Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: education – Page 139

If you are interested in superlongevity, I have a spectacular book for you: Lifespan — Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To, by David Sinclair PhD.

Sinclair has written a book about all the various ways in which humans can extend their lifespan and their healthspan.

One of the best aspects of this book is that Sinclair has a way of writing that is clear and insightful. It is so rare for me to read a book about scientific experiments in which it is easy to follow the methodology, but it is unique to also have an explanation of the application of the results that is crystal clear. Sinclair does both simply and easily.

Sinclair writes about all of the avenues that I’ve heard of for life extension. Metformin. NAD+. NMN. NR. Diet. Exercise. Resveratrol. Senolytics.

However, the most gripping aspect of this book is Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging. Here is one excerpt from the book:

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Sometimes, being human involves tragedy: unexpected accidents can alter a person’s future, permanently changing how they need to approach their daily lives. Those with traumatic brain injuries suffer long-term mental and physical challenges, such as trouble with their working memory span, which can play a significant role in their education and longevity. However, if used properly, transhuman aids such as prosthetic limbs can provide solutions to human challenges.

Transhumanism, in a nutshell, is the idea that people can use technology to overcome biological limitations. Just as how we use rational means to improve our life experiences and the world around us, we can use such means to improve ourselves as organisms. It is simply a concept, not a tangible characterization of some futuristic cyborg.

There is reasonable fear that using such technologies would be tampering with nature. This is true. However, whether something is good or bad cannot be decided simply by asking whether or not it is natural. Plenty of natural things are horrible, such as diseases and parasites, where our moral interest is to intervene and improve these conditions. The question to ask is not whether the technology is natural, but rather, what are the various possible consequences that would arise from it, both desirable and undesirable, and the likelihood of each. People who are concerned that our species will stray too far away from what it means to be a ‘natural human’ forget how far we have already evolved as a species.

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The coffin that holds the mummified body of the ancient Egyptian Nesyamun, who lived around 1100 B.C., expresses the man’s desire for his voice to live on. Now, 3,000 years after his death, that wish has come true. Using a 3D-printed replica of Nesyamun’s vocal tract and an electronic larynx, researchers in the UK have synthesized the dead man’s voice. Listen to it here:

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Quantum physics now states that matter is merely an illusion and that everything is energy at a different frequency in vibratory motion. This is something that science has only started to take seriously since the turn of the last century. However, this was something Hermes Trismegistus (the founder of the hermetic teachings) taught as one of the 7 principles of existence and recorded history of his teachings have dated back as far as the 1st century AD.

These teachings go further than modern science has the ability to quantify, but science is slowly catching up with many of the ideas shared. Here is a section on vibration which has been taken from the book The Kybalion is an introduction into the teachings of occult hermeticism and was derived from the ancient teachings of Hermes Trismegistus.

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything.

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Since the explosion of student debt following the Great Recession, annual repayment rates, or the amount of existing balances lowered, have been just 3%, Moody’s said. Just 51% of borrowers who took out loans from 2010-12 have made any progress at all in paying down their debt.

“While in the past, higher enrollment and rising tuition were the main drivers of growing student loan balances, more recently, slow repayments have become the primary driver,” Jody Shenn, senior analyst at Moody’s, and others said in the report. “Over the next few years, the combination of slow repayments and elevated, if no longer growing, levels of new borrowing will likely fuel further increases in outstanding debt.”

There are multiple reasons why the debt levels are not going down.

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A drone has become a welcomed addition to cinematography in recent years. With brand new ways to see the world, they provide us with new viewpoints deemed impossible only a few years ago. We can already see their impact when used in documentaries and recreational films: most new movies rely on the standard drone overhead shot used for establishing the scene and aesthetic.

Here are some of the coolest drone shots that have been posted online. Some of these explore views that have never been captured on film before, making for some amazing ways to see the world.

These two got close and personal to some pretty wild beasts in California. The girls were part of a documentary that explored the relationship between sharks and humans when they traveled on a paddleboard to see them.

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A Chinese facial-recognition database with information on thousands of children was stored without protection on the internet, a researcher discovered, raising questions about school surveillance and cybersecurity in China.

The cache was connected to a surveillance system labeled “Safe School Shield” and contained facial-identification and location data, according to Victor Gevers, a researcher at the Dutch nonprofit GDI Foundation, which scans the internet for vulnerabilities and flags them to owners for fixing.

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