Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The biggest challenge to the ‘ecosystem’ of world economics that keeps society ticking over is how to overcome our inability to regulate a sustainable economic model. In Europe at present we are undergoing the difficult measures in setting about rules of austerity to ensure that government borrowing never gets as out of hand as it has done on our watch. I post on this topic now as it is topical to me — back home here in my native Ireland we are voting on a referendum this week to ensure we no longer borrow from our children to fuel indulgences today — a referendum on rationality and responsibility.

The topical of austerity reminds me of an opinion I blogged on a crisis in the Obama administration last August on national debt in the light of striking comments from foreign figureheads amid the storm from the ‘Tea Party Taliban’. I share with you for to see if anyone cares to comment on an operandi of living like parasites off the global economy:

Living Like Parasites Off The Global Economy, originally written 3 Aug 2011:

With the US in turmoil over its national debt, and held to ransom by a ‘Tea Party Taliban’, last week China publicly mocked American democracy. Yesterday, the world witnessed the humbling of America after a trillion-dollar deal marked the end of an era for the US. The US now faces a shift in its relations with creditor nations, and it was not all too surprising to hear Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, yesterday accusing Americans of living “like parasites off the global economy”. If America had defaulted on its international debt obligations, that is exactly what it would be. While America continues to service it’s debt, it is quite the opposite — for now at least- as is perpetually paying interest to its creditors.

However, one needs to look at the bigger picture. In 1980, the size of US debt was $1 Trillion. It stabilized in 1995 at $5 Trillion until 9/11 after which the gross military spending on combating dubious wars saw it rise to where it is now — $15 Trillion and rising rapidly out of control. An 11th hour rescue deal that was far less than the Obama administration wished for sees its debt ceiling rise further, though perhaps finally brought to account.

The US debt is the largest in the world. Purchasers of Treasury bills still reasonably expect the US economy to recover enough to pay them back and foreign investors like China and Japan, the US is such a large customer it is allowed to run a huge tab so it will keep buying exports. The debt is 95% of GDP, and interest alone on the debt was $414 billion in Fiscal Year 2010. One wonders when the US is going to pay it all back. It is reasonable to anticipate that sooner or later, an 11th hour rescue package, like the one negotiated with The Tea Party Taliban this week, will not be there to save the US from defaulting on its debt, at which point the US will have proven itself to be a parasite on the world stage — one that borrows and declines to pay you back.

The alternative scenario paints a parasitic picture of only a different hue — if the US government and similars do eventually pay back all their borrowings in recent decades via raised taxes and spending cuts, we are in a situation where ones children have to collect the invoice for the excessive indulgences of today. A falsis principiis proficisci…

I spend most of my time thinking about software, and occasionally I come across issues that are relevant to futurists. I wrote my book about the future of software in OpenOffice, and needed many of its features. It might not be the only writing / spreadsheet / diagramming / presentation, etc. tool in your toolbox, but it is a worthy one. OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the best open standard for these sorts of scenarios and LibreOffice is currently the premier tool to handle that format. I suspect many of the readers of Lifeboat have a variant installed, but don’t know much of the details of what is going on.

The OpenOffice situation has been a mess for many years. Sun didn’t foster a community of developers around their work. In fact, they didn’t listen to the community when it told them what to do. So about 18 months ago, after Oracle purchased Sun and made the situation worse, the LibreOffice fork was created with most of the best outside developers. LibreOffice quickly became the version embraced by the Linux community as many of the outside developers were funded by the Linux distros themselves. After realizing their mess and watching LibreOffice take off within the free software community, Oracle decided to fire all their engineers (50) and hand the trademark and a copy of the code over to IBM / Apache.

Now it would be natural to imagine that this should be handed over to LibreOffice, and have all interested parties join up with this effort. But that is not what is happening. There are employees out there whose job it is to help Linux, but they are actually hurting it. You can read more details on a Linux blog article I wrote here. I also post this message as a reminder about how working together efficiently is critical to have faster progress on complicated things.

It’s been a while since anyone contributed a post on space exploration here on the Lifeboat blogs, so I thought I’d contribute a few thoughts on the subject of potential hazards to interstellar travel in the future — if indeed humanity ever attempts to explore that far in space.

It is only recently that the Voyager probes provided us with some idea of the nature of the boundary of our solar system with what is commonly referred to as the local fluff, The Local Interstellar Cloud, through which we have been travelling for the past 100,000 years or so, and which we will continue to travel through for another 10,000 or 20,000 years yet. The cloud has a temperate of about 6000°C — albeit very tenuous.

