December 2008 – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:43:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8 Globally Networked Anarchy (#Griot) https://lifeboat.com/blog/2008/12/globally-networked-anarchy-griot Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:09:04 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=182 The year 2008 saw the hype fall away from virtual worlds but in contrast social networks are going from strength to strength and are being increasingly used as protest vehicles around the world. While the utility of Facebook and Twitter (using the #griot descriptor to report on the riots in Greece) have been widely reported upon some of the more interesting and interactive information can still be found in Second Life, which bodes well for the future of virtual worlds. Full report and links relating to this phenomena over at the MetaSecurity blog. Whether it be web-forums, Facebook or Second Life, virtual communities will continue to be an increasingly important part of the National Security picture in 2009.

]]> Why antropic principle stops to defend us https://lifeboat.com/blog/2008/12/why-antropic-principle-stops-to-defend-us https://lifeboat.com/blog/2008/12/why-antropic-principle-stops-to-defend-us#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:28:15 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=180 In the volume “Global catastrophic risks” you could find excellent article of Milan Circovic “Observation selection effects and global catastrophic risks”, where he shows that we can’t use information from past records to estimating future rate of global catastrophes.
This has one more consequence which I investigate in my article: “Why antropic principle stops to defend us. Observation selection, future rate of natural disasters and fragility of our environment” — that is we could be in the end of the long period of stability, and some catastrophes may be long overdue and what is most important we could underestimate fragility of our environment which could be on the verge of bifurcation. It is because origination of intellectual life on the Earth is very rare event and it means that some critical parameters may lay near their bounds of stability and small anthropogenic influences could start catastrophic process in this century.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8729933/Why-antropic-principle-sto…vironment–

Why antropic principle stops to defend us
Observation selection, future rate of natural disasters and fragility of our environment.

Alexei Turchin,
Russian Transhumanist movement

The previous version of this article was published on Russian in «Problems of management of risks and safety», Works of Institute of the System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, v. 31, 2007, p. 306–332.

Abstract:

The main idea of this article is not only that observation selection leads to underestimation of future rate of natural disasters, but that our environment is much more fragile to antropic influences (like overinflated toy balloon), also because of observation selection, and so we should much more carefully think about global warming and deep earth drilling.
The main idea of antropic principle (AP) is that our Universe has qualities that allow existence of the observers. In particular this means that global natural disasters that could prevent developing of intellectual life on the Earth never happened here. This is true only for the past but not for the future. So we cannot use information about frequency of global natural disasters in the past for extrapolation it to the future, except some special cases then we have additional information, as Circovic shoes in his paper. Therefore, an observer could find that all the important parametres for his/her survival (sun, temperature, asteroid risk etc.) start altogether inexplicably and quickly deteriorating – and possibly we could already find the signs of this process. In a few words: The anthropic principle has stopped to ‘defend’ humanity and we should take responsibility for our survival. Moreover, as origination of intellectual life on the Earth is very rare event it means that some critical parameters may lay near their bounds of stability and small antropogenic influences could start catastrophic process in this century.

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