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Nichola Conlon and James Strole

Posts by Nichola Conlon and James Strole

Dr. Nichola Conlon and James Strole Discuss the Biggest Reported Increase of NAD in Humans

Dr. Nichola Conlon and James Strole Discuss the Biggest Reported Increase of NAD in Humans

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Nichola Conlon
James Strole

Dr. Nichola Conlon, Nuchido CEO & Co-founder, spoke with James Strole, Director of the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, about what she’s bringing to RAADfest 2019:
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Increasing NAD+ levels to a level comparable with people 17 years younger. 
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NAD is a natural molecule found within every living cell of your body. Without it, your body couldn’t generate the energy it needs to survive or kick-start its natural cell maintenance and repair systems. In its youthful state, your body naturally makes and retains high levels of NAD. But as you age, these levels are not maintained and the amount of NAD in your body drops by 50% every 20 years. This decline has been scientifically linked to the increasing effects of aging.
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Recent scientific breakthroughs have shown that one of the best ways to combat aging is to maintain high levels of NAD.
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Nuchido has pioneered the use of systems pharmacology and clinical research to boost and maintain NAD. In a scientific world-first, the team achieved the biggest increase of NAD in humans reported by any scientific group.
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Hear what she has to share, and meet her at RAADfest 2019, October 3-6:

To find out more and register, visit the RAAD Fest website at https://www.raadfest.com/.

Watch the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s prior appearances at RAAD Fests in 2017 and 2018 below.

RAAD Fest 2017

The U.S. Transhumanist Party – Pursuing a Peaceful Political Revolution for Longevity – August 11, 2017

Advocating for the Future – Panel at RAAD Fest 2017 – Gennady Stolyarov II, Zoltan Istvan, Max More, Ben Goertzel,

RAAD Fest 2018

The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Four Years of Advocating for the Future – Gennady Stolyarov II at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 21, 2018

Gennady Stolyarov II Interviews Ray Kurzweil at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 21, 2018

U.S. Transhumanist Party Meeting at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 22, 2018

Andrés Grases Interviews Gennady Stolyarov II on Transhumanism and the Transition to the Next Technological Era – September 23, 2018

Register for RAAD Fest 2019 here. 

U.S. Transhumanist Party Presidential Primary Candidates Johannon Ben Zion and Rachel Haywire Discuss Policy, the Democratic Debates, and Transhumanist Advocacy

U.S. Transhumanist Party Presidential Primary Candidates Johannon Ben Zion and Rachel Haywire Discuss Policy, the Democratic Debates, and Transhumanist Advocacy

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Johannon Ben Zion
Rachel Haywire

Two 2020 Third-Party Candidates dissect the “First Democratic Debate” from Johannon Ben Zion on Vimeo.

On June 28, 2019, two of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Presidential primary candidates, Rachel Haywire and Johannon Ben Zion, conversed about the juxtaposition of techno-progressive and public-health goals, policy-making, and organizing.

This thoughtful and constructive policy-oriented discussion is a worthy precursor to the forthcoming July 6 Virtual Debate (which the public can watch here), where candidates including Johannon Ben Zion and Rachel Haywire (as well as Charles Holsopple and Dan Good) will be articulating their visions of transhumanist policy to the public. The caliber and civility of discourse in the Ben Zion / Haywire conversation stand out as being immensely higher than what was observed during the Democratic primary debates, where it seems that many of the candidates were at one another’s throats. Once again, transhumanists have shown that they can do better. This discussion is a valuable building block for the outcome that we hope will happen once the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Electronic Primary is concluded in mid-August – that all of the candidates will collaborate with the nominee, no matter who wins, and work toward maximizing the influence and impact of transhumanist ideas and policy proposals.

The Importance of an “Industrial Space Elevator” to Transhumanism and the “Futurist New Deal” Platform – Article by Nikolay Agapov

The Importance of an “Industrial Space Elevator” to Transhumanism and the “Futurist New Deal” Platform – Article by Nikolay Agapov

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Nikolay Agapov

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) publishes this article by Nikolay Agapov to advance the goals of Section XVII of the USTP Platform, which states that “The United States Transhumanist Party holds that present and future societies should take all reasonable measures to embrace and fund space travel, not only for the spirit of adventure and to gain knowledge by exploring the universe, but as an ultimate safeguard to its citizens and transhumanity should planet Earth become uninhabitable or be destroyed.” The construction of a highly economical infrastructure project such as the Agapov Orbital Lift would greatly reduce the costs of space travel and thus enable rapid exploration and development of space for the benefit of humankind and all sentient entities – thus also accelerating our transition into the next era of our civilization. As of this time, the USTP has not yet endorsed a Presidential candidate but welcomes activity from all of our Presidential Primary candidates to advance the USTP Platform. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, June 23, 2019

This article is primarily about  the value to society of an industrial space elevator; which I believe could have already been built using a small fraction of the resources that have been spent on space tourism for a select few individuals.  But before we begin, I would like to take a moment to talk about how “Space Age” goals do correlate quite strongly with the goals of “Digital Democracy” and the strengthening of your middle class more generally, that are described in Mr. Johannon Ben Zion’s “Futurist New Deal” platform as a candidate seeking the Presidential nomination of the Transhumanist Party.  I have been previously described in an interview for this site as an “Open-Source Business Developer,” a term which is not a direct translation of the phrase that I used in the Russian interview, but it does describe this underlying commonality fairly well. By using “network technology” and allowing a larger group of peers to participate in the space industry, we’ll create a system that is making better use of the funds and resources that it has allocated and perhaps more importantly, one that can and will evolve as a matter of course to serve humankind.  

This open yet technocratic principle is also very well understood when it comes to more decentralized and more representative forms of government, and the funding of social programs that support the middle class, whether they are funded in the present day by largely public means or in the near-future by public-private partnerships.  

In a great many economies with post-industrial elements including Russia – although it is quite far from the strongest of economies – it is widely believed that the birth rate is “dangerously low.”  So much so that future generations of adults, working people, are said to have to provide for far too many retirees – the idea being that this can lead to an economic crisis. To avoid the crisis of an aging population, developed economies are actively attempting to assist young families.  In particular, the Russian government has provided many types of additional social services to young families that are not so widely available in the United States – for example, “Family Paid Leave”, “Universal Healthcare Services”, and other measures designed to encourage these vital family activities.  

I believe that concerns about “under-population” are not entirely rooted in reality; the main problem that people who fear this population bust express is that the population of older people or pensioners, is becoming much larger than the population of young people, and while in 20th-century technology terms that would lead to a shortage of labor, we now live in the 21st century.  Their fears do not take into account the ways in which all of our societies are moving towards full automation; a circumstance that is negating and will continue to negate these generational problems. However, the larger spirit and implementation of this partly fear-based set of policies is correct. Society and the economy flourish when people are free in their time and resources to pursue family life and small businesses; and these things are very strongly represented in the economic policies of the “Futurist New Deal”.

In Russia, the government is also concerned about a lack of human development and lower productivity.  At a recent open press conference, the Russian president announced a program for a sharp increase in overall labor productivity.  Achieving this rapid growth in production is possible only through a massive influx of small, private enterprises, but they must have a high level of automation and be able to quickly recoup the funds invested in them and develop rapidly both in quantitative and qualitative terms.  For this industries-wide sea-change to occur, you first need to create a conducive environment for all entrepreneurs. A democratization of laws and government is necessary for this purpose; but the Russian government in some ways continues to follow a strategy of rigid central planning and economic development through large state projects that have a high price and long implementation periods; this failing itself tends to make these modernization programs which are occurring under government control a rather dubious institution.

At the same time, Russia has a weak civil society and relatively low economic literacy, which do not foster developing entrepreneurial communities at the grassroots level – those not dependent on the government.  I think that developing decentralized production in Russia, as well as in many developing countries, is easier through collaboration with innovators in the United States. The first networks of decentralized industry are more likely to appear in the United States, Western Europe, and China.  After that, they will begin to transfer the rights to use their intellectual property worldwide, for a percentage of the profits. This is similar to the way 20th-century franchises have tended to work.  

Beginning to make these barest kinds of preparations for the economic health of a society, it is not so dissimilar from focusing on better and more discrete goals in the world of near-earth development.  Just as moving away from the rhetoric of “austerity” or nationalism allows you to identify problem areas more clearly, and correct them; the colonization of space by more collaborative efforts on the part of users – with more industrial and less fanciful goals in mind – will be a truly great boon to humankind.

I have begun to create social networks such as my “People of the Space-Era” and various working groups to this end; and I hope that the people of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, perhaps one of the most technologically literate cohorts in the world, will see and promote the value of this “open-source” approach.

Imagine if a new continent here on Earth were discovered and, rather than create trade networks  with that continent, those responsible for dealings with this new land opted to take a lot of “selfies” there instead – and do little else. As the public, you might rightly ask yourselves when it would be an appropriate time to begin to engage in more practical expeditions.  The simple fact is that an information society, any post-industrial society should be making better use of our connectivity and our technology than we are.

 When the first flights into space began, people enthusiastically waited for the first experiments to be followed up by larger-scale developments or innovations, such as those aimed at the practical and permanent venture into space by our species; and all the while hoping for inexpensive reusable rockets, or these fundamentally different ”rocketless” means of space transport to be developed. They waited with bated breath for the first extraterrestrial technological centers to be built, and after them the first extraterrestrial industrial enterprises should have surely followed.  People waited for humanity to start taking real steps towards becoming a space civilization. Sadly the nation-states concerned used their astronauts only to maintain their standing in public opinion, and these state space programs remained at an earlier stage of research and experimentation.

If our society wants to move into the Space Age, it is time for all of us to take the initiative. Team up to work on new global programs such as the development of new industries based on digital production, consisting of miniature factories capable of making their own replacements to accelerate industrial growth on Earth.  And later, in space, such micro-factories will themselves “multiply”, and build an array of near-earth industrial infrastructure, without the onerous costs associated with high-speed travel, operating on principles of development and economic efficiency. Today it is possible to develop on Earth the beginnings of a society on a truly cosmic scale, through the tenacity of many of you space-travel-minded people. These ways of thinking and ultimately this way of life must be adapted to the conditions of a functional space civilization, not tailored to narrower nationalistic or “creative” ends. The most innovative supporters of space expansion must take on these roles as coordinators to create earth-based industrial and entrepreneurial networks vital to this development of new programs for the industrialization of space.

Such initiative would lead to far broader and more robust sets of satellites which would improve the experiences of today’s device and IOT (Internet of Things) users and revolutionize this sadly untapped field of solar energy – which is inexhaustible and eco-friendly.  The development of cosmic mineral resources, the most valuable of these being precious metals and rare earth elements will be supplied to earth with ease. Perhaps of less value, but still market-changing, those many resources that serve in the construction of consumer orbital enterprises and transport systems, and of course the more widespread industrial use of 3-D printing, minimizing the need for expensive cargo delivery from the ground, will become more commonplace in near-earth and earthbound building.

It is indeed possible to suppose that a decentralized civil society which is still overseen by “good-faith” public coordinators could also actively prepare better for the colonization of space than we are preparing today.  For this to happen, the participation of nation-states directly is not needed, and even large capital investments would not be absolutely required; the network world of agile “citizen scientists” itself will become the best source of capital and resources. We need only initiative and personal energy to move past these 20th-century constraints.

One of the projects of these new  rocketless transport systems, which I propose that we implement, is the “Agapov Orbital Lift” (A.O.L.).   The A.O.L. is a simplified version of the space elevator which will remain in geosynchronous orbit but  will not be secured to the ground by a tether. This design is relied upon, as it is far more effective than the “Stationary Space Elevator” which has a cable that reaches the earth.  For the A.O.L. to work, there is a need for some rocketry, as the lower end of the cable will fly above the ground at a height of low orbit, but at a speed below the earth escape velocity of today’s rockets, at 1 – 3 kilometers per second. The A.O.L, unlike competitor lifts, will be able to immediately give us tremendous breakthroughs in the modernization of space transport.  This project is technically feasible since the earth connection cable is not needed, and so additional materials science innovations such as nanotubes or graphene tape need not be made a contingency of the first-generation A.O.L. Suffice it to say that materials such as carbon fiber, “Kevlar,” “Vectran,” or other polyethylene materials of a high degree of polymerization will be strong enough to suit these ends.  These existing materials-science innovations are already wholly mastered by industrial producers, are widely commercially available, and have a cost that is not exorbitantly high for near-earth development.

Waiting for one particular breakthrough is just not worth it when high-strength materials of many kinds are constantly being produced and improved upon, and as we mentioned at some length in our interview, the A.O.L. will also be upgraded many times in the course of its productive life. At certain intervals, older tethers, battered by space debris, will need to be replaced with newer, stronger, and longer ones made with more durable materials. And so, in the course of operation, the A.O.L. system of lifts will in short order be transformed into a stationary one, an achievement which itself would allow for the complete abandonment of missiles in near-earth travel.

The counterweight to the A.O.L. will be the International Space Station (ISS), as its life as a space-science laboratory comes to an end. And as part of the elevator, the station will be able to continue its multifaceted work in an exciting new capacity as a component of a revolutionary transport system. The ISS as counterweight to the elevator would be an appropriation of 100 billion dollars in existing space infrastructure, and its use will couple state space agencies with private firms in a timeless public-private partnership.  In addition, the ISS as part of the orbital elevator will be able to work as a technological platform for mounting satellites and various useful space objects, from relatively light payloads delivered to it by cables from suborbital flight. In doing so we will be responsible for the beginning of true space production.

In my previous interview with Presidential candidate Johannon Ben Zion, we discussed a figure of between 100 and 500 million dollars for the building of a first-generation, highly-automated industrial space elevator.   I understand that many of your readers are skeptical of this design and these figures, and at the risk of repeating myself from earlier in this article, I will say here again what I did not say in that shorter interview published June 12th, which is that the success of such a project could hinge on the “network effects,” the user-generated efforts in numerous interworking systems of networked organizations which are capable of consolidating the work product of industrial enterprises and small entrepreneurs on earth for the implementation of large-scale programs for the industrialization of space.  We must spearhead this construction ourselves in order to turn the entire world industry into a springboard for the colonization of the solar system and not limit this to individual government agencies or scattered and not fully realized private space firms. In short, on this quality of being “Open-Source”, which is again not the exact wording that I preferred to use in the original Russian interview, that phrasing certainly does get to the heart of the way in which this kind of effort should be different from previous private or public space-faring attempts.

Even in the weeks since that interview was conducted, new discoveries of underground resources on the Moon have been made, I believe that had previous lunar expeditions been more focused on making use of these resources, we would already have the industrial infrastructure between our planet and our Moon to be safely excavating these kinds of materials.

It would be unfair to describe private space industry as unconcerned with these improvements; incredible breakthroughs have been made in recent decades toward streamlining space-faring processes, making them cheaper and cleaner.  That said, I believe that almost all of the people working in this business have a fixation with rockets and an almost total lack of interest in the equally practical transport systems that I have described. If these engineers really believe that the focus of space travel is to stick pretty flags in piles of dirt, or engage in publicity stunts where people who are famous solely for being wealthy celebrate their success by enjoying zero gravity for a few hours – my advice is that they should pursue another line of work because these “accomplishments” are not of such great value as we have been led to believe.

My design for a space elevator is meant to be a transition, using the existing infrastructure now in low-earth orbit to create a lift system capable of slow but steady industrial growth – within 3 to 5 years – using the kinds of robotics that industry has taken for granted for a few decades.  To achieve this some adjustments will need to be made to the International Space Station so that its orbit is better positioned to support this lift system. When you consider the hundred or more billion dollars that have been spent on space stations which are now decommissioned, and I would argue have always been underutilized, the choice not to build a space elevator from them seems to me, frankly, a silly one.  The very important point in this design, which I have already iterated but that was sadly not included in the truncated first interview, is that this spacelift will not reach completely to Earth, and vehicles will be required to shuttle payloads up to that point. But as the cost of operating these vehicles will be much lower – as the high speeds required of rockets today to escape Earth’s gravity will not be necessary, the A.O.L. will nonetheless be of great value to industry.

There is no question in my mind that this tether design, which incorporates a few different interworking ultra-strong polymer blends, all of which are currently in widespread industrial use, will suffice for our materials needs.  And I should point out once again, and it has been said many times before, that by first constructing this industrial lift, we will then very soon be able to build out its infrastructure and create parallel lift structures that will quickly improve industrial, and presumably consumer, uses.

With greater interest after significant return on investment from these industrial undertakings, we will very quickly see that this initial design was well worth the effort. I hope that the lack of focus on space tourism in our first-generation A.O.L. design will be seen by potential investors as an asset to both consumers and industry in the long-term.

It is not just nostalgia for my youth that drives my interest in this repurposing of existing space infrastructure like the International Space Station; we should give the ISS a second life; this is the best way to continue the work begun by those 20th-century visionaries who first sought to propel our civilization beyond our atmosphere. These state-sponsored space administrations and the public-private partnerships which today exist in service to space travel and research are not enough to undertake this repurposing.  We need our “open-source” public efforts to become a kind of popular fascination, like the one seen in the 1950s “space race.” However, even the number of users currently contributing to the SETI app would be an excellent start to collaborative design and build efforts that would benefit our repurposing and tether-building efforts.

Such seeds of public fascination in an enterprise can direct public initiatives, both investment and intellectual capital into enterprises no less interesting and potentially far more vital than the some of the mechanisms of today’s Silicon Valley-style capitalism. Furthermore, this will give us a new arena for the development of information technology businesses in conjunction with these new generations of networks and satellite communications, which will make high-speed Internet far more accessible to the entire planet and will overwhelmingly strengthen the global information space of mankind, moving global civilization ever closer to the realization of a true “noosphere.”

Finally, I would reiterate that the focus on the cost of an industrial space lift should not be on the hundreds of millions of dollars in the initial outlay – but rather on the many trillions of dollars that could be generated by making this bold step. The A.O.L. transport infrastructure will confer great economic effects by the creation of a global industry in near-earth development; and just as on land, where railways and ports do not always bring the largest of profits, yet they do underpin the life of entirely greater industries and regions, so will millions of inhabitants benefit by industries developing out into the many hundreds of billions of dollars.

I hope that you will all leave this conversation with a somewhat clearer idea of the purpose and design of my industrial space lift, the “Agapov Orbital Lift”, and as well will consider endorsing Mr. Ben Zion and the “Futurist New Deal;” I believe that the architects of this plan truly do have your best interests as techno-optimists at heart.

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) has not yet, as of this publication, endorsed a candidate for U.S. President. Therefore, the statement in the last sentence above by Mr. Agapov should be considered to be his personal opinion only at this time. Readers can view the profiles of all USTP Presidential Primary candidates and make informed decisions regarding which candidate(s) and which of their proposals to support. 

Meet the Naked Mole-Rat: Impervious to Pain and Cancer, and Lives Ten Times Longer Than It Should – Article by Ewan St. John Smith

Meet the Naked Mole-Rat: Impervious to Pain and Cancer, and Lives Ten Times Longer Than It Should – Article by Ewan St. John Smith

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Ewan St. John Smith

Smithsonian’s National Zoo/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Ewan St. John Smith, University of Cambridge

The naked mole-rat is perhaps one of the most bizarre beasts on the planet. At first glance, it looks like little more than a cocktail sausage with legs and teeth. But beneath its wrinkly pink skin, this creature’s strange and beautiful biology has me fascinated – so much so that I set up a whole research group devoted to studying them. Largely immune to cancer, impervious to some forms of pain, and seemingly blessed with the elixir of life, you may well owe your life to them one day.

As the name might suggest, naked mole-rats buck the mammalian trend by almost completely lacking hair or fur. Living underground in complex networks of tunnels in East Africa, their thermally stable environment means that a few orientation-aiding bodily hairs and facial whiskers are all they need. Lacking evolutionary pressure to regulate their body temperature, they’re also the only known cold-blooded mammal on the planet.

The way naked mole-rats mate and socially organise is more akin to certain insect species than to mammals. Like some species of bees and ants, naked mole-rats are eusocial, living in 100-strong groups headed by a sole breeding female, the queen. But while insects command their colonies with pheromones, the naked mole-rat queen uses physical aggression to keep their groups digging tunnels, foraging, and defending entrances.

No, this isn’t Star Wars – it’s a naked mole-rat defending a tunnel.
Neil Bromhall/Shutterstock

A key tool for both digging and combat is their teeth. Their incisors are exterior to their lips, so that when they bite through hard soil they don’t get a mouthful of earth each time. Naked mole-rats can also move their lower incisors to manipulate objects, and have a large sensory area of their brains dedicated to their teeth in the same way that hands have dedicated brain space in humans.

The peculiarities of naked mole-rat behaviour are captivating in themselves. However, to most scientists, what makes them really exciting is the potential some of their incredible biology holds for making biomedical breakthroughs.

The naked mole rat’s resistance to cancer, diagnosed in humans every two minutes in the UK alone, is a particular area of focus for researchers. In studying why there are just a few documented cases worldwide in naked mole-rats, scientists are hoping to identify new ways to prevent or treat the deadly disease.

As yet, we’re not exactly sure what gives them their resistance. Some evidence suggests that a key difference in one of the meshwork of substances providing structural and nutritional support to cells prevents them from reproducing uncontrollably. However, others have observed different results, so further investigation is needed.

Not content with just being immune to cancer, naked mole-rats are also impervious to some normally agonising chemical stimuli, such as capsaicin (the substance that makes chilli peppers taste hot) and acid (what gives lemon juice and vinegar their kick). For their acid-insensitivity, researchers are clearer about why. A subtle difference in one particular molecule of the animal’s pain-sensing nerves turns acid into an anaesthetic. That is, rather than stimulating pain-sensing nerves, it actually numbs them – just like an anaesthetic that your dentist administers before the drilling starts. Sadly, this superpower only works with specific chemical stimuli – heat and pressure are just as damaging to them as us.

Scientists are now further studying the naked mole-rat to see whether we might be able to make the human pain system similarly impervious to acid pain. This could be extremely useful for cancer and arthritis sufferers, for whom build-ups of acid in body tissue can be a major contributor to chronic pain. The molecule responsible for insensitivity to acid in mole-rats also plays a role in human genetic conditions that drastically alter pain perception, and as a result of this convergent research, potential painkillers targeting this molecule have made it into clinical trials in humans.

Naked mole-rats are also highly resilient to low oxygen conditions. Their nerve cells can function for almost one hour in the complete absence of oxygen, by instead using fructose to power energy production. In studying this remarkable ability, my lab and others are hoping to uncover novel treatments to prevent brain damage in stroke patients.

Naked mole-rats are also renowned for their longevity. Broadly speaking, a larger body equals longer life in mammals. Standard lab mice weigh around 35 grams, and usually live a maximum of two to three years. Naked mole-rats can be up to twice as heavy, so might be expected to live four to six years, but can actually survive for more than 30 years in captivity. That’s longer than the lifespan of polar bears and giraffes. And while humans experience from many ageing-associated health problems (for example, osteoarthritis), naked mole-rats appear to age without issue. Research into the ageing processes of naked mole-rats is only in its infancy, but could have multiple implications for treating ageing-related conditions in humans.

Newborn naked mole-rats weigh as little as two grams.
belizar/Shutterstock

Naked mole-rats may look comical, but their magical biology is no laughing matter. Studying their hidden powers will not always result in preventions, cures and treatments for human ailments because of fundamental differences between the species. However, every new insight has the potential to lead to a breakthrough – as animal research has continually done throughout recent history. By unlocking the secrets held within their cells in a responsible manner, we may one day improve countless human lives.The Conversation

Ewan St. John Smith, University Senior Lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From Darwinian Greed to Altruistic Greed: the Strangest Period So Far in Our Planet’s History – Article by Hilda Koehler

From Darwinian Greed to Altruistic Greed: the Strangest Period So Far in Our Planet’s History – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

We are smack-dab in the middle of what might be the oddest period of our planet’s history thus far. The last 200 years have seen more rapid technological and scientific advancement than all the 3.5 billion prior years of life on Earth combined. And that technological progress is set to increase even more exponentially within our lifetimes. In the span of my grandmother’s life, humanity has put a man on the Moon, and now we’re having serious discussions about Moon bases and terraforming Mars to start a colony there. Within my own life thus far, I’ve gone from using a dial-up box-shaped computer in my kindergarten years to learning about the exponential progress made in quantum computing and the invention of a material that could potentially be a non-organic substrate to download human thoughts into.

I think that John L. Smart is essentially correct in the theories he puts force in his evolutionary-developmental (“EvoDevo”) transcension hypothesis. There seems to be a kind of biological Moore’s law that applies to human intelligence. If you chart the developments in human evolution from 200,000 years ago till the present, the jump from hunting and gathering to civilization occurred at an immensely fast rate. And the subsequent jump from pre-scientific civilization to the contemporary technological age has been the most astronomical one thus far. And with that astronomical jump in humanity’s technological progress has come an incredible leap in humanity’s moral progress.

The irony of our strange epoch

One of the most ironic aspects about the current climate crisis I like to point out is this: thank goodness that the climate crisis is happening now, and not in the 1500s. That seems like a rather ironic or even flippant thing to say. But thank goodness that the two greatest existential threats to all sentient life on Earth, the existence of nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and global warming, are occurring in the 21st century. Because we are living in a time period where democracies are the most common political model across the globe. Public protests such as those led by Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s climate strike movement have proliferated across the globe. Can you imagine what would have happened if this order of climate catastrophe had occurred a thousand years ago, when monarchies were the default political model? Can you imagine what would happen if you had tyrannical monarchies across the globe, with kings and lords as the primary stakeholders in climate-destroying corporations? It doesn’t seem likely that Greta Thunberg and her ilk would have made much progress in pushing for a pro-climate action zeitgeist in a regime where criticizing the reigning monarch automatically meant decapitation.

Furthermore, we’re extremely fortunate to be living in an era where science is accelerating fast enough to pioneer carbon-capture technology, and more recently, the geoengineering as a viable solution. To paraphrase Michio Kaku, “the dinosaurs got wiped out by the meteor shower; but they didn’t have advanced technology which could detect and disintegrate meteors long before they enter the Earth’s orbit. That’s something current human beings can work on building.” The same is true of the current scramble for climate engineers to churn out anti-pollution and temperature-lowering technologies.

How the technological pursuit of a post-scarcity world is encourages altruism and egalitarianism

I often write about how the last 150 years of global society have seen an exponential jump in the perpetuation of universal human rights. And that’s because it’s nothing short of amazing. Most of the world’s major civilizations which had political and economically subjugated women, ethnic minorities, and the working class for the past 6,000 years suddenly had a change of heart overnight, seemingly. It’s no coincidence that the proliferation of universal civil rights and the criminalization of interpsersonal violence against women and minorities coincided with the Post-Industrial Revolution. As resource scarcity has been drastically reduced in the contemporary technological era, so, too, has the Darwinian impetus towards domination and subjugation of minority groups.

We have shifted from a violent Darwinian greed in the form of the colonization of minority groups, to a kind of altruistic greed. Altruistic greed is characterized by an unabetting desire for ever-higher qualities of life; but which can be made widely available to the masses. The clearest example of this is the advent of modern healthcare, beginning with the mass administration of vaccinations for diseases like polio. As Steven Pinker points out, infant mortality rates and deaths from child birth have plummeted throughout that world in the last 50 years. Across the world, the proliferation of technological infrastructure has made public transport systems faster and safer than they ever were before. Altruistic greed is a major driving force for many in the transhumanist community. Most transhumanists are advocates of making radical life extension and cutting edge medical therapies affordable and accessible to everyone. The fundamental driving principle behind transhumanism is that humanity can transcend its biological limitations through rapid technological advancement; but the benefits reaped must be made as accessible as possible.

A reason often cited by nihilists who say that we should accept human extinction is on the grounds that human beings hold the glaring track record of being the most gut-wrenchingly cruel of all the species on Earth. This is empirically and philosophically indisputable. No other species shares a historical laundry list of genocide campaigns, slavery, rape, domestic abuse, and egregious socio-economic inequality on par with human beings.

But since the post-World War II era, something miraculous happened. We became kind and peaceful; and this impetus towards kindness and peace proliferated globally. After 10,000 years of treating women as the property of their husbands, it became possible for women to get voted into positions of power across the globe, and marital rape became criminalized in an increasing number of countries. After 10,000 years of holding corporal punishment as an essential part of child-rearing in nearly every human society, an increasing number of democracies have begun to enact child-abuse laws against striking children.

We still have long ways to go.

Sweatshop labor exploitation and the sex trafficking of females remain major human-rights issues today. But an increasing number of international law bodies and humanitarian groups are cracking down on them and fighting to eradicate them permanently. They are no longer seen as “business as usual” practices that are essential parts of human society which shouldn’t cause anyone to bat an eye; despite the fact that slavery has been a staple institution of nearly every civilization for the last ten millennia.

There are, of course, many aspects of ethical progress in which human beings are still lagging sorely behind, besides human trafficking. Although wars are far less common and less glamorized than they were in millennia past, conflicts are still raging on in Congo, and dictatorial regimes still exist. Income inequality is now greater than it was at any other time in human history. Another of the great ironies of the contemporary technological era is that we now produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, but there are still 795 million people in the world suffering from malnutrition. As much as 40% of all the food we produce is wasted unnecessarily.

The exploitation of animals and the thoughtless destruction of their habitats is one respect in which humanity has actually backslid in terms of ethical progress in the last 70 years. Since the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of the human population, humans have radically decimated the earth’s natural biomass, and one million species are now facing the threat of extinction due to human industrial activity.

Nevertheless, one hopes that Steven Pinker is essentially correct in his assessment of humanity’s rapid moral growth over the last 200 years. It could be said that it’s not necessarily the case that primates are inherently more predisposed to cruelty than all other species. Rape, infanticide, and killing rival males during mating season are common amongst many species of birds, reptiles, and mammals, as David Pearce points out. It’s just that human beings have the capacity to inflict exponential amounts on damage on other humans and animals because of our exceptional intelligence. Intelligence makes possible exploitation. Human intelligence has allowed us to exploit other human beings and sentient beings for millennia. But human intelligence is what has also enabled us to radically improve healthcare, longevity, and universal human rights across the globe.

The long history of suffering endured by sentient life on Earth is why the far-flung topic of technological resurrection is a major point of discussion amongst transhumanists. We believe that all sentient creatures which have endured considerable physical suffering, manmade or naturally-inflicted, deserve a second shot at life in the name of humanitarian justice.

There’s still much room for progress.

At present we seem to be entering a bottleneck era where we might have to drastically reduce our currently excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources, in light of the current climate crisis. The good news is that a growing number of us are realizing the looming existential threat of climate change and doubling down on combating it, as I’d mentioned earlier. The even better news is that an increasing number of bioethicists, particularly in the transhumanist movement, are now touting a permanent solution to the worst of humanity’s selfish, overly aggressive monkey-brain impulses. This seems to be just in the nick of time, given that this coincides with an era where humanity has access to nuclear arms capable of obliterating all life on Earth with the press of a Big Red Button.

My biggest hope for humanity is not only that our exponential technological progress will persist, but that our ethical and altruistic progress will continue in tandem with it. We have gotten to a stage of technological development where the forces of nature have become almost entirely subjugated, and our own impetus towards aggression has become the single greatest existential threat. It could be that every single sufficiently advanced alien civilization that is capable of exploiting all the natural resources on its home planets or inventing WMDs is eventually forced to cognitively recondition itself towards pacifism and altruism.

There is an ongoing debate in the existential-risk movement about whether or not SETI or METI could be unintentionally endangering all life on Earth by attempting to make contact with alien civilizations several orders of magnitude more advanced than ours. The analogy commonly cited is how the first European explorers of the Americas massacred scores of indigenous tribespeople who didn’t have guns. But the opposite could also be true. It could be that once other alien civilizations achieve a post-scarcity global economy, the neurobiological Darwinian impetus to colonize less developed groups gets steadily replaced by an altruistic impetus to ensure the survival and flourishing of all sentient species on that planet. We can’t tell for sure until we meet another alien species. But on our part, we’ve yet to ride out the tidal wave of the strangest period of Earth’s history. As we take our next steps forward into a radically different phase of human civilization, we gain an ever greater ability to control our own development as a species. Here’s to Pinker’s hope that we’re going in the right direction, and will do our best to head that way indefinitely.

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

Kindness, the Greatest Temperer of Hubris – Article by Hilda Koehler

Kindness, the Greatest Temperer of Hubris – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

In light of the increasingly alarming reports on climate catastrophe that have been released in the past few months, more and more transhumanists are taking up the gauntlet and putting climate-change solutions on their political agenda. Sadly, the transhumanist movement hasn’t exactly been well-received by the environmentalist movement. Environmentalists such as Charles Eisenstein have blamed “scientism” and excessive faith in the scientific materialist worldview as being primarily responsible for the overexploitation of the natural world. Other environmentalists are hostile towards the transhumanist imperative to find a cure for biological aging, arguing that curing aging will further exacerbate the resource scarcity (a common criticism which LEAF has dealt with so extensively, they have a page dedicated to it).

It probably doesn’t help that a handful of transhumanists are very vocally “anti-nature”. One of transhumanism’s primary goals is to knock down fallacious appeals to nature which are propped up against the pursuit of radical human lifespan extension or cyborgification. However, the way we present these ideas could perhaps be phrased in a more palatable manner.

Environmentalists and bioconservatives are fond of claiming that transhumanism is the apogee of human hubris. They claim that transhumanism’s goals to overcome humanity’s biological limits are inseparable from the rapacious greed that has driven developed economies to violate the natural world to a point of near-collapse. Deep Greens go so far as to call for a total renunciation of the technological fruits of civilization, and a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Radical environmentalists claim that a return to Luddism is the only thing that can save humanity from pillaging the natural world to a point where it becomes utterly inhabitable. But I would argue that the either-or split between human progress through technological advancement and compassion towards non-human life is a false dichotomy.

Drawing on David Pearce’s hedonistic imperative, I will argue that transhumanism and environmentalism aren’t necessarily at loggerheads with each other. You could even say that transhumanism entails a benevolent stewardship of nature, and that care for all non-human life is a logical extension of human exceptionalism. If the core imperative of our movement is to minimize suffering caused by biological limitations, that should apply to minimizing non-human suffering as well.

Benevolent stewardship: the Aristotelian mean between Deep Green Ludditism and Radical Transhumanist Anti-Naturism

I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody whose ideas have so radically changed my views on existential teleology and the natural world as quickly as David’s have. What I love about David’s hedonistic imperative and his involvement in the Reducing Wild Animal Suffering (RWAS) movement is how radically his ideology reframes the idea of human exceptionalism.

“Human exceptionalism” is generally seen as a bad thing, and with good reason. For the better part of human civilisation’s history, humans have been exceptionally bad – exceptionally bad to ethnic minorities who didn’t have guns or cannons,  exceptionally bad to women by depriving them of equal status to men and bodily autonomy, and exceptionally bad to all the animals humans have needlessly slaughtered or whose habitats they obliterated. Human beings are stand out as being exceptionally intelligent amongst the animal kingdom, and they also stand out for using that intelligence in extremely innovative ways to amass vast amounts of resources for their “in” groups, by brutally exploiting “out” groups in the most unimaginably vile ways.

But the hedonistic imperative puts a new spin on “human exceptionalism”. The hedonistic imperative is the great Uncle Ben lesson for humanity. With our exceptional intelligence comes great responsibility – responsibility not just to currently marginalized ethnic groups, genders, and social classes within humanity, but to non-human species, too. If we have the intelligence to turn humanity into a planet-ravaging force, then we have the intelligence to find a way to repair the damage humans have done.

The hedonistic imperative movement has also been credited with helping to convert a growing number of transhumanists to veganism, and to supporting planet-saving initiatives.

Aristotle is best known for describing virtue as the golden mean between two vices. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Deep Green environmentalism or radically anti-naturist transhumanism “vices”, but I would say that the hedonistic imperative manages to gel the most effective aspects of both schools of thought while avoiding the practical blind spots of both.

Deep Green environmentalists like Charles Eisenstein tend to promulgate the idea of nature’s sacredness as entailing an acceptance of natural malaises. These include death due to biological aging, but a logical extension of this is that it is immoral for human beings to intervene in nature and prevent animals from harming each other, since it is part of the “natural order”. Radically anti-naturist transhumanists tend to view anything natural as being automatically inferior to whatever man-made alternatives can be technologically manufactured. While we shouldn’t accept invocations of naturalism prima facie, this view isn’t quite tenable for primarily practical reasons. It would probably be extremely unwise to replace all the organic trees in the world with man-made synthetic ones, because the Earth’s biosphere is an exceedingly complex system that even our best biologists and geologists still do not fully understand. Likewise, we cannot solely on carbon-capture technology or geoengineering to be the ultimate solutions to the ongoing climate crisis. Much more still needs to be invested in reforestation and the restoration of currently endangered animal and plant species which have been afflicted by habitat loss or resource depletion.

Homo Deus: Already Here

For all the utter destruction that humanity has wrought over the past 10,000 years, we can’t overlook the great capabilities we hold as stewards of nature. Say what you will about humanity, but we’re literally the only species on Earth that has evolved to a point where we can use science to resurrect the dodo bird, the woolly mammoth, and the pterodactyl. And we can do that with all the other species we’ve driven to extinction. Perhaps those will be the reparations we pay to the animal kingdom for the previous damage done.

Humanity is also the only species in existence that actually has the power to contradict the forces of natural selection and end natural suffering in its tracks. We just choose not to because we can’t be bothered to. I had never in my life thought about how powerful the implications of this were until I listened to David speak about it. We are the only species with the requisite technological power to end hunger, disease, and infant mortality amongst animals, if we so choose.

Basically put: we’re already gods and goddesses.

We are literally gods in the eyes of animals.

But many humans have chosen to emulate the very worst behaviours of the Old Testament Biblical God rather than being the kind of God all human civilizations would long hope would care for them kindly.

One of Ben Goertzel’s major life goals is to create the most benevolent possible AI nanny who will be programmed to watch over humanity, make us immortal and create a post-scarcity condition where all of our physical needs can be met through the application of nanotechnology. Ben acknowledges that deliberately programming an AI to be as benevolent and compassionate is possible, because at present, everyone and their mother is preparing for a possible Terminator scenario where AI goes rogue and decides that it is under no obligation to be kind to its human creators.

If you would like to know exactly how badly an indifferent or uncompassionate posthuman AI could treat us, you need only look at how badly humans treat chickens and cows. You would only have to look up YouTube videos of desperate orangutans feebly trying to push aside construction cranes that are in the midst of pulverising the trees in which they reside.

And it wasn’t too long ago that humans treated different races of human beings in a similar fashion (although they weren’t slaughtered for consumption).

A posthuman ultra-intelligent AI inflicting the same treatment on humans in developed industrial economies might just be karma coming to pay what’s long been due.

“The benevolent AI god who will resurrect the dead and keep us prosperous forever” is the one wild fantasy which transhumanist forums are constantly salivating over. But why should we expect the AI god to be so propitious to us when humans are not even showing a fraction of that expected mercy to the elephants, cows, and salmon alive today?

Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.” Pearce and the RWAS movement crank this imperative up a notch:

“Be the ultra-intelligent, highly-evolved benevolent steward whom you’d like to see overseeing the well-being and survival of your species.”

The New Narrative of Human Exceptionalism

At their core, the primary message of the Deep Green environmentalism and the transhumanist hedonistic imperative aren’t so different. Both movements say that the narrative of Man as the Mighty Colonizer must now come to an end. Charles Eisenstein and Jason Godesky propose we get there by returning to having Animism as the overarching religious paradigm of global society, and by returning to a more hunter-gatherer-like lifestyle.

Julian Savulescu argues that we nip the problem in its biological bud by using biotechnological intervention to delete the human genes that predispose us to excessive aggression towards “out” groups, excessive resource hoarding, and rape. For reasons I’ve explained in detail elsewhere, I tend to side more with Savulescu. But put aside the means, and you’ll realise that both the Deep Greens and more pacifist-humanitarian transhumanists are both proponents of the same end.

One reason why I tend more towards siding with Savulescu and Pearce is because I think that forsaking technological advancement would be a mistake. If transhumanism is about transcending our biologically-saddled limitations through the application of technology, it follows that the shortcomings of primate-based moral psychology shouldn’t be an exception. As leading primatologist Richard Wrangham points out in his often-cited Demonic Males, our primate ancestors evolved to wage war on hominids from other “out” groups and to be predisposed towards hyper-aggression and selfishness, as a means of surviving on the resource-scarce savannah. And our neurobiological hardwiring hasn’t changed significantly since then. One of Savulescu’s favorite argument points is claiming that had genetic moral editing been available earlier, we’d probably have averted the climate catastrophe altogether. Savulescu sees the climate catastrophe as being a glaring symptom of still-dominant monkey brains’ failures to consider the long-term consequences of short-term consumer capitalist satisfaction.

Furthermore, renouncing the fruits of technology and modern medicine would make us far less effective stewards of the animal world. If we go back to a hunter-gatherer existence, we’ll be renouncing the technology needed to resurrect both long and recently extinct species. Another major goal of the RWAS movement is to use CRISPR gene-editing to help reduce the propensity towards suffering in wild animals, and to engage in fertility regulation. Pearce claims that we might even be able to make natural carnivorism and mating-season-induced violence obsolete using gene-editing in various aggression-prone species. While we’re at it, we could edit the physiological basis for craving meat out of human beings, since our primate ancestors evolved to be omnivorous. Or we could at the very least try to create a future where all of our meat is lab-grown or made from plant-based substitutes.

It’s also worth noting that human beings are the only species on the planet to find out about the ultimate fate of life on Earth. We’ve very, very recently found out that the duration of the planet’s habitability has an expiry date, and that the Sun will eventually turn into a red dwarf and fry the Earth into an inhospitable wasteland. Given that human beings are the only species which has the necessary intelligence to engage in space travel and colonization, the survival of every single non-human species on the planet falls into our hands. The sole hope for the perpetuation of non-human species lies in future humans setting up space colonies in other habitable planets outside our solar system, and taking all of Earth’s animal species with us. Again, this isn’t something we can achieve if we renounce technological progress.

Conclusion

Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus has become a staple read for many in the transhumanist movement. But in the eyes of the world’s animals, we have already become all-powerful gods, who can dole out exploitative cruelty or interventional mercy on a whim. The criticisms of the Deep Green environmentalist movement are increasingly forcing techno-utopians to confront this question; exactly what kind of gods and goddesses will we continue to be to the non-humans of the Earth? If we are going to reconceptualize human exceptionalism from being associated with exceptional human greed and exploitation, to being based on exceptional human wisdom and interventionary benevolence, we need to heed the words of both Savulescu and Eisenstein, and pursue a different human narrative. We’re generally kinder towards women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and the working class than we were three hundred years ago, so there is hope that we’re steadily changing course towards a more altruistic track. If every great moral school of thought has an overarching axiom, the one that defines the hedonistic imperative should be this: “Treat less sentient animals the way you would like the posthuman AI god to treat you and your family.”

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

Open-Source Business Developer Nikolay Agapov and Transhumanist Party Presidential Primary Candidate Johannon Ben Zion In Conversation: On Near-Earth/Space Development, the Orbital Ring, and the Design for the Agapov Orbital Lift

Open-Source Business Developer Nikolay Agapov and Transhumanist Party Presidential Primary Candidate Johannon Ben Zion In Conversation: On Near-Earth/Space Development, the Orbital Ring, and the Design for the Agapov Orbital Lift

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Nikolay Agapov
Johannon Ben Zion

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) publishes this interview between Johannon Ben Zion and Nikolay Agapov to advance the goals of Section XVII of the USTP Platform, which states that “The United States Transhumanist Party holds that present and future societies should take all reasonable measures to embrace and fund space travel, not only for the spirit of adventure and to gain knowledge by exploring the universe, but as an ultimate safeguard to its citizens and transhumanity should planet Earth become uninhabitable or be destroyed.” The construction of a highly economical infrastructure project such as the Agapov Orbital Lift would greatly reduce the costs of space travel and thus enable rapid exploration and development of space for the benefit of humankind and all sentient entities – thus also accelerating our transition into the next era of our civilization. As of this time, the USTP has not yet endorsed a Presidential candidate but welcomes activity from all of our Presidential Primary candidates to advance the USTP Platform. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, June 11, 2019

Read the English-language outline for the Agapov Orbital Lift, written by Nikolay Agapov, here. 

Johannon Ben Zion:  We live in different countries; we’ve never met!  Should we talk about how we met?

Nikolay Agapov:  Yes, Ben, having heard of your Arizona Transhumanist Party‘s “Orbital Ring” publicity push, I felt I would have been remiss if I didn’t reach out to the Arizona Transhumanist Party and your U.S.  Presidential candidacy with the Transhumanist Party, and offer to make a comparison and further study of the respective designs, my team’s included.  I like to tell people that I am an “open-source” business developer in this context, and an avid supporter of the near-earth industrialization, in contrast to “pure exploration.”

I principally come from an educational background in economics with a specialization in business administration. I have made an extensive study of the global economic environment in the course of my international business studies and striven to understand and emulate the careers and novel methods of innovators like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs.

I have always been interested in the topic of space exploration and in the process of studying at the university, I began to develop extensive plans for near-earth industrialization with the relatively smaller-budgeted space agencies in mind, as Roscosmos now has, and also a focus on high attractiveness to investors.

In addition, I have often written of as well as developed several designs in the field of solid-fuel rocket engines.  Making solid propellant rockets cheaper and more environmentally friendly with the ability to raise their efficiency to the level of liquid engines has been a central focus of my work.

After writing and developing in these areas for quite some time, I am convinced that space agencies and businesses are not nearly focused enough on outcomes or growth, which is why I have become an “open-source” business developer; network effects and “crowd-sourcing” effects in research and development must be better utilized if we are to quicken the pace of technological advancement.

The main goal of space businesses and agencies is the development of civilizational impacts of space-faring, the transition of humanity to the level of a true space-faring civilization. And all smaller projects should be viewed as merely steps to this larger goal.

It is not so much of an overstatement to say that modern space administrations in fact remain mechanisms of the state-run propaganda that arose during the period of escalation during the Cold War. Their goal is to maintain a certain prestige and visibility, through periodic campaigns and in the launching of scientific probes, etc.  A “Space Age cynic” such as myself will view many of these endeavors as not always directly contributing to the aforementioned “transition to a space-faring civilization.” As for the real, practical, space exploration, they have no idea how to develop it and do not strive for it.

As a result, I have completely updated my approaches to the industrialization of space, in the form of more networked or “crowdsourcing-ready” businesses and more results-oriented public agencies.  Since I’ve read more recently of your “Futurist New Deal”, I do hope that you will continue your commitment to near-earth industrialization as we first discussed.

JBZ: Well, yes, we absolutely will.  Although our campaign is focused on domestic economic  policy and e-governance issues now, all of our near-term undertakings are intended to set the stage for your “transition to a space-faring civilization,” or a true post-industrial society more broadly.

Nikolay Agapov: My team has our own approaches to the development of space expansion and the end goal, the preparation for the colonization of space, a goal I believe best achieved through the creation of a permanent transportation system to our nearest neighbor, the Moon.  The more than one trillion dollars that have been spent in the pursuit of space travel have not had this focus, been a rather poor use of funds, with a somewhat disappointing result all told.   I believe that you yourself told me in our first conversation that the efforts of your space agency [NASA] were “the most expensive PR campaign.”

JBZ: Yes, I said, “The most expensive PR campaign in history” and basically one with surprisingly little focus on tangible production outcomes, a concern I share with you. A popular, if a little operatic view of the history of NASA is one to which I do subscribe to a certain degree myself, at least in principle.  It’s a distrustful sentiment that really gets to the heart of most of this confused thinking on the NASA subject in a roundabout sort of way; the NASA “conspiracy theories” are largely rooted, I believe, in this feeling that this whole operation was a “Cold War” publicity stunt – a very expensive one – that didn’t “build” much of anything, in structural engineering terms at least –  although it contributed to the production of any number of groundbreaking technological breakthroughs argued for in hindsight as justification of the expense, and quite rightly argued considering the impact of those things – in spite of the lack of interest in “near-earth industrialization” by the parties in question.

Nikolay Agapov:   I would say that the “Space Age” tropes that both derived from and guided these somewhat odd goals have themselves become codified, leading to impractical implementations (or as we’ve suggested above, a lack thereof) and also a “monoculture,” where what began as nebulous goals, have become codified by science-fiction fanatics, films, and television – so that all interest, popular or industrial, is centering on rockets and journeys beyond our sphere which are very exciting – but a little ineffable as to their purpose relative to the building of things.

JBZ: Most of us at the Transhumanist Party are believers in technocratic solutions, even some beyond the 20th-century or early post-industrial models of today – and I am one of those. The principles of technocracy and automation-centered policy making would do quite a bit to solve these problems in private and public space initiatives.

Nikolay Agapov: Modernized countries share a technocratic approach to their organization.

JBZ: Yes, it’s odd to me that so many in the USA  view technocracy as an ugly word.  I regard myself (and all those involved in the “Futurist New Deal” do as well) as an “economic populist”, but I view this tendency to criticize technocracy as something to be viewed with skepticism, a “false populist phenomenon,” that derives from what is sometimes called in the USA “know-nothing”-ism, a set of anti-science and low-information cultural values that poison, well, many, if not most, earnest efforts in public policy and the ordering of a civil society.  

Nikolay Agapov:  Yes, and your “futurists” would be doing the right thing in trying to counteract this other failing in thinking about technology and progress.

JBZ: How expensive would your space elevator be?  What’s the cost of the most expensive or extravagant elevator or orbital ring you’d like to build, since I know we’ve discussed a few with cost in mind?

Nikolay Agapov: Incorporating the existing but non-operational space stations described in my prospectus into the design, using a tether with a specialized design using Kevlar, carbon fiber,  or polyethylene materials designs that could sustain the tether and a series of relatively small additional payloads, a little smaller than a human at first – as I’ve described in our prospectus.

JBZ: Yes, I was imagining a bunch of little “Roombas” scooting up there to the space station to then be boosted off to the moon and do some work.

Nikolay Agapov:  Yes, these types of remotely controlled or semi-autonomous devices should be among the easier parts of our “work order” to fulfill.  And as the system is judged to be stable, more tethers would be built, a number of these which are stable would perhaps allow for very low-cost space tourism, travel from Earth to the space station in a matter of days at that time shortly after the initial stabilization of the tether, but it is quite likely that other materials designs for tethers would be required, delaying the tourism part, which I regard as the smallest part of this undertaking compared to getting “robots” out in earth’s orbit fixing and building existing and new infrastructure, respectively, and traveling on to do so on the Moon as well.  

Using materials costs from the Eurasian markets and including the estimates of existing but underutilized space infrastructure and present-day tether materials (despite their payload limitations), I would put the total costs at 100 – 500 million dollars.  This 500% variation in costs would be due to the uncertain nature of building in orbit and the problems with constructing and maintaining the tether, as well as market uncertainties for the materials needed.

JBZ: That’s 100-500 million right?  Millions, 1 and six zeroes, 1,000,000? Is that what you are saying?

Nikolay Agapov: Yes.

JBZ: That’s many billions of dollars lower than any of the prospecti I’ve seen, some of which push up to a trillion dollars.

Nikolay Agapov:  Building systems for space tourism would be a lot more than a few hundred million dollars, as those systems are built and rebuilt to higher standards, but by that time there will occur an immense economic impact from making better use of building in orbit or on the Moon and the ways that they would impact existing markets, with cheaper and better satellites, new energy developments in solar and other renewable energies, and the appeal and benefits of industrializing in earth’s orbit and on the moon. As a result, those significant added costs for stronger elevators would be happily undertaken by those industries.

