Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Kerstin Dautenhahn joins our Robotics/AI Board. She coedited Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioral, Social, and Communicative Dimensions.

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  Actor/director Edward James Olmos joins our Ethics Board and Media & Arts Board. Eddie has done everything from playing Admiral Adama on Battlestar Galactica to helping get communities cleaned up and rebuilt after the 1992 Rodney King Riots in Los Angeles.

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  The Lifeboat Foundation worked with ten other organizations including the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation to launch a new strategic alliance for space development and commerce named the Alliance for Space Development (ASD).

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  Nanotechnology Now, the world’s most in-depth online resource for nanotechnology, supports Lifeboat Foundation with a free banner ad!

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  Andrzej Bartke, winner of the first Methuselah Mouse Prize, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.

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  Read Human Body Version 2.0 by Ray Kurzweil.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.

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  We now have a quote by Garry Kasparov on our Quotes page.

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  The RPG Eclipse Phase includes the “Singularity Foundation” and “Lifeboat Institute” as player factions. Learn more about this game!

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  Learn that Moore’s Law has been replaced by a Virtual Moore’s Law that is accelerating and bringing the Singularity with it!

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  We would like your input on our InternetShield program. 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.

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  Ed Begley Jr., actor, environmentalist, and founder of Begley’s Best, joins our Sustainability Board.