Lifeboat Foundation

What’s to worry? RMS Titanic departs Southampton.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 1912. What better time to think about lifeboats?

One way to start a discussion is with some vintage entertainment. On the centenary weekend of the wreck of the mega-liner, our local movie palace near the Hudson River waterfront ran a triple bill of classic films about maritime disasters: A Night to Remember, Lifeboat, and The Poseidon Adventure. Each one highlights an aspect of the lifeboat problem. They’re useful analogies for thinking about the existential risks of booking a passage on spaceship Earth.

Can’t happen…

Continue reading “Earth's Titanic Challenges” »

High energy experiments like the LHC at the nuclear research centre CERN are extreme energy consumers (needing the power of a nuclear plant). Their construction is extremely costly (presently 7 Billion Euros) and practical benefits are not in sight. The experiments eventually pose existential risks and these risks have not been properly investigated.

It is not the first time that CERN announces record energies and news around April 1 – apparently hoping that some critique and concerns about the risks could be misinterpreted as an April joke. Additionally CERN regularly starts up the LHC at Easter celebrations and just before week ends, when news offices are empty and people prefer to have peaceful days with their friends and families.

CERN has just announced new records in collision energies at the LHC. And instead of conducting a neutral risk assessment, the nuclear research centre plans costly upgrades of its Big Bang machine. Facing an LHC upgrade in 2013 for up to CHF 1 Billion and the perspective of a Mega-LHC in 2022: How long will it take until risk researchers are finally integrated in a neutral safety assessment?

There are countless evidences for the necessity of an external and multidisciplinary safety assessment of the LHC. According to a pre-study in risk research, CERN fits less than a fifth of the criteria for a modern risk assessment (see the press release below). It is not acceptable that the clueless member states point at the operator CERN itself, while this regards its self-set security measures as sufficient, in spite of critique from risk researchers, continuous debates and the publication of further papers pointing at concrete dangers and even existential risks (black holes, strangelets) eventually arising from the experiments sooner or later. Presently science has to admit that the risk is disputed and basically unknown.

Continue reading “LHC-Critique Press Info: Instead of a neutral risk assessment of the LHC: New records and plans for costly upgrades at CERN” »

[Disclaimer: This contribution does not reflect the views of the Lifeboat Foundation as with the scientific community in general, but individual sentiment — Web Admin]

CERN insists on believing in physical nonsense as a guarantee that their LHC experiment were innocuous. They refuse an update on their false “Safety Report” for almost 4 years.

The sacrosanct safety report dogmatically posits that one particular version of string theory possessed physical reality which no string theorist claims.

They refuse up-dating, open discussion and the necessary scientific safety conference for 4 years ( http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/PetitiontoCERN.pdf ). They thereby behave like medieval dogmatists.

Continue reading “Nil Nocere, Dear CERN !” »

GatgetBridge is currently just a concept. It might start its life as a discussion forum, later turn into a network or an organisation and hopefully inspire a range of similar activities.

We will soon be able to use technology to make ourselves more intelligent, feel happier or change what motivates us. When the use of such technologies is banned, the nations or individuals who manage to cheat will soon lord it over their more obedient but unfortunately much dimmer fellows. When these technologies are made freely available, a few terrorists and psychopaths will use them to cause major disasters. Societies will have to find ways to spread these mind enhancement treatments quickly among the majority of their citizens, while keeping them from the few who are likely to cause harm. After a few enhancement cycles, the most capable members of such societies will all be “trustworthy” and use their skills to stabilise the system (see “All In The Mind”).

But how can we manage the transition period, the time in which these technologies are powerful enough to be abused but no social structures are yet in place to handle them? It might help to use these technologies for entertainment purposes, so that many people learn about their risks and societies can adapt (see “Should we build a trustworthiness tester for fun”). But ideally, a large, critical and well-connected group of technology users should be part of the development from the start and remain involved in every step.

