Lifeboat Foundation

This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the SENS Research Foundation in Mountain View, California, February 2013.

“The first person to live to 150 is alive today.” That was the promise featured on a billboard from the insurance giant Prudential in the year 2013. The advertisement was perhaps representative of a growing awareness that the possibility of substantially extended human longevity was, if not around the corner, no longer a science fiction daydream. Later the same year, search leader Google established a company, Calico, specifically dedicated to rethinking aging. It seemed as though the existing paradigm, in which thinking about longevity was all well and good — but actually investing in it crossed over into madness — was starting to crumble.

Despite these outward signs of change however, polls indicated that most people were not interested in investing — financially or emotionally — in longevity. Many saw in longevity research the problems implicit in the message of the Insurance billboard: “If I live to 150, won’t I run out of money? Will I ever be able to retire? Wouldn’t dying at 80 or 90 be just fine, really?”

Continue reading “Dr. Aubrey de Grey: When Do You Want to Die?” »

To Omniscience or To Not Omniscience? By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

FULL EXPLANATION OF: TO OMNISCIENCE OR TO NOT OMNISCIENCE http://linkd.in/1AdDCVc

Continue reading “To Omniscience or To Not Omniscience? By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini — http://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini — http://www.LINKEDIN.com/in/andresagostini” »

from Erik Wernquist

Wanderers — a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

FUTURISM UPDATE (January 02, 2015) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn

PHYS.ORG: Thermodynamic analysis reveals large overlooked role of oil and other energy sources in the economy http://phys.org/news/2014-12-thermodynamic-analysis-reve…ooked.html

PHYS.ORG: Scientists identify patterns of RNA regulation in the nuclei of plants http://phys.org/news/2014-12-scientists-patterns-rna-nuclei.html

PHYS.ORG: Unique Sulawesi frog gives birth to tadpoles http://phys.org/news/2014-12-unique-sulawesi-frog-birth-tadpoles.html

Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (January 02, 2015) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn” »

FUTURISM UPDATE (January 01, 2015) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn

TECHCRUNCH: The Grid Uses Artificial Intelligence To Design Your Websites For You http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/08/the-grid-uses-artificial-in…s-for-you/

WHITE SWAN BOOK: US and European visions of connected objects at Odds https://lnkd.in/e_kBdXV

Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (January 01, 2015) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn” »

Everyone can witness it in the scientifically well-researched blockbuster movie “Interstellar”: The protagonist had to travel fairly deep down to the vicinity of the surface of a giant black hole while feeling absolutely normal there. But there he realizes that when he is to come back home soon, decades will have passed by out there owing to his momentarily heavily slowed clocks and aging. Hence he is younger now than his own daughter whom he had so reluctantly left behind. This is the ingenious part of the script. The rest of the movie becomes inconsistent, the viewer realizes: The crew next goes down much deeper to reach the horizon and travel through the wormhole (and so a second time on the way back), but this time around the matching infinitely fast aging rate in the outside world is swept under the rug for the sake of the narrative having a happy end.

My point is that near the horizon itself, the slowdown becomes infinite. Hence “infinity plus infinity equals zero” is the axiom presupposed in the movie’s second part. Therefore we can dismiss that part as crab? Please, do not do so: this part describes exactly what modern physics is teaching. That is, the movie’s inconsistent second part is the current textbook knowledge: a belief in the presence of “equal rights” between the two time scales, the one outside and the one downstairs in gravity. This is the canonical teaching in physics for 75 years – ever since 1939 when J. Robert Oppenheimer unwittingly laid the ground to this logical error in his ingenious paper, written jointly with Hartland Snyder, in which the physical existence of stellar black holes was first predicted. It is highly technical (http://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.56.455 ).

Following 1939, only the “Russian school” avoided the mentioned error by speaking of “frozen stars” rather than of “stellar black holes.” Eventually, however, peer pressure from the West caused this view to fall into oblivion following the end of the cold war. The once correctly recognized “freezing of time near a black hole” was forgotten by the profession. Interstellar now brought it to the whole world.

The mentioned emotional scene (a father suffering in his heart because the imperceptible slowing-down of time that holds true for him near a mega black hole implies that his beloved young daughter will no longer be a child on his impending return) is now an eye-opener for the whole planet.

Continue reading “‘Infinity plus Infinity equals zero’: A logical Error made by the Physics Profession” »

by Frederic Lardinois — TechCrunch

Designing a good-looking website has never been easy, and while many services promise to let you build a site without ever having to touch any code, you quickly reach their limits if you want to have a more advanced site. The Grid, which is launching its crowdfunding campaign today, promises to do away with all of this. Instead of designing your site pixel by pixel yourself, The Grid team wants to use artificial intelligence to design your site based on your content and goals (more followers, more customers, higher sales, etc.).

Read more

WHITE SWAN BOOK: 10 Threats Worse Than Artificial Intelligence http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/10-thre…id/1318210

WHITE SWAN BOOK: KURZWEIL: Human-Level AI Is Coming By 2029 http://www.businessinsider.com/ray-kurzweil-thinks-well-have…014-12

Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (December 31, 2014) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon, LinkedIn” »

Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.

The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.

Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/