The various attempts to slow the utilization of advanced materials, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and robotics is akin to keeping certain gender or ethnic groups out of the games. Not just discrimination, but impeding the flow of progress.

If the ultimate goal of world-level competition is advancement of human physical ability, then athletes, coaches, physicians, and biotech engineers should be able to choose the very best tactics and strategies to achieve that goal.

A Transhuman Olympics would be wildly entertaining, but would also spur the development of biotechnology at a pace that public and private science could never keep up with.  While the ethics of such an event might be hotly contested, the benefits to humankind would be lasting and far reaching.

Competitors involved would sign a medical waiver and hold harmless agreement.  Education for both athletes and trainers would be mandatory so that participants and competitors understand the risks. Athletes in particular would have to attest that they are willingly participating in the games and that at the time of their consent to do so, they were of sound mind.

Performance enhancing substances — anabolic steroids, human growth hormones — would be permitted. Safer formulations would be encouraged. Experimentation would also be encouraged, insofar as it would drive the development of substances with less extreme, more commercial applications, outside of the games.

Biotechnology augmentation and bioengineered device integration would also be advised. Biotech is still in its relative infancy and the mainstream medical benefit for technology spun-off from this kind of competitive arena would be amazingly valuable.

In short, virtually any edge that provides enhanced performance times, distances, heights, or otherwise advances human competitive ability — be it mechanical, pharmaceutical, biotechnological, or genetic — would be considered fair game.

Boredom and sport would never again occur together in the same sentence. The performance-enhancing scandal that supposedly hurt the image of baseball in the late 1990s, led to new records from players like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Roger Clemens, as well as a substantial lift in audience attention at the world level.

Some of the most competitive and gifted athletes in baseball watched as their reputations were dragged through the proverbial mud, as members of US Congress and the Federal judiciary presided over efforts to jail both trainers and athletes alike.

In reality, the use of performance enhancing substances in baseball goes back to 1889, when pitcher Pud Galvin used, and vocally endorsed, Brown-Séquard Elixir, a monkey-sourced testosterone supplement.

“Doping,” as it is commonly referred to, remains an American taboo subject.

The Transhuman Olympics would provide a venue for science to be more competitive and for athletes and trainers to take measures that they deem befitting to secure the best performance results.

Rather than laboratory-based timelines — often handled in academic settings, with limited access to financial resources — scientific improvements would need to find practical applications in the real world. Research efforts would have to provide meaningful, actionable improvements to athletic performance, within real world timeframes.

Imagine for a moment the incredible entertainment value.  Perhaps countries with the most money just emerge victorious. Perhaps smaller scientific efforts with less access to resources would be forced to find novel innovations to gain a competitive advantage.

Watching athletes push the limits of humanity to achieve new records and break through established competitive plateaus is a fundamental facet of human evolution. The Transhuman Olympics would simply better facilitate that process.

Over time, the opportunity to invent new sports based on emerging capabilities and new technological developments would emerge.  When the 1896 Olympics revived the ancient Olympic tradition, only one sport was excluded from the games (for you history buffs, the sport was pankration, a mild mixed martial art).  However, with new technology and advanced human capability comes new competitive territory. Imagine a real-life Icarus competing with other airborne humans.  Underwater games or sports in low-Earth orbit — the competitive horizon is endless.

Robotic elements, like chaser drones, helping athletes to see around corners or from other perspectives would be spectacular. Imagine force multipliers to provide boosts of strength or improve the strength and resilience of joints, muscles, tendons, and/or ligaments.

Once tested and proven in the venue of competitive sport, these technologies would have the widespread potential for mainstream medical adoption. Think of elderly patients who have trouble walking or individuals dealing with neurodegenerative disorders, now empowered thanks to the sacrifices and risks taken on by these gladiators of evolved sport.

Until modern society overcomes its resistance to unencumbered, more loosely regulated sporting events, the Transhuman Olympics would need to be held in a country with fewer controlled substance laws.

This country would likely receive a substantial windfall of medical tourism, so long as the technology being utilized was also developed there.  Cuba springs first to mind but other present-day medical tourism destinations include Argentina, Brunei, Jordan, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand and many others.

