An exploration of the idea of an indefinite partial colonization of a galaxy as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.
An exploration of the question of whether transhumanism, and the analogue in alien civilizations is in fact the great filter.
My Patreon Page:
/ johnmichaelgodier.
My Event Horizon Channel:
/ eventhorizonshow.
Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a writer who had just published his first novel.
It was Zoltan Istvan’s very first media interview as a book author.
The book was The Transhumanist Wager. The question behind it was simple and almost unbearable: what would you do, and what would you give up, to live forever?
I loved half of it. I argued with the other half. That tension is exactly why I think it still matters.
Zoltan built his story out of Plato and Nietzsche, out of Thomas More’s Utopia and Zen Buddhism, then wrapped it all in an Atlas Shrugged plot of lone heroes and evil states. The philosophy is sophisticated. The framing is stark. The contradictions are not a flaw. They are the point.
One line from our conversation has stayed with me for more than a decade:
In 2013, I interviewed a man who studies cyborgs and war for a living.
Somewhere in that conversation, Prof. Chris Hables Gray predicted a global pandemic. I chimed in that it would most likely stem from a bird flu outbreak.
We were both right. Neither of us wanted to be.
That was six years before COVID. And here we are in 2026, watching H5N1 headlines pile up again.
The point was never the prediction. The point was what he said we should do about it.
Chris did not pitch a gadget. He did not sell a forecast. He argued that surviving the century is not a technology problem; it is a citizenship problem.
An exploration of the question of whether transhumanism, and the analogue in alien civilizations is in fact the great filter.
My Patreon Page:
/ johnmichaelgodier.
My Event Horizon Channel:
/ eventhorizonshow.
Music:
I shook his hand once. I have never forgotten it.
It was a bionic hand, and Nigel Ackland gripped mine like any man would, except this one whirred and clicked and carried more meaning in a single gesture than most of us pack into a lifetime of handshakes.
Nigel is gone now. We miss him. He called himself ordinary. He was anything but.
Thirteen years ago, on Singularity 1 on 1, we sat down to talk about life with a bionic arm. And somewhere in that conversation we wandered into territory the world only just got around to naming this month: the Enhanced Games.
We asked whether people would one day volunteer to be enhanced. Whether the line between fixing a body and upgrading one was ever as solid as we pretended. Whether the Paralympics might one day be the more interesting show.
In 2013, those were thought experiments. Last weekend in Las Vegas, they sold tickets.
What counts as death? And who gets to decide?
In the summer of 2013, I traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona to visit the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s leading cryonics organization, founded in 1972. CEO Dr. Max More gave me a full tour of the facilities and walked me through the entire process: from the moment clinical death is declared, through controlled cooling and vitrification, to the cryo-tanks holding (at the time) 117 patients in long-term storage.
I also asked him, somewhat selfishly, whether my big bald head would fit comfortably in a neuro-patient container.
After the tour, Max sat down with me for a 25-minute conversation that covered:
Affordability and the real cost of membership Why minimizing cooling delays after clinical death is critical, and what long-distance members do about it Preserving pets, because of course people ask Chemical brain preservation as an alternative path The importance of protecting the neuron’s microtubules The case for an X Prize style competition to reduce tissue damage Where cryonics sits inside the broader transhumanist project.
My favorite line from Max, the one I still come back to:
“We are in a time of circulating flesh.”
Stelarc said that to me 13 years ago. In 2026, it reads less like art criticism and more like a status report.
He had grown an ear on his arm. He had hung himself from hooks 25 times. He had let strangers on the internet choreograph his muscles through electrical stimulation, his body remote-controlled across continents.
Most people called it spectacle. I think it was inquiry.
Because long before deepfakes, before voice cloning, before AI agents wearing our faces, was already asking the question we now cannot avoid:
Where does the body end and the network begin?
Our extropian future: natasha vita-more on AI, nanotechnology, mind uploading, and the birth of transhumanism.
What happened to the future we dreamed about on the Extropian mailing list 30 years ago? Did we get the timelines wrong, or was the architecture of our thinking correct? In this compelling follow-up to the conversation with Max More, Giulio Prisco sits down with Natasha Vita-More—futurist, designer, and co-founder of the Extropian movement—to assess the state of \.
Physicist and neuroscientist Dr. Alex Gómez-Marín delivered a strikingly activist speech at the Science of Consciousness Conference (TSC) in Barcelona. He argued that we are now in a war on consciousness, with materialism and transhumanism forming a dangerous cocktail.
Dr. Alex Gómez-Marín is associate professor of the Spanish Research Council in Alicante, Spain, and director of the Pari Center in Tuscany, Italy. Hans Busstra sat down with Marín directly after his speech to analyze what this war is really about.
Our previous conversation with Marín: • Blind Man Sees: Consciousness Beyond The S…
You can learn more about Marín’s work at:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?…
Watch Dr. Gomez Marin’s full presentation at the Science of Consciousness Conference (TSC2025):
• 2025 TSC — Barcelona — Plenary 12 — End of…
Other TSC interesting TSC videos: / @thescienceofconsciousness.
The Essentia Foundation wants to thank The Science Of Consciousness Conference and Robert Neville for their great support in producing this interview.