Lifeboat Foundation

As astronomers track down more clues as to the existence of a large world orbiting the sun in the outer fringes of the solar system, a classic planetary purveyor of doom has been resurrected as a possible trigger behind mass extinctions on Earth.

Yes, I’m talking about “Planet X.” And yes, there’s going to be hype.

MORE: 9th Planet May Lurk in the Outer Solar System.

Continue reading “Could ‘Planet X’ Cause Comet Catastrophes on Earth?” »

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who’s to say we can’t go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

Astronomers have captured video evidence of a collision between Jupiter and a small celestial object, likely a comet or asteroid. Though it looks like a small blip of light, the resulting explosion was unusually powerful.

As Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy reports, the collision occurred on March 17, but confirmation of the event only emerged this week. An amateur Austrian astronomer used a 20-centimeter telescope to chronicle the unexpected event, but it could’ve been some kind of visual artifact.

Continue reading “Something Just Slammed Into Jupiter” »

Oh, joy. I hope it doesn’t take an actual catastrophe before the world comes together to get all of our eggs out of this one basket.

Comet P/2016 BA14 was initially thought to be a cosmic lightweight, but as it flew past Earth on March 22, NASA pinged it with radar to reveal just what a heavyweight it really is.

At least in public relations terms, transhumanism is a house divided against itself. On the one hand, there are the ingenious efforts of Zoltan Istvan – in the guise of an ongoing US presidential bid — to promote an upbeat image of the movement by focusing on human life extension and other tech-based forms of empowerment that might appeal to ordinary voters. On the other hand, there is transhumanism’s image in the ‘serious’ mainstream media, which is currently dominated by Nick Bostrom’s warnings of a superintelligence-based apocalypse. The smart machines will eat not only our jobs but eat us as well, if we don’t introduce enough security measures.

Of course, as a founder of contemporary transhumanism, Bostrom does not wish to stop artificial intelligence research, and he ultimately believes that we can prevent worst case scenarios if we act now. Thus, we see a growing trade in the management of ‘existential risks’, which focusses on how we might prevent if not predict any such tech-based species-annihilating prospects. Nevertheless, this turn of events has made some observers reasonably wonder whether indeed it might not be better simply to put a halt to artificial intelligence research altogether. As a result, the precautionary principle, previously invoked in the context of environmental and health policy, has been given a new lease on life as generalized world-view.

The idea of ‘existential risk’ capitalizes on the prospect of a very unlikely event that, were it to pass, would be extremely catastrophic for the human condition. Thus, the high value of the outcome psychologically counterbalances its low probability. It’s a bit like Pascal’s wager, whereby the potentially negative consequences of you not believing in God – to wit, eternal damnation — rationally compels you to believe in God, despite your instinctive doubts about the deity’s existence.

However, this line of reasoning underestimates both the weakness and the strength of human intelligence. On the one hand, we’re not so powerful as to create a ‘weapon of mass destruction’, however defined, that could annihilate all of humanity; on the other, we’re not so weak as to be unable to recover from whatever errors of design or judgement that might be committed in the normal advance of science and technology in the human life-world. I make this point not to counsel complacency but to question whether ‘existential risk’ is really the high concept that it is cracked up to be. I don’t believe it is.

Continue reading “Who's Afraid of Existential Risk? Or, Why It's Time to Bring the Cold War out of the Cold” »

I am not in fact talking about the delightful Deus Ex game, but rather about the actual revolution in society and technology we are witnessing today. Pretty much every day I look at any news source, be it on cable news networks or facebook feeds or whathaveyou, I always see fear mongering. “Implantable chips will let the government track you!” or “Hackers will soon be able to steal your thoughts!” (Seriously, seen both of these and much more and much crazier.) …But I’m here to tell you two things. First, calm the hell down. Nearly every doomsday scenario painted by fear-mongering assholes is either impossible or so utterly unlikely as to be effectively impossible. And second… that you should psych the hell up because its actually extremely exciting and worth getting excited about. But for good reasons, not bad.

We may be on the verge of creating a new life form, one that could mark not only an evolutionary breakthrough, but a potential threat to our survival as a species.

United States, Russia, China remain the greatest threat against each other in what could be the next World War 3.

An article for the “Dooms Day” fans.

An asteroid roughly 100 feet long and moving at more than 34,000 mph is scheduled to make a close pass by Earth in two weeks.

But don’t worry, scientists say. It has no chance of hitting us, and may instead help draw public attention to growing efforts at tracking the thousands of asteroids zooming around space that could one day wipe out a city — or worse — if they ever hit our planet.

Continue reading “100-foot asteroid to zoom past Earth in two weeks; no chance of collision, scientists say” »