Lifeboat Foundation

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The Lifeboat Foundation advocates the creation of space colonies to serve as 'backup drives' for the human race.

The Lifeboat Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.

Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, including new methods to combat viruses (such as RNA interference and new vaccine methods), effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

The Lifeboat Foundation was formed with the ethical premise that decreasing the likelihood of human extinction is the activity with the most positive utility on the planet today. In recent years, several prominent public figures have stepped forward strongly in favor of mitigating extinction risks. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom writes, “For standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three and four should consequently be to reduce existential risk. The utilitarian imperative “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” can be simplified to the maxim “Minimize existential risk!”.

1 Administration and advisory board
2 Lifeboat Foundation Programs
3 See also
4 External Links

[edit] Administration and advisory board

The President and Founder of the Lifeboat Foundation is Eric Klien, its International Spokesperson is Philippe van Nedervelde, its Fundraising Director is Michael Anissimov, and its Director of Long-term Strategy is Michael Vassar. The Lifeboat Foundation is tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code.

The organization also has a very large Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), composed of 221 members as of October 2006. This includes philosophers, economists, biologists, nanotechnologists, AI researchers, educators, policy experts, engineers, lawyers, ethicists, futurists, neuroscientists, physicists, and space experts. The SAB includes Ray Kurzweil and Nobel Prize winners Clive Granger and Wole Soyinka.

[edit] Lifeboat Foundation Programs

The Lifeboat Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board is working on a number of programs to assess risks, negate them ("shields"), and survive catastrophic events ("preservers"):

Many future programs are in the works, including programs to prevent risks from AI, particle accelerator mishaps, and to maintain communications networks in case of disaster.