Lifeboat Foundation

But a British PhD candidate has warned of the darker side of a transhumanist future.

Sociologist Alex Thomas of East London University believes that transhumanism will further enforce a societal obsession with “progress” and “efficiency” at the expense of social justice and environmental sustainability. In an article published this week in The Conversation, Thomas argues that unbridled technological progress, in which technology “become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body”, could lead to a loss of basic societal values such as compassion and a concern for the environment.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value “progress” and “efficiency” above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes.”

Continue reading “The risk of a transhumanist future” »

Breakthroughs in biometric science mean future troops will fight with weapons that understand them — inside and out.

Imagine a group of volunteers, their chests rigged with biophysical sensors, preparing for a mission in a military office building outfitted with cameras and microphones to capture everything they do. “We want to set up a living laboratory where we can actually pervasively sense people, continuously, for a long period of time. The goal is to do our best to quantify the person, the environment, and how the person is behaving in the environment,” Justin Brooks, a scientist at the Army Research Lab, or ARL, told me last year.

ARL was launching the Human Variability Project, essentially a military version of the reality- TV show Big Brother without the drama. The Project seeks to turn a wide variety of human biophysical signals into machine-readable data by outfitting humans and their environment with interactive sensors.

Continue reading “Tomorrow Soldier: How The Military Is Altering the Limits of Human Performance” »

The Joint Chiefs’ vice chair says smaller-yield weapons are needed to deter the use of same.

The future of nuclear weapons might not be huge and mega destructive but smaller, tactical, and frighteningly, more common. The U.S. Air Force is investigating more options for “variable yield” bombs — nukes that can be dialed down to blow up an area as small as a neighborhood, or dialed up for a much larger punch.

The Air Force currently has gravity bombs that either have or can be set to low yields: less than 20 kilotons. Such a bomb dropped in the center of Washington, D.C., wouldn’t even directly affect Georgetown or Foggy Bottom. But a Minuteman III missile tipped with a 300-kiloton warhead would destroy downtown Washington and cause third-degree burns into Virginia and Maryland.

Continue reading “US Military Eyes New Mini-Nukes for 21st-Century Deterrence” »

An advanced railgun cannon prototype developed by General Atomics for the Navy is preparing for testing, according to the company.

The 10-megajoule medium-range multi-mission railgun system, one of two prototypes in development for the service, has completed final assembly and factory acceptance test, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems recently announced.

The system was designed to provide multi-domain capability on a smaller footprint for ship, land and mobile devices. It will be delivered to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, according to a company press release.

Continue reading “General Atomics Railgun System Heading for Testing” »

New capacitors offer big power storage and transmission in a mini-package, with benefits beyond electro-cannons.

The U.S. Navy’s shipboard railgun is moving from the lab to the testing range, a big step for a weapon designed to fire massive bullets at hypersonic speeds. But a separate breakthrough in electrical pulse generation — capacitors that provide a bigger jolt in a smaller package — that may reshape the future of naval power.

The railgun’s electromagnets are designed to accelerate a Hyper Velocity Projectile from zero to some 8,600 kmph, about Mach 7. That velocity requires a lot of power. In early testing, the Office of Naval Research had relied on banks of commercial capacitors to pulse electricity to the gun. But they were “not suitable for integration aboard a ship” — too large to fit aboard Zumwalt-class destroyers, as Thomas Beutner, head of ONR’s Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department, explained during a July event in Washington.

Continue reading “The US Navy’s Railgun Breakthrough Could Change Energy Storage” »

A service lab has turned a lieutenant’s brainstorm into a testable prototype dubbed the GunnAR augmented-reality headset.

In just a year, a wearable headset designed to help U.S. Navy gunnery sailors cut through the fog of combat has evolved from a lieutenant’s brainstorm to a prototype being tested in various exercises.

Conceived by a junior officer aboard the destroyer Gridley, the idea for GunnAR was presented at last year’s ONR Innovation Jam, where it received first prize — and $100,000 to make it real. After rapid progressions through various development milestones, the blue-tinted visor was put to the test in the Trident Warrior 2017 experiment aboard USS Bunker Hill, where sailors used it to put live fire on targets.

Continue reading “US Navy Gunners Are Testing A Wearable Heads-Up Display” »

At the 2017 Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo in Washington DC, an ONR spokesman revealed that the weapon is ready for field demonstrations at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division’s new railgun Rep-Rate Test Site at Terminal Range, according to New Atlas.

Initial rep-rate fires (repetition rate of fires) of multi-shot salvos already have been successfully conducted at low muzzle energy, officials say.

Continue reading “US Navy’s mach 6 railgun set for first tests outside the lab” »

Sweden’s government has exposed sensitive and personal data of millions, along with the nation’s military secrets, in what is now considered to be one of the worst government IT disasters ever. The leak, which occurred in 2015, saw the names, photos and home addresses of millions exposed. Those affected include fighter pilots of Swedish air force, police suspects, people under the witness relocation programme, members of the military’s most secretive units (equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams) and more.

The leak occurred after the Swedish Transportation Agency (STA) decided to outsource its database management and other IT services to firms such as IBM and NCR. However, the STA uploaded its entire database onto cloud servers, which included details on every single vehicle in the country. The database was then emailed to marketers in clear text message. When the error was discovered, the STA merely sent another email asking the marketing subscribers to delete the previous list themselves.

In 2016, the US military’s budget was about $580 billion more than NASA’s.