We are protected by the effects of the local fluff by the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field, the front between the two just beyond the termination shock where the solar wind slows to subsonic velocities. Here, in the heliosheath, the solar wind becomes turbulent by its interaction with the interstellar medium, and keeping the interstellar medium at bay from the inners of the solar system, the region currently under study by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. It has been hypothesised that there may be a hydrogen wall further out between the bow shock and the heliopause composed of ISM interacting with the edge of the heliosphere, another obstacle to consider with interstellar travel.

The short end of the stick is that what many consider ‘open space’ to traverse once we get beyond the Kuiper belt may in fact be many more mission-threatening obstacles to traverse to reach beyond our solar system. Opinions welcome. I am not an expert on this.

… theorem and still do so on CERN’s website ( http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/Safety-en.html ):

Dear colleagues, please, try and dismantle my much simpler, and hence both more powerful and more easy-to-disprove if false, “Telemach theorem” ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/82752272/Rossler-s-Telemach-paper ).

The latter again proves the likely pan-biocidal nature of the currently running LHC experiment. For it shows that black holes have radically new properties: They are stable, almost frictionless at first, undetectable by CERN’s detectors, and exponentially growing inside matter – thus forming a perfect slow bomb for planet earth. The theorem waits to be dismantled for 2 years (the former does so for 5 years).

I grant you, my esteemed 11 colleagues, 11 days to deliver – either on the CERN website of 2008, revised, or in case CERN denies you access, on this blog. If none of you manages to deliver a counter-proof to Telemach during this time, I shall accuse all of you of actively supporting the worst terrorist act of history, presently in progress. Acting in good faith – as you no doubt will pledge – offers no excuse as you were alerted in time. And please, do forgive me that I did not give you the occasion to revoke your testimony earlier.

I now wait in anticipation that one (or more) of you will deliver a cogent counterproof. If so, the planet is safe again. And I shall apologize for the spirit of urgency that I created in fulfillment of my Hippocratic oath.

In case CERN halts its experiment before the 11 days are over, I extend the 11-day deadline by so many days as CERN announces the halt to last.

Thank you, dear Professors (in the order you are quoted by CERN)

Academician Vitaly Ginzburg (Nobel Laureate in Physics, Lebedev Institute Moscow),
Sheldon Glashow (Nobel Laureate in Physics, Boston University),
Frank Wilczek (Nobel Laureate in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
Richard Wilson (Mallinckrodt Professor emeritus of Physics, Harvard University),
Steven Hawking (Lucasian Professor emeritus of Mathematics, Cambridge University),
Edward Kolb (Astrophysicist, University of Chicago),
Sir Roger Penrose (Rouse Ball Professor emeritus of Mathematics, Oxford University),
Sir Martin Rees (UK Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society London),
Academician V.A. Rubakov (Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow),
Gerard ‘t Hooft (Nobel Laureate in Physics, CERN Scientific Policy Committee), and
Hermann Nicolai (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam).

Sincerely yours,

Otto E. Rössler, chaos theorist, University of Tubingen

Note: This article originally appears on WealthLift.com and can be seen here.

In 2006, the underpinnings of the American financial system began to crack from a speculative bubble in the country’s housing market. Fueled by irrational exuberance in which homeowners believed their home prices would rise forever, this was made worse by Main Street and Wall Street, both of whom repackaged mortgage loans for sale to everyday investors through a process called securitization. That’s right, this was a multipronged problem, not the hell-bent desires of a few financial fat cats, as Occupy Wall Street would have you believe.

When the bubble burst and home prices began to decline, this not only hurt the original lender, but also every investor that held a piece of a mortgage-backed asset. Imagine this process like a moldy pie that no one realizes is bad. Originally, the entire pie is held by one bank. Next, pieces of this pie are sold to other banks, pension funds, hedge funds, and anyone else that has an appetite. Soon enough, however, everyone holding this pie has gotten sick. Well, this happens with all kinds of assets, including car loans, credit cards and student loans. The benefit of securitization is that it allows organizations to grant more loans to people like you and me, but the downside is that it exposes the entire economy to the financial woes of an individual market. Without securitization, what happened in the housing market would have likely stayed in the housing market.

Six years later, many people are crying that the same thing will happen to the student loan market. While disbelievers can claim that these are just ‘cynics’ whose views are skewed by the world’s ongoing economic turmoil, a basic investigation into the matter yields some worrying results.

1. A college education has more in common with a house than you would think. Currently, the average cost of a single-family home in the United States is just above $150,000, while the average tuition of a private institution’s four-year degree program is around $130,000. Moreover, it is common practice for students to employ the use of debt to cover 20 to 50 percent of their costs, depending on the state. Just as homeowners once expected home prices to rise every year into infinity, students are undertaking loans with a shared expectation of a future income that exceeds the value of the loan. Unfortunately, historically high rates of unemployment have made this a pipe dream for an increasing number of students. In fact, the latest nationwide student default rates stand at 9 percent, up two percentage points from the previous year.

