Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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On the cusp of graduation, I’ve had two major realizations in college.

One: most of America’s worst economic crises have been a result of financial obscurity. The first major crash in my lifetime was in the tech bubble of the early 2000s, where Wall Street traders were overrating the quality of Internet stocks. Once the broader market realized this, the values of many tech companies were obliterated. Millions of investors exposed to this sector lost their entire investments because they were unaware of these misrepresentations. In the most last recession, where lenders were underrating the riskiness of homeowners and financial institutions were securitizing riskier-than-advertised mortgages, millions of investors lost their entire investments yet again because they were unaware of further misrepresentations.

Two: economic history repeats itself, even if as a society, we might be aware of this pattern. Taking these two market crises as an example of this bleak fact about our species, it seems that we’ll always have the shortest of memories. In this case, history repeated rather quickly – twice in the span of a decade. Is it possible that people are cognizant of a recurring mistake before it happens, even if it’s happened before in their lifetimes? Most likely not, if the last recession is any example. A significant number of real estate professionals, banking gurus, and regulators were responsible for inflating a price bubble in the housing market, even though some fraction should have been economically conscious enough to understand the problems that would eventually arise.

The question then remains: is there a way to solve both of these problems, assuming the best of all possible worlds? Yes. Imagine a place where peoples’ understandings of basic economics and financial practices was commonplace, where a homeowner and a lender had an equal comprehension of a mortgage, where a hard-working breadwinner knew the dangers of payday loans, and where a child could sit side-by-side with his or her parents while overseeing family finances. All of these possibilities – and more – can come into fruition if we as individuals place a greater emphasis on financial awareness. Note: I don’t say “financial learning” because all of these concepts are innate to us, though hidden by verbiage and stigma. Whether we like it or not, if our career is in finance or not, we must come to terms with the economic world that surrounds us.

If we are lucky, a societal “financial flowering” may just reduce the severity of future crises, and will definitely place more dollars in the pockets of our grandchildren. Just think, if we are able to teach future generations about the dangers of debt, or the linkages between well-being and sound investing practices, our world will be a better place. For lack of a better cliché, this is not rocket-science, which is why it is actually possible. I work for WealthLift, a company that teaches novice investors how to evaluate and trade stocks, while providing them with educational lessons about topics such as hedge funds, the Federal Reserve, and retirement planning. I hope that more people will try to make a difference in the realm of financial clarity, because it is an issue that affects us all.

At the end of the day, our lives are a factor of the number of Greenbacks we hold, whether we like it or not. I want to raise my children in a culture that has a better grasp on these issues, not for wealth or power, but for peace.

How hard is to assess which risks to mitigate? It turns out to be pretty hard.

Let’s start with a model of risk so simplified as to be completely unrealistic, yet will still retain a key feature. Suppose that we managed to translate every risk into some single normalized unit of “cost of expected harm”. Let us also suppose that we could bring together all of the payments that could be made to avoid risks. A mitigation policy given these simplifications must be pretty easy: just buy each of the “biggest for your dollar” risks.

Not so fast.

The problem with this is that many risk mitigation measures are discrete. Either you buy the air filter or you don’t. Either your town filters its water a certain way or it doesn’t. Either we have the infrastructure to divert the asteroid or we don’t. When risk mitigation measures become discrete, then allocating the costs becomes trickier. Given a budget of 80 “harms” to reduce, and risks of 50, 40, and 35, then buying the 50 leaves 15 “harms” that you were willing to pay to avoid left on the table.

Alright, so how hard can this be to sort this out? After all, just because going big isn’t always the best for your budget, doesn’t mean it isn’t easy to figure out. Unfortunately, this problem is also known as the “0−1 knapsack problem”, which computer scientists know to be NP-complete. This means that there isn’t any known process to find exact solutions that are polynomial in the size of the input, thus requiring looking through a good portion of the potential solution combinations, taking an exponential amount of time.

What does this tell us? First of all, it means that it isn’t appropriate to expect all individuals, organizations, or governments to make accurate comparative risk assessments for themselves, but neither should we discount the work that they have done. Accurate risk comparisons are hard won and many time-honed cautions are embedded in our insurance policies and laws.

