The Russian Religion of Spaceflight

The space programme was presented as the result of the great work of the proletariat. The Moon, a 1965 film by Pavel Pavel Klushantsev, presents a future in which Soviet people live a life of peace and progress on the colonised moon, thanks to the technological advances capable under communism. We had made it to the stars and, as the saying went, “there was no bearded old God there”. Only science. Only the Soviet system. Space themes were woven into everyday life, into endless festivals ...

 Transhumanism in Lovecraft

After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder secrets he was saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his trip to Yuggoth and beyond—and my own possible participation in it—was to be the next day’s topic. He must have been amused by the start of horror I gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on my part proposed, for his head wabbled violently when I shewed my fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of how human beings might accomplish—and several times had acc...

 Martin Rees: We'll Never Hit Barriers To Scientific Under...

We humans haven't changed much since our remote ancestors roamed the African savannah. Our brains evolved to cope with the human-scale environment. So it is surely remarkable that we can make sense of phenomena that confound everyday intuition: in particular, the minuscule atoms we're made of, and the vast cosmos that surrounds us. Nonetheless—and here I'm sticking my neck out—maybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-h...

 Time is the Most Precious Commodity

Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry. ... In your world, people are used to fighting for resources, like oil, minerals, or land. When you have access to the vastness of space, you realize that there's only one resource worth fighting over--even killing for--more time. Time is the singlemost precious commodity in the Universe.

 Prejudice Against Transhumanism in Star Trek

Star Trek’s greatest villains are, almost without exception, the products of human (or whatever-the-original-species-was) enhancement. For example Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, universally regarded as the best Trek movie, has as its villain Khan Noonien Singh. [...] In Star Trek: The Next Generation, of course, we get the Borg, cyborgs from the other side of the galaxy who exist as part of a single collective consciousness which they continually seek to forcibly add other species to. And ...

 Amendments to Nature

Amendment No. 1. We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death. Through genetic alterations, cellular manipulations, synthetic organs, and any necessary means, we will endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date. We will each decide for ourselves how long we shall live. Amendment No. 2. We will expand our perceptual range through biotechnological and computational means. We seek to exceed the perceptual abilities of any other creature and to devise novel...

 Religion Prevented Immortality

The other way was if you do various kinds of mumbo-jumbo then this great agent in the sky will come down and give you eternal life, in which case you could have an infinite number of sports cars. And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t...

 The Hybronaut

I have developed a concept that attempts to emphasize, cross, and further blur the borders of technology and the human. My artistic research work experiments with a networked human, whose body and environment are characteristically techno-organic. This concept developed as the techno-organic figure, what I call “the Hybronaut.” The Hybronaut proposes an “action” state of a human, whose existence and identity are deeply intertwined with its networked hybrid environment. It is understoo...

 The Umwelt Bubble

The biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term Umwelt refers to a concept about the subjective world of an organism. The world can be imagined as a soap bubble, which surrounds each individual and contains signifying markers relevant only to the world of that specific creature. This soap bubble, or Umwelt, is actively created by the individual organism in a process of forming a perception of reality, which is guided by the organism’s design, its physiology, and its needs. According to Uexküll,...

 The Chain of Human Rights to Morphological Freedom

The right to life, the right to not have other people prevent oneself from surviving, is a central right, without which all other rights have no meaning. But to realize the right to life we need other rights. Another central right for any humanistic view of human rights is the right to seek happiness. Without it human flourishing is unprotected, and there is not much point in having a freedom to live if it will not be at least a potentially happy life. In a way the right to life follows from...