2. The student loan bubble has been growing faster than the housing bubble. According to a recent study by the New York Fed, the volume of student loans in the American economy has increased 500 percent over the past decade to a current value of $1 trillion. While this amount is less than the value of the mortgage volume peak before the recession, the growth rate is twice as high.

3. SLABS may be this crisis’s nuclear bomb. The acronym SLABS stands for student loan asset backed securities. In many ways, they are similar to the mortgage backed securities that played a hand in breaking the financial system in 2008. It is estimated that there are over $250 billion worth of SLABS in the markets today. This is a whopping 1,000 times the amount of SLABS in the American economy 20 years ago. More troubling, these investments have been viewed as the safest asset backed security in the post-recession era. While securitizes backed by mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards have been cut in half over the past few years, SLABS activity has continued to grow. In fact, they are marketed to individual investors, pension funds, and anyone else seeking an economic safety net.

4. Student loan debt is unforgivable. This ‘safety net’ belief is held partly because student loans are currently the only form of debt that is unforgivable even in bankruptcy. From investors’ eyes, this is good news because their return is generated from students making their loan payments. From a broader perspective, though, this spells bad news for the American economy. See, students can still default on their loans, which simply means that they are unable to make payments. Unlike mortgage debt, however, students who default are not given the option of leniency in the form of principal or interest rate reduction.

Instead, defaulting students are economically punished, as they are unable to receive any IRS tax refunds or federal benefits. Moreover, the government is entitled to take up to 15 percent of a student’s disposable income, and may even sue in some cases. In a world teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession, all of these actions would only make the situation shoddier. In fact, the worst thing that can happen to a mortgage defaulter is the loss of their home, but they can move on, economically speaking. Students who default on their loans, however, are not offered the same route. Moreover, this incentivizes lenders to offer loans to any and all students since there is no risk of payment loss in the long run. Tell me, do we trust our lending institutions enough to think that this would not be the case? Of course not; besides, it is arguably up to the government to provide an economic structure for banks to follow. If businesses are profit maximizing, which we’ve all learned in school that they are, then they are not to blame for taking advantage of this situation.

5. Unlike all other debt holders, students are not classified based on their ability to repay. Okay, most lending institutions look at the credit worthiness of a student’s parents, but this is insufficient. What lenders should be doing is rating students based on the probability that they can repay after graduation. Whether we like it or not, the only way to do this is to classify students based on their future earnings potential. Think about it – a student with an Engineering degree will be entering a field where the median salary is $90,681. Moreover, the unemployment rate in this field is around 2 percent. Compare this with a student majoring in English. This student is only expected to earn around $40,000 in a field with 7 percent unemployment.

Clearly, the student with the lower expected salary entering the riskier field should be granted a lower amount of student loans. While some may argue that this disincentives students to follow their dreams, it is common sense economics. Moreover, a student rating system would likely improve the U.S.’s fallback in the global Math and Science race, in which the country is currently ranked 23rd and 31st respectively. As college students would realize that they could only attend the best institutions if they chose the highest-earning majors, this problem could be corrected over the next decade. Now, doubters may cry that the most affluent students would not be subject to this plan, but this is an advantage that persists in any scenario. In fact, the implementation of this system could reduce a growing wealth gap, as a higher percentage of lower-income students shifted to the most fruitful career fields.

The reason for the current planet-wide abandonment of major progress lies in the re-acquired belief in clairvoyance – of which anonymous peer review is a symptom. Einstein would ridicule the latter as a “dogma-generating superstition.” While in the early 17th century, the innovators were burnt on the stakes, to date the censors choose instead to burn themselves along with their children and planet.

NO BIG BANG

The expansion theory got disproved in 1929 by Hubble’s friend Zwicky. A remaining gap was closed in 1943 by Chandrasekhar, but the two apparently never met. The final cornerstone is the discovery of a “second statistical mechanics” besides Thermodynamics, called Cryodynamics. It can be used to break the decades-old impasse of hot fusion and hence solve earth’s energy problems.

NO GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

Originally taken back by Einstein, these waves in spacetime were laid to rest by the global constancy of the speed of light c, implicit in the “L” of the T-L-M-Ch theorem (Rossler-Cook) which revives the power of Einstein’s “happiest thought,” the equivalence principle.

NO HAWKING RADIATION

Stephen Hawking’s ingenious idea of black hole evaporation got toppled by the same letter “L” in the Telemach theorem.

THE VOICE OF THE DOLPHINS

Leo Szilard was the first to call for the help of cetacean intelligence, after having been unable to prevent his brainchild, the bomb, from being dropped in 1945.

Next, a female co-worker of John C. Lilly’s took the first steps empirically, but got ostracized into scientific nonexistence.