However, as a result of this difficulty, we should expect that certain short-cuts are made, particularly cognitive short-cuts: sharp losses are felt more sharply, and have more clearly identifiable culprits, than slow shifts that erode our capacities. We therefore expect our laws and insurance policies to be biased towards sudden unusual losses, such as car accidents and burglaries, as opposed to a gradual increase in surrounding pollutants or a gradual decrease in salary as a profession becomes obsolete. Rare events may also not be included through processes of legal and financial adaptation. We should also expect them to pay more attention to issues we have no “control” over, even if the activities we do control are actually more dangerous. We should therefore be particularly careful of extreme risks that move slowly and depend upon our own activities, as we are naturally biased to ignore them compared to more flashy and sudden events. For this reason, models, games, and simulations are very important tools for risk policy. For one thing, they make these shifts perceivable by compressing them. Further, as they can move longer-term events into the short-term view of our emotional responses. However, these tools are only as good as the information they include, so we also need design methodologies that aim to broadly discover information to help avoid these biases.

The discrete, “all or nothing” character of some mitigation measures has another implication. It also tells us that we wouldn’t be able to make implicit assessments of how much individuals of different income levels value their lives by the amount they are willing to pay to avoid risks. Suppose that we have some number of relatively rare risks, each having a prevention stage, in which the risks have not manifested in any way, and a treatment stage, in which they have started to manifest. Even if the expected value favors prevention over treatment in all cases, if one cannot pay for all such prevention, then the best course in some cases is to pay for very few of them, leaving a pool of available resources to treat what does manifest, which we do not know ahead of time.

The implication for existential and other extreme risks is we should be very careful to clearly articulate what the warning signs for each of them are, for when it is appropriate to shift from acts of prevention to acts of treatment. In particular, we should sharply proceed with mitigating the cases where the best available theories suggest there will be no further warning signs. With existential risks, the boundary between remaining flexible and needing to commit requires sharply different responses, but with unknown tipping points, the location of the boundary is fuzzy. As a lack of knowledge knows no prevention and will always manifest, only treatment is feasible, so acting sharply to build our theories is vital.

We can draw another conclusion by expanding on how the model given at the beginning is unrealistic. There is no such thing as a completely normalized harm, as there are tradeoffs between irreconcilable criteria, the evaluation of which changes with experience across and within individuals. Even temporarily limiting an analysis to standard physical criteria (say lives), rare events pose a problem for actuarial assessment, with few occurrences giving poor bounds on likelihood. Existential risks provide no direct frequencies, nor opportunity for an update in Bayesian belief, so we are left to an inductive assessment of the risk’s potential pathways.

However, there is also no single pool for mitigation measures. People will form and dissolve different pools of resources for different purposes as they are persuaded and dissuaded. Therefore, those who take it upon themselves to investigate the theory leading to rare and one-pass harms, for whatever reason, provide a mitigation effort we might not rationally take for ourselves. It is my particular bias to think that information systems for aggregating these efforts and interrogating these findings, and methods for asking about further phenomena still, are worth the expenditure, and thus the loss in overall flexibility. This combination of our biases leads to a randomized strategy for investigating unknown risks.

In my view, the Lifeboat Foundation works from a similar strategy as an umbrella organization: one doesn’t have to yet agree that any particular risk, mitigation approach, or desired future is the one right thing to pursue, which of course can’t be known. It is merely the bet that pooling those pursuits will serve us. I have some hope this pooling will lead to efforts inductively combining the assessments of disparate risks and potential mitigation approaches.

But I would suggest CERN to select the majority of speakers and to make sure they are high-ranking and not necessarily on their payroll.

And Dr. W. Wagner and Mag. M. Goritschnig should be included, as well as the editor of Leonardo.

I also apologize for my having provoked G&M: they have all the chance of the world to defend their position. And no one would be happier than me if they prevailed. For as I always said I am CERN’s best friend. My having asked for a rebuttal was the opposite of an aggressive act: “science is friendship” by its definition. Lifeboat loves science.

RMS <em>Titanic</em> Sails
What’s to worry? RMS Titanic departs Southampton.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 1912. What better time to think about lifeboats?

One way to start a discussion is with some vintage entertainment. On the centenary weekend of the wreck of the mega-liner, our local movie palace near the Hudson River waterfront ran a triple bill of classic films about maritime disasters: A Night to Remember, Lifeboat, and The Poseidon Adventure. Each one highlights an aspect of the lifeboat problem. They’re useful analogies for thinking about the existential risks of booking a passage on spaceship Earth.

