Lifeboat Foundation

ARTICLE: “My own contribution has been to take the avant-garde ideas of architecture into a laboratory space.”

Bütschli Dynamic Droplet System in Summer/Fall 2013 issue of Artificial Life

“A flag, in short, for all of earth.”

Edge of Dark is part space-opera, part coming-of-age story, and part exploration of the relationship between humans and the post-human descendants who may ultimately transcend them.

The book takes place in the same universe as Brenda Cooper’s “Ruby’s Song” books (The Creative Fire; The Diamond Deep). However, you don’t need to have read those books to enjoy this one. The story in Edge of Dark picks up decades after the earlier books.

The setting is a solar system in which the most Earth-like planet, once nearly ecologically destroyed, is now in large part a wilderness preserve, still undergoing active restoration. Most humans live on massive space stations in the inner solar system. A few live on smaller space stations a bit further out, closer to the proverbial “Edge”. And beyond that? Beyond that, far from the sun, dwell exiles, cast out long ago for violating social norms by daring to go too far in tinkering with the human mind and body.

Continue reading “Edge of Dark Review” »

It’s hard to believe, but…

Ten years ago…

• The first video was uploaded to YouTube.
• Facebook, then just a year old, dropped “the” from its old URL “thefacebook.com” after acquiring “facebook.com” for $200K.
• An early prototype of an autonomous car completed the DARPA Grand Challenge for the first time.
• The term “drone” meant a military weapon system.
• Bitcoin and blockchain didn’t exist, and wouldn’t be created for three more years.
• Android was a small startup that Google had just acquired.
• There were 6.4 billion humans on Earth, only ~1 billion were online, and none of them had heard of Uber or AirBnb. Read more

Adam Rothstein | Motherboard
“In the city of the future, trains would rocket across overhead rails, airplanes would dive from the sky to land on the roof, and skyscrapers would stretch their sinewed limbs into the heavens to feel the hot pulse of radio waves beating across the planet. This artistic, but unbridled enthusiasm was the last century’s first expression of wholesale tech optimism.” Read more

Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Why the LHC must be shut down

Continue reading “CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!” »

By Steven Kotler — SingularityHub

For the past 25 years, my beat as a journalist has been covering those moments in time when science fiction became science fact. As a result, and on a good number of occasions—like when the first artificial vision implant was turned on or when the first private spaceship was launched—I was lucky enough to be in the room when history happened.

These moments are also the subject of my next book: Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact, which hits stores in early May. As the title suggests, this book is an investigation into those transformational sci-fi to sci-fact moments and—more specifically—the incredibly disruptive impact they have on culture. Read more

Robert Szczerba | The Next Web
“The advancement of technology generally evokes a range of emotions in people from all walks of life. Some view technology as a great evil that slowly diminishes our humanity, while others view it as a way to bring the world closer together and to help solve some of our greatest challenges.” Read more