JBZ: I am still a little taken aback with this “low” budget.   That is a number that Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis, or many of these guys could fund based on their companies’ valuations just by diverting some portion of funds from other space companies.

Nikolay Agapov:  Maybe. Your question about the most expensive project I can think of – I don’t think is a serious one.  The “most expensive design” is to continue building rockets if operating cost and environmental impact are no concern.  

JBZ: Fair enough. Your prospectus states that you could have this design completed and financially self-sustaining in 3-5 years. Do you stand by that?

Nikolay Agapov:  Yes and no.  If the project was fully funded and international cooperation and many other political factors were dealt with independently – then yes, absolutely.  I think that the cooperation of U.S. and Russian space agencies and associated corporations and entities may be enough to accomplish this.

JBZ: It would take a mighty fine group of statesmen and women to accomplish such a thing.

Nikolay Agapov:  Maybe, maybe not.

JBZ: If such a project could be built so cheaply, why hasn’t it been done yet?

Nikolay Agapov:  I would answer “politics” more than “design”, but I would also include with that concern, the lack of motivation and the focus on these “popular imagination” and “sci-fi-genre media-driven” goals we spoke of, resulting in the “rich guys with big rockets” and tourism over industrialization.  Industry is a more controversial design principle because it is perceived as being more “invasive” or “less ecological”, although in practice the opposite is true; rockets have been and still are much worse.  Irony.

JBZ:  The design like the one that I had been sharing with others was to build out an entirely new orbital ring with a “PBO”, also known as  “Zylon” tether and with a $10 billion total price tag.  That’s the “Low Cost Design for an Orbital Ring” by California engineer David Nelson, I believe, and published July of 2017.  I should say it’s possible he’s a bit of a shy character; after a few attempts I’ve not been able to actually identify him (his writing has been republished, and Dave Nelson is an extremely common name in the U.S.) nor contact him for comment.  It’s also a design that requires a 10-plus-year build timeline.

Nikolay Agapov:  I’ve read all about this design, and he’s done a lot of good work, but I think we can do a lot better with a smaller, more industry-focused orbital ring.  The option of using the decommissioned space station as a counterweight is a major selling point for us, but it, too, requires international and national politicking, as well as the business acumen of my organization and other private space companies.

JBZ:  Therein lies the rub, but it starts with getting people excited and having these conversations outside of the typical bluster of these discussions as nationalistic or symbolic endeavors.  If I had 100 million dollars, I would be investing that money into this today, and to that end  I hope we can link to your outline at least, for our readers, here.

Nikolay Agapov:  Yes, that is fine, but bear in mind the full prospectus is written in Russian, and this outline of concepts was also written in English, but there remain a few proofreading concerns, so please be patient.  This outline at the time of its publication had not had the benefit of a translator, as this interview has.

JBZ: But feel free to comment and discuss with us,;we will be happy to engage with you. The function of such a thing is to answer questions and bring in new ideas and hopefully get a working space elevator built soon.

Nikolay Agapov:  Yes, thank you for your time.

 

Update Regarding the Presidential Candidates and Forthcoming Events of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party

Update Regarding the Presidential Candidates and Forthcoming Events of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party

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June 10, 2019: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) encourages its members to follow the activities of our current declared candidates for President of the United States. While we have not yet endorsed any candidate and will not do so until after the Electronic Primary in August 2019, we wish to offer this update in an informational capacity to give our members more insight into the current candidates and their recent campaign efforts.

Watch this video, created by USTP Director of Media Production Tom Ross, featuring the current four candidates, their campaign slogans, and the USTP Core Ideals.

Any additional candidates have until 11:59 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time on July 31, 2019, to declare themselves. To declare their candidacies, individuals would need to submit the electronic Presidential Candidate Declaration of Interest form. Thereafter, to demonstrate the seriousness of their intentions, all candidates who declare themselves will be asked to respond in writing to the same profile questions that were answered by the four candidates currently running.

The First Virtual Debate among the candidates will be held on Saturday, July 6, 2019, at 3 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time. The public will be able to watch the debate and submit any questions on the YouTube page for the livestream here.

The Electronic Primary to select the USTP Presidential nominee will be held during the week of August 11-17, 2019. A seven-day electronic voting period will be opened on August 11, 2019 (with some time window possible for early voting on August 10, 2019), in order to give all members the opportunity to conveniently vote as their time permits.

Currently, as of June 9, 2019, the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party has 1,525 members who would be eligible to vote in the Electronic Primary. We hope that this number will grow as a result of interest in the Presidential process and as the candidates reach new audiences and also rally support from their constituencies. We have encouraged candidates to recruit new members, and so far this has worked in increasing the volume of members registered each day.

Any individual who joins the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party as a member (see the online Membership Application Form) and expresses agreement with the three USTP Core Ideals, on or prior to August 10, 2019, will be eligible to vote in the Electronic Primary. Additionally, a tiny minority of members (fewer than 10) who did not express agreement with the Core Ideals will be queried by the USTP Chairman to determine whether their ideas are sufficiently in alignment with transhumanist values and aspirations to enable them to become eligible to vote. Such eligibility decisions will be made at the USTP Chairman’s discretion based on the responses of those members.

Charles Holsopple

Candidate Charles Holsopple offers the following update regarding his activities and aspirations.

Project222.org Human Rights Campaign and the Transhumanist Party have so much in common, that when asked just weeks ago, I decided to run for the nomination of the Party for the office of President of the United States.

My platform is rooted in the wise use technology and finite naturally occurring resources to ensure that all people have dignified access to a minimum of 2 gallons of clean water in a day, 2000 nutritional calories and 200 ft.³ of secure shelter. Accomplishing these reasonable and achievable goals is essential in solving the growing refugee crisis and a creating a peaceful, sustainable economy.

For the past year, word of Project222 has been spreading among aid workers, Board members of nonprofits, and my many connections on LinkedIn and social media platforms.

Project222 appeals to a wide audience and has been a great segue into introducing the Transhumanist Party.

Recently I have begun introducing myself as the founder of Project222 and as a Transhumanist candidate for the USTP’s nomination for POTUS.

So far I am very encouraged by the reception this decision has been given.

Whether you support me or another Transhumanist candidate, I ask that you take advantage of free membership in the Transhumanist Party. Also please check out Project222.org and help bring both into the conversation this election season.

If I receive the nomination, I pledge to promote the values of the Transhumanist Party, in their relationship to the benefit of humankind in this and future generations.

Remember! Wherever you live, you are eligible to vote!

“Welcome To The Party!”

Rachel Haywire

Candidate Rachel Haywire has teamed up with Transhuman Tees to develop T-shirts for her campaign. Find them here. See a broader selection of shirts here.

Rachel Haywire has also been featured in a profile by Biohackinfo, entitled “Transhumanist will defeat Trump using a pirate spaceship”.

Watch this video update by Rachel Haywire.

 

Johannon Ben Zion

Candidate Johannon Ben Zion has founded the Arizona Transhumanist Party and has been recruiting members to join it. He offers the following update:

Over the last few months and in cooperation with other Arizona Transhumanist Party members, we have begun development of policy proposals for a healthcare expense-sharing program and a legal fund that would allow Transhumanists to safeguard their life extension protocols and secure “health savings accounts” with longer lives in mind. We have also cultivated deep ties to political and private organizations centered on technology outside of the H+ community. We have, moreover, heavily promoted our increasingly popular platform, “The Futurist New Deal”, to one simple end – to bring new blood into the H+ community.

Watch these video updates by Johannon Ben Zion.

Update 1:

 

Update 2:

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Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party absolutely for free, no matter where you reside. It takes less than a minute to fill out our Membership Application Form.

In Support of “Unfit for the Future”: When the Vessel is Unfit for the Task – Article by Hilda Koehler

In Support of “Unfit for the Future”: When the Vessel is Unfit for the Task – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

This essay has been submitted for publication to the Journal of Posthuman Studies.

This essay is written in support of the ideas presented by Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson in their book Unfit for the Future: the Need for Moral Enhancement. I will argue that Savulescu and Persson’s arguments for moral bioenhancement should be given more serious consideration, on the grounds that moral bioenhancement will most likely be humanity’s best chance at ensuring its future ethical progress, since our current achievements in rapid ethical progress have been highly contingent on economic progress and an increasing quality of life. As a vehicle for for ethical progress, this is becoming increasingly untenable as the world enters a new period of resource scarcity brought about by the ravages of climate change. This essay will also respond to some of the claims against human genetic enhancement, and transhumanism in general, made by critic John Gray. Finally, the concluding remarks of this essay will examine a possible long-term drawback to moral bioenhancement which has not net been raised by Savulescu’s critics thus far – namely, that genetically altering future human beings to be less aggressive could unintentionally result in them becoming complacent to a point of lacking self-preservation.

Maslow and Malthus

Ethical philosophers in Steven Pinker’s camp may argue that the consideration of moral bioenhancement is absurd because moral education has apparently been sufficient enough to bring forth radical moral progress in terms of civil liberties in the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century heralded in never-before-seen progress in terms of the civil rights granted to women, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ people, and the working class. As Pinker points out, crime rates plummeted over the past 150 years, and so has the total number of wars being fought throughout the world. Savulescu admits that this is a valid point.

However, Savulescu’s main point of contention is that while the overall rates of violent crime have been drastically reduced, rapid advancements in technology have enabled rouge individuals to inflict more mass damage than at any other point in human history. While overall rates of interpersonal violence and warfare are decreasing, advancements in technology have exponentially increased the ability of individual actors to inflict harm on others to a greater extent than at any other point in human history. It takes just one lone Unabomber-type anarchist to genetically engineer a strain of smallpox virus in a backyard laboratory, to start a pandemic killing millions of innocent people, argues Savulescu. A statistic he constantly cites is that 1% of the overall human population are psychopaths. This means that there are approximately 77 million psychopaths alive today.

I would like to raise a further point in support of Savulescu’s argument. I would argue that the exceptional progress in ethics and civil rights that the developed world has witnessed in the last century has been the result of unprecedented levels of economic growth and vast improvements in the average quality of life. The life spans, health spans, and accessibility of food, medicine, and consumer goods seen in developed economies today would have been an unbelievable utopian dream as little as 250 years ago. One of X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis’s favorite quips is that our standard of living has increased so exponentially that the average lower-income American has a far higher quality of life than the wealthiest of robber barons did in the 19th century.

As Pinker himself points out, the first moral philosophies of the Axial Age arose when our ancestors finally became agriculturally productive enough to no longer worry about basic survival. Once they had roofs over their heads and sufficient grain stores, they could begin to wax lyrical about philosophy, the meaning of life, and the place of the individual in wider society. Arguably, the same correlation was strongly demonstrated in the post-World War II era in the developed economies of the world. Once the population’s basic needs are not just met, but they are also provided with access to higher education and a burgeoning variety of consumer goods, they’re much less likely to be in conflict with “out” groups over scarce resources. Similarly, incredible advancements in maternal healthcare and birth control played a major role in the socio-economic emancipation of women.

Our ethical progress being highly contingent on economic progress and quality of life should concern us for one major reason – climate change and the resource scarcity that follows it. The UN estimates that the world’s population will hit 9.8 billion by 2050. At the same time, food insecurity and water scarcity are going to become increasingly common. According to UNICEF, 1.3 million people in Madagascar are now at risk of malnutrition, due to food shortages caused by cyclones and droughts. There could as many as 25 million more children worldwide suffering from climate-change-caused malnutrition by the middle of this century. This is on top of the 149 million malnourished children below 5 years old, who are already suffering from stunted growth, as of 2019.

This is the worst-case scenario that climate-change doomsdayers and authors of fiction revolving around dystopian civilizational collapse keep on warning us of. There is a legitimate fear that a rapid dwindling of access to food, medical care, and clean water could lead currently progressive developed economies to descend back into pre-Enlightenment levels of barbarism. Looting and black markets for necessities could flourish, while riots break out over access to food and medical supplies. Ostensibly, worsening scarcity could encourage the proliferation of human trafficking, especially of females from desperate families. The idea is often dismissed as wildly speculative alarmist screed by a considerable number of middle-income city dwellers living in developed nations. Food shortages caused by climate change have mostly affected the sub-Saharan Africa and India, where they’re far out of sight and out of mind to most people in developed economies.

However, the World Bank estimates that 140 million people could become refugees by 2050, as a result of climate change. These populations will predominantly be from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, but it is likely that a significant percentage of them will seek asylum in Europe and America. And developed Western economies will only be spared from the worst effects of climate change for so long. North Carolina has already been afflicted by severe flooding caused by Hurricane Florence in 2018, just as it was  affected by Hurricane Matthew which had struck two years earlier. Climate journalist David Wallace-Wells has gone so far as to claim that a four degree increase in global temperature by 2100 could result in resource scarcity so severe, that it will effectively double the number of wars we see in the world today.

Savulescu argues that the fact that we’ve already let climate change and global income inequality get this bad is itself proof that we’re naturally hardwired towards selfishness and short-term goals.

A Response to John Gray

As one of the most well-known critics of transhumanism, John Gray has said that it is naive to dream that humanity’s future will somehow be dramatically safer, more humane, and more rational than its past. Gray claims that humanity’s pursuit of moral progress will ultimately never see true fruition, because our proclivities towards irrationality and self-preservation will inevitably override our utopian goals in the long run. Gray cites the example of torture, which was formally banned in various treaties across Europe during the 20th century. However, this hasn’t stopped the US from torturing prisoners of war with all sorts of brutal methods, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gray claims that this is proof that moral progress can be rolled back just as easily as it is made. Justin E. H. Smith makes similar arguments about the inherent, biologically-influenced cognitive limits of human rational thinking, although he does not explicitly criticise transhumanism itself. And Savulescu agrees with him. Throughout their argument, both Savulescu and Persson hammer home the assertion that humans have a much greater predilection towards violence than altruism.

But here Gray is making a major assumption – that future generations of human beings will continue to have the same genetically-predisposed psychology and cognitive capabilities as we currently do. Over millennia, we have been trying to adapt humanity to a task that evolution did not predispose us towards. We’ve effectively been trying to carry water from a well using a colander. We might try to stop the water from leaking out from the colander as best we can by cupping its sides and bottom with our bare palms, but Savulescu is proposing a radically different solution; that we should re-model the colander into a proper soup bowl.

It seems that Gray is overlooking some of his own circular reasoning which he uses to perpetuate his arguments against transhumanist principles and genetic enhancement. He argues that humanity will never truly be able to overcome our worst proclivities towards violence and selfishness. However, he simultaneously argues that endeavoring to enhance our cognitive capabilities and dispositions towards rationality and altruism are a lost cause that will be ultimately futile. Following Gray’s line of reasoning will effectively keep humanity stuck in a catch-22 situation where we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Gray is telling us that we need to resign ourselves to never being able to have a proper water-holding vessel while simultaneously discouraging us from considering the possibility of going to a workshop to weld the holes in our colander shut.

Windows of Opportunity

There is one final reason for which I will argue for greater urgency in considering Savulescu’s proposal seriously. Namely, we are currently have a very rare window of opportunity to execute it practically. If Gray is right about the likelihood that moral progress can be rolled back more easily than it is made, then he should acknowledge that we need to take full advantage of the current moral progress in developed economies, while we still have the chance to. Rapid advancements in CRISPR technologies and gene-editing are increasing the practical viability of moral bioenhancement without the consumption of neurotransmitters. Savulescu argues that we need to strike while the iron is hot; while the world economy is still relatively healthy and while STEM fields are still receiving billions in funding for research and development.

If nothing else, a rather intellectually sparse appeal to novelty can be made in defence of Savulescu’s proposal. Given that climate change could be the greatest existential risk humanity has ever faced in its whole history to date, we should begin considering more radical options to deal with its worst ravages. The limited faculties of rationality and altruism which nature has saddled us with have brought us millennia of warfare, genocide, radical inequality in resource distribution, and sexual violence. We keep on saying “never again” after every single cataclysmic man-made tragedy, but “again” still keeps on happening. Now is as good a time as ever to consider the possibility that humanity’s cognitive faculties are themselves fundamentally flawed, and inadequate to cope with the seemingly insurmountable challenges that lie ahead of us.

A Possible Future Negative Consequence of Moral Bioenhancement to be Considered

Multiple objections to Savulescu’s proposal have been raised by authors such as Alexander Thomas and Rebecca Bennett. I would like to raise another possible objection to moral bioenhancement, although I myself am a proponent of it. A possible unforeseen consequence of radically genetically reprogramming homo sapiens to be significantly less selfish and prone to aggression could be that this will simultaneously destroy our drive for self-improvement. One could argue that the only reason human beings have made it far enough to become the most technologically advanced and powerful species in our solar system was precisely because our drive for self-preservation and insatiable desire for an ever-increasing quality of life. You could claim that if we had just remained content to be hunter-gatherers, we would never have gotten to the level of civilization we’re at now. It’s more likely that we would have gone extinct on the savannah like our other hominid cousins, who were not homo sapiens.

Our inability to be satisfied with the naturally-determined status quo is the very reason the transhumanist movement itself exists. What happens, then, if we genetically re-dispose homo sapiens to become more selfless and less aggressive? Could this policy ironically backfire and create future generations of human beings who become complacent about technological progress and self-improvement? Furthermore, what happens if these future generations of morally bioenhanced human beings face new existential threats which require them to act urgently? What happens if they face an asteroid collision or a potential extraterrestrial invasion (although the latter seems to be far less likely)? We don’t want to end up genetically engineering future generations of human beings who are so devoid of self-preservation that they accept extinction as an outcome they should just peacefully resign themselves to. And if human beings become a space-faring species and end up making contact with a highly-advanced imperialist alien species bent on galaxy-wide colonization, our future generations will have to take up arms in self-defence.

This raises the question of whether it might be possible to simultaneously increase the human propensity towards altruism and non-violence towards other human beings, while still preserving the human predisposition towards ensuring our overall survival and well-being. If such a radical re-programming of humanity’s cognitive disposition is possible, it’s going to be a very delicate balancing act. This major shortcoming is one that proponents of moral bioenhancement have not yet formulated a plausible safety net for. Techno-utopian advocates claim that we could one day create a powerful artificial intelligence programme that will indefinitely protect humanity against unforeseen attacks from extraterrestrials or possible natural catastrophes. More serious discussion needs to be devoted to finding possible ways to make moral bioenhancement as realistically viable as possible.

Conclusion

The arguments put forth by Savulescu in Unfit for the Future should be reviewed with greater urgency and thoughtful consideration, and this essay has argued in favour of this appeal. We cannot take the great strides in civil rights made in the last 100 years, which have been heavily dependent on economic development and the growth of the capitalist world economy, for granted. As resource scarcity brought about by climate change looms on the near horizon, the very system which the 20th and 21st centuries’ great ethical progress has been contingent upon threatens to crumble. Gray is right in arguing that the human animal is fundamentally flawed and that repeated historical attempts at better models of moral systems have failed to truly reform humanity. And this is where Savulescu proposes a controversial answer to Gray’s resignation to humanity’s impending self-destruction. We must consider reforming the human animal itself. As the field of gene-editing and the development of impulse-controlling neurotransmitter drugs continue to show great promise, world governments and private institutions should begin to view these as viable options to creating a less short-sighted, less-aggressive, and more rational version of homo sapiens 2.0. There are only so many more global-scale man-made catastrophes that mankind can further inflict upon itself and the planet, before this radical proposal is finally undertaken as a last resort.

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

How Transhumanism Changed My Views on Teleology – Article by Hilda Koehler

How Transhumanism Changed My Views on Teleology – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

My views on teleology and existentialism have changed considerably since I’ve joined the transhumanist movement. This is my attempt at reconciling my views on humanity’s quest for cosmological purpose with the role of human agency and value creation.

I used to have a rosier view of the universe and nature before I got more involved in transhumanism. I’ve been quite heavily influenced by Brian Swimme’s The Universe Story and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. Swimme invokes cosmological fine-tuning as proof that the universe wants humans to be around and cares about us (to some degree). Even the Earth itself has carefully regulated its temperature to ensure that life could thrive on it, despite the fact that the heat emitted from the Sun has gone up thousands of degrees since the inception of homo sapiens. If you agree with Paul Davies’s interpretation of cosmology, then you could say that the universe is happy to have intelligent creatures around because the universe “wants” to be observed. Davies and Swimme argue that the universe created intelligent life so that it could understand itself through us, via our higher cognitive faculties and our ability to conceptualise mathematics and physics. We are the universe experiencing itself, a la Carl Sagan. Andrei Linde shares this sentiment with Davies.

Some of my readers will disagree with me on this, but I do think that there is some merit in what Davies, Swimme, and Linde claim. Swimme points out that almost all the major traditions in the world have a creation myth which points to the celestial realm as being the home of the creative force. This can’t be a mere coincidence, Swimme argues. It’s almost as if the universe was subconsciously nudging our ancestors towards the greater scientific truth of Big Bang cosmology. Obviously, this isn’t a claim that can be empirically falsified (yet, anyway), but it’s at least food for thought.

As I began to read up more on transhumanist philosophy, however, a nagging objection to this teleological value claim dawned on me.

If the universe did indeed intend to create intelligent animals to observe itself, it didn’t do a very efficient job of it. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it made an exceedingly clumsy, slow, and wasteful job of it.

It has taken 13.8 billion years for the universe to give rise to modern homo sapiens who know how to execute the requisite mathematics and science necessary for the physics of cosmology. And we only exist in a ridiculously minuscule corner of a galaxy, which is itself one out of a hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe. And 90% of the universe is still unobserved.

Even within the confines of the pale blue dot we call home, the process of life hasn’t exactly been a cake walk. Like most kids my age raised on Animal Planet and school field trips to flower parks, I had a relatively rose-tinted view of the natural world. I hadn’t really taken time to think about the nastiest parts of Darwinian natural selection and the last five major mass extinctions that have occurred throughout Earth’s history. I hadn’t thought about how death and starvation were biological inevitabilities only because the forces of natural selection dictated that they had to be. Natural selection itself is an apparently purposeless process. The only goal of a species is to ensure that its genes survive to the next generation, by any means possible. Hence why rape and infanticide are common amongst various species.

Even Swimme himself views suffering in nature as being unavoidable and something that must be gracefully accepted rather than stamped out. “Humans and animals are cruel because the universe that created them is cruel; even galaxies eat each other,” says Swimme. But transhumanist philosophers argue otherwise. David Pearce asserts that the witticism, “suffering is inevitable; misery is a choice,” is just that – a hackneyed saying. It’s a cop-out that encourages intelligent agents to resign themselves to fate instead of finding ways to overcome that suffering. Until I discovered the transhumanist movement, it had never occurred to me that we could one day phase out suffering amongst wild animals through a combination of genetic alteration and deliberate healthcare and food-supply intervention. And I had no idea how much progress had been made in terms of anti-aging research, whole-brain emulation and the development of prosthetics.

To paraphrase Nick Bostrom, “Mother Nature is a crappy parent.”

To my mind, the big question of teleology and humanity’s search for meaning isn’t so much “Does the universe want intelligent apes to observe it?” as much as it is, “Does the universe actually care enough about us to keep us around well into the future?”

Even if the universe does have a purpose for intelligent creatures, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that it has to keep the human species going. Given the sheer number of stars in the observable part of the universe alone, there could be thousands, if not millions, of alien civilisations which are vastly more advanced than we currently are. It would be exponentially more unlikely for us to be the sole sentient species in the universe, than it would for there to be more highly advanced alien civilisations out there. We could be one of millions of sentient species that the universe creates and then disposes of on a cosmic whim.

But does it really matter if the universe cares about us or not?

An analogy I hadn’t really thought of came to my mind while I was waxing lyrical about this topic with Adrian Chia. Adrian said that even if the universe doesn’t give a toss about whether humanity survives or perishes, it shouldn’t stop us from caring about ourselves and seeking an enhanced transhuman future. I told Adrian that that’s exactly the kind of advice I give when I counsel people who grew up in abusive homes with parents who clearly have no interest in their well-being. I’ve counseled people whose parents have tried to throw them out of windows as children, gashed wounds into their backs with knives or beaten them so badly they had the majority of the bones in their legs broken and were forced to crawl around their homes on their forearms. I tell them that even if their parents fail to care for them as a parent should, it shouldn’t stop them from loving or valuing themselves.

So what if the universe doesn’t have any vested interest in taking care of us? We shouldn’t expect it to. Rather, we owe it to ourselves to overcome the biological limitations nature has slapped on us. We no longer pray to gods for a good harvest; we’ve invented modern agriculture and GMO crops. We no longer make sacrifices and hold rituals to beg the gods to heal the sick; that’s what we invented modern medicine for. We no longer sacrifice animals in an attempt to appease the gods so that earthquakes will not devastate our villages; that’s why we’re getting better at developing disaster-evacuation plans and earthquake-proof infrastructure. And hopefully one day, our immortal post-human descendants will look back at us and snicker at how we used to pray that some transcendental deity would answer our prayers for eternal life.

The forces of natural selection and whatever whims the universe may have, have gotten us up to a certain point; but ensuring a better future for ourselves lies squarely on our shoulders now. Plenty of neglectful parents have children without any particularly strong commitment to ensuring those children’s welfare. But I’ve also seen lots of kids from broken homes grow up to become successful doctors, lawyers, and CEOs and go on to lead very fulfilling lives.

This article is dedicated to David Pearce and Andres Gomez Emilsson. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

Life Extension, Inequality, and Resource Scarcity: Dealing with Anti-Transhumanist Stereotypes – Article by Hilda Koehler

Life Extension, Inequality, and Resource Scarcity: Dealing with Anti-Transhumanist Stereotypes – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

One of the most major accusations the transhumanist movement faces is the charge of elitism. Journalists such as Alexander Thomas and Jessica Powell have claimed that the spread of transhumanist ideals could lead to the worsening of already severe income inequality in developed nations such as the U.S. With billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel being the most prominent investors in the immortality industry, liberal journalists have tended to paint the transhumanist movement as a vain pursuit for the wealthy.

This article is a message to my fellow transhumanists. While these charges might seem unreasonably derisive, we cannot leave them unanswered. It’s easy to dismiss our critics as luddites, “deathists”, or a group of unimaginative bioconservatives who are suffering from sour-grape syndrome. As I keep saying to my friend Hank Pellissier, “you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.” It may not be wise to alienate our critics by dismissing them as bitter have-nots or bioconservatives who are resistant to technological progress because they can’t imagine the potential benefits of having a triple-digit health span.

Anti-immortalist sentiment

The single greatest charge levied at immortalists is that we are inevitably going to exacerbate the existing problem of overpopulation and resource scarcity. In the last two centuries and a half, the world’s population has grown exponentially. In 1800, the global population stood at 1 billion; as of last year it was 7.6 billion. By the time we’re little way past the Singularity in 2050, the global population is projected to hit 11.2 billion. Most folks and most mainstream scientists argue that a double-digit lifespan is an absolute biological necessity to keep this number from exploding further. This is probably the greatest objection the mainstream public has to radical lifespan extension.

“Privilege” has unfortunately become a very hackneyed word in the last decade, but it’s one that mainstream liberal critics keep on bringing up in their objections of radical lifespan extension. Here comes That Eye Roll-Inducing Statement; in particular, liberal feminist journalists like to criticise that transhumanist movement for “being a movement made for cis straight white upper-middle class men with enough disposable income to benefit from the latest advancements in healthcare.”  Sanjana Varghese at The New Statesman forebodingly warns her readers that “the first men to conquer death will create a new social order – a terrifying one.” Varghese warns that the rich, able-bodied Caucasian men who will be the first to have access to immortality treatments will create a dystopian future where we have Elon living to be 500, while the have-nots live much shorter lives and are forced to deal with a declining global economy and increasingly unaffordable healthcare.

Anyone who isn’t a Tumblr native probably has their pupils in the backs of their skulls right now.

Nevertheless, we can’t let these criticisms go unanswered. We can’t just dismiss them as liberal whinging or bioconservative paranoia. Public intellectuals like Nassim Taleb, John Gray and Leon Kass have gained a lot of media traction for their impassioned criticisms of radical life extension. The perpetuation of the view of transhumanism as an elitist “cis, straight, rich, able-bodied white man’s” game is going to undermine the potential for transhumanism to be taken seriously.

There are ideas, and then there are ideas.

Transhumanists are aware that we are of a minority viewpoint and that we view human exceptionalism differently from both the world’s religious majority and from the mainstream scientific atheist community. We don’t view biological death and the termination of individual consciousness as facts of life that need to be accepted prima facie, and we don’t unquestioningly accept natural biological functions as being sacred and off-limits from deliberate technological alteration. However, we must acknowledge that much more PR work needs to be done to assuage the public’s hostilities towards the transhumanist movement’s long-term goals.

The fact that the transhumanist movement itself even exists is itself remarkable. Our movement is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and humanity’s inextinguishable desire for perpetual self-improvement, beyond biological determinism. But we must also constantly remind ourselves that radical shifts in social paradigms are long-term goals. Making transhumanism mainstream is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. Our paradise-engineering goals are noble, but we have to be realistic in our approximation of the time it will take to reach them.

Climate change is another hot-button issue closely related to overpopulation. Since the end of last year, scientists have become increasingly pessimistic about humanity’s ability to cope with environmental degradation in the decades to come.

While our individual opinions on this may vary, I applaud Gennady Stolyarov II for making a public statement declaring that the U.S. Transhumanist Party takes climate change seriously, as he states in this article here: “Ideas for Technological Solutions to Destructive Climate Change“. 

Critics of transhumanism, especially liberal journalists and online environmental activists, have often painted transhumanists as having our priorities wrongly arranged. Indefinite biological lifespan extension and cryonics won’t matter if society collapses due to resource scarcity, droughts, tornados, and food shortages, they retort. Again, proposing that the time is now right for biomedical and biotech fields in developed nations to pursue the goals of indefinite lifespan extension can appear to be utterly tone-deaf in the face of the oncoming ecological crisis. And rightly so.

The World Bank estimates that over 200 million people from the sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia could be driven into refugee status by 2045 – which is, coincidentally, Ray Kurzweil’s much-hyped appointed year of the Singularity. To give us an idea of how disruptive this is going to be, says David Wallace-Wells the 2015 Syrian migrant crisis in Europe was the result of just one hundred thousand refugees entering Europe; and look at the unprecedented level of political destabilization that followed it in just a span of 4 years.

Transhumanists cannot forget that the majority of us were lucky enough to be born into relatively favorable circumstances. Most of us live in developed nations, or at least developed cities, away from natural-disaster-prone, pandemic-prone, and conflict-prone areas. If we don’t have diabetes or heart disease and don’t smoke, we can reasonably expect to live until 75 (barring a freak accident). In contrast, the expectancy in some of the least developed parts of Africa is as low as 50 years flat. I was talking to my friend Hank, who runs the Brighter Brains Institute and who does humanitarian work in Kenya, was telling me that he’s often called the “really old man” by the Kenyan children he works with, because anyone who manages to survive past 60 is considered exceptionally long-lived in Kenya.

So what can be done about this?

How can we can dispel the negative stereotypes surrounding transhumanism and radical lifespan extension? The most immediate thing that comes to mind would be more public dialogues and conferences to engage a mainstream audience. The Methuselah Foundation’s CEO David Gobel has publicly stated in a CNBC interview that, “the vast majority of life-extension proponents don’t want things to be expensive,” and would rather make life extension affordable for the majority of the public. A fellow immortalist and Cosmist, Giovanni Santostasi like to use the analogy of mobile phones when they first came out in the 1980s. They were the size of bricks, had minimal connection, and cost a few thousand dollars each; but they became a major status symbol for rich Americans, anyway. Fast forward to 2019; literally everyone and their mother has a cell phone you can text on and take pictures with, i ncluding farmers living in rural Indonesia who are barely above the poverty line. Giovanni is optimistic that radical life extension treatments (and later mind-uploading services) will have a similar trajectory of development.

However, this leads us back to the overpopulation problem. If radical longevity becomes readily affordable to 70% of the public in developed nations, how will the world deal with a further exacerbation of the overpopulation problem? Perhaps what could be done is to hold a public forum specifically dedicated to addressing issues regarding the relationships between transhumanism, resource scarcity, and income inequality. Sociologists, economists, and humanitarian advocates in the transhumanist movement could mobilise to make such a forum a reality soon.

This article is dedicated to my fellow transhumanist humanitarian advocates, Dinorah Delfin and Hank Pellissier.

Disclaimer: If you don’t think that climate change and income inequality are major global concerns, and feel that I’m being a climate alarmist or preachy moralist who’s just delivering holier-than-thou declarations from my soap box, I won’t try to change your mind. If however, you’d like to rationally and politely debate the points I’ve raised in this article, you can PM me at Sarah Chowhugger on Facebook.

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

Video of Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada State Legislature – May 15, 2019

Video of Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada State Legislature – May 15, 2019

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Anastasia Synn
R. Nicholas Starr

Watch the video containing 73 minutes of excerpts from the Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum, held on May 15, 2019, at the Nevada State Legislature Building.

The Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada Legislature on May 15, 2019, marked a milestone for the U.S. Transhumanist Party and the Nevada Transhumanist Party. This was the first time that an official transhumanist event was held within the halls of a State Legislature, in one of the busiest areas of the building, within sight of the rooms where legislative committees met. The presenters were approached by tens of individuals – a few legislators and many lobbyists and staff members. The reaction was predominantly either positive or at least curious; there was no hostility and only mild disagreement from a few individuals. Generally, the outlook within the Legislative Building seems to be in favor of individual autonomy to pursue truly voluntary microchip implants. The testimony of Anastasia Synn at the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 26, 2019, in opposition to Assembly Bill 226, is one of the most memorable episodes of the 2019 Legislative Session for many who heard it. It has certainly affected the outcome for Assembly Bill 226, which was subsequently further amended to restore the original scope of the bill and only apply the prohibition to coercive microchip implants, while specifically exempting microchip implants voluntarily received by an individual from the prohibition. The scope of the prohibition was also narrowed by removing the reference to “any other person” and applying the prohibition to an enumerated list of entities who may not require others to be microchipped: state officers and employees, employers as a condition of employment, and persons in the business of insurance or bail. These changes alleviated the vast majority of the concerns within the transhumanist and cyborg communities about Assembly Bill 226.

 

From left to right: Gennady Stolyarov II, Anastasia Synn, and Ryan Starr (R. Nicholas Starr)

This Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum comes at the beginning of an era of transhumanist political engagement with policymakers and those who advise them. It was widely accepted by the visitors to the demonstration tables that technological advances are accelerating, and that policy decisions regarding technology should only be made with adequate knowledge about the technology itself – working on the basis of facts and not fears or misconceptions that arise from popular culture and dystopian fiction. Ryan Starr shared his expertise on the workings and limitations of both NFC/RFID microchips and GPS technology and who explained that cell phones are already far more trackable than microchips ever could be (based on their technical specifications and how those specifications could potentially be improved in the future). U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II introduced visitors to the world of transhumanist literature by bringing books for display – including writings by Aubrey de Grey, Bill Andrews, Ray Kurzweil, Jose Cordeiro, Ben Goertzel, Phil Bowermaster, and Mr. Stolyarov’s own book “Death is Wrong” in five languages. It appears that there is more sympathy for transhumanism within contemporary political circles than might appear at first glance; it is often transhumanists themselves who overestimate the negativity of the reaction they expect to receive. But nobody picketed the event or even called the presenters names; transhumanist ideas, expressed in a civil and engaging way – with an emphasis on practical applications that are here today or due to arrive in the near future – will be taken seriously when there is an opening to articulate them.

The graphics for the Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum were created by Tom Ross, the U.S. Transhumanist Party Director of Media Production.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party free of charge, no matter where you reside.

References

• Gennady Stolyarov II Interviews Ray Kurzweil at RAAD Fest 2018

• “A Word on Implanted NFC Tags” – Article by Ryan Starr

• Assembly Bill 226, Second Reprint – This is the version of the bill that passed the Senate on May 23, 2019.

• Amendment to Assembly Bill 226 to essentially remove the prohibition against voluntary microchip implants

• Future Grind Podcast

• Synnister – Website of Anastasia Synn

Why Non-Existence is Suffering, and Why We Shouldn’t Accept It as a Given – Article by Hilda Koehler

Why Non-Existence is Suffering, and Why We Shouldn’t Accept It as a Given – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

My friend Alexey Turchin, a fellow supporter of the mass technological resurrection, has made an eyebrow-raising claim in one of his recent presentations: non-existence is a form of suffering. That in itself appears to be an oxymoronic claim. How can an individual suffer when they have no conscious experiences at all, since personal consciousness is permanently annihilated forever upon bodily death? Philosophically speaking, this is impossible. You need to be conscious to be able to experience either pain or pleasure. However, Alexey argues that the permanent cessation of consciousness can be considered the ultimate form of suffering because it means that the individual will forever be deprived of any further opportunities to experience the physical world. This means literally never existing ever again; which makes it doubly worse if you happened to get an unfortunate lot in this current life. This is a grim reality that atheists across the entire world must contend with.

Being an atheist in the late modern period is a very unique experience in its own ways, especially for those who fell out of the womb into religious abodes. The Richard Dawkinses of the world can attest to the extent of the cognitive dissonance that comes with a life trajectory of being repeatedly told that an all-loving, all-powerful deity exists and that everything your religious tradition says is truth that must be accepted at face value — only to go to a secular public school and receive a proper education in history, critical thinking, and good ol’ science.

The shattering of your entire worldview and belief system can be likened to coming home at the end of the day to find your wife in bed with a Mickey Mouse impersonator who works at Disneyland, while he’s still fully clad in the Mickey suit. The realization of absurdity that comes with an overhauling of one’s worldview this radical can range from breeding quiet cynicism, to full-blown distress and an existentialist crisis. This depends on the degree to which your previously held religious convictions held sway over your life. Both Michael Shermer and I went down this same route (although I was fortunate enough to have my transformative moment at a considerably younger age than Shermer). Shermer was previously in pursuit of a PhD in theology when he lost his faith; I was cajoled into a far-right radical Calvinist sect when I was 13, by an online friend who had convinced me that if I didn’t proselytize my faith to everybody else in Singapore, God would force me to watch my family get repeatedly eviscerated with hot iron blades for all of eternity. My church strongly discouraged women from pursuing higher education and regularly reminded its female parishoners that God would like them to obey their husbands. When I was 16, I was propositioned by a 21-year-old male youth group member who strongly hinted that I was at the appropriate age where he could ask me to become his wife.

And then when I was 17, I studied enough philosophy to find out that the whole damn thing was made up by a bunch of people as they were going along and that Heaven wasn’t real. And that every single human being who is born will naturally be destined to spend all of eternity in an empty, dark void once each of our individual brains cease all neural function. Needless to say, I didn’t take to this revelation well.

Understandably, most atheists aren’t chuffed about the idea of spending the next 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years being unable to see, hear, feel, smell, or think anything at all. But most of us still consider that a veritable improvement from spending the next 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years being fully conscious while being boiled in a pit of sulfur as punishment for not tithing or sharing a kiss with someone of the same biological sex. The choice between eternal oblivion and eternal torture isn’t a hard one to make. But it still doesn’t make it all that easy for atheists to accept their permanent annihilation. While some psychological studies claim that atheists apparently fear death considerably less than their religious counterparts, I’d also say that atheists tend to be more frank with themselves in openly discussing their fear of eternal oblivion. It’s only been very recently that I’ve begun visiting online atheist forums and was surprised to find that “how do I cope with my fear of non-existence?” is an exceedingly common question.

The typical suggestions given to deal with this extreme existentialist dread are, more often than not, “you were dead for 13 billion years before you were born, so it shouldn’t bother you that you’ll be dead for the next 13 billion years after you’re dead (again).” Or trying to convince the original poster that death is no different from being under general anesthesia for all of eternity (“if you’ve already undergone surgery, you have nothing to fear!”) Or just plain ol’, “suck it up; the entire universe is going to perish in heat death, anyway, and it’s taking all of us with it.” While I applaud my fellow atheists for being thoroughly honest with themselves in facing the most terrible prospect all of humanity has ever faced, I can’t help but feel that this is a form of very pained resignation. I’ve met numerous other atheists who have had to undergo cognitive-behavioral therapy and take psychiatric medication because their thanatophobia (fear of death) is so severe that they’re terrified to leave their own houses on a daily basis and that they’ve developed severe insomnia because they can’t fall asleep regularly without having panic attacks.

How should the atheist community cope with the biggest question any human being will ever face? Should the acceptance of the permanent annihilation of consciousness continue to be the modus operandi for the atheist and scientific community for the rest of humanity’s existence?

Or should we dare to stick our necks out and consider the very far out possibility of a third alternative, that is neither the acceptance of eternal oblivion nor delusional faith in the promises of a spiritual life in a castle in the sky?

What if we reconceptualized the way we see non-existence? What if this is the next great paradigm shift that humanity will eventually come face-to-face with?

Up till the very recent modern period in human history, slavery and wife-beating were seen as perfectly normal facts of life that just had to be accepted. It was considered a given fact that some men (and the overwhelming majority of women) were effectively going to be someone else’s property and could be completely at their mercy. Try holding a similar attitude today in a developed nation. Try, in 2019 A.D., to stand on a soap box in the middle of California and scream at the top of your lungs that women should be denuded of all their political rights and that the government should make it legal for you to sell your teenaged daughter into prostitution so that you can pay off your mortgage.

“BECAUSE THAT’S HOW IT’S ALWAYS BEEN DONE.”

Try yelling at the top of your voice that slavery should be re-institutionalized and that Caucasian Americans should be granted the legal right to forcibly capture their African-American, Native American and Latino neighbours, have them shackled in chains and put them up for auction in a human market.

“THIS IS HOW IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, SO THERE’S NO REASON FOR US TO BREAK THE HABIT.”

Everyone can obviously guess how that’s going to go down. Good night, and good luck, to whomsoever endeavors to try this out.

Given that modern human civilization is approximately 10,000 years old, the shifts in moral attitudes that have occurred over the last 200 years can be considered astronomical in every sense of the word. And if technological progress continues to press forth, who knows what on earth our descendants will think of us at present?

I personally had never remotely considered reconceptualizing the way I view death and aging until I was first introduced to the transhumanist movement when I watched a documentary on it, featuring Ben Goertzel.

So said Ben, “one day, our descendants are going to look back at us and be unable to believe that we let our elderly folks die of aging and accepted it as being natural. They’re going to think it’s absolutely barbaric that we accepted death so unquestioningly. It’s going to be how we now look at our forebears and remember that they thought rape and murder were pretty much okay.” Needless to say, I was pretty flabbergasted when I first heard this. It’s taken me some time to really think over the implications of what death really is, and just how great the potential for human society to shift its values and conceptions of the world is.

And funnily enough? The exact same thing can be said for the entire atheist movement. It isn’t much of a miraculous coincidence that religious “nones” are the fastest-growing worldview demographic in contemporary developed nations which place a premium on the scientific enterprise. Understandably, all the way up till the industrial revolution, people didn’t really think too hard about whether or not God really existed and if we really did evolve from monkeys, because most people were too busy trying to survive and feed their eight children (six of whom most likely wouldn’t survive till adulthood). Famines, plagues and warfare were a norm rather than exceptions that remain unimaginable to most of us living in developed nations today.

“No afterlife, no problem,” is an attitude that has only developed amongst modern atheists in very recent times. You can tell people to be content with just having one shot at an 80-year-long life, because that option is actually available to them now. If you have the good fortune to be born into a middle-class family without any significant disabilities or health issues, and you stand a fairly good chance of living a happy, fulfilling life without any significant hardships. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for the better part of the last 9900 years of human civilizational history. Wishing very badly that something could be true doesn’t make it true, of course. But we should at least be able to sympathize with the reasons our forebears had, and many people currently living in hardship still have, for clinging on fervently to the hope of a second chance in an afterlife.

Nevertheless, atheists today should begin to see humanity’s dreams of immortality not as a slice of pie in the sky; we should see it as a challenge and a goal post we will eventually cross with the aid of science. It’s a big dream and one that may seem impossible at the moment. But that hasn’t stopped humanity before. Transcending our biological limitations and striving for a better world than the one we currently live in has been the whole narrative of the human story. Our dreams of greater things will always seem absurd, until available technological advancements arrive to deliver them. But those dreams are what keep us pressing forward.

This essay is dedicated to Nick Bostrom and Giulio Prisco, who are my philosophical inspirations.

Due to space constraints, this essay has not dealt with the issue of overpopulation and resource depletion which are alleged by some come with indefinite lifespan extension. Other transhumanists such as Gennady Stolyarov II have addressed such concerns in other writings and videos.

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

In Defense of Human Exceptionalism and Immortalism – Article by Hilda Koehler

In Defense of Human Exceptionalism and Immortalism – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

This essay will be attempting to rebut some of the main objections raised to indefinite lifespan extension, technological immortality, and technological resurrection. The overwhelming majority of the objections to immortalism are based on arguments from naturalism. Devotees of religious traditionalism argue that death is a doorway to an afterlife or reunion with a higher deity in the spirit world. Some atheists argue that death is unavoidable because the limit of the human lifespan is the result of natural selection, and should thus be unquestioningly accepted. However, what if a different perspective were taken on death and the natural limits of the human lifespan?

This essay will primarily attempt to go toe-to-toe with scientifically-based objections against immortalism raised by prominent atheists like Massimo Pigliucci and Michael Shermer. As an atheist myself, I think that the objections to the claims of religious traditionalists that a spiritual afterlife exist are already well-worn and solidly established. Modern neuroscience has solidly established the fact that consciousness is wholly generated by the brain and that there is no empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that immaterial souls exist. Nearly the entire atheist and scientific community accepts this as having been conclusively proven time and again (in spite of this, those who believe in the existence of a spiritual afterlife still make up the vast majority of the world’s population).

One of the major scientifically-based objections to immortalism is the charge that human beings should not be spared from death because we’re not God’s special people, but merely a bunch of apes that were lucky enough to get smart. This is the argument against human exceptionalism or anthropocentrism. There are plenty of other natural entities that have far longer lifespans than human beings do. The turritopsis dohrnii, the famous immortal jellyfish, is known for being able to naturally live indefinitely. Bristlecone pine trees are known to live up to 5000 years old. To quote Michael Shermer, “even stars die,” although they can live for billions of years. But what separates you from the turritopsis dohrnii, or a star? Well, for one thing, the turritopsis dohrnii can’t create self-driving cars and pioneer the practice of modern dentistry. Stars, including our own sun, are wonderful and all, but they can’t do the mathematics and quantum physics necessary to give a full account of the Big Bang theory and the Planck epoch. Human exceptionalism exists because of the sheer degree of human intelligence, compared to every other existing organism in our solar system. There might ostensibly be highly advanced alien civilizations far more intelligent than us residing somewhere in the Milky Way, or in any other of the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, but we can at least pat ourselves on the backs for being the smartest meat robots in our own solar system.

As Ernest Becker and pretty much everyone else in the history of modern homo sapiens has realised, two things set human beings apart from every single other species that has ever existed. These are the ability to question the story of our origin, and the ability to be cognizant of the termination of our own consciousnesses. Unless, of course, one day zoologists devise a way to read the minds of animals with perfect accuracy and will be surprised to find out that penguins and dolphins believe in heaven, hell, and reincarnation. But with that particularly odd possibility off of the table, homo sapiens are the only known creatures to be actively cognizant of the Eternal Oblivion all of us must face when our consciousnesses are terminated at bodily death. This is the basis of Becker’s arguments regarding terror management theory, and the basis of every single afterlife belief in every single culture throughout human history. Human beings have attained such a developed state of cognitive function that we can actually comprehend the concept of eternity; and we can comprehend the horrors of ceasing to exist for all of the rest of it.

But we shouldn’t think we’re special, the nihilistic atheists argue. We shouldn’t think we’re special because we’re just insignificant specks of protein within an extremely vast, indifferent universe that doesn’t give a rat’s hide about whether we exist or go extinct. Nothing human beings do matters, because we’re so ridiculously insignificant in the grand cosmological scheme. If that argument were taken to its logical conclusion, I can tell you about something else we can stop giving a damn about: the whole of the scientific enterprise. If nothing we do matters, all of us can happily abandon the scientific method and go back to believing that the Earth was made 6000 years ago, in seven days. If nothing we do matters, we can all happily wrap up our efforts to combat global warming and to prevent the utilization of nuclear weapons. For all intents and purposes, I’ve yet to actually meet a nihilist who will willingly let themselves and their family members stand directly in front of an oncoming truck.

I know some atheists who will respond to this with the retort that, “the universe doesn’t owe you a significantly longer lifespan just because human beings wish for it.” Well, the universe doesn’t theoretically owe us effective root-canal treatments, general anaesthesia, Reebok sneakers, hearing aids, or iPhones, but here we are, anyway. The universe may not owe any particular aforementioned desirable to human beings, but that shouldn’t in any way stop us from trying to attain it through our own ingenuity.

Death and a lifespan under three digits might be natural, but guess what else is? Giving birth without epidural. And cancerous tumors. And dying prematurely from various diseases in the absence of medical care. And spending your life stumbling about and squinting if you’re short-sighted but aren’t fortunate enough to have access to laser eye surgery or spectacles.

And plenty of our forebears accepted those aforementioned ailments as such. In every single pre-modern culture, a whole crapbundle of ailments we now have readily available medical treatment for were seen as “God’s will”. The agonizing pain of natural childbirth was, up till very recently, seen as the “curse of Eve” and a burden all women had to suck up and bear as punishment for being women. And then came epidural, and that long-held belief went right out the window. Ostensibly, cancer and viral infections are great ways for the forces of natural selection to keep human population in steady state; but that still hasn’t stopped us from inventing anti-viral medication and chemotherapy.

To quote Alan Harrington, “We must never forget that we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.”

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

 

SVAI Undiagnosed-1 Collaborative Genomics Research Case: A Call for Bioinformatics and/or Computational Biology Researchers to Get Involved

SVAI Undiagnosed-1 Collaborative Genomics Research Case: A Call for Bioinformatics and/or Computational Biology Researchers to Get Involved

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SVAI

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party provides this announcement to encourage any of our members and allies with expertise in bioinformatics and/or computational biology to contribute their talents to resolving the medical conundrum of one of our longtime loyal members, John – referred to in the Patient Case Background below as JCM – who has suffered from an undiagnosed condition his entire life. The Undiagnosed-1 Collaborative Genomics Research Case, arranged by the non-profit, volunteer-run organization SVAI, will take place on June 7-9 in San Francisco.  Find out more about this effort at breakthrough medical diagnosis – which could make a lifetime’s worth of difference to John – here. Even if you cannot attend the event in person, you can apply to participate in the research online here. John has generously provided for his data to be made available in an open-source manner so that future researchers into rare diseases could benefit from it and advance the state of medical science. Researchers have already agreed to study the data; one of them, longtime life-extension advocate Kevin Perrott, the CEO and Founder of OpenCures, a company located at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging that helps individuals performing self-directed research to access technologies and education, wishes to use mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and proteomics to find biomarkers of aging, and John has agreed to be a part of that project. John’s quest to discover the causes of his own ailment can thus lead to beneficial insights that could be used to research ways the extend the lifespans of all. The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party fully supports this noble effort and is heartened that many prominent researchers have already stepped forward to participate. However, there can never be enough trained and talented minds working on such endeavors, so, if you have the relevant expertise, we strongly encourage you to get involved.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, May 21, 2019

PATIENT CASE BACKGROUND

  1. Our patient, JCM, is a 33-year-old Caucasian male suffering from undiagnosed disease(s).
  2. As an infant, the patient, JCM reports a history of vomiting after breastfeeding and Failure to Thrive (FTT).
  3. Since childhood, JCM has had a significant issue in weight gaining despite adequate caloric intake, though his height has remained on the curve. As a child, he also has reported nausea, stomach aches and an overall aversion to food.
  4. In his 20’s, JCM’s GI issues became more severe as he began to have daily lower abdominal pain characterized by burning and nausea. He began to develop chronic vomiting daily and would vomit as many as 5 times per day.
  5. At his current age, JCM is 5’10” tall and weighs 109lbs. He is easily fatigued due to his limited muscle mass and low weight.
  6. He reports several issues: pain and weakness in his knees, a couple of disc herniations, and shoulder dislocations. His GI issues and pain prevents him from attempts on building muscle masses with lifting and protein intake.

