Lifeboat Foundation

[Disclaimer: This contribution does not reflect the views of the Lifeboat Foundation as with the scientific community in general, but individual sentiment — Web Admin]

There is not the slightest alleviation of danger so far. All I can record so far is a stalling in favor of letting CERN continue till the end of the year – its present goal. No immediate safety discussion with CERN is planned by any organization if I am told correctly.

I would very much like to understand the mechanism: How is it possible that so many grown-up persons collude in a game of hide-and-seek: What do they gain by refusing to think and, most of all, discuss?

Their neglect of rationality is unprecedented. Imagine: A whole profession being too weak to find a single counterargument against the reproach of trying to vaporize the planet into a black hole in a few years’ time – with not a single member speaking up in objection!

Continue reading “To Set the Record Straight” »

Our bodies are composed of 50 to 65 percent water. Without it – we die. Yet studies indicate that human beings are destroying this precious resource that is so vital to our very existence.

The Pacific Institute, in a 2010 report issued for Global Water Day, reports that every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water — the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people.¹

The UN estimates that the amount of wastewater produced annually is about 1,500 km, six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. (UN WWAP, 2003) .¹ In fact, more people die from unsafe water annually than from all forms of violence, including war (WHO, 2002).² This Gallup World News report provides a summary of water problems worldwide:

Some think that safe drinking water is easy to find in nations where supermarkets are packed with bottled water – a multibillion-dollar-per-year industry. Yet if you want to drink water that does not have harmful contaminants, the challenge of finding it remains great.

Continue reading “Safe Drinking Water: an endangered resource” »

The avid reader of Lifeboat may have noticed that the debate on LHC safety assurances has recently swerved here towards discussion on astronomical phenomenology — mainly the continued existence of white dwarfs and neutron stars.

The detailed G&M safety report naturally considers both of these, and considers hypothetical stable MBH capture rates based on a weak CR background flux. It actually overlooks better examples of white dwarfs which are part of a binary pair such as Sirius B, the little companion to one of our closest and brightest stars, Sirius A.

One could argue that white dwarfs are not greatly understood — but the relevant factors to the safety debate are quite understood — density, mass, escape velocity, and approximate age of such observed phenomenon. Only magnetic field effects are up for debate.

If Sirius B captured even one such MBH due to CR bombardment from its companion star in the first say 20 million years of its existence — and it would be difficult to argue that it would not — then that MBH would be accreting for the last 100 million years, through far denser material, and most likely at a much higher velocity, than any MBH captured in the Earth due to LHC collisions. Therefore, given the continued existence of Sirius B, accretion rates would therefore have to be incredibly slow and there would be no significant threat to Earth from what would be a much slower MBH accretion rate here.

Continue reading “A muse on why Telemach could actually be a Safety Assurance” »

Relating Black Holes to Old Faithful exploding into a huge volcano and other disasters

Some on this site think there is something unique about the Black Hole controversy. It does affect the whole planet. But most people don’t consider humancide worse than genocide, and humancide not as bad as destroying all life. Americans and Canadians might suffer in an almost total way if Old Faithful geyser and Yellowstone National Park becomes a newly active volcano. http://www.phillyimc.org/en/bee-colony-collapse-and-dealing-disaster

On the cusp of graduation, I’ve had two major realizations in college.

One: most of America’s worst economic crises have been a result of financial obscurity. The first major crash in my lifetime was in the tech bubble of the early 2000s, where Wall Street traders were overrating the quality of Internet stocks. Once the broader market realized this, the values of many tech companies were obliterated. Millions of investors exposed to this sector lost their entire investments because they were unaware of these misrepresentations. In the most last recession, where lenders were underrating the riskiness of homeowners and financial institutions were securitizing riskier-than-advertised mortgages, millions of investors lost their entire investments yet again because they were unaware of further misrepresentations.

Two: economic history repeats itself, even if as a society, we might be aware of this pattern. Taking these two market crises as an example of this bleak fact about our species, it seems that we’ll always have the shortest of memories. In this case, history repeated rather quickly – twice in the span of a decade. Is it possible that people are cognizant of a recurring mistake before it happens, even if it’s happened before in their lifetimes? Most likely not, if the last recession is any example. A significant number of real estate professionals, banking gurus, and regulators were responsible for inflating a price bubble in the housing market, even though some fraction should have been economically conscious enough to understand the problems that would eventually arise.

