printing is one of those technologies where the reality is fast outrunning our imagination. It is, in essence, the ability to construct a product from feedstock using a readily available “printer” linked to a computer where the source code for the product is executed. According the Washington Post’s story, the new plastic guns are capable of firing lethal rounds and, naturally, they are beyond the detection of metal detectors.

But for every “parade of horrible story” about 3D printing there’s also one of great promise. For example, NASA recently announced plans to send a 3D printer to the space station. This development, combined with the development of printing for metal objects (from liquid metal feedstock) means that many of our concepts of logistics will go out the window. If a manufacturer can construct metal parts from an easily transported feed stock then, as Andrew Filo, a consultant with NASA on the 3D space station printing project, said: “You can get rid of concepts like rationing, scarce or irreplaceable.” That’s a truly extraordinary development.

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Meta-materials — materials that have been engineered to have properties that absolutely do not exist in nature — such as negative refraction — are unraveling interesting possibilities in future engineering. The discovery of negative refraction has led to the creation of invisibility cloaks, for example, which seamlessly bend light and other electromagnetic radiation around an object, though such are normally restricted to cumbersome laboratory experiments with split-ring resonators and/or restricted to an insufficient slice of spectrum.

A recent article in ExtremeTech drew attention to the world’s first quantum meta-material, created recently by a team of German material scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It is believed such quantum meta-material can overcome the main problem with traditional meta-materials based on split-ring resonators, which can only be tuned to a small range of frequencies and not conducive to operate across a useful slice of spectrum. While fanciful applications such as quantum birefringence and super-radiant phase transitions are cited it is perhaps invisibility cloaks that until very recently seemed a forte of science fiction.

Breakthroughs at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan have also made great strides in building quantum invisibility cloaks, and as the arXiv blog on TechnologyReview recently commented ‘invisibility cloaks are all the rage these days’. With such breakthroughs, these technologies may soon find mass take-up in future consumer products & security, and also have abundant military uses — where it may find the financial stimulus to advance the technology to its true capabilities. Indeed researchers in China have been looking into how to mass-produce invisibility cloaks from materials such as Teflon. We’ll all be invisible soon.

Continue reading “Quantum Metamaterial and the Feasibility of Invisiblity Cloaks” »

As the Western media and governments continue poking fun and demonizing a very misunderstood country, there are a group of people who are taking it upon themselves in ignoring the propaganda and instead reaching out with compassion and understanding. These people are visiting and working in North Korea. They’re not North Koreans, but the love and connection they’ve gained with the North Korean people is real and deserve to have their stories told.

DMZ Northern Commander and former American commander, Michael Bassett, hug during the April 2013 Period of Brinksmanship. (Photo credit Joseph Ferris)

I’ve interviewed a few people of importance in gaining greater insight into the country, its people, its military, and its government. It is my goal in providing an open venue for them to speak out and hopefully gain enough attention for others to follow suit.

Here I’ve interviewed Michael Bassett and Felix Abt. Mr. Bassett is a decorated Army Veteran who holds a BA in International Communication from the American University in Washington DC, a graduate certificate in North Korean Affairs from Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, South Korea, and is currently working on his MA in Public Diplomacy from the American University.

Continue reading “Ruling the Rhetoric on North Korea: A Pedagogical Perspective” »

My paper “New Evidence, Conditions, Instruments & Experiments for Gravitational Theories” was finally published by the Journal of Modern Physics, Vol. 8A, 2013. That is today Aug 26, 2013.

Over the last several years I had been compiling a list of inconsistencies in modern contemporary physics. This paper documents 12 inconsistencies. If I’m correct there will sooner or later, be a massive rewrite of modern physical theories, because I do not just criticize contemporary theories but critique them, i.e. provide positive suggestions based on empirical data, on how our theories need to be modified.

The upshot of all this is that I was able to propose two original, new experiments, never before contemplated in physics journals. Both involve new experimental devices, and one is so radically new that it is unthinkable. This is the gravity wave *telescope*.

The new physics lends itself to a new and different forms of weaponizations achievable within the next few decades, with technologies *not* predicted in science fiction. How about that?

Continue reading “From New Physics to New Weapons Technologies” »

This essay was also published by the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies and by Transhumanity under the title “Is Price Performance the Wrong Measure for a Coming Intelligence Explosion?”.

Introduction

Most thinkers speculating on the coming of an intelligence explosion (whether via Artificial-General-Intelligence or Whole-Brain-Emulation/uploading), such as Ray Kurzweil [1] and Hans Moravec [2], typically use computational price performance as the best measure for an impending intelligence explosion (e.g. Kurzweil’s measure is when enough processing power to satisfy his estimates for basic processing power required to simulate the human brain costs $1,000). However, I think a lurking assumption lies here: that it won’t be much of an explosion unless available to the average person. I present a scenario below that may indicate that the imminence of a coming intelligence-explosion is more impacted by basic processing speed – or instructions per second (ISP), regardless of cost or resource requirements per unit of computation, than it is by computational price performance. This scenario also yields some additional, counter-intuitive conclusions, such as that it may be easier (for a given amount of “effort” or funding) to implement WBE+AGI than it would be to implement AGI alone – or rather that using WBE as a mediator of an increase in the rate of progress in AGI may yield an AGI faster or more efficiently per unit of effort or funding than it would be to implement AGI directly.

Loaded Uploads:

Continue reading “How Could WBE+AGI be Easier than AGI Alone?” »