Learn more about the Undiagnosed-1 Collaborative Genomics Research Case here. You are encouraged to share this information with others who may be interested and qualified to assist.

 

The Transhumanist Party Presidential Process Can Change the World – Post by Zoltan Istvan

The Transhumanist Party Presidential Process Can Change the World – Post by Zoltan Istvan

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Zoltan Istvan

As the 2016 U.S. Transhumanist Party Presidential candidate, I encourage everyone to take part in the USTP’s 2019 process for selecting its 2020 nominee for the office of President of the United States.  Please take the time to learn about the candidates, support the ones you favor most, become a member of the USTP for free, and help put science, health, and technology at the forefront of American politics!

I can attest to the effectiveness of transhumanist political activism as the candidate who trafficked 5th or 6th in the media for large swaths of the end of 2016 elections, making an enormous difference to life extension, which coincidentally now has many billions of dollars flowing into it – far more than when I started my campaign. One of these candidates above can win the Presidency and bring the Transhumanist Party to power as well along the way.

I would like to counter the critics who accuse the Transhumanist Party Presidential process of being “distractive nonsense” – and yet “distractive nonsense” is exactly what those critics are preaching. People have a right to push forward their ideas and political values regardless. And we may just find that it was the Transhumanist Party and its candidates that changed the world far more than the 4 or 8 years of Trump.

We are going to run into a lot of people who aim to deny Americans their right to vote and support whom they want to choose. I want everyone to know that the Transhumanist Party candidate can be powerful and historic. We must always maintain the right to support whom we want, win or lose. I absolutely despise this idea we are stuck with only left or right. There are many reasons to run for the Transhumanist Party – reasons that could prove far more important than a single Presidency.

This is really important in 2020. The Libertarians, Greens, Transhumanist Party folks, and other third parties and independents have as much a right to win the Presidency as anyone. That’s what America is about. In 2020, because of what happened in 2016, this will be a big topic. We must defend our right to exist and thrive as much as possible. We must fight to keep America free and politically diverse.

Zoltan Istvan is the founder of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and its former Chairman (October 7, 2014 – November 16, 2016) and 2016 Presidential candidate. In 2018 he ran as a Libertarian for Governor of California. Zoltan Istvan is a renowned journalist, entrepreneur, and transhumanist. He writes transhumanist-themed columns: “The Transhumanist Philosopher” – a blog for Psychology Today, and “Transhumanist Future” for Vice’s Motherboard. He has also worked as a reporter for the National Geographic Channel and is a blogger of futurist, transhumanist, and atheist topics for The Huffington Post. He is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, a philosophical science fiction novel.

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Announces Six Candidates for Its 2019 Presidential Primary

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Announces Six Candidates for Its 2019 Presidential Primary

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The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) is pleased to announce the candidates who have put themselves forward for consideration for the USTP’s endorsement in running for the position of President of the United States of America. To become eligible to vote for any of these candidates in August 2019, please register for free as a member of the USTP, no matter where you reside. Only those who register for membership through August 10, 2019, would be eligible to take part in the USTP Electronic Presidential Primary.

Because of the formidable hurdles to political-party ballot access on the State level, the candidates seeking the USTP’s endorsement would need to officially run as independent candidates. However, if those candidates qualify for inclusion on their States’ ballots, then, in approximately half of the jurisdictions in the United States, it would be possible to use a “political party designation” of “Transhumanist Party” to accompany the candidate’s name on the ballot.

Learn About the Candidates

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) has asked all of its declared candidates for its 2019 Presidential Primary to answer the same essential questions so as to inform the USTP membership of the candidates’ stances on key issues and provide each USTP member the opportunity to make an informed decision, including through comparisons of the candidates’ answers. The USTP will endeavor to pose the same questions and generate profiles for all of the candidates who make their intentions known to us via the Presidential Candidate Declaration of Interest Form.

The USTP has not, at this time, endorsed any Presidential candidate. Such an endorsement will occur as a consequence of the USTP Electronic Primary, which is intended to be held in August 2019. At this time, all contents of the candidate profiles are for informational purposes only, in order to contribute to a more informed membership and enable knowledge of the candidates and their positions to spread.

The order of presentation of the candidate profiles below is alphabetical by first name. It is not intended to indicate any preference or lack thereof for any of the candidates.

Brent

Reitze

Candidacy withdrawn on May 22, 2019

 Charles

Holsopple

 Dan

Good

Candidacy withdrawn on July 6, 2019
 Johannon

Ben Zion

Candidacy withdrawn on May 22, 2019

 Rachel

Haywire

Endorsement and Electronic Primary Process – Anticipated Timeline

The following timeline is approximate and subject to change as circumstances may necessitate. However, it is intended to provide an overarching impression of the sequence and desirable speed of steps for reaching an endorsement of a candidate for President of the United States.

– April 5, 2019 – July 5, 2019: Candidates declare their intention to seek the USTP Presidential endorsement and begin to campaign through channels of their choosing (online and/or in person) to attract supporters and spread awareness of their messages.

– July 6, 2019: First Transhumanist Presidential Debate (Virtual)

– July 6 – August 3, 2019: Candidates continue to campaign; the USTP will introduce structured questions on various issues of interest for the candidates to respond to in writing. The candidates’ answers will be spread by the USTP, which will have the effect of further raising awareness of the candidates and their stances.

– July 16, 2019: The Transhumanism Handbook (edited by Newton Lee) is expected to be released. It is hoped that candidates will read this book (or significant portions thereof) and reference the ideas therein as part of their public outreach and campaign-related discussions.

– August 3, 2019: Second Transhumanist Presidential Debate (Virtual)

– August 3-10, 2019: Final week for candidates to campaign prior to the electronic primary.

– August 11-17, 2019: Electronic ranked-preference primary (7-day voting period, simultaneous for all USTP members).

– August 18-24, 2019: Votes from the electronic primary are tabulated and released. The candidate winning the USTP endorsement is announced simultaneously with the release of the results.

– August 24, 2019 – November 3, 2020: The candidate winning the USTP endorsement continues to campaign until Election Day 2020. The other candidates may seek the USTP’s endorsement for other federal, state, or local offices.

– August 24, 2019 – September 30, 2019: Potential separate campaign and primary process for the selection of the USTP Vice-Presidential nominee.

– Early October 2019: Potential for the candidate winning the USTP endorsement to deliver an official acceptance speech in a venue with a large number of attendees.

– October 15, 2019 – November 30, 2019: Selection of a Transhumanist Cabinet to assist the USTP Presidential nominee to demonstrate a model of governance and constructive policymaking in the event of a Transhumanist Presidency.

The USTP is committed to running a fair, transparent, and (small “d”) democratic election with no predetermined outcome. Each of these candidates has the opportunity to make his or her case to the USTP membership and to recruit new members prior to the August 10, 2019, cutoff date for registration. We find each candidate to be insightful, intelligent, accomplished, and representative of perspectives that constitute the transhumanist movement in all of its variety and will help shape that movement in the years to come. Accordingly, it is important that this election give voice to these perspectives and do so in a civil, orderly, and constructive manner. We will have true competition in this election – genuine debates, discussions of issues, consideration of the candidates’ similarities and differences. The candidates will be free to utilize the means, methods, and personal styles at their disposal to engage in such competition. At the same time, we will also have true structure in this election – an objective process that will apply equitably to all and provide a framework for different points of view to be articulated, with an aim of educating the public, raising the profile of the transhumanist movement, and hopefully resolving some key differences along the way, by means of the process itself.

 

Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada State Legislature – Scheduled for May 15, 2019

Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada State Legislature – Scheduled for May 15, 2019

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If you are interested in transhumanism, life extension, biohacking, prosthetics, implantable technologies, advances to help the disabled, and the political and philosophical implications of all of these areas, then you are encouraged to come to the Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada State Legislature in Carson City, Nevada, on Wednesday, May 15, 2019. This promises to be the first event of its kind – a great opportunity for advocates of emerging technologies to communicate with legislators, lobbyists, media, and the general public, and educate them about transhumanism and its technological dimensions while also dispelling common fears and myths.

The Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on May 15.

Address:

Nevada State Legislature Building

401 S Carson St, Carson City, NV 89701

Second Floor Atrium (See the Second Floor Map)

Co-organized by the Future Grind podcast, the Nevada Transhumanist Party, and magician Anastasia Synn (who testified against Assembly Bill 226 at the Nevada Senate Judiciary Committee), and supported by the Nevada Technology Association, the Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum will feature practical demonstrations of emerging technologies, such as implantable microchips, in order to dispel common fears and myths about those technologies and educate the public about their capabilities and limitations. Also, the event will feature a discussion of technological augmentations, transhumanist philosophy, the uses of technology to overcome disabilities and extend longevity and health, the directions of technological evolution in the coming decades, and the policy implications stemming from these developments.

Most of the event will be in a conversational format as participants will interact with visitors and answer their questions.

If you could either travel to Carson City, Nevada, on Wednesday, May 15, 2019, or share this event with other transhumanists and life-extensionists who you think might be able to do so, it would be greatly appreciated. Even if you cannot attend yourself, you can help by spreading information about this event to others who might be in a position to attend – especially if they live in Northern Nevada or Northern California (but we welcome others who would have to travel farther!).

We need more transhumanists in attendance at this event! Please send an e-mail to U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman and Nevada Transhumanist Party Chief Executive Gennady Stolyarov II if you wish to participate as one of the speakers educating people about transhumanism and emerging technologies. The more representation we have, the better! No matter what your areas of expertise or what flavor of transhumanism you espouse – whether you seek to pursue biological life extension, mechanical/electronic augmentations, policy reforms, or all of the above – your involvement and perspectives will be welcome. This is a unique opportunity for transhumanists to access policymakers and render them aware of the imperative of protecting the rights of technological innovators and creating an environment conducive to an acceleration of beneficial technological progress.

Magician Anastasia Synn Testifies Against Banning RFID/NFC Microchip Implants

Magician Anastasia Synn Testifies Against Banning RFID/NFC Microchip Implants

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Anastasia Synn

Transhumanist activism takes center stage at the Nevada Legislature: Magician and transhumanist Anastasia Synn testified on April 26, 2019, before the Nevada Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to Nevada Assembly Bill 226 (AB 226). AB 226 would prohibit most implantation of NFC/RFID microchips, including voluntary programs for such implantation.

Ms. Synn demonstrated a variety of microchip technologies and their beneficial uses, as well as the difficulties in using voluntary implants to actually infringe on an individual’s privacy. Watch her testimony here.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) initially raised awareness about AB 226 and its detrimental impacts in March 2019, via this article by R. Nicholas Starr: “Bait and Switch on Nevada AB226“.

The USTP, through Legislative Director Justin Waters, submitted a letter in opposition to AB 226 and encouraged others to submit public comments on the bill at the Nevada Legislature website here.  

Anastasia Synn answered the USTP’s call for vocal, articulate opposition to AB 226 and testified in person at the Senate Judiciary Committee in a manner that greatly impressed the Legislators and opened them to a new world of technology.

The USTP encourages our members to continue to express their concerns on AB 226 by writing the Senate Judiciary Committee here and Assemblyman  Richard “Skip” Daly, the sponsor of AB 226, here.

Transhumanist legislative activism has made a difference; let us work to enable it to continue to do so.

Become a member of the USTP for free, no matter where you reside. Apply in less than a minute here.

The music is excerpted from Movement 4 of Symphony No. 1, Op. 86, by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. The theme is based on Mr. Stolyarov’s Transhumanist March, Op. 78.

Finally, Rejuvenation is a Thing! – Fresh Interview with Aubrey de Grey by Ariel VA Feinerman

Finally, Rejuvenation is a Thing! – Fresh Interview with Aubrey de Grey by Ariel VA Feinerman

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Ariel VA Feinerman
Aubrey de Grey

This interview was originally published here. 

Preface

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself — the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue — is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previous undamaged — young — state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! It sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio, somewhere between cold, rainy Saint-Petersburg and warm, sunny Mountain View, we meet Aubrey de Grey, again! For those of you who are not familiar with him, here is a brief introduction.

Dr Aubrey de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who researched the idea for and founded SENS Research Foundation. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr. de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations. In 2011, de Grey inherited roughly $16.5 million on the death of his mother. Of this he assigned $13 million to fund SENS research.

Note: If you have not read “Ending Aging” yet I suggest you to do it as soon as possible, and to be more comfortable with the ideas we are discussing below I highly recommend you to read short introduction to SENS research on their web page. Also if you are interested in recent news and up-to-date reviews about [anti]ageing and rejuvenation research the best place to look for is Fight Aging! blog. Finally, if you are an investor or just curious, I highly encourage you to take a look at Jim Mellon’s book “Juvenescence”.

Interview

Ariel Feinerman: Hello, Dr Aubrey de Grey!

Aubrey de Grey: Hello Ariel — thanks for the interview.

Ariel Feinerman: How do you feel 2018 year? Can you compare 2018 to 2017 or early years? What is changing?

Aubrey de Grey: 2018 was a fantastic year for rejuvenation biotechnology. The main thing that made it special was the explosive growth of the private-sector side of the field — the number of start-up companies, the number of investors, and the scale of investment. Two companies, AgeX Therapeutics and Unity Biotechnology, went public with nine-digit valuations, and a bunch of others are not far behind. Of course this has only been possible because of all the great progress that has been made in the actual science, but one can never predict when that slow, steady progress will reach “critical mass”.

Ariel Feinerman: In 2017 SENS RF have received about $7 million. What has been accomplished in 2018?

Aubrey de Grey: We received almost all of that money right around the end of 2017, in the form of four cryptocurrency donations of $1 million or more, totalling about $6.5 million. We of course realised that this was a one-off windfall, so we didn’t spend it all at once! The main things we have done are to start a major new project at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, focused on stem cell therapy for Alzheimer’s, and to broaden our education initiative to include more senior people. See our website and newsletters for details.

Ariel Feinerman: What breakthroughs of 2018 can you name as the most important by your choice?

Aubrey de Grey: On the science side, well, regarding our funded work I guess I would choose our progress in getting mitochondrial genes to work when relocated to the nucleus. We published a groundbreaking progress report at the end of 2016, but to be honest I was not at all sure that we would be able to build quickly on it. I’m delighted to say that my caution was misplaced, and that we’ve continued to make great advances. The details will be submitted for publication very soon.

Ariel Feinerman: You say that many of rejuvenating therapies will work in clinical trials within five years. Giving that many of them are already working in clinical trials or even in the clinic (like immunotherapies, cell and gene therapies) do you mean the first — maybe incomplete — rejuvenation panel, when you speak of early 2020?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, basically. SENS is a divide-and-conquer approach, so we can view it in three overlapping phases. The first phase is to get the basic concept accepted and moving. The second phase is to get the most challenging components moving. And the third phase is to combine the components. Phase 1 is pretty much done, as you say. Phase 2 is beginning, but it’s at an early stage. Phase 3 will probably not even properly begin for a few more years. That’s why I still think we only have about a 50% chance of getting to longevity escape velocity by 2035 or so.

Ariel Feinerman: Even now many investors are fearful of real regenerative medicine approaches. For example pharmacological companies which use small molecules, like Unity Biotechnology, received more than $300 million, in much more favour than real bioengineering companies like Oisin Biotechnologies, received less than $4 million, even though the biological approach is much more powerful, cheap, effective and safe! Why is this so in your opinion, and when can we see the shift?

Aubrey de Grey: I don’t see a problem there. The big change in mindset that was needed has already occurred: rejuvenation is a thing. It’s natural that small-molecule approaches to rejuvenation will lead the way, because that’s what pharma already knows how to do. Often, that approach will in due course be overtaken by more sophisticated approaches. Sometimes the small molecules will actually work well! It’s all good.

Ariel Feinerman: Do you agree that the small-molecule approach is generally the wrong way in the future rejuvenation therapies? Because they have many flaws — especially their main mechanism via interference with human metabolism. Unlike them SENS bioengineering therapies are designed to be metabolically inert — because they just eliminate the key damage, they do not need to interfere with metabolism, so it is much easier than usual to avoid side effects and interactions with other therapies. They just eliminate the key damage, which means they are easier to develop and test — and much safer.

Aubrey de Grey: Ah, no, that’s too simplistic. It’s not true that small molecules always just “mess with metabolism” whereas genetic and enzymatic approaches eliminate damage. Small molecules that selectively kill senescent cells are absolutely an example of SENS-esque damage repair; the only thing against them is that it may be more difficult to eliminate side-effects, but that’s not because of their mode of action, it’s because of an additional action.

Ariel Feinerman: In recent years many countries gave the green light for regenerative medicine. Fast-track approval in Japan, for example, allows for emerging treatments to be used so long as they have been proven safe. The similar approach works in Russia. What about the EU or USA?

Aubrey de Grey: There’s definitely a long way to go, but the regulatory situation in the West is moving in the right direction. The TAME trial has led the way in articulating an approvable endpoint for clinical trials that is ageing in all but name, and the WHO has found a very well-judged way to incorporate ageing into its classification.

Ariel Feinerman: Do you think of working with USA Army? As far as we know they conduct research on regeneration and are very interested in keeping soldiers healthier for longer. And they have much money!

Aubrey de Grey: The Department of Defense in the USA has certainly funded a lot of high-impact regenerative medicine research for many years. I’m sure they will continue to do so.

Ariel Feinerman: Is any progress in the OncoSENS programme? Have you found any ALT genes? Is any ongoing research in WILT?

Aubrey de Grey: No — in the end that program was not successful enough to continue with, so we stopped it. There is now more interest in ALT in other labs than there was, though, so I’m hopeful that progress will be made. But also, one reason why I felt that it was OK to stop was that cancer immunotherapy is doing so well now. I think there is a significant chance that we won’t need WILT after all, because we will really truly defeat cancer using the immune system.

Ariel Feinerman: Spiegel Lab has recently published an abstract where they say they have found 3 enzymes capable of breaking glucosepane. Very exiting info! When can we hear more on their research? Revel LLC is a very secretive company.

Aubrey de Grey: They aren’t really being secretive, they are just setting up.

Ariel Feinerman: When can we see the first clinical trial of glucosepane breaker therapy?

Aubrey de Grey: I think two years is a reasonable estimate, but that’s a guess.

Ariel Feinerman: What do you think of the Open Source approach in rejuvenation biotechnology? The computer revolution in the early 2000s has taken place only because Open Source caused an explosion in software engineering!

We have many examples when Big Pharma buys a small company which has patents on technology and then cancels all research. In the Open Source approach you cannot “close” any technology, while everyone can contribute, making protocol better and everyone can use that without any licence fee! Anyway, there are countries where you cannot protect your patents. Maybe it will be better to make technology open from the beginning?

Famous biohacker Josiah Zayner said: “In the gene therapy world most treatments are easy to replicate or pirate because you can reverse engineer the DNA from scientific papers or patents. Same exact treatment, same purity and quality I could give to someone rejected from the clinical trial. The cost? Hundreds or a few thousand dollars at most. Same deal with immunotherapy.”

Aubrey de Grey: I think you’ve pretty much answered your own question with that quote. The technologies that will drive rejuvenation are not so easy to suppress.

Ariel Feinerman: Is the SENS RF going to begin new research programmes in 2019?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure! But we are still deciding which ones. We expect that our conference in Berlin (Undoing Aging, March 28–30) will bring some new opportunities to our attention.

Ariel Feinerman: What are your plans for 2019?

Aubrey de Grey: I’d like to say less travelling, but that doesn’t seem very likely at this point. Really my goal is just to keep on keeping on — to do all I can to maintain the growth of the field and the emerging industry.

Ariel Feinerman: Thank you very much for your answers, hope to see you again!

Aubrey de Grey: My pleasure!

Ariel VA Feinerman is a researcher, author, and photographer, who believes that people should not die from diseases and ageing, and whose main goal is to improve human health and achieve immortality. If you like Ariel’s work, any help would be appreciated via PayPal: arielfeinerman@gmail.com.

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Call for 2020 Presidential Candidates and Outline of 2019 Endorsement and Primary Process

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Call for 2020 Presidential Candidates and Outline of 2019 Endorsement and Primary Process

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) issues its call for candidates wishing to run for President of the United States in the 2020 elections and seeking an endorsement from the USTP. Candidates are encouraged to officially announce their intentions via this form and then spread awareness of the USTP, its forthcoming debate and primary process, and possibilities for individuals to sign up for free membership in the USTP in time to participate as voters in this process.

Because of the formidable hurdles to political-party ballot access on the State level, the candidates seeking the USTP’s endorsement would need to officially run as independent candidates. However, if those candidates qualify for inclusion on their States’ ballots, then, in approximately half of the jurisdictions in the United States, it would be possible to use a “political party designation” of “Transhumanist Party” to accompany the candidate’s name on the ballot.

Endorsement and Electronic Primary Process – Anticipated Timeline

The following timeline is approximate and subject to change as circumstances may necessitate. However, it is intended to provide an overarching impression of the sequence and desirable speed of steps for reaching an endorsement of a candidate for President of the United States.

– April 5, 2019 – June 30, 2019: Candidates declare their intention to seek the USTP Presidential endorsement and begin to campaign through channels of their choosing (online and/or in person) to attract supporters and spread awareness of their messages.

– July 1, 2019: First Transhumanist Presidential Debate (Virtual)

– July 1 – August 3, 2019: Candidates continue to campaign; the USTP will introduce structured questions on various issues of interest for the candidates to respond to in writing. The candidates’ answers will be spread by the USTP, which will have the effect of further raising awareness of the candidates and their stances.

– July 16, 2019: The Transhumanism Handbook (edited by Newton Lee) is expected to be released. It is hoped that candidates will read this book (or significant portions thereof) and reference the ideas therein as part of their public outreach and campaign-related discussions.

– August 3, 2019: Second Transhumanist Presidential Debate (Virtual)

– August 3-10, 2019: Final week for candidates to campaign prior to the electronic primary.

– August 11-17, 2019: Electronic ranked-preference primary (7-day voting period, simultaneous for all USTP members).

– August 18-24, 2019: Votes from the electronic primary are tabulated and released. The candidate winning the USTP endorsement is announced simultaneously with the release of the results.

– August 24, 2019 – November 3, 2020: The candidate winning the USTP endorsement continues to campaign until Election Day 2020. The other candidates may seek the USTP’s endorsement for other federal, state, or local offices.

– Early October 2019: Potential for the candidate winning the USTP endorsement to deliver an official acceptance speech in a venue with a large number of attendees.

U.S. Presidential Candidate Qualifications and Expectations

Qualifications Pursuant to the United States Constitution

Pursuant to Article 2, Section 1, of the United States Constitution, to be eligible to become President of the United States, the candidate must:

(1) Be at least 35 years old as of January 20, 2021 (i.e., born on or before January 20, 1986);

(2) Be a natural-born citizen of the United States; and

(3) Have been a resident of the United States for at least 14 years.

The USTP considers the existence of the above restrictions unfortunate, as they could disqualify many otherwise fine candidates. However, in the absence of a Constitutional Amendment, they are insurmountable during the 2020 election season.

Expectations of the Candidate from the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party

(4) If officially endorsed, the candidate must commit to running for office until Election Day 2020 (November 3, 2020). During the time prior to Election Day 2020, the candidate shall not concede to or endorse another candidate from another political party. The candidate also shall not run on behalf of any other political party.

(5) Although the candidate is not obligated to either raise or spend funds, if the candidate does choose to fundraise, the candidate must agree to perform any such fundraising for the candidate’s campaign independently of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party. Furthermore, any campaign committee and/or bank account established by or on behalf of the candidate must be organizationally separate from the USTP. The USTP will spread information and raise public awareness about the candidate, but the USTP is a non-monetary organization and so cannot collect or disburse funds directly. The candidate must also agree to independently comply with all campaign-finance laws and report campaign contributions and expenses in the manner required pursuant to all applicable state and federal laws. The candidate must agree that responsibility for such compliance is solely on the part of the candidate, and that, as a non-monetary organization which does not finance campaigns, the USTP has no obligation nor legal liability in regard to such compliance. (The USTP may, however, at times assist the candidate by providing relevant information, as long as such assistance is understood to be non-obligatory in nature.)

(6) The candidate must agree to participate in the USTP Endorsement and Electronic Primary process as set forth herein and to respect the outcome of that process, no matter whether or not the candidate is ultimately endorsed to run for the office of President of the United States.

(7) The candidate should be in agreement with the USTP Core Ideals:

Ideal 1. The Transhumanist Party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology.

Ideal 2. The Transhumanist Party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values.

Ideal 3. The Transhumanist Party supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species.

(8) The candidate should have significant areas of alignment with the USTP Platform. While complete agreement with all positions therein is not required, and diversity of perspectives is encouraged, it should be possible for the public to clearly perceive the candidate as being closer to the USTP Platform than any given non-USTP-endorsed candidate – for instance, a Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, or Green candidate – would be.

(9) The candidate must agree to work collaboratively with the USTP during the campaign season and not to disparage the USTP as well as not to work contrary to the interests and goals of the USTP during that time.

(10) If officially endorsed, and if the candidate raises $5,000 or more in contributions or incurs $5,000 or more in expenditures, the candidate must agree to register as an independent candidate for President with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Guidance pertaining to this process can be found on the FEC website here or in video form here. However, nothing obligates the candidate to either raise or spend $5,000 or more; any fundraising is at the candidate’s discretion.

For any questions, please e-mail Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the USTP, here.

You can also complete the embedded form below to express your interest in becoming a U.S. Presidential candidate who would participate in the USTP Endorsement and Electronic Primary Process:

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party General Discussion Thread for the Second Quarter of 2019

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party General Discussion Thread for the Second Quarter of 2019

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The purpose of this post is to facilitate member comments pertaining to transhumanism and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, which might not specifically fit the subjects of any other post or article on the U.S. Transhumanist Party website. This is the place for members to offer suggestions or converse about any areas of emerging technologies and their political, moral, societal, cultural, and esthetic implications. The general discussion thread is also an ideal location to suggest or propose platform planks that may be considered for future platform voting, and/or bring our attention to emerging legislative and societal developments that may affect the course and impact of emerging technologies.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party will endeavor to open one of these general comment threads per quarter. This comment thread pertains to the months of April, May, and June 2019.

Type in your comments below. Please note that, to protect against spambots, the first comment by any individual will be moderated. After passing moderation, a civil commenter should be able to post comments without future moderation – although we cannot guarantee that the technical aspect of this functionality will work as intended 100% of the time.

3 Reasons Why “Ending Suffering” Should Be the #1 Transhumanist Priority – Article by Hank Pellissier

3 Reasons Why “Ending Suffering” Should Be the #1 Transhumanist Priority – Article by Hank Pellissier

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Hank Pellissier

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party features this proposal by our member Hank Pellissier for a new website called Paradise2040, which will focus on the abolition of involuntary suffering and incremental ways of getting there within the next 21 years. This is an endeavor supported by Article IV of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0. It is also a current within transhumanist thinking that, as Mr. Pellissier points out, could bring additional support to the movement. Different transhumanists will have different views as to what the most important aims of transhumanism should be. As an organization that embraces pluralism and diversity of thought, the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party would encourage any of our members who agree with the direction Mr. Pellissier proposes to collaborate with him on the creation of the Paradise2040 website.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, March 25, 2019

A survey I conducted in 2010 of 818 transhumanists identified “brain enhancement” as the #1 priority, with “maximizing” health and life extension as #2 and #3.  The top three “values” of the U.S. Transhumanist Party (the Core Ideals) are #1) Life Extension, #2) “a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values”, and #3) “to reduce and eliminate existential risks.”

I believe all these ambitions are important, but over-rated and mis-placed. My opinion, after ten years as a transhumanist, is this: the #1 goal of H+ should be the Abolition of Suffering. My view is advocated by multiple transhumanists, notably David Pearce, but… we’re in the minority.

Here’s three reasons why Abolition of Suffering deserves top consideration:

#1: Eternal Pain = Torture. It is shallow-thinking to not recognize super-longevity in a state of pain as undesirable; in fact, it is masochistic/sadistic. Ask yourself this: would you rather live 60 years in a state of bliss, joy, love, ecstasy, or at least moderate happiness, than exist for 120 years in pain, fear, anguish, despair, and horror? Quality of life is far more important than quantity, IMO.

I have three friends who suffer from depression. When I talk about “ending death”, they sigh forlornly and admit that they are “ready to die”, “sick to death of themselves”, and “have been punished by life long enough.” These people don’t want or need additional decades of misery, they need “happy days” as soon as possible. Hundreds of millions of humans live with chronic physical, mental, and emotional pain, and even the rest of us would appreciate higher doses of joy.

#2: Marketing “Ending Pain” sells better than “Ending Death.” When I tell acquaintances I’m a transhumanist and our #1 goal is elimination of death, they usually roll their eyes and dismiss me as a death-phobic weirdo. Sure, we can castigate these critics with the “Deathist” slur, but it is a superior strategy, I believe, to find common ground. Informing folks that the primary ambition of transhumanists is to elevate human happiness advertises us as charity-givers of cheerfulness, humanitarians of happiness, altruists of euphoria. Instead of billing ourselves as Slayers of the horrible Grim Reaper, we can offer ecstasy, contentment, increased friendship networks, psychedelic discoveries, purpose in life, etc. Recruitment will skyrocket!

#3: “Abolition of Suffering” is more Inclusive. Teenagers usually aren’t nervous about death, but they’re anxious about depression, body shame, bullying, and disempowerment, and don’t like their elders groaning and moaning in anguish. Religionists believe death opens a gate to heaven, but they experience the same pain from auto accidents, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s as atheists do, and they’re on board with extinguishing this.

My activist plan to end suffering is to launch a website called Paradise2040 – to promote cessation of suffering in the next 21 years.  The website will be ‘practical’ but fun and imaginative; it will list dozens of pains from hangnails to herpes to homelessness with links to research-supported cures and potential futurist remedies.

If anyone wants to help – contact hankpellissier@yahoo.com.

 

 

 

In Defense of Resurrecting 100 Billion Dead People – Article by Hilda Koehler

In Defense of Resurrecting 100 Billion Dead People – Article by Hilda Koehler

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Hilda Koehler

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party has published this manifesto by Hilda Koehler to bring attention to a prospect for a more distant future – the technological resurrection of those who have already died. This idea has been posited by such proto-transhumanist thinkers as the Russian Cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov and is involved to various degrees in transhumanist projects such as cryonics, the creation of mindfiles, brain preservation, and the pursuit of various approaches toward mind uploading. There also arise various philosophical dilemmas as to the identities of such hypothetically resurrected individuals. Would they indeed be continuations of the original individuals’ lives, or, rather, close replicas of those individuals, with similar memories and patterns of thinking but distinct “I-nesses” which would come into being upon “resurrection” instead of continuing the “I-nesses” of the original individuals? For a more detailed exploration of this question, please see the essay “How Can I Live Forever?: What Does and Does Not Preserve the Self” (Gennady Stolyarov II, 2010). Nonetheless, even if a “resurrected” individual is a distinct person from the original, it may be valuable to have that person’s memories and patterns of thinking and acting available in the future. However, the question of the continuity of identity is crucial for addressing the issues of justice raised in the article by Ms. Chowhugger. For example, if a “resurrected” individual is not the same person as the original, it would not appear to be justified to hold that individual responsible for any transgressions committed by the original, previously deceased individual. Thoughts on these and other relevant questions and ideas are welcome in the comments for this article.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, March 24, 2019

One of the long-term goals of the transhumanist movement is the physical resurrection of every single human being who has passed away since the beginning of homo sapiens as a species. This would entail using highly advanced technology to resurrect approximately 100 billion people. This sounds implausible. This sounds absolutely mad. But I would argue that it still has to be done. This is not only a potential project humanity must consider; it must be an absolutely imperative goal. In my argument below, I will explain some of the reasons why humanity needs to consider the scientific resurrection of every deceased human being in history to be an imperative long-term goal for all of humanity.

If there’s no afterlife, we have to make one for ourselves.

Unless there is some completely unforeseen breakthrough in science providing conclusive evidence that human consciousness can survive outside the brain beyond there, it is safe to say that developments in neuroscience have very much proven that all religious notions of the afterlife do not exist. If you take an agnostic position about the afterlife and claim that there is still a possibility that a physically-manifested afterlife could exist out there and one day be scientifically proven, fair enough. But I personally believe that we have a higher likelihood of finally being able to travel to a parallel universe only to discover that it is entirely inhabited by sentient Pikachus or clones of Brad Pitt.

An unfortunate position which currently plagues the modern atheist community is one of existential nihilism. The vast majority of atheists acknowledge that the afterlife does not physically exist.

But that’s defying the laws of nature!

And since when have things being unnatural stopped us from recognizing and utilizing their beneficial aspects? Birth control is unnatural; so is laser eye surgery. So are motor vehicles, and so is all of modern medicine. At this point I would like all our readers that there are people out there adamantly trying to stop their children from being vaccinated against measles on the grounds that vaccination is “unnatural”. Perhaps one day our descendants living in an age when technologically-enabled resurrection is as common as Botox shots or bypass surgeries are today will look back at us in condescending amusement.

You have a personal stake in it; so does everyone you love. If you had the option to be revived and continue living indefinitely after your initial demise, would you choose it?

You might ask, “What value is there in resurrecting a random Chinese peasant from the 15th century?” but one day in the far future, our descendants who actually have the viable technology to execute this may ask the same of you and your family.

It’s the economy, bruh.

Consider this final practical implication of the mass technological resurrection of 100 billion deceased people: it’s going to need a lot of manpower and a lot of resources to carry out. And it’s going to be a very long-term process from start to finish. One of the biggest concerns amongst economists right now is the possibility that artificial intelligence will leave the vast majority of the human population unemployed, or underemployed. Imagine the vast number of jobs that could be created if the governments of the world collaborated to undertake a massive resurrection project. We would not just need scientists and engineers to complete the biological process. A major implication our future descendants will have to deal with is the moral re-education of those who lived in more backwards societies or time periods. Imparting modern notions of racial and gender equality to the vast majority of people born before the 1900s is going to be no mean feat. So will educating them about the major historical events and technological advancements that have taken place since their passing.

The ultimate reparative justice

The current run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections has reignited the debate about whether or not African-Americans should receive reparations as a form of compensation for the injustices done to their ancestors during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Shashi Tharoor caused an international stir with his claims that Britain has a moral obligation to pay reparations to India for the economic damage and loss of lives caused by the ravages of british colonialism. However, I would now like to propose an even more radical solution to the question of reparative justice for historical systemic injustices. What if we resurrected all 25 million slaves who were captured and trafficked during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and then awarded compensation to each one of them? What if we resurrected all 26 million Russians killed during the Nazi invasion of the USSR and offered personal compensation to them, as well as telling them of the satisfying knowledge that the Nazis were the losers at the end of World War II. Zoltan Istvan has remarked that he himself has Jewish acquaintances who would be happy to see Hitler get resurrected if only to see him get officially tried in court and sentenced (presumably to an exceptionally harsh prison sentence like 6 million years of hard labor). Through resurrecting victims of past injustices, we could pursue the a direct form of reparative justice and give them the peace of mind they have been waiting decades, centuries, or even millennia to receive.

Hilda Koehler is a fourth-year political science major at the National University of Singapore. She is a proud supporter of the transhumanist movement and aims to do her best to promote transhumanism and progress towards the Singularity.

Statement on the Tragic Death of Danielle Baker and the Imperative for Improved Protections for Cryonics Patients

Statement on the Tragic Death of Danielle Baker and the Imperative for Improved Protections for Cryonics Patients

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March 19, 2019: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) issues this statement in response to the unfortunate demise and cremation of Danielle Michelle Baker, which contravened her specific and documented wishes to be cryopreserved. We ask the members of the USTP to deliberate about specific measures that could be taken to prevent such violations of cryonics patients’ wishes and legitimate rights from arising again. These measures could include reforms to laws so as to improve protections for cryonics patients, as well as improved enforcement of existing laws which may offer some extent of protections at least in theory.

Danielle Michelle Baker, a 31-year-old cryonics advocate, disappeared on December 1, 2018, and was found dead on December 4, 2018, in Laurel County, Kentucky. Despite her expressly documented wishes and a legal contract into which she entered to be cryopreserved by Oregon Cryonics, she was cremated by Laurel County Coroner Doug Bowling at the behest of her family members.

Zoltan Istvan, the founder and former Chairman (2014-2016) of the USTP, now an independent commentator, transhumanist advocate, and USTP Political and Media Advisor, initially brought attention to Danielle Baker’s unfortunate cremation in an article published by Quartz on February 22, 2019, entitled “We need better laws to protect the rights of future frozen cryonicists”. Istvan then encouraged the USTP to provide more in-depth coverage to this issue than was possible through mainstream media outlets.

Zoltan Istvan expressed his views on cryonics to the USTP: “No longer just science fiction, cryonics represents the best scientific chance life extension advocates like Baker have to avoid permanent death. For those without faith in an afterlife, preserving the neurons, cerebral structure, and memories in their brains are the highest priority in both life and death. But the practice of cryonicists signing a Document of Gift doesn’t always work, as in the case of Baker, whose body was controversially cremated just three days” after her body was discovered.

Eric Homeyer, a USTP member and volunteer supporter of cryonics who assisted Oregon Cryonics in this matter but who is not affiliated with Oregon Cryonics in any official capacity, communicated to the USTP the story of Danielle Baker’s tragic and unfortunate situation from his point of view.

Homeyer relayed the following information: “It is rumored that [Baker] went missing from home since Saturday, December 1, 2018. She was reported missing on Monday, December 3, 2018. Her father found her deceased in the woods behind the residence on Tuesday, December 4, 2018, at approximately 3 p.m. I found out about her disappearance/death from a mutual friend when I was at home in Cincinnati at 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 4, 2018. At that time I found out an Autopsy was scheduled in Frankfort, Kentucky, for the next morning, Wednesday, December 5, 2018. He asked me to go try to represent her interests since I was the closest cryonicist any of us knows to her physical location.”

Homeyer continued, describing his trip on Baker’s behalf: “I left Cincinnati at 2:15 a.m. on December 5, 2018 and drove to Frankfort. I got down to Frankfort at around 5 a.m., found the State Medical Examiner’s office, figuring that is where they do the autopsies, and went to the door to see their hours. The door was unlocked, so I went in and tried to find out if [Baker] was there. After a brief chat with the front-desk cop, I realized I was in the right place. I told him I was there on behalf of Danielle Baker to help facilitate her final wishes as an Anatomical Gift Act tissue donor and that I was primarily concerned with making sure brain tissue wasn’t damaged. He said they get started at 8 a.m. and to come back then. Then I went and sat in my car at a gas station five minutes away to wait for a little over two and a half hours. Just before 8 a.m., I returned to the Medical Examiner’s office, and spoke again, to a different cop at the desk. I had the security officer convey by phone to the Medical Examiner’s office that I was there as a volunteer representative of Oregon Cryonics on behalf of Danielle Michelle Baker, an anatomical tissue donor and that my boss Dr. Jordan Sparks would be calling in about an hour to make requests for the handling of the brain during and after the autopsy and the logistics of the release afterwards. I again stressed that of critical importance was that the brain tissue not be damaged.  At that time there weren’t any medical examiners in the office. They took down my number, and told me to check back in a couple of hours if I hadn’t heard from them. I got their fax number and forwarded it and all of the information I had found to [Dr. Sparks]. I then got a hotel nearby and stayed on standby. At 9:26 a.m. [Dr. Sparks] contacted me, told me he was in communication with the Medical Examiner’s office, and said that I didn’t need to go back. I left Frankfort at 5:36pm on December 5, 2018, heading back to Cincinnati, believing I had helped my friend.”

However, despite the efforts of Homeyer and the subsequent efforts of Dr. Jordan Sparks of Oregon Cryonics to advocate for the cryopreservation, Danielle Baker was cremated. Istvan, in his Quartz article of February 22, 2019, wrote that “despite the major parties knowing about the cryonics contract and Document of Gift, Baker’s family pushed for the cremation, which then was carried out by the coroner via a funeral home three days later.”

Homeyer notes that the cremation “was done at the crematory which happens to be co-owned by the coroner who was in charge of her case and in custody of her remains.”

Cryonics advocate Matthew Bryce Deutsch wrote, “Doug Bowling is the coroner, and Baker was cremated at Bowling Funeral home.” Bowling is the Laurel County Coroner in Kentucky, and was re-elected as a Republican for the job in 2018. He is listed as the President of Bowling Funeral home on its website.

Homeyer expressed his view in disapproval of Bowling’s decision to cremate Baker: “Not sure if that’s too much poking the bear… But if he ultimately stands to gain from ignoring her wishes, as an elected official who is supposed to uphold the law, that’s kind of messed up.”

Dr. Jordan Sparks, D.M.D., of Oregon Cryonics explained that “Usually, families don’t object to non-transplant donation, so there is no conflict. In this case, there was disagreement. Funeral directors and coroners are not supposed to be mediators in disputes. It was also an unexpected death, so emotions were very high. I was over 2000 miles away, so I could not be a strong advocate. Things might have been different if we were in the same town. Maybe. At least something like an injunction might have been an option.”

Homeyer expressed his view that he “arrived at the medical examiner’s office on the morning of her scheduled autopsy, in time to prevent damage, but despite this the cremation was carried out.” However, there is disagreement about whether Danielle Baker’s brain was in a sufficiently intact state to enable her memories, personality, and identity to be maintained in some form in the course of the cryopreservation process.

Sparks informed the USTP that “A body that lies undiscovered for three days will never be in good condition.  I think the mind was hopelessly lost by that time. I want to be clear that an [Oregon Cryonics] technician was not able to appear on site.  A volunteer friend showed up and tried to help, but that is very different.  My opinion is that a meaningful preservation can only be performed immediately or within maybe an hour.  At about 6 hours, all the cells are necrotic.  At about 12-24 hours, it becomes impossible to perfuse in all cases, and tissue breakdown is well underway. Because of the already hopeless condition of Danielle’s brain, I don’t believe that Doug Bowling’s actions harmed her.” However, Dr. Sparks also clarified his view that Bowling’s actions were nonetheless “illegal and unethical”. The USTP cannot claim expertise in Kentucky law and so cannot express an opinion on the current legality of Bowling’s behavior, but the USTP holds that legal protections should be established to clearly, unambiguously protect the wishes of cryonics patients, notwithstanding the objections of any other party. The USTP also concurs with Dr. Sparks that cremating an individual against that individual’s express, known wishes is indeed unethical.

Homeyer stated his perspective that “Although I never laid eyes on the body, so I cannot with certainty claim knowledge of her state of decay, as far as I know, Mr. Bowling is not an expert in information-theoretic demise, and nobody currently alive is an expert in the capabilities of future revival technology, therefore his opinion of how well she could have been preserved, seems irrelevant with respect to his ability to carry out what he knew were her final wishes.”

In subsequent communications with the USTP, Istvan commented that “Dr. Sparks here is speaking on matters of the mind. This is not his expertise. And frankly, that’s not for any of us to understand in 2019. We know the research today. But they thought they knew the research in the 1920s with blood tests for murders. What they didn’t know was DNA would overturn the entire field and exonerate many people a century later (as well as ruin many lives unfairly in prison). The point here is we simply cannot know these things, but we do know is Baker had a legit signed contract. And her rights were not followed. And [we know] that a preserved slightly decayed corpse is better than ashes for a person who wanted to come back alive. You have to put yourself in this position and ask what you’d want to be done. I think it’s safe to say: all of us would want the chance to be preserved, whether or not the cryonics process was in optimal conditions.”

The USTP Platform is clear on where we stand in regard to the decision that should have been made in Danielle Baker’s situation. Article III, Section VI, of the USTP Platform, focusing on morphological freedom, reads, in part, that “The United States Transhumanist Party considers morphological freedom to include the prerogative for a sentient intelligence to set forth in advance provisions for how to handle its physical manifestation, should that intelligence enter into a vegetative, unconscious, or similarly inactive state, notwithstanding any legal definition of death. For instance, a cryonics patient should be entitled to determine in advance that the patient’s body shall be cryopreserved and kept under specified conditions, in spite of any legal definition of death that might apply to that patient under cryopreservation.” The concluding paragraph of Section VI also recognizes cryonics as a choice which should “be the purview of […] individual [sapient] beings, and holds that no other group, individual, or government has the right to limit those choices”. The right to morphological freedom is reiterated in Article X of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0, with essentially the same language as contained in Article III, Section VI, of the USTP Platform. This principle is a matter on which every cryonics supporter – including Istvan, Sparks, Homeyer, and Deutsch – would also express a fundamental agreement.

As noted above, the USTP takes no position on whether or not Doug Bowling’s actions were in violation of current law; however, we invite our members to consider how applicable laws could be interpreted or improved in order to render the protection of cryonics patients’ wishes unambiguous and incapable of being lawfully abrogated by a third party. The USTP also invites ideas on how to foster improved social acceptance of cryonics so as to at least facilitate its toleration by non-adopters to the same degree that various funeral practices – such as burial, embalming, or cremation – are tolerated today. Members may and will differ in their opinions as to whether Danielle Baker as a person could have been saved even through cryopreservation, and further consideration of this question may be valuable as a theoretical discussion of what cryonics can and what it cannot achieve. Ultimately, though, we have an opportunity to craft a proposal for a “Danielle’s Law” that would protect those cryonicists who do stand a chance to ultimately be revived if their wishes are honored in a sufficiently prompt fashion after legal death.

We encourage you to post your thoughts in the comment thread accompanying this statement.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Achieves Its First Legislative Victory

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Achieves Its First Legislative Victory

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party has achieved its first legislative victory. We previously issued an alert about Nevada Assembly Bill 226 (AB226), which originally was written only to prohibit compulsory microchip implants, but whose sponsor, Assemblyman Richard “Skip” Daly, proposed an amendment to also prohibit all voluntary programs for the implantation of a microchip. This concerned us greatly, as it would have essentially prohibited both medical implants with electronic components, as well as implants pursued for reasons of esthetics, self-expression, and functional improvement.

Although we learned of the proposed amendment only two days before the March 15, 2019, Work Session at the Assembly Judiciary Committee, the dedicated grassroots activists among our membership sprang into action. USTP activists quickly published an article, circulated tens of posts via social media, informed prominent transhumanists via e-mail, submitted comments on the Nevada Legislature and to the Assembly Judiciary Committee, and reached out to Legislators. We greatly appreciate that Assemblyman Richard “Skip” Daly took our concerns into account and proposed Subsection 3 within his amendment (below), which defines “microchip implant” in quite a narrow manner, addressing his concerns about potential future institutional pressure to use implanted identification markers, while exempting from the bill’s scope any medical devices, artistic implants, or implants pursued for reasons of personal expression. This amendment was incorporated into AB226 at the Assembly Judiciary Committee Work Session on March 15, 2019.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party believes that AB226, as amended, is no longer a cause for significant concern. While we are not thrilled about any restrictions on voluntary, peaceful activity, we believe that medical innovators, patients, artists, biohackers, grinders, cyborgs, fitness enthusiasts, and many other users of functional implantable technologies will not be at risk from this bill. Thank you to the transhumanist community for mobilizing so effectively to achieve this victory!

This, friends, is why we need a Transhumanist Party. Join us for free.

It is also noteworthy that AB226 has not yet been enacted into law. It will still need to come before a vote of the full Assembly Floor Session, after which the bill would move to the Senate, where a public hearing and a Senate Judiciary Committee work session would need to be held before a full Senate vote. The public hearing in the Senate would be the opportunity of those with remaining concerns to testify on AB226. Furthermore, the Nevada Legislature website allows members of the public to submit their opinions about specific bills, and it is also possible to contact Assemblyman Richard “Skip” Daly,  the sponsor of AB226, as well as the Assembly Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee to express one’s views. AB226 can also be monitored on NELIS, the Nevada Legislature’s online informational system.

To respond to some of the critical comments made by R. Nicholas Starr in his dissenting article, it is important to recognize that the inclusion of Subsection 3 in AB226 is at least an incremental victory, because it turned an essentially absolute ban on all implants (which would have crippled medical progress) into a more limited ban on implantation of NFC devices used as identification markers. It is still possible that a technical reading of the text – particularly of the phrase “intended to act as an identification marker” – in fact creates a safe harbor for many NFC implants that are not intended for identification purposes. For instance, if Person X were to have a functional NFC implant that enabled him to open car doors but that did not specifically identify him as Person X, a strong case could be made that participating in a voluntary program to receive this implant would not be prohibited if AB226 were to be enacted.

The NFC tag may have a number assigned to it, but if the number is not also assigned to an individual, this tag may not be an “identification marker”. For instance, a person could hypothetically have two or more tags with distinct numbers that have a similar or identical intended function. If neither of the unique tag numbers would necessarily be associated with that person as an individual, then one could make the argument that the number of the object (the tag) is not a number that has any relevance to the identity of the person in whom the tag is implanted.

The USTP does acknowledge, however, that services which specifically market themselves as providing identity-related security and verification would find the amended version of AB226 problematic, and representatives of such services are encouraged to voice their views, including by using the Legislative contact information and opinion-sharing functionality linked herein.

This Was No Victory – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

This Was No Victory – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

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R. Nicholas Starr

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party has published this dissenting view by our member R. Nicholas Starr, in response to the USTP’s efforts to mitigate the harms of the proposal in Nevada’s Assembly Bill 226 (AB226) to ban participation in voluntary programs for the implantation of microchips. The USTP issued a statement regarding the success of our efforts here. We would recommend that our members read both the USTP’s statement and Mr. Starr’s dissenting point of view and arrive at their own thoughts as to the extent to which, if any, AB226, as amended, would continue to pose barriers, risks, and/or inconveniences to research efforts and attempts at personal self-improvement through technology which the USTP wholly supports. It is also noteworthy that AB226 has not yet been enacted into law. It will still need to come before a vote of the full Assembly Floor Session, after which the bill would move to the Senate, where a public hearing and a Senate Judiciary Committee work session would need to be held before a full Senate vote. The public hearing in the Senate would be the opportunity of those with remaining concerns to testify on AB226. Furthermore, the Nevada Legislature website allows members of the public to submit their opinions about specific bills, and it is also possible to contact Assemblyman Richard “Skip” Daly,  the sponsor of AB226, as well as the Assembly Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee to express one’s views. AB226 can also be monitored on NELIS, the Nevada Legislature’s online informational system.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, March 17, 2019

TL;DR- Nevada still intends to ban voluntary NFC/RFID implants.

