Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Now there’s a lifeboat. However my life may be extended, if anyone lives that long or some future generation has to deal with it, at some point this universe will be far less friendly to life than it already is. So, a way out?

Billions of years from now, the universe as we know it will cease to exist. The good news is, that gives us a lot of time to prepare, and maybe even figure out a way to cheat cosmic death. Here are some possible ways our descendants might survive a cosmological apocalypse.

The Universe, like the organisms that reside within it, is a mortal entity. Born in the Big Bang, it will eventually meet its fate through an equally cataclysmic process, whether it be in the form of a Big Rip, a Big Crunch, or an eternal deep freeze. Regardless, all life as we know it will be extinguished.

Unless, of course, our highly advanced offspring can find a way to escape the confines of the cosmos—or more radically, change the rules of the cosmological game.

Read more

The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.

Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there’s no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream — to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.

But hang on — is the buzz around aging really reflective of what’s being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly — as if they were infections — rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes.

Read more

The solar system might be a lot hairier than we thought. A new study publishing this week in the Astrophysical Journal by Gary Prézeau of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, proposes the existence of long filaments of dark matter, or “hairs.”

Dark matter is an invisible, mysterious substance that makes up about 27 percent of all matter and energy in the universe. The regular matter, which makes up everything we can see around us, is only 5 percent of the universe. The rest is dark energy, a strange phenomenon associated with the acceleration of our expanding universe.

Neither dark matter nor dark energy has ever been directly detected, although many experiments are trying to unlock the mysteries of dark matter, whether from deep underground or in space.

Read more

As the challenges of particle physics have become more and more complex, we’ve had to plan and build larger and larger machines to explore the tiny subatomic world. But now, an international group of physicists has developed a technology to miniaturize particle accelerators, which could revolutionize physics and the life sciences.

The team has received a $13.5 million (£9 million) grant to develop a prototype particle accelerator that will fit in a shoebox. The technology being developed is called “accelerator-on-a-chip”. Electrons are made to travel through a channel within a silica chip. Shining a laser onto the chip produces an electric field, and the field is modified by the ridges within the channel. This set-up dramatically accelerates the electrons moving through the channel.

The prototype is based on independent experiments from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany. Both teams discovered that these chips are capable of accelerating electrons to relativistic speed no matter the speed at which the electron was travelling before entering the channel. Also, the technology is capable of producing a larger acceleration gradient than current labs, which could reduce the size of particle accelerators – 100 meters (330 feet) of accelerator-on-a-chip would produce an acceleration equivalent to the 3.2-kilometer (two miles) SLAC linear accelerator, which is the longest in the world.

Read more

Researchers in Sweden have developed fully functional cyberplants, living plants which are engineered to host analog and digital electronic circuits, and the leaves can change colors. Using the vascular system of living roses, which distributes water and nutrients, the researchers were able to build key components of electronic circuits inside of the plants.

Read more

In February, NASA announced that it was investing in a $2 billion mission to Europa — a tiny moon of Jupiter that is one of the most likely places for life beyond Earth.

Their spacecraft, called the Europa Multi-Flyby Mission, would orbit Jupiter, taking frequent passes by Europa for a close look at its surface.

But there is another important piece of the puzzle that NASA is exploring, and in a recent conversation with US Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), Ars Technica’s senior space editor, Eric Berger, reported the details — it’s a lander and it could be the key to discovering the first extraterrestrial life.

Read more

It was an audacious statement, but there it was.

Audi expects that 25 percent of the cars it sells just 10 years hence will be either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid models.

And it came directly from Scott Keogh, president of Audi of America, in front of a packed media audience at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

Read more