The question then remains: is there a way to solve both of these problems, assuming the best of all possible worlds? Yes. Imagine a place where peoples’ understandings of basic economics and financial practices was commonplace, where a homeowner and a lender had an equal comprehension of a mortgage, where a hard-working breadwinner knew the dangers of payday loans, and where a child could sit side-by-side with his or her parents while overseeing family finances. All of these possibilities – and more – can come into fruition if we as individuals place a greater emphasis on financial awareness. Note: I don’t say “financial learning” because all of these concepts are innate to us, though hidden by verbiage and stigma. Whether we like it or not, if our career is in finance or not, we must come to terms with the economic world that surrounds us.

Continue reading “One Key to The Future is Financial Clarity” »

How hard is to assess which risks to mitigate? It turns out to be pretty hard.

Let’s start with a model of risk so simplified as to be completely unrealistic, yet will still retain a key feature. Suppose that we managed to translate every risk into some single normalized unit of “cost of expected harm”. Let us also suppose that we could bring together all of the payments that could be made to avoid risks. A mitigation policy given these simplifications must be pretty easy: just buy each of the “biggest for your dollar” risks.

Not so fast.

The problem with this is that many risk mitigation measures are discrete. Either you buy the air filter or you don’t. Either your town filters its water a certain way or it doesn’t. Either we have the infrastructure to divert the asteroid or we don’t. When risk mitigation measures become discrete, then allocating the costs becomes trickier. Given a budget of 80 “harms” to reduce, and risks of 50, 40, and 35, then buying the 50 leaves 15 “harms” that you were willing to pay to avoid left on the table.

Continue reading “Risk Assessment is Hard (computationally and otherwise)” »

But I would suggest CERN to select the majority of speakers and to make sure they are high-ranking and not necessarily on their payroll.

And Dr. W. Wagner and Mag. M. Goritschnig should be included, as well as the editor of Leonardo.

I also apologize for my having provoked G&M: they have all the chance of the world to defend their position. And no one would be happier than me if they prevailed. For as I always said I am CERN’s best friend. My having asked for a rebuttal was the opposite of an aggressive act: “science is friendship” by its definition. Lifeboat loves science.

What’s to worry? RMS Titanic departs Southampton.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 1912. What better time to think about lifeboats?

One way to start a discussion is with some vintage entertainment. On the centenary weekend of the wreck of the mega-liner, our local movie palace near the Hudson River waterfront ran a triple bill of classic films about maritime disasters: A Night to Remember, Lifeboat, and The Poseidon Adventure. Each one highlights an aspect of the lifeboat problem. They’re useful analogies for thinking about the existential risks of booking a passage on spaceship Earth.

Can’t happen…

Continue reading “Earth's Titanic Challenges” »

High energy experiments like the LHC at the nuclear research centre CERN are extreme energy consumers (needing the power of a nuclear plant). Their construction is extremely costly (presently 7 Billion Euros) and practical benefits are not in sight. The experiments eventually pose existential risks and these risks have not been properly investigated.

It is not the first time that CERN announces record energies and news around April 1 – apparently hoping that some critique and concerns about the risks could be misinterpreted as an April joke. Additionally CERN regularly starts up the LHC at Easter celebrations and just before week ends, when news offices are empty and people prefer to have peaceful days with their friends and families.

CERN has just announced new records in collision energies at the LHC. And instead of conducting a neutral risk assessment, the nuclear research centre plans costly upgrades of its Big Bang machine. Facing an LHC upgrade in 2013 for up to CHF 1 Billion and the perspective of a Mega-LHC in 2022: How long will it take until risk researchers are finally integrated in a neutral safety assessment?

There are countless evidences for the necessity of an external and multidisciplinary safety assessment of the LHC. According to a pre-study in risk research, CERN fits less than a fifth of the criteria for a modern risk assessment (see the press release below). It is not acceptable that the clueless member states point at the operator CERN itself, while this regards its self-set security measures as sufficient, in spite of critique from risk researchers, continuous debates and the publication of further papers pointing at concrete dangers and even existential risks (black holes, strangelets) eventually arising from the experiments sooner or later. Presently science has to admit that the risk is disputed and basically unknown.

Continue reading “LHC-Critique Press Info: Instead of a neutral risk assessment of the LHC: New records and plans for costly upgrades at CERN” »