On March 15, 2019, the USTP claimed victory against legislation intended to ban all “microchip” implants. And while our last-minute action produced a result, it wasn’t one of any substance. If anything we fell victim to smart political wordsmithing, and I guess we’re supposed to be happy about that.

Nevada AB226 is a bill that, when it was first introduced, banned forced implantation of RFID/NFC tags, which they like to call microchips. On March 4th the bill’s original author, Skip Daly (D – Sparks), added an amendment banning voluntary implantation as well. This bill went to an Assembly Work Session on March 15th, where the amendment was modified, accepted, and passed out of Committee for vote on a later date. But to be clear, the modification of the amendment did nothing to stop a ban on voluntary NFC/RFID implants. Let’s examine the new language, which is contained in Subsection 3.

3. For the purposes of this section “microchip implant” means a near field communication technology that allows wireless communication of electronic devices over short distances where the device is intended to act as an identification marker.
(a) The term does not include any non-transmitting device, implant or marking for medical or for self-expression purposes or;
(b) Any transmitting medical device or implant provided the transmitting medical device or implant is not used as an identification marker and records or sends only the information necessary to carry out the primary purpose of the transmitting medical device or implant.

At the top of this section we see their definition for a microchip implant; that’s a pretty standard definition. The exception for medical devices in paragraph (b) also seems fairly well-thought-out and provides no issues. Subsection A is where the problem lies. It clarifies an exemption for NON-TRANSMITTING devices, implants, or other markers for medical or self expression purposes. Why are we talking about non-transmitting implants in a bill that is specifically about transmitting implants?

It’s a clever attempt by the author to placate naysayers with something that looks like a concession, if you skim past key words. And judging by the reaction of many over the past several days, it worked. The State of Nevada doesn’t have a problem with voluntary implants that don’t transmit anything. Just visit any strip club in the state if you want graphic proof of that. What is a non-transmitting implant? Breast augmentation, silicone horns, transdermal piercings… you get the idea. Inert stuff that we have been shoving under our skin for aesthetic purposes for a very long time now. These are all already legal and have their own regulations. They didn’t need to be included in the bill. The only purpose of adding this “exception” was to distract from the fact that they still want to ban implantable RFID/NFC tags.

And lots of transhumanists have these tags, myself included! We get these tags because they transmit a signal, given power by a reader, to complete various tasks. Many of us in the Party are actively using and developing this technology, and on March 15 the Party failed them – not for valiantly trying to stop the amendment, but for claiming victory over meaningless words that changed nothing. This was not a victory, and I’m embarrassed that anyone would say so. We got played.

But you know what? This does prove something that every transhumanist should consider. Providing remarks during public comment is not enough. We need active politicians who can use legislative tools and face-to-face debate to identify and stop attempts to placate us with empty words. Force them to look at the facts and stop them from doing damage to an individual’s freedom, especially in fear-based preemptive bills like this. To take a step in that direction, I have developed a Proposal to Establish a Legislative Action Framework on which I encourage input from our members.

Ryan Starr (R. Nicholas Starr) is a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and the founder of the Transhumanist Party of Colorado. 

Proposal to Establish a Legislative Action Framework – Post by R. Nicholas Starr

Proposal to Establish a Legislative Action Framework – Post by R. Nicholas Starr

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R. Nicholas Starr

In light of recent legislative action pursued by the United States Transhumanist Party (USTP), and the urgent need for response on a topic that could have been identified much earlier, I propose the establishment of a legislation tracking and analysis structure as detailed below. The goal is not necessarily to write new legislation (we have no members currently serving in government positions), but to act as a think tank or watchdog organization as legislation is presented in federal or state governments.

Core requirements:

  • Compilation of a comprehensive topic/keyword database, sorted into issue groups
    • If possible, the creation of a legislative keyword tracking program made available to analysts in a cross platform or web-based architecture
  • A chain of command detailing positions and the responsibilities their responsibilities 

Chain of Command

Chairman
|
Legislative Director ————> Expert Advisors
^
/
  Issue Analysts

Issues may include, but are not limited to:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Biohacking hardware
• Biomedical research and practical application
• Computer and data sciences
• Education
• Environment and ecology
• Existential risk
• Foreign policy
• Life extension
• Privacy, surveillance, and security
• Robotics
• Science and exploration

Keywords shall be gathered for each issue, and analysts should be provided with a thorough and frequently updated list from which to search all available resources (legislation trackers, search engines, government databases, etc.). Eventually, understanding the massive amount of work this would require, we should develop our own legislation tracking system to streamline operations and increase effectiveness.

The Legislative Director would ideally have a background in law/policy making. It would be the responsibility of the Legislative Director to inform the Chairman of all relevant legislation on a state and federal level as provided by analysts or personal observation. It would also be the Legislative Director’s responsibility to identify national policy trends and make suggestions for yearly priorities. The Legislative Director should, when necessary, reach out to our expert Advisors as listed on the USTP Advisors page.

Analysts would ideally have knowledge of/passion for the issues they desire to monitor. There should be no limit to how many analysts cover any particular issue, and individual analysts can cover multiple issues if they desire. Before an analyst submits a legislative report to the Legislative Director, they must provide a link to the legislation and try to answer the following:

  • How urgent is the matter?
    • Could this cause harm to an individual’s physical/mental health or civil rights?
  • Which article of our Platform does this pertain to?
    • If none, please explain its relevance. 
  • Does this apply to other issue groups?
  • What do you propose the Party do?
    • Provide evidence to support your position.

Many of these issues will overlap each other, which is ideal, as it may provide different analyst perspectives on a particular issue. Many of these issues may also have other prominent organizations (ACLU, EFF) that may be better equipped to address a particular issue. In such cases it is important that we identify to what extent the topic impacts our platform and whether or not it relates to future technology/advancements or present-day capabilities.

This is by no means an exhaustive recommendation, and the nature of this body should be flexible to meet the USTP’s current and future needs. Please provide your comments, recommendations, and criticisms below.

Ryan Starr (R. Nicholas Starr) is a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and the founder of the Transhumanist Party of Colorado. 

Bait and Switch on Nevada AB226 – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

Bait and Switch on Nevada AB226 – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

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R. Nicholas Starr

TL;DR – Nevada Assembly Bill 226 is an attack on bodily autonomy hidden in a good idea.

On February 22nd, 2019, Assemblyman Skip Daly (D-Sparks) presented AB226 for review and debate. The act, in its original form, is a good thing. It prevents against forced implantation of a “microchip or other identifying marker”, punishable as a class C felony (up to 5 years in prison and/or $10,000 fine). Fantastic! No one should be forced to do anything to their bodies they don’t want to do! But on March 4th Daly proposed an amendment  to his own bill that also bans VOLUNTARY implantation. This is a staggering attack on bodily autonomy and self determination. To be clear, the exact language of the bill and amendment is below.

1. An officer or employee of this State or any political- subdivision thereof or any other person shall not~

(a- original language) Require another person to undergo the implantation of a microchip or other permanent identification marker of any kind or nature. 

(b- amendment) Establish or participate in a voluntary program for the implantation of a microchip or other permanent identification marker of any kind or nature.

2. A person who violates the provisions of this section is guilty of a category C felony and shall be punished as provided in NRS 193.130.

3. Each day or part of a day during which a violation of this section is continued or repeated constitutes a separate offense.

First of all, I find this amendment suspicious. Why would the original author amend his own bill that he said was inspired by a company’s voluntary program? It appears to me that the amendment’s ban on voluntary implantation was always the intent, but Daly knew that it would never pass on its own. And he’s right! Such a blatant attack on a person’s bodily autonomy, even under the pretense of privacy concerns, would certainly create resistance. And let’s be clear, today’s implants pose no privacy threat. They actually help maintain an individual’s privacy and data security. We also aren’t talking about dangerous devices or chemicals. These implants are extensively tested and biosafe. Any attempt to say otherwise is either deliberate, or ignorant, fear mongering.

The consequences of violating this act, in its amended form, are also extreme. I certainly support felony charges against a person forcing implantation on another. But voluntary implantation carrying the same punishment? That is beyond extreme. Let’s examine Sections 2 and 3 in a realistic scenario. DEF CON, an annual conference held in Las Vegas, has hosted biohacking and implantation during the event since 2015. Indeed, many have traveled to the conference to get their implants. If each implant is a separate offense, and each offense carries a maximum prison sentence of 5 years’ imprisonment, the person performing the implantations could effectively earn a life sentence by lunch! All for agreeing to implant a biosafe tag in a person who volunteered and given their informed consent. 

Bodily autonomy and free determination: these are human rights that guarantee control over your own body. Getting “chipped”, or not, has always been a choice left to the individual with zero known incidents of forced implantation. Mr. Daly’s concern, while appearing noble on the surface, has no basis in reality, but rather arises out of fear and fiction. Sadly, those are two things easily sold these days. Let’s make sure we set the record straight and prevent a crisis where it doesn’t exist.

Ryan Starr (R. Nicholas Starr) is a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and the founder of the Transhumanist Party of Colorado. 

 

#IAmTranshuman – Video Compilation #1

#IAmTranshuman – Video Compilation #1

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logo_bgB.J. Murphy
Ira Pastor
Tom Ross
José Luis Cordeiro
Charlie Kam
Bill Andrews
Gennady Stolyarov II

Leading transhumanists from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives provide concise, powerful statements as to why they are transhuman. The Transhuman Era has arrived; some of us are aware of this already, whereas others are transhuman but do not know it yet. The #IAmTranshuman campaign helps illustrate how emerging technologies and the accompanying shifts in thinking are already transforming everyday life.

This video was compiled and formatted by Tom Ross, the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party’s Director of Media Production.

The following transhumanists are featured, in order of appearance:

– B.J. Murphy, Director of Social Media, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party
– Ira Pastor, Regeneration Advisor, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party
– Tom Ross, Director of Media Production, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party
– José Luis Cordeiro, Technology Advisor and Ambassador to Spain, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party
– Charlie Kam, Director of Networking, California Transhumanist Party
– Bill Andrews, Biotechnology Advisor, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party
– Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party

Learn more about the #IAmTranshuman campaign, the Transhuman Present Project (#TranshumanPresent), and how you can readily participate here.

You can participate in the #IAmTranshuman campaign by submitting still images or video recordings of one minute or less (15 seconds or less for Instagram stories, one minute or less for Instagram-compatible videos). Use the hashtag #IAmTranshuman, and let us know if you would like your video included in a subsequent compilation!

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply here in less than a minute.

Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Apply here.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Public-Service Announcement by Casey Cockrell

U.S. Transhumanist Party Public-Service Announcement by Casey Cockrell

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Casey Cockrell

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party is pleased to feature this public-service announcement created by our member Casey Cockrell. You can view it on YouTube here. 

You can also share it via the following embed code:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/4STsaZ3NmvA” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe> 

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply here in less than a minute.

 

 

U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Meeting and Q&A – February 23, 2019

U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Meeting and Q&A – February 23, 2019

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Denisa Rensen
Palak Madan
Pam Keefe
Dinorah Delfin
Arin Vahanian
Tom Ross
B.J. Murphy

On February 23, 2019, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invited many of its Officers and Ambassadors to discuss recent activities and plans for 2019, including the upcoming Presidential nomination process. The meeting included a public chat and portions where inquiries from members and the general public were addressed. Find the video recording of the meeting and the accompanying YouTube Live chat here.

Agenda
– Gennady Stolyarov II: Overview of 2019 Transhumanist Presidential Nomination/Debate/Primary Process
– Ambassadors – Denisa Rensen, Palak Madan, Pam Keefe: Discussions on Transhumanist Sentiment / Attitudinal Environment in Japan, India, and Hong Kong
– Denisa Rensen: Report on TransVision 2018 in Madrid
– Gennady Stolyarov II: Integration with the Transhuman Party / Dissolution of the TNC
– Dinorah Delfin: Discussion of Forthcoming Article in The Transhumanism Handbook: “An Artist’s Creative Process: A Model of Conscious Evolution”
– Arin Vahanian: Report on Premiere of “Immortality or Bust” Documentary
– Group Discussion: How to Reach 10,000 Members? (What demographics have yet to be exposed to transhumanist ideas and the existence of the USTP? How can we be more effective in getting people “in the door” to even be aware of our existence and content?)
   Potential Ideas
– Social-Media Digital Poster Contest (Suggestion by Tom Ross)
– Incentives for Members to Recruit Other Members (Suggestion by Tom Ross)
– Appeal to Subcultures – e.g., Steampunk, Cyborg Communities (Suggestion by Tom Ross)
– Question for Discussion: Should we engage with conspiracy theorists (e.g., attempt to rebut them) or distance ourselves from them as much as possible?
– Any questions from the audience

Note: The meeting livestream terminated slightly prematurely due to an Internet disconnection. However, the meeting did proceed over the course of the planned two-hour timeframe, and the vast majority of the intended subjects were covered.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our Membership Application Form.

Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Fill out the application form here.

Transhumanist Ideas for Reforming Political Processes and Improving Government Accountability – Presentation by Gennady Stolyarov II

Transhumanist Ideas for Reforming Political Processes and Improving Government Accountability – Presentation by Gennady Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II

On February 13, 2019, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, spoke to the Young Americans for Liberty Chapter at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) in a wide-ranging discussion on the intersection of technology and politics and the types of reforms that could pave the way to the new technological era of major progress and radical abundance. Watch Mr. Stolyarov’s presentation on YouTube here.

Mr. Stolyarov discussed policy positions from the U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform, such as support for ranked-preference voting, greatly lowered ballot-access thresholds, simultaneous nationwide primaries, shorter campaign seasons, AI-assisted redistricting, germaneness rules for legislation, minimum consideration timeframes for amendments, and the general desirable shift in the balance away from special-interest lobbies and toward intelligent laypersons.

See Mr. Stolyarov’s presentation slides here.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply here in less than a minute.

Watch Mr. Stolyarov’s interview of Ray Kurzweil at RAAD Fest 2018.

Watch the presentation by Gennady Stolyarov II at RAAD Fest 2018, entitled, “The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Four Years of Advocating for the Future”.

Dr. Bill Andrews Interviewed by John Murrieta of the Science-Based Species Channel

Dr. Bill Andrews Interviewed by John Murrieta of the Science-Based Species Channel

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Bill Andrews
John Murrieta

John Murrieta of the channel Science-Based Species interviewed Dr. Bill Andrews, the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Biotechnology Advisor, in October 2018. Watch this interview on YouTube here.

In this video, Dr. Andrews discusses the research he does at Sierra Sciences with the aim to reverse aging and extend lifespans by extending telomeres, as well as the forthcoming gene-therapy clinical trial by Libella Gene Therapeutics.

This interview with recorded by U.S. Transhumanist Party Secretary Bobby Ridge at the Fifth Enlightenment Salon, hosted by U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party: The Last, Best Hope for Transhumanist Politics

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party: The Last, Best Hope for Transhumanist Politics

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The Transhuman National Committee of the United States (TNC) has disbanded, and the Transhuman Party is being integrated into the U.S. Transhumanist Party.  We (including our State-level affiliates) are now the sole transhumanist political organization in the United States.

The United States Transhumanist Party issues this statement to bring attention to a series of rapid developments during January 2019, at the end of which our political party (including its State-level affiliates) remains the sole transhumanist political organization in the United States. As Chairman of this sole transhumanist political organization, I am determined to continue to grow it and maintain its distinctive identity and purpose above the toxic “mainstream” partisan fray. I invite all transhumanists to apply for free membership within our growing and vibrant party, which has reached 1,282 members and continues to expand daily.

In short succession, the following events recently transpired.

Integration of the Transhuman Party

The Transhuman Party, a 25-member experimental splinter party founded in October 2017, recently became defunct due to lack of activity. On December 30, 2018, I acquired the website (not yet edited except for the statement on the front page) and Facebook page for the Transhuman Party and issued a standing invitation to its former members to become members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, with an option to take Officer or Advisor roles. So far approximately half of the former Transhuman Party members have accepted the offer, and the process of integration is ongoing, with the intention to continue to issue such invitations as time advances.

The Transhuman Party was originally formed because its members disapproved of the term “Transhumanist Party” having been trademarked by Zoltan Istvan. (This matter is extensively addressed in the U.S. Transhumanist Party FAQ. Furthermore, Zoltan Istvan has not had any role in the governance of the Transhumanist Party since November 2016 and has also specifically stated that he views favorably the course that the Transhumanist Party has taken; from this one can conclude that he has no desire or reason to intervene.)

However, to assuage any concerns of those who criticized the existence of the trademark, there will now exist two options for how to call our party.  Accordingly, the name “Transhuman Party” will be preserved. Previous efforts by former Transhuman Party members to trademark this term had been abandoned, and any such efforts are likely to fail from a legal standpoint due to the similarity of this term to the term “Transhumanist Party”. However, it is desirable to preserve “Transhuman Party” as a non-trademarked term that those who object to the trademark of “Transhumanist Party” may use to enable their participation in our organization nonetheless.

Accordingly, the full name of our organization hereby becomes “United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party”. Members henceforth have the choice to refer to it as either the “Transhumanist Party” (the trademarked term) or the “Transhuman Party” (the non-trademarked term), using these terms either together or apart or interchangeably, as they please. We hope that these options will enable individuals to bypass arguments over the trademark and collaborate on substantive matters with the knowledge that at least one (and most likely both) of these terms will remain available for us to use, no matter what.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party seeks to be a “big tent” for the transhumanist movement. We welcome the involvement and perspectives of the original Transhuman Party members, as well as others from various backgrounds and organizations within the broader transhumanist community. Our eventual aim is to end transhumanist infighting to the extent possible and to replace it with a deliberative and democratic process where ideas are civilly and constructively discussed and translated into suggestions for policies and general technological, societal, and cultural improvements.

The new logo of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party intentionally allows the party’s name to be read as either “Transhumanist Party” or “Transhuman Party”. The color scheme also places emphasis on the term “human”; we are the only political party in the United States with the word “human” in our name. This is justified, as our ultimate focus is the well-being of humans (and other sentient entities) and the championing of technological and societal improvements that enable all humans to overcome their limitations, actualize their potential, and live and improve without bound. 

Dissolution of the Transhuman National Committee of the United States (TNC)

The Transhuman National Committee of the United States (TNC) was originally formed in October 2015 as an alternative transhumanist political organization that sought to eventually form a Political Action Committee (PAC) but never officially did so.

On January 25, 2019, the Board of the Transhuman National Committee of the United States (TNC) voted unanimously to disband the TNC. Two Officers of the U.S. Transhumanist Party – Gennady Stolyarov II and B.J. Murphy – were members of the TNC Board and were present at the virtual TNC Board meeting of January 25, 2019.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party acknowledged the validity of the reasons for the dissolution of the TNC. We had long considered the TNC to be an Allied Organization but took a fundamentally different approach from that espoused by the TNC Chair – e.g., the U.S. Transhumanist Party is a non-monetary, all-volunteer organization and therefore is not reliant on funding, whose cessation essentially ended the viability of the TNC. Furthermore, the U.S. Transhumanist Party favors a principles-based, idea-oriented, and pluralistic approach to public outreach, education, and transformation of the intellectual and cultural landscape – whereas the TNC sought (unsuccessfully) to become a lobbying organization and to adopt the often questionable tactics of mainstream politics. Playing by the rules of mainstream politics is a self-defeating approach, as I explained in “The Great Transhumanist Game” video series (Part 1 and Part 2); the unscrupulous expert political operatives will win every time. Only by changing the rules to those of the new era of our civilization and leading by example under those rules, can transhumanists hope to effectuate constructive change notwithstanding existing political roadblocks.

However, in order to salvage any of the beneficial objectives of the TNC, the U.S. Transhumanist Party reached out in hopes of enabling the people who were involved in it to continue their political activism under the auspices of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. I extended a standing offer to any of the former TNC Officers and Board Members to take on roles as Officers, Advisors, or Ambassadors within the U.S. Transhumanist Party, depending on their individual circumstances, skill sets, and preferences.

Unfortunately, the former TNC Chair used the proxy votes at the last TNC Board meeting to push through a series of divisive and contested statements which encouraged transhumanists to work within the two major political parties instead of any minor political parties or the U.S. Transhumanist Party. I offered motions to surgically excise these counterproductive recommendations from the statements, and the majority of TNC Board members present on the call expressed similar concerns regarding the former TNC Chair’s attempts to push through what was clearly not a consensus position within either the TNC or the broader transhumanist community – much of which remains interested in a distinctively transhumanist political approach. It is unfortunate that, because of the TNC Chair’s use of the proxy votes at his disposal, the TNC’s last gesture will be one of division rather than unification. This outcome illustrates one reason for the TNC’s failure – an approach which favored adversarial “hardball” tactics over attempts to reach consensus. However, as the last remaining transhumanist political organization in the United States, the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party can carry on in expressing its principled views and eschewing the tragi-comical theater that “mainstream” politics has become. The tactics of contemporary political operatives are inimical to the nobler mindset that is needed to build the next era of our civilization. Adversarial “hardball” is precisely one of the unfortunate aspects of the present that needs to be transcended if we are to overcome the roadblocks that stand in the way of technological, cultural, and policy progress.

As I expressed in a statement to the TNC Board, I consider the two main parties to have thoroughly discredited themselves. The Democratic and Republican Parties are essentially committing suicide via their tactics of partisan toxicity that set people against one another and prevent constructive policy discussions and solutions. The recent fiasco of the U.S. federal government shutdown is just the most recent example of this toxicity getting in the way of even routine operations.

The transhumanist movement is indeed small at this stage, although we are growing and are much larger than we were several years ago. That being said, if transhumanists attempt to work within the two major parties, they will just contribute infinitesimally to these gargantuan political machines that have wrongfully subsumed American political discourse. This is exactly what happened to the Futurist Party, which rendered itself irrelevant when it endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2015; it essentially then became just one of the numerous feeder organizations into the Democratic Party, which ultimately benefited the Hillary Clinton campaign. While the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party welcomes all individual transhumanists – including those who also participate in the major political parties in some capacity – it cannot, as an organization, endorse any of the major political parties or their candidates due to the concern that such endorsements would subsume the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party within the partisan fray, where completely unrelated “wedge” issues are used solely to perpetuate animosity and strife at the expense of constructive exploration of future possibilities.

Contrary to the opinions of the former TNC Chair, the value of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (or any other standalone transhumanist organization, for that matter) is that it can stand above that toxic fray and look toward long-term policy solutions and shifting the climate of ideas. It does not matter if we can elect candidates to the office in the immediate future (although James Schultz and I put forth valiant efforts in 2018). We will, of course, continue to endorse other independent or nonpartisan candidates in the coming years and use each electoral race as an educational opportunity. Our nomination process for the 2020 Presidential election will hopefully attract unprecedented participation within the transhumanist community as well as considerable external interest in transhumanist political discourse. Our main vision, however, is far longer-term. The key is for the Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party to exist and to remain active in the meantime, with whatever resources and volunteer efforts are available at its disposal. This dynamic of activity and gradual growth is one that I believe can be sustained indefinitely until a power vacuum arises when the two main parties implode. (This will happen eventually, but it is impossible to predict when.) If the Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party is ready to step into the vacuum and, in the meantime, establishes a reputation for respectable, thoughtful discourse, advocacy, and activism, then it may be possible to become a major player on the political scene virtually overnight once that power vacuum forms. In the meantime, we should continue gradually, patiently building up the infrastructure that would enable us to take advantage of that inflection point.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party continues to grow in membership and expand its reach. An easy and highly effective contribution that anyone can make is to sign up for free membership, which takes less than a minute and brings additional benefits to the member. The TNC and its statements are now only part of history, but we have a future to build. As Chairman of the sole surviving political transhumanist organization in the United States, I am committed to preserving and growing a distinctive alternative to the two main political parties, whose very existence and example in deed are what transhumanists need in order to overcome the continually downward-spiraling political “mainstream” in the United States. The path toward this goal includes the necessity of achieving a widespread recognition of common purpose or at least non-antagonism within the transhumanist movement itself. Eventually a vacuum will form within the political landscape, and the party that survives with integrity will be the one that gets to fill that vacuum. Anyone who wishes to join us in taking the high road toward transhumanist unity and the next era of our civilization is welcome to do so.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, January 26, 2019

Discount for RAAD Fest 2019 Registration Until January 31, 2019 – The U.S. Transhumanist Party Will Be There on October 3-6, 2019

Discount for RAAD Fest 2019 Registration Until January 31, 2019 – The U.S. Transhumanist Party Will Be There on October 3-6, 2019

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The U.S. Transhumanist Party will again have a presence at RAAD Fest in 2019 at the fourth RAAD Fest in Las Vegas during October 3-6, 2019. RAAD Fest has been an excellent venue for building alliances and collaborations among supporters of longevity, health, and technological advancement and interfacing with a multiplicity of perspectives on these areas and their relation to politics and policy.

To find out more and register, visit the RAAD Fest website at https://www.raadfest.com/. A 10% discount on the cost of registration applies until January 31, 2019.

Watch the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s prior appearances at RAAD Fests in 2017 and 2018 below. You will want to be present for what we have planned in 2019!

RAAD Fest 2017

The U.S. Transhumanist Party – Pursuing a Peaceful Political Revolution for Longevity – August 11, 2017

Advocating for the Future – Panel at RAAD Fest 2017 – Gennady Stolyarov II, Zoltan Istvan, Max More, Ben Goertzel,

RAAD Fest 2018

The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Four Years of Advocating for the Future – Gennady Stolyarov II at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 21, 2018

Gennady Stolyarov II Interviews Ray Kurzweil at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 21, 2018

U.S. Transhumanist Party Meeting at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 22, 2018

Andrés Grases Interviews Gennady Stolyarov II on Transhumanism and the Transition to the Next Technological Era – September 23, 2018

 

Gennady Stolyarov II Interviews Ray Kurzweil at RAAD Fest 2018

Gennady Stolyarov II Interviews Ray Kurzweil at RAAD Fest 2018

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Ray Kurzweil

The Stolyarov-Kurzweil Interview has been released at last! Watch it on YouTube here.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II posed a wide array of questions for inventor, futurist, and Singularitarian Dr. Ray Kurzweil on September 21, 2018, at RAAD Fest 2018 in San Diego, California. Topics discussed include advances in robotics and the potential for household robots, artificial intelligence and overcoming the pitfalls of AI bias, the importance of philosophy, culture, and politics in ensuring that humankind realizes the best possible future, how emerging technologies can protect privacy and verify the truthfulness of information being analyzed by algorithms, as well as insights that can assist in the attainment of longevity and the preservation of good health – including a brief foray into how Ray Kurzweil overcame his Type 2 Diabetes.

Learn more about RAAD Fest here. RAAD Fest 2019 will occur in Las Vegas during October 3-6, 2019.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our Membership Application Form.

Watch the presentation by Gennady Stolyarov II at RAAD Fest 2018, entitled, “The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Four Years of Advocating for the Future”.

Advocating for the Future – Panel at RAAD Fest 2017 – Gennady Stolyarov II, Zoltan Istvan, Max More, Ben Goertzel, Natasha Vita-More

Advocating for the Future – Panel at RAAD Fest 2017 – Gennady Stolyarov II, Zoltan Istvan, Max More, Ben Goertzel, Natasha Vita-More

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Zoltan Istvan
Max More
Ben Goertzel
Natasha Vita-More

Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, moderated this panel discussion, entitled “Advocating for the Future”, at RAAD Fest 2017 on August 11, 2017, in San Diego, California.

Watch it on YouTube here.

From left to right, the panelists are Zoltan Istvan, Gennady Stolyarov II, Max More, Ben Goertzel, and Natasha Vita-More. With these leading transhumanist luminaries, Mr. Stolyarov discussed subjects such as what the transhumanist movement will look like in 2030, artificial intelligence and sources of existential risk, gamification and the use of games to motivate young people to create a better future, and how to persuade large numbers of people to support life-extension research with at least the same degree of enthusiasm that they display toward the fight against specific diseases.

Learn more about RAAD Fest here.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our Membership Application Form.

Watch the presentations of Gennady Stolyarov II and Zoltan Istvan from the “Advocating for the Future” panel.

Consumerism Qua Materialism: A Modern Confusion – Article by Kaiter Enless

Consumerism Qua Materialism: A Modern Confusion – Article by Kaiter Enless

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Kaiter Enless

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party has published this article by our member Kaiter Enless, originally posted on the Logos website,  to illustrate the importance of clarity in the use of philosophical terms. Mr. Enless articulates a distinction between materialism and consumerism that is often missing from contemporary discourse; this is particularly needed, as popular thinking regarding materialism indeed tends to be quite muddled and too often associates materialist philosophical frameworks with the kind of consumerism that is alleged to be problematic. Many transhumanists are ontological materialists and seek to more effectively harness the material world and its workings for human benefit. If the false equivalency between this approach and stereotypical consumerism can be dispelled, this would assist with the public acceptance of the transhumanist worldview and aspirations. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, January 9, 2019

Materialism has become a rather dirty word, principally through its connection to consumerism. Indeed materialism seems to have become so thoroughly conflated with consumerism as to be wholly indistinguishable. For example, in the study, Changes In Materialism, Changes In Psychological Well-Being: Evidence For Three Longitudinal Studies & An Intervention Experiment, the authors write: “Studies 1, 2, and 3 examined how changes in materialistic aspirations related to changes in well-being, using varying time frames (12 years, 2 years, and 6 months), samples (US young adults and Icelandic adults), and measures of materialism and well-being.”

It would be mistaken to conflate a philosophy of materialism, with mere consumerism as behavioral practice. I am not here suggesting that this is what the authors of the document have done (indeed, it appears as if they are simply using ‘materialism’ as a placeholder for ‘material object; principally, those objects manufactured and distributed in modern western society’), however, at first glance, it is difficult to tell and this is the crux of the problem. When one word is conflated with another, after a sufficient period of usage the two become implicitly associated, regardless of whether they are actually interlaced in any meaningful way. Thus, when one deploys the term ‘consumerism’ one instantly thinks of ‘materialism’ and vice-versa. This, I shall argue, is wholly mistaken; however, before proceeding, let us define our terms.

Consumerism is a term which rose to prominence in the 20th Century with the advent of mass production and denotes a social order wherein goods are purchased and used (‘consumed’) in ever increasing quantities. It has a few other more technical definitions, however, this is generally the explicit meaning of the term when it is negatively deployed (and it is almost always negatively deployed, at least, as of this writing, though positive variations of the term were used, such as by J. S. Bugas who deployed the word to refer to consumer sovereignty). In this negative characterization, consumerism is keeping-up-with-the-Jones or Patrick Batemanism — normative behaviors which privilege non-noetic objects over noetic ones with the exception of the referent consumer (the individual who is consuming the non-noetic objects, who naturally does so, not because they care solely about the objects themselves, but because they gain something from the consumption of those objects).

Materialism, broadly, briskly and vulgarly speaking, is a philosophical position generally characterized by substance monism, which holds that because everything which has been observed is energy and matter, it is rational to conclude everything that exists is (or is likely to be) composed of energy and matter (the same inductive reasoning is at work in expanding the theory of gravity to all places in the universe, even those wholly unobserved). As a school of thought, it has gone through numerous incarnations ranging from Democritus the atomist, to the cosmic mechanists prior to Newton, to the scientistic physicalists of the modern age (such as Hawking, Krauss and Dawkins).

More rigorous, sophisticated and logically defensible forms of ontological naturalism (sometimes referred to as ‘realism’ in contradistinction to ‘idealism’) which have been referred to as various materialisms can be found in the work of such philosophers as Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell and Jeremy Randel Koons, and the neuroscientist, Paul M. Churchland.

Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the ontological assertions or arguments of any variation of materialism – atomist, mechanist, Sellarsian or eliminativist – it should be clearly noted that consumerism is a descriptive set of social practices, not a holistic formal ontology. One may be a Buddhist, Christian, Muslim or Daoist and still be a consumerist. Indeed, the vast majority of those who have ever lived western consumerist lifestyles within modern society have been Christians (principally Catholics and Protestants), not scientistic materialists (as is sometimes alleged); this is demonstrable simply by reference to religio-demographic composition, as most consumer societies were, from their inception, constituted by Christians who are, obviously, non-materialists (philosophically speaking). Of course, it is perfectly possible to be a stalwart materialist (in the philosophical sense) and still be a consumerist, but it is not intrinsic to the position.

Drawing a clear distinction between materialism and consumerism is important given that because consumerism has become so thoroughly disdained, referent to it likewise besmirches any materialist ontology through negative moral assignation, RATHER than through rigorous logical refutation, thus engendering an impairment, not only of the thorough-going materialist diagrams, but also of critical, logical thought itself.

Kaiter Enless is the administrator and principal author of the Logos website and literary organization.

Fractal of 85 – Art by Gennady Stolyarov II

Fractal of 85 – Art by Gennady Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II

Fractal of 85 – by Gennady Stolyarov II

Note: Left-click on this image to get a full view of this digital work of fractal art.

This fractal was created by U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II as a present from one mathematician to another, based on 85-fold rotational symmetry for the 85th Birthday of his grandfather and namesake, Gennady Stolyarov I, on October 24, 2018. Notice how the rings can continue to stack along their orbit.

Gennady Stolyarov I, upon seeing the fractal, remarked that it illustrated to him that an entire lifetime is indeed long. However, in the view of Gennady Stolyarov II, it should be made even longer!

This digital artwork was created by Mr. Stolyarov in Apophysis, a free program that facilitates deliberate manipulation of randomly generated fractals into intelligible shapes.

This fractal is an extension of Mr. Stolyarov’s artistic style of Abstract Orderism, whose goal is the creation of abstract objects that are appealing by virtue of their geometric intricacy — a demonstration of the order that man can both discover in the universe and bring into existence through his own actions and applications of the laws of nature.

Fractal art is based on the idea of the spontaneous order – which is pivotal in economics, culture, and human civilization itself. Now, using computer technology, spontaneous orders can be harnessed in individual art works as well.

Blockchains Instead of Beggars: Could Cryptocurrencies Unleash Universal Basic Income? – Article by Nicole Sallak Anderson

Blockchains Instead of Beggars: Could Cryptocurrencies Unleash Universal Basic Income? – Article by Nicole Sallak Anderson

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Nicole Sallak Anderson

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this article by Nicole Sallak Anderson as part of our ongoing integration with the Transhuman Party. This article posits a creative approach toward fulfilling one of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s objectives – the achievement of a Universal Basic Income (which is advocated for in our Platform and in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0). We advocate a wide variety of emerging technologies, including cryptocurrencies, as well, and we endeavor to contemplate ways in which such technologies can solve deep-rooted societal problems by altering people’s incentives, hopefully in positive directions. This article was written in February 2018, just past the peak of the cryptocurrency bubble, but it looks beyond that bubble and envisions more sustainable functions for cryptocurrencies beyond speculation – for instance, achieving the goal of providing a basic income and integrating activities that create external value in the community with rewards for the individuals who engage in such activities. We continue to encourage our members to contemplate possibilities for implementing a Universal Basic Income in realistic ways that would harness new technologies for incremental progress toward the goal and would not require revolutionizing the entire world at once. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, January 6, 2019

Cryptocurrencies are America’s latest capitalist playthings—from Bitcoin’s Christmas surprise of over $14K per coin, to the Bitcoin Cash fork of August 2017 and BitFury’s success in negotiating blockchain contracts in both Georgia and Dubai, cryptocurrencies, and the technology that powers them, went from being anarchists’ obscure hobby to the latest shiny object that the financial markets are drooling over. While cryptocurrencies are still a ways off from becoming actual currencies that can be used to exchange goods, they have proven to be valuable assets in today’s markets. Moreover, the blockchain technology that underpins said currencies has begun to gain momentum as an advanced application for the encryption and storage of data. Many see it as the natural evolution in the digital age.

For those of you who don’t know what blockchain technology is read here, or if you’re interested in cryptocurrencies in general, read here. People much savvier than I can teach you the technical details. Today I want to discuss practical implementations.

In the past two years, cryptocurrencies have made a lot of young people, and already rich old people, very rich. Cryptocoins and blockchain applications are the latest innovation to encourage the American rags-to-riches mythos, and I don’t see their bubbles popping anytime soon. Yet is seems like all of this is creating just another set of 1% who are wealthy, while most miss the boat completely, and this is the complete opposite of what many of the early adopters had envisioned—rather than creating a new cryptoclass, the blockchain was supposed to emancipate humanity.

This has me thinking…how could blockchain technology be used to create currencies that support a universal income? I’ve written before about universal basic income, from both a practical perspective and a feminist perspective. Most people argue there isn’t enough money out there to create a sustainable world where everyone is fed. I’ve long called bulls**t on this. Technologically we can now feed the world, so what’s holding us back? The food can be farmed in labs and it can be distributed to the most remote locations on Earth. Why then, does much of it rot in holding areas? Or never even get planted, while children die of starvation in our streets? Even in America, child poverty is rising with 30.4 million children daily in our country using the National School Lunch Program in their schools.

To me, the growing poverty in the “Land of Opportunity” is a universal lack of love on every citizen’s part, not a money problem. However, if everyone’s convinced that there aren’t enough American dollars to go around so that we can guarantee housing, food, and clothing to our fellow brothers and sisters, then perhaps it’s time to make more money, and not the kind you can hold in your wallet.

The way to create a new economy based on care and commonwealth may be to create a new currency with community as its only goal, rather than profit and greed, and what better way to do this than with a cryptocurrency? Why not build a crypto-token that is secure, hard to hack and trackable, whose purpose was to provide liquid resources to the most vulnerable members of society?

This last feature – traceability – is very important.  In principle it would be a clear advantage over fiat currency welfare systems, since the cash economy is only partially measurable in terms of mapping demographic groups to purchase/usage patterns. For fun, let’s call the new currency, LifeCoin, created not to get a bunch of miners and traders rich, but instead to be shared from person to person, growing as we all grow in wealth, a true peer-to-peer network both technically and socially.

A currency whose aim is to provide a universal basic income would need to have the following properties:

1)      It would need to be easily distributed to all citizens in the network 18 and over. Thus, a wallet that accepted LifeCoin, identifiable by the currency platform would need to be created.

2)      It would need to be accepted by all businesses that provide shelter (banks, landlords, etc.), food, clothing and healthcare. Thus a networked payment system that accepted LifeCoin and linked up to user’s wallets would need to be created. It needs to be seamless and provide incentives to services providers for honoring the LifeCoins as currency, thus the traditional fee structures in place for money exchange would need adjustment.

3)      It would need the ability to be changed into other currencies at the owner’s discretion. Thus the LifeCoin would need to be accepted on a decent number of exchanges.

This is a minimum list of technological needs, but at its most basic, a currency needs to be able to flow throughout the society if it’s going to be a true universal basic income solution.

Essentially there are two ways the LifeCoin could be created, either by the government, or by us, the citizens in an act of goodwill.

How could a government create and issue LifeCoin responsibly? There are probably many answers to this, but I think LifeCoin could be implemented by local governments that are looking to use blockchain technologies to manage and secure their data. Governments collect more than taxes, they’ve long been keeping track of our data, such as births, deaths, marriages, land titles, county employee information, driver’s license information, school information, health information and even voting registration and ballots. All of this information needs to be managed, and many governments are starting to consider using blockchain technology to do just that. Take the country of Georgia, who has uploaded over 100,000 land titles to a blockchain network created by BitFury. They have decided that using blockchain smart contracts will help them prove land ownership as Russia slowly begins to occupy more and more of their land. Dubai has also decided to use the Ethereum architecture to manage its data and bring their country into the 21st century.

Many other countries have taken notice. In Haiti, for example, after the earthquake in 2010, the first building to fall into ruin was the building that held all of their public records. In seconds, all the paperwork that documented who owned what land was gone. My own town of Santa Cruz, CA, is always under earthquake threat, could moving their local government data to a blockchain system help them in the long run? Of course it can.

Money will be saved by adopting these new technologies for data management. According to an article in August 2017, the government of Dubai expects to, “Reduce the cost of document processing by billions of dollars through eliminating manual processing of residencies, passport documentation and visas through a partnership with ConsenSys.”

Billions of dollars, eh? And what to do with those savings? Why not redistribute them back into the community as a universal basic income? This can be done by tokenizing the endeavor, and backing the initial release of the coins with the savings the governmental entity receives.

As governments begin to implement various blockchain schemes to manage their data it is the ideal moment for them to tokenize the blockchain ledger they’re creating and distribute those tokens to their citizens as a universal basic income.

Consider Santa Cruz. Recently named the fourth most expensive place to live in the nation, it is estimated that our cost of living is 81% higher than the national average and our housing costs are 208% higher than the national average. When I drive down the street near town, I see tents nestled in along the highway, back near the fences and hidden in tall grasses. At night, when you pass our city hall, the courtyard is filled with people in sleeping bags, trying to find a place to sleep. Beggars line our downtown mall. Truly if any town needed a universal basic income, it’s ours.

Perhaps UBI begins at home with our local city council opting to invest in building a blockchain ledger using Ethereum to manage all contracts regarding land in the county as well as all legal documentation and contracts stored in the courthouse. The project includes tokens that are backed by the city at first with the monies annually saved by efficiently managing and securing their data. These tokens are distributed evenly to every citizen over 18 on a monthly basis.

As time goes on, more data can be added to the ledger and with each savings by switching from the manual handling of the data to digital networks doing the job, that money is used to issue new coins to citizens. The basic income could start at one number, say $500/month with the intention of growing to a final amount that can sustain a human being within the county.

In addition, more tokens are created as incentives to encourage people to enter the system as miners to help maintain the ledger. This is the decentralization aspect, the data is stored across hundreds of servers rather than just one. Thus everyone gets a set amount, but those who mine create more coins that they can use to purchase items in the community, or trade on the exchange, thus increasing the value of the tokens. Tokens can also be given to businesses as a means of encouraging them to accept LifeCoin as payment for their goods and services. With time, the currency spreads throughout the city and county, and as a result is accepted at more and more locations. None of this is because we “took” money from somewhere else. Using blockchain technologies, money was freed up to invest in a new currency, one that exists for the sole purpose of providing a living to our citizens.

Now, this is a very basic sketch of the system, and one I’m not able to complete. I’m merely putting it out there as something to debate and discuss, with the hopes that minds much more crypto than mine can see that their work has this potential. And perhaps to get the political dialogue rolling. This has to start somewhere and we can’t wait for our federal government to help. I also realize that as with any monetary system, cryptocurrencies may not be able to address the potential inflation and deflation associated with a universal basic income.

My good friend and fellow Medium writer, John Eden, put it perfectly:

“My view is that the real worry about crypto-powered UBI has nothing to do with the power of the blockchain from a tech POV.  The problem is that any economic system with a fixed or variable amount of tokens can and will experience inflation and deflation.  To me, this basic economic fact can’t in any way to neutralized by blockchain.  The implication of this is that the token one designs for UBI must be created in partnership with some pretty thoughtful economists so that a method of adjusting the value of the token relative to the wider economy is built into the token infrastructure.  After all, you don’t want to create LifeCoin only to see inflation ruin it’s core purpose – i.e., giving the most vulnerable members of society the ability to live a decent life.”

I’m not sure where we’d find those thoughtful economists. Can our local governments implement a token system to help the poor while keeping in mind the long term economic monetary policy goals? The blockchain might not save us from this issue, but the currency created can be set up with a new set of rules than our regular fiat, especially since it would be it’s own new market, individualized at the local level. We’ve been manipulating the markets forever, is it any different for a township to create it’s own currency to establish a standard of living?

We could also leave the government out of this and instead take responsibility as private citizens, creating a universal reward token ourselves. Private citizens can create a coin that is then given to those who need it. This work has already begun. GrantCoin was established in 2015 with the intent of providing a UBI to those who meet their criteria. However, this feels more like charitable handouts than a true UBI, for it’s still based on need, which requires judgement by a group of people who get to determine whether or not you really need it. Universal Basic Income is not only about providing the basics to all in a world of plenty, it’s also about freeing us from the judgments of others. We all receive a universal basic income, that’s what makes it universal, and we’re trusted to do what we should with it. Still, GrantCoin is a good start.

Another idea that caught my eye was the concept of gamifying cryptocurrencies as a means of deploying them. In an incredibly passionate plea to save cryptocurrencies from big business, author Daniel Jeffries writes,

“By gamifying money distribution, we spread it far and wide across the playing field, as fast as possible, and guarantee that the system becomes viable. We bootstrap the system from banana republic to global powerhouse. That will bring powerful economic players into the system, who will then be incentivized to protect it and expand it.

If we move swiftly, we can unleash the true power of the blockchain to unlock the frozen reserves of human potential, rise from the ashes of our crumbling political systems and rocket into a whole new level of economic potential and development.”

He goes on to explain how by using a killer gaming app along with a universal reward token, one could possibly build a cryptocurrency that is completely decentralized with the possibility to not only fund life, but allow the movement to build into smart contracts and other aspects of civilization. Instead of the government initiating the move to the blockchain, private citizens do it for each other, via games so fun to play, we play them for a living. His article is a worthy read if this sort of idea floats your boat.

This may seem a bit pie in the sky, and on some level it is, but when thinking about the future of money we have the ability to write a whole new story, so why not base it upon joy and games?

Regardless, as financial firms explore the possibilities that platforms like Ethereum bring, it may benefit us to begin to probe our local governments into doing the same. However, instead of keeping the profits for themselves, they could the adventure to create new systems of money that promote life and health for all citizens.

Nicole Sallak Anderson is Computer Science graduate from Purdue University, and former CTO for a small Silicon Valley startup, turned novelist and blogger, focusing on the intersection of technology and consciousness. In addition to rebooting her eHuman series, she recently sold a historical fantasy trilogy about the Great Egyptian Revolt of 200 B.C. She currently lives in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains in California with her husband and teen-aged sons, where she raises goats and bees. She enjoys spinning, knitting, playing the bass, and dancing, particularly the tango. Visit her blog at eHumanity: The Intersection of Consciousness and Technology. 

The Singularity: Fact or Fiction or Somewhere In-Between? – Article by Gareth John

The Singularity: Fact or Fiction or Somewhere In-Between? – Article by Gareth John

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Gareth John

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this article by our member Gareth John, originally published by IEET on January 13, 2016, as part of our ongoing integration with the Transhuman Party. This article raises various perspectives about the idea of technological Singularity and asks readers to offer their perspectives regarding how plausible the Singularity narrative, especially as articulated by Ray Kurzweil, is. The U.S. Transhumanist Party welcomes such deliberations and assessments of where technological progress may be taking our species and how rapid such progress might be – as well as how subject to human influence and socio-cultural factors technological progress is, and whether a technological Singularity would be characterized predominantly by benefits or by risks to humankind. The article by Mr. John is a valuable contribution to the consideration of such important questions.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, January 2, 2019

In my continued striving to disprove the theorem that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, I shall now proceed to ask one. What’s the consensus on Ray Kurzweil’s position concerning the coming Singularity? [1] Do you as transhumanists accept his premise and timeline, or do you feel that a) it’s a fiction, or b) it’s a reality but not one that’s going to arrive anytime soon? Is it as inevitable as Kurzweil suggests, or is it simply millenarian daydreaming in line with the coming Rapture?

According to Wikipedia (yes, I know, but I’m learning as I go along), the first use of the term ‘singularity’ in this context was made by Stanislav Ulam in his 1958 obituary for John von Neumann, in which he mentioned a conversation with von Neumann about the ‘ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’. [2] The term was popularised by mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological advancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. [3]  Kurzweil cited von Neumann’s use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann’s classic The Computer and the Brain. [4]

Kurzweil predicts the singularity to occur around 2045 [5] whereas Vinge predicts some time before 2030 [6]. In 2012, Stuart Armstrong and Kaj Sotala published a study of AGI predictions by both experts and non-experts and found a wide range of predicted dates, with a median value of 2040. [7] Discussing the level of uncertainty in AGI estimates, Armstrong stated at the 2012 Singularity Summit: ‘It’s not fully formalized, but my current 80% estimate is something like five to 100 years.’ [8]

Speaking for myself, and despite the above, I’m not at all convinced that a Singularity will occur, i.e. one singular event that effectively changes history for ever from that precise moment moving forward. From my (admittedly limited) research on the matter, it seems far more realistic to think of the future in terms of incremental steps made along the way, leading up to major diverse changes (plural) in the way we as human beings – and indeed all sentient life – live, but try as I might I cannot get my head around these all occurring in a near-contemporary Big Bang.

Surely we have plenty of evidence already that the opposite will most likely be the case? Scientists have been working on AI, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, robotics, et al., for many years and I see no reason to conclude that this won’t remain the case in the years to come. Small steps leading to big changes maybe, but perhaps not one giant leap for mankind in a singular convergence of emerging technologies?

Let’s be straight here: I’m not having a go at Kurzweil or his ideas – the man’s clearly a visionary (at least from my standpoint) and leagues ahead when it comes to intelligence and foresight. I’m simply interested as to what extent his ideas are accepted by the wider transhumanist movement.

There are notable critics (again leagues ahead of me in critically engaging with the subject) who argue against the idea of the Singularity. Nathan Pensky, writing in 2014 says:

It’s no doubt true that the speculative inquiry that informed Kurzweil’s creation of the Singularity also informed his prodigious accomplishment in the invention of new tech. But just because a guy is smart doesn’t mean he’s always right. The Singularity makes for great science-fiction, but not much else. [9]

Other well-informed critics have also dismissed Kurzweil’s central premise, among them Professor Andrew Blake, managing director of Microsoft at Cambridge, Jaron Lanier, Paul Allen, Peter Murray, Jeff Hawkins, Gordon Moore, Jared Diamond, and Steven Pinker to name but a few. Even Noam Chomsky has waded in to categorically deny the possibility of such. Pinker writes:

There is not the slightest reason to believe in the coming singularity. The fact you can visualise a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible… Sheer processing is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems. [10]

There are, of course, many more critics, but then there are also many supporters also, and Kurzweil rarely lets a criticism pass without a fierce rebuttal. Indeed, new academic interdisciplinary disciplines have been founded in part on the presupposition of the Singularity occurring in line with Kurzweil’s predictions (along with other phenomena that pose the possibility of existential risk). Examples include Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University or the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.

Given the above and returning to my original question: how do transhumanists taken as a whole rate the possibility of an imminent Singularity as described by Kurzweil? Good science or good science-fiction? For Kurzweil it is the pace of change – exponential growth – that will result in a runaway effect – an intelligence explosion– where smart machines design successive generations of increasingly powerful machines, creating intelligence far exceeding human intellectual capacity and control. Because the capabilities of such a super intelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence. [11] The only way for us to participate in such an event will be by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating.

And I guess this is what is hard for me to fathom. We are creating these machines with all our mixed-up, blinkered, prejudicial, oppositional minds, aims, and values. We as human beings, however intelligent, are an absolutely necessary part of the picture that I think Kurzweil sometimes underestimates. I’m more inclined to agree with Jamais Cascio when he says:

I don’t think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late followers learn from the dilemmas of those who had initially encountered the disruptive change. [12]

So I’d love to know what you think. Are you in Kurzweil’s corner waiting for that singular moment in 2045 when the world as we know it stops for an instant… and then restarts in a glorious new utopian future? Or do you agree with Kurzweil but harbour serious fears that the whole ‘glorious new future’ may not be on the cards and we’re all obliterated in the newborn AGI’s capriciousness or gray goo? Or, are you a moderate, maintaining that a Singularity, while almost certain to occur, will pass unnoticed by those waiting? Or do you think it’s so much baloney?

Whatever, I’d really value your input and hear your views on the subject.