Finally, Lilly’s good friend Gregory Bateson approved of a paper by the present author published in the San Diego Biomedical Symposium 1975, entitled “A proposed treatment of early infantile autism…” which showed how to tap the higher intelligence and humor of cetaceans and other savants.

THE CERN COVER-UP

On January 27, 2011, CERN stood before a court in Cologne listening to the final advice given to it: To admit a “safety conference” before continuing the nuclear collisions of the LHC experiment. Instead, CERN keeps shooting sharp up to this day while keeping the fact of this official admonition made to it in time a planet-wide secret.

The planet’s media pretend not to know better than the “cleaned version” distributed on Wikipedia, for example.

A PLANET-BORNE QUESTION

In the name of the planet’s cetaceans – dolphins and their relatives including the highest-brained creature known, the sperm whale – and all other savants, I herewith ask the planet’s public to insist on honesty being restored in the face of un-disproved black-hole mediated terminal danger by posing the following question to CERN:

“WHY did CERN cover up the received public admonition to admit the logically necessary safety conference before its continuing with the LHC experiment?”

On a casual read of the appraised work of Duncan R. Lorimer on Binary and Millisecond Pulsars (2005) last week, I noted the reference to the lack of pulsars with P < 1.5 ms. It cites a mere suggestion that this is due to gravitational wave emission from R-mode instabilities, but one has not offered a solid reason for such absence from our Universe. As the surface magnetic field strength of such would be lower (B ∝ (P ˙P )^(1÷2)) than other pulsars, one could equally suggest that the lack of sub millisecond pulsars is due to their weaker magnetic fields allowing CR impacts resulting in stable MBH capture… Therefore if one could interpret that the 108 G field strength adopted by G&M is an approximate cut-off point where MBH are likely to be captured by neutron stars, then one would perhaps have some phenomenological evidence that MBH capture results in the destruction of neutron stars into black holes. One should note that more typical values of observed neutron stars calculate a 1012 G field, so that is a 104 difference from the borderline-existence cases used in the G&M analysis (and so much less likely to capture). That is not to say that MBH would equate to a certain danger for capture in a planet such as Earth where the density of matter is much lower — and accretion rates much more likely to be lower than radiation rates — an understanding that is backed up by the ‘safety assurance’ in observational evidence of white dwarf longevity. However, it does take us back to question — regardless of the frequently mentioned theorem here on Lifeboat that states Hawking Radiation should be impossible — Hawking Radiation as an unobserved theoretical phenomenon may not be anywhere near as effective as derived in theoretical analysis regardless of this. This oft mentioned concern of ‘what if Hawking is wrong’ of course is endorsed by a detailed G&M analysis which set about proving safety in the scenario that Hawking Radiation was ineffective at evaporating such phenomenon. Though doubts about the neutron star safety assurance immediately makes one question how reliable are the safety assurances of white dwarf longevity – and my belief has been that the white dwarf safety assurance seems highly rational (as derived in a few short pages in the G&M paper and not particularly challenged except for the hypothesis that they may have over-estimated TeV-scale MBH size which could reduce their likelihood of capture). It is quite difficult to imagine a body as dense as a white dwarf not capturing any such hypothetical stable MBH over their lifetime from CR exposure – which validates the G&M position that accretion rates therein must be vastly outweighed by radiation rates, so the even lower accretion rates on a planet such as Earth would be even less of a concern. However, given the gravity of the analysis, those various assumptions on which it is based perhaps deserves greater scrutiny, underscored by a concern made recently that 20% of the mass/energy in current LHC collisions are unaccounted for. Pulsars are often considered one of the most accurate references in the Universe due to their regularity and predictability. How ironic if those pulsars which are absent from the Universe also provided a significant measurement. Binary and Millisecond Pulsars, D.R. Lorimer: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0511258v1.pdf

Using Large Hadron Colliders to break particles and explore new ways to understand our universe may be seen as a hacking attack by the Administrator of the universe. We can imagine that god can restore the universe to a previous version in order to neutralize the LHC hack. In the same way, the emerging singularity will probably try to break all the security rules achieved by humans in order to prevent it from accessing our real world. The main difference is that we do not have a way to do a big internet rollback, if the singularity succeeds in breaking our rules. Therefore, we must be prepared to collaborate with the singularity rather than desperately trying to reduce its liberty.

Hawking radiation is dead ever since the Telemach result and its precursors surfaced on the web. No one ever defended Hawking including his own heroic voice.

The same holds true for CERN’s detectors. They are blind to its most touted anticipated success – black hole production – by virtue of the said theorem. Again not a single word of defense.

This is why a court asked CERN and the world for a safety conference on January 27, 2011.

The press cannot continue shielding the world, and Lifeboat must be relieved from its having to carry the burden of informing an otherwise lifeboat-less planet, singlehandedly.