Can’t happen…

A Night to Remember frames the basic social priorities: Should we have lifeboats and who are they for? Just anybody?? When William McQuitty produced his famous 1958 docudrama of the Titanic’s last hours, the answers were blindingly obvious – of course we need lifeboats! They’re for everyone and there should be enough! Where is that moral certainty these days? And whatever happened to the universal technological optimism of 1912? For example, certain Seasteaders guarantee your rights – and presumably a lifeboat seat – only as long as your dues are paid. Libertarians privatize public goods, run them into the ground, squeeze out every dime, move the money offshore, and then dictate budget priorities in their own interest. Malthusians handle the menu planning. And the ship’s captain just might be the neo-feudal Prince Philip, plotting our course back to his Deep Green Eleventh Century.

Tallulah Bankhead in <em>Lifeboat</em>
Think Mink and Don’t Sink: Talulah Bankhead in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat deals with the problems of being in one. For a very long time – unlike the lucky stiffs on the Titanic, who were picked up in 2 hours. Specifically, it’s about a motley group of passengers thrown together in an open boat with short provisions, no compass, and no certain course. And, oh yes, the skipper is their mortal enemy: The lifeboat is helmed by the U-boat commander who torpedoed their ship. He overawes them with seafaring expertise and boundless energy (thanks to the speed pills in his secret stash) and then lulls them by singing sentimental German lieder. At night, the captain solves his problems of supply and authority by culling the injured passengers while everyone’s asleep. He tells the survivors they’re going to Bermuda. They’re actually headed for a rendezvous with his supply ship – and from there the slow boat to Buchenwald. The point of Lifeboat is simple: What can you do in your life and environment so you never, ever end up in one?

What’s wrong with this picture?

Risk avoidance is the moral of The Poseidon Adventure. A glorious old ocean liner, the Poseidon, is acquired by new owners who plan to scrap it. But these clever operators maximize shareholder value by billing the ship’s final voyage as a New Year’s cruise to Greece. They take on every paying passenger they can find, barter with a band to get free entertainment, and drive the underloaded ship hard and fast into the stormy winter Mediterranean over the protests of the captain and seasick travelers. At this point an undersea earthquake triggers a 90-foot tsunami, and despite ample warnings this monster wave broadsides the top-heavy liner at midnight, during the New Year’s party. First the ball drops. Then the other shoe drops. The result is the ultimate “Bottoms Up!”

And the takeaway of The Poseidon Adventure applies to all of the films and to life in general, not to mention the next few generations on the planet. As David McCollough’s famously concluded in The Johnstown Flood, it can be a fatal assumption ‘that the people who were responsible for your safety will act responsibly.’

You can have a ripping good time watching these old movies. And as futurists, sociologists, planners, catastrophists, humanists or transhumanists, you can conjure with them, too. Icebergs and U-boats have ceased to menace – of cruise ships, I say nothing.

But the same principles of egalitarianism, legitimacy, non-beligerence and prudential planning apply to Earth-crossing asteroids, CERN’s operations and program, Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno manipulations, monetary policy and international finance, and NATO deployments present and future.

Or do they? And if they do, who says so?

Ship beautiful — the Aquitania on her way.

CC BY-NC-ND Clark Matthews and The Lifeboat Foundation

Creative Commons License
Earth’s Titanic Challenges by Clark Matthews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://lifeboat.com.

High energy experiments like the LHC at the nuclear research centre CERN are extreme energy consumers (needing the power of a nuclear plant). Their construction is extremely costly (presently 7 Billion Euros) and practical benefits are not in sight. The experiments eventually pose existential risks and these risks have not been properly investigated.

It is not the first time that CERN announces record energies and news around April 1 – apparently hoping that some critique and concerns about the risks could be misinterpreted as an April joke. Additionally CERN regularly starts up the LHC at Easter celebrations and just before week ends, when news offices are empty and people prefer to have peaceful days with their friends and families.

CERN has just announced new records in collision energies at the LHC. And instead of conducting a neutral risk assessment, the nuclear research centre plans costly upgrades of its Big Bang machine. Facing an LHC upgrade in 2013 for up to CHF 1 Billion and the perspective of a Mega-LHC in 2022: How long will it take until risk researchers are finally integrated in a neutral safety assessment?

