Lifeboat Foundation

If the apocalypse hits, the Arch Mission Foundation wants to be sure the knowledge we’ve accrued sticks around.

Are we poised to witness the evolution of evolution itself? In the following interview, expert Peter Diamandis predicts not only will humanity soon transcend its current biological limits, our world will become automated and magical, responding to our deepest desires and inner thoughts.

Humanity is under threat. At least according to Sir Martin Rees, one of Britain’s most esteemed astronomers.

These two kinds of technologies enable just a few people to have a hugely wide-ranging and maybe even global cascading effect. This leads to big problems of governance because you’d like to regulate the use of these things, but enforcing regulations worldwide is very, very difficult. Think how hopeless it is to enforce the drug laws globally or the tax laws globally. To actually ensure that no one misuses these new technologies is just as difficult. I worry that we are going to have to minimize this risk by actions which lead to a great tension between privacy, liberty and security.

Do you see ways that we can use and develop these technologies in a responsible way?

Continue reading “Will humanity survive this century? Sir Martin Rees predicts ‘a bumpy ride’ ahead” »

NASA’s DART mission is on track to launch in June 2021 and collide with an asteroid called Didymos in 2022.

Tidying up our extraplanetary mess is as important a task as cleaning up the Earth. If we don’t, it will become increasingly hard to launch rockets into space.

Showrunner Jeff Buhler has built a fascinating world around Martin’s story seeds, starting by setting the action within the foreseeable future, rather than in an incomprehensibly distant one. The invented technologies here are particularly intriguing, like the genetic modifications first officer Melantha Jhirl (Jodie Turner-Smith) has to make her better suited for space travel, or the cybernetics technician Lommie (Maya Eshet) uses to interface with machinery. Given the state of real-world technological developments in genetic engineering and research into brain-machine interfaces, the series feels plausible and grounded, even though it’s set in a spacefaring future.

The 10-episode space series adapts a 40-year-old George R.R. Martin novella.

Continue reading “Syfy’s Nightflyers asks whether humanity deserves to be saved” »

What would it take to become an interstellar civilization?

String theory is a complex theory that describes our reality with superstrings as the most basic and fundamental piece of all matter Theoretical particle physicist Daniele Amati supposedly said that string theory was 21st century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century.