Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

lifebFreedom fironically found in flesh, not knowing whe’er I’m foul or fowl… tickly bound neath trickly form twisting and more unfresh as dawn upon dawn dies in menstrual skyfire like blood made light — a mocking microcosm of my own transubstantiation from rotting viscera to lightstorm infinity?

Just what sick joke is this? To wake and ache and dream and be and become! – and then to die..? To culminate the very universe itself!.. and then to simply die?! For what I ask you! What! Death… what audacious greed! What reckless squander and heedless extravagance!

Guttural red fringed black a bulbous muck death bastphelgmy! We cannot comprehend the sheer stature of death and so hurriedly cover the unknown with a word to hold it in hand and at a distance, to doubt no doubt.

O pallid heavens! O incessant sun undaunted by my barrenaked finitude! O fetid sanctity wet and redragged as the sickly bloom of jagged flesh! O putrid night sky serene despite my spat fury; as I ebb and ember a’roil withinside my sadness unbelieving and hysteric animal heat that vile sun and auster night jaunt their jeer and mock the rude squall of my panicstrewn death nonetheless.

We must not believe them when they tell us with sad care that we will one day die.

We must not believe them when they tell us that we will escape death by any means but our own daring.

We must bleed our eschaton passion upforth and afroth upon that void hated with awefull grandeur for its monster honesty. We must take self in hand and be/hold the possible futures still fetal inside. We must rage our righteous revolt with pride bright as that unsickened sun, not afraid to boast that we fear death but instead eager to thrust our fervent urgency upon the others still bound to opiate incredulity.

We are Man, and we shall NOT go quietly into that dog night!

This soliloquy was originally published on Transhumanity.net

This article first appeared under the title “Techno-Optimists & Pessimists are Brothers in Arms” at Transhumanity.net, where Franco is a contributing editor.

opt4It is all too easy to assume that techno-optimists and techno-pessimists are diametrically opposed. But while they may have different destinations in mind, the road to get there – what they need to do to achieve their respective ends – is a shared one. Techno-optimists, Techno-progressives, Techno-gaians and Techno-utopians express hope and passion for technologies’ liberating and empowering potentials, while techno-pessimists are fearful of their dystopic and dehumanizing potentials. Optimists want to spread awareness of the ways in which technology can improve self and society, while pessimists seek to spread awareness of the ways in which technology can make matters worse. Techno-criticism is the neutral middle, where the unbiased study of culture and technology take place, and so should not be confused with Techno-pessimism.

But they both agree on the underlying premise that technologies can and likely will have profoundly transformative effects on self and society. They agree not only that we have the power to shape the outcomes such technologies can foster, that we have the power to affect and to a large extent determine the ultimate embodiment and repercussions of such technologies, but also that such technologies impel us to make concerted efforts towards determining such repercussions and embodiments! It may not look that way from the inside-out, but they are fighting to realize their vision of Humanity’s brightest future. Until we reach the day when the majority of humanity has extensively acknowledged the expansive power such transformative technologies hold, Techno-optimists & Techno-pessimists, Transhumanists & Luddites, and Revolutionaries & Revivalists alike are on the same side! Both camps are on a campaign to alert planet earth of the titanic transformations rushing foreforth upon its horizon. Both agree on the underlying potential such technologies hold for changing the world and the self – whether encased as Prized Present or in Pandora’s Box – and both are weary for the world to wake up and smell the rising.

opt8And besides, we’re all in it together, no? At least Techno-pessimists are thinking about such issues, and putting forth their appraisals. At least they’ve begun to consider what is at stake. Is a techno-pessimist closer to a Technoprogressive or Transhumanist than one who doesn’t take a stance either way is? Maybe.

Not that the likes of Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama and other Neo-Luddites, Developmental Critics, or Anarcho-Primitivists are to be heralded or left to lie without rebuttal. Their pessimism still does cause palpable harm, as in the delays in Stem-Cell research caused by G.W. Bush’s “President’s Council on Bioethics” evidenced. Thus we shouldn’t simply smile politely and let them on their merry way… But neither should we automatically jump to out-snuff their wild-fires of panic. We should instead let them whip up their frenzies, but be there waiting in the wings to attest for Icarus’s insight, and to offer Prometheus a light. Let them have their say, because it increases public awareness of the cause, because it clues people in to the fact that there many dangers are possible with these technologies (even if we disagree on the nature and extent of those dangers), but be sure to be there waiting, ready to refute their specific and untenable solutions, and not their call for fear in the first place. We are right to simultenaciously fear and hope for technology’s powerful potential. But considering that both Neo-Luddites and Neohumanists alike agree on the transformative and world-whirling capabilities of such technologies, is it more likely that we can take them in hand and shape the course of their eventual realization by outright relinquishment, or by taking advantage of those very transformative potentialities so as to increase our ability to shape them, in a self-recursive feedback loop fitting for Man, the Homoautofabber?