In modern Olympic competition, corporate sponsorship was first forbidden.

It wasn’t until 1972, when the medium of television opened up new channels for advertising, that corporate sponsorship began to emerge. In the Transhuman Olympics, corporate and/or government sponsorship would be essential and robustly encouraged.

With each passing Olympic games, the amount spent increases dramatically.  Russia spent $51 billion on the 2014 games in Sochi, in the hopes of capturing and drawing the international spotlight.

In the Transhuman Olympics, the core benefits would include not only spectators and advertising sponsors, but tangible medical advancements and beneficial intellectual property.

We’re already living in the age of the technologically enhanced athlete.

LZR Racer swimsuits, made of woven elastane-nylon and buoyant polyurethane provided swimmers the ability to shave relatively substantial amounts of time from races.  Those suits were banned in 2010, following the 2008 Beijing games.

The 1936 Olympics in Berlin showed Hitler that preconceived notions of superiority were no match for the power of diversity.

In 2012, for the first time since the inception of the International Olympic Committee, all countries participating in the Olympics sent delegations that included both male and female competitors. That same year, 204 countries sent competitors to the games.

Now that the human race has achieved an even playing field for global competition, the next step is technologically empowered, superhuman competitors.

Kindly join me in supporting the call for a Transhuman Olympics.

Planet Earth, Zemlia, di qiu, Avani, la monde, la tierra, der erde — each of these names, in their respective language, puts significance on the physical stuff held together by gravity beneath our feet, the foundation upon which we’ve built our ever expanding civilization.

We did not fully understand that stuff to be a planet until a few hundred years ago.

How quaint. How archaic.

How utterly primitive to think that in our ongoing effort to categorize and name the stars, planets, galaxies, and other celestial objects around us, we fail in the most basic sense to understand our own place in grander scheme of nature.

Discovery, science, and exploration missions from a variety of countries continue to elevate our understanding of nature into a clearer context. With each discovery, there seems to be a clearer need to name our home planet.

The globally diverse make-up of some of the more advanced technical and scientific institutions like NASA, ESA, Caltech, and MIT, show that there already exists a self-selecting intellectual elite shining a widening light into our understanding of the natural world beyond our planetary confines.

Our curiosity knows only temporary bounds. In time, even the most complicated mysteries become science, fact, human history.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, observing nearby stars, has shown us that the presence of planets around stars is more common than not.  There are estimated to be between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.

Kepler turned up some very interested potential destinations.  What we call exoplanet Gliese 581 g, might already be populated with life and if that life is advanced enough, that exoplanet might already have a name.

A senior astronomer at SETI recently stated publicly that the research center expects advances in computing to discover evidence of life on another planet in the next twenty years.  Space archaeologist Alice Gorman is looking in a slightly different direction, toward the structures, orbital debris, and other related relics that an extraterrestrial civilization may have left behind.

Beyond the extra-stellar destinations of worlds we have yet to closely explore, there are also existential threats, like the possibility of near Earth objects colliding with our home planet, which should compel us toward a stronger sense of planetary awareness.

Until Elon Musk and SpaceX solve the transportation challenge to take humans to Mars, we should regard our home planet as singular and worthy of a name that all of humanity understands, supports, and ideally can pronounce in roughly the same way.

While the name Gaia, from Greek mythology is occasionally used to describe “mother Earth,” the truth is that such a name is far too Western-centric to resonate globally.

There is no urgent need to continue the tradition of naming planets after Greco-Roman gods and goddesses.

Ours is an era of distinctly connected global culture.  The fidelity, speed, and reach of that connection grows daily, linking not just the developed world, but emerging cultures, further afield.

The name could be a symbol, a phrase, a proper name, or a single sound.  In a perfect world, a vote would be taken, providing consideration by countries around the entire world.

Currently, the International Astronomical Union governs the process of naming newly discovered exoplanets and would likely be the leading candidate to manage or oversee such an effort.

The need to name our planet is not merely some sugar-coated idealism, but a legitimate, concrete gesture toward recognizing a single human identity. It would demonstrate that our planet, despite nuanced cultural and genetic diversity remains ultimately unified.  The differences that appear to separate the citizens of each country are far outweighed by the many similarities we share.

