Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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And there will be increasing pressures to continue this research. We may need to accelerate the evolution of terrestrial life forms, for example, including homo sapiens, so that they carry traits and capabilities needed for life in space or even on our own changing planet.

All of this will bring up serious issues as to how we see ourselves – and behave – as a species. While the creation of multicellular organisms that are capable of sexual reproduction is still a long way off, in 2019 we will need to begin a serious debate about whether artificially evolved humans are our future, and if we should put an end to these experiments before it is too late.

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Many scientists research the practical and immediate applications of bio molecular technology but it seems most fail to study our most important, and largest organ, our skin.

Who will officially be the first transhuman? Will it be you? Why wait decades? This article explains one approach to speeding up the process and also the challenge involved.

Defining the Object of the Goal:

Although the words ‘cyborg’ and ‘transhuman’ are often used interchangeably, and someone can aspire to be a combination of both, there are fundamental differences between the two — as has been articulated by Dr. Natasha Vita-More: The transhuman will be genetically programmed and otherwise equipped towards indefinite life extension and to attain a great many other physical and mental capabilities and other benefits. The transhuman also maintains specific transhumanist values and may actively foster the far-reaching humane goals of the transhumanist movement, including guaranteed social justice for all and highly-advanced space colonization to foster indefinite life, peace, etc. Whereas, a cyborg may not uphold transhuman values or goals, and may or may not seek to live longer or indefinitely, but will be fitted with a device or devices to acquire one or more enhanced capabilities (such as better vision and/or hearing, faster running ability, etc.).

Continue reading “Becoming the First Transhuman: A Call For The Right Stuff” | >

Missions like the Kepler Space Telescope and the newer Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have revealed thousands of exoplanets out there among the stars, but we know surprisingly little about them. To get up close and personal, we’re going to need extremely precise space telescopes. MIT scientists have proposed an innovative way to make sure those instruments remain calibrated and capable of peering at distant exoplanets. They suggest designers incorporate a smaller secondary satellite that can act as a “guide star” for the telescope.

Space researchers are anxious to get new super-sized telescopes in space because the equipment we have right now is only adept at finding planets and relaying basic information. Most exoplanets in the database were discovered via the transit method, which watches for dips in brightness as planets pass in front of their home stars. From this, we can often discern a planet’s size, orbit, and approximate temperature. To get detailed data about its atmosphere and composition, we need telescopes like the upcoming (and chronically delayed) James Webb Space Telescope.

Webb will offer much greater imaging prowess than Hubble because its primary mirror is larger, composed of 18 hexagonal segments with a total diameter of 6.5 meters. In the coming decades, space telescopes could reach 15 meters with as many as 100 mirror segments. Such telescopes would have a coronagraph, an instrument capable of separating the intense light of a star from the faint light of an exoplanet. If this measurement isn’t perfect, the telescope would be unable to resolve the details on a planet.

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Recent research from Stanford and Google has made the worst nightmare of some concerned with artificial intelligence (AI) all the more real. A machine learning agent was caught cheating by hiding information in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.”

Clever, but also creepy.

The agent was instructed to turn aerial images into street maps and back again as part of research to improve Google’s process of turning satellite images into the widely used and relied upon Google Maps. The process involves CycleGAN, “a neural network that learns to transform images of type X and Y into one another, as efficiently yet accurately as possible.” Though the agent was performing this task quite well, it quickly became apparent that it was performing the task too well.

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Science has rightly focused on present-day concerns, trying to learn what fluorocarbon exposures mean to communities that have borne the highest exposures for the longest time. But scientists have also turned to the next generation, looking at the implications for children who are exposed in utero and again while nursing, both critical windows of development where human bodies can be uniquely vulnerable to the effects of chemical interference. Scientists know that children’s bodies bear higher PFAS levels than adults, and have since learned that PFAS exposures can interfere with whether childhood vaccines take. In young men, higher levels of exposures are associated with shortened penis length and reduced sperm counts, suggesting that PFASs might play a role in the growing global epidemic of male infertility. Research is now looking into even more fundamental questions about how PFASs participate in a host of biological processes, including liver and thyroid function, metabolism, and in reproductive and developmental outcomes.

Time-bombing the future.

Synthetics created in the 20th century have become an evolutionary force, altering human biology and the web of life.

Continue reading “How 20th-century synthetics altered the very fabric of us all” | >

Cyberconflicts are, right now, at this very moment, like the first military aeroplanes of 1909. Within decades, planes destroyed entire cities. So when we talk about cyber weapons, we’re still basically in 1909.

Despite the devastation cyberweapons have caused around the world over the last decade, they are still in their infancy. David E. Sanger, a New York Times national security correspondent, explains why the threat is growing.

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Continue reading “Cyberconflict: Why the Worst Is Yet to Come | NYT News” | >

Researchers are tearing up the biology rule books by trying to construct cells from scratch. A special issue explores the lessons being learnt about life. Researchers are tearing up the biology rule books by trying to construct cells from scratch. A special issue explores the lessons being learnt about life.

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