Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: geopolitics – Page 31

This tongue-in-cheek article highlights an interesting experience I had a few days ago on the Immortality Bus in North Carolina:

One wants to live forever, the other wants to push reset on the US Constitution. Both are running for president in 2016. As Republican and Democrat presidential candidates prepare for December’s debates, pioneering Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and cybersecurity legend John McAfee met for the first time this week for their own debate, over several large drinks in a motel bar.

Istvan, who is currently touring the US aboard a coffin-shaped campaign bus, and McAfee both have technology at the core of their campaign policies, but in terms of specific policy this is where the similarities end.

“I can’t think of a more horrific concept than immortality,” McAfee told Istvan soon after meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It is anti-evolutionary. We need to die and die young preferably; dying is the most beautiful of all things. I’d get behind a platform where you kill everyone at 30. I would fight you tooth and nail to stop you making people live forever.”

John McAfee zoltan istvan elections

Read more

An Immortality Bus campaign report today on CNET from South Carolina and transhumanism discussed. http://www.cnet.com/videos/the-cravecast-visits-the-future-w…an-istvan/ And here’s the original story: http://www.cnet.com/news/the-cravecast-welcomes-the-presiden…he-robots/

The Transhumanist Party candidate called in from the campaign trail and his “Immortality Bus” to help us look forward to 2016… and to 2050.

Read more

Here’s a very in depth, approximately 6,000 word story (broken into 5 articles) with many pictures on transhumanism–from one of the world’s leading tech sites: The Verge.

Zoltan Istvan is very worried about the superintelligent machines.

He says the war over artificial intelligence will be worse than the Cold War nuclear arms race — much worse. It will be far more deadly, and whoever wins will control the world, eternally. This artificial intelligence might be being developed right now, he says, for all we know. At a government facility in the middle of the Arizona desert, perhaps.

But this is not what Zoltan Istvan is most afraid of, and neither is it the weirdest thing he will tell me in our week together driving 400 miles across the Southwest in his 40-year-old “Immortality Bus,” crudely fashioned into the shape of a coffin. As the presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan is dedicated to spreading transhumanism’s gospel, like some modern day Ken Kesey who doesn’t even need acid for his trip.

Zoltan Istvan very much wants to be the next president of the United States.

Read more

Excited to have a full feature on the BBC homepage on transhumanism and my growing presidential campaign. Transhumanist Party, speech at the World Bank, Immortality Bus, and universal basic income issues discussed:

Not many politicians running for the White House promise to end death. But not many politicians are Zoltan Istvan. Tim Maughan meets a man travelling America in a giant coffin-shaped bus to make his point.

Read more

A new article on my campaign with a provocative headline, but most of the story is nice. I’ll be speaking in Florida on Saturday as part of the Immortality Bus tour. We visited Alabama’s largest megachurch yesterday:

His name sounds funny to Americans, but presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan says it’s totally normal in Hungary, from where his parents hail. Istvan himself was born in Los Angeles and worked for National Geographic for years — a job that led him to explore science, particularly the concept of transhumanism, which posits that people will merge with technology.

Today, Istvan continues to write for Vice, Psychology Today, Gizmod o, and more — when he’s not campaigning across the country and promoting the Transhumanist Party platform, which promises better lives — and hopefully immortality — through science. Istvan will speak this Saturday at the Church of Perpetual Life in Hollywood, which promotes the same ideals and which New Times featured in a cover story earlier this year.

Istvan says that as a journalist, he used to cover nature, until “we were in Vietnam and I had a very close call with a land mine. I thought, ‘Why don’t I write less about nature and the environment and more about science, medicine, and future uses of science to conquer death?’” After leaving Nat Geo circa 2004, when he was about 28, to take care of his ailing father, he says he made some money in real estate and in 2013, “I wrote a novel called The Transhumanist Wage r, which launched my career as a futurist.”

Now he’s onboard with the Transhumanist Party, which has been established for about 14 months, he says. “It’s an actual, organized national party,” he says, though you’re unlikely to see it on a ballot because it’s nearly impossible for small political parties to get on “unless you have almost 50 or 60 million dollars lying around.”

Read more

According to international treaties, no country is allowed to own things like moons or asteroids. But what about a company?

A new bill would allow space mining companies to own pieces of space. Although they couldn’t own a whole asteroid, for example, the bill would ensure that space mining businesses would legally own the resources they extract from that asteroid.

Last week the bill passed in the Senate with a few amendments, and yesterday those amendments were accepted in the House of Representatives. Now the bill is off to the Oval Office, where space policy experts predict President Obama will sign it into law.

Read more

Transhumanism featured in The Times of London, a major UK paper. Sorry, you do need a subscription, I think:

Zoltan Istvan is campaigning for the White House by promising voters everlasting life. He is the Transhumanist party’s presidential nominee and he is touring the US in a vehicle shaped like a coffin that he calls the immortality bus.

He believes that technology will eventually allow humans to live for ever. His message, he says, is connecting with the millennial generation who were born from the early 80s onwards. But he has little money and his bus, which is very old, keeps breaking down. “I know what the chances are,” he told me of his attempt to capture the Oval…

Read more

New cybersecurity arms treaty compared unfavourably with nuclear treaties:

“In the Cold War and still today, nuclear arms remain in the hands of states, meaning they can usually be counted and their movements observed. Cyberweapons, too, are often developed by countries … but they can also be found in the hands of criminal groups and teenagers, neither of which negotiate treaties.”

The countries are discussing what could be the first arms control accord for cyberspace, and an agreement could be announced as soon as Thursday, according to officials.

Read more