Lifeboat Foundation

The great mystery of where all the aliens are in our vast Universe contemplates ancient interstellar civilizations building enormous megastructures that rival worlds or even stars in the immensity… and asks why we can’t see these giant alien artifacts.

David Brin on Event Horizon with John Michael Godier: • A.I. Wars, The Fermi Paradox and Grea…
This Week in Space with Rod Pyle: • Alien Megastructures — Isaac Arthur a…

Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Absent Megastructures” »

Will artificial intelligence weapons cause World War III? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiJTq11kqdwThis animated clip is from my friends at http://ve42.co/.…

Radical Plan to Stop ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Melting to Cost $50 Billion.

Working on these next-gen intelligent AIs must be a freaky experience. As Anthropic announces the smartest model ever tested across a range of benchmarks, researchers recall a chilling moment when Claude 3 realized that it was being evaluated.

Anthropic, you may recall, was founded in 2021 by a group of senior OpenAI team members, who broke away because they didn’t agree with OpenAI’s decision to work closely with Microsoft. The company’s Claude and Claude 2 AIs have been competitive with GPT models, but neither Anthropic nor Claude have really broken through into public awareness.

Continue reading “Smarter than GPT-4: Claude 3 AI catches researchers testing it” »

At a San Diego laboratory, four women do the painstaking work of preserving cells amid a growing extinction crisis.

Star Trek is the most popular and longest running Sci-Fi franchise in American history. Created by Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek follows the various crew of Starfleet in their missions across the galaxy.

This presentation showcases the inspiration behind Star Trek, how the Federation came to be, examines the post-scarcity economy featured in their future Earth society, and explores the philosophies of all of the major alien cultures shown throughout the Star Trek series.

Continue reading “The Philosophy of Star Trek [Federation, Post Scarcity Economy, Alien Cultures]” »

New research shows that nasal drops of neuropeptide Y triggers extinction of fear memories in an animal model of PTSD.

The probe “performed as predicted” during the first of seven close approaches to the sun on its way to Apophis, NASA said.

Here’s my latest Opinion piece just out for Newsweek. Check it out! Lifeboat Foundation mentioned.

We need to remember that universal distress we all had when the world started to shut down in March 2020: when not enough ventilators and hospital beds could be found; when food shelves and supplies were scarce; when no COVID-19 vaccines existed. We need to remember because COVID is just one of many different existential risks that can appear out of nowhere, and halt our lives as we know it.

Naturally, I’m glad that the world has carried on with its head high after the pandemic, but I’m also worried that more people didn’t take to heart a longer-term philosophical view that human and earthly life is highly tentative. The best, most practical way to protect ourselves from more existential risks is to try to protect ourselves ahead of time.

Continue reading “We Need a Far Better Plan for Dealing With Existential Threat” »

There are plenty of life-friendly stellar systems in the Universe today. But at some point in the far future, life’s final extinction will occur.