There are countless evidences for the necessity of an external and multidisciplinary safety assessment of the LHC. According to a pre-study in risk research, CERN fits less than a fifth of the criteria for a modern risk assessment (see the press release below). It is not acceptable that the clueless member states point at the operator CERN itself, while this regards its self-set security measures as sufficient, in spite of critique from risk researchers, continuous debates and the publication of further papers pointing at concrete dangers and even existential risks (black holes, strangelets) eventually arising from the experiments sooner or later. Presently science has to admit that the risk is disputed and basically unknown.

It will not be possible to keep up this ostrich policy much longer. Especially facing the planned upgrades of the LHC, CERN will be confronted with increasing critique from scientific and civil side that the most powerful particle collider has yet not been challenged in a neutral and multidisciplinary safety assessment. CERN has yet not answered to pragmatic proposals for such a process that also should constructively involve critics and CERN. Also further legal steps from different sides are possible.

The member states that are financing the CERN budget, the UN or private funds are addressed to provide resources to finally initiate a neutral and multidisciplinary risk assessment.

German version of this article published in Oekonews: http://www.oekonews.at/index.php?mdoc_id=1069458

Related LHC-Critique press release and open letter to CERN:

https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/02/lhc-critique-press-release-feb-13-2012-cern-plans-mega-particle-collider-communication-to-cern-for-a-neutral-and-multi-disciplinary-risk-assessment-before-any-lhc-upgrade

Typical physicist’s April joke on stable black holes at the LHC (April 1 2012, German): http://www.scienceblogs.de/hier-wohnen-drachen/2012/04/stabiles-minischwarzes-loch-aus-higgsteilchen-erzeugt.php

Latest publications of studies demonstrating risks arising from the LHC experiment:

Prof Otto E. Rössler: http://www.academicjournals.org/AJMCSR/PDF/pdf2012/Feb/9%20Feb/Rossler.pdf

Thomas Kerwick B.Tech. M.Eng. Ph.D.: http://www.vixra.org/abs/1203.0055

Brief summary of the basic problem by LHC-Kritik (still valid since Sep. 2008): http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/lhc-kritik-cern-1st-statement-summary-908.pdf

Detailed summary of the scientific LHC risk discussion by LHC-Kritik and ConCERNed International: http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/critical-revision-of-lhc-risks_concerned-int.pdf

We wish you happy Easter and hope for your support of our pragmatic proposals to urgently increase safety in these new fields of nuclear physics.

LHC Critique / LHC Kritik — Network for Safety at nuclear and sub-nuclear high energy Experiments.

www.LHC-concern.info

[email protected]

Tel.: +43 650 629 627 5

New Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/LHC.Critique/

[Disclaimer: This contribution does not reflect the views of the Lifeboat Foundation as with the scientific community in general, but individual sentiment — Web Admin]

CERN insists on believing in physical nonsense as a guarantee that their LHC experiment were innocuous. They refuse an update on their false “Safety Report” for almost 4 years.

The sacrosanct safety report dogmatically posits that one particular version of string theory possessed physical reality which no string theorist claims.

They refuse up-dating, open discussion and the necessary scientific safety conference for 4 years ( http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/PetitiontoCERN.pdf ). They thereby behave like medieval dogmatists.

I publicly accuse Giddings and Mangano and acting director Heuer of the crime of scientific fraud in conjunction with consciously risking Armageddon.

The silence of the United Nations Security Council and all members and non-members of the world press club is owed to the most effective press campaign of history, launched by the inventor of the web. Even a court’s advice, given to CERN on the 27th of January 2011 to admit a “safety conference,” was prevented from reaching the public.

For future historians who hopefully will exist, this cover-up is the most momentous event to report to the next generation as a “ktéma eis aeí” – a possession for eternity – in homage to Thucydides.

CERN MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY to await the verdict of the safety conference.

GatgetBridge is currently just a concept. It might start its life as a discussion forum, later turn into a network or an organisation and hopefully inspire a range of similar activities.

We will soon be able to use technology to make ourselves more intelligent, feel happier or change what motivates us. When the use of such technologies is banned, the nations or individuals who manage to cheat will soon lord it over their more obedient but unfortunately much dimmer fellows. When these technologies are made freely available, a few terrorists and psychopaths will use them to cause major disasters. Societies will have to find ways to spread these mind enhancement treatments quickly among the majority of their citizens, while keeping them from the few who are likely to cause harm. After a few enhancement cycles, the most capable members of such societies will all be “trustworthy” and use their skills to stabilise the system (see “All In The Mind”).