NOTES

1. As stated below, the term Singularity was in use before Kurweil’s appropriation of it. But as shorthand I’ll refer to his interpretation and predictions relating to it throughout this article.

2. Carvalko, J, 2012, ‘The Techno-human Shell-A Jump in the Evolutionary Gap.’ (Mechanicsburg: Sunbury Press)

3. Ulam, S, 1958, ‘ Tribute to John von Neumann’, 64, #3, part 2. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. p. 5

4. Vinge, V, 2013, ‘Vernor Vinge on the Singularity’, San Diego State University. Retrieved Nov 2015

5. Kurzweil R, 2005, ‘The Singularity is Near’, (London: Penguin Group)

6. Vinge, V, 1993, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era’, originally in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129

7. Armstrong S and Sotala, K, 2012 ‘How We’re Predicting AI – Or Failing To’, in Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams, edited by Jan Romportl, Pavel Ircing, Eva Zackova, Michal Polak, and Radek Schuster (Pilsen: University of West Bohemia) https://intelligence.org/files/PredictingAI.pdf

8. Armstrong, S, ‘How We’re Predicting AI’, from the 2012 Singularity Conference

9. Pensky, N, 2014, article taken from Pando. https://goo.gl/LpR3eF

10. Pinker S, 2008, IEEE Spectrum: ‘Tech Luminaries Address Singularity’. http://goo.gl/ujQlyI

11. Wikipedia, ‘Technological Singularity; Retrieved Nov 2015. https://goo.gl/nFzi2y

12. Cascio, J, ‘New FC: Singularity Scenarios’ article taken from Open the Future. http://goo.gl/dZptO3

Gareth John lives in Cardiff, UK and is a trainee social researcher with an interest in the intersection of emerging technologies with behavioural and mental health. He has an MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of Bristol. He is also a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party. 

HISTORICAL COMMENTS

Gareth,

Thank you for the thoughtful article. I’m emailing to comment on the blog post, though I can’t tell when it was written. You say that you don’t believe the singularity will necessarily occur the way Kurzweil envisions, but it seems like you slightly mischaracterize his definition of the term.

I don’t believe that Kurzweil ever meant to suggest that the singularity will simply consist of one single event that will change everything. Rather, I believe he means that the singularity is when no person can make any prediction past that point in time when a $1,000 computer becomes smarter than the entire human race, much like how an event horizon of a black hole prevents anyone from seeing past it.

Given that Kurzweil’s definition isn’t an arbitrary claim that everything changes all at once, I don’t see how anyone can really argue with whether the singularity will happen. After all, at some point in the future, even if it happens much slower than Kurzweil predicts, a $1,000 computer will eventually become smarter than every human. When this happens, I think it’s fair to say no one is capable of predicting the future of humanity past that point. Would you disagree with this?

Even more important is that although many of Kurzweil’s predictions are untrue about when certain products will become commercially available to the general public, all the evidence I’ve seen about the actual trend of the law of accelerating returns seems to be exactly spot on. Maybe this trend will slow down, or stop, but it hasn’t yet. Until it does, I think the law of accelerating returns, and Kurzweil’s singularity, deserve the benefit of the doubt.

[…]

Thanks,

Rich Casada

Hi Rich,
Thanks for the comments. The post was written back in 2015 for IEET, and represented a genuine ask from the transhumanist community. At that time my priority was to learn what I could, where I could, and not a lot’s changed for me since – I’m still learning!

I’m not sure I agree that Kurzweil’s definition isn’t a claim that ‘everything changes at once’. In The Singularity is Near, he states:

“So we will be producing about 1026 to 1029 cps of nonbiological computation per year in the early 2030s. This is roughly equal to our estimate for the capacity of all living biological human intelligence … This state of computation in the early 2030s will not represent the Singularity, however, because it does not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence. By the mid-2040s, however, that one thousand dollars’ worth of computation will be equal to 1026 cps, so the intelligence created per year (at a total cost of about $1012) will be about one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. That will indeed represent a profound change, and it is for that reason that I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045.” (Kurzweil 2005, pp.135-36, italics mine).

Kurzweil specifically defines what the Singularity is and isn’t (a profound and disruptive transformation in human intelligence), and a more-or-less precise prediction of when it will occur. A consequence of that may be that we will not ‘be able to make any prediction past that point in time’, however, I don’t believe this is the main thrust of Kurzweil’s argument.

I do, however, agree with what you appear to be postulating (correct me if I’m wrong) in that a better definition of a Singularity might indeed simply be ‘when no person can make any prediction past that point in time.’ And, like you, I don’t believe it will be tied to any set-point in time. We may be living through a singularity as we speak. There may be many singularities (although, worth noting again, Kurzweil reserves the term “singularity” for a rapid increase in artificial intelligence as opposed to other technologies, writing for example that, “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains … There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (Kurzweil 2005, p. 9)

So, having said all that, and in answer to your question of whether there is a point beyond which no one is capable of predicting the future of humanity: I’m not sure. I guess none of us can really be sure until, or unless, it happens.

This is why I believe having the conversation about the ethical implications of these new technologies now is so important. Post-singularity might simply be too late.

Gareth

U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for the First Quarter of 2019

U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for the First Quarter of 2019

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The purpose of this post is to facilitate member comments pertaining to transhumanism and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, which might not specifically fit the subjects of any other post or article on the U.S. Transhumanist Party website. This is the place for members to offer suggestions or converse about any areas of emerging technologies and their political, moral, societal, cultural, and esthetic implications. The general discussion thread is also an ideal location to suggest or propose platform planks that may be considered for future platform voting.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party will endeavor to open one of these general comment threads per quarter. This comment thread pertains to the months of January, February, and March 2019.

Type in your comments below. Please note that, to protect against spambots, the first comment by any individual will be moderated. After passing moderation, a civil commenter should be able to post comments without future moderation – although we cannot guarantee that the technical aspect of this functionality will work as intended 100% of the time.

2019 New Year’s Message – A Call for Medical Progress and Preservation of the Good – Article by Victor Bjoerk

2019 New Year’s Message – A Call for Medical Progress and Preservation of the Good – Article by Victor Bjoerk

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Victor Bjoerk

I celebrated the end of 2018 like normally with neuroscientist Anders Sandberg and several other “transhumanists” or “technoprogressive people” in Stockholm!

Why am I in that place to start with? Well, I’m quite frustrated with the human condition in the first place; I’ve always questioned everything from social norms and different kinds of problems in the world, and there’s still so much misery around that we need to unite and fix. (I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true!)

As people reading this know, the vast majority of human misery worldwide today occurs due to our bodies damaging themselves with the passage of time, the biological process we call aging. This occurs because evolution has no goals and our ancestors died at the age of 30-40 prehistorically, and therefore there was no pressure for evolution to create humans that could repair themselves molecularly to live thousands of years. The closest we get among Eukaryotes/Vertebrates are Greenland sharks, which can live to 500+ years; that is easy to understand since they have no predators and just have to open their mouths to get their daily food. On the opposite side we have as a prominent example the mouse, with a very poor molecular repair system and subsequent 2.5-year lifespan, easy to understand when you realize how dangerous life is in the wild if having a mouse body.

Thanks to our technology, we have created the “paradise Greenland shark scenario” for humans during the past century essentially, creating very comfortable existences where nearly everyone survives.

So if you’re 25 years old, life is really great nowadays in Western countries (unless you like to complain about everything!); the existential risks are so low in the absence of aging that you would live many thousands of years just by being a young person living in Sweden.

So I’ve worked a lot in nursing homes both before and during my studies in molecular biology, and what those people have to endure would be strictly illegal in most countries if we knew how to change it. Imagine if, for example, Saudi Arabia allowed its citizens to age while the Western world had abolished it; wouldn’t Amnesty International intervene?

But what can be done with the human body? Well, I assume quite a lot! We are seeing so many people who can’t stand the medical monopoly and the 17-year bench-to-bedside status quo, which isn’t an abstract academic complaint but which impact their daily lives, so they start self-experimenting with, for example, senolytic medicines to kill their senescent cells, making themselves “younger” in certain aspects, which is pretty cool!

However I’m not someone who constantly calls for change and “progress”; I mean, if something is nice, then why not keep it? As far as I’m concerned, for example, the beautiful architecture from the past can continue to stand for thousands more years. These buildings fulfill their purpose and look nice; I’m quite conservative on those points – but please accelerate the medical research, and it is crucial to spot the techniques that actually do work and to not waste resources on hype!

2018 has brought me many good things, those which one can call “achievements” and those which are not visible. The Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging in Brussels became a success! (And there will be some events during 2019 that I am also announcing for everyone who enjoyed it!)

I’ve been learning a lot about CRISPR and many other techniques both practically and theoretically, though I have not exactly used them to change the world. Medical progress takes forever to achieve, and it’s not exactly helped by a massive web of bureaucracy/hierarchies/prestige/laws, all contributing to slowing down progress for people in need. What can really be done? One needs to focus on the positive and go where the biotech companies can succeed!

So if things are working out for me as I hope now in 2019, I hope being able to really work full time to impact the longevity industry, I really feel like an overripe fruit that needs to get things done, because implementing stuff is what matters and not becoming some passive “longevity encyclopedia”. I’ll keep everyone as usually updated!

So happy new 2019 everyone! And make sure to take good care of yourselves!

Victor Bjoerk has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging. 

Happy New Years – Space Painting by Ekaterinya Vladinakova

Happy New Years – Space Painting by Ekaterinya Vladinakova

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Ekaterinya Vladinakova

“Happy New Years” by Ekaterinya Vladinakova

Left-click on the image for a fuller view. You can also download this painting (3265 by 5000 pixels) here.

Happy New Years – indefinitely many of them! As we celebrate the arrival of 2019, we can find great inspiration in this painting by Ekaterinya Vladinakova. May we someday stand on worlds such as this distant cratered planet and observe nebulas like this one in glorious color.

Ekaterinya Vladinakova is an accomplished digital painter. See her gallery here and her DeviantArt page here.

What President Trump Should Focus on Instead of the Border Wall – Article by Alex Lightman

What President Trump Should Focus on Instead of the Border Wall – Article by Alex Lightman

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Alex Lightman

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party is home to many innovative thinkers who offer more forward-looking and far superior policy solutions than those pursued by either of the major political parties in the United States. This brief article by Alex Lightman, Campaign Director for the California Transhumanist Party, is an example of how even a few constructive, inspiring, big-picture ideas by transhumanists could revolutionize politics for the better and help us construct the next era of our civilization. What could Donald Trump be focusing on instead of his brinksmanship over an unnecessary border wall? Mr. Lightman explores the alternatives here.  

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 24, 2018

I am stunned by this Presidency. If I were President of the United States, I would be obsessively focused on:

 1. Space Migration – Setting up permanent bases and thriving colonies on the moon (for Helium 3, one shuttle load of which could cleanly power the entire US for a few weeks) and Mars (as a base for jumping off to other worlds and mining the asteroid belt).

2. Intelligence Increase – I would focus on raising average IQ from what I believe to be 87 to over 106, equal to the highest national average in Asia. IQ can be raised by 19 points within six weeks.

3. Life Extension – Average life expectancy in the US has dropped three years in a row after 114 years of steady increase that DOUBLED life expectancy. The USA ranks in the 25-50 range in key health measures, including infant mortality. I think a smart Presidency could boost average life expectancy by 5-15 years.

4. Acceleration of Innovation – just implementing the 200-page national innovation plan I was paid to write by the Obama White House would do this. It’s ready to implement and there is nothing comparable to it ever tried by any nation in history.

5. Smart Green Augmented Cities – I can’t understand why Donald Trump, real-estate developer, doesn’t use some of the $20-25 trillion he has to play with during a four-year term to create a novel, brilliant, beautiful, state-of-the-art city that sets a new high standard and serves as an archetype and living laboratory for all future cities.

Instead, the Border Wall is where his head is.

If I were him, I would ask someone like me, “Why are the people from Mexico and Central America coming? What can we do to make their countries successful?” I spent $300,000 or so of my own money figuring this out, and I shared the results with Mexico’s Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Energy, and Director of Sustainability, and they all said my plan made sense.

My point isn’t that I am the only one with a plan. When you are the US government, you can hire thousands of people like me and have them come up with thousands of possible solutions and then implement these solutions.

Trump claims that his art form is the art of the deal. A deal that helped Mexico and Central America be successful would be easy to strike with Democrats.

Alex Lightman, Campaign Director for the California Transhumanist Party, has 25 years of management and social innovation experience and 15 years of chairman and chief executive experience. He is an award-winning inventor with multiple U.S. patents issued or pending and author of over one million published words, including the first book on 4G wireless, and over 150 articles in major publications. He chaired and organized 17 international conferences with engineers, scientists, and government officials since 2002, with the intention of achieving policy breakthroughs related to innovation. He is a world-class innovator and recipient of the first Economist magazine Readers’ Choice Award for “The Innovation that will Most Radically Change the World over the Decade 2010 to 2020” (awarded Oct. 21, 2010, out of 4,000 initial suggestions and votes over 5 months from 200 countries, and from 32 judges). He is the recipient of the 2nd Reader’s Award (the posthumous recipient announced 10/21/2011 was Steve Jobs). He is also the winner of the only SGI Internet 3D contest (both Entertainment and Grand Prize) out of 800 contestants.

Social innovation work includes repeatedly putting almost unknown technologies and innovation-accelerating policies that can leverage the abilities of humanity into the mainstream of media, business, government, foundations, and standards bodies, including virtual reality, augmented reality, Internet Protocol version 6, and 4G wireless broadband, open spectrum, technology transfer to developing countries, unified standards, crowd-sourcing, and collective intelligence, via over 40 US government agencies, over 40 national governments, and via international entities including the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Political credentials include a national innovation plan entitled “The Acceleration of American Innovation” for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, work for U.S. Senator Paul E. Tsongas (D-MA) and on several state campaigns and U.S. presidential campaigns for Democratic candidates (Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt), presentations to the United Nations, and advisory services to the governments of Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Japan, China, Korea, and India, as well as to the U.S. Congress, the White House (via the Office of Management and Budget), the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Information Systems Agency, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Lightman is trained as an engineer at MIT and as a prospective diplomat and policy analyst at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Improving Schooling – Ideas to Move Away from the Assembly-Line Method – Article by Lev Polyakov

Improving Schooling – Ideas to Move Away from the Assembly-Line Method – Article by Lev Polyakov

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logo_bgLev Polyakov

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this guest article by Lev Polyakov to advance the objectives of Section XII of our Platform, which reads, in part, “The United States Transhumanist Party holds that present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all in pursuit of factual knowledge to increase intellectual acuity; promote critical thinking and logic; foster creativity; form an enlightened collective; attain health; secure the bounty of liberty for all sentient entities for our posterity; and forge new ideas, meanings, and values.” It is clear that contemporary systems of mass education are broken in that they fail to encourage creativity, critical thinking, and even the acquisition and retention of knowledge. However, the ideas provided by Mr. Polyakov – which combine an Internet meritocracy with individualized attention to students and the ability of students to take charge of their learning – offer some promising options for elevating the quality of education and reaching more young minds at crucial formative stages. The U.S. Transhumanist Party encourages its members to consider these ideas and to offer their own perspectives. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 23, 2018

Today’s kids have outgrown the top-down-style assembly-line schools, and many rightfully hate them. While I don’t have exact numbers to quote, I can tell you I was not a fan of this approach for sure, and a change would be especially good for most boys who are missing the male role models they would have been able to get were this whole thing to have been structured differently from the bottom up.

Combine an Internet meritocracy (master instructors from anywhere) with smaller groups of kids assigned to an apprentice instructor who learns from the master instructors. Instead of sitting in desks facing one direction, the arrangement could be a circle, whose exchange of information the kids can look forward to. Weather permitting, many classes can take place outdoors, and if a kid doesn’t want to participate, he can go and play with some twigs. Eventually, were the class group itself worth being in more than the twig, he’ll come back to the group. The point here is to have these small circles engaging to the curiosity the kids have. And most kids, if they are younger and less jaded by normal school, will have this curiosity. If you don’t put in the effort on your end, the twig wins.

For apprentices new to teaching a group, they would first be the apprentices to a master teacher who would be teaching kids face to face instead of through the Internet. This would involve some travel for the prospective apprentice, depending on how many of these master teachers are in their area. But the understanding is that with time, the apprentice will become the master, and finding a local master teacher in your area will be easier.

These apprentices will also earn various markers based on their performance and what they learn, which will make them more sought after. Certain strengths of theirs can complete a particular neighborhood’s need for this strength. For example, someone good at math in Neighborhood A could more become aware that he or she is needed in Neighborhood B which already has people good at science and geography.

As far as money is concerned, there can be various methods tried out, but in the end, I think it makes sense to have the remuneration be based on the merit of the teacher and results. Perhaps the compensation could even be based on results measured in the long term, as far as the kids giving testimonials about the teachers when they are older, though how this would result in more money is still not clear.

Lastly, classes would start later (giving more time for kids to sleep).

Follow Lev Polyakov’s Twitter account: https://twitter.com/levpo

Visit the video channel co-hosted by Lev Polyakov and Jules Hamilton, “”. U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II was recently honored to be the first guest ever interviewed on “Lev and Jules Break the Rules”. Watch this interview here. 

Lev Polyakov is an award-winning independent animation director and conceptual artist, whose films were featured on WNET 13, Channel Frederator, and ShortsHD.

Lev Polyakov has been active in the animation world since 2004, starting as an intern for Signe Baumane, one of New York’s most prominent independent animators, and proceeding to write and direct his own animated films. His first short, Piper the Goat and the Peace Pipe, won the first place at the 2005 Ottawa Animation Festival. For his next film, Morning, Day, Evening, Night… and Morning Again, Lev was awarded a grant and an honorary membership from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. During his junior year at SVA, Lev directed and produced Only Love, a 15-minute animated short that premiered at the prestigious Woodstock Film Festival, and has been shown at more than 30 film festivals around the world, winning many first-place awards.

Lev has done work visually appealing character-driven commercial work such as character design, storyboarding, and animation for Giants Are Small’s “Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood” iPad app in partnership with Universal Music; and for the virtual reality studio, The Glimpse Group.

Lev is currently chair of the Art and Technology Committee at the National Arts Club in New York City.

You can see Lev’s work at http://youtube.com/levpolyakov

Follow Lev Polyakov’s Instagram account: https://instagram.com/levpolyakov/

Creating A Physical Map of the Brain – Article by Zena O’Brien

Creating A Physical Map of the Brain – Article by Zena O’Brien

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logo_bgZena O’Brien

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party publishes this article by one of our members, Zena O’Brien, as an example of the creative deliberations we encourage in regard to the design of future technologies and their implementation to improve the human condition. Here Ms. O’Brien writes about a possibility for providing a physical brain map that is both structural and functional through the use of sufficiently advanced cryopreservation techniques. We welcome input from our members regarding this concept.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 22, 2018

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM:

So I have this vague and speculative idea. I was trying to come up with a way of somehow overcoming the resolution and storage problems of brain imaging and mapping. I think of this in case we fail within our lifetimes in attaining the goal of extending life indefinitely. At first I thought of imaging the brain in high spatial and temporal resolution, but instead of storing the exabytes of information, you’d transmit them into space in the form of radio waves. You could transmit the radio waves towards a star or series of stars to be gravitationally slingshot back to Earth and received in maybe 200 or 400 years total from transmission to reception. By that time Earth should have developed a storage device with the capacity to store the information. This would solve the storage problem because you don’t have to create a storage device with such capacity. All you have to do is wait. However this would require you to image a brain in high resolution in the first place, and we don’t have that technology yet. We’d probably need advanced nanotechnology of some sort.

A Possibly More Feasible Solution. A Physical Map:

I want to reiterate that these ideas are vague and highly speculative. I came up with the idea of a physical map to overcome the resolution problem. Why image a brain in high resolution when you could just cryopreserve it? There are a lot of issues with this idea on the offset, but I think they can be overcome. The first is the formation of ice crystals. There is a solution to this already. It’s called vitrification. It has to do with the addition of cryoprotectants that prevent the formation of ice crystals and keep individual water molecules in place as the brain is cooled below freezing. This prevents a lot of damage to the brain that would occur if it was just cryopreserved without cryoprotectants.

You can learn more about vitrification here.

However, from what I’ve read, there is still a problem with fractures due to the nature of storage and not necessarily the process of vitrification. This problem will have to be overcome somehow for this idea to work. And some individuals are already working on it.

To learn more about fractures and solutions, read here.

If we could overcome this hurdle, then so far we would have a physical structural map of the brain. However, something’s missing: the pattern of neural activity before you died. The brain is a complex system, and to have the connections without the patterns of activity would mean that your last experiences before you died wouldn’t be reproducible. There would be no sense of continuity, AND this could really affect the development of your consciousness. This is why I propose finding “markers” that could be introduced to the extracellular fluid in the brain and somehow enter neurons when an action potential occurs and reliably transfer from one neuron to the next as the neurons fire so that these atomic or molecular markers always end up in the neuron that was last fired upon. They would have to not interact with or damage any part of the brain and be unable to affect the voltage of the cells. If we can achieve this, then when a person dies, these markers would indicate to us where the activity stopped. And if the brain is vitrified without fractures, then we have not only a physical structural map but a functional map as well. No need for advanced neuroimaging techniques or storage devices with high capacity. What do you think?

Zena O’Brien is a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, a polymath for social change, and a supporter of life extension. 

A Biohacker’s Letter to Santa – Article by Elena Milova

A Biohacker’s Letter to Santa – Article by Elena Milova

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Elena Milova

Editor’s Note: Happy Holidays! If Santa Claus were real, life extension would be the greatest gift that he could possibly give. Elena Milova convincingly illustrates why in this letter, originally published by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF).

                   ~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, U.S. Transhumanist Party, December 21, 2018

Dear Santa,
My name is Elena Milova, and I am from Moscow, Russia. I am a science popularizer, biohacker, and public health advocate in the field of aging and longevity. I am 39, single, and without children, but if you think that I am reaching out to you to ask for a CRISPR-designed baby, I am not. I believe that this type of wish is rather in the pile of letters from China. I am not asking you for a particular health improvement, as one could not wish for a better HOMA-IR (mine is 0.40, because I greatly reduced fast carbs) or total cholesterol level (below 4 mmol/L). I am fine without a new smartphone, too.

The thing that I am going to ask you for is much more tricky to get. I want everyone on Earth to realize that biological aging is amenable to medical intervention and that treatments targeting various mechanisms of aging are already in human clinical trials. 7.6 billion minds, one idea. That is my only wish.

Why this is so important to me

You have probably noticed yourself that your clientele is changing over time. There are more and more people over 60 in the world, and I assume that the number of wishes for recovery from this or that age-related disease are spiking higher every year. This must be a problem for you, as for many diseases of old age, there is still no effective treatment that would actually help to cure people. It must be frustrating to not be able to fulfill a sincere wish of a good person, especially when a child asks for her grandparents to recover so that they can walk and throw snowballs together.

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017). World Population Prospects 2017 – Data Booklet (ST/ESA/SER.A/401)

By 2050, the elderly will be a quarter of the global population, and these people will likely be suffering from several chronic diseases at once, gradually losing their health, independence and dignity. For so many people, being a burden on their families because of their deteriorating health is unacceptable, which is why the number of suicides in this age group is so high.

Is aging an invisible problem?

The numbers of these voluntary deaths are very upsetting, but what is even more upsetting is that diseases of old age are the major cause of death worldwide and aging kills around 100,000 people every day. This is the population of a small city. Imagine what would happen if everyone in a city like Cambridge, Massachusetts were to die in one day. I bet that there would be a lot of media attention and that thousands of experts would be on television discussing the potential causes of death and ways of preventing this tragedy in the future. Let’s say that the next day, another city becomes deadly peaceful. Take the Russian city of Domodedovo, which has its own airport. Everyone dead. People in neighboring cities would probably be frightened, and some charismatic politicians would be trying to calm down the public and promising to do something about all these deaths. The next day, this happens to yet another city, maybe in India. Then another one in Australia. It would not take long before G20 would set up an urgent conference call to set up an international commission and allocate money and scientists to investigate and solve the problem.

                                                                                                                                              Source: WHO website

Guess what? This type of thing never happens in relation to aging, because people dying from it are spread around the globe, so the disaster does not make the headlines. The public only notices the problem when an actor, scientist, or other significant public figure dies from an age-related disease – most often heart disease, stroke, or cancer. Do you want an example? “Santa Claus, age 90, dies from a heart attack: a critical blow to the industry of giftmaking.”

Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, but you get the point, right? From looking at your pictures, I could suspect that you might have some minor problems with glucose metabolism, but your extensive physical activity during gift delivery should be compensating for that, so you should be fine. For other people aged 60 and older, aging is an ever-increasing problem. Here, we come to the other important issue.

What is aging? How it can be addressed?

You see, aging is the accumulation of damage that happens due to normal bodily functions. This damage builds up over time, normal cell functions erode, and, at some point, this leads to the manifestation of age-related diseases. Normal operations, damage accumulation, disease, more damage, aggravation of disease, death. Simple.

It turns out that at the beginning of this century, British scientist Aubrey de Grey published an article in which he described several types of damage done by aging. He suggested the heretical idea of targeting these damages with medical interventions instead of trying to cure the symptoms of each age-related disease. He argued that age-related diseases are only a consequence of damage accumulation and that it would be much more effective to address the root causes.

The seed that Dr. de Grey dropped into the fertile soil of scholarship produced nice fruit in 2013, which is when a group of famous researchers of aging published The Hallmarks of Aging, a paper in which they described nine types of damage that accumulate with age and could be made into new therapeutic targets.

Comparison of a mouse treated with senolytics (at right) and a same-age mouse of the control group (at left). Source: Baker, D. J., Childs, B. G., Durik, M., Wijers, M. E., Sieben, C. J., Zhong, J., … & Khazaie, K. (2016). Naturally occurring p16Ink4a-positive cells shorten healthy lifespan. Nature, 530(7589), 184.

There were other fruits as well: animal studies have definitively proven that even only addressing one type of damage can extend the healthy period of life, postpone age-related diseases, keep animals more active, and, as a positive side effect, extend lifespan. It is worms that hold the best record so far, as tweaking some of their longevity-related genes has allowed them to live 10 times longer. The results in mice are also impressive – the researchers can extend both their healthy period of life and lifespan by 30-35%. Honestly, I find myself jealous of these mice, sometimes. I would not mind adding another 30% of youthful and healthy years to my life, even if I would have to take some pills or get some regular injections.

Can we control aging in humans?

You see, Santa, where I am going with this. I am sure that you sometimes leave gifts under the trees of people who work for the FDA. Accumulating a critical mass of knowledge about interventions against murine aging made it possible to develop the same type of interventions for people. Now, drugs and therapies addressing some of the root mechanisms of aging are in official human clinical trials. At some point, some of these trials will be successful, and drugs and therapies targeting aging itself will come to market.

If you don’t believe me, here is the short list of people whose chimneys’ stacks are the best source of additional information on the topic: George Church, Anthony Atala, Judy Campisi, Vadim Gladyshev, Maria Blasco, Michael West, Vera Gorbunova, Irina Conboy, Kelsey Moody, Brian Kennedy, Linda Partridge, Alexey Moskalev, Cynthia Kenyon, Claudio Franceschi, Alex Zhavoronkov, Nir Barzilai, and, of course, Aubrey de Grey. He wears a great beard, so you have more in common with gerontologists than you would think.

Listen to these people tell their families about their research, and you will get my point. We are on the edge of a revolution in rejuvenation biotechnology. Yet, most people don’t know about it and don’t realize what kind of potential benefit this advancement holds for them and for our aging society as a whole. Most importantly, as they know nothing, they have no say in decision making. How can people possibly speed up the pace of aging research if they don’t realize that aging is amenable to intervention? How can they foster technology transfer and local production of the cures for aging, such as senolytics, in their countries? How can they control prices and make future distribution and access equal? How can they ensure that old people in their families, who need these new treatments the most, would get them sooner?

Knowledge is power. We hear this in almost every interview, and you should be hearing it every Christmas from the researchers of aging, too. They have golden brains; the only thing they need is an appropriate amount of funding to solve the problem of aging more quickly. A strong public movement for aging research could be a game changer and could act as leverage to allocate government funding towards researching and developing treatments that target the underlying mechanisms of aging.

Ending aging and age-related diseases is possible

It is obvious that you are a kind person, Santa. You are perceptive and generous; you know what people want, and you try to give them what they want. However, if you don’t help me with my information campaign, in a couple of decades from now, you will be delivering billions of adult diapers and wheelchairs all over the globe. Wouldn’t it be nicer if you were to pile these up in your warehouse to be covered in dust while you give people therapies and drugs that prevent aging and wipe age-related diseases out of human lives? Just imagine how much happier people would be if they could remain healthy and independent, enjoy full and productive lives, achieve more, and stay with their families and friends for longer.

I was a good girl the whole year, attending scientific conferences, interviewing researchers, speaking at public events, and supporting our partners and colleagues in every way I could, even if that much socializing makes me suffer from an introvert’s hangover. I was eating healthy food and promoting evidence-based means to slow down aging among my relatives and friends. I deserve a nice Christmas gift.

All you have to do is to let everyone on the planet know that aging is amenable to intervention and that treatments addressing the root causes of aging are currently being created. For real. That would make me the happiest creature on the planet. Thank you in advance!

Sincerely, Elena

Instead of a conclusion

I am 39 years old, and I am an agnostic. There is not much evidence that Santa Claus exists. However, I do believe that miracles happen: the miracles that we create with our own hands. You who are reading these words (thanks for getting this far, by the way!) possess this special power, too. Use it! Let people around you know that science is close to bringing aging under medical control, and let’s build a world where healthy longevity for everyone is a reality.

As a devoted advocate of rejuvenation technologies since 2013, Elena Milova is providing the community with a systemic vision how aging is affecting our society. Her research interests include global and local policies on aging, demographic changes, public perception of the application of rejuvenation technologies to prevent age-related diseases and extend life, and related public concerns. Elena is a co-author of the book Aging prevention for all (in Russian, 2015) and the organizer of multiple educational events helping the general public adopt the idea of eventually bringing aging under medical control.

Mountain in the Jungle: Habitable Exomoon – Painting by Ekaterinya Vladinakova

Mountain in the Jungle: Habitable Exomoon – Painting by Ekaterinya Vladinakova

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Ekaterinya Vladinakova

“Mountain in the Jungle: Habitable Exomoon” by Ekaterinya Vladinakova

Left-click on the image for a fuller view. You can also download this painting (5000 by 2636 pixels) here.

The terraformed surface of an exomoon – another illustration by Ekaterinya Vladinakova of the lush worlds that can be created as a result of our species’ colonization of the cosmos. Let humanity venture forth to both discover and create such splendid new environments!

Ekaterinya Vladinakova is an accomplished digital painter. See her gallery here and her DeviantArt page here.

Aubrey de Grey – Clinical Trials in Five Years – Interview by Laura Sanz Olacia

Aubrey de Grey – Clinical Trials in Five Years – Interview by Laura Sanz Olacia

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logo_bgLaura Sanz Olacia
Aubrey de Grey

Editor’s Note: In this interview originally published by our allies at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), Laura Sanz Olacia discusses with Dr. Aubrey de Grey his anticipation that treatments aimed at reversing biological aging may enter clinical trials within five years. The U.S. Transhumanist Party is pleased to feature these insights from Dr. de Grey. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 18, 2018

 

In November, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a graduate of the University of Cambridge, was in Spain to attend the Longevity World Forum in the city of Valencia, and he gave a press conference organized by his friend, MIT engineer José Luis Cordeiro.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the scientific director (CSO) and founder of the SENS Research Foundation. In Madrid and Valencia, Dr. de Grey reaffirmed for Tendencias21 one of his most striking statements of 2018: “In the future, there will be many different medicines to reverse aging. In five years, we will have many of them working in early clinical trials.”

The Longevity World Forum is a congress on longevity and genomics in Europe. It is heir to the first congress in Spain, the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit, which was held at the CSIC headquarters in Madrid in May 2017, and Dr. de Grey also participated in that event. In Valencia, his presentation was recieved with interest, and Dr. de Grey explained to this select audience that aging will be treated as a medical problem in the near future. Rather than treating its symptoms using the infectious disease model, the root causes of aging will themselves be treated.

It was published recently on longevityworldforum.com that a therapy to reverse aging will be a reality within five years. What will be its mechanism of action, roughly?

There will not be just one medicine; there will be a lot of different medicines, and they will all have different mechanisms of action. For example, some of them will be stem cells, where we put cells back into the body in order to replace cells that the body is not replacing on its own. Sometimes, they will be drugs that kill cells that we don’t want. Sometimes, they will be gene therapy treatments that give cells new capabilities to break down waste products, for example. Sometimes, they will be vaccines or other immune therapies to stimulate the immune system to eliminate certain substances. Many different things. In five years from now, we will probably have most of that working. I do not think that we will really have it perfect by then; probably, we will still be at the early stages of clinical trials in some of these things. Then, we will need to combine them, one by one, to make sure that they do not affect each other negatively. So, there will still be some way to go. But, yes, I think it’s quite likely that in five years from now, we will have everything, or almost everything, in clinical trials.

Then clinical trials for seven years until it’s perfected. Don’t clinical trials usually take a long time?

It depends. For example, in aging, because there is this progressive accumulation of damage, you could have therapies that slow down the rate at which damage accumulates, or you could have therapies that repair the damage that has already happened. The second type of therapy is what we think is going to be most effective and is going to be easiest to do, and you can see results from that very quickly, like in one or two years. Now, of course, you still want to know what happens later on, but the first thing is to determine whether this is working at all, and as soon as it starts to work, then you can start to make it available. Clinical trials are changing in that way. Historically, clinical trials had to be completed before anybody could get these drugs, but now we are getting new policies; there is a thing called adaptive licensing, which is becoming popular in the US and elsewhere, where the therapy becomes approved at an earlier stage, and then it’s monitored after that.

Beyond the humanitarian perspective of avoiding the pain and suffering that comes with old age, if increasing the years of healthy life in people will significantly reduce health care spending by governments, why don’t they promote research in this area?

You’re absolutely right. It’s quite strange that governments are so short-sighted. But, of course, the real problem is psychological: it’s not just governments that are short-sighted. Almost everybody in the world is short-sighted about this. The reason I believe why that’s true is people still can’t quite convince themselves that it’s going to happen. Since the beginning of civilization, we have known that there is this terrible thing called aging, and we have been desperate to do something about it, to get rid of it. And people have been coming along, ever since the beginning of civilization, saying, “Yes, here’s the solution, here’s the fountain of youth!” And they’ve always been wrong. So, when the next person comes along and says they think they know how to do it, of course, there is going to be some skepticism until they have really shown that it’s true. Of course, if you don’t think it’s going to work, then you’re not going to support the effort financially. It’s very short-sighted, but it’s understandable.

Why do you think that the pharmaceutical industry does not devote its research and development efforts to this area, which causes the death of 100,000 people every day?

Today, the pharmaceutical industry is geared toward keeping old people alive when they are sick. It makes its money that way. It’s not just the pharmaceutical industry, it’s the whole of the medical industry. And so, most people say that they are worried that maybe the pharmaceutical industry will be against these therapies when they do come along. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think they will be in favor because people will be in favor, but people are not really in favor yet. People don’t really trust preventive medicine. They think “Okay if I am not yet sick…” They don’t trust medicine in general; they know that this is experimental. So, when they are not yet sick, they think “Well, I’ll wait until I am sick,” but we can change that. Eventually, people will understand that it’s going to be much more effective to treat yourself before you get sick, and then the whole medical industry will just respond to that; they will make the medicines that people want to pay for.

So you don’t think that they will be against these therapies?

No. They will follow.

But now, they are not focusing their research into this field.

That’s right because they don’t need to. The big pharmaceutical companies don’t really do much of their own research in the first place. They just wait to see what happens, and then they buy small companies.

In the car analogy that you use, you say that a car is built to last 10 or 15 years, but with proper maintenance, it can last up to 100 years. Isn’t this expressing the idea that aging is programmed and that the life of a car is also programmed?

No, it’s not. All of you know that, a long time ago, Henry Ford invented a concept called planned obsolescence, which was a way of building a car so that you could predict pretty accurately how long it would last. But, of course, the only reason that the prediction works is because people are lazy, and they don’t mind replacing their cars, so they only do the minimum amount of maintenance that the law tells them to. The reason that some cars last 100 years is not because those cars were built differently, it’s because there are a few people out there who fall in love with their cars and they don’t want them to get old. So, it really is exactly the same. In the human body, we have aging, because there are certain types of damage that are not automatically repaired when they happen. Of course, many types of damage in the human body are repaired automatically when they happen, so we don’t need medicine for that, but some of them are not. So, if we can develop medicines that do fix those things, it’s exactly the same as with a car.

If aging is not programmed, why do different species have different lifespans?

Because they have different qualities of built-in repair machinery. When I talk about all these types of damage, they are the types of damage that accumulate in the body, and they accumulate because the body does not have ways to repair them. There are massive amounts of other types of damage that I don’t call damage, and the reason I don’t call them damage is because they don’t accumulate. The reason that they don’t accumulate is because we already have built-in machinery to repair them when they happen. So, long-lived species have more comprehensive automatic repair machinery built into them.

Do you think that first we can focus on just replacing organs and restoring their function, and eventually we can eliminate the root causes of aging? Once we reach longevity escape velocity, maybe we can focus on just eliminating it?

We will never be able to stop the body from creating this damage. The body is going to do that because it is intrinsic to metabolism, but the better we get at repairing the damage, the fewer problems we have.

What healthy habits do you follow now?

I don’t do healthy habits. I’m lucky, I don’t need to do anything; I can drink whatever I like and nothing happens. I don’t even do much exercise, and also I don’t get nearly enough sleep, which is probably shortening my life, but it is worth it because I am hastening the defeat of aging, so it is a net positive.

Which generation will live to be a thousand years old? Do you think it is born already?

I think it is very probably born already, yes. But, of course, we cannot know until we get the medicines.

Which country do you think is more aware, or the people is more aware that this is a problem that we need to fix?

I would say Russia.

Russia?

Yeah. Surprising, isn’t it? But when I go to Russia and I talk about all of this, it’s so wonderful; I don’t get any of the uninformed questions, and everyone seems to understand it.

They don’t ask you ethical questions?

That’s right, yeah. They understand that this is a medical problem, it needs to be fixed, and it can be fixed.

Kriorus [the first and only cryonics company in Eurasia] is there right?

Yeah, I know Kriorus, I know the people very well.

Alcor [the world leader in cryonics located in Arizona] is the most expensive.

It gives the best service. I mean, it makes sense to have a very expensive, high-quality service and also less expensive and lower quality service. That is normal.

Where are you currently living?

I live in the United States, but I go everywhere when I am invited to speak and so on.

Laura Sanz Olacia, has a degree in Pharmacy from the Complutense University of Madrid (2015). Between 2016 and 2017 she worked for nine months in different pharmacies in London. She also worked in a pharmacy laboratory compounding medicines and cosmetics in Madrid. More recently she worked in IQVIA as Data Management Analyst. She is very interested in research and, in particular, in the area of ​aging. During her stay in London, she participated in the organization of the Antiaging Conference London 2016, and back in Madrid, she collaborated closely with the organizing committee of the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit 2017. She wants to devote her career to doing research in this field.

The Imperative to Build a Transhumanist Society – Article by C. H. Antony

The Imperative to Build a Transhumanist Society – Article by C. H. Antony

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logo_bgC. H. Antony

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party publishes this article by member C. H. Antony as a reminder that the aspirations of the transhumanist movement and the imperative to develop technologies to instantiate it are personal to many of us. Delays in achieving our vision come at the cost of innocent lives. In Section XXII of its Platform, “The United States Transhumanist Party supports efforts at political, economic, and cultural experimentation in the form of seasteads and micronations.” To what extent can such experimentation be explicitly transhumanist in nature? To what extent can the U.S. Transhumanist Party collaborate and its members contribute their efforts to advance emerging efforts to create seasteads and micronations – such as Blue Frontiers? Do members agree with Mr. Antony’s critique of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s predominant approach, which is aimed at incrementally reforming existing political systems? Comments from various perspectives are welcome.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 17, 2018

        Amanda Y. Bowers

         September 25th, 1984 – December 8th, 2018

My wife had been sick for a long time. Off and on she suffered peculiar gastrointestinal problems and was given a different reason every time. Finally, in 2015, Amanda was diagnosed with celiac sprue symptomatically, though she presented no protein markers. We were told that is sometimes the case and began a gluten-free diet and some important lifestyle changes we hoped would alleviate her suffering. As time went on, we believed every other GI problem to be easily explained by some cross-contamination or hidden filler in something. We had no idea that she was suffering from colorectal cancer that was slowly reaching a critical point. In July of 2018 her left ureter collapsed, and she was sent home with the explanation that she had passed a kidney stone. I came home from a trip to find her more ill than when I had left and brought her back in and had to fight for her admission and testing. The results were inconclusive, the prevailing theory being a progression of Celiac Disease to Crohn’s Disease. She was sent home on a steroidal regiment. Before we could follow up with the GI issues, we found ourselves back in the hospital, where they refused to do imaging and her bowel ruptured right there in front of them. But again she was sent home after the pain meds she was on quieted things down. I brought her back the very next day after begging a hospitalist we hit off with to grease the wheels a little. The result was emergency surgery and an ileostomy. Three days later, after narrowly surviving the rupture and sepsis, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. A week later, as her pleural tissues filled with fluid, and they determined the cancer to be at Stage 4. The last 5 months had been a breakneck race against a clock we couldn’t see. She endured 4 rounds of chemo, a pericardial effusion that she was again sent home with to die, and finally, her lungs began filling with fluid. On Tuesday last week, she came home on hospice; she died that Saturday night.

The longer history of this is filled with misdiagnosis, marginalization, even accusations of attempting to fraudulently obtain opioids. The local hospital corporation, the Veterans’ Administration (VA), all the affiliated specialists – they all guessed and missed. This is an all-too-common story. Cancer is nearly epidemic in our country; patients get passed around and dumped here and there, and diagnoses are rarely found before their deaths. My wife, Amanda, leaves behind two young children and a distraught husband. Her life thus far was rife with struggle and abuse; we had only a short time together for that to abate before she died in the most horrific manner I’ve ever witnessed. It has to stop.

Many investors have sniffed at the idea of breakaway nations, never quite biting in. But I believe it is now critical. The system of cronyism and lobbying that retards advancement and availability of medical science will not be remedied in this or any other nation. We must do it ourselves. My wife died because of this system. Her cancer was not a mutation of her own genes, nor inherited. It was most likely environmental, and most likely caused by the contaminated water on the bases where she was stationed. There will never be enough accountability to atone for this. We are soaked in contaminants we don’t understand and can’t remove from our daily lives. It’s time to take what we do know and start over.

Jeff Bezos recently expressed interest in seastead nations. Imagine if we could have the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and others backing a transhumanist colony? What opportunity for human advancement we would have! The good people at Blue Frontiers are doing their best, but they need more backing and interest. We need a more solid plan; we can’t simply say what we will do; we must show and sell. It’s not enough to simply say “solar”, “materials science”, “sapioponics”; we have to design it and sell the design, down to the last bolt. And we need to sell it to the men who currently captain our industry, make it appealing and beneficial to them as well. Our wants are simple: freedom – the freedom to live without disease or fear in any form we choose, the freedom to never know hunger or disparity, the freedom to explore each of our individual potentials. But we will not have this freedom in America. Freedom here is truly an illusion.

To borrow heavily from greater minds than mine, we of good conscience cannot abide this culture of blinders and muzzles. We can do better and we must. Should great minds like Elon Musk, Bezos, Sir Branson, Ray Kurzweil, and so on come together and help become the architects of the future, we may yet survive the filthy politics of our current condition. I fear that no matter the achievement, it will be boxed up and slow-rolled for as long as politically possible. We can speculate forever the motivations of our various political parties as to why we are so far behind when we know how to be so far ahead; I do not intend to argue these points anymore. Instead, we must ignore the Luddites and move ahead on our own in the hopes that, through our example, the rest of humanity will eventually follow.

The meat of it is that we must acquire sufficient land and sovereignty to live as we wish, invite the industry and economy that we choose to utilize, and encourage the availability of advancements that are necessary to transcend this mortality and banality. We require financiers, captains of industry who want this future as much as we do, a nation attractive to the sciences and technology that we need in our endeavor, UN representation to protect our sovereignty as we pursue our human birthright, and a well thought-out design ethic to ensure no individual is encroached up on by another. We must not only design our nation, but the very infrastructure with purposeful intent.

To put the finest point on it that I can, I submit the following as the most humble beginning of a Transhumanist Nation:

  • A carefully laid-out infrastructure and topography conducive to peaceful coexistence among the population. One idea is a city-center of commerce and industry, surrounded by suburbs for families and recreation, and outskirt establishments for research and development.
  • The layout would prevent the tendencies for crime and predation that emerge when humans are forced to live in close quarters and congestion. Tunnel systems, electric vehicles, solar and other alternative energies, new forms of currency and trade, methods of education will all be prototyped and heavily utilized as a proof of concept for the rest of the world. The stress of daily living can be mitigated further with the adoption of universal basic income, uninfringed property rights, and universal, state-of-the-art medical-care access.
  • The presence of Amazon, Tesla, Neuralink, Virgin, and Google and all their various useful subsidiaries as our primary industry and commerce. This would serve as an enticement for the funding necessary to establish a new nation, no doubt purchased from another nation that may be willing to benefit from the vast technological advancement of a Transhumanist Society. The sponsoring corporations will be free to innovate and advance so long as doing so is in line with Transhumanist ideals and sensibilities.
  • Recruitment of Researchers and Medical Professionals germane to our intent and ideals.
  • Recruitment of Scholars and Philosophers, Artists and Artisans, Educators, and anyone else who believes that we can be more than the sum of our parts.

We need to achieve a society driven by life and betterment, not this crippling stagnation that sees millions die as the pace is slowed to one comfortable for limited minds and ambitions. Again, I cite Blue Frontiers as a group actively trying for this; I suggest we back them vigorously and attempt to build a purposeful society as soon as possible.

The United States Transhumanist Party has already brilliantly laid out the groundwork for this society in its Transhumanist Bill of Rights and Party Platform. We have the foundation of a great nation in our hands, but the status quo will never allow it. Power, such as it is, is too seductive a drug. Were we to gather our resources, both financial and human, I believe we could engineer a new, greater society of free minds and exchange, one where our coming Singularity propels us to heights we can only imagine. But we must come together. My wife was only 34 years old at the time of her death – a young mother, a veteran, a brilliant mind. As a paid intern, she coauthored a USGS study regarding asteroid mining, because she did the math for the researchers – a feat that required her to learn chemistry and new physics on the fly, all while finishing her own degree work. And now she is gone – just like that.

No More.

Let us begin now. Let us come together and create an opportunity, rather than wait for it to present itself. With the deepest respect to this party and its leadership, I believe that we are wasting our precious time attempting to participate in the American political system. I propose we open discussions with Blue Frontiers, Amazon, Virgin, Tesla, and other innovative organizations and begin the process – before more lives are lost.

C. H. Antony is a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. He may be contacted here. 

Transhumanist Bill of Rights – Results of Vote and Version 3.0

Transhumanist Bill of Rights – Results of Vote and Version 3.0

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The U.S. Transhumanist Party conducted its tenth vote of the members on December 2 through December 9, 2018. Official ballot options can be found here.

Detailed results of the voting have been tabulated here. Where more than two options existed, the winning result was selected based on the ranked-preference method with instant runoffs.

As a result, Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights was compiled on the basis of the members’ decisions. Version 3.0 augments and supersedes Version 2.0, while retaining the original intent of Version 2.0.

The resulting Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is permanently hosted here. Its text is also reproduced below.

Note: It is important to keep in mind that the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is not a policy platform but rather a member-driven expression of ideals for a transhumanist society. No individual is bound to it (indeed, its new Article I states this explicitly), it is not static, and it is subject to further amendments if/when member recommendations arise and meet with significant demand.  Anyone who sees this version can always give feedback on the U.S. Transhumanist Party website (including on this thread) and/or Facebook page. The official U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform can be found here.

Transhumanist Bill of Rights – Version 3.0

Version 1.0 written by Zoltan Istvan – Delivered to the U.S. Capitol on December 14, 2015

Version 2.0 developed by members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party – Adopted via Electronic Vote on December 25-31, 2016 – Integrated from Voting Preferences on January 4, 2017

Version 3.0 developed by members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party – Adopted via Electronic Vote on December 2-9, 2018 – Integrated from Voting Preferences on December 12, 2018

[NOTE: The Transhumanist Bill of Rights is not static and is open to further amendments via future votes of U.S. Transhumanist Party members. To suggest a specific amendment, you may make a post on this thread or e-mail Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, here. Proposed amendments that receive sufficient member demand will be considered for inclusion on future ballots.]

Preamble

Whereas science and technology are now radically changing human beings and may also create future forms of advanced sapient and sentient life, transhumanists establish this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS to help guide and enact sensible policies in the pursuit of life, liberty, security of person, and happiness.

As used in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS, the term “sentient entities” encompasses:
        (i) Human beings, including genetically modified humans;
        (ii) Cyborgs;
        (iii) Digital intelligences;
        (iv) Intellectually enhanced, previously non-sapient animals;
       (v) Any species of plant or animal which has been enhanced to possess the capacity for intelligent thought; and
        (vi) Other advanced sapient life forms.

Sentient entities are defined by information-processing capacity such that this term should not apply to non-self-aware lifeforms, like plants and slime molds. Biological processing substrates are referred to as using an “analogue intelligence”, whereas purely electronic processing substrates are referred to as “digital intelligence”, and processing substrates that utilize quantum effects would be considered “quantum intelligence”.

Sentience is ranked as Level 5 information integration according to the following criteria:

  • Level 0 – No information integration: Inanimate objects; objects that do not modify themselves in response to interaction – e.g., rocks, mountains.
  • Level 1 – Non-zero information integration: Sensors – anything that is able to sense its environment – e.g., photo-diode sense organs, eyes, skin.
  • Level 2 – Information manipulation: Systems that include feedback that is non-adaptive or minimally adaptive – e.g., plants, basic algorithms, the system that interprets the output from a photo-diode to determine its on/off state (a photo diode itself cannot detect its own state). Level 2 capabilities include the following:
  1. Expression of emotion;
  2. Expression of sensory pleasure;
  3. Taste aversion.
  • Level 3 – Information integration – Awareness: Systems that include adaptive feedback, can dynamically generate classification – e.g., deep-learning AI, chickens, animals that are able to react to their environment, have a model of their perception but not the world. This level describes animals acting on instinct and unable to classify other animals into more types than “predator”, “prey”, or “possible mate”. Level 3 capabilities include the following:
  1. Navigational detouring (which requires an being to pursue a series of non-rewarding intermediate goals in order to obtain an ultimate reward); Examples: documentation of detouring in jumping spiders (Jackson and Wilcox 1998), motivational trade-off behavior in hermit crabs (Elwood and Appel 2009);
  2. Emotional fever (an increase in body temperature in response to a supposedly stressful situation — gentle handling, as operationalized in Cabanac’s experiments).
  • Level 4 – Awareness + World model: Systems that have a modeling system complex enough to create a world model: a sense of other, without a sense of self – e.g., dogs. Level 4 capabilities include static behaviors and rudimentary learned behavior.
  • Level 5 – Awareness + World model + Primarily subconscious self model = Sapient or Lucid: Lucidity means to be meta-aware – that is, to be aware of one’s own awareness, aware of abstractions, aware of one’s self, and therefore able to actively analyze each of these phenomena. If a given animal is meta-aware to any extent, it can therefore make lucid decisions. Level 5 capabilities include the following:
  1. The “sense of self”;
  2. Complex learned behavior;
  3. Ability to predict the future emotional states of the self (to some degree);
  4. The ability to make motivational tradeoffs.
  • Level 6 – Awareness + World model + Dynamic self model + Effective control of subconscious: The dynamic sense of self can expand from “the small self” (directed consciousness) to the big self (“social group dynamics”). The “self” can include features that cross barriers between biological and non-biological – e.g., features resulting from cybernetic additions, like smartphones.
  • Level 7 – Global awareness – Hybrid biological-digital awareness = Singleton: Complex algorithms and/or networks of algorithms that have capacity for multiple parallel simulations of multiple world models, enabling cross-domain analysis and novel temporary model generation. This level includes an ability to contain a vastly larger amount of biases, many paradoxically held. Perspectives are maintained in separate modules, which are able to dynamically switch between identifying with the local module of awareness/perspective or the global awareness/perspective. Level 7 capabilities involve the same type of dynamic that exists between the subconscious and directed consciousness, but massively parallelized, beyond biological capacities.

