Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Ed Begley Jr., actor, environmentalist, and founder of Begley’s Best, joins our Sustainability Board.

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  Xerox researcher Frédérique Segond, who helped develop an evolutionary search engine that analyzes the meaning of words and contexts and accepts queries in everyday language, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.

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  Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, the only major IM client that both securely authenticates conversation participants and encrypts the communication, donates over $10,000 to Lifeboat Foundation.

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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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  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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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Brave New World? A Defense Of Paradise-Engineering.
   
  In the future, it will be feasible technically — at the very least — for pharmacotherapy and genetic medicine to re-engineer us so that we can become — to take one example among billions — a cross between Jesus and Einstein. Potentially, transhumans will be endowed with a greater capacity for love, empathypsychopaths by comparison; and posterity will be right.
   
  In contrast to Brave New World, however, the death of ageing won’t be followed by our swift demise after a sixty-odd year life-span. We’ll have to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of living happily ever after. Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting bliss isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.

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  Saskia Sassen, author of A Sociology of Globalization and Cities in a World Economy, joins our Human Trajectories Board. Saskia coined the term global city.

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  Meredith L. Patterson, who discovered a major security flaw in the Bitfrost security procedures for the OLPC, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board and Biotech/Medical Board. She was recently profiled by the AP for doing genetic engineering at home. Meredith enjoys knitting, sewing, and target shooting.

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  Listen to I am the very model of a Singularitarian by our Charlie Kam.

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  Our José Luis Cordeiro has authored the special report A New Renaissance. This report discusses how our current pandemic may lead to a new Renaissance just as The Black Death led to the original Renaissance.