Lifeboat Foundation

“Doomsday prepping”, or “survivalism”, is on the rise in Australia, as it is in the US and UK.

This is despite “preppers” being widely met with ridicule or fear (as the New York Times writes, prepping reality TV shows “are full of people lovingly cradling their weaponry, which in many cases is frighteningly extensive”).

Continue reading “I spent a week with a doomsday prepper in the outback. This is how it changed me” »

FAQ Timeline Dashboard Multimedia Exhibit A new abnormal: It is still 2 minutes to midnight 2019 Doomsday Clock Statement Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Editor, John Mecklin From the President | Full Statement | Board Biographies | About the Bulletin | Clock Timeline PDF version | Print this … Continued.

Apart from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, there aren’t many connections between space and dinosaurs outside of the imagination. But that all changed when NASA research scientist Jessie Christiansen brought the two together in an animation on social media this month.

For the past decade, Christiansen has studied planet occurrence rates, or how often and what kinds of planets occur in the galaxy, while studying data from exoplanet hunters such as NASA’s Kepler, K2 and TESS missions.

During a stargazing party at the California Institute of Technology, Christiansen was explaining how young the stars were that they observed. The skywatchers were looking at the Pleiades, a bright young cluster of stars that are some of the youngest in our sky.

In this episode of “Hello World,” Ashlee Vance travels to Svalbard — an archipelago located at 80 degrees north — to participate in some doomsday preparation with GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

#HelloWorldBloomberg #Svalbard

Continue reading “In Case of Apocalypse, Open This Arctic Code Vault” »

Scientists who are trying to save species at the brink of extinction are finding help in an unexpected place.

Heather Farrington, curator of zoology for the Cincinnati Museum Center, is using DNA from specimens collected more than 100 years ago to help understand the evolution and stresses faced by today’s animals.

Farrington runs the museum’s new state-of-the-art genetics laboratory, which helps researchers study populations of animals over time.

Beyond cortical and limbic systems, the company Neuralink could add a third layer of digital superintelligence to humans and avoid artificial intelligence enslavement, its founder Elon Musk claimed Tuesday. The brain-computer linkup firm is working to treat medical conditions using its implanted chip as early as next year, but during a podcast appearance, Musk reiterated his belief that the technology could avoid some of the worst consequences of advanced machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smK9dgdTl40

“It’s important that Neuralink solves this problem sooner rather than later, because the point at which we have digital superintelligence, that’s when we pass the singularity and things become just very uncertain,” Musk said during an interview with MIT professor Lex Fridman.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says Neuralink could bring A.I. ‘superintelligence’ to the brain” »

Both humans and mice respond to fear in ways that are deeply etched in survival mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years. Feeling afraid is part of a response that helps us to survive; we learn to respond appropriately, based on our assessment of the danger we face. Importantly, part of this response involves extinguishing fear and modifying our behavior accordingly, once we have learned that a potential threat poses little or no imminent danger. The inability to adapt to fears or lay them aside is involved in disorders such as PTSD and anxiety.

The researchers from Weill Cornell demonstrated that changes in the microbiome can result in an impaired ability to extinguish fear. This was true of two groups of mice: one group had been treated with antibiotics; the other group was raised entirely free of germs. The ability of both groups of mice to extinguish fear was compared with that of control mice whose microbiome was not altered. The difference suggested that signals from the microbiome were necessary for optimal extinction of conditioned fear responses.

In this issue, top experts examine technology-related doomsdays the world might soon face if they go unaddressed, not to frighten readers, but to alert them, so they might act in time, making a loud and unmistakable demand: that the Earth be preserved, that the human experiment be extended, that midnight never toll.

Learn more about nuclear weapons and what you can do to stop them.
EN: http://www.notonukes.org
FR: http://www.sansarmesnucleaires.org
ES: http://www.nomasarmasnucleares.org
PT: http://www.fimdasarmasnucleares.org
DE: http://www.neinzuatomwaffen.org
AR: http://www.notonukes.org/ar
RU: http://www.notonukes.org/ru
CH: http://www.notonukes.org/zh

Spread the word and use the following Hashtags:
EN: #nuclearban FR: #nuclearban
ES: #nomasarmasnucleares
PT: #fimdasarmasnucleares

Continue reading “What if We Nuke a City?” »