But how can we manage the transition period, the time in which these technologies are powerful enough to be abused but no social structures are yet in place to handle them? It might help to use these technologies for entertainment purposes, so that many people learn about their risks and societies can adapt (see “Should we build a trustworthiness tester for fun”). But ideally, a large, critical and well-connected group of technology users should be part of the development from the start and remain involved in every step.

To do that, these users would have to spend large amounts of money and dedicate considerable manpower. Fortunately, the basic spending and working patterns are in place: People already use a considerable part of their income to buy consumer devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and PCs and increasingly also accessories such as blood glucose meters, EEG recorders and many others; they also spend a considerable part of their time to get familiar with these devices. Manufacturers and software developers are keen to turn any promising technology into a product and over time this will surely include most mind measuring and mind enhancement technologies. But for some critical technologies this time might be too long. GadgetBridge is there to shorten it as follows:

- GadgetBridge spreads its philosophy — that mind-enhancing technologies are only dangerous when they are allowed to develop in isolation — that spreading these technologies makes a freer world more likely — and that playing with innovative consumer gadgets is therefore not just fun but also serves a good cause.

- Contributors make suggestions for new consumer devices based on the latest brain research and their personal experiences. Many people have innovative ideas but few are in a position to exploit them. Contributors rather donate their ideas that see them wither away or claimed by somebody else.

- All ideas are immediately published and offered free of charge to anyone who wants to use them. Companies select and implement the best options. Users buy their products and gain hands-on experience with the latest mind measurement and mind enhancement technologies. When risks become obvious, concerned users and governments look for ways to cope with them before they get out of hand.

- Once GadgetBridge produces results, it might attract funding from the companies that have benefited or hope to benefit from its services. GadgetBridge might then organise competitions, commission feasibility studies or develop a structure that provides modest rewards to successful contributors.

Your feedback is needed! Please be honest rather than polite: Could GadgetBridge make a difference?

This note considers the possibility of earth being replaceable in the galaxy in the foreseeable future. The suggested answer is: no.

Let me explain why. For once, fundamental physics is not enough to understand the story since implied physical disciplines, chemistry and biology, come into play. The modern synthesis (Ernst Mayr) is presupposed. Stu Kauffmann and Joel Cohen stand in the background.

But are humans (the extinction of which the CERN debate is all about) not at the tip of the animal kingdom and hence similar tips should exist elsewhere? Our blue planet would then be not THAT important from a more sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint.

Even this consolation – if it qualifies for one – cannot be offered: Everything speaks in favor of the conclusion that humans are unique over vast stretches of the galaxy’s life-bearing quarters.

The reason is that human beings do not, biologically speaking, occupy the tip of the evolutionary arrow. There exist terrestrial animals with more highly developed brains. The eusocial mole rat has a larger relative brain weight, for example. And sperm whales – the carriers of the largest brains on earth who recently were found to use a different (“baby”) language in communicating with their young – possess the both largest and most complex brain on earth as is well known. But do we humans not make a unique use of our own, lower-class, brains on the planet? This is correct.

This use is not a “more advanced” use in the sense of biological evolution, however. Orangutans can be shown to be more advanced, evolutionarily speaking, in the use they make of their brains. For although they live in a very precarious environment – regarding the height of the trees on which they stay day and night to collect their diverse time-dependent sources of food and to build nests in the night –, they have the lowest known failure rate in using their brains. The maximum error rate, however, determines the minimum allowed reproductive rate: Orangutans have an offspring only every 7 to 9 years, at a lifespan of not much more than 50 years and a fairly late adolescence. This puts them at the top of the efficiency index for their brain.

If it is not the quality of the brain that is so exceptional with the human brain, it must be the human use of the brain if our species is to be unique. What proves to be unique is the use of the brain as a person. How can I be sure? Because the “personogenetic bifurcation” is a tantalizing process in the ontogenesis of the human organism: a “function change” in the sense of Robert Rosen’s. So humans are indeed special. The same function change can, in principle, occur also in other highly brained organisms as well as artificial intelligences, as Steven Spielberg correctly anticipated in “A.I.” and as Ray Kurzweil implicitly assumes in his “Singularity theory.”