The very beliefs that Neo-Luddism share with Technoprogressivism and Transhumanism constitute one of the best reasons for arguing that their specific approach – outright relinquishment more often than not, or at least curtailing and slowing of development in certain areas to so large an extent that it shouldn’t even be called Differential Technological Development – is an untenable one. They seek to point out the massively transformative potential of technology, and then use this as an excuse to mitigate their dangers and ameliorate their potential downfalls. We should take their approach, pat them on the back (not too heartily, of course) for their starting point, and then flip the course around. We seek to point out the massively transformative potential of technology, but instead of arguing that the transformative potentialities of such technologies justifies their relinquishment, we should instead argue that those same transformative potentialities actually increase our potential to successfully shape their outcome and mitigate their potentially problematizing aspects!

opt10What are the chances that as soon as it becomes possible to use technology in massively immoral ways, we also gain the ability to shape and determine the parameters of our own moralities — and through the very technologies that created the potential problems in the first place, no less? What are the chances that as soon as technology seems to be building upon itself in an unending upward avalanche of momentous momentum, we also gain — through the use of those very same technologies — the ability to better forecast cascading causes and effects into the postmost outpost and to better track trends into the forward-flitting future? The technologies that hold such transformative potential are neither good nor bad, but morally ambiguous. They have the power to spiral out of control, to be strung as leash or noose around humanity’s neck — but they also have the potential to increase our degree self-determination and our control — or our degree of choice — over the circumstances and capabilities afforded by our environments.

A closed circle can seem like just that, until adding a vertical dimension reveals that it was an upward spiral all along. We’ve turned upon ourselves to find (or perhaps just refine) ourselves at least once before, when meat went meta and matter turned upon itself to make mind. Perhaps this was but echoes through time of that final feedback for forward freedom we stand to face, upright and with eyes sun-undaunted, in a future so near that it might as well be here, where the fat of fate is now kindled anew to light our own spindled fires aspiring ever higher, into parts and selves wholly unknown — and holier for it.

Techno-pessimists, Neo-Luddites, Revivalists and Relinquishists alike are not wholly wrong, just mostly. Rather the backlash against technology’s profoundly transformative potentials represents one small step in the right direction, and one giant leap left-field. So let’s unite in their plight to ignite consideration of the dangerous potentialities of technology in the eyes of humanity, but fight them when they move to stop the motion with a whimpered halt, rather than to continue the discussion with daring determination and impassioned exalt of aug- and of alt-.
FRANCO1111

The APS April Meeting 2013, Vol. 58 #4 will be held Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2013; Denver, Colorado.

I am very pleased to announce that my abstract was accepted and I will be presenting “Empirical Evidence Suggest A Need For A Different Gravitational Theory” at this prestigious conference.

For those of you who can make it to Denver, April 13–16, and are interested in alternative gravitational theories, lets meet up.

I am especially interested in physicists and engineers who have the funding to test gravity modification technologies, proposed in my book An Introduction to Gravity Modification.

** Note, APS is the publisher of the most prestigious physics journal in the world, Physical Review Letters. If you remember Robert Nemiroff published his ground breaking findings that quantum foam cannot exists, 3 photons and 7-billion year old gamma ray burst in the Physical Review Letters.

——————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification

In an enormously influential article published in 1974 in Psychology Today, and in a longer version published later that year in BioScience, Garrett Hardin introduced the metaphor of the lifeboat for economic and ethical consideration. This conceptual construction was intended as an improvement over the then-popular ecological metaphor of “spaceship earth” coined by Kenneth Boulding in 1966. Interestingly, in the opening paragraph of “Living on a lifeboat”, Hardin indicates that metaphors in general may be understood as only an early stage in mentally approaching difficult problems, and that this stage may be surpassed as theory advances and becomes more rigorous.

In Hardin’s analogy, large entities such as nations or the biosphere are likened to a boat, while smaller entities – for example, migrating individuals or groups – are likened to swimmers trying to board the already cramped vessel and exploit whatever resources are on board. In the imagined scenario, it is believed that the boat is near carrying capacity, but exactly how near is not known with certainty given the many future possibilities. A central question focuses on at what point, if any, the risk of sinking the entire boat outweighs the good provided for each additional rescued swimmer.