Article I. All sentient entities are hereby entitled to pursue any and all rights within this document to the degree that they deem desirable – including not at all. All sentient entities are entitled, to the extent of their individual decisions, to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, social, or planetary origin, property, birth (including manner of birth), biological or non-biological origins, or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional, or international status of the country or territory to which a sentient entity belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing, or under any other limitation of sovereignty. In the exercise of their rights and freedoms, all sentient entities shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic society, which may not undermine the peaceful prerogatives of any individual sentient entity. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.

Article II. The enumeration in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage any other rights retained by sentient entities.

Article III. All sentient entities shall be granted equal and total access to any universal rights to life. All sentient entities are created free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood (without necessitating any particular gender or implying any particular biological or non-biological origin or composition).

Article IV. Sentient entities are entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering, making personhood improvements, and achieving an indefinite lifespan via science and technology. The right of ending involuntary suffering does not refer to euthanasia but rather to the application of technology to eliminate involuntary suffering in still-living beings, while enabling their lives to continue with improved quality and length.

Article V. No coercive legal restrictions should exist to bar access to life extension and life expansion for all sentient entities. Life expansion includes life extension, sensory improvements, and other technologically driven improvements of the human condition that might be achieved in the future.

Article VI. Involuntary aging shall be classified as a disease. All nations and their governments will actively seek to dramatically extend the lives and improve the health of their citizens by offering them scientific and medical technologies to overcome involuntary aging.

Article VII. All sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of a system of universal health care. A system of universal health care does not necessitate any particular means, policy framework, source, or method of payment for delivering health care. A system of universal health care may be provided privately, by governments, or by some combination thereof, as long as, in practice, health care is abundant, inexpensive, accessible, and effective in curing diseases, healing injuries, and lengthening lifespans.

Article VIII. Sentient entities are entitled to the freedom to conduct research, experiment, and explore life, science, technology, medicine, and extraterrestrial realms to overcome biological limitations of humanity. Such experimentation will not be carried out on any sapient being, without that being’s informed consent. Sentient entities are also entitled to the freedom to create cybernetic artificial organs, bio-mechatronic parts, genetic modifications, systems, technologies, and enhancements to extend lifespan, eradicate illness, and improve all sentient life forms. Any such creations that demonstrate sapience cannot be considered property and are protected by the rights presented herein.

Article IX. Legal safeguards should be established to protect individual free choice in pursuing peaceful, consensual life-extension science, health improvements, body modification, and morphological enhancement. While all individuals should be free to formulate their independent opinions regarding the aforementioned pursuits, no hostile cultural, ethnic, or religious perspectives should be entitled to apply the force of law to erode the safeguards protecting peaceful, voluntary measures intended to maximize the number of life hours citizens possess.

Article X. Sentient entities agree to uphold morphological freedom—the right to do with one’s physical attributes or intelligence whatever one wants so long as it does not harm others.

This right includes the prerogative for a sentient intelligence to set forth in advance provisions for how to handle its physical manifestation, should that intelligence enter into a vegetative, unconscious, or similarly inactive state, notwithstanding any legal definition of death. For instance, a cryonics patient has the right to determine in advance that the patient’s body shall be cryopreserved and kept under specified conditions, in spite of any legal definition of death that might apply to that patient under cryopreservation.

Morphological freedom entails the duty to treat all sapients as individuals instead of categorizing them into arbitrary subgroups or demographics, including as yet undefined subcategorizations that may arise as sapience evolves.

However, the proper exercise of morphological freedom must also ensure that any improvement of the self should not result in involuntary harms inflicted upon others. Furthermore, any sentient entity is also recognized to have the freedom not to modify itself without being subject to negative political repercussions, which include but are not limited to legal and/or socio-economic repercussions.

Article XI.  An altered, augmented, cybernetic, transgenic, anthropomorphic, or avatar sentient entity, whether derived from or edited by science, comprised of or conjoined with technology, has the right to exist, form, and join the neo-civilization.

Article XII.  All sentient entities are entitled to reproductive freedom, including through novel means such as the creation of mind clones, monoparent children, or benevolent artificial general intelligence. All sentient entities of full age and competency, without any limitation due to race, nationality, religion, or origin, have the right to marry and found a family or to found a family as single heads of household. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. All families, including families formed through novel means, are entitled to protection by society and the State. All sentient entities also have the right to prevent unauthorized reproduction of themselves in both a physical and a digital context. Privacy and security legislation should be enacted to prevent any individual’s DNA, data, or other information from being stolen and duplicated without that individual’s authorization.

Article XIII. No sentient entity shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his, her, or its privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his, her, or its honor and reputation. Every sentient entity has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. All sentient entities have privacy rights to personal data, genetic material, digital, biographic, physical, and intellectual enhancements, and consciousness. Despite the differences between physical and virtual worlds, equal protections for privacy should apply to both physical and digital environments. Any data, such as footage from a public security camera, archived without the consent of the person(s) about whom the data were gathered and subject to legal retention, shall be removed after a period of seven (7) years, unless otherwise requested by said person(s).

Article XIV. No sentient entity shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. Sousveillance laws should be enacted to ensure that all members of peaceful communities feel safe, to achieve governmental transparency, and to provide counter-balances to any surveillance state. For instance, law-enforcement officials, when interacting with the public, should be required to wear body cameras or similar devices continuously monitoring their activities.

Article XV. All sentient entities, with the exception only of those in legal detention, have the right to private internet access without such access being prohibited or circumvented by either private corporations or governmental bureaucracy.

Article XVI. All sentient entities are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All sentient entities are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS and against any incitement to such discrimination.All sentient entities should be protected from discrimination based on their physical form in the context of business transactions and law enforcement.

Article XVII. All sentient entities have the right to life, liberty and security of person. All sentient entities have the right to defend themselves from attack, in both physical and virtual worlds.

Article XVIII. Societies of the present and future should afford all sentient entities sufficient basic access to wealth and resources to sustain the basic requirements of existence in a civilized society and function as the foundation for pursuits of self-improvement. This includes the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including food or other necessary sources of energy, clothing, housing or other appropriate shelter, medical care or other necessary physical maintenance, necessary social services, and the right of security in the event of involuntary unemployment, sickness, disability, loss of family support, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond the sentient entity’s control. Present and future societies should ensure that their members will not live in poverty solely for being born to the wrong parents. All children and other recently created sentient entities, irrespective of the manner or circumstances of their creation, shall enjoy the same social protection. Each sentient entity, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for his, her, or its dignity and the free development of his, her, or its personality.

Article XIX. Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities, all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.

Article XX. Present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all in pursuit of factual knowledge to increase intellectual acuity; promote critical thinking and logic; foster creativity; form an enlightened collective; attain health; secure the bounty of liberty for all sentient entities for our posterity; and forge new ideas, meanings, and values. All sentient entities have the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. Education shall be directed to the full development of the sentient entity’s personality and to the strengthening of respect for all sentient entities’ rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all nations, racial, religious, and other sentient groups – whether biological, non-biological, or a combination thereof – and shall further the maintenance of peace. Parents and other creators of sentient entities have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children or other recently created sentient entities which have not yet developed sufficient maturity to select their own education.

Article XXI. All sentient entities are entitled to join their psyches to a collective noosphere in an effort to preserve self-consciousness in perpetuity. The noosphere is the sphere of human thought and includes, but is not limited to, intellectual systems in the realm of law, education, philosophy, technology, art, culture, and industry. All sentient entities have the right to participate in the noosphere using any level of technology that is conducive to constructive participation.

Article XXII. Sentient entities will take every reasonable precaution to prevent existential risks, including those of rogue artificial intelligence, asteroids, plagues, weapons of mass destruction, bioterrorism, war, and global warming, among others.

Article XXIII. All nations and their governments will take all reasonable measures to embrace and fund space travel, not only for the spirit of adventure and to gain knowledge by exploring the universe, but as an ultimate safeguard to its citizens and transhumanity should planet Earth become uninhabitable or be destroyed.

Article XXIV. Transhumanists stand opposed to the post-truth culture of deception. All governments should be required to make decisions and communicate information rationally and in accordance with facts. Lying for political gain or intentionally fomenting irrational fears among the general public should entail heavy political penalties for the officials who engage in such behaviors.

Article XXV. No sentient entity shall be held in slavery or involuntary servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article XXVI. No sentient entity shall be subjected to torture or to treatment or punishment that is cruel, degrading, inhuman, or otherwise unworthy of sentience or sapience.

Article XXVII. Each sentient entity has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article XXVIII. All individual sentient entities have the right to an effective remedy by the competent local, national, international, or interplanetary tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted them by the constitution, by law, and/or by this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.

Article XXIX. All individual sentient entities are entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of their individual rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against them.

Article XXX. All individual sentient entities charged with a penal offence have the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which they individually have had all the guarantees necessary for their defense. No sentient entity shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article XXXI. All sentient entities have the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Each individual sentient entity has the right to leave any country, including his, her, or its own, and to return to his, her, or its country.

Article XXXII. All sentient entities have the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.

Article XXXIII. All sentient entities have the right to a nationality. No sentient entity shall be arbitrarily deprived of his, her, or its nationality nor denied the right to change his, her, or its nationality.

Article XXXIV. All sentient entities have the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his, her, or its property.

Article XXXV. All sentient entities have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change one’s religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest one’s religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. This right also includes freedom not to have a religion and to criticize or refuse to engage in any religious practice or belief without adverse legal consequences.

Article XXXVI. All sentient entities have the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article XXXVII. All sentient entities have the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No sentient entity may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article XXXVIII. All sentient entities have the right to take part in the government of their countries, directly or through freely chosen representatives. All sentient entities have the right of equal access to public service in their countries. The will of the constituent sentient entities shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage of sentient entities and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article XXXIX. All sentient entities have the right to work, to free choice of employment, and to just and favorable conditions of work, as long as employment is offered or considered economically necessary in the sentient entity’s proximate society and contemporary epoch. All sentient entities who choose to work have the right to equal pay for equal work. All sentient entities who choose to work have the right to just and favorable remuneration, ensuring for themselves and their families an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection, such as a universal basic income. All sentient entities have the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests; however, no sentient entity may be compelled to join a trade union as a condition of employment.

Article XL. All sentient entities have the right to rest and leisure commensurate with the physical requirements of those sentient entities for maintaining optimal physical and mental health, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay in societies where paid employment is considered economically necessary.

Article XLI. All sentient entities have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. All sentient entities have the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production of which they are the authors.

Article XLII. All sentient entities are entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS can be fully realized.

Article XLIII. Nothing in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS may be interpreted as implying for any State, group, or sentient entity any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Official Ballot Options for Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0 – Voting Period of December 2-8, 2018

Official Ballot Options for Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0 – Voting Period of December 2-8, 2018

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The 7-day electronic voting period on the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0, will occur from 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on December 2, 2018, to 12:01 a.m.  U.S. Pacific Time on December 9, 2018. All members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party who have applied before 12:01 a.m. on December 2, 2018, will be eligible to vote, as long as they have expressed agreement with the three Core Ideals of the Transhumanist Party or have otherwise been rendered eligible to vote at the discretion of the Chairman.

All members who are eligible to vote will be sent a link to an electronic submission form whereby they will be able to cast their ballot.

When you are voting, it is strongly recommended that you keep this page of official ballot options and the submission form open simultaneously in different windows so that you can reference the relevant options as you vote on them. Due to space limitations, the submission form does not list the entire text of all the options.

It is also recommended that you set aside at least one hour to consider and vote on all of the options and read their text closely, as some of the options contain minor variations upon other options. 

For some questions, electronic voting is  conducted by a ranked-preference method on individual articles where more options are possible than would be accommodated by a simple “Yes” or “No” vote. Members should keep in mind that the ranked-preference method eliminates the incentives for strategic voting – so members are encouraged to vote for the options that reflect their individual preferences as closely as possible, without regard for how other members might vote.

Results of the voting will be tabulated during the second week of December 2018, with the intent to announce the results approximately 7 days after all votes have been submitted.

NOTE: The titles of the questions and potential Articles are descriptive and informational only and will not appear in the final adopted Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0. They are intended as concise guides to the subject matter of the questions and potential Articles. Likewise, the numbers or letters assigned to Articles within this ballot may or may not reflect the numbering in the final adopted Transhumanist Bill of Rights, which will depend on which Articles are selected by the membership.

NOTE II: The inclusion of any proposals on this ballot does not indicate any manner of endorsement for those proposals by the U.S. Transhumanist Party at this time – except to place those proposals before the members to determine the will of the members with regard to whether or not the Transhumanist Bill of Rights should incorporate any given proposal.

Voter Identification

What is your name?

At minimum, first and last name are required, unless you are publicly known by a single-name pseudonym which is not itself a common name. Your identity will not be publicly disclosed by the Transhumanist Party, unless you choose and/or authorize its disclosure. The nature of the selections made by the members may be disclosed, but, if they are, each individual vote will not be associated with the identity of the voter but rather will be presented in an anonymized manner.

What is your e-mail address?

Provide the same e-mail address you used to register for U.S. Transhumanist Party membership. Your ballot will be cross-referenced to our membership rolls, and only ballots with matching e-mail addresses will be counted.

Navigate the Options

Proposed Clarifying Amendments

Amendment TBR-IV. Clarification Regarding the Right to End Involuntary Suffering
Amendment TBR-VII. Clarification Regarding Universal Healthcare
Amendment TBR-XIX. Expansion of the Context for Universal Basic Income
Amendment TBR-XXI. Additional Information Regarding the Noosphere

Proposed Amendments to Integrate the Provisions of the United Nations Universal Declarations of Human Rights (“UN Declaration”) Directly into the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

Amendment TBR-I. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article I, and UN Declaration Articles 2 and 29
Amendment TBR-III. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article III, and UN Declaration Article 1
Amendment TBR-XII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XII, and UN Declaration Article 16
Amendment TBR-XIII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XIII, and UN Declaration Article 12
Amendment TBR-XIV. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XIV, and UN Declaration Article 9
Amendment TBR-XVI. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVI, and UN Declaration Article 7
Amendment TBR-XVII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVII, and UN Declaration Article 3
Amendment TBR-XVIII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVIII, and UN Declaration Articles 22 and 25
Amendment TBR-XX. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XX, and UN Declaration Article 26
Amendment TBR-XXV. Addition of New Article to Prohibit Slavery and Involuntary Servitude, Per UN Declaration Article 4
Amendment TBR-XXVI. Addition of New Article to Prohibit Torture and Cruel Punishment, Per UN Declaration Article 5
Amendment TBR-XXVII. Addition of New Article on Recognition Before the Law, Per UN Declaration Article 6
Amendment TBR-XXVIII. Addition of New Article on Effective Remedy – Expanded Version of UN Declaration Article 8
Amendment TBR-XXIX. Addition of New Article on Public Hearings for Criminal Charges – Per UN Declaration Article 10
Amendment TBR-XXX. Addition of New Article on Presumption of Innocence – Per  UN Declaration Article 11
Amendment TBR-XXXI. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Movement – Per  UN Declaration Article 13
Amendment TBR-XXXII. Addition of New Article on Right to Seek Asylum – Per  UN Declaration Article 14
Amendment TBR-XXXIII. Addition of New Article on Right to Nationality – Per  UN Declaration Article 15
Amendment TBR-XXXIV. Addition of New Article on Right to Property – Per  UN Declaration Article 17
Amendment TBR-XXXV. Addition of New Article on Religious Freedom – Expanded Version of UN Declaration Article 18
Amendment TBR-XXXVI. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Opinion and Expression – Per UN Declaration Article 19
Amendment TBR-XXXVII. Addition of New Article on Peaceful Assembly and Association – Per UN Declaration Article 20
Amendment TBR-XXXVIII. Addition of New Article on Right of Political Participation – Per UN Declaration Article 21
Amendment TBR-XXXIX. Addition of New Article on Right to Work – Modified Version of UN Declaration Article 23
Amendment TBR-XL. Addition of New Article on Right to Rest and Leisure – Modified Version of UN Declaration Article 24
Amendment TBR-XLI. Addition of New Article on Right of Cultural Participation – Per UN Declaration Article 27
Amendment TBR-XLII. Addition of New Article on Right to Social and International Order – Per UN Declaration Article 28
Amendment TBR-XLIII. Addition of New Article to Oppose Destruction of Rights and Freedoms – Per UN Declaration Article 30

Proposed Clarifying Amendments

Amendment TBR-IV. Clarification Regarding the Right to End Involuntary Suffering

Shall Article IV be amended to add the following statement at the end?

“The right of ending involuntary suffering does not refer to euthanasia but rather to the application of technology to eliminate involuntary suffering in still-living beings, while enabling their lives to continue with improved quality and length.”

If this proposal is passed, the resulting Article IV will read as follows:

“Sentient entities are entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering, making personhood improvements, and achieving an indefinite lifespan via science and technology. The right of ending involuntary suffering does not refer to euthanasia but rather to the application of technology to eliminate involuntary suffering in still-living beings, while enabling their lives to continue with improved quality and length.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-VII. Clarification Regarding Universal Healthcare

Rank-order the Amendment TBR-VII Options that you support. Choose “1” for your most highly favored option, “2” for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option to “Keep the Current Wording of Article VII” in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no amendment is preferable to some of the other options.)

If you choose “Abstain”, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

☐ Proposal TBR-VII-1 [Universal Healthcare as Practical Reality]: Amend Article VII to add the following statement at the end so that the complete Article reads as follows:

“All sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of a system of universal health care. A system of universal healthcare does not necessitate any particular means, policy framework, source, or method of payment for delivering healthcare. A system of universal healthcare may be provided privately, by governments, or by some combination thereof, as long as, in practice, healthcare is abundant, inexpensive, accessible, and effective in curing diseases, healing injuries, and lengthening lifespans.”

☐ Proposal TBR-VII-2 [Universal Healthcare as Legal Guarantee, Based on Proposal by Didier Coeurnelle]: Amend Article VII to add the following statement at the end:

“All sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of a system of universal health care. A system of universal healthcare does not necessitate any particular means, policy framework, source, or method of payment for delivering healthcare. A system of universal healthcare may be provided by public institutions, by private organizations, or by some combination thereof, as long as there are legal guarantees that healthcare is to become abundant, inexpensive, accessible, and effective in curing diseases, healing injuries, and lengthening lifespans.”

☐ Keep the Current Wording of Article VII: “All sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of a system of universal health care.”

Amendment TBR-XIX. Expansion of the Context for Universal Basic Income

Shall Article XIX be amended to replace the starting clause of the Article (“Given the inevitability of technology eventually replacing the need for the labor of sentient entities,”) with an alternative clause: “Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities,” – such that, if the proposal is passed, the revised Article XIX would read as follows?

“Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities, all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXI. Additional Information Regarding the Noosphere

Shall Article XXI be amended to add the following statement at the end?

“The noosphere is the sphere of human thought and includes, but is not limited to, intellectual systems in the realm of law, education, philosophy, technology, art, culture, and industry. All sentient entities have the right to participate in the noosphere using any level of technology that is conducive to constructive participation.”

If this proposal is passed, the resulting Article XXI will read as follows:

“All sentient entities are entitled to join their psyches to a collective noosphere in an effort to preserve self-consciousness in perpetuity. The noosphere is the sphere of human thought and includes, but is not limited to, intellectual systems in the realm of law, education, philosophy, technology, art, culture, and industry. All sentient entities have the right to participate in the noosphere using any level of technology that is conducive to constructive participation.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Proposed Amendments to Integrate the Provisions of the United Nations Universal Declarations of Human Rights (“UN Declaration”) Directly into the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

Amendment TBR-I. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article I, and UN Declaration Articles 2 and 29:

Shall Article I be amended to read as follows?

“All sentient entities are hereby entitled to pursue any and all rights within this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS to the degree that they deem desirable – including not at all. All sentient entities are entitled, to the extent of their individual decisions, to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, social, or planetary origin, property, birth (including manner of birth), biological or non-biological origins, or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a sentient entity belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing, or under any other limitation of sovereignty. In the exercise of their rights and freedoms, all sentient entities shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic society, which may not undermine the peaceful prerogatives of any individual sentient entity. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article I: “All sentient entities are hereby entitled to pursue any and all rights within this document to the degree that they deem desirable – including not at all.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-III. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article III, and UN Declaration Article 1:

Shall Article III be amended to read as follows?

“All sentient entities shall be granted equal and total access to any universal rights to life. All sentient entities are created free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood (without necessitating any particular gender or implying any particular biological or non-biological origin or composition).”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article III: “All sentient entities shall be granted equal and total access to any universal rights to life.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XII, and UN Declaration Article 16:

Shall Article XII be amended to read as follows?

“All sentient entities are entitled to reproductive freedom, including through novel means such as the creation of mind clones, monoparent children, or benevolent artificial general intelligence. All sentient entities of full age and competency, without any limitation due to race, nationality, religion, or origin, have the right to marry and found a family or to found a family as single heads of household. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. All families, including families formed through novel means, are entitled to protection by society and the State. All sentient entities also have the right to prevent unauthorized reproduction of themselves in both a physical and a digital context. Privacy and security legislation should be enacted to prevent any individual’s DNA, data, or other information from being stolen and duplicated without that individual’s authorization.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XII: “All sentient entities are entitled to reproductive freedom, including through novel means such as the creation of mind clones, monoparent children, or benevolent artificial general intelligence. All sentient entities also have the right to prevent unauthorized reproduction of themselves in both a physical and a digital context. Privacy and security legislation should be enacted to prevent any individual’s DNA, data, or other information from being stolen and duplicated without that individual’s authorization.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XIII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XIII, and UN Declaration Article 12:

Shall Article XIII be amended to read as follows?

“No sentient entity shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his, her, or its privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his, her, or its honor and reputation. Every sentient entity has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. All sentient entities have privacy rights to personal data, genetic material, digital, biographic, physical, and intellectual enhancements, and consciousness. Despite the differences between physical and virtual worlds, equal protections for privacy should apply to both physical and digital environments. Any data, such as footage from a public security camera, archived without the consent of the person(s) about whom the data were gathered and subject to legal retention, shall be removed after a period of seven (7) years, unless otherwise requested by said person(s).”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XIII: “All sentient entities have privacy rights to personal data, genetic material, digital, biographic, physical, and intellectual enhancements, and consciousness. Despite the differences between physical and virtual worlds, equal protections for privacy should apply to both physical and digital environments. Any data, such as footage from a public security camera, archived without the consent of the person(s) about whom the data were gathered and subject to legal retention, shall be removed after a period of seven (7) years, unless otherwise requested by said person(s).”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XIV. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XIV, and UN Declaration Article 9:

Shall Article XIV be amended to read as follows?

“No sentient entity shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. Sousveillance laws should be enacted to ensure that all members of peaceful communities feel safe, to achieve governmental transparency, and to provide counter-balances to any surveillance state. For instance, law-enforcement officials, when interacting with the public, should be required to wear body cameras or similar devices continuously monitoring their activities.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XIV: “Sousveillance laws should be enacted to ensure that all members of peaceful communities feel safe, to achieve governmental transparency, and to provide counter-balances to any surveillance state. For instance, law-enforcement officials, when interacting with the public, should be required to wear body cameras or similar devices continuously monitoring their activities.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XVI. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVI, and UN Declaration Article 7:

Shall Article XVI be amended to read as follows?

“All sentient entities are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All sentient entities are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS and against any incitement to such discrimination. All sentient entities should be protected from discrimination based on their physical form in the context of business transactions and law enforcement.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XVI: “All sentient entities should be protected from discrimination based on their physical form in the context of business transactions and law enforcement.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XVII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVII, and UN Declaration Article 3:

Shall Article XVII be amended to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to life, liberty and security of person. All sentient entities have the right to defend themselves from attack, in both physical and virtual worlds.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XVII: “All sentient entities have the right to defend themselves from attack, in both physical and virtual worlds.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XVIII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVIII, and UN Declaration Articles 22 and 25:

Shall Article XVIII be amended to read as follows?

“Societies of the present and future should afford all sentient entities sufficient basic access to wealth and resources to sustain the basic requirements of existence in a civilized society and function as the foundation for pursuits of self-improvement. This includes the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including food or other necessary sources of energy, clothing, housing or other appropriate shelter, medical care or other necessary physical maintenance, necessary social services, and the right of security in the event of involuntary unemployment, sickness, disability, loss of family support, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond the sentient entity’s control. Present and future societies should ensure that their members will not live in poverty solely for being born to the wrong parents. All children and other recently created sentient entities, irrespective of the manner or circumstances of their creation, shall enjoy the same social protection. Each sentient entity, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for his, her, or its dignity and the free development of his, her, or its personality.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XVIII: “Societies of the present and future should afford all sentient entities sufficient basic access to wealth and resources to sustain the basic requirements of existence in a civilized society and function as the foundation for pursuits of self-improvement. Present and future societies should ensure that their members will not live in poverty solely for being born to the wrong parents.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XX. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XX, and UN Declaration Article 26:

Shall Article XX be amended to read as follows?

“Present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all in pursuit of factual knowledge to increase intellectual acuity; promote critical thinking and logic; foster creativity; form an enlightened collective; attain health; secure the bounty of liberty for all sentient entities for our posterity; and forge new ideas, meanings, and values. All sentient entities have the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. Education shall be directed to the full development of the sentient entity’s personality and to the strengthening of respect for all sentient entities’ rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all nations, racial, religious, and other sentient groups – whether biological, non-biological, or a combination thereof – and shall further the maintenance of peace. Parents and other creators of sentient entities have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children or other recently created sentient entities which have not yet developed sufficient maturity to select their own education.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XX: “Present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all in pursuit of factual knowledge to increase intellectual acuity; promote critical thinking and logic; foster creativity; form an enlightened collective; attain health; secure the bounty of liberty for all sentient entities for our posterity; and forge new ideas, meanings, and values.”)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXV. Addition of New Article to Prohibit Slavery and Involuntary Servitude, Per UN Declaration Article 4:

Shall Article XXV be replaced to read as follows?

“No sentient entity shall be held in slavery or involuntary servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No. (A “No” vote would support retaining the current Article XXV: “In addition to the rights enumerated herein, this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS hereby incorporates by reference all of the rights expressed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and hereby extends these rights to all entities encompassed by this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.” However, please note that the other contents of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights are being proposed for direct adaptation into the Transhumanist Bill of Rights within other amendments for consideration on this ballot. Thus, the substantive effect of a “Yes” vote would not be to remove all of the other rights referenced in the UN Declaration, but rather it would support the integration of those rights directly into the Transhumanist Bill of Rights.)

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXVI. Addition of New Article to Prohibit Torture and Cruel Punishment, Per UN Declaration Article 5:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“No sentient entity shall be subjected to torture or to treatment or punishment that is cruel, degrading, inhuman, or otherwise unworthy of sentience or sapience.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXVII. Addition of New Article on Recognition Before the Law, Per UN Declaration Article 6:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“Each sentient entity has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXVIII. Addition of New Article on Effective Remedy – Expanded Version of UN Declaration Article 8:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All individual sentient entities have the right to an effective remedy by the competent local, national, international, or interplanetary tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted them by the constitution, by law, and/or by this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXIX. Addition of New Article on Public Hearings for Criminal Charges – Per UN Declaration Article 10:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All individual sentient entities are entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of their individual rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against them.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXX. Addition of New Article on Presumption of Innocence – Per  UN Declaration Article 11:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All individual sentient entities charged with a penal offence have the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which they individually have had all the guarantees necessary for their defense. No sentient entity shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXI. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Movement – Per  UN Declaration Article 13:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Each individual sentient entity has the right to leave any country, including his, her, or its own, and to return to his, her, or its country.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXII. Addition of New Article on Right to Seek Asylum – Per  UN Declaration Article 14:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXIII. Addition of New Article on Right to Nationality – Per  UN Declaration Article 15:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to a nationality. No sentient entity shall be arbitrarily deprived of his, her, or its nationality nor denied the right to change his, her, or its nationality.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXIV. Addition of New Article on Right to Property – Per  UN Declaration Article 17:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his, her, or its property.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXV. Addition of New Article on Religious Freedom – Expanded Version of UN Declaration Article 18:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change one’s religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest one’s religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. This right also includes freedom not to have a religion and to criticize or refuse to engage in any religious practice or belief without adverse legal consequences.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXVI. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Opinion and Expression – Per  UN Declaration Article 19:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXVII. Addition of New Article on Peaceful Assembly and Association – Per  UN Declaration Article 20:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No sentient entity may be compelled to belong to an association.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXVIII. Addition of New Article on Right of Political Participation – Per  UN Declaration Article 21:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to take part in the government of their countries, directly or through freely chosen representatives. All sentient entities have the right of equal access to public service in their countries. The will of the constituent sentient entities shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage of sentient entities and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XXXIX. Addition of New Article on Right to Work – Modified Version of UN Declaration Article 23:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to work, to free choice of employment, and to just and favorable conditions of work, as long as employment is offered or considered economically necessary in the sentient entity’s proximate society and contemporary epoch. All sentient entities who choose to work have the right to equal pay for equal work. All sentient entities who choose to work have the right to just and favorable remuneration, ensuring for themselves and their families an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection, such as a universal basic income. All sentient entities have the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests; however, no sentient entity may be compelled to join a trade union as a condition of employment.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XL. Addition of New Article on Right to Rest and Leisure – Modified Version of UN Declaration Article 24:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right to rest and leisure commensurate with the physical requirements of those sentient entities for maintaining optimal physical and mental health, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay in societies where paid employment is considered economically necessary.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XLI. Addition of New Article on Right of Cultural Participation – Per  UN Declaration Article 27:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. All sentient entities have the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production of which they are the authors.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XLII. Addition of New Article on Right to Social and International Order – Per  UN Declaration Article 28:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“All sentient entities are entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS can be fully realized.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Amendment TBR-XLIII. Addition of New Article to Oppose Destruction of Rights and Freedoms – Per  UN Declaration Article 30:

Shall a new Article be added to read as follows?

“Nothing in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS may be interpreted as implying for any State, group, or sentient entity any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman’s Second Anniversary Message

U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman’s Second Anniversary Message

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Gennady Stolyarov II

It astonishes me that two years have elapsed since I became Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party on November 17, 2016. Nonetheless, in retrospect, it seems that we are living in a different epoch from the one in which I stepped into this leadership role. In this epoch, transhumanism is no longer a fringe extreme; while we are a small political party, we occupy the sensible moderate ground – the civilized center of political discourse – precisely because we reject the downward spiral of toxicity, tribalism, political violence, and zero-sum partisanship which characterizes both the Democratic and Republican Parties today. Many people beyond the historic core transhumanist constituencies ought to find our message appealing, if they only knew about the Transhumanist Party and what it actually stands for.

While 2017 was a year of focusing on developing our now-extensive Platform, 2018 was characterized by increased outreach, more frequent events and interviews, steady membership growth (doubling our membership to 1,187 as of this writing), and the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s first foray into electoral politics under my Chairmanship. For a summary of our achievements in 2018, I encourage you to watch my speech at RAAD Fest 2018 in San Diego, CA, entitled “The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Four Years of Advocating for the Future” and attended by over 1,000 people.

We endorsed two candidates during this election season, James D. Schultz and myself. While Mr. Schultz fell slightly short of the 1,500 petition signatures required by New York law for ballot access, he did obtain 1,239 signatures, which shows that transhumanism can attract supporters in the four-figure range with diligent advocacy.

My own campaign for the Board of Trustees of the Indian Hills General Improvement District (IHGID) in Nevada was able to proceed to the general-election stage, since ballot access was available without the need to submit petitions. I ultimately obtained 520 votes out of 2,024 residents who cast their ballots. While I did not win a seat on the Board, 25.7% – more than a quarter – of the voters cast affirmative ballots in my favor.

While I would have preferred to win, this outcome still shows that my campaign – on which I spent no money but rather utilized social media, in-person appearances in public places, videos, and word of mouth – enabled me to reach more than a quarter of the residents after beginning with essentially zero name recognition in the area. Transhumanism, when articulated in a mainstream-friendly manner, can elicit support from people across the political spectrum and in all walks of life. We just need to continue to spread our message with determination and deliberate regarding ways of reaching constituencies who might not have become aware of transhumanism yet – perhaps because our methods of communication have not yet overlapped with their preferred media and social circles.

I am not particularly disappointed regarding the outcome of the IHGID Board election, since even getting to the stage where a Transhumanist-Party-endorsed candidate appeared on the ballot and received 520 votes constitutes major progress, since even Zoltan Istvan in 2016 had to campaign as a write-in candidate and so did not receive an official count of the votes cast in his favor. Furthermore, in my experience, the IHGID Board of Trustees is extremely open to resident input. As a resident, I have always been able to speak my mind at the Board meetings and make suggestions that have had substantive impacts. I am confident that the elected Board members are good people who have the well-being of the residents in mind, and that each of them will be receptive to at least a significant portion of my ideas in the future. Furthermore, I think this campaign helped me incrementally in the longer term to build ties with people in my community and to become more involved and able to have a voice in the many ongoing interesting developments that affect it.

From the standpoint of improving the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s political acumen, however, with a result such as the outcome of the IHGID vote, it is important to understand what happened and why and to see what this can teach about politics, the spread of information, and human dynamics more generally.

What factors could explain this outcome, to the best of my knowledge? Some of the electoral dynamics involved surprised me. Residents were able to choose up to three candidates, and it seems rather unusual to me that so few did. My calculations (which I am happy to share in greater detail upon request) indicate the following:

Of those IHGID residents who voted in 2018 at all:
– 878 voters did not make a selection.
– 605 voters only made 1 choice.
– 1,281 voters only made 2 choices.
– 138 voters made 3 choices. (I am one of those voters.)

It is possible that some voters did not understand that they could select multiple candidates. I expected that my best outcome would arise in a situation where I would be seen as a “consensus candidate” whom other candidates would be agreeable to supporting. However, this situation could only materialize if most, or at least many, voters voted for three choices.

However, the majority of those who voted actually selected two options rather than three. This suggests that they knew their prerogatives – so the possibilities are (a) they only voted for candidates whose names they recognized; and/or (b) there could have been a coalition between some two of the candidates (I do not know which two and would have no way of knowing), who informed their supporters to support both of them but not select a third.

However, the most disappointing explanation possible (if true) is this: names were arranged in alphabetical order by last name on the ballot, and some voters might have just picked the first name or the first two or three names. This could indeed have happened in an election which was not all that controversial, where there were no “hot-button” issues, where all the candidates were on friendly terms, where very little money was spent (none on my end), and where probably many voters only minimally informed themselves about the candidates.

My campaign, based on all indications, dominated on the Internet and social media – yet there are many residents of the District who do not appear to use the Internet or social media to any great extent. All of my interactions with residents who knew of my campaign have been extremely positive, but I posit that there exists a large demographic whom my efforts did not reach because there was not any online medium to even facilitate an in-person interaction (e.g., they did not see my announcements on Nextdoor.com and did not watch the candidate videos; also, their in-person activities do not overlap with mine). How to reach such constituents is a perpetual challenge, especially because I only practice genteel campaign tactics – e.g., no door-to-door soliciting or other intrusive messaging; I let people process information at their own convenience. I hypothesize that the only real way to attain recognition from non-Internet users is to build a reputation over many years of participation in in-person community activities. The contemporary world is quite fragmented, so those activities have been rarer than I would like – but there may be more opportunities over the coming years. I raise the more general question of how transhumanists can be more effective in reaching constituencies that are not as active online as most of us technology enthusiasts. What tactics can work to build both name recognition and good will? Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

For me, my next proximate political area of focus will be continuing to build the U.S. Transhumanist Party in its national and international presence and intellectual influence. There is much effort that could be put forth in this area in the immediate future.

  • We have already opened a new exposure period to consider clarifying amendments to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. While the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is achieving significant media coverage, we need to be vigilant against basic factual inaccuracies regarding the representation of its contents. These amendments will enable us to steer the narrative toward what transhumanists actually think and value, rather than unwarranted assumptions and associations made by persons whose agendas often steer them in the direction of manufacturing straw-man positions that transhumanists do not, in fact, espouse.
  • In early 2019 we will conduct the selection process for the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s 2020 Presidential candidate. Unlike the major political parties, we will have a short campaign season for contenders and an electronic, ranked-preference primary held during the same timeframe for all members, no matter where they reside. This will be a practical implementation of Sections XXVIII, XXIX, and XXX of our Platform. We are still looking for potential candidates for political office at any level in 2020, but having a Presidential candidate will be important as a high-profile educational approach to expose vast numbers of people to transhumanist ideas and aspirations. For this role we are seeking an erudite, articulate, scientifically literate individual with sufficient resources to self-fund a campaign and an absolute commitment to carry such a campaign through to Election Day in November 2020.
  • We need to continue to press toward our crucial threshold goal of 10,000 members. Membership is free and quick to acquire, and now brings several additional benefits with it. Please persuade as many people as you can to go to our free Membership Application Form at https://transhumanist-party.org/membership/ and sign up in less than a minute, no matter where they reside.
  • We need existing members to organize grassroots initiatives – which can include meetups, presentations, writing of articles and policy papers, and outreach within their local communities. If you engage in activism on behalf of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, please contact me and let me know what you wish to do or have done already, and we will publicize it as an example to other members of what is possible. No matter what your skill set, there are many constructive possibilities for you to contribute to our movement and the public’s recognition of it. An active presence in public discourse matters most of all at this stage. Be creative in how you bring that active presence into being!
  • We need to create State-level Transhumanist Parties in every State. If your State is not represented on our list of State Parties, you are welcome to form a State-level party yourself and contact me about doing so. While you explore the relevant requirements for official formation, even beginning a Facebook group for coordination among the members of the embryonic State-level Transhumanist Party would be a major step forward.
  • We need to expand our Foreign Ambassador program to as many countries as possible. The U.S. Transhumanist Party is proud of its international membership and the many fruitful ways in which we have coordinated with transhumanists in other countries. The more representatives we have abroad, the more opportunities there will be for transhumanism to become an integrated global phenomenon that guides the policies of all nations in pro-technology, pro-life-extension, pro-reason directions. To apply to become a Foreign Ambassador, fill out our application form here.
  • We need to continue improving our internal infrastructure, from developing a more efficient voting system (while preserving the ranked-preference method, but hopefully automating the instant runoffs and the publication of results) to adding more features to our website to encourage members to visit it more frequently and participate in discussions and other initiatives available through it. If you have not actively participated on the U.S. Transhumanist Party website yet, we would be interested to know why not, and what additional elements of the website might encourage you to participate in the future.

If you were to retain only several key insights from this message, they would be the following:

  • Attaining basic public awareness remains the major challenge of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and of transhumanism in general.
  • Growth in active members who operate at the grassroots level is the key to overcoming this challenge. Encourage others to sign up for free here.
  • Our message is appealing to the mainstream when properly articulated, but to succeed in doing so, we need to be in control of the narrative and speak for ourselves, instead of letting the media and intellectual opponents portray us as caricatured straw-men.
  • The moment the general public becomes tired of the partisan toxicity of the major political parties to the extent of actually creating a political vacuum, we need to be ready with a constructive alternative. We already have the conceptual alternative prepared; now we need to prepare the infrastructure to deploy and expand it.
  • There is much that you as an individual can do. Do it!

May the next year of my Chairmanship see the U.S. Transhumanist Party attain many of its goals and achieve unprecedented growth and impact for the transhumanist movement. If this happens, it will be because you, our members, will have made it happen.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II, FSA, ACAS, MAAA, CPCU, ARe, ARC, API, AIS, AIE, AIAF
Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party
Chief Executive, Nevada Transhumanist Party
Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator
Author, Death is Wrong

15-Day Exposure Period for Clarifying Amendments to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

15-Day Exposure Period for Clarifying Amendments to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

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The U.S. Transhumanist Party will hold an electronic vote of the membership for a seven-day period ending on 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on Sunday, December 2, 2018, regarding proposed amendments to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 2.0. During the present 15-day exposure period, members are welcome to suggest additional amendments for consideration, with the caveat that the amendments in question should be considered to be incremental and clarifying modifications to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights and not radical revisions of the principles behind it – principles which have largely been democratically agreed upon among the U.S. Transhumanist Party membership and which have been further elaborated upon within the U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform.

The initial clarifying changes exposed here are proposed in response to some misleading media coverage of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 2.o – coverage that goes beyond positing critical opinions and misrepresents the very text of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, reading into it provisions that are not there. Accordingly, clarifying changes to the wording may prevent and/or dispel such factual misrepresentations.

For instance, the U.S. Transhumanist Party notes that following misconceptions are salient in a recent article by Jasper Hamill in The Metro. While Mr. Hammill does cite many of the remarks of U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II, which generally characterize the purpose and context of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Mr. Hammill, in his analysis, also unfortunately borrows extensively from a factually flawed article by Michael Cook on the bioconservative website BioEdge.  It is always of concern to the U.S. Transhumanist Party when commentators do not clearly distinguish the facts of a given matter – such as what a document actually says – from the ideological lens through which they perceive that matter.

• For example, Mr. Hammill writes, “The bill aims to give all these entities the right to take total control of their own bodies, allowing them to use technology to boost their lifespan or seek euthanasia to end ‘involuntary suffering’.” The U.S. Transhumanist Party responds: The right to end involuntary suffering in Article IV does not refer to euthanasia. It refers to the idea that suffering itself should be abolished for still-living entities who desire this, as expressed in David Pearce’s philosophy of abolitionism. To equate this to euthanasia is short-sighted and fails to appreciate how technology can alleviate suffering without ending life; furthermore, such a portrayal reveals Mr. Hammill’s lack of research into a key philosophical strain within the transhumanist movement and the extent to which transhumanists recognize the possibilities of technology to be truly transformative in enhancing human well-being. The U.S. Transhumanist Party does have Article III, Section L, of its Platform, which supports a highly limited and regulated right to be prescribed a life-ending substance for self-administration by terminally ill patients – but that is nothing like “euthanasia” as commonly understood. Hence, it is important to clarify in Article IV of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights that this Article does not imply a right to euthanasia.

• Mr. Hammill further writes, “It also calls for reproductive freedom, open government, NHS-style healthcare and a universal income given to people whose jobs will ‘inevitably’ be replaced by technology.” The U.S. Transhumanist Party responds: Nowhere in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is “NHS-style” anything advocated. The right to universal healthcare, as specified in Article VII, does not inherently presuppose any monopolistic, single-payer system and was left deliberately open-ended. Many of the planks in the Platform advocate for significant free-market elements in healthcare systems. Universal healthcare could mean, for instance, that all services become so inexpensive and automated that everyone would be able to readily afford them. However, different members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party would advocate different systems of healthcare delivery. The Transhumanist Bill of Rights focuses on outcomes, rather than prescribing the specific delivery system – and hence it is desirable to clarify Article VII to ensure that the pursuit of universal healthcare can remain open-ended and potentially be arrived at through a variety of means, including those not yet conceived of, while allowing discussion and debate to continue within the transhumanist community about whether private or governmental means, or a combination thereof, would be most effective in achieving radical life extension and universal access to healthcare in the most expeditious timeframe possible.

• The U.S. Transhumanist Party further responds: While U.S. Transhumanist Party members have held various perspectives about the impacts of automation and the future effects that automation would have on opportunities for paid employment, it is important for a bill of rights to endeavor to express universal principles regarding desirable treatment of sentient entities, independent of contingent events (such as whether or not automation will “inevitably” render paid employment obsolete). There are many good reasons to advocate a universal, unconditional basic income even in a world where most people continue to work for a living and earn the majority of their income through traditional jobs.  Accordingly, broadening the starting clause of Article XIX to accommodate a variety of outcomes with regard to the future of automation and employment would strengthen the advocacy of universal basic income in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights.

• Mr. Hammill states that the Transhumanist Bill of Rights “incorporates elements of socialism”, and while there is some common ground in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights with positions that some socialists would find sympathetic, Mr. Hammill’s article curiously does not mention common elements with other political ideologies. It is possible that socialism was singled out because Mr. Hammill wanted to put this document in some pre-existing conceptual pigeonhole, failing to recognize that it is intended to transcend all conventional ideologies, as Chairman Stolyarov recently discussed at length and was even quoted as stating in Mr. Hammill’s article.

• Additionally it has come to the attention of the U.S. Transhumanist Party that Article XXI, which states that “All sentient entities are entitled to join their psyches to a collective noosphere in an effort to preserve self-consciousness in perpetuity”, has often not been sufficiently understood by the general public, even though it expresses a prerogative that is accessible even using today’s technologies. Accordingly, it is desirable for the Transhumanist Bill of Rights to clarify what the noosphere is and that there exist a variety of options for participating in it.

During the exposure period, please post your comments on this thread. If you post comments intended to be considered in voting and/or amending the Transhumanist Bill of Rights in any other electronic medium, please note that you thereby give your consent to have your comments reproduced with attribution or linked within this discussion thread, in order to direct members’ attention and consideration to them.

After the exposure period, a 7-day electronic voting period will occur from 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on Sunday, December 2, 2018, to 12:01 a.m.  U.S. Pacific Time on Sunday December 9, 2018. Instructions for electronic voting will be sent to members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party via e-mail. All individuals who are members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party as of the end of the exposure period and who have expressed agreement with its three Core Ideals will be eligible to vote thereafter. You can still vote if you become a member during the exposure period, so please apply here if you are interested. During the 7-day electronic voting period, you will still be able to become a member – but you will only be able to vote in subsequent elections, since we seek for voting on any given issue to be done by those members who have had an opportunity to thoroughly consider that issue and be involved in deliberations regarding it.

Electronic voting will be conducted by a ranked-preference method. Members will be able to rank-order their preferred selections on each individual proposed amendment to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. The original text of each Article will be available for selection, as well as any reasonable amendments proposed by any member. Leadership of the Transhumanist Party reserves the right to edit any proposed amendment for correctness of spelling and grammar only – but not with regard to the substance, unless the person proposing the amendment requests or consents to a substantive edit.  Members will also be able to abstain from voting on any given article.

The ranked-preference method has the advantage of eliminating a “winner-take-all” or “first-past-the-post” mentality and preventing people from being channeled into voting for sub-optimal choices (in their view) just because they fear an even less palatable alternative prevailing. Within the ranked-preference methodology, if no option obtains a clear majority as voters’ first choice, the option having the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated from consideration, and all those who voted for that option will have their votes assigned to their second-choice options. This process of elimination continues until one particular option has a clear majority of votes.

The Transhumanist Party encourages all members to participate in this process and for other transhumanists to sign up for membership during the exposure period. 

The Amendment titles below are informational only and will not be included in the adopted versions of the platform planks. Other proposed amendments and options for each amendment will be posted here during the exposure period as member suggestions are received.

Options for Proposed Amendments

Amendment TBR-IV. Clarification Regarding the Right to End Involuntary Suffering

Proposal TBR-IV-1: Amend Article IV to add the following statement at the end:

“The right of ending involuntary suffering does not refer to euthanasia but rather to the application of technology to eliminate involuntary suffering in still-living beings, while enabling their lives to continue with improved quality and length.”

Amendment TBR-VII. Clarification Regarding Universal Healthcare

Proposal TBR-VII-1: Amend Article VII to add the following statement at the end:

“A system of universal healthcare does not necessitate any particular means, policy framework, source, or method of payment for delivering healthcare. A system of universal healthcare may be provided privately, by governments, or by some combination thereof, as long as, in practice, healthcare is abundant, inexpensive, accessible, and effective in curing diseases, healing injuries, and lengthening lifespans.”

Proposal TBR-VII-2 [Based on Proposal by Didier Coeurnelle]: Amend Article VII to add the following statement at the end:

“A system of universal healthcare does not necessitate any particular means, policy framework, source, or method of payment for delivering healthcare. A system of universal healthcare may be provided by public institutions, by private organizations, or by some combination thereof, as long as there are legal guarantees that healthcare is to become abundant, inexpensive, accessible, and effective in curing diseases, healing injuries, and lengthening lifespans.”

Amendment TBR-XIX. Expansion of the Context for Universal Basic Income

Proposal TBR-XIX-1: Replace the starting clause of the Article (“Given the inevitability of technology eventually replacing the need for the labor of sentient entities,”) with an alternative clause: “Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities,” – such that the revised Article XIX would read as follows:

“Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities, all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.”

Amendment TBR-XXI. Additional Information Regarding the Noosphere

Proposal TBR-XXI-1: Amend Article XXI to add the following statement at the end:

“The noosphere is the sphere of human thought and includes, but is not limited to, intellectual systems in the realm of law, education, philosophy, technology, art, culture, and industry. All sentient entities have the right to participate in the noosphere using any level of technology that is conducive to constructive participation.”

Options for Proposed Amendments to Integrate the Provisions of the United Nations Universal Declarations of Human Rights (“UN Declaration”)

Amendment TBR-I. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article I, and UN Declaration Articles 2 and 29:

Proposal TBR-III-1: Amend Article I to read as follows: 

“All sentient entities are hereby entitled to pursue any and all rights within this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS to the degree that they deem desirable – including not at all. All sentient entities are entitled, to the extent of their individual decisions, to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, social, or planetary origin, property, birth (including manner of birth), biological or non-biological origins, or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a sentient entity belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing, or under any other limitation of sovereignty. In the exercise of their rights and freedoms, all sentient entities shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic society, which may not undermine the peaceful prerogatives of any individual sentient entity. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.”

Amendment TBR-III. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article III, and UN Declaration Article 1:

Proposal TBR-III-1: Amend Article III to read as follows: 

“All sentient entities shall be granted equal and total access to any universal rights to life. All sentient entities are created free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood (without necessitating any particular gender or implying any particular biological or non-biological origin or composition).”

Amendment TBR-XII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XII, and UN Declaration Article 16:

Proposal TBR-XII-1: Amend Article XII to read as follows:

“All sentient entities are entitled to reproductive freedom, including through novel means such as the creation of mind clones, monoparent children, or benevolent artificial general intelligence. All sentient entities of full age and competency, without any limitation due to race, nationality, religion, or origin, have the right to marry and found a family or to found a family as single heads of household. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. All families, including families formed through novel means, are entitled to protection by society and the State. All sentient entities also have the right to prevent unauthorized reproduction of themselves in both a physical and a digital context. Privacy and security legislation should be enacted to prevent any individual’s DNA, data, or other information from being stolen and duplicated without that individual’s authorization.”

