Lifeboat Foundation

Whether it’s Juno, Kepler or the Mars Rover; everyday we are one step closer to answering the eternal question. Are we alone in this Universe?

Introducing our brand-new project that needs your help:

The best way to find laser flashes from another civilization is to always look everywhere | Crowdfunding is a democratic way to support the fundraising needs of your community. Make a contribution today!

Continue reading “Laser SETI: First Ever All-Sky All-the-Time Search” »

The year is 2030. In a high-security containment lab, scientists gathered around a towering machine, eagerly awaiting the first look at a newly discovered bacterium on Mars.

With a series of beeps, the machine—a digital-to-biological converter, or DBC—signaled that it had successfully received the bacterium’s digitized genomic file. Using a chemical cocktail comprised of the building blocks of DNA, it whirled into action, automatically reconstructing the alien organism’s genes letter-by-letter.

Within a day, scientists had an exact replica of the Martian bacterium.

Continue reading “‘Biological Teleportation’ Edges Closer With Craig Venter’s Digital-to-Biological Converter” »

Early space aliens wouldn’t need to have worried about iron-poor blood astrophysicists now report. Apparently, iron was distributed uniformly throughout the cosmos quite quickly.

The implications for #astrobiology are obvious.

Iron — a building block of everything as we know it — was ubiquitous much earlier in the cosmos than anyone could have imagined, astrophysicists now report.

Continue reading “Universe Was Rife With Iron Early On, Say Astrophysicists” »

They say everything’s sweeter the second time around, and that seems to be the case for SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars. Last year, Musk unveiled his plans to colonize the Red Planet and make it fit for human habitation. Now, that version of the plan has been published and made available for free— with a few notable updates.

In the paper, the focus is on affordability, as that is the primary factor in making life on Mars a reality. As Musk notes, “You cannot create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion per person.” In order for it to be viable, Musk asserts that the cost should be about $200,000—equivalent to the median price of a house in the United States. In the paper, Musk outlines the steps he considers essential to ensuring this relative affordability.

But this is just the beginning. Musk posted a tweet today hinting that this version one is already being reviewed…and version 2 is on its way.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Just Published His Plan to Colonize Mars” »

The SETI Institute is hosting a global, public hackathon and code challenge to find a robust signal classification algorithm for use in our mission to find E.T. radio communication.

The Data Set

Each night, the SETI Institute observes signals across the radio frequency spectrum using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The signal detection system at the ATA searches for narrow-band radio signals coming directly from particular targets in the sky.

UPDATE May 17, 2017: The IBM PowerAI team and Nimbix have recently announced support for the hackathon. Teams at the hackathon will enjoy access to PowerAI systems for the weekend, which will significantly improve deep learning model building for ET signal classification. Thanks, Nimbix and IBM PowerAI.

As the Fermi paradox states, the Universe is a vast, unknowable space, filled with trillions upon trillions of potentially habitable planets, so… where are all the aliens?

In the latest attempt to solve this conundrum, a trio of researchers have suggested that advanced alien civilisations have gone into self-imposed ‘hibernation’ — waiting for a future where the Universe is far colder than it is now, which would facilitate the kind of processing power we could only ever dream about.

A new paper written by Oxford neuroscientist and AI expert, Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong, together with Milan Ćirković from the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, Serbia, argues that civilisations far more advanced than us could have conceivably explored a big chunk of the Universe already, and are now waiting for a better time to be alive.

Continue reading “Could Aliens Be Hibernating Through The Worst Time in The Universe?” »

Robert Bigelow has joined the ranks of wealthy entrepreneurs with an expensive interest in space.