Following World War II, the United Nations organized and assembled to prevent the unchecked atrocities that brought the deaths of tens of millions humans during the war. That effort fell short of its originally intended charter, largely due to the concentration of veto power of a few influential nations (China, Russia, France, the UK and the US, all permanent members of the UN’s Security Council).

By concentrating power among a few elite nations, the democratic power of the UN was reduced to yet another forum for potentially divisive geopolitics.

In the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, the World Wide Web offered a different kind of global democracy, facilitated largely by the sharing of knowledge, information, and technology.

Either by commerce or by charity, countries whose governments and business built-out the Web have an obligation to continue that infrastructure development in such a way that will bring the Web to a truly global audience.

When that future day arrives when a lucky few on our home planet are able to communicate in meaningful dialogue with intelligent life from another planet, we will naturally want to compare our understanding of the natural world, on both a scientific as well as a cultural level.

We’re going to want to know what they call their planet and they will likely want to know what we call ours.

Should the possibility exist that space archaeologist Alice Gorman, or someone like her, happens upon the remains of such a civilization, so too will we seek to unearth the details of their understanding of their particular corner of nature.

If they were advanced enough to escape the gravity well of their home planet and make it into interplanetary space, we will expect that they have hammered down and fleshed out some of the same fundamental physical laws that first bedeviled and later empowered humanity over the centuries.

In preparation for that eventual contact, we’ll need to first foster better awareness of our own planetary identity, if only for the sake of more clearly and succinctly articulating the shared genetic heritage that evolved and spread across our particular globe.

There will come a day, when entirety of human civilization looks back with a knowing smile at how simple we once were, how blindly unaware of our position in nature we seemed to be.

Naturally, of course, once we name our planet, the need shall also arise to name our only moon and our parent star.

Alas, one step at a time.

A concerted global effort like naming the planet might very well be the best anti-war cocktail this planet ever imbibed or an answer to the most important question we’ve ever been asked.

In one sweeping gesture we can think and act, both locally and globally, and thus solidify humanity’s future history.

After nearly six months of relative quiet, our parent star, the sun, awoke.  Recent predictions from leading solar scientists ranged from “cycle 24 will be our weakest yet” to “cycle 24 is quiet now, because it will be double peaked.”  It appears that the latter is emerging as the clearer truth.

Over the course of a week, between October 24^th and 31^st, more than 28 substantial flares fired off from the sun. Several of the more recent flares sent massive clouds of ionized particulate matter, called coronal mass ejections, toward Earth.

Four of the recent flares were X-class solar flares, the strongest on the scale, erupting from the photosphere of the sun, causing minor radio blackouts, and sending coronal mass ejections in many different directions, including toward Earth.

Unfortunately, due to the recent US government shutdown, the suite of tools generally available to the public for space weather prediction were offline. As of November 2^nd, there remains a backlog of missing data for several sets of publically available apps and internet resources for space weather prediction and observation.

This period of excited solar activity comes of the heals of recently published science that revealed no discernable connection between the planetary rotation period of Jupiter (11.87 years) and the length of solar cycles (variable between 9 and 12 years). This may sound intuitively obvious, but holdouts from several corners of the scientific world have sought to ascribe significance to the similarities between both cycles. Some claimed that the much less massive Jupiter somehow caused solar dynamic activity.

Published analyses of radioactive isotopes of beryllium and carbon in 10,000 year-old ice core samples recently dismissed the similarities between both periods as being consistent with chance and statistically insignificant.  This leaves open the possibility that the solar dynamo is indeed self-excited, in a process whose predictive models are still being tested and perfected, called the meridional flow.

Meridional flow moves solar material just beneath the apparent subsurface of the sun (called the photosphere).  Models for the meridional flow have proven difficult to hammer down with predictive certainty, but NASA’s Dr. David Hathaway and a number of other leading solar scientists are moving closer to understanding the dynamic forces that drive the activity of our parent star.

