Lifeboat Foundation

The Norwegian government proposed $12.7 million in upgrades to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as melting permafrost threatens this doomsday seed bank.

It has proposed spending a total of US$12.7 million on technical upgrades to the vault to better protect the more than 930,000 seed varieties inside. It has completed a feasibility study and plans to move ahead with the construction of a new concrete access tunnel and a new service building for the emergency power, refrigeration units and electrical equipment.

Global food security is serious business, and when you have water seeping into a doomsday facility built to shore up food supplies for the future, well, that’s hardly ideal. But such breaches should be a thing of the past, with Norwegian authorities overseeing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault planning a multi-million dollar overhaul of the structure.

By Eliott Edge

“It is possible for a computer to become conscious. Basically, we are that. We are data, computation, memory. So we are conscious computers in a sense.”

—Tom Campbell, NASA

If the universe is a computer simulation, virtual reality, or video game, then a few unusual conditions seem to necessarily fall out from that reading. One is what we call consciousness, the mind, is actually something like an artificial intelligence. If the universe is a computer simulation, we are all likely one form of AI or another. In fact, we might come from the same computer that is creating this simulated universe to begin with. If so then it stands to reason that we are virtual characters and virtual minds in a virtual universe.

Continue reading “We are already Artificial Intelligence” »

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the doomsday clock closer to midnight on Thursday morning, warning the world that it is as close to catastrophe in 2018 as it has ever been.

They say the world is as close to catastrophe as it has been in the nuclear age.

India and Japan have vowed to strengthen their strategic ties by increasing cooperation in the defense, robotics and AI sectors in coming years in response to Chinese regional ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear plans.

“You should expect to see increased bilateral cooperation between us to develop unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and robotics,”Japanese State Minister for Foreign Affairs Kentaro Sonoura told the Times of India. The move follows the successful ratification of the Indo-Japanese civil nuclear agreement by Japan’s parliament in late 2017.

The two countries are launching a working group on cooperation between nuclear companies. “Japan’s intention is to start this quickly, possibly by the end of this month,” Sonoura said.

The dozen people working at CSER itself—little more than a large room in an out-of-the-way building near the university’s occupational health service—organize talks, convene scientists to discuss future developments, and publish on topics from regulation of synthetic biology to ecological tipping points. A lot of their time is spent pondering end-of-the-world scenarios and potential safeguards.

A small cadre of scientists worries that lab-made viruses, AI, or nanobots could drive humans to extinction.

Continue reading “Could science destroy the world? These scholars want to save us from a modern-day Frankenstein” »

The extinction of various species has led to a segregation of human activity and natural activity, says Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation, which focuses on long-term strategies for the next 10,000 years. The organization develops biotechnology to allow humans to better co-exist with nature. In this interview filmed at the 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival, Brand discusses how biotechnology can be used to bring back the passenger pigeon from extinction and mitigate climate change at last.

Pyongyang is conducting tests to see if anthrax germs can survive at temperatures of 7,000 degrees or more.

Daniel Ellsberg gained notoriety in the early 1970s for leaking the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War, and then for outspokenly protesting the war and the government’s secrecy which sustained it. Yet few, then or now, are aware that he spent much of the previous decade immersed in highly classified studies of the U.S. nuclear-war machine: how it works, who can launch an attack, and how much devastation it can wreak if someone ever pushed the button.

His new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, is his long-gestating memoir of those times and the years since, and it is one of the best books ever written on the subject—certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side.

Dr. Strangelove “was a documentary,” writes the man behind the Pentagon Papers.

Continue reading “Daniel Ellsberg’s Memoir About Life as a Nuclear War Planner Would Be Terrifying Even if Trump Weren’t President” »