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Stephen Wolfram Joins The Life Boat Foundation and Bets On Singularity
kodiaktau writes "This week The Lifeboat Foundation announced that Stephen Wolfram would be joining its organization. The purpose of the group is to think through scientific solutions to existential problems that might be used to save humanity from such risks as asteroids hitting the earth or some other diabolical disaster. Wolfram brings computational science to the table and has posited that the earth and universe can be understood as a computer program that can be significantly altered as we continue to advance in technology."
A nut? That's hilarious, Wolfram is probably the smartest man alive. Like Da Vinci and others his legacy won't be truly appreciated for centuries. Read NKS and if that doesn't give you some concept of his abilities, well, I don't think anything will convince you.
I'm not really impressed by either. Wolfram made some very good software but then wrote that wretched book which was primarily a mix of either wrong ideas or unoriginal ideas. There was a strong failure to credit the work others had done with cellular automaton. I couldn't tell if that was due to his ignorance or his general self-promotional tendencies.
As to the Lifeboat Foundation I lost minimal trust in them after they got in bed with Pam Geller http://lifeboat.com/ex/boards (yes, that's Pamela "Obama is a Muslim with a Fake Birth Certificate" Geller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Geller#Birther_views). If that weren't enough they've been involved in fear mongering about the LHC http://lifeboat.com/ex/particle.accelerator.shield. There are however other groups that are dealing with exisential risk threats in a serious and useful fashion. The Future of Humanity Institute http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ which is affiliated with the University of Oxford, and headed by the very bright Nick Bostrom thinks about existential risk issues in general. Meanwhile, there are organizations focusing on specific concerns. For example, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is focused on dealing with detecting and dealing with large asteroids. They have the advantage of also having a very clever name. Internet cookie to anyone who can figure out why they are called that without searching.
Global Warming (whether caused by human activity or natural cycles or whatever) is by no means an existential threat to humanity. If worst case scenarios come true it will have a massive socio-political impact as large areas of attractive coastal areas may be threatened and fertile vs un-fertile land (deserts etc) will move around, but that's rather an inconvenience compared to a large meteor impact or some of the other scenarios mentioned in the article. That's not to say that nobody should be concerned about global warming, but it's not what the Lifeboat Foundation is.