The metaphor of the lifeboat has structured thought about conservation, economics, ethics, and any number of other disciplinary areas for decades. The question I would like to pose is the following: Is the lifeboat scenario still (or was it ever) an apt metaphor for structuring thought about ethical conservation of resources, or have we reached a stage where the boat should be scuttled in favor of either a new metaphor or more literal language? Please feel free to post any thoughts you may have on this issue.

Yesterday, March 25 2013, the Colorado Legislature passed a resolution making March 25, Aerospace Day. What a great way to celebrate Colorado’s participation in space endeavors. The state is the second largest employer of space related companies. Thanks to Colorado Space Business Roundtable (CSBR), the Colorado Space Coalition (CSC), the Rocky Mountain AIAA (RMAIAA), and the many sponsors who helped make this possible.

The sponsors are Aurora Chamber of Commerce, Ball Aerospace Technologies, GH Phipps Construction, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Metro State University of Denver, United Launch Alliance, Red Canyon Software, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Webster University, and the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum.

Picture of the Colorado Senate just after passing the resolution.

Picture of the Colorado House of Representative congratulating CSBR, CSC & RMAIAA just after having passed the resolution.

If we are to become a space faring civilization it is important to celebrate our efforts in space endeavors. Our Colorado legislature recognized the need and passed the resolution to make March 25 Colorado’s Aerospace Day. I hope all the other states will would join Colorado and make March 25 Aerospace Day, and one day March 25 will be the national Aerospace Day.

———————-

I received some photos from Michael Piccone. Here they are

Picture of the inside Capitol Hill showing some of the attendees visiting with the exhibitors.

Picture of 60+ of us who attended. There were more, and we were the ones who posed for this photo.

Close up of on of our state senators.

Some of the people who planned and made this event and resolution possible. They are from CSBR, CSC, Colorado Legislature, Lockheed, Boeing, Wings Over the Rockies.…

——————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification

NOT.GRANDMAS.ROBOT.NO.IS
Japanese People are Getting Old — Fast. So… Robots!
Japan is one of those great examples of how, when a society reaches a certain stage of development, population can stabilize itself based simply on quality of life (economic well-being, healthcare, community, Golden Rule morality, etc.). There is a challenge, however: population decline. In arguably one of the world’s most advanced capitalist nations, where 70% of GDP is based on the services economy and nearly all national debt is public held, a big die-off is… big problematic. Sure, the population decline will be gradual — but it’s inexorable, and Japan has to prepare now.

Make Robots, Not Babies?
A (perhaps questionable) study from the Japan Family Planning Association found that 1/3 of Japanese youth have no desire to get their groove on. They just don’t wanna hump each other. And as many of us know, it’s not just an enjoyable hobby, it’s where babies come from! Realistically, a decent number of respondents were probably lying, though. Because in Japan being fake polite and feigning ignorance to the nastiness & porno of human life is… a way of life (that’s a compliment — fake polite is far better than honest rude).

But actually, whether a large segment of the youth truly don’t want to make sweet love, or do, it doesn’t change the fact that Japan’s going to be running out of people. Factor in a rising women’s liberation, the destigmatization of birth control, and perceived economic instability — who knows what the actual equation looks like, but the answer is a birthrate of 1.39. And in case it’s not obvious, a birthrate of at least 2 is a replacement set for the parents; a population at stasis. Ain’t happening.

So, at the end of the day, replacing the lost population with robots, thereby replacing a lost labor force and augmenting the consumer economy — well, seems like a decent enough course of action.

Three States of Robot Assimilation:
Hop on over to Akihabara News to have a look at the sharing, the wearing, and the caring: Dear Assistive Robot Industry, We Need You. Sincerely, Rapidly Aging Japan.

Lastly, you kinda have to wonder: in the macro, why don’t they want sex AND robots?
Japan, sometimes you so cray.

[YOUNG JAPANESE PEOPLE NOT INTERESTED IN GETTING IT ON — HUFF POST]

The University of Colorado Boulder holds its annual Gamow Memorial Lecture around this time of the year. This year, Feb 26, 2013, Brian Greene gave the lecture, on multiverses.

His talk was very good. He explained why there are 10500 possible variations to possible universes, and ours was just one of many possible universes, thus the term multiverse.

How interesting. This is an extension of the idea that the Earth or the Sun not being at the center of our Universe.

Brian Green graciously allowed me to have my picture taken with him at the reception held in honor of him after his lecture. In the middle picture I am getting ready my new Nokia Lumia 920 Windows 8 phone.

I may not agree with string theories, but I think it is vitally important to allow all forms of physical theories to take root, and let the community of physicists & engineers determine which theories have a better chance of explaining some aspect of the universal laws of physics, through discussions and experimentations. I would add, and drive new commercially viable technologies.

