Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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From Yahoo News:

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says he wants to undertake a zero-gravity flight aboard an aircraft this year as a precursor to a journey into space.

“This year I’m planning a zero-gravity flight and to go into space in 2009,” he was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Hawking, 65, has said he hopes to travel on British businessman Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic service, which is scheduled to launch in 2009. The service will charge space tourists about $US200,000 ($A257,000) for a two-hour suborbital trip 140 km above the Earth.

Branson was keen to help the scientist realise his dream of space flight, Virgin Galactic spokesman Stephen Attenborough said.

“Richard is very determined that if we can possibly make this happen, then it should,” Attenborough said.

He said the company had not discussed the issue of payment with Hawking.

One of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation, Hawking gained fame with the best-selling book A Brief History of Time.

The scientist, who uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.

Hawking has warned that the survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth.

See you in orbit, Dr. Hawking!

From ABC News:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4, 2007 — North Korea appears to have made preparations for another nuclear test, according to U.S. defense officials.

“We think they’ve put everything in place to conduct a test without any notice or warning,” a senior U.S. defense official told ABC News.

The official cautions that the intelligence is inconclusive as to whether North Korea will actually go ahead with another test but said the preparations are similar to the steps taken by Pyongyang before it shocked the world by conducting its first nuclear test last Oct. 9.

Two other senior defense officials confirmed that recent intelligence suggested that the North Koreans appear to be ready to test a nuclear weapon again, but the intelligence community divides over whether another test is likely.

“That would surprise me,” a senior intelligence official said when asked if North Korea is likely to soon conduct another test.

Another official had a different view, predicting North Korea would conduct a test sometime over the next two or three months.

In the weeks before the Oct. 9 test, U.S. spy satellites witnessed the unloading of large cables at a suspected test site in P’onggye, in northeastern North Korea. The more recent activity has been observed in the same area as the Oct. 9 test.

In October, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution that imposed harsh sanctions against North Korea just six days after Kim Jong Il’s regime declared that it conducted an underground nuclear test. The sanctions were designed to coerce North Korea into giving up its nuclear program.

Read the rest at the site. Why is Kim Jong Il so brazenly disobedient of the international community? Because he is power crazy and insane. Just who we need to have the power to kill millions.

On Edge.org, 160 brilliant scientists and thinkers were asked, “what are you optimistic about?” Gregory Cochran, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, chose to speak about self-replicating manufacturing:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”—it has always been that way.

Most men have been slaves of necessity, while the few who were not lived by exploiting others who were. Although mechanization has eased that burden in the advanced countries, it is still the case for the majority of the human race. Limited resources (mainly fossil fuels), as well as negative consequences of industrialization such as global warming, have made some people question whether American living standards can ever be extended to most of the human race. They’re pessimists, and they’re wrong.

Hardly anyone seems to realize it, but we’re on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. Within a generation—sooner if we want it enough—we will be able to make a self-replicating machine, first seriously suggested by John von Neumann.

Read the rest here. What Cochran slightly misses is that making unlimited weapons is just as easy as making unlimited products using exponential manufacturing. Read my essay on first-stage nanoproducts and nanoweaponry, the type we’d start to see in less than a year if von Neumann’s machines started working.

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Another terrorist attack, a warmer planet, death and destruction from a natural disaster. These are among Americans’ grim predictions for the United States in 2007.

But on a brighter note, only a minority of people think the U.S. will go to war with Iran or North Korea over the countries’ nuclear ambitions. An overwhelming majority thinks Congress will raise the federal minimum wage. A third sees hope for a cure to cancer.

These are among the findings of an Associated Press-AOL News poll that asked Americans to gaze into their crystal balls and contemplate what 2007 holds for the country.

Six in 10 people think the U.S. will be the victim of another terrorist attack next year, more than five years after the Sept. 11 assault on New York and Washington. An identical percentage think it is likely that bad guys will unleash a biological or nuclear weapon elsewhere in the world.

A biological or nuclear weapon released in a densely populated urban center could kill millions. 60% of Americans think it is likely this will happen in the next year. There may be some overestimations of the probability because of confirmation bias, but still, this number is very high. It underscores the responsibility we have to do something about lowering that likelihood.

