Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  The Lifeboat Foundation presented the Lifeboat to the Stars award to Kevin J. Anderson and Steven Savile for their collaborative book Tau Ceti. The authors split the $1,000 prize, and each received a handsome trophy in an hourglass design.
   
  This award honors the best work of science fiction of any length contributing to an understanding of the benefits, means, and difficulties of interstellar travel.
   
  Coordinating judge was Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell Award-winning science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, and the other judges were Catherine Asaro, Jason Batt, Sherry E. Bell, Kevin M. Berry, Brenda Cooper, Niklas Järvstråt, Jim Karkanias, Rouslan Krechetnikov, Eva-Jane Lark, Mike E. McCulloch, George Perry, John K. Strickland Jr., and Allen G. Taylor.

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  The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do, the first book published by the Lifeboat Foundation, has been awarded the “Peer Reviewed & Approved for Science” seal of approval by the Washington Academy of Sciences.

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  Ray Kurzweil says “Currently at least 99 percent, if not 99.9 percent, of the computational capacity of all the computers on the Internet lies unused.” We say “Join [email protected] to use spare clock cycles on your computer to help discover new drugs that fight AIDS! Join our team!”

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  We now have a quote by Jeff Bezos on our Quotes page. Jeff is founder of Amazon and will soon be the richest person on the planet. (This is an important quote. Read it!)

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  Our Space Habitats program works to build fail-safes against global existential risks by encouraging the spread of sustainable human civilization beyond Earth.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.

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  Read Jurisprudence of Artilects: Blueprint for a Synthetic Citizen by Frank W. Sudia, JD.

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  Astrophysicist, author, and recording artist Fiorella Terenzi, described by Time Magazine as “a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna”, joins our Media & Arts Board and Space Settlement Board.
   
  Fiorella has performed and recorded with artists from Herbie Hancock to Ornette Coleman and earned her doctorate in physics from the University of Milan.