——————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification

FUKUSHIMA.MAKES.JAPAN.DO.MORE.ROBOTS
Fukushima’s Second Anniversary…
Two years ago the international robot dorkosphere was stunned when, in the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster, there were no domestically produced robots in Japan ready to jump into the death-to-all-mammals radiation contamination situation at the down-melting Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

…and Japan is Hard at Work.
Suffice it to say, when Japan finds out its robots aren’t good enough — JAPAN RESPONDS! For more on how Japan has and is addressing the situation, have a jump on over to AkihabaraNews.com.

Oh, and here’s some awesome stuff sourced from the TheRobotReport.com:

Larger Image - PDF With Links

1. Thou shalt first guard the Earth and preserve humanity.

Impact deflection and survival colonies hold the moral high ground above all other calls on public funds.

2. Thou shalt go into space with heavy lift rockets with hydrogen upper stages and not go extinct.

The human race can only go in one of two directions; space or extinction- right now we are an endangered species.

3. Thou shalt use the power of the atom to live on other worlds.

Nuclear energy is to the space age as steam was to the industrial revolution; chemical propulsion is useless for interplanetary travel and there is no solar energy in the outer solar system.

4. Thou shalt use nuclear weapons to travel through space.

Physical matter can barely contain chemical reactions; the only way to effectively harness nuclear energy to propel spaceships is to avoid containment problems completely- with bombs.

5. Thou shalt gather ice on the Moon as a shield and travel outbound.

The Moon has water for the minimum 14 foot thick radiation shield and is a safe place to light off a bomb propulsion system; it is the starting gate.

6. Thou shalt spin thy spaceships and rings and hollow spheres to create gravity and thrive.

Humankind requires Earth gravity and radiation to travel for years through space; anything less is a guarantee of failure.

7. Thou shalt harvest the Sun on the Moon and use the energy to power the Earth and propel spaceships with mighty beams.

8. Thou shalt freeze without damage the old and sick and revive them when a cure is found; only an indefinite lifespan will allow humankind to combine and survive. Only with this reprieve can we sleep and reach the stars.

9. Thou shalt build solar power stations in space hundreds of miles in diameter and with this power manufacture small black holes for starship engines.

10. Thou shalt build artificial intellects and with these beings escape the death of the universe and resurrect all who have died, joining all minds on a new plane.

CCC – “Constant c Catastrophe”

Otto E. Rossler

Faculty of Science, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, Germany

Abstract

The historical twist that the universal constancy of the speed of light, c, got abandoned for more than a century is recalled. The new situation, arrived at independently by Richard J. Cook, is outlined along with some of its uplifting consequences. A new metrology and a new cosmology take shape.
(March 15, 2013)

Text

A globally constant c is not a catastrophe in the opinion of the present writer, despite the fact that most everyone feels safe in the fold of the old paradigm. A simplification of physics is almost never a step back. The new situation can be summarized as follows.

In 1907, Einstein realized that relative to the tip of a constantly accelerating long rocketship in outer space, clocks located at the bottom of the rocketship tick slower, e.g. half as fast, than those at the tip [1]. This was “the happiest thought of my life,” he always stressed. The breakthrough allowed him to understand gravitation in the context of his new theory of special relativity described two years before.

To his dismay, however, he was forced to realize that, at the bottom of the long rocketship, the local slowdown of time is accompanied by a numerically equal, visible from above, reduction of the speed of light c even though the latter had been a universal constant in special relativity. Both observable changes (the slowdown and the crawl) remain masked on the lower level itself. The drawback of the reduced c caused Einstein to drop the subject of gravitation for 4 years (until his good friend Ehrenfest lured him back with the related paradigm of the rotating disk). Einstein then would carefully “build around” the drawback mentioned. And the simplest nontrivial solution of the finished general theory of relativity, the Schwarzschild metric, can indeed be written in an equivalent form in which c is globally constant [2].

But how about the riddle of the “creeping” speed of light downstairs in the rocketship and in gravity? The solution to the conundrum emerges from a second look at the famous “Lorentz contraction” which (as is well known) states that a fast-moving car is shortened while keeping its width: Does this fact mean that the shortened car has become anisotropic in its own frame? The answer is no.

Analogously here: the apparently only vertically enlarged “spaghetti people” downstairs in gravity are not distorted in their own frame. They are objectively enlarged in all directions since time is slowed and c is constant. Their lateral size change is masked when viewed from above. Hence c only seems to be creeping in the lateral directions downstairs without being reduced in reality.