Radar imagery from SDO, taken every 45 seconds over the past two years, was recently analyzed as well. The results of that analysis revealed that the current models, which predict the rate of meridional flow are off by at least half. In short, the conveyor belt-like process of plasma that returns material to the photosphere of the sun moves more quickly than originally theorized. This misunderstanding might have contributed to the lower than normal forecast for solar cycle 24. Time will tell if the sun is truly tapering off its maximum output for this cycle, or if more activity is coming Earth’s way.

The NASA/ESA heliophysics fleet currently observing the sun is comprised of nearly twenty spacecraft in various orbits measuring not only our star, but the interstellar space between it and Earth as well as the intricate space weather system that interacts constantly with our planet.

One of the most exciting moments in solar sciences comes when an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection collides with the Earth’s magnetic field to the degree of causing a geomagnetic storm.  The Earth’s magnetic field is fully capable of protecting our planet from the occasional glancing blow from the sun; however, strong clouds of magnetized plasma can often find their way into Earth’s atmosphere, causing minor interference with electrical grids as well as the constellation of GPS satellites.

The Carrington Event of 1859 and the Manitoba Blackout of 1989, revealed that the Earth is indeed vulnerable to space weather events.  There have been calls, falling largely upon the deaf ears of US legislators, that want the electrical grid of the United States to be fully retrofitted with radiation hardened components that could handle the surges associated with geomagnetic storms.  The problem will not go away and unlike global warming and other self-destructive, human propagated phenomena, there is little we can due to curtail such activity, other than being aware and prepared.

As the number of active regions on the apparent surface of the sun increase, we are likely to experience more geo-effective activity in the coming weeks and months.  The phase of the solar cycle remains high and will gently curtail overall activity as solar maximum wanes into the lull of solar minimum.

For solar science enthusiasts, including this writer, this period of solar activity is an ideal time to better understand the dynamic interactions that the sun has with Earth.  It is only in the last 10 to 15 years that we’ve understood our parent star to be a dynamic system, not as predictable as we’d assumed it to be in the nearly 400 years of solar science observations.

Deepening the scientific understanding about our parent star is as much about protecting Earth, as it is about examining the interconnected nature of the Earth-Sun space weather system. It behooves all of humanity to keep apprised of this connection as we establish new laws and more accurately understand our extended natural environment.

On one hand, Earth is situated so perfectly, so ideally, inside the sun’s habitable zone, that it is impossible not to esteem our parent star with a sense of ongoing gratitude.  It is, after all, the onslaught of spectral rain, the sun’s seemingly limitless output of charged particles, which provide the initial spark to all terrestrial life.

Yet on another hand, during those brief moments of solar upheaval, when highly energetic Earth-directed ejecta threaten with destruction our precipitously perched technological infrastructure, one cannot help but eye with caution the potentially calamitous distance of only 93 million miles that our entire human population resides from this unpredictable stellar inferno.

On 6 February 2011, twin solar observational spacecraft STEREO aligned at opposite ends of the sun along Earth’s orbit, and for the first time in human history, offered scientists a complete 360-degree view of the sun.  Since solar observation began hundreds of years ago, humanity has had available only one side of the sun in view at any given time, as it slowly completed a rotation every 27 days.  First launched in 2006, the two STEREO satellites are glittering jewels among a growing crown of heliophysics science missions that aim to better understand solar dynamics, and for the next eight years, will offer this dual-sided view of our parent star.

In addition to providing the source of all energy to our home planet Earth, the sun occasionally spews from its active regions violent bursts of energy, known as coronal mass ejections(CMEs).  These fast traveling clouds of ionized gas are responsible for lovely events like the aurorae borealis and australis, but beyond a certain point have been known to overload orbiting satellites, set fire to ground-based technological infrastructure, and even usher in widespread blackouts.

CMEs are natural occurrences and as well understood as ever thanks to the emerging perspective of our sun as a dynamic star.  Though humanity has known for centuries that the solar cycle follows a more/less eleven-year ebb and flow, only recently has the scientific community effectively constellated a more complete picture as to how our sun’s subtle changes effect space weather and, unfortunately, how little we can feasibly contend with this legitimate global threat.

