Lifeboat Foundation Website Redesign Fundraising

The Lifeboat Foundation is raising funds for a redesign of its website, which is out of date and not suitable for the 2010s. Since the Lifeboat Foundation is the only organization in the world devoted to coming up with comprehensive strategies to address myriad extinction risks, and its website is its main public face, it might be beneficial for humanity as a whole that its website be upgraded! The cost for such a venture looks relatively high because the company we want to use (Hell Design) is very high quality and because the Lifeboat Foundation website has a very large number of pages. Here is the fundraising email from Lifeboat Foundation President Eric Klien:

Michael,

We have been helping Ray Kurzweil for the past half a year on a new version of KurzweilAI that we internally call “KurzweilAI 2.0″. In the process, we have developed many useful skills in PHP, web design, MySQL, etc.

We would like to use these newly acquired skills on a new Lifeboat Foundation site designed by Helldesign. Helldesign has designed many prominent sites …

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Why I’ve Donated Over $1,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation

Recently, my regular contributions to the Lifeboat Foundation surpassed $1,000. I am the 11th highest contributor to the organization as of September 2007, tied together with fellow members Philippe Van Nevervelde and Michael Dickey. I’m a member of the LF500, committing $1,000 each year to the Lifeboat Foundation.

Consider the amount of delicious food and electronic gadgets one might buy with $1,000. Since a shrimp, my favorite food, goes for about 25 cents, I could’ve bought approximately 4,000 shrimp with that money, and cooked them in a variety of ways.

But yet, I contributed to the Lifeboat Foundation instead. This is because I see a significant probability that humanity will wipe itself out in the next few decades, through abuse or misuse of advanced technologies such as genetic engineering, molecular manufacturing, and AI, and actually want to do something about it. I doubt that world governments or NGOs are going to put serious work towards alleviating the risks before it’s too late, so therefore we must found our own organization, and put our own resources, knowledge, …

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Lifeboat Foundation in the Wall Street Journal

Lifeboat Foundation, one of the most important organizations of the early 21st century, was recently mentioned briefly in the Wall Street Journal article “Colonize the Moon” (subscription required) by our Scientific Advisory Board member William E. Burroughs. Burroughs proposes using the Moon as a backup drive for civilization. His organization, known as ARC, was absorbed into Lifeboat not too long ago. By working together, we’ll have a better chance of achieving our goal – ensuring that the human species survives these crucial next decades. Here is the relevant excerpt from the article:

It was for that reason that a few individuals, myself included, started a group called the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) several years ago. Its purpose was to start an archive on the moon that would be a continuously updated international record of our civilization. That way, if a major catastrophe happens, the record would survive. Keeping a record on the moon (and perhaps at one of the poles on this planet) would be like backing up a computer’s hard drive. We would emerge …

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