“Who ordered that?,” one feels tempted to say. The new size change which follows from the universal constancy of c has been spotted from time to time in the past, cf. [2]. The most convincing mathematical demonstration based on the theory of general relativity was given by Richard J. Cook in a paper entitled “Gravitational space dilation” [3]. A very simple derivation using the equivalence principle is the “Telemach theorem” [4]. Its cousin, the “Olemach theorem” [5], is even simpler (using only angular-momentum conservation and the Bohr radius formula of quantum mechanics).

The thus successfully recovered “Einstein universality of c ” is a bonanza. Global constancy of c implies, for example, that the well-known infinite time delay of light going all the way down to a black hole’s horizon (or up from it) [6] reflects an infinite distance (if in s/t = c = const., t goes to infinity, so does s ). Therefore the famous “Flamm’s paraboloid” describing the shape of space-time around a Schwarzschild black hole now gets replaced by (is morphed into) a “generic 3-pseudosphere”: Space itself is infinitely enlarged towards the horizon in a trumpet-like fashion. While this is hard to visualize, the lower-dimensional analog, a halved 2-pseudosphere (replacing the upper part of the likewise 2-dimensional Flamm-paraboloid) looks like a vertical infinitely long trumpet whose upper rim and its neighborhood coincides with that of the former paraboloid. An ant placed on the locally flat rim of the trumpet’s big mouth can walk around it in a short finite time. But the same ant has to muster an infinite distance in order to reach the middle of the very same plane – namely the mouthpiece of the maximally drawn-out trumpet (which represents the horizon of the black hole). Thus, “curvature” and “stretching” do both go to infinity near the horizon like Siamese twins, in the new differential geometry of gravitation.

Further new implications are as follows: Rest mass and charge both go to zero in inverse proportion to the local redshift [4]. The charge change represents a major surprise in physics following a 1½ centuries long reign of the law of charge conservation. In consequence of this, the combined “Einstein-Maxwell equations” cease to be physically valid, as do other compound solutions [4]. The same fatal fate holds true, for all expanding-universe solutions to the Einstein equation since they imply global non-constancy of the speed of light c as is well known. Therefore cosmology suddenly finds itself to be on the lookout for a replacement for the big bang. A major catastrophe in view of a decades-long previous consensus.

Equally important, numerous changes in metrology follow if distances, masses and charges are no longer the same as before: The Ur-meter, the Ur-charge (of the electron) and the Ur-kilogram all cease to be valid along with other previous constants of nature, as the price to pay for c’s newly won universality [4]. Hence a new global picture of space-time including the cosmos is implicit. This prospect is almost unacceptable at first sight. By coincidence, though, a new “second statistical mechanics” – cryodynamics sister discipline to thermodynamics – was recently found to exist [7] which independently calls for a new cosmology and is bound to help in its formulation.

To conclude, space-time theory acquires a new symmetry between curvature and stretching in the wake of the new global constancy of the speed of light. General relativity acquires a new face without losing its beauty. The speed of light c thus proves as fertile as it was a century ago. Is it conceivable that Einstein will dominate the 21st century no less than the 20th?

Acknowledgments

I thank Dieter Fröhlich, Heinrich Kuypers, Frank Kuske and Ali Sanayei for discussions. For J.O.R.

References

[1] A. Einstein, On the relativity principle and the conclusions drawn from it (in German). Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität 4, 411–462 (1907), p. 458; English translation: http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/GR&Grav_2007/pdf/Einstein_1907.pdf , p. 306.
[2] O.E. Rossler, Abraham-like return to constant c in general relativity: Gothic-R theorem demonstrated in Schwarzschild metric, 2008
( http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/fullpreprint.pdf ; revised http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/chaos.pdf ), Fractal Spacetime and Noncommutative Geometry in Quantum and High Energy Physics 2, 1-14 (2012).
[3] R.J. Cook, Gravitational space dilation (2009). http://arxiv.org/pdf/0902.2811.pdf
[4] O.E. Rossler, Einstein’s equivalence principle has three further implications besides affecting time: T-L-M-Ch theorem (“Telemach”). African Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science Research 5, 44-47 (2012). http://www.academicjournals.org/ajmcsr/PDF/pdf2012/Feb/9%20Feb/Rossler.pdf
[5] O.E. Rossler, Olemach theorem: Angular-momentum conservation implies gravitational-redshift proportional change of length, mass and charge. European Scientific Journal 9(2), 38-45 (2013). http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/814/876
[6] J.R. Oppenheimer and H. Snyder, On continued gravitational contraction. Phys. Rev. 56, 455–459 (1939). Abstract: http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v56/i5/p455_1
[7] O.E. Rossler, The new science of cryodynamics and its connection to cosmology. Complex Systems 20, 105-113 (2011). http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/20-2-3.pdf