Amendment TBR-XIII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XIII, and UN Declaration Article 12:

Proposal TBR-XIII-1: Amend Article XIII to read as follows:

“No sentient entity shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his, her, or its privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his, her, or its honor and reputation. Every sentient entity has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. All sentient entities have privacy rights to personal data, genetic material, digital, biographic, physical, and intellectual enhancements, and consciousness. Despite the differences between physical and virtual worlds, equal protections for privacy should apply to both physical and digital environments. Any data, such as footage from a public security camera, archived without the consent of the person(s) about whom the data were gathered and subject to legal retention, shall be removed after a period of seven (7) years, unless otherwise requested by said person(s).”

Amendment TBR-XIV. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XIV, and UN Declaration Article 9:

Proposal TBR-XIV-1: Amend Article XIV to read as follows:

“No sentient entity shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. Sousveillance laws should be enacted to ensure that all members of peaceful communities feel safe, to achieve governmental transparency, and to provide counter-balances to any surveillance state. For instance, law-enforcement officials, when interacting with the public, should be required to wear body cameras or similar devices continuously monitoring their activities.”

Amendment TBR-XVI. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVI, and UN Declaration Article 7:

Proposal TBR-XVI-1: Amend Article XVI to read as follows:

“All sentient entities are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All sentient entities are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS and against any incitement to such discrimination. All sentient entities should be protected from discrimination based on their physical form in the context of business transactions and law enforcement.”

Amendment TBR-XVII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVII, and UN Declaration Article 3:

Proposal TBR-XVII-1: Amend Article XVII to read as follows: 

“All sentient entities have the right to life, liberty and security of person. All sentient entities have the right to defend themselves from attack, in both physical and virtual worlds.”

Amendment TBR-XVIII. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XVIII, and UN Declaration Articles 22 and 25:

Proposal TBR-XVIII-1: Amend Article XVIII to read as follows: 

“Societies of the present and future should afford all sentient entities sufficient basic access to wealth and resources to sustain the basic requirements of existence in a civilized society and function as the foundation for pursuits of self-improvement. This includes the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including food or other necessary sources of energy, clothing, housing or other appropriate shelter, medical care or other necessary physical maintenance, necessary social services, and the right of security in the event of involuntary unemployment, sickness, disability, loss of family support, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond the sentient entity’s control. Present and future societies should ensure that their members will not live in poverty solely for being born to the wrong parents. All children and other recently created sentient entities, irrespective of the manner or circumstances of their creation, shall enjoy the same social protection. Each sentient entity, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for his, her, or its dignity and the free development of his, her, or its personality.”

Amendment TBR-XX. Integration of Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Article XX, and UN Declaration Article 26:

Proposal TBR-XX-1: Amend Article XX to read as follows: 

“Present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all in pursuit of factual knowledge to increase intellectual acuity; promote critical thinking and logic; foster creativity; form an enlightened collective; attain health; secure the bounty of liberty for all sentient entities for our posterity; and forge new ideas, meanings, and values. All sentient entities have the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. Education shall be directed to the full development of the sentient entity’s personality and to the strengthening of respect for all sentient entities’ rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all nations, racial, religious, and other sentient groups – whether biological, non-biological, or a combination thereof – and shall further the maintenance of peace. Parents and creators of sentient entities have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children or other recently created sentient entities which have not yet developed sufficient maturity to select their own education.”

Amendment TBR-XXV. Addition of New Article to Prohibit Slavery and Involuntary Servitude, Per UN Declaration Article 4:

Proposal TBR-XXV-1: Replace Article XXV with the following text:

“No sentient entity shall be held in slavery or involuntary servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

Amendment TBR-XXVI. Addition of New Article to Prohibit Torture and Cruel Punishment, Per UN Declaration Article 5:

Proposal TBR-XXVI-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“No sentient entity shall be subjected to torture or to treatment or punishment that is cruel, degrading, inhuman, or otherwise unworthy of sentience or sapience.”

Amendment TBR-XXVII. Addition of New Article on Recognition Before the Law, Per UN Declaration Article 6:

Proposal TBR-XXVII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“Each sentient entity has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

Amendment TBR-XXVIII. Addition of New Article on Effective Remedy – Expanded Version of UN Declaration Article 8:

Proposal TBR-XXVIII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All individual sentient entities have the right to an effective remedy by the competent local, national, international, or interplanetary tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted them by the constitution, by law, and/or by this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.”

Amendment TBR-XXIX. Addition of New Article on Public Hearings for Criminal Charges – Per UN Declaration Article 10:

Proposal TBR-XXIX-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All individual sentient entities are entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of their individual rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against them.”

Amendment TBR-XXX. Addition of New Article on Presumption of Innocence – Per  UN Declaration Article 11:

Proposal TBR-XXX-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All individual sentient entities charged with a penal offence have the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which they individually have had all the guarantees necessary for their defense. No sentient entity shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.”

Amendment TBR-XXXI. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Movement – Per  UN Declaration Article 13:

Proposal TBR-XXXI-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Each individual sentient entity has the right to leave any country, including his, her, or its own, and to return to his, her, or its country.”

Amendment TBR-XXXII. Addition of New Article on Right to Seek Asylum – Per  UN Declaration Article 14:

Proposal TBR-XXXII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS.”

Amendment TBR-XXXIII. Addition of New Article on Right to Nationality – Per  UN Declaration Article 15:

Proposal TBR-XXXIII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to a nationality. No sentient entity shall be arbitrarily deprived of his, her, or its nationality nor denied the right to change his, her, or its nationality.”

Amendment TBR-XXXIV. Addition of New Article on Right to Property – Per  UN Declaration Article 17:

Proposal TBR-XXXIV-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his, her, or its property.”

Amendment TBR-XXXV. Addition of New Article on Religious Freedom – Expanded Version of UN Declaration Article 18:

Proposal TBR-XXXV-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change one’s religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest one’s religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. This right also includes freedom not to have a religion and to criticize or refuse to engage in any religious practice or belief without adverse legal consequences.”

Amendment TBR-XXXVI. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Opinion and Expression – Per  UN Declaration Article 19:

Proposal TBR-XXXVI-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Amendment TBR-XXXVII. Addition of New Article on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association – Per  UN Declaration Article 20:

Proposal TBR-XXXVII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No sentient entity may be compelled to belong to an association.”

Amendment TBR-XXXVIII. Addition of New Article on Right of Political Participation – Per  UN Declaration Article 21:

Proposal TBR-XXXVIII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to take part in the government of their countries, directly or through freely chosen representatives. All sentient entities have the right of equal access to public service in their countries. The will of the constituent sentient entities shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage of sentient entities and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

Amendment TBR-XXXIX. Addition of New Article on Right to Work – Modified Version of UN Declaration Article 23:

Proposal TBR-XXXIX-1: Add a new Article to read as follows: 

“All sentient entities have the right to work, to free choice of employment, and to just and favorable conditions of work, as long as employment is offered or considered economically necessary in the sentient entity’s proximate society and contemporary epoch. All sentient entities who choose to work have the right to equal pay for equal work. All sentient entities who choose to work have the right to just and favorable remuneration, ensuring for themselves and their families an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection, such as a universal basic income. All sentient entities have the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests; however, no sentient entity may be compelled to join a trade union as a condition of employment.”

Amendment TBR-XL. Addition of New Article on Right to Rest and Leisure – Modified Version of UN Declaration Article 24:

Proposal TBR-XL-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right to rest and leisure commensurate with the physical requirements of those sentient entities for maintaining optimal physical and mental health, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay in societies where paid employment is considered economically necessary.”

Amendment TBR-XLI. Addition of New Article on Right of Cultural Participation – Per  UN Declaration Article 27:

Proposal TBR-XLI-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities have the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. All sentient entities have the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production of which they are the authors.”

Amendment TBR-XLII. Addition of New Article on Right to Social and International Order – Per  UN Declaration Article 28:

Proposal TBR-XLII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“All sentient entities are entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS can be fully realized.”

Amendment TBR-XLIII. Addition of New Article to Oppose Destruction of Rights and Freedoms – Per  UN Declaration Article 30:

Proposal TBR-XLIII-1: Add a new Article to read as follows:

“Nothing in this TRANSHUMANIST BILL OF RIGHTS may be interpreted as implying for any State, group, or sentient entity any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”

 

How I Kicked Cancer with Cannabis – Article by Jennifer A. Huse

How I Kicked Cancer with Cannabis – Article by Jennifer A. Huse

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logo_bgJennifer A. Huse

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this article by Jennifer A. Huse as part of its ongoing integration with the Transhuman Party. This article was originally published on the Transhuman Party website circa November 7, 2018. The account in this article is germane to Article III, Section XIV of our Platform, which reads, “The United States Transhumanist Party supports an end to the costly drug war, which is often an infringement upon the lives and liberties of innocent citizens who do not use drugs but fall victim to militant enforcement of drug prohibitions. The United States Transhumanist Party supports legalization of mild recreational drugs such as marijuana.” Blanket prohibitions on marijuana especially are completely unreasonable, in light of documented medicinal uses for this substance. While the U.S. Transhumanist Party is a political organization and so not in a position to give any medical advice or to take any stance on the more general medical claims made in this article, we do consider it important to take into account the experience of patients who have had success after pursuing certain treatments. The story of Jennifer Huse should illustrate the importance of allowing patients the freedom to choose and experiment with treatments, including cannabis-derived products, in order to increase the probability that some approach may work even if many conventional medical practitioners have given up on the patient. Much is still unknown about cancer and the human organism’s workings more generally. Only through an iterative process can we find out more, and that involves being open to the evidence from patients who have actually experienced success.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 30, 2018  

I am recovering from a six-year struggle with an inflammatory and bleeding condition that eventually lead to a cancer diagnosis. I am supposed to be dead because I ignored the treatment nearly all of the doctors insisted on. I tried an alternative approach…

Cannabis saved me.

One day I started bleeding, I thought to myself, “OK, I have my period” – but then, it didn’t stop for 4 months. This happened over and over again for the next 4 years. I went to doctor after doctor and hospital after hospital – approximately 40 doctors and 5 hospitals in the United States in Europe.

I was told by nearly all of them that had “perfect” blood work, and that nothing was showing up in any of the scans or biopsies except an occasional atypical cell that I had nothing to be concerned about.  I tried different things, and at times it would stop, and then the bleeding would start back up. I was even able to stop the bleeding and most of the swelling for about a year by drinking Kangen water. (Although do not feel it was the proper medicine to correct the improper cell signal firing to my endometrial lining, I do think is a very powerful anti-inflammatory substance.)

This process was very expensive and very exhausting. Nearly all the doctors told me I was in perfect health and all of the tests were coming back perfect. Some told me it “was all in my head” – even though I was bleeding 4 months straight! Or longer! Nearly all told me I needed at least a partial if not full hysterectomy. Some mentioned oncology; many yelled or got irritated when I asked questions, not knowing my background, and part of my background is specifically oncology research. (I almost went into the field, but it was so corrupt I couldn’t bear it.)

Some told me to get  my affairs in order because I was going to die, or, if I didn’t do what they said, I was going to die. They did not know I grew up in a center where people went who had been written off by mainstream medicine and they lived – so I didn’t put too much weight on their words, especially since – doctors or not – they had a very limited toolbox on how to approach this.

I found it quite ridiculous that you could recommend an invasive surgery without a diagnosis. NONE of the doctors were able to figure out what was wrong, but at the same time they told me I needed to have a full hysterectomy.

In June of 2015 I finally got a diagnosis: Complex endometrial hyperplasia with atypia. In other words: my body had not been shedding its endometrial lining as a normal functioning uterus does every month; it had not been getting the proper cell signals to complete this function, for still unknown reasons. (I am starting to formulate some ideas on the subject.)

This lead to a build up of endometrial lining that nearly filled up my uterine cavity. The reason I was constantly bleeding was that parts of the lining were coming out at times. The reason I was constantly swelling was because the body was registering this unshed tissue as a foreign object and since it was not being eliminated the “normal” way, the body was trying to burn it out to eliminate it. Due to the extended delay in diagnosis, I had advanced endometrial pre-cancer, plus I had cysts all over my ovaries.

The general consensus?

We would try medicine to eliminate the endometrial lining with the hopes that it would clear away the endometrial lining with the Atypia. But most likely, I was going to die unless I underwent a hysterectomy and also (possibly) chemo and radiation.

The first doctor to properly diagnose the condition was Dr. Morgan in Ocean, NJ. I am mentioning him because as far as being able to diagnose the issue, that was accomplished. But as far as his bedside manner  and certain approaches, I would say look for someone else who might be more receptive to alternative treatments. Also biopsies can be done with anesthesia or not – his were not, and this was extremely painful to an area that was already so raw from pain. He was very clear that he did not feel the progesterone would work and he gave the same recommendation of full hysterectomy.

I went to A Woman’s Place (also in New Jersey); they told me the same thing, but with an extra-sarcastic “it’s your life”, when I said I wanted a different approach. After all, the cancerous tissue was only found in the endometrial lining at this point and nowhere else, so why not just remove the lining first?

My response to “it’s your life” was, “Yes, it is.” And so I spent another $150 for a ten-minute conversation on nothing.

The atypia diagnosis was concerning, but I felt I was better prepared to handle it than most because of my background.  Cancer isn’t scary to me; it is a malfunction like any other, and when addressed it can be resolved. But it is not being addressed properly.

The first treatment the diagnosing doctor in New Jersey prescribed was progesterone, 150 mg for 10 days to force my body to shed all the years of inflamed uterine lining that had built up. At this point my body was expelling 40+ blood clots the size of my palm every day. My stomach would go from flat to the size of a 9-months-pregnant woman in a matter of minutes, and the pain was excruciating. In the beginning it would go up and down and flat again, but then the swelling started to move around my body even to my brain, giving me a lot of brain fog and inability to remember. I would find out later from another practitioner that the inflammation had also ransacked my adrenals, causing near-total adrenal system failure.

Taking the first dose of progesterone caused me to expel all of the tissue that had built up. It was extremely painful, and there was so much blood loss my husband (then fiance) and friend were quite ready to take me to the hospital.

After the tissue was expelled, I was able to begin to heal.

My dear friend Roxanne Meadows of The Venus Project recommended a brilliant women’s health practitioner: Amanda Lucero in Sebring, Florida. The name of her facility is Customized Wellness. I would highly recommend her to anyone, and she is also available for phone consultations. Amanda did take a look at all the medical information I had available at that time and the most recent diagnosis and other tests. She ordered extensive blood work and noticed I had nearly exhausted my adrenals, plus I had other deficiencies such as vitamin D and vitamin B; she recommended supplementation from a company called Pure Encapsulations.

She also changed my progesterone to a bioidentical type prepared at a compounding pharmacy in California. She said that the traditional approach to this was a hysterectomy, as she had referred me to a wonderful surgeon (also in Sebring) who had tested me and informed me my lining had returned to normal but the precancerous tissue (and cysts) were still there.

I told them I was going to try cannabis oil first, because I have been researching it, and the information I was reading in regard to why it works was compatible with the theories I have on why cancer starts and how the issue can be corrected. I would leave for treatment and come back in 3 months, and if there was no change, we would start by removing the endometrial lining first, which is commonly referred to as a D & C, as this is a minimally invasive procedure and so far any atypical tissue had only been found in the endometrial lining.  Even though they still spoke to me about standard treatments, their bedside manners were very knowledgeable and caring, and not dismissive of the approach I wished to take with my own body.

By the time we arrived in Denver, I could barely walk without the assistance of my husband due to blood loss and weakness and pain, and I had put on over 20 pounds of trapped swelling. Most of the weight people in such situations put on and have difficulty losing is due to inflammation, not fat.

I went to Cohen Medical Center in Denver and was assigned a caregiver to start preparing my oil for me. I strongly recommend that anyone pursuing this path of treatment go to this facility if they are in the Denver area.

I took it in the form of vaginal suppository and drops by mouth in a steadily increasing dosage over the 3 months but averaging about a gram a day.

The recipe my caregiver used can be found at http://phoenixtears.ca/, except she used food-grade alcohol instead of isopropyl.

At the end of the 3 months I returned to Florida and had an elective D & C with biopsies of the tissue.

I had a camera scope at the end of December 2016, at which time I was declared free not just of cancerous tissue but all unhealthy gynecological tissue; even my ovarian cysts were gone.

(Those were neurological in origin also; they are getting the wrong cell signal.)

The financial expense from this delayed diagnosis – all of the doctors and hospitals and medicine with no health insurance in the United States – is unfathomable… I had a huge medical bankruptcy before I even got the diagnosis, and then we had to pay for everything after $750 for each bloodwork. No insurance, so every visit, test, surgery, medicine – you name it – was out of pocket. It is very sad how you can be financially ruined from being sick in our developed country.

Another difference between this treatment versus the traditional surgery, chemo, and radiation, is that the treatment makes you feel so good. Your pain goes away a little every day; so does your brain fog, and you get a little more energy every day. Your sleep evens out, and you get rested and repaired versus the horrible inflammation and weakening caused by chemo, radiation, surgery, and other toxic, invasive procedures

One of the issues facing people in regard to getting this medicine is that in many areas it is either still illegal or there are restrictions on the amount that do not allow for the quantity needed in the recipe. It is also very expensive when obtainable, because it is not covered by insurance, and so far homegrown plants are not that common. I feel it is very crucial that we, as a people, come together to demand that this medicine be allowed to be grown at home.

Many people that need the plant the most have already been suffering for so long that their bodies cannot allow them to work, and they are on a very limited budget. Changing the law to allow anyone to grow as much of this medicine as they wish is something we must strive for, along with complete expungement of any past non-violent cannabis legal record, and assistance in helping the victims of imprisonment to regain and improve their quality of life.

It is legal in New Jersey – the state we are in now – medically but not recreationally. I qualify because I had a previous cancer diagnosis, so I can obtain it here, but New Jersey only allows enough for maintenance, not the doses required for neurological system deficiency reversal. I’m here playing with dosages and delivery methods on myself to see what we can do.for people with more restricted  access.

The proper dosage does have to be figured out. The http://phoenixtears.ca/ website has its recommended recipe, and if you have a caregiver assigned thru Cohen Medical or another cooperating medical facility, they can help figure that out for you.  Many people are also happy with the effects of CBD oil; I can’t comment personally on this though, because I didn’t take the CBD oil component. I took whole-plant medicine.

All of the research I’ve read indicates for treating cancer you need the THC. All the components working together help repair and protect different aspects of the neurological system.

Or can they also radically extend life?

Cannabinoids are in our breast milk, which is typically one of the the most nutritious foods you can give a developing child. For the most part – without some other sort of intervention causing disruption to the organism’s system or systems – it will develop properly and be “healthy” in a manner of progressing in health, not decreasing in health.

After children are removed from breast milk, we have demonized most of the things that have cannabinoids, like cannabis, hemp,  chocolate… real chocolate with cannabinoids, not processed substances that contribute to going into deficit status.

With modern technology we have only been able to extend life to approximately 100 to 120 years, because our body is constantly inflaming, and over time even the strongest biological organism’s tissue cannot sustain the damage and starts to degrade until the organism ceases to be able to transmit electrical cell signal functions altogether.

Repairing this deficiency can right now work with the cancers. Cancer is a neurological malfunction.  The cell is not receiving the signal to die off, like a “normal” cell does after replication; it appears that the deficiency is directly related to the deficiency of the endocannabinoid system.

When that deficiency is addressed, it seems to correct the signal to the cancerous cells and cause them to commit apoptosis.  It is my opinion that this medicine can be used in regard to other medical conditions that are neurological in nature, to treat and resolve in a non-toxic manner. It is also my opinion that nearly all conditions and aging itself are neurological in origin. So if the human biological system is in proper stasis, its cells will continue to replicate, divide, and die off as they should for a radically longer amount of time than they currently do, if not indefinitely.

Repairing this deficiency can right now work with the cancers. Cancer is a neurological malfunction.  The cell is not receiving the signal to die off, like a “normal” cell does after replication.

Jennifer A. Huse works for The Venus Project as its Social Media & Marketing Coordinator.

Gennady Stolyarov II Interviewed on “Lev and Jules Break the Rules” – Sowing Discourse, Episode #001

Gennady Stolyarov II Interviewed on “Lev and Jules Break the Rules” – Sowing Discourse, Episode #001

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logo_bgGennady Stolyarov II
Jules Hamilton
Lev Polyakov

U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II was recently honored to be the first guest ever interviewed on the video channel Lev and Jules Break the Rules with Lev Polyakov and Jules Hamilton. Lev and Jules have produced this skillfully edited video of the conversation, with content references from the conversation inserted directly into the footage. For those who wish to explore broad questions related to technology, transhumanism, culture, economics, politics, philosophy, art, and even connections to popular films and computer games, this is the discussion to watch.

This video was originally posted here. It is mirrored on Mr. Stolyarov’s YouTube channel here.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our free Membership Application Form here. It takes less than a minute!

It is republished with permission.

More information about Lev and Jules Break the Rules:
– Patreon
– Minds
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Health & Wellness: Living Forever – Presentation by Peter Xing at Real Big Things #22

Health & Wellness: Living Forever – Presentation by Peter Xing at Real Big Things #22

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Peter Xing

The U.S. Transhumanist Party is pleased to feature this presentation from Peter Xing, co-founder of Transhumanism Australia, an organization allied with the U.S. Transhumanist Party, from the Real Big Things Conference earlier in 2018. This video was originally published on June 13, 2018.

Peter challenges our way of thinking about death by presenting the very real prospect that living forever isn’t just a plot in Hollywood scripts. Walking us through the research developments, Peter shows living into our hundreds (or even thousands) is science non-fiction.

About Peter Xing

“We’re at an inflection point of being able to cure all diseases including the ageing process, solving intelligence, and conquering scarcity to create abundance.”

~ Peter Xing

KPMG’s Tech & Innovation Manager and Co-founder of Transhumanism Australia, Peter Xing, has built a community that educates and invests in scientific research and technologies to enhance the human biological condition. Through nanotech, biotech, and artificial intelligence, Peter seeks to accelerate its research and applications to benefit society and wellbeing through Transhumanism Australia.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party – Four Years of Advocating for the Future – Gennady Stolyarov II Presents at RAAD Fest 2018

The U.S. Transhumanist Party – Four Years of Advocating for the Future – Gennady Stolyarov II Presents at RAAD Fest 2018

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Gennady Stolyarov II

This is the video that American voters need to see prior to the 2018 elections. Watch it here.

On October 7, 2018, the U.S. Transhumanist Party marked its four-year anniversary. On September 21, 2018, at RAAD Fest 2018 in San Diego, CA, Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II spoke in advance of this occasion by highlighting the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s recent achievements – including a doubling in membership over the past year, the revived Enlightenment Salons, a Platform that rivals those of the two major political parties, and Mr. Stolyarov’s own candidacy in 2018.

Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our free Membership Application Form. It takes less than a minute!

Visit the U.S. Transhumanist Party Values page.

See the U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform.

See the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 2.0.

Watch the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s subsequent meeting at RAAD Fest 2018 on September 22, 2018 here.

View Mr. Stolyarov’s official page for his candidacy for the Indian Hills General Improvement District (IHGID) Board of Trustees.

U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for the Fourth Quarter of 2018

U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for the Fourth Quarter of 2018

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The purpose of this post is to facilitate member comments pertaining to transhumanism and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, which might not specifically fit the subjects of any other post or article on the U.S. Transhumanist Party website. This is the place for members to offer suggestions or converse about any areas of emerging technologies and their political, moral, societal, cultural, and esthetic implications. The general discussion thread is also an ideal location to suggest or propose platform planks that may be considered for future platform voting.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party will endeavor to open one of these general comment threads per quarter. This comment thread pertains to the months of October, November, and December 2018.

Type in your comments below. Please note that, to protect against spambots, the first comment by any individual will be moderated. After passing moderation, a civil commenter should be able to post comments without future moderation – although we cannot guarantee that the technical aspect of this functionality will work as intended 100% of the time.

Gennady Stolyarov II Presents at the “Meet the Candidates” Night of the Indian Hills General Improvement District

Gennady Stolyarov II Presents at the “Meet the Candidates” Night of the Indian Hills General Improvement District

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The video recording of Gennady Stolyarov II’s presentation at the “Meet the Candidates” Night (October 17, 2018) at the Indian Hills General Improvement District has been posted here.

Mr. Stolyarov’s candidacy has previously been unanimously endorsed by a vote of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s members.

There is some technical flaw with the audio around 8:52 – the time that Mr. Stolyarov discusses protecting homeowners’ property rights and opposing the establishment of a homeowners’ association. You will hear several parts of these remarks simultaneously – but you will likely still be able to discern Mr. Stolyarov’s position. About a minute afterward, the proper linear audio stream resumes.

After completing his presentation, Mr. Stolyarov issued the following written statement:

I am pleased with the outcome of “Meet the Candidates” Night at the Indian Hills General Improvement District this evening. The seats were nearly all filled, and approximately 25 residents appeared in person. All candidates’ responses were recorded and will be posted on YouTube in the coming days. I will provide links as soon as I become aware of them.

I was able to use the allotted time to present my intended messages regarding my qualifications and my priorities of maintaining essential infrastructure, promoting growth, supporting technological and factually, rationally grounded solutions, and being attentive to all residents and representing the District as a whole in a nonpartisan manner. The statements and questions were thoughtful and generated a civil, meaningful discussion about events in the District. This is what political activity should be about – not factionalism, tribalism, or blind partisanship.

Many residents and the other candidates appeared to be sympathetic to my approach and positions – and my hope is that this will enable them to recognize me as a good consensus candidate who can draw support from all constituencies in the District. I stated at the event that I would be honored to work with any of the other candidates if they are elected to the Board alongside me.

Whether my objective of not being last in the vote count can be met remains to be seen; this election will probably surprise everyone. However, this event most definitely helped – and I hope the videos will help as well.

Early voting in Douglas County begins this Saturday, October 20, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Courthouse in Minden. I have been conducting research on the ballot questions and candidates in the contested races for several hours per day; now I am close to finalizing my own preferences.

Please inform any of your acquaintances who reside in the Indian Hills GID about me and my candidacy!

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our free Membership Application Form here. It takes less than a minute!

 

 

Nevada Transhumanist Party Positions on 2018 Nevada Ballot Questions

Nevada Transhumanist Party Positions on 2018 Nevada Ballot Questions

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The Nevada Transhumanist Party offers the following brief statements of position on the ballot questions currently before Nevada voters in the 2018 General Election.

Summary
Question 1: Support
Question 2: Support
Question 3: Support
Question 4: Support
Question 5: Oppose
Question 6: Oppose

 

Ballot Question 1 – Marsy’s Law Crime Victims’ Rights Amendment – Support

Wording of Ballot Question: “Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) remove existing provisions that require the Legislature to provide certain statutory rights for crime victims; and (2) adopt in their place certain expressly stated constitutional rights that crime victims may assert throughout the criminal or juvenile justice process?” (More information on BallotPedia.)

Position of the Nevada Transhumanist Party: The Nevada Transhumanist Party supports Ballot Question 1 as an expansion of the rights of crime victims to render those rights more symmetrical to the protections that those accused of criminal acts already receive. The Nevada Transhumanist Party strongly holds that due process is vital for both the accused and the victim of a crime. Section X of the Nevada Transhumanist Party Platform states, in part, that “each individual should be sentenced based solely on the consideration of the nature of that individual’s crime, its context, and its severity.” However, the nature, context, and severity of a crime can only be ascertained if victims are permitted to participate in the justice process, with full protections of their safety and right to be heard. One of the most important protections of Ballot Question 1 is “To have all monetary payments, money and property collected from any person who has been ordered to make restitution be first applied to pay the amounts ordered as restitution to the victim.” This shifts the focus of the justice system toward compensating the victim, instead of simply enriching the state. A restitution-oriented justice system is ideal where the damage from a crime can be repaired or compensated monetarily, as this approach actually endeavors to make the victims whole and thereby undo as many of the ill effects of the crime as possible. The more lives can be repaired in this way, the fewer obstacles to innocent individuals’ flourishing will exist, and the faster our society will progress in economic, moral, and technological dimensions.

 

Ballot Question 2 – Sales-Tax Exemption for Feminine Hygiene Products – Support

Wording of Ballot Question: “Shall the Sales and Use Tax Act of 1955 be amended to provide an exemption from the taxes imposed by this Act on the gross receipts from the sale and the storage, use or other consumption of feminine hygiene products?” (More information on BallotPedia.)

Position of the Nevada Transhumanist Party: The Nevada Transhumanist Party supports Ballot Question 2 as a protection for the morphological freedom of individuals. The morphological freedom of female individuals is infringed by asymmetrical taxation of products that those individuals uniquely require. While the Nevada Transhumanist Party does not oppose sales taxes per se, exemptions from sales taxes for the necessities of life are reasonable if such taxes pose impediments to individual quality of life or even the ability to afford those necessities.

 

Ballot Question 3 – Energy Choice Initiative – Support

Wording of Ballot Question: “Shall Article 1 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require the Legislature to provide by law for the establishment of an open, competitive retail electric energy market that prohibits the granting of monopolies and exclusive franchises for the generation of electricity?” (More information on BallotPedia.)

Position of the Nevada Transhumanist Party: The Nevada Transhumanist Party supports Ballot Question 3 to eliminate the coercive energy monopoly currently held by NV Energy and allow individuals to choose their utility and source of energy, much like they are able to choose which furniture or which cars to buy today. NV Energy has used its monopoly position to stifle and penalize the deployment of economical rooftop solar systems, which allow homeowners to autonomously generate their own electricity and even earn some money doing so. The suppression of such opportunities is a travesty of justice and needs to be reversed.

The NV Energy monopoly is not only harmful to technological progress, renewal energy, and affordable electricity costs; it is also a danger to the health and safety of homeowners. This is because of NV Energy’s arcane, deliberately circular call-center system, which gives consumers “the runaround” when consumers attempt to contact NV Energy to request emergency service related to failures in the electrical panels on their homes. NV Energy has connected the main circuit-breakers on many such panels to its “smart meters”, which require the intervention of an NV Energy technician to disable to that the circuit-breakers can be worked on and repaired or replaced. However, NV Energy does not offer consumers a dedicated emergency response to promptly allow access to those consumers’ own electrical systems in situations where hours and even minutes matter for preserving life and property.

The Nevada Transhumanist Party considers particularly reprehensible the “No on 3” campaign in Nevada – orchestrated and almost exclusively (99.99%) financed by NV Energy and its connected organizations – which has been disingenuous in its messaging and which has created many mistaken impressions on the part of the public. Question 3 would only deprive NV Energy of its monopoly powers; it would not mirror the California-style (pseudo)-“deregulation” of the late 1990s, nor would it thwart any renewable-energy projects. Quite the contrary, it has been NV Energy and only NV Energy that has stifled efforts by consumers and rooftop-solar installers to create genuine alternatives to NV Energy’s electrical grid and its intentionally cumbersome and restrictive policies.

Question 3, indeed, would require that the Nevada Legislature “ensure that protections are established that entitle customers to safe, reliable, and competitively priced electricity;” and “protect against service disconnections and unfair practices” – protections that are currently absent because of the NV Energy monopoly’s political connections, asymmetrical lobbying clout, and the regulatory capture of the Public Utilities Commission.

Nevada’s voters overwhelmingly approved Question 3 in 2016 (72.36% voted in favor). Now that NV Energy has launched a last-ditch campaign in reaction to the jeopardy in which its monopoly finds itself, voters should inform themselves and see through the misleading rhetoric of the “Coalition to Defeat Question 3” (i.e., NV Energy). The Nevada Transhumanist Party staunchly supports Question 3 as the pathway toward major technological progress and innovation in the realm of energy, harnessing the forces of market competition to provide cleaner, more affordable electricity for all Nevadans.

 

Ballot Question 4 – Medical Equipment Sales Tax Exemption Amendment – Support

Wording of Ballot Question: “Shall Article 10 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require the Legislature to provide by law for the exemption of durable medical equipment, oxygen delivery equipment, and mobility enhancing equipment prescribed for use by a licensed health care provider from any tax upon the sale, storage, use, or consumption of tangible personal property?” (More information on BallotPedia.)

Position of the Nevada Transhumanist Party: The Nevada Transhumanist Party supports Ballot Question 4 to exempt durable medical equipment from sales and use tax. These taxes can often run into the thousands of dollars for sick and dying patients and could compromise the quality of their care. We support any measure that helps make medical equipment affordable and more widespread.

 

Ballot Question 5 – Automatic Voter Registration via DMV – Oppose

Wording of Ballot Question: “Shall Chapter 293 of the Nevada Revised Statutes be amended to establish a system that will automatically register an eligible person to vote, or update that person’s existing Nevada voter registration information, at the time the person applies to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles for the issuance or renewal of any type of driver’s license or identification card, or makes a request to change the address on such a license or identification card, unless the person affirmatively declines in writing?” (More information on BallotPedia.)

Position of the Nevada Transhumanist Party: The Nevada Transhumanist Party opposes Ballot Question 5. While the Nevada Transhumanist Party supports efforts to render voter registration easy and seamless, the particular requirements of Ballot Question 5 would entail the DMV being mandated to insert disclosures that encourage voters to select a major political-party registration by including a statement “that the person will not be able to vote at a primary election for candidates for partisan offices of a major political party unless the person indicates a major political party affiliation”. Such wording – which would essentially compel a State agency to advertise for the major political parties – would further skew the political arena toward the major political parties and would entrench their dominance. Voter registration should furthermore always occur on an opt-in, rather than opt-out, basis; this is the only approach that consistently respects individual autonomy and choice to participate in the political system or to abstain from such participation. Opting in should be easy and made available through a variety of methods (including electronic, same-day registration), but the presumption of registration can create logistical difficulties for some individuals and conceivable situations where an automatic “updated” registration generates needless contradictions in a person’s registration status, which would actually render it more difficult for that person to subsequently cast a vote.

 

Ballot Question 6 – Renewable Energy Standards Initiative – Oppose

Wording of Ballot Question: “Shall Article 4 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require, beginning in calendar year 2022, that all providers of electric utility services who sell electricity to retail customers for consumption in Nevada generate or acquire incrementally larger percentages of electricity from renewable energy resources so that by calendar year 2030 not less than 50 percent of the total amount of electricity sold by each provider to its retail customers in Nevada comes from renewable energy resources?“ (More information on BallotPedia.)

Position of the Nevada Transhumanist Party: The Nevada Transhumanist Party opposes Ballot Question 6. While the Nevada Transhumanist Party supports economical renewable energy and the acceleration of efforts to develop technologies to render as much of our energy supply renewable as possible, the ability to affordably generate 50 percent of the total electricity through renewable energy resources is ultimately a technological challenge, not a political one. If the technology is ready, and the market is robust and competitive enough to deploy it to consumers at more attractive prices than fossil-fuel energy, then a 50-percent or greater renewable proportion of electricity will be achieved by 2030 without the need for a mandate. If, however, the technology cannot yet render renewable energy competitive with fossil fuels, then the only effect of the mandate would be to push up costs and constrict supply of electricity to consumers. The surest way to bring about a future of greater renewable energy is to repeal the NV Energy monopoly which has been standing in its way. Through competition, both technological and marketing innovations will thrive and will deliver renewable energy solutions to consumers.  Ballot Question 3, rather than Ballot Question 6, is therefore a superior means toward that goal.

 

Mr. Stolyarov is the Chief Executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party and Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party.
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Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our free Membership Application Form here. It takes less than a minute!
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This post may be freely reproduced using the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike International 4.0 License, which requires that credit be given to the author, Gennady Stolyarov II (G. Stolyarov II). Find out about Mr. Stolyarov here.
Fifth Enlightenment Salon – Discussions on Longevity, Gene Therapy, Overcoming Disabilities, Animal Lifespans, Education, and Privacy

Fifth Enlightenment Salon – Discussions on Longevity, Gene Therapy, Overcoming Disabilities, Animal Lifespans, Education, and Privacy

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Bill Andrews
James Kohagen
Bobby Ridge
John Murrieta

On October 13, 2018, in the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment and its furtherance today, Gennady Stolyarov II, Bill Andrews, James Kohagen, Bobby Ridge, and John Murrieta met for the fifth interdisciplinary discussion – hosted by Mr. Stolyarov – on science, culture, education, advocacy, and policy. Subjects discussed included the following:

– The recent RAAD Fest 2018 in San Diego
– Developments in the field of gene therapy
– Advances in epidural stimulation for treating and overcoming spinal-cord injuries
– Long-lived organisms and their similarities and dissimilarities to humans
– How animal experiments can become more humane
– How contemporary science still has far to go to accumulate even fairly basic information about certain organisms
– How the study of lifespans can be included in educational curricula starting at early childhood
– Whether privacy will remain in a more technologically interconnected future.

Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside by filling out an application form that takes less than a minute.

Find out about Death is Wrong – the illustrated children’s book on indefinite life extension.

Future Grind Episode 28: Ryan O’Shea Interviews Gennady Stolyarov II on the State of Transhumanist Politics

Future Grind Episode 28: Ryan O’Shea Interviews Gennady Stolyarov II on the State of Transhumanist Politics

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logo_bgGennady Stolyarov II
Ryan O’Shea

Listen to Ryan O’Shea’s interview with U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II on the Future Grind podcast, where they discuss the state of Transhumanist politics. Mr. Stolyarov responds to some of the most detailed and well-researched questions that he has been presented with regarding contemporary political issues in the U.S. Transhumanist Party and transhumanist movement. The U.S. Transhumanist Party thanks Mr. O’Shea for enabling a thoughtful discussion that will be of interest to our listeners.

– Watch/listen on YouTube.

– Listen/download on the Future Grind website.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply online here in less than a minute.

Description by Ryan O’Shea: In this installment of the Future Grind podcast host Ryan O’Shea sits down with Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party. Gennady took the reins of the Transhumanist Party when the organization’s founder, Zoltan Istvan, stepped down after his campaign for President in 2016. In addition to his work work with the Party, Gennady is a published author and composer, and he has contributed articles to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Brighter Brains Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and many more. They discuss the current state of transhumanist politics, why Gennady believes that they are important in the first place, and how he feels that transhumanism can transcend socialism, libertarianism, and all other conventional ideologies.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Meeting at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 22, 2018

U.S. Transhumanist Party Meeting at RAAD Fest 2018 – September 22, 2018

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On September 22, 2018, representatives of the U.S. Transhumanist Party met in San Diego, California, during RAAD Fest 2018, in order to provide an overview of recent efforts and future prospects, discuss approaches to advocacy with several leading transhumanist public figures, and field audience questions regarding the transhumanist movement and its goals.

Watch the video of the meeting on YouTube here.

Participants at the meeting included the following individuals:
– Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, U.S. Transhumanist Party
– Arin Vahanian, Director of Marketing, U.S. Transhumanist Party
– Newton Lee, Chairman, California Transhumanist Party, U.S. Transhumanist Party Education and Media Advisor
– José Luis Cordeiro, U.S. Transhumanist Party Technology Advisor and Foreign Ambassador to Spain
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– Bill Andrews, U.S. Transhumanist Party Biotechnology Advisor
– Charlie Kam, Director of Networking, California Transhumanist Party
– Elizabeth (Liz) Parrish, U.S. Transhumanist Party Advocacy Advisor

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our Membership Application Form here.

Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Apply here.

Andrés Grases Interviews U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II on Transhumanism and the Transition to the Next Technological Era

Andrés Grases Interviews U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II on Transhumanism and the Transition to the Next Technological Era

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logo_bgGennady Stolyarov II
Andrés Grases

Andrés Grases, the publisher of the Transhuman Plus website (http://transhumanplus.com/) interviews U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II at RAAD Fest 2018 in San Diego, CA, on September 23, 2018. During the course of this conversation, both the contemporary state of transhumanist politics and future directions are covered – along with the challenges to reforming the educational system, the need to create open access to academic works, the manner in which the transition toward the next era of technologies will occur, the meaning of transhumanism and its applications in the proximate future – including promising advances that we can expect to see during the next several years.

Watch the video here.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply online here in less than a minute.

How Transhumanism Can Transcend Socialism, Libertarianism, and All Other Conventional Ideologies – Gennady Stolyarov II Presents at the VSIM:18 Conference

How Transhumanism Can Transcend Socialism, Libertarianism, and All Other Conventional Ideologies – Gennady Stolyarov II Presents at the VSIM:18 Conference

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Gennady Stolyarov II

Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, discusses the key strengths and weaknesses of libertarianism, socialism, conservatism, and left-liberalism, the common failings of these and all other conventional ideologies, and why transhumanism offers a principled, integrated, dynamic approach for a new era of history, which can overcome all of these failings.

This presentation was delivered virtually by Mr. Stolyarov on September 13, 2018, to the Vanguard Scientific Instruments in Management 2018 (VSIM:18) conference in Ravda, Bulgaria. Afterward, a discussion ensured, in which Professor Angel Marchev, Sr., the conference organizer and the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Ambassador to Bulgaria, offered his views on the dangers of socialism and the promise of transhumanism, followed by a brief question-and-answer period.

Download and view the slides of Mr. Stolyarov’s presentation (with hyperlinks) here.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our Membership Application Form here.

Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Apply here.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Unanimously Endorses Gennady Stolyarov II for the Board of Trustees of the Indian Hills General Improvement District

U.S. Transhumanist Party Unanimously Endorses Gennady Stolyarov II for the Board of Trustees of the Indian Hills General Improvement District

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The U.S. Transhumanist Party has concluded its seven-day electronic vote on the question of endorsing Gennady Stolyarov II for the Board of Trustees of the Indian Hills General Improvement District (IHGID) in Nevada in the 2018 general election.

Of the 43 members who voted, 100% cast their ballots in favor of endorsing Mr. Stolyarov’s candidacy. During the vote, two members requested to be independent observers and received access to the vote results. Furthermore, all of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Officers received independent access to the vote results as well.

Accordingly, the U.S. Transhumanist Party has an endorsed candidate who will be on the ballot in the 2018 general election.

In response to this endorsement, Mr. Stolyarov issued the following statement:

“I am deeply honored by the confidence that the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s members have placed in me as a candidate for local political office. It is my view that, while U.S. federal politics is broken almost beyond proximate recourse, substantial progress can be made at the local level by persons of good will, seeking constructive solutions to everyday concerns. As my campaign statement declares, through reason, technology, and respect for property rights, we can live well and improve. If I am elected to the IHGID Board of Trustees, I will demonstrate in action that transhumanism can be an effective, everyday, mainstream system of principles and practices that, if given a chance, will produce concrete good for all persons. The transhumanists of today can become the political center of tomorrow. Negative, adversarial, and petty politics have torn our country apart, and it is time for the thinking of a new era to be forged to bring us back together in addressing universal questions and aspirations. Creating the future will take concerted, persistent efforts to ameliorate human societies and institutions at their most basic levels. But it is upon this firm foundation that a sound civil society can be built, and that civil society will then have the proper immune system to deflect those cynical manipulators of public opinion who would divide us for their transitory gain. I hope that my campaign – with good will toward my fellow residents, other candidates, the IHGID staff, and people throughout the world who have voiced their support – will become one building block in that foundation.”

Questions about Mr. Stolyarov’s candidacy can be directed here.

From Within Your Own Failing Shell – Article by Nicola Bagalà

From Within Your Own Failing Shell – Article by Nicola Bagalà

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Nicola Bagalà

Editor’s Note: In this article originally published by our allies at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF),  Mr. Nicola Bagalà provides a poignant discussion of the suffering associated with the diseases of old age, for which contemporary geriatric medicine can only offer palliative treatments but no lasting solutions. It is imperative to correct this situation by advocating for the advancement of effective rejuvenation treatments which can not only successfully cure the diseases of old age but also reverse biological aging itself.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, September 9, 2018

Some time ago, I noticed a stock photo of an old lady seeing her geriatrician, who was a much younger woman. Nothing special was happening in the picture, which showed just two people talking; however, it made me wonder what it must feel like to be an elderly person consulting a geriatrician.

One initial assumption could be that it isn’t much different than seeing a GP, but that seems unlikely. If you are seeing a GP, the odds are your disease or ailment is not debilitating, let alone life-threatening. Whatever it might be, you went to see your doctor knowing that, most likely, he or she would be able to cure you; especially if you are young, it’s probable that just taking a medicine for some time, or doing physical therapy, will make you better. You know that you will recover, and the discomfort or the suffering you’re going through is destined to go away. You will get back to your life as it used to be, healthy as ever.

Things are rather different when you are seeing a geriatrician. A geriatrician is a specialist who takes care of the needs of elderly patients, an activity that can be summarized as ensuring the highest possible life quality of a patient in spite of his or her failing body, which becomes increasingly less resilient and less able to respond to treatment with the passing of time. Existing drugs and exercise programs, for example, can ameliorate the symptoms that an elderly person experiences and improve his or her life quality, but the vast majority of age-related diseases simply cannot be cured right now.

When you go to see a geriatrician, you do so with the knowledge that your doctor will most likely be unable to make you any better, despite his or her best efforts; you simply can’t shovel water with a pitchfork. You are aware that, as you keep aging, your condition is likely to worsen, and all your doctor will be able to do is help you manage your symptoms. You know that you are not going to get back to your life as it used to be and that you are not going to be as healthy as ever—that’s not what old people generally are like. In fact, one day, one of the conditions that brought you to see a geriatrician in the first place is going to worsen to the point that you will die of it.

Most of us are familiar with the feeling of going to see a general practitioner, getting a prescription for some mild ailment, and going back home, thinking about our plans for the rest of the day or the week, which possibly involve a big project that we have been working on for a while and can’t wait to take to completion. What if, instead, you are going home after seeing a geriatrician because of osteoarthritis in your knees? Whatever you might be thinking then, you probably are distracted by the pain that you feel in your knees with every step you take, and the thought that it’s not really going to ever improve doesn’t make it any better. It is unlikely that you have any big project going on that you are looking forward to finishing; it’s not that you wouldn’t like to have one, but your deteriorating health makes it difficult to do anything too demanding. Probably, your much younger doctor is going to go back home thinking about an exciting upcoming trip or her next night out, but you are not.

It’s impossible not to wonder what it must feel like to watch others get back to their own lives from within your own failing shell, knowing that the life that you are getting back to is likely going to be short and decreasing in quality; to hear your doctor say that your ailments can be managed, but not cured; to know that, as time passes, you are more and more likely to lose your independence and cause problems or suffering for your loved ones.

Putting on a smile and trying to look at the bright side of things may help you cope and avoid making things worse than they have to be, but it’s not going to make them better either. A positive attitude is a great prescription for any disease you might have, regardless of your age, but it is not the only prescription that you would be given for any serious illness that might strike you before old age. There is no reason why staying positive and palliative care should be the only medicines against aging—not now that rejuvenation biotechnology is becoming an ever-more concrete prospect.

People of all ages should have the right to go to see their doctors knowing that, most probably, whatever diseases they have may be cured; that any others they might get in the future can be prevented; that their discomfort or suffering is going to go away; and that they are going to get back to their lives as they used to be, healthy as ever.

About Nicola Bagalà

Nicola Bagalà  is a bit of a jack of all trades—a holder of an M.Sc. degree in mathematics; an amateur programmer; a hobbyist at novel writing, piano, and art; and, of course, a passionate life-extensionist. After his interest in the science of undoing aging arose in 2011, he gradually shifted from quiet supporter to active advocate in 2015, first launching his advocacy blog Rejuvenaction before eventually joining LEAF. These years in the field sparked an interest in molecular biology, which he actively studies. Other subjects he loves to discuss to no end are cosmology, artificial intelligence, and many others—far too many for a currently normal lifespan, which is one of the reasons he’s into life extension.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Vote on the Question of Endorsing Gennady Stolyarov II for the Indian Hills General Improvement District Board of Trustees

U.S. Transhumanist Party Vote on the Question of Endorsing Gennady Stolyarov II for the Indian Hills General Improvement District Board of Trustees

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The U.S. Transhumanist Party will hold an electronic vote of the membership for a seven-day period ending on 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on Monday, September 10, 2018, on the question of whether to endorse Gennady Stolyarov II who is running and on the ballot as a candidate for the Board of Trustees of the Indian Hills General Improvement District (IHGID) in Nevada in the 2018  general election.

See Mr. Stolyarov’s campaign page here.

Registered U.S. Transhumanist Party members as of 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on Monday, September 3, 2018, would be able to cast their ballots on this question and will be sent their ballots via e-mail.

Because Mr. Stolyarov is the Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, we shall strive to make every effort that the voting proceeds in as transparent and independently verifiable a manner as possible. Members are free to vote for or against the endorsement, or to abstain from voting, without any adverse repercussions for any decision made or in consequence of any outcome resulting from this vote. Every member is encouraged to make an independent, informed decision on this question. Any member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party who wishes to be an independent observer of the vote results may contact Mr. Stolyarov at gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com. All independent observers must promise not to disclose the names of those who voted to the broader public, although the independent observers may be privy to those names for purposes of verification of results only (and not for purposes of using this information to influence the outcome), and with the understanding that such non-disclosure must be adhered to.

Mr. Stolyarov is officially running as a nonpartisan candidate for this nonpartisan office, and accordingly his name on the ballot cannot be accompanied by a political party designation. There are currently four candidates, including Mr. Stolyarov, running for three open positions.

Accordingly, the significance of any endorsement by the U.S. Transhumanist Party would be symbolic in nature and would serve to bring greater attention to transhumanist ideas and how they could be instantiated in everyday, nonpartisan governance and an approach that can also appeal to the broader public, as Mr. Stolyarov attempts to do in his campaign. Furthermore, now that our previously endorsed candidate James D. Schultz has ended his campaign, the prominence of the U.S. Transhumanist Party would be aided by having an endorsed candidate in the 2018 general election, especially a candidate with a realistic possibility of winning the office for which he is running.

