Our goal is to raise $25,000.

Summary of current Lifeboat Foundation activities

1) We are working with Sara Gardephe to create a documentary about the Lifeboat Foundation.

2) Our financial and media support for Kickstarter/Indiegogo campaigns has generated the following recent successes: • Future of Money TV Series, total $37,235 raised.
• Trsst: a distributed secure blog platform for the open web, total $65,224 raised.
• MA365, a One-Year Mars Simulation in the Canadian Arctic, total $17,081 raised.
• Help Teach 1000 Kids That Death is Wrong, total $5,135 raised.
3) The Lifeboat Foundation has launched our YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/lifeboathq

We have initially launched it with Asteroids, Biotech/Medical, Cybercrime/Malcode, Cryptocurrency, Drones, Educational, Existential Risks, Futurism, Life Extension, Nanotechnology, Neuroscience, Nuclear, Particle Accelerator, Particle Physics, Robotics/AI, Space Settlement, Sustainability, and Transparency and Privacy videos.

Important videos on this channel include: • Blue Beauty: Our Beautiful Earth
• The Doomsday Curve
• Existential Risks: An Educational Video for the Lifeboat Foundation by Dr. Kim Solez
4) Lifeboat Foundation Essays

An interesting activity that is relevant to Lifeboat concerns has been provided for us by the Foundational Questions Institute, styled FQXi. They recently ran an essay contest on the topic, “How should humanity steer the future?”. This contest was announced to Lifeboat members. Fifteen of the 155 posted essays are written by Lifeboat members, and some are written by top scientists. The contest is closed to submissions, but we can still participate.

Members of the public are invited to read and rate essays on the FQXi website. Public ratings will not decide the winners, but they may guide official judges. Essay quality varies, and the best might make a real contribution, so FQXi could use help in finding which are best. Their diversity is also interesting, and might show us paths we could take, and perhaps paths to avoid.

Lifeboat members who submitted essays include James Blodgett, Frank Boehm, Angelika Domschke, James Dunn, Preston Estep, Bob Freeman, Giorgio Gaviraghi, Jacob Haqq-Misra, Orenda Urbano Hern´ndez, Alexander Hoekstra, Ted Howard, Valkyrie Ice, Randal A. Koene, Alexander MacRae, Federico Pistono, Walter Putnam, and Tihamer Toth-Fejel.

The essays are posted at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/category/31422

5) The 2014 Edition of our book The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen – and What was awarded the “Peer Reviewed & Approved for Science” seal of the Washington Academy of Sciences which was founded in 1898. 10 Nobel Prize laureates have participated in the academy’ peer-reviewed Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences over the past century. Read The Futurist review of our book. Read the KurzweilAI feature about our book. Read the Harry J. Bentham review.

The Kindle version of our book is available at http://amzn.to/19H3qf0 and the paperback version is available at http://amzn.to/1cujxeG.

6) Lifeboat Foundation conference support

The International Conference on Genetics of Aging and Longevity was held April 6–10, 2014 in Sochi, Russia. Our Yelena Budovskaya, Judith Campisi, João Pedro de Magalhães, Alexey Moskalev, Elena G. Pasyukova, Robert J. Shmookler Reis, Yousin Suh, and Jan Vijg participated.

Bitcoin Expo 2014 was held April 11–13, 2014 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Our David Bailey, Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Stuart Hoegner, Charles Hoskinson, Adam B. Levine, Jonathan Mohan, Stephanie Murphy, Elizabeth Ploshay, and Jeffrey Tucker spoke/participated.

Our Michael Anissimov, Seth Baum, David Brin, Karl Doerrer, Anatoly Karlin, Pavel Luksha, Bryce A. Lynch, Hank Pellissier, Anna Petrova, and Alexei Turchin spoke at Global Existential Risks & Radical Futures on June 14 in Piedmont, California. The Lifeboat Foundation was Cosponsor of this event.

WorldFuture 2014 was held July 11–13, 2014 at the Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek Hotel, Orlando, Florida, USA. Our Guillermina Baena, Lawrence Baines, Rob Bencini, Peter Bishop, Ted Chu, Brenda Cooper, José Cordeiro, Jason Dunn, Cindy Frewen, Jay Gary, Lesley Gist, Jerome Glenn, Fabienne Goux-Baudiment, Linda Groff, Bill Halal, Trevor Haldenby, Derek Boyd Hankerson, Glen Hiemstra, Elina Hiltunen, Andy Hines, Rudi Hoffman, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Zoltan Istvan, Zhouying Jin, Steven M. Johnson, Ted Kahn, Cadell Last, James H. Lee, Tom Lombardo, Tim Mack, Gary Marx, Kate McCallum, Alex McManus, Ramez Naam, Claire Nelson, Bj Price, Clay Rawlings, Kevin Russell, Laura Schlehuber, John Schmidt, Gray Scott, Rupam Shrivastava, John M. Smart, Rick Smyre, Kiko Suarez, Jason Swanson, Patrick Tucker, Ashok Vaseashta, Alexandra Whittington, Lindsea Wilbur, and Michael Zey spoke/participated.

Our José Cordeiro hosted a free dinner for our members at the hotel on July 13 at 6:30 pm.

Our María Blasco, Judith Campisi, Jeffrey Karp, Neil Littman, Stephen Minger, David Schaffer, Einar M. Sigurdsson, and Evan Snyder will be speaking at the Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference 2014 on August 21–23, 2014 at the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency Hotel, California, USA. Get 25% off with the discount code LIFEBOAT25.

7) Into the Cloud

In the July 2008 edition of Lifeboat News we talked about the new high speed machine that we had upgraded to. Recently, we had a page reach #18 on reddit which strained that setup, specifically the ethernet connection on the machine became saturated. (The machine workload was still quite low so at least our caching efforts worked well.)

Thanks to efforts by our Chris Haley, we have now upgraded from a dedicated machine to a double-layered cloud setup. The core of our setup is a virtual server with Linode which has twice the CPU power and two and a half times the bandwidth of our old setup. The surrounding layer is of the cloud service CloudFlare that can increase our bandwidth by as much as 30 times assuming that a handful of pages are getting most of our traffic. So overall, we currently have about 75 times as much bandwidth than before and Linode has been increasing the bandwidth allocated to their virtual servers over time so this number will just increase. CloudFlare only caches non HTML items so we couldn’t only use CloudFlare in a setup. Finally, note that we could upgrade the speed and bandwidth of our Linode virtual server in a matter of minutes if needed.

8) Do you have a project that would benefit from the advice and input of our advisory board members? If so, send an email with the subject “Lifeboat Foundation Projects” to projects_coordination@lifeboat.com

Help us meet our goal so we can “flower” this summer!