Category: transhumanism – Page 77
Waiting on research advances is the rationale behind cryopreservation, and more broadly, a worldview known as transhumanism. A person killed by cancer or heart disease could reasonably be revived in a future when such ailments no longer exist. “They believe in the advance of technology,” says Giuseppe Nucci, an Italian photographer who visited with transhumanists and toured the facilities of Russia-based cryonics company KrioRus. “They hope that someone will wake them up.”
This hope, that the future will vanquish the ills of the present, is as old as the first civilisations that realized that with each passing year life got a little better. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov helped create an early 20th-century movement known as cosmism that was rooted in the idea that, given enough time, humans could defeat evil and death. If the human life span was too short, then the simple solution was to extend it, even after death, and suspend its decomposition until the world caught up.
Employees of a liquid nitrogen and dry ice factory on the outskirts of Moscow are shrouded in fog while refilling their liquid nitrogen tanks. Founded by former KrioRus employees, the company now supplies them. PHOTOGRAPH BY GIUSEPPE NUCCI
While the Winter Olympics are going on, here’s.
A story of mine on the dream of a future Transhumanist Olympics: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/is-it-time-for-…77194.html #transhumanism
Oracle Team USA made a historic comeback to beat Emirates Team New Zealand in the American’s Cup in San Francisco last month. I have closely followed the sport of sail racing for over 30 years, and what astonishes me is how much faster and better the boats are today than they were three decades ago. Sailing speeds and performances have doubled in some cases.
The same cannot be said about most other major sports. Even Michael Phelps, considered by many the greatest living athlete, is only a few seconds faster than swimming world records set 30 years ago. Most sports have not allowed scientific improvements or technology upgrades to their athletes and the equipment they use. I find that disappointing.
So will we ever be able to do this or is this just a pipe dream? Plenty has been written about the future and what we may be able to do one day, but not much attention gets paid to the hurdles we have yet to overcome. Forget all the techno-babble, philosophy, and transhumanism – how close is this brave new world to our present time?
“Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in a bucket.”
Taken from 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, this sentence perfectly sums up the complexity and ambiguity of the human mind and the brain. Despite enormous advances, our ignorance on what lies within our cranium remains vast and sometimes unyielding. Those drops, and their relation to the bucket, are profoundly enigmatic.
#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.
The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.
It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.
Dublin writer Mark O’Connell spent three years travelling the globe, meeting people who believe that they can actually achieve this by digitising their brains and transcending human flesh to become de facto cyborgs, impervious to…
But Altered Carbon is only the latest bit of transhumanism to hit TV recently. From Black Mirror’s cookies and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ mind-invading telepaths and alien bodysnatchers to Star Trek: Discovery’s surgical espionage and Travelers’ time-jumping consciousness, the classic tropes of body-hopping, body-swapping, and otherwise commandeering has exploded in an era on the brink, one in which longevity technology is accelerating more rapidly than ever, all while most people still trying to survive regular threats to basic corporeal health and safety.
Nobody wants these dumb meat-sack bodies anymore. Now TV is asking if what replaces them will be any better.