The massive solar storm that occurred on 1 September 1859 produced aurorae that were visible as far south as Hawai’i and Cuba, with similar effects observed around the South Pole.  The Earth-directed CME took all of 17 hours to make the 93 million mile trek from the corona of our sun to the Earth’s atmosphere, due to an earlier CME that had cleared a nice path for its intra-stellar journey.  The one saving grace of this massive space weather event was that the North American and European telegraph system was in its delicate infancy, in place for only 15 years prior.  Nevertheless, telegraph pylons threw sparks, many of them burning, and telegraph paper worldwide caught fire spontaneously.

Considering the ambitious improvements in communications lines, electrical grids, and broadband networks that have been implemented since, humanity faces the threat of space weather on uneven footing.  Large CME events are known to occur around every 500 years, based on ice core samples measured for high-energy proton radiation.

The CME event on 14 March 1989 overloaded the HydroQuebec transmission lines and caused the catastrophic collapse of an entire power gird.  The resulting aurorae were visible as far south as Texas and Florida.  The estimated cost was totaled in the hundreds of million of dollars.  A later storm in August 1989 interfered with semiconductor functionality and trading was called off on the Toronto stock exchange.

Beginning in 1995 with the launch and deployment of The Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), through 2009 with the launch of SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and finally this year, with the launch of the Glory science mission, NASA is making ambitious, thoughtful strides to gain a clearer picture of the dynamics of the sun, to offer a better means to predict space weather, and evaluate more clearly both the great benefits and grave stellar threats.

Earth-bound technology infrastructure remains vulnerable to high-energy output from the sun.  However, the growing array of orbiting satellites that the best and the brightest among modern science use to continually gather data from our dynamic star will offer humanity its best chance of modeling, predicting, and perhaps some day defending against the occasional outburst from our parent star.

Written by Zachary Urbina, Founder Cozy Dark

Be you a technophile, you are eagerly awaiting, with perhaps equal parts hope and fear, the moment when artificial general intelligence surpasses human intelligence. You don’t know exactly how this new, more cunning intelligence will react to humans, but you’re fairly certain that humanity might well be in a bit of trouble, or at very least, have some unique competition.

Be you a technophobe, you shun the trappings of in-depth science and technology involvement, save for a superficial interaction with the rudimentary elements of technology which likely do not extend much further than your home computer, cell phone, automobile, and/or microwave oven. As a technophobe, you might even consider yourself religious, and if you’re a Christian, you might well be waiting for the second-coming, the rapture.

Both scenarios lead humanity to ironically similar destinations, in which humankind becomes either marginalized or largely vestigial.

It’s difficult to parse either eventuality with observant members of the other’s belief system. If you ask a group of technophiles what they think of the idea of the rapture you will likely be laughed at or drown in tidal wave of atheist drool. The very thought of some magical force eviscerating an entire religious population in one eschatological fell swoop might be too much for some science and tech geeks, and medical attention, or at the very least a warehouse-quantity dose of smelling salts, might be in order.

Conversely, to the religiously observant, the notion of the singularity might for them, exist in terms too technical to even theoretically digest or represent something entirely dark or sinister that seems to fulfill their own belief system’s end game, a kind of techno-holocaust that reifies their purported faith.

The objective reality of both scenarios will be very different than either envisioned teleologies. Reality’s shades of gray of have a way of making foolish even the wisest individual’s predictions.

In my personal life, I too believed that the publication of my latest and most ambitious work, explaining the decidedly broad-scope Parent Star Theory would also constitute an end result of significant consequence, much like the popular narrative surrounding the moment of the singularity; that some great finish line was reached. The truth, however, is that just like the singularity, my own narrative-ized moment was not a precisely secured end, but a distinct moments of beginning, of conception and commitment. Not an arrival but a departure; a bold embarkation without clear end in sight.

Rather than answers, the coming singularity should provoke additional questions. How do we proceed? Where do we go from here? If the fundamental rules in the calculus of the human equation are changing, then how must we adapt? If the next stage of humanity exists on a post-scarcity planet, what then will be our larger goals, our new quest as a global human force?

Humanity must recognize that the idea of a narrative is indeed useful, so long as that narrative maintains some aspect of open-endedness. We might well need that consequential beginning-middle-end, if only to be reminded that each end most often leads to a new beginning.

Written by Zachary Urbina, Founder, Cozy Dark