Lifeboat Foundation AIShield

To protect against unfriendly AI (Artificial Intelligence). Consequently, we support initiatives like the Friendly AI proposal by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).

We believe that a key element of Friendly AI is to construct such AGIs with empathy so they feel our pain and share our hopes.

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Lifeboat Foundation AsteroidShield

Until fairly recently there were no significant efforts to identify asteroids and comets that may impact the Earth. This began to change in 1992 with the Spaceguard Survey Report which in 1994 led the House Committee on Science and Technology to direct NASA to work with the space agencies of other countries to identify and catalogue within 10 years the orbital characteristics of 90% of all comets and asteroids larger than 1 km and in orbits that cross the orbit of Earth. In 2005, the U.S. Congress further tasked NASA to identify 90% of near-Earth objects with a size greater than 140 meters in diameter by the year 2020 and 90% of objects greater than 1 kilometer by the year 2008.

This report will conclude with our solutions to the problem of asteroid impacts.

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Lifeboat Foundation Bioshield

Ray Kurzweil says “We have an existential threat now in the form of the possibility of a bioengineered malevolent biological virus. With all the talk of bioterrorism, the possibility of a bioengineered bioterrorism agent gets little and inadequate attention. The tools and knowledge to create a bioengineered pathogen are more widespread than the tools and knowledge to create an atomic weapon, yet it could be far more destructive. I’m on the Army Science Advisory Group (a board of five people who advise the Army on science and technology), and the Army is the institution responsible for the nation’s bioterrorism protection. Without revealing anything confidential, I can say that there is acute awareness of these dangers, but there is neither the funding nor national priority to address them in an adequate way.”

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Lifeboat Foundation InfoPreserver

While building and maintaining our InfoPreserver skills repository, the question arises, “Why do this at all?” This is an interesting question and one we hope to answer here. We have three main reasons that validate this activity.

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Lifeboat Foundation InternetShield

As the Internet grows in importance, an attack on it could cause physical as well as informational damage. An attack today on hospital systems or electric utilities could lead to deaths. In the future an attack could be used to alter the output that is produced by nanofactories worldwide leading to massive deaths. This program looks for solutions to prevent such attacks, or at least reduce the damage caused by them.

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Lifeboat Foundation LifePreserver

By the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board including María A. Blasco, Steve Hill, and Elena Milova. This is an ongoing program so you may submit suggestions to [email protected].

The LifePreserver program is designed to bring you the latest information about aging research and the progress towards treating age-related diseases. This program also aims to bring you practical information about the steps you can take now to slow the aging process and delay the onset of age-related disease. Hopefully by taking these measures you can increase your chances of being in good health when more robust life-extending and life-enhancing technologies become available over the next couple of decades.

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LifeShield Bunkers

Our LifeShield Bunkers program is a compliment to our Space Habitats program. It is a fallback position in case programs such as our BioShield and NanoShield fail globally or locally.

A bunker can be quite large, such as Biosphere 2. A large bunker would be a place where babies are born and children play and go to school.

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Lifeboat Foundation NanoShield Version 0.90.2.13

The most immediate danger facing life on earth is probably that posed by biological weapons and emergent disease. The Lifeboat Foundation BioShield proposal [1], described by Lemelson-MIT Prize winner Ray Kurzweil and U.S. Senate majority leader Bill Frist is our recommended response to this danger. The BioShield proposal emphasizes the development of technologies to combat bioweapons, such as biological viruses, by developing broad tools to prevent their development and to destroy them.

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Lifeboat Foundation ScientificFreedomShield

In 1987, The American economist Robert M. Solow won the Nobel Prize for Economics when he proved that some 90% of economic growth stems from “technical change”, as he called it, rather than the trinity of capital, resources, and labor as had previously been assumed when he started work in the 1950s. Nowadays, the most reliable route to technical change is through science.

One might expect, therefore, that the-powers-that-be would be careful to preserve the sources of new science. Instead, they increasingly subject them to ill-considered constraints designed to enhance efficiency and accountability. The consequences of these actions could threaten the very future of civilization.

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Lifeboat Foundation SecurityPreserver

The best way to survive a bioweapon, nanoweapon, nuclear, or other attack is to prevent it from happening in the first place. The Lifeboat Foundation’s SecurityPreserver program is looking for ways to provide early warning of attacks before such attacks can be fully designed, planned, developed, deployed, let alone launched.

In an ideal world, you would have perfect defenses and therefore would not need to have early warnings of attacks before they were developed. The SecurityPreserver program is for use in an imperfect world with imperfect defenses. If you wish to help improve our imperfect defenses, we have developed many programs that we need your input on including our BioShield and NanoShield programs.

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Lifeboat Foundation Space Habitats

Establishing self-sufficient space habitats will serve as a backup plan for human civilization. A number of key milestones need to be reached before the long-term development of space is feasible, however. Improved access to space will catalyze the establishment of such habitats by allowing more frequent and less expensive flights beyond the atmosphere. Innovative, non-rocket methods of reaching orbit will enable more substantial progress in space. Artificial ecosystems will need to be made as independent as possible to minimize the need for new resources. Better management of and access to resources from non-terrestrial bodies will allow astronauts to get the most out of what they do have. Finally, further countermeasures against the effects of space on health will be required to sustain human life in space.

The Lifeboat Foundation has begun design on Ark I, a self-sustaining space habitat. We support the efforts by SpaceX and others to make access to space more affordable. Likewise, we support the efforts of Bigelow Aerospace and others to develop habitable environments in space.

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X-Risks Network

The goal of the X-Risks Network project is to combine a bayesian network, a debate graph, and a project tracking system all into one graph. The project is focused on tracking progress on existential risk reduction and then determining the most leveraged ways to help reduce existential risks.

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