Russian Transhumanism

Russia has always been considered a hotbed of utopias, both from above and from below, that is: State and intelligentsia (think of Peter the Great, Nikolai Chernyshevskii‘s socialist-utopian novel "What‘s to be Done" or Dostoevskii‘s ideal man Count Myshkin, the Idiot) – and at the same time there was a strong milleniarism among the people, a religious zeal leading to a variety of sects, peasant and folk beliefs resulting sometimes in bizarre mass movements. (Skoptsy) (This history h...

 Science Extends the Range of Phenomena

Science is in a literal sense constructive of new facts. It has no fixed body of facts passively awaiting explanation, for successful theories allow the construction of new instruments—electron microscopes and deep space probes—and the exploration of phenomena that were beyond description—the behavior of transistors, recombinant DNA, and elementary particles, for example. This is a key point in the progressive nature of science—not only are there more elegant or accurate analyses of p...

 The Earth is Overcrowded Psychologically

The Earth is overcrowded. Not yet in a literal sense: Our technology is adequate to maintain comfortably a population significantly larger than our present 3.6 billion. The Earth is overcrowded in a psychological sense. For that restless and ambition-driven fraction of mankind that has blazed new paths for our species, there are no new places to go. There are places inside of ourselves, but this is not the forte of such individuals. There are the ocean basins, but we are not yet committed to ...