To do that, these users would have to spend large amounts of money and dedicate considerable manpower. Fortunately, the basic spending and working patterns are in place: People already use a considerable part of their income to buy consumer devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and PCs and increasingly also accessories such as blood glucose meters, EEG recorders and many others; they also spend a considerable part of their time to get familiar with these devices. Manufacturers and software developers are keen to turn any promising technology into a product and over time this will surely include most mind measuring and mind enhancement technologies. But for some critical technologies this time might be too long. GadgetBridge is there to shorten it as follows:

Continue reading “GadgetBridge — Taming dangerous technologies by pushing them into consumer gadgets” »

This note considers the possibility of earth being replaceable in the galaxy in the foreseeable future. The suggested answer is: no.

Let me explain why. For once, fundamental physics is not enough to understand the story since implied physical disciplines, chemistry and biology, come into play. The modern synthesis (Ernst Mayr) is presupposed. Stu Kauffmann and Joel Cohen stand in the background.

But are humans (the extinction of which the CERN debate is all about) not at the tip of the animal kingdom and hence similar tips should exist elsewhere? Our blue planet would then be not THAT important from a more sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint.

Even this consolation – if it qualifies for one – cannot be offered: Everything speaks in favor of the conclusion that humans are unique over vast stretches of the galaxy’s life-bearing quarters.

Continue reading “CERN is so Important also because there Is no ‘E.T.’ in the Galaxy” »

Either I am a liar or not. You treat me like being one by your observing a world-wide curfew. I must have made grave mistakes in the past that explain this attitude.

I admit that my latest post on Oppenheimer is a bit technical since I mentioned the duration of a trip down to the horizon of the black hole remnant of a collapsed star and back. But my conclusion was easy to understand: If Oppie was right then both trips take an infinite outside time. Every high-school student can confirm this.

Therefore my public request to CERN, to please before starting 8 TeV proton collisions on a large scale tomorrow give a reason as to why they stick to a theory of black holes that denies Oppenheimer’s finding, is perhaps sufficiently grounded on facts to be worth reporting.

Forgive me for my turning to you directly.

In light of continued frustration by many users, and due to a recent request by Prof Peter Howell on the lack of web administration on obscene/offensive posts and the effect this can have on the overall impression of Lifeboat, I have taken measures on cleaning up posts by a contributor who regularly depreciates the standards of what can otherwise be a fine blog of academic opinion. Apologies to Prof Otto Rossler — but referring to CERN as ‘urinating soldiers’ etc is far below the standards Lifeboat aspires to — Please clean up your act.

Tom — Web Admin.

Professor Ereditato’s basic insight – that particles sent across differing longitudes can be technically speaking superluminal – was correct. This I showed in my paper on Lifeboat submitted to Science ( https://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/10/%E2%80%9Ctwo-percent-expla…ting-earth ).

I regret the unscientific demand for clairvoyance-in-retrospect – not to have seen that the effect is technically smaller than claimed – which led to his resignation from “Opera” about which fact I learned today from a newspaper.

His enthusiasm and openness to the new is sorely needed by the scientific community. I would like to ask CERN to re-hire him. You cannot let your best man go.

Six years before Oppenheimer declared physics to be sinful after his success at building the bomb, he had discovered the existence of black holes as solutions to the Einstein equation. It took the physics community 30 years to fully believe him.

He found two things. (1) An astronaut jumping in takes infinitely long to disappear from sight (provided one could see him that long since the frequency of the light emitted by him goes to zero). (2) On his own wristwatch, only 2 days passed until he reached the surface of the star-mass black hole. Both results are still accepted.

Oppenheimer knew that if a trampoline were installed on the surface, enabling the astronaut to jump back up uninjured, both results are valid again: Up to his return to from where he came, 2 days would pass on his own wristwatch again. But for the outside world, once more an infinite amount of time would have passed.

This simple result is universally accepted but for some reason virtually unknown. It goes under the name “gravitational twins paradox.” No specialist denies it but virtually each will admit that it is new to him or her.

Continue reading “Oppie’s Black Holes versus CERN” »