Lifeboat Foundation

Bezos: “I don’t think we’ll live on planets…I think we’ll live in giant O’Neal-style space colonies.”

• Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, gave a talk to a members-only event at the Yale Club in New York on Tuesday.
• During the 30-minute lecture, Bezos said his private aerospace company, Blue Origin, would launch its first people into space aboard a New Shepard rocket in 2019.
• Bezos also questioned the capabilities of a space tourism competitor, Virgin Galactic, and criticized the goal of Elon Musk and SpaceX to settle Mars with humans.
• Ultimately, Bezos said he wants Blue Origin to enable a space-faring civilization where “a Mark Zuckerberg of space” and “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins” can flourish.
• Bezos advised the crowd to hold a powerful, personal long-term vision, but to devote “the vast majority of your energy and attention” on shorter-term activities and those ranging up to 2- or 3-year timeframes.

Jeff Bezos may be the richest human on Earth, as the founder of Amazon, but his ultimate dreams reside within a relatively obscure company called Blue Origin.

In fact, as Bezos told the CEO of Business Insider’s parent company in April 2018, he liquidates $1 billion of stock a year to fund his private aerospace outfit.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos just gave a private talk in New York. From utopian space colonies to dissing Elon Musk’s Martian dream, here are the most notable things he said” »

A study published today in Cell describes a form of “interspecies communication” in which bacteria secrete a specific molecule — nitric oxide — that allows them to communicate with and control their hosts’ DNA, and suggests that the conversation between the two may broadly influence human health.

The researchers out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School tracked nitric oxide secreted by gut bacteria inside tiny worms (C. elegans, a common mammalian laboratory model). Nitric oxide secreted by gut bacteria attached to thousands of host proteins, completely changing a worm’s ability to regulate its own gene expression.

The study is the first to show gut bacteria can tap into nitric oxide networks ubiquitous in mammals, including humans. Nitric oxide attaches to human proteins in a carefully regulated manner — a process known as S-nitrosylation — and disruptions are broadly implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Thanks to The Netherlands-based Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), 300,000 new galaxies have just been discovered.

LOFAR, a massive radio telescope network, was designed to pick up low radio frequencies, which are invisible to other telescopes. Using this method, it found traces of radiation that forms when galaxies are merging.

Continue reading “Dutch Researchers Just Discovered 300,000 New Galaxies” »

Understanding the global carbon cycle provides scientists with vital clues about the planet’s habitability.

It’s the reason why the Earth has a clement stable climate and a low carbon dioxide atmosphere compared to that of Venus, for instance, which is in a runaway greenhouse state with high surface temperatures and a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere.

One major difference between Earth and Venus is the existence of active plate tectonics on Earth, which make our environment unique within our solar system.

Continue reading “Diving into Earth’s interior helps scientists unravel secrets of diamond formation” »

Most of us know that at some point in our evolutionary history around 600 million years ago, single-celled organisms evolved into more complex multicellular life.

But knowing that happened and actually seeing it happen in real-time in front of you is an entirely different matter altogether.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Witnessed in Real-Time a Single-Celled Algae Evolve Into a Multicellular Organism” »

U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Meeting and Q&A – Saturday, February 23, 2019, at 6 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time. Join us for an extensive 2-hour discussion! Watch it and view the agenda here:

The U.S. Transhumanist Party invites many of its Officers and Ambassadors to discuss recent activities and plans for 2019, including the upcoming Presidential nomination process. The meeting will include a question-and-answer portion where inquiries from members and the general public will be addressed.

Continue reading “U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Meeting and Q&A — February 2019” »

Ingenius.

Researchers in China have developed a new way to remove bacteria from water that they say is both highly efficient and environmentally sound.

By shining ultraviolet light onto a two-dimensional sheet of a compound called graphitic carbon nitride, the team’s prototype can purify 10 litres (2.6 liquid gallons) of water in just one hour, killing virtually all the harmful bacteria present.

Continue reading “Scientists Develop a Material That Kills 99.9% of Bacteria in Drinking Water Using Nothing But Light” »

This next wave of automation won’t just be sleek robotic arms on factory floors. It will be ordering kiosks, self-service apps and software smart enough to perfect schedules and cut down on the workers needed to cover a shift. Employers are already testing these systems. A recession will force them into the mainstream.

Robots’ infiltration of the workforce doesn’t happen gradually, at the pace of technology. It happens in surges, when companies are given strong incentives to tackle the difficult task of automation.

Typically, those incentives occur during recessions. Employers slash payrolls going into a downturn and, out of necessity, turn to software or machinery to take over the tasks once performed by their laid-off workers as business begins to recover.

Continue reading “When the next recession comes, the robots will be ready” »

Foreword to the Syntellect Hypothesis.

I had the honour of writing the foreword of Alex Vikoulov’s recently published masterpiece and bestseller “The Syntellect Hypothesis”. Hereunder you can read my foreword:

“If you picked up this book, it is not unlikely that you may have heard of the early 20th century philosophical movement of Cosmism. This movement, which originated in Russia, was striving for conquering the planets and stars, for radical life extension, immortality and resurrection of our loved ones by the means of technology. Perhaps one of its most important pioneers was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose aspirations did not only venture into the realm of the Macro, but also explored the Micro. He spoke of the atomic world as being animated and can thus be considered a kind of cosmist-panpsychist.

Continue reading “Masterpiece: ‘The Syntellect Hypothesis’” »