The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.
The 2021 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Martine Rothblatt, who has devoted her life to moving humanity towards a positive future.
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Martine was the 500th person to join our Advisory Board, has contributed to our blog, and has generously supported the Lifeboat Foundation's goal of "Safeguarding Humanity."
Martine is cofounder of the Terasem Movement Foundation. Their mission is to promote the geoethical (world ethical) use of nanotechnology for human life extension. They conduct educational programs and support scientific research and development in the areas of cryonics, biotechnology, and cyber consciousness. This foundation is related to the Lifeboat Foundation programs LifePreserver and PersonalityPreserver (which Martine contributed text to).
The Terasem Movement Foundation publishes "The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness" and "The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology."
The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness explores the mathematical, physical, engineering (hardware, software, firmware), philosophical, psychological, biological, socio-economic, and juridical aspects of non-flesh-based consciousness, which could arise from an advanced machine-based computer.
The Journal invites submissions on controversial topics such as how consciousness can be ported from a human being into a machine, how consciousness can emerge in a computer and be ported into a nanotechnological or cellular-regenerated body, and how mindware can be developed that enables consciousness to emerge from fragments of someone's lifetime experiences that have been stored in digital media.
The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology explores economic, political, social and technological aspects of the developing technology of molecular nanotechnology. The Journal invites submissions on controversial topics such as self-replication and governance.
Particularly encouraged are articles relating to neuronano-technology, the use of atomic-size devices to interface with neurons. Geoethical aspects of neuronanotechnology include the impact of its use on others (both those who are interfaced and those who are not), the accessibility of it to all (commencing with those who will benefit most from it) and independent means of monitoring its compliance with widely agreed-upon norms. Possible examples of geoethical neuronanotechnology include rectification of mental illness, knowledge commodification and consciousness beming.
Martine also created LifeNaut.com (formally CyBeRev), which is a web-based research project that allows anyone to create a digital backup of their mind and genetic code. (Backup of genetic code is done via cryonics and cell samples.) The ultimate goal of their research project is to explore the transfer of human consciousness to computers/robots and beyond.
The digital backup of your mind is called a MindFile and is a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends. Each account comes with an interactive Avatar that becomes more like you the more you teach and train it to think like you (free).
Martine also created Bina48, one of the world's most advanced social robots based on a composite of information from several people including, Bina Rothblatt, cofounder of the Terasem Movement Foundation. She was created using video interview transcripts, laser scanning life mask technology, face recognition, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition technologies. As an "ambassador" for the LifeNaut project, Bina48 is designed to be a social robot that can interact based on information, memories, values, and beliefs collected about an actual person.
Martine also led the International Bar Association's biopolitical project to develop a draft Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights for the United Nations (whose final version was adopted by the UNESCO on November 11, 1997, and endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1998).
While at the NASA tracking station in Seychelles, during the summer of 1974, Martine had her epiphany to unite the world via satellite communications. She then returned to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating summa cum laude in communication studies in 1977, with a thesis on international direct-broadcast satellites.
As an undergraduate, she became a convert to Gerard K. O'Neill's "High Frontier" plan for space colonization after analyzing his 1974 Physics Today cover story on the concept as a project for Professor Harland Epps' Topics in Modern Astronomy seminar. Martine subsequently became an active member of the L5 Society and its Southern California affiliate, Organization for the Advancement of Space Industrialization and Settlement (OASIS). It was related to Lifeboat's Space Habitats program.
During her four-year J.D./M.B.A. program, also at UCLA, she published five articles on the law of satellite communications and prepared a business plan for the Hughes Space and Communications Group titled PanAmSat about how satellite spot beam technology could be used to provide communication service to multiple Latin American countries. She also became a regular contributor on legal aspects of space colonization to the OASIS newsletter.
Martine was responsible for launching several communications satellite companies, including the first private international spacecom project (PanAmSat in 1984, which was eventually sold for $3.2 billion), the first global satellite radio network (WorldSpace, 1990), and the first non-geostationary satellite-to-car broadcasting system (Sirius Satellite Radio in 1990 with current market cap of $25 billion).
She was also responsible for leading the efforts to obtain worldwide approval, via new international treaties, of satellite orbit/spectrum allocations for space-based navigation services (1987) and direct-to-person satellite radio transmissions (1992).
Martine is a well-known voice for medical and pharmaceutical innovation. In 1994, motivated by her daughter being diagnosed with life-threatening pulmonary hypertension, she created the PPH Cure Foundation and in 1996 founded United Therapeutics, which now has a market cap of $10 billion. (She also saved her daughter's life!) Thanks to United Therapeutics, she was the top-earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry in 2018.
In 1996, she began studying for a Ph.D. in medical ethics at the Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London. The degree was granted in June 2001 based upon her dissertation on the conflict between private and public interests in xenotransplantation. This thesis, defended before England's leading bioethicist John Harris, was later published by Ashgate House under the title "Your Life or Mine."
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