I had no time to talk about these “softer” things on lifeboat up until now. After the new fait accompli by CERN – no one believes that a proof of unsafety is a cause for a double-check on our planet – I can do so. When survival is too boring as a topic for the planet’s media, the secret of humanity is perhaps the most interesting and moving topic in the universe.

The protagonists are mother and toddler. The most interesting phase in every individual’s life is the least appreciated one. The toddler is unintentionally seduced into spontaneously inventing, out of nothing, the suspicion of benevolence being shown towards him. And in return he invents a desire to execute benevolent acts by himself (like putting a sweetie into Pa’s mouth and asking “good?!” as I once witnessed an 18-months old do).

But is not brood-caring a benevolent activity all over the animal kingdom? Brood-caring is not at all benevolence-in-action, it only looks so. The caring is finely controlled as an egocentric activity. Take the proverbial example of the chimpanzee mother whose offspring had a broken arm: When it cried, she hugged it more firmly in her arms. Everyone understands this example which I was offered in conversation in 1966. But is this not the essence of all love – egotism? Not among persons. The invention of the suspicion of benevolence at a very young age, and the implied sudden existence as a person wanting to do good to the other as a person, is the most tremendous bifurcation event in the universe.

I do not wish to enter into the fascinating details of reciprocal mappings. But the understanding of the mechanism allows one to “export” this “autocatalysis of mutually being moved” out to smile-blind human children who are not exposed to the double meaning of the mother’s smile as both an expression of bonding and of general joyfulness. A causal therapy of autism based on artificial “acoustic smiles” whenever the caretaker is about to laugh follows. This sacrifice mothers would love to bring if they were only told the secret. The therapy stays un-adopted – presumably because it is so easy that it can be exported to other mirror-competent bonding animals. The profession’s reluctance over 4 decades may have to do with this embarrassing fact. Gregory Bateson was its only high-ranking supporter in 1975. His friend and colleague, John C. Lilly, had come close. Leo Szilard had thought of export first.

Here the improbability of the same epigenetic function change occurring spontaneously in other branches of biology (outside the pongids) is at stake. It follows from the fact that personogenesis marks the end of spontaneous biological evolution. So there is a strong selection pressure acting against its preconditions (an overlap between laughter and smile, friskiness and bonding) occurring in highly brained animals. So despite the fact that personogenesis is tantamount to a jump up the whole evolutionary ladder into the lap of point Omega (in the terminology of Teilhard de Chardin). I always felt that the pope at least ought to understand.

Thus it can be predicted for sure that in other biologies (like that on Europa or that inside Jupiter with its inorganic biochemistry based on B-N-B-N- rather than C-C-C- backbones, or Robert Forward’s nuclear-chemical evolution on neutron stars) the same epigenetic accident is most likely to be avoided in nature. In other words, the general theory of life as an uninhibitable cosmic thermodynamic phenomenon does not include personogenesis.

Nevertheless personhood is not confined to the human species once it has been invented. The mission of planet earth is to export it. “Galactic export” begins on planet earth. This makes the latter maximally precious in the galaxy and, possibly, the whole cosmos. Singularity theory is related. Let me wish you a good Easter holiday in reminiscence of our being elected as persons: http://www.youtube.com/embed/rZKJcHVWI_4?rel=0

Either I am a liar or not. You treat me like being one by your observing a world-wide curfew. I must have made grave mistakes in the past that explain this attitude.

I admit that my latest post on Oppenheimer is a bit technical since I mentioned the duration of a trip down to the horizon of the black hole remnant of a collapsed star and back. But my conclusion was easy to understand: If Oppie was right then both trips take an infinite outside time. Every high-school student can confirm this.

Therefore my public request to CERN, to please before starting 8 TeV proton collisions on a large scale tomorrow give a reason as to why they stick to a theory of black holes that denies Oppenheimer’s finding, is perhaps sufficiently grounded on facts to be worth reporting.

Forgive me for my turning to you directly.

In light of continued frustration by many users, and due to a recent request by Prof Peter Howell on the lack of web administration on obscene/offensive posts and the effect this can have on the overall impression of Lifeboat, I have taken measures on cleaning up posts by a contributor who regularly depreciates the standards of what can otherwise be a fine blog of academic opinion. Apologies to Prof Otto Rossler — but referring to CERN as ‘urinating soldiers’ etc is far below the standards Lifeboat aspires to — Please clean up your act.

Tom — Web Admin.