Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 546

A way to speed up quantum computer tech progress has arrived from Intel. If you are interested in following the waves and advances in quantum computing, then get familiar with this word trio: Cryogenic Wafer Prober. Before their design, the electrical characterization of qubits was slower than with traditional transistors. Even small subsets of data might take days to collect.

Drug development. Chemistry. Climate change. Financial modeling. Scientists in all areas look forward to more advancements to push quantum computers to the frontlines. Speeding progress could also mean speeding up advancements in science and industry.

“Quantum computing, in essence, is the ultimate in , with the potential to tackle problems conventional computers can’t handle,” said Intel.

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When was the last time you thought about your breathing? Take a breath right now and think about it. You breathe because you need oxygen, a gas which makes up 21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. All that oxygen has to come from somewhere. You might already know that it comes from photosynthetic organisms like plants. But did you know that most of the oxygen you breathe comes from organisms in the ocean?

That’s right—more than half of the oxygen you breathe comes from marine photosynthesizers, like phytoplankton and seaweed. Both use carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun to make food for themselves, releasing oxygen in the process. In other words, they photosynthesize. And they do it in the ocean.

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Circa 2012

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Artist’s concept of a Kardashev Type 2 civilization (credit: Chris Cold)

Lt Col Garretson — one of the USAF’s most farsighted and original thinkers — has been at the forefront of USAF strategy on the long-term future in projects such as Blue Horizons (on KurzweilAI — see video), Energy Horizons, Space Solar Power, the AF Futures Game, the USAF Strategic Environmental Assessment, and the USAF RPA Flight Plan. Now in this exclusive to KurzweilAI, he pushes the boundary of long-term thinking about humanity’s survival out to the edge … and beyond. — Ed.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force or the U.S. government.

It isn’t enough just to plan for two or 20, or even the fabled Chinese 100 year periods. We need to be thinking and planning on the order of billions of years. Our civilization needs inter-generational plans and goals that span as far out as we can forecast significant events.

Continue reading “What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan” | >

According to the Bulletin, we’ve done nothing in the past year to make the situation any less precarious — humanity still faces not one, but two “existential threats” in the form of nuclear weapons and climate change.

While the clock remains set at 11:58, the potential of either threat to destroy humanity has increased over the past 12 months, according to the Bulletin’s 2019 statement. We must do something to alter our path.

“Though unchanged from 2018, this setting should be taken not as a sign of stability but as a stark warning to leaders and citizens around the world,” the scientists wrote. “The current international security situation — what we call the ‘new abnormal’ — has extended over two years now… Th e longer world leaders and citizens carelessly inhabit this new and abnormal reality, the more likely the world is to experience catastrophe of historic proportions.”

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This thesis has been rolling around like a marble in the bowl of a lot of people’s brains for a while now, and many of those marbles were handed out by Martin Ford, in his 2015 book, “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.” In the book, and in an essay in “Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work” (Cornell), Ford acknowledges that all other earlier robot-invasion panics were unfounded. In the nineteenth century, people who worked on farms lost their jobs when agricultural processes were mechanized, but they eventually earned more money working in factories. In the twentieth century, automation of industrial production led to warnings about “unprecedented economic and social disorder.” Instead, displaced factory workers moved into service jobs. Machines eliminate jobs; rising productivity creates new jobs.

Probably, but don’t count yourself out.

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  • After years of development, the housing startup Arkup has debuted a floating home that can withstand rising sea levels and Category 4 hurricanes.
  • The home contains a hydraulic system that lifts it above water and anchors it during heavy winds.
  • Arkup envisions a future where entire communities in Miami and other major cities are designed to float.

When the housing startup Arkup revealed its plan to build a floating, hurricane-proof yacht in 2017, South Florida had just witnessed the devastating effects of Hurricane Irma, a Category 4 storm that destroyed hundreds of residences.

The company’s models were designed to weather a storm of that magnitude, but it would be another two years before they became a reality.

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Recently University of Glasgow developed a Graphene based E-Skin for prosthetic limbs. The research started with making a prosthetic arm that could sense even the minutest of pressure for gripping soft objects. It eventually yielded a prosthetic limb that was also self powering.

This was because of the development of Graphene based supercapacitors.

Graphene is now being explored for wearable electronics and health pathes because of its flexibility and ability to pick the smallest of signals.

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