In an important step forward for acknowledging the possibility of real AI in our immediate future, a report by the UK government that says robots will have the same rights and responsibilities as human citizens. The Financial Times reports:

The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day when it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth. Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future. Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist.

The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation. “If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The idea will not surprise science fiction aficionados.

It was widely explored by Dr Isaac Asimov, one of the foremost science fiction writers of the 20th century. He wrote of a society where robots were fully integrated and essential in day-to-day life.In his system, the ‘three laws of robotics’ governed machine life. They decreed that robots could not injure humans, must obey orders and protect their own existence – in that order.

Robots and machines are now classed as inanimate objects without rights or duties but if artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, the report argues, there may be calls for humans’ rights to be extended to them.It is also logical that such rights are meted out with citizens’ duties, including voting, paying tax and compulsory military service.

Mr Christensen said: “Would it be acceptable to kick a robotic dog even though we shouldn’t kick a normal one? There will be people who can’t distinguish that so we need to have ethical rules to make sure we as humans interact with robots in an ethical manner so we do not move our boundaries of what is acceptable.”

The Horizon Scan report argues that if ‘correctly managed’, this new world of robots’ rights could lead to increased labour output and greater prosperity. “If granted full rights, states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare to fix the machines over time,” it says.

But it points out that the process has casualties and the first one may be the environment, especially in the areas of energy and waste.

Human-level AI could be invented within 50 years, if not much sooner. Our supercomputers are already approaching the computing power of the human brain, and the software end of things is starting to progress steadily. It’s time for us to start thinking about AI as a positive and negative factor in global risk.

From Popular Science, a project that introduces a powerful kinetic weapon to the U.S. military arsenal:

When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident’s four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods-each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.

If Pentagon strategists get their way, there will be no place on the planet to hide from such an assault. The plan is part of a program — in slow development since the 1990s, and now quickly coalescing in military circles — called Prompt Global Strike. It will begin with modified Tridents. But eventually, Prompt Global Strike could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal. One candidate: the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, which is designed to hit Mach 5 — roughly 3600 mph. The goal, according to the U.S. Strategic Command’s deputy commander Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler, is “to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes.”

The question is whether such an attack can be deployed without triggering World War III: Those tungsten-armed Tridents look, and fly, exactly like the deadliest weapons in the American nuclear arsenal.

The article goes on to list concerns that were brought up by officials in congress and elsewhere — what is it really good for? If the President is going to authorize an ICBM launch, he’d better have a damn good reason to do so. But the need to use a cruise missile implies inaccessability by air. If the target is inaccessible by air, then is the intelligence leading to its selection really that trustworthy? Because this weapon looks like a nuclear missile, it probably has the potential to cause more problems than it solves.

From Eurekalert, a warning about the dangers of nuclear war:

Even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could produce as many direct fatalities as all of World War II and disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, with environmental effects that could be devastating for everyone on Earth, university researchers have found.

These powerful conclusions are being presented Dec. 11 during a press conference and a special technical session at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The research also appears in twin papers posted on Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, an online journal.

A team of scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder); and UCLA conducted the rigorous scientific studies reported.

Against the backdrop of growing tensions in the Middle East and nuclear “saber rattling” elsewhere in Asia, the authors point out that even the smallest nuclear powers today and in the near future may have as many as 50 or more Hiroshima-size (15 kiloton) weapons in their arsenals; all told, about 40 countries possess enough plutonium and/or uranium to construct substantial nuclear arsenals.

Owen “Brian” Toon, chair of the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU-Boulder, oversaw the analysis of potential fatalities based on an assessment of current nuclear weapons inventories and population densities in large urban complexes. His team focused on scenarios of smoke emissions that urban firestorms could produce.

“The results described in one of the new papers represent the first comprehensive quantitative study of the consequences of a nuclear conflict between smaller nuclear states,” said Toon and his co-authors. “A small country is likely to direct its weapons against population centers to maximize damage and achieve the greatest advantage,” Toon said. Fatality estimates for a plausible regional conflict ranged from 2.6 million to 16.7 million per country.

So it does look like global cooling from soot emitted by nuclear firestorms really is a big problem. All countries should suspend any research towards nuclear weapons, and countries like the United States should openly state that they will withhold from using nuclear weapons during specific engagements.