Lifeboat Foundation

Recorded at “Contra Krugman: The Economic Myths of the 2016 Election”: the Mises Circle at Seattle’s historic Town Hall, on 21 May 2016.

Presidential candidates promise everything from living wages to free health care and college. Proposals about how to run whole segments of the economy are made with a straight face. The most tired and hackneyed ideas about income equality, corporate greed, creating jobs, and paying one’s fair share of taxes are trotted out. And millions of voters apparently believe it all, falling for the same promises of free stuff and prosperity from Washington.

Continue reading “The Single Greatest Economic Myth” »

Article (2017) about oxygen depletion. “There has been a clear decline in the volume of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere over the past 20 years. Although the magnitude of this decrease appears small compared to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, it is difficult to predict how this process may evolve, due to the brevity of the collected records. A recently proposed model predicts a non-linear decay, which would result in an increasingly rapid fall-off in atmospheric oxygen concentration, with potentially devastating consequences for human health. We discuss the impact that global deoxygenation, over hundreds of generations, might have on human physiology. Exploring the changes between different native high-altitude populations provides a paradigm of how humans might tolerate worsening hypoxia over time. Using this model of atmospheric change, we predict that humans may continue to survive in an unprotected atmosphere for ~3600 years. Accordingly, without dramatic changes to the way in which we interact with our planet, humans may lose their dominance on Earth during the next few millennia.”

There has been a clear decline in the volume of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere over the past 20 years. Although the magnitude of this decrease appears small compared to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, it is difficult to predict how this process may evolve, due to the brevity of the collected records. A recently proposed model predicts a non-linear decay, which would result in an increasingly rapid fall-off in atmospheric oxygen concentration, with potentially devastating consequences for human health. We discuss the impact that global deoxygenation, over hundreds of generations, might have on human physiology. Exploring the changes between different native high-altitude populations provides a paradigm of how humans might tolerate worsening hypoxia over time. Using this model of atmospheric change, we predict that humans may continue to survive in an unprotected atmosphere for ~3600 years. Accordingly, without dramatic changes to the way in which we interact with our planet, humans may lose their dominance on Earth during the next few millennia.

Keywords: Oxygen, Hypoxia, Acclimatization, Physiological adaptation.

Continue reading “The human physiological impact of global deoxygenation” »

Any thoughts about the problem of open discussion of the catastrophic risks?

TL;DR: In order to prevent x-risks, our strategic vision should outperform technical capabilities of the potential malevolent agents, which means that strategic discussion should be public and open, but the publication of technical dangerous knowledge should be prevented.

Risks and benefits of the open discussion

Bostrom has created a typology of info-hazards, but any information could also have “x-risk prevention positive impact”, or info-benefits. Obviously, info-benefits must outweigh the info-hazards of the open public discussion of x-risks, or the research of the x-risks is useless. In other words, the “cost-effectiveness” of the open discussion of a risk A should be estimated, and the potential increase in catastrophic probability should be weighed against a possible decrease of the probability of a catastrophe.

Continue reading “Informational hazards and the cost-effectiveness of open discussion of catastrophic risks” »

Old, but excellent post:

[Image: “Disckonsia Costata” by Verisimilius is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0]

Several times in evolutionary history, the arrival of an innovative new evolutionary strategy has lead to a mass extinction followed by a restructuring of biota and new dominant life forms. This may pose an unlikely but possible global catastrophic risk in the future, in which spontaneous evolutionary strategies (like new biochemical pathways or feeding strategies) become wildly successful, and lead to extreme climate change and die-offs. This is also known as a ‘biotic replacement’ hypothesis of extinction events.

Continue reading “Biotic replacement and evolutionary innovation as a global catastrophic risk” »

President Trump meets with the National Space Council at the White House. It is expected that the council will discuss the role of private organizations in space travel and exploration.

The Philippines is proud to announce the rocket launch of its first cube satellite, MAYA-1, to the International Space Station (ISS) on June 29, 2018.

Watch out for its broadcast on Friday at 5:41 PM (PHT), live from Canaveral, Florida, at the DOST-ASTI FB page!

#sciencejourney60

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According to new Stanford research, it may depend on how many natural killer cells you have: https://stan.md/2I2IDZx (Photo by Kelly Sikkema)

…” Because unlike Konopinski-Marvin-Teller, it (the paper) actually focuses on those “necessary conditions”: what would need to be different, if you did want to have a self-propagating reaction?

What would it take to turn the world into one big fusion reaction, wiping it clean of life and turning it into a barren rock? Asking for a friend.