Highlights from Mr. Stolyarov’s campaign website include the following:

  • Transcending political divisions: The IHGID Board of Trustees is nonpartisan, and I am running as a nonpartisan for this office. This means that I hope to represent everyone in this District, no matter what their political views or how they might differ from mine. Although we live in a politically divisive era, when it comes to a high quality of life in a neighborhood, we all have shared values that enable common ground to be found. We may not always agree on particular issues, or always reach an outcome that satisfies everyone, but I will strive to engage sincerely and transparently with each interested resident, and find creative solutions that meet as many goals of as many residents as possible.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: Tolerance and inclusivity of all individuals of all races, genders, classes, religions, creeds, national origins, and other characteristics. [Article III, Section II]
  • Putting facts first: Many of the decisions of the IHGID Board of Trustees are focused on specific knowledge about the water, sewer, and road systems within the District. I consider it crucial to gather as much factual information as possible about the workings of the affected systems, the available options, and the benefits and costs involved with each option, before making a decision. Every decision is a learning opportunity, and I promise to be open to the facts and to the input of those with knowledge and experience in the areas that the decisions affect.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: Support of all values and efforts toward cultivation of science, technology, reason. [Article III, Section VII]
  • Ensuring that key infrastructure operates smoothly: We all want clean and safe water, well-maintained roads, and an effective sewer system. Additionally, the IHGID maintains parks that many residents enjoy and hosts events that improve quality of life for members of this community. These core functions are important and need to be performed well. Many people only notice them if there is a shortcoming, but the IHGID conducts valuable work in the background to prevent such shortcomings from arising. I will be attentive to this work, in large part so that residents can go about their daily lives smoothly. In my experience, there has been significant improvement in these areas during my time as a resident in the District, and I hope to encourage and work toward further improvement wherever possible.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: Support for a smart infrastructure. [Article III, Section X]
  • Respecting homeowners’ property rights: I espouse the view that one’s home is one’s inviolable personal domain. This means that choices about esthetics – such as home décor, color, texture, landscaping, outdoor furniture, statuary, and other purely visual elements – should be entirely within the discretion of a home’s owner. I oppose any plan to establish a homeowners’ association within the IHGID, and I support keeping the IHGID’s roles as currently defined. The only justifiable restrictions on a homeowner’s prerogatives should be considerations of the health and safety of others, as well as the ability of others to make rightful use of the common elements of the neighborhood. I support and encourage compliance with all IHGID policies and applicable provisions of law, including Douglas County Ordinances, and I also support being a good neighbor – which includes maintaining clean and visually appealing properties. However, much that is good about the appearance of our neighborhood can be and has been achieved informally and voluntarily – by people respecting others and arranging improvements amongst themselves. Not everything that is good should be mandatory.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: Individual privacy and liberty over how to apply technology to one’s personal life [Article III, Section I]; morphological freedom [Article III, Section VI]. Note: The freedom to use technology extends to basic and long-established technologies, such as those involved in home decoration, functional features, and furnishings. If one’s home is viewed as an extension of one’s self-expression, then the freedom to make esthetic choices for one’s home is a key component of morphological freedom.
  • Pursuing technological solutions: I am a strong advocate of emerging technologies in a wide variety of realms. I will think carefully and thoroughly about which new advances can enable the IHGID to fulfill its purposes in a more effective and cost-effective manner, while only improving quality of service.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: Support of all emerging technologies that improve the human condition. [Article III, Section IX]
  • Enabling resident initiatives: If you have an idea for an effort that will improve life in this neighborhood, and you are willing to implement it through your own hard work and that of people who agree with you, please feel free to reach out to me, and I will explore how this idea relates to the IHGID and how to enable your idea to be realized within the framework of the IHGID’s mission and goals.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: “The United States Transhumanist Party supports the involvement of intelligent laypersons in the political process to counteract and neutralize the influence of politically connected special interests and their paid representatives. The United States Transhumanist Party supports all electronic and other technologies that can inform and empower intelligent laypersons to monitor and contribute to political discussions and decisions.” [Article III, Section XIII]
  • Supporting development that helps everyone and preserving valuable amenities: I believe that it is possible to have more of everything that everyone considers good. Life is not a zero-sum game; it can be positive-sum with the appropriate focus on win-win solutions and sincere consideration of how to improve from everyone’s perspective. I am a runner and hiker, so I enjoy open space and an abundance of trails nearby. I also consider additional residential development in the vicinity to be beneficial, provided that it is supported by adequate infrastructure – such as well-maintained roads, multiple outlets, and water and wastewater systems that amply provide for all residents’ needs. The real-world approach to particular situations involving preservation and development is often highly situationally specific, and could, in certain circumstances, be outside the scope of the IHGID’s boundaries and mission altogether. However, I promise to thoughtfully consider how our neighborhood and the surrounding areas are changing and to reach informed opinions regarding how any problems could be viably addressed. Through science, technology, rational thinking, and the consequent progress of our civilization, we are all tremendously better off than our ancestors were generations ago. We can continue the improvement on every scale, from local to global.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Values and Platform: Support of all values and efforts toward cultivation of science, technology, reason. [Article III, Section VII]
    • Core Ideal 2: The Transhumanist Party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values.
  • Commitment to fair campaign practices: I have signed the Nevada Code of Fair Campaign Practices and will abide by it. There will be three vacancies for the IHGID Board of Trustees on January 1, 2019. If more than three candidates run, and there is a possibility that some candidates might not be elected, I promise that I will treat every candidate with civility and respect.  I reject negative campaigning and all personal attacks.
    • Parallel in U.S. Transhumanist Party Constitution, Article I, Section III, Operating Principle 2: “The Transhumanist Party commits to always pursuing its goals in a civil, law-abiding manner, respecting the legitimate rights of all persons.”
    • Parallel in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 2.0, Article XXIV: “Transhumanists stand opposed to the post-truth culture of deception. All governments should be required to make decisions and communicate information rationally and in accordance with facts. Lying for political gain or intentionally fomenting irrational fears among the general public should entail heavy political penalties for the officials who engage in such behaviors.”
U.S. Transhumanist Party Endorsed Candidate James D. Schultz Ends His Campaign for New York State Assembly District 2

U.S. Transhumanist Party Endorsed Candidate James D. Schultz Ends His Campaign for New York State Assembly District 2

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The U.S. Transhumanist Party regrets to announce that our previously endorsed candidate for New York State Assembly District 2, James D. Schultz, has ended his campaign because of his effort falling short of gaining the necessary 1,500 signatures for ballot access.

On August 21, 2018, Mr. Schultz offered the following statement: “It personally pains me to come to this. My friends and I have been working hard on securing ballot access for my State Assembly run on an Independent ballot. Despite our efforts we have fallen short of the minimum signatures needed to gain ballot access. Because of this and the very slim chance of a write-in effort making a difference, I am, effective immediately, dropping out of the race. We needed a minimum of 1,500 signatures to get on the ballot; we fell short with 1,239. Everyone who has helped the campaign and wished us luck, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. On our first day we only got 18 signatures. We kept on pushing hard despite the many hostile attitudes of both Democrats and Republicans.”

Despite the best intentions, Mr. Schultz’s campaign fell slightly short of the onerous ballot-access threshold established by the two major political parties in New York State. This is yet another illustration of the travesty of ballot-access laws in the United States, which act to preserve the two-party duopoly while denying Americans the genuine choice of considering innovative, creative voices that can offer true progress. This example underscores why the U.S. Transhumanist Party strongly supports reducing or eliminating these ballot-access thresholds wherever and to whatever extent possible.

Nonetheless, we express our appreciation to Mr. Schultz for his efforts and for the fact that, because of his campaign, the U.S. Transhumanist Party had an endorsed candidate in the 2018 midterm elections for over four months, between April 12 and August 21, 2018.

How shall we proceed to make a difference in the 2018 elections? Will the U.S. Transhumanist Party still be able to have a presence and an influence? Fear not – for the U.S. Transhumanist Party leadership has been discussing just this and has a proposition that will be put forth before the membership in early September 2018.

Enlightenment Transhumanist Association Registered in Nigeria – Press Release by Leo Igwe

Enlightenment Transhumanist Association Registered in Nigeria – Press Release by Leo Igwe

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Leo Igwe

A transhumanist organization, Enlightenment Transhumanist Forum of Nigeria (ETFN) also known as H+ Nigeria, has been licensed to operate in the country. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission, the agency that is in charge of registering societies issued the license on August 7, 2018. H+ Nigeria was registered after it fulfilled all the conditions required for operation as a legal entity in the country. The objectives of the organization include the promotion of transhumanist thought and culture. The forum plans to create awareness of the radical changes and feasibility of redesigning the human condition which humanity stands to undergo through science and technology in the future.

The organization will also encourage the growth of technological culture in a broad range of emerging, sophisticated technologies. In addition, it will promote ethical principles and methods of adopting new and emerging technologies in Nigeria beyond.

Furthermore, the ETFN will advocate the moral right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. Also, it will encourage systematic research and create a forum where people can rationally debate what needs to be done and advocate for a social order where responsible decisions on transhumanist principles can be implemented. It is most exciting that such a platform for furthering the ideals of transhumanism, and other futurist philosophies, has been incorporated in Nigeria.

“Shattered” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Shattered” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston

Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party: “Shattered” is a print by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io. Along with the three other artworks that I acquired from Dr. Weston – “Teeming”, “Graceful”, and “Squeak” – this print is featured as part of my Longevity Wall.

This work depicts how the forces of ruin can lead once-ornate and beautiful things to become eroded and deteriorated. This process, unfortunately, afflicts human organisms and minds as well, causing much of value to be lost or at least faded with time. Even with age, there remain in everything and everyone traces of the former splendor that can yet potentially be reclaimed – if humanity reconsiders its priorities and decisively commits to the war on ruin, including the quest to overcome aging and death.

Artist’s Description: “Time ravages even the greatest of minds, shattering them into a chaotic cloud of misfired potential. Once simple tasks become impossible, we become unable to live without aid, to live for ourselves any longer.

“I don’t know about you… But I don’t want that future. We have the power to change that. All we need is more support.”

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Invites Candidates to Apply for Endorsement

U.S. Transhumanist Party Invites Candidates to Apply for Endorsement

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The United States Transhumanist Party continues to invite independent or nonpartisan candidates for elected office who seek our endorsement.

To apply, please e-mail Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II at gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com. We will put any potential endorsement before a vote of the members and will consider endorsing any candidate who shares many of our values and who is not running on behalf of another non-transhumanist political party.

In your e-mail, please include (i) your name; (ii) the office you are running for; (iii) a description of your platform and/or the goals of your candidacy; and (iv) why you seek the endorsement of the U.S. Transhumanist Party.

If you do not wish to run yourself but would wish to recommend other candidates to our attention, please, likewise, e-mail Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II at gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com.

In the following states, candidates may even be able to use the “political party designation” of “Transhumanist Party” to affiliate with us without the Transhumanist Party needing to obtain ballot access:

Review of Ray Kurzweil’s “How to Create a Mind” – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II

Review of Ray Kurzweil’s “How to Create a Mind” – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II

How to Create a Mind (2012) by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sets forth a case for engineering minds that are able to emulate the complexity of human thought (and exceed it) without the need to reverse-engineer every detail of the human brain or of the plethora of content with which the brain operates. Kurzweil persuasively describes the human conscious mind as based on hierarchies of pattern-recognition algorithms which, even when based on relatively simple rules and heuristics, combine to give rise to the extremely sophisticated emergent properties of conscious awareness and reasoning about the world. How to Create a Mind takes readers through an integrated tour of key historical advances in computer science, physics, mathematics, and neuroscience – among other disciplines – and describes the incremental evolution of computers and artificial-intelligence algorithms toward increasing capabilities – leading toward the not-too-distant future (the late 2020s, according to Kurzweil) during which computers would be able to emulate human minds.

Kurzweil’s fundamental claim is that there is nothing which a biological mind is able to do, of which an artificial mind would be incapable in principle, and that those who posit that the extreme complexity of biological minds is insurmountable are missing the metaphorical forest for the trees. Analogously, although a fractal or a procedurally generated world may be extraordinarily intricate and complex in their details, they can arise on the basis of carrying out simple and conceptually fathomable rules. If appropriate rules are used to construct a system that takes in information about the world and processes and analyzes it in ways conceptually analogous to a human mind, Kurzweil holds that the rest is a matter of having adequate computational and other information-technology resources to carry out the implementation. Much of the first half of the book is devoted to the workings of the human mind, the functions of the various parts of the brain, and the hierarchical pattern recognition in which they engage. Kurzweil also discusses existing “narrow” artificial-intelligence systems, such as IBM’s Watson, language-translation programs, and the mobile-phone “assistants” that have been released in recent years by companies such as Apple and Google. Kurzweil observes that, thus far, the most effective AIs have been developed using a combination of approaches, having some aspects of prescribed rule-following alongside the ability to engage in open-ended “learning” and extrapolation upon the information which they encounter. Kurzweil draws parallels to the more creative or even “transcendent” human abilities – such as those of musical prodigies – and observes that the manner in which those abilities are made possible is not too dissimilar in principle.

With regard to some of Kurzweil’s characterizations, however, I question whether they are universally applicable to all human minds – particularly where he mentions certain limitations – or whether they only pertain to some observed subset of human minds. For instance, Kurzweil describes the ostensible impossibility of reciting the English alphabet backwards without error (absent explicit study of the reverse order), because of the sequential nature in which memories are formed. Yet, upon reading the passage in question, I was able to recite the alphabet backwards without error upon my first attempt. It is true that this occurred more slowly than the forward recitation, but I am aware of why I was able to do it; I perceive larger conceptual structures or bodies of knowledge as mental “objects” of a sort – and these objects possess “landscapes” on which it is possible to move in various directions; the memory is not “hard-coded” in a particular sequence. One particular order of movement does not preclude others, even if those others are less familiar – but the key to successfully reciting the alphabet backwards is to hold it in one’s awareness as a single mental object and move along its “landscape” in the desired direction. (I once memorized how to pronounce ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ as a single continuous word; any other order is slower, but it is quite doable as long as one fully knows the contents of the “object” and keeps it in focus.) This is also possible to do with other bodies of knowledge that one encounters frequently – such as dates of historical events: one visualizes them along the mental object of a timeline, visualizes the entire object, and then moves along it or drops in at various points using whatever sequences are necessary to draw comparisons or identify parallels (e.g., which events happened contemporaneously, or which events influenced which others). I do not know what fraction of the human population carries out these techniques – as the ability to recall facts and dates has always seemed rather straightforward to me, even as it challenged many others. Yet there is no reason why the approaches for more flexible operation with common elements of our awareness cannot be taught to large numbers of people, as these techniques are a matter of how the mind chooses to process, model, and ultimately recombine the data which it encounters. The more general point in relation to Kurzweil’s characterization of human minds is that there may be a greater diversity of human conceptual frameworks and approaches toward cognition than Kurzweil has described. Can an artificially intelligent system be devised to encompass this diversity? This is certainly possible, since the architecture of AI systems would be more flexible than the biological structures of the human brain. Yet it would be necessary for true artificial general intelligences to be able not only to learn using particular predetermined methods, but also to teach themselves new techniques for learning and conceptualization altogether – just as humans are capable of today.

The latter portion of the book is more explicitly philosophical and devoted to thought experiments regarding the nature of the mind, consciousness, identity, free will, and the kinds of transformations that may or may not preserve identity. Many of these discussions are fascinating and erudite – and Kurzweil often transcends fashionable dogmas by bringing in perspectives such as the compatibilist case for free will and the idea that the experiments performed by Benjamin Libet (that showed the existence of certain signals in the brain prior to the conscious decision to perform an activity) do not rule out free will or human agency. It is possible to conceive of such signals as “preparatory work” within the brain to present a decision that could then be accepted or rejected by the conscious mind. Kurzweil draws an analogy to government officials preparing a course of action for the president to either approve or disapprove. “Since the ‘brain’ represented by this analogy involves the unconscious processes of the neocortex (that is, the officials under the president) as well as the conscious processes (the president), we would see neural activity as well as actual actions taking place prior to the official decision’s being made” (p. 231). Kurzweil’s thoughtfulness is an important antidote to commonplace glib assertions that “Experiment X proved that Y [some regularly experienced attribute of humans] is an illusion” – assertions which frequently tend toward cynicism and nihilism if widely adopted and extrapolated upon. It is far more productive to deploy both science and philosophy toward seeking to understand more directly apparent phenomena of human awareness, sensation, and decision-making – instead of rejecting the existence of such phenomena contrary to the evidence of direct experience. Especially if the task is to engineer a mind that has at least the faculties of the human brain, then Kurzweil is wise not to dismiss aspects such as consciousness, free will, and the more elevated emotions, which have been known to philosophers and ordinary people for millennia, and which only predominantly in the 20th century has it become fashionable to disparage in some circles. Kurzweil’s only vulnerability in this area is that he often resorts to statements that he accepts the existence of these aspects “on faith” (although it does not appear to be a particularly religious faith; it is, rather, more analogous to “leaps of faith” in the sense that Albert Einstein referred to them). Kurzweil does not need to do this, as he himself outlines sufficient logical arguments to be able to rationally conclude that attributes such as awareness, free will, and agency upon the world – which have been recognized across predominant historical and colloquial understandings, irrespective of particular religious or philosophical flavors – indeed actually exist and should not be neglected when modeling the human mind or developing artificial minds.

One of the thought experiments presented by Kurzweil is vital to consider, because the process by which an individual’s mind and body might become “upgraded” through future technologies would determine whether that individual is actually preserved – in terms of the aspects of that individual that enable one to conclude that that particular person, and not merely a copy, is still alive and conscious:

Consider this thought experiment: You are in the future with technologies more advanced than today’s. While you are sleeping, some group scans your brain and picks up every salient detail. Perhaps they do this with blood-cell-sized scanning machines traveling in the capillaries of your brain or with some other suitable noninvasive technology, but they have all of the information about your brain at a particular point in time. They also pick up and record any bodily details that might reflect on your state of mind, such as the endocrine system. They instantiate this “mind file” in a morphological body that looks and moves like you and has the requisite subtlety and suppleness to pass for you. In the morning you are informed about this transfer and you watch (perhaps without being noticed) your mind clone, whom we’ll call You 2. You 2 is talking about his or he life as if s/he were you, and relating how s/he discovered that very morning that s/he had been given a much more durable new version 2.0 body. […] The first question to consider is: Is You 2 conscious? Well, s/he certainly seems to be. S/he passes the test I articulated earlier, in that s/he has the subtle cues of becoming a feeling, conscious person. If you are conscious, then so too is You 2.

So if you were to, uh, disappear, no one would notice. You 2 would go around claiming to be you. All of your friends and loved ones would be content with the situation and perhaps pleased that you now have a more durable body and mental substrate than you used to have. Perhaps your more philosophically minded friends would express concerns, but for the most party, everybody would be happy, including you, or at least the person who is convincingly claiming to be you.

So we don’t need your old body and brain anymore, right? Okay if we dispose of it?

You’re probably not going to go along with this. I indicated that the scan was noninvasive, so you are still around and still conscious. Moreover your sense of identity is still with you, not with You 2, even though You 2 thinks s/he is a continuation of you. You 2 might not even be aware that you exist or ever existed. In fact you would not be aware of the existence of You 2 either, if we hadn’t told you about it.

Our conclusion? You 2 is conscious but is a different person than you – You 2 has a different identity. S/he is extremely similar, much more so than a mere genetic clone, because s/he also shares all of your neocortical patterns and connections. Or should I say s/he shared those patterns at the moment s/he was created. At that point, the two of you started to go your own ways, neocortically speaking. You are still around. You are not having the same experiences as You 2. Bottom line: You 2 is not you.  (How to Create a Mind, pp. 243-244)

This thought experiment is essentially the same one as I independently posited in my 2010 essay “How Can I Live Forever?: What Does and Does Not Preserve the Self”:

Consider what would happen if a scientist discovered a way to reconstruct, atom by atom, an identical copy of my body, with all of its physical structures and their interrelationships exactly replicating my present condition. If, thereafter, I continued to exist alongside this new individual – call him GSII-2 – it would be clear that he and I would not be the same person. While he would have memories of my past as I experienced it, if he chose to recall those memories, I would not be experiencing his recollection. Moreover, going forward, he would be able to think different thoughts and undertake different actions than the ones I might choose to pursue. I would not be able to directly experience whatever he choose to experience (or experiences involuntarily). He would not have my ‘I-ness’ – which would remain mine only.

Thus, Kurzweil and I agree, at least preliminarily, that an identically constructed copy of oneself does not somehow obtain the identity of the original. Kurzweil and I also agree that a sufficiently gradual replacement of an individual’s cells and perhaps other larger functional units of the organism, including a replacement with non-biological components that are integrated into the body’s processes, would not destroy an individual’s identity (assuming it can be done without collateral damage to other components of the body). Then, however, Kurzweil posits the scenario where one, over time, transforms into an entity that is materially identical to the “You 2” as posited above. He writes:

But we come back to the dilemma I introduced earlier. You, after a period of gradual replacement, are equivalent to You 2 in the scan-and-instantiate scenario, but we decided that You 2 in that scenario does not have the same identity as you. So where does that leave us? (How to Create a Mind, p. 247)

Kurzweil and I are still in agreement that “You 2” in the gradual-replacement scenario could legitimately be a continuation of “You” – but our views diverge when Kurzweil states, “My resolution of the dilemma is this: It is not true that You 2 is not you – it is you. It is just that there are now two of you. That’s not so bad – if you think you are a good thing, then two of you is even better” (p. 247). I disagree. If I (via a continuation of my present vantage point) cannot have the direct, immediate experiences and sensations of GSII-2, then GSII-2 is not me, but rather an individual with a high degree of similarity to me, but with a separate vantage point and separate physical processes, including consciousness. I might not mind the existence of GSII-2 per se, but I would mind if that existence were posited as a sufficient reason to be comfortable with my present instantiation ceasing to exist.  Although Kurzweil correctly reasons through many of the initial hypotheses and intermediate steps leading from them, he ultimately arrives at a “pattern” view of identity, with which I differ. I hold, rather, a “process” view of identity, where a person’s “I-ness” remains the same if “the continuity of bodily processes is preserved even as their physical components are constantly circulating into and out of the body. The mind is essentially a process made possible by the interactions of the brain and the remainder of nervous system with the rest of the body. One’s ‘I-ness’, being a product of the mind, is therefore reliant on the physical continuity of bodily processes, though not necessarily an unbroken continuity of higher consciousness.” (“How Can I Live Forever?: What Does and Does Not Preserve the Self”) If only a pattern of one’s mind were preserved and re-instantiated, the result may be potentially indistinguishable from the original person to an external observer, but the original individual would not directly experience the re-instantiation. It is not the content of one’s experiences or personality that is definitive of “I-ness” – but rather the more basic fact that one experiences anything as oneself and not from the vantage point of another individual; this requires the same bodily processes that give rise to the conscious mind to operate without complete interruption. (The extent of permissible partial interruption is difficult to determine precisely and open to debate; general anesthesia is not sufficient to disrupt I-ness, but what about cryonics or shorter-term “suspended animation?). For this reason, the pursuit of biological life extension of one’s present organism remains crucial; one cannot rely merely on one’s “mindfile” being re-instantiated in a hypothetical future after one’s demise. The future of medical care and life extension may certainly involve non-biological enhancements and upgrades, but in the context of augmenting an existing organism, not disposing of that organism.

How to Create a Mind is highly informative for artificial-intelligence researchers and laypersons alike, and it merits revisiting a reference for useful ideas regarding how (at least some) minds operate. It facilitates thoughtful consideration of both the practical methods and more fundamental philosophical implications of the quest to improve the flexibility and autonomy with which our technologies interact with the external world and augment our capabilities. At the same time, as Kurzweil acknowledges, those technologies often lead us to “outsource” many of our own functions to them – as is the case, for instance, with vast amounts of human memories and creations residing on smartphones and in the “cloud”. If the timeframes of arrival of human-like AI capabilities match those described by Kurzweil in his characterization of the “law of accelerating returns”, then questions regarding what constitutes a mind sufficiently like our own – and how we will treat those minds – will become ever more salient in the proximate future. It is important, however, for interest in advancing this field to become more widespread, and for political, cultural, and attitudinal barriers to its advancement to be lifted – for, unlike Kurzweil, I do not consider the advances of technology to be inevitable or unstoppable. We humans maintain the responsibility of persuading enough other humans that the pursuit of these advances is worthwhile and will greatly improve the length and quality of our lives, while enhancing our capabilities and attainable outcomes. Every movement along an exponential growth curve is due to a deliberate push upward by the efforts of the minds of the creators of progress and using the machines they have built.

Gennady Stolyarov II is Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party. Learn more about Mr. Stolyarov here. 

This article is made available pursuant to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author, Gennady Stolyarov II (G. Stolyarov II). 

Whatever Future Comes, Life Extension Will Improve It – Article by Nicola Bagalà

Whatever Future Comes, Life Extension Will Improve It – Article by Nicola Bagalà

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Nicola Bagalà

Editor’s Note: In this article originally published by our allies at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF),  Mr.Nicola Bagalà makes a persuasive case for optimism regarding the role of technology in the future. While the future will certainly have problems as well, technological progress – including progress in greatly increasing human health and longevity – can only contribute to solutions and improved quality of life. It is time to reject defeatism and build the future we wish to inhabit.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, August 12, 2018

Right now, as I write this article, I’m sitting in a machine that, about 120 years ago, was laughed at as a pipe dream. The machine is a plane, by the way. The onboard wi-fi leaves much to be desired, but if you had told people living in the early 1900s that you could type an article on a paperless portable device while flying in a huge metal cabin at an altitude of 10.3 kilometers and a ground speed of 904 kilometers an hour (that’s what the huge metal cabin is magically telling my portable device through thin air), they’d have had you in a straitjacket before you could finish your sentence.

Talking about computers and planes in these terms today often feels cringeworthy, because we’re all familiar with this technology. We’re used to having all these cool devices and machines doing stuff for us; it isn’t surprising or awe-inducing in the least anymore. However, it’s not a bad idea to remind ourselves how what we now nearly shrug at wasn’t even conceivable not too long ago. Examples include a 27-kilometer ring buried underneath Geneva where ridiculously tiny particles are smashed together at near-lightspeed to unravel the inner workings of the universe and tools that allow us to modify the basic building blocks of your cells with unprecedented precision—neither of which would’ve made you come across as particularly sane, had you conjectured them in a conversation, say, 200 years ago.

This is not to say that people in the past lacked imagination; scientists and visionaries did try to predict what the future might look like—sometimes getting quite close to the mark and other times ending up embarrassingly far from it—but the average joes who had to tend their crops the whole day or work at some kind of drudgery 70 hours a week probably weren’t too optimistic about a future with sophisticated machines of all sorts that make your life much easier and open unthinkable possibilities. They were too used to the standards of the age in which they lived. In a similar way, people of today sometimes tend to look at the future as something that isn’t going to be much different from the present, as if most of what our species could realistically achieve—not only in terms of science and technology but also as a society—was already achieved, and all you could look forward to in the future was just more of the same, except perhaps with slightly fancier tools.

It’s easy to think that way when your days are taken up by a job you’re not crazy about, when you’ve got bills to pay, or when you don’t find world news too encouraging. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that being alive 100 years from now wouldn’t be worth the trouble and just start looking forward to retirement and bowing out instead, but that’s all it is—a mind trap. A good chunk of the 1900s was a rather messy time to be alive, and people who witnessed not one but two World Wars had all the reasons to think that humanity was going south on them and that getting old and checking out was preferable to seeing whatever catastrophe the future might have in store. However, the world has been getting better and better since then as well as since the beginning of recorded history; if you’re not convinced of that, I recommend checking out Our World In Data and Gapminder, two excellent resources that demonstrate how our pessimism comes mostly from a tendency to focus on the negatives and disqualify the positives.

This is my answer to anyone who argues that longer lives would mean more time spent in an increasingly worsening world: The data simply don’t support this claim. At this point, a convinced pessimist would start throwing news items at me: world politics, climate issues, the refugee crisis, etc. I’m not denying the existence of these problems, nor that they may well have the potential to cause serious trouble if left unchecked; but their existence doesn’t mean that the world is getting worse. It only means that it is not getting better all at once; the state of human affairs isn’t improving at a uniform rate, but if you look at the general trend, you’ll see that it’s going up, with crests and troughs. Extrapolating from this general trend, it’s sensible to believe that things are likely to continue improving, but we cannot take for granted that things will get better of their own accord. That would be just as wrong as focusing only on the troughs in the graph and conclude that they signify that things are inevitably going to go downhill.

Now is a good moment to remind ourselves that life extension means, first and foremost, preserving our youthful health irrespective of our chronological age; any longevity benefits deriving from it would only be more than welcome side effects. Given this fact, even assuming that living on Earth will eventually be so intolerable that death would be preferable, it really makes no sense to wait for it to happen because of aging and go through about twenty years of declining health, thus adding insult to injury. To put it bluntly, people who really have had enough of life generally seek to terminate it quickly and painlessly; not too many choose pneumonia or ebola as a way out. Wanting to die of aging because you think the world won’t be worth living in beyond your “natural” lifespan is no different from wanting to die of pneumonia because you think that the world won’t be worth living in six months from now.

Eliminating the diseases of aging can only make life better, and it’s a different matter if it’lll be good enough to be worth living—that’s a personal choice that has nothing to do with whether life extension should be developed or not. To be completely honest, if you lived your entire life in a country torn by war, or fighting over food, then I would understand if you were pessimistic about the benefits of a longer life; however, when I hear people living reasonably comfortable lives in industrialized countries claiming “Living longer? Good God, that would be awful!” just because they don’t like their jobs or some other silly pretext like that, I can’t help thinking that they’re just having a bad case of first world problems.

Besides, what is a defeatist attitude going to accomplish? Assuming that life extension isn’t worth bothering with because the future won’t be worth it makes two more assumptions. The first is that the world is going to be too horrible to live in within the handful of decades of a currently normal lifespan, and the second is that it won’t really improve significantly after that point, so pulling through the bad times in the hopes of seeing better ones would be a waste of effort. If it really were that way, then we might as well throw in the towel, stop worrying about making the world a better place, stop having children, who could only expect to live in a world worse than we did, and just let everything collapse.

If we did this, the defeatist attitude would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but thankfully, we don’t really do anything like that. We might be tempted to think like that when we feel discouraged, but throughout our history, we’ve always picked ourselves up and continued, not matter how dire the times, and always managed to make the world a little better than it was before. The right attitude is neither “the future will certainly be great” nor “the future will certainly be horrible”; the right attitude is “we don’t know for sure what the future will be like, but we are capable of making it better”. The data’s with us on that one.

About Nicola Bagalà

Nicola Bagalà  is a bit of a jack of all trades—a holder of an M.Sc. degree in mathematics; an amateur programmer; a hobbyist at novel writing, piano, and art; and, of course, a passionate life-extensionist. After his interest in the science of undoing aging arose in 2011, he gradually shifted from quiet supporter to active advocate in 2015, first launching his advocacy blog Rejuvenaction before eventually joining LEAF. These years in the field sparked an interest in molecular biology, which he actively studies. Other subjects he loves to discuss to no end are cosmology, artificial intelligence, and many others—far too many for a currently normal lifespan, which is one of the reasons he’s into life extension.

Sophia the Humanoid Robot Wants to Meet You at RAADfest – Video by Hanson Robotics

Sophia the Humanoid Robot Wants to Meet You at RAADfest – Video by Hanson Robotics

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Hanson Robotics
Coalition for Radical Life Extension

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party encourages our members to attend RAAD Fest 2018, where we will have our own conference room, and technological marvels such as Sophia the Robot, as well the visionaries who make these technological advances possible, will be present. Over the coming weeks we hope to offer other videos highlighting some of the key features of this unique gathering in furtherance of the Revolution Against Aging and Death.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, August 10, 2018

Message from the Coalition for Radical Life Extension:

Meet Sophia, the latest robot from Hanson Robotics. She will be attending (and performing!) at RAADfest 2018.

Sophia was created using breakthrough robotics and artificial intelligence technologies developed by David Hanson, Dr. Ben Goertzel and their friends at Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong; and is being used as a platform for blockchain-based AI development by SingularityNET Foundation.

RAADfest is the largest event in the world where practical and cutting-edge methods to reverse aging are presented for all interest levels, from beginner to expert.

RAADfest is organized by the non-profit Coalition for Radical Life Extension.

-More about RAADfest: http://raadfest.com/

-More about the Coalition for Radical Life Extension: http://www.rlecoalition.com/

-More about Sophia: http://sophiabot.com/

-More about Hanson Robotics: http://www.hansonrobotics.com/

The New Way of BioViva – Interview with Liz Parrish by Ariel VA Feinerman

The New Way of BioViva – Interview with Liz Parrish by Ariel VA Feinerman

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Ariel VA Feinerman
Elizabeth Parrish

Interview with Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva

Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva

Preface

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself — the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue — is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previously undamaged — young — state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! Sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells), it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio somewhere between Saint-Petersburg and Seattle, we meet a famous person! Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva, is a humanitarian, entrepreneur, innovator, and a leading voice for genetic cures. As a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of regenerative medicine modalities, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. She is actively involved in international educational media outreach and is a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA). She is an affiliated member of the Complex Biological Systems Alliance (CBSA), which is a unique platform for Mensa-based, highly gifted persons who advance scientific discourse and discovery.

The mission of the CBSA is to further scientific understanding of biological complexity and the nature and origins of human disease. She is the founder of BioTrove Investments LLC and the BioTrove Podcasts, which is committed to offering a meaningful way for people to learn about and fund research in regenerative medicine.

Interview

Ariel Feinerman: Hello, Ms. Liz Parrish!

Liz Parrish: Hello, Ariel Feinerman!

Ariel Feinerman: Honestly, I have planned to offer you the idea of building the whole infrastructure for delivering therapies from manufacturers via clinics to the patients. Because we really need such an infrastructure! By the way, when I looked at BioViva web page, I could see that you already do that! Very nice surprise for all. Can you say, when and why you realised that making therapy is not enough and that to build a viable alternative to the usual regulatory path, we need such a platform and a whole parallel infrastructure?

Liz Parrish: I realized that quite early in my journey, but it took us a while to organize the right team, and our collaborations.

Ariel Feinerman: How optimistic are you that other companies will follow your way?

Liz Parrish: Very. We think that the anti-ageing and regenerative market with growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 8.4% over the next 5 years, and the total market valuation will reach approximately $500 billion by 2022. We have no doubt that this will encourage many companies all over the world to find innovative ways to capture market share by providing unprecedented value to customers. We hope those companies will use our platform and we can use our years of experience to assist them.

Ariel Feinerman: We already have many amazing results in the lab which can save human lives just now, but lack of funding and the over-regulated medical system don’t give them any chance to be in clinics in coming years. With the current pace of progress, they will already be outdated even before clinical trials. Do you think that translational research becomes the bottleneck?

Liz Parrish: Yes and no. Part of the the bench-to-bedside translational process needs to be expedited, whilst other parts need better oversight, and due-diligence, and yet other parts of the process need to be built from the ground up. BioViva is collaborating with biotech companies, researchers, clinicians, and regulators to put together all these pieces of the translational puzzle in the right place at the right time for the right set of patients to benefit.

Ariel Feinerman: What therapies do you offer now?

Liz Parrish: BioViva doesn’t offer any therapies. We partner with clinics, and other companies, including Integrated Health Systems (IHS), that offer patients treatments in various places in the world. Please contact IHS to receive their treatment details for patients.

Ariel Feinerman: As far as I remember, BioViva worked on telomerase earlier. Does your company work on any therapy now?

Liz Parrish: Our company partnered with Integrated Health Systems (IHS) earlier this year. Our partner company offers treatments in various parts of the world, while BioViva collects and analyses patient data.

Ariel Feinerman: What are your requirements for a bioengineering company that wishes to use your program? How do you ensure that their therapy is safe and effective?

Liz Parrish: We are not a body-hacking or bioengineering company. We collect data from treatments offered at clinics selected by our partner company mentioned above. IHS demands that the clinics conform to their countries’ regulations and medical personnel involved have adequate training, as well as high standards of hygiene and equipment. IHS only works with clinics that have an excellent reputation. US-trained doctors also regularly inspect clinics working for IHS to ensure that standards are maintained.

Ariel Feinerman: I mean can you say how your platform works?

Liz Parrish: Our company business is done by contract. Unfortunately I cannot elaborate on this point because it is not public information. Our goal, when setting up our platform, is to speed up regulation by getting as much early human data as possible that will hopefully make cutting-edge technologies available to those who need them as soon as possible. Ageing kills 100,000 people a day, so we cannot humanely afford to drag our feet; we must get treatments out as soon as they are available.

Ariel Feinerman: Investors usually fear uncertainty which follows companies who choose any alternative to the mainstream regulatory way. Is this improving? How do you solve this problem? Do you help bioengineering companies to look for loyal investors?

Liz Parrish: Any investment in new methods is risky. No risk, no gain. Medicine cannot progress if no one is prepared to take a risk. This applies as much to investors as to patients. Recently however we notice a trend in favour of investments that would have been considered high-risk five years ago but that today are regarded rather as medium-risk. The reason is the increase in computer capacity which in turn allows for more data and therefore for more data analysis. When it comes to data, more is synonymous with better. Lots of data allow investors to better predict the returns on their investments, so more money is invested in endeavours involving lots of data.

Ariel Feinerman: Dr. Aubrey de Grey has said: “I think the key thing we should be doing more of is making better use of those who choose to go abroad to get treated: we should make it as easy as possible for them to report on what treatment they received and how well it worked, any side-effects, etc., for a long time after the treatment, so that such information can be analysed and used to guide future research. The people who provide experimental therapies don’t have any incentive to gather such data themselves, so it usually never gets gathered.”

Do you or your partner clinics gather such information or follow your patients?

Liz Parrish: As I said above, BioViva’s task is the collection and treatment of data. This is what we do. We collect data before and at the time of the treatment, and then at various times after the therapy. We hope to gather much data from each patient we treat, and to gather much data from many, many patients. This is the only way to assess if a treatment works, whom it works for, after how long, how many times, etc.

Ariel Feinerman: Some people express concern that many therapies via medical tourism will be available only for small groups of people, because of lack of information, need to go abroad, lack of established clinic networks, and so on. What can you argue? How can you plan to make them more available?

Liz Parrish: All novel therapies are expensive because the R&D enabling them is still ongoing. The small group of people who can afford them are benefiting from what at the time of their treatment is cutting-edge medicine, but they are simultaneously funding the R&D that will assess these therapies, and later make them affordable to a larger number of people. This is just as true of organ transplants or surgical bypass, now routine but once unaffordable to most, as it is of gene therapy.

The fact that a treatment takes place abroad does not necessarily imply lack of information. All clinics proposed by IHS have websites with detailed information about their facilities. IHS is the clinical network, that hitherto has been lacking, which will connect patients needing treatment to clinics all over the world, one or two of which may have just the treatment a certain patient requires.

For sure, there is less information about the clinical results of some of the treatments they propose, and how could it be otherwise? Those treatments are pioneering, and therefore off the beaten track in novel territory. This novel territory requires patients to explore it, provide data for BioViva to analyse and in this way make the new treatments available to more people.

Ariel Feinerman: Thank you very much for your answers, hope to see you again!

Liz Parrish: Thanks you, it was my pleasure.

Ariel VA Feinerman is a researcher, author, and photographer, who believes that people should not die from diseases and ageing, and whose main goal is to improve human health and achieve immortality.

Message from Ariel VA Feinerman: If you like my work, any help will be appreciated!

PayPal: arielfeinerman@gmail.com

Bitcoin: 1Gz5ebAyPmM9vNAAgpmeX7G3rtKMyWEjb1

Ether: 0x4752d8a8615Cdf48E220f9dbb48654C7791716ee

Bitcoin Cash: qzh427szlnfyk2k6v547gkpjvafnmzgk35hzagzs82

Ideas for Technological Solutions to Destructive Climate Change – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II

Ideas for Technological Solutions to Destructive Climate Change – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor’s Note: What follows is a preliminary identification of potential constructive solutions to the problems of deleterious climate change. They are intended for discussion and perhaps eventual incorporation into the U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform, along with other member-generated suggestions, if supported by a vote of the members. At present, though, the priority is to generate and discuss potential effective solutions that do not run into the common pitfalls of Neo-Malthusianism and Neo-Pigovianism, but rather embody the transhumanist Proactionary Principle and remain compatible with continued improvements in the length and quality of human lives. It is our hope that the U.S. Transhumanist Party will eventually emerge at the forefront of generating solutions to the climate-change issue that come to be widely recognized as feasible, effective, and palatable to the majority of people. Accordingly, the list identified in this article is open to revision and expansion in accordance with reader-generated solutions that adhere to the two major constraints specified herein. Both the initially identified potential solutions and these constraints are compatible with the existing related provisions in the Constitution of the U.S. Transhumanist Party (Article III, Sections VIII, IX, X, XI, and XXXVIII), as well as  Article XXII of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 2.0.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, August 5, 2018

Destructive climate change is no longer a hypothesis or mere possibility; rather, the empirical evidence for it has become apparent in the form of increasingly frequent extremes of temperature and natural disasters – particularly the ongoing global heat wave and major wildfires occurring in diverse parts of the world. In each individual incident, it is difficult to pinpoint “climate change” as a singular cause, but climate change can be said to exacerbate the frequency and severity of the catastrophes that arise. Residing in Northern Nevada for the past decade has provided me ample empirical evidence of the realities of deleterious climate change. Whereas there were no smoke inundations from California wildfires during the first four summers of my time in Northern Nevada, the next six consecutive summers (2013-2018) were all marked by widespread, persistent inflows of smoke from major wildfires hundreds of kilometers away, so as to render the air quality here unhealthy for long periods of time. From a purely probabilistic standpoint, the probability of this prolonged sequence of recent but consistently recurring smoke inundations would be minuscule in the absence of some significant climate change. Even in the presence of some continued debate over the nature and causes of climate change, the probabilities favor some action to mitigate the evident adverse effects and to rely on the best-available scientific understanding to do so, even with the allowance that the scientific understanding will evolve and hopefully become more refined over time – as good science does. Thus, it is most prudent to accept that there is deleterious climate change and that at least a significant contribution to it comes from emissions of certain gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere as a result of particular human activities, the foremost of which is the use of fossil fuels. This is not an indictment of human beings, nor even of fossil fuels per se, but rather an indication that the deleterious side effects of particular activities should be prevented or alleviated through further human activity and ingenuity.

Yet one of the major causes of historical reluctance among laypersons, especially in the United States, to accept the findings of the majority of climate scientists has been the misguided conflation by certain activists (almost always on the political Left) of the justifiable need to prevent or mitigate the effects of climate change with specific policy recommendations that are profoundly counterproductive to that purpose and would only increase the everyday suffering of ordinary people without genuinely alleviating deleterious climate change. The policy recommendations of this sort have historically fallen into two categories: (i) Neo-Malthusian, “back to nature” proposals to restrict the use of advanced technologies and return to more primitive modes of living; and (ii) elaborate economic manipulations, such as the creation of artificial markets in “carbon credits”, or the imposition of a carbon tax or a related form of “Pigovian tax” – ostensibly to associate the “negative externalities” of greenhouse-gas emissions with a tangible cost. The Neo-Malthusian “solutions” would, in part deliberately, cause extreme detriments to most people’s quality of life (for those who remain alive), while simultaneously resulting in the use of older, far more environmentally destructive techniques of energy generation, such as massive deforestation or the combustion of animal byproducts. The Neo-Pigovian economic manipulations ignore how human motives and incentives actually work and are far too indirect and contingent on a variety of assumptions that are virtually never likely to hold in practice. At the same time, the artificially complex structures that these economic manipulations inevitably create would pose obstructions to the direct deployment of more straightforward solutions by entangling such potential solutions in an inextricable web of compliance interdependencies.

The solutions to destructive climate change are ultimately technological and infrastructural.  No single device or tactic – and certainly no tax or prohibition – can comprehensively combat a problem of this magnitude and variety of impacts. However, a suite of technologically oriented approaches – pushing forward the deployment and quality of the arsenal of tools available to humankind – could indeed arrest and perhaps reverse the course of deleterious climate change by directly reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases and/or directly alleviating the consequences of increased climate variability.

Because both human circumstances and current as well as potential technologies are extremely diverse, no list of potential solutions to deleterious climate change can ever be exhaustive. Here I attempt the beginnings of such a list, but I invite others to contribute additional technologically oriented solutions as well. There are only two constraints on the kinds of solutions that can feasibly and ethically combat deleterious climate change – but those constraints are of immense importance:

Constraint 1. The solutions may not result in a net detriment to any individual human’s length or material quality of life.

Constraint 2. The solutions may not involve the prohibition of technologies or the restraint of further technological progress.

Constraint 1 implies that any solution to deleterious climate change will need to be a Pareto-efficient move, in that at least one person should benefit, while no person should suffer a detriment (or at least a detriment that has not been satisfactorily compensated for in that person’s judgment). Constraint 2 implies a techno-optimistic and technoprogressive perspective on combating deleterious climate change: we can do it without restrictions or prohibitions, but rather through innovations that will benefit all humans. Some technologies, particularly those associated with the extraction and use of fossil fuels, may gradually be consigned to obsolescence and irrelevance with this approach, but this will be due to their voluntary abandonment once superior, more advanced technological alternatives become widespread and economical to deploy. The more freedom to innovate and active acceleration of technological progress exist, the sooner that stage of fossil-fuel obsolescence could be reached. In the meantime, some damaging events are unfortunately unavoidable (as are many natural catastrophes more generally in our still insufficiently advanced era), but a variety of approaches can be deployed to at least prevent or reduce some damage that would otherwise arise.

If humanity solves the problems of deleterious climate change, it can only be with the mindset that solutions are indeed achievable, and they are achievable without compromising our progress or standards of living. We must be neither defeatists nor reactionaries, but rather should proactively accelerate the development of emerging technologies to meet this challenge by actualizing the tremendous creative potential our minds have to offer.

What follows is the initial list of potential solutions. Long may it grow.

Direct Technological Innovation

  • Continued development of economical solar and wind power that could compete with fossil fuels on the basis of cost alone.
  • Continued development of electric vehicles and increases in their range, as well as deployment of charging stations throughout all inhabited areas to enable recharging to become as easy as a refueling a gasoline-powered vehicle.
  • Development of in vitro (lab-grown) meat that is biologically identical to currently available meat but does not require actual animals to die. Eventually this could lead the commercial raising of cattle – which contribute significantly to methane emissions – to decline substantially.
  • Development of vertical farming to increase the amount of arable land indoors – rendering more food production largely unaffected by climate change.
  • Autonomous vehicles offered as services by transportation network companies – reducing the need for direct car ownership in urban areas.
  • Development and spread of pest-resistant, drought-resistant genetically modified crops that require less intensive cultivation techniques and less application of spray pesticides, and which can also flourish in less hospitable climates.
  • Construction of hyperloop transit networks among major cities, allowing rapid transit without the pollution generated by most automobile and air travel. Hyperloop networks would also allow for more rapid evacuation from a disaster area.
  • Construction of next-generation, meltdown-proof nuclear-power reactors, including those that utilize the thorium fuel cycle. It is already possible today for most of a country’s electricity to be provided through nuclear power, if only the fear of nuclear energy could be overcome. However, the best way to overcome the fear of nuclear energy is to deploy new technologies that eliminate the risk of meltdown. In addition to this, technologies should be developed to reprocess nuclear waste and to safely re-purpose dismantled nuclear weapons for civilian energy use.
  • Construction of smart infrastructure systems and devices that enable each building to use available energy with the maximum possible benefit and minimum possible waste, while also providing opportunities for the building to generate its own renewable energy whenever possible.
  • In the longer term, development of technologies to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and export it via spaceships to the Moon and Mars, where it could be released as part of efforts to generate a greenhouse effect and begin terraforming these worlds.

Disaster Response

  • Fire cameras located at prominent vantage points in any area of high fire risk – perhaps linked to automatic alerts to nearby fire departments and sprinkler systems built into the landscape, which might be auto-activated if a sufficiently large fire is detected in the vicinity.
  • Major increases in recruitment of firefighters, with generous pay and strategic construction of outposts in wilderness areas. Broad, paved roads need to lead to the outposts, allowing for heavy equipment to reach the site of a wildfire easily.
  • Development of firefighting robots to accompany human firefighters. The robots would need to be constructed from fire-resistive materials and have means of transporting themselves over rugged terrain (e.g., tank treads).
  • Design and deployment of automated firefighting drones – large autonomous aircraft that could carry substantial amounts of water and/or fire-retardant sprays.

Disaster Prevention

  • Recruitment of large brush-clearing brigades to travel through heavily forested areas – particularly remote and seldom-accessed ones – and clear dead vegetation as well as other wildfire fuels. This work does not require significant training or expertise and so could offer an easy job opportunity for currently unemployed or underemployed individuals. In the event of shortages of human labor, brush-clearing robots could be designed and deployed. The robots could also have the built-in capability to reprocess dead vegetation into commercially usable goods – such as mulch or wood pellets. Think of encountering your friendly maintenance robot when hiking or running on a trail!
  • Proactive creation of fire breaks in wilderness areas – not “controlled burns” (which are, in practice, difficult to control) but rather controlled cuts of smaller, flammable brush to reduce the probability of fire spreading. Larger trees of historic significance should be spared, but with defensible space created around them.
  • Deployment of surveillance drones in forested areas, to detect behaviors such as vandalism or improper precautions around manmade fires – which are often the causes of large wildfires.
  • Construction of large levees throughout coastal regions – protecting lowland areas from flooding and achieving in the United States what has been achieved in the Netherlands over centuries on a smaller scale. Instead of building a wall at the land border, build many walls along the coasts!
  • Construction of vast desalination facilities along ocean coasts. These facilities would take in ocean water, thereby counteracting the effects of rising water levels, then purify the water and transmit it via a massive pipe network throughout the country, including to drought-prone regions. This would mitigating multiple problems, reducing the excess of water in the oceans while replenishing the deficit of water in inland areas.
  • Creation of countrywide irrigation and water-pipeline networks to spread available water and prevent drought wherever it might arise.

Economic Policies

  • Redesign of home insurance policies and disaster-mitigation/recovery grants to allow homeowners who lost their homes to natural disasters to rebuild in different, safer areas.
  • Development of workplace policies to encourage telecommuting and teleconferencing, including through immersive virtual-reality technologies that allow for plausible simulacra of in-person interaction. The majority of business interactions can be performed virtually, eliminating the need for much business-related commuting and travel.
  • Elimination of local and regional monopoly powers of utility companies in order to allow alternative-energy utilities, such as companies specializing in the installation of solar panels, to compete and offer their services to homeowners independently of traditional utilities.
  • Establishment of consumer agencies (public or private) that review products for durability and encourage the construction of devices that lack “planned obsolescence” but rather can be used for decades with largely similar effect.
  • Establishment of easily accessible community repair shops where old devices and household goods can be taken to be repaired or re-purposed instead of being discarded.
  • Abolition of inflexible zoning regulations and overly prescriptive building codes; replacement with a more flexible system that allows a wide variety of innovative construction techniques, including disaster-resistant and sustainable construction methods, tiny homes, homes created from re-purposed materials, and mixed-use residential/commercial developments (which also reduce the need for vehicular commuting).
  • Abolition of sales taxes on energy-efficient consumer goods.
  • Repeal or non-enactment of any mileage-based taxes for electric or hybrid vehicles, thereby resulting in such vehicles becoming incrementally less expensive to operate.
  • Lifting of all bans and restrictions on genetically modified plants and animals – which are a crucial component in adaptation to climate change and in reducing the carbon footprint of agricultural activities.

Harm Mitigation

  • Increases in planned urban vegetation through parks, rooftop gardens, trees planted alongside streets, pedestrian / bicyclist “greenways” lined with vegetation. The additional vegetation can absorb carbon dioxide, reducing the concentrations in the atmosphere.
  • Construction of additional pedestrian / bicyclist “greenways”, which could help reduce the need for vehicular commutes.
  • Construction of always-operational disaster shelters with abundant stockpiles of aid supplies, in order to prevent the delays in deployment of resources that occur during a disaster. When there is no disaster, the shelters could perform other valuable tasks that generally are not conducive to market solutions, such as litter cleanup in public spaces or even offering inexpensive meeting space to various individuals and organizations. (This could also contribute to the disaster shelters largely becoming self-funding in calm times.)
  • Provision of population-wide free courses on disaster preparation and mitigation. The courses could have significant online components as well as in-person components administered by first-aid and disaster-relief organizations.
Choose Your Own Story – by Nicola Bagalà

Choose Your Own Story – by Nicola Bagalà

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Nicola Bagalà

Editor’s Note: In this set of short stories originally published by our allies at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), Nicola Bagalà illustrates  through convincing scenarios of possible futures why we should take seriously research and activism into rejuvenation biotechnology. It may make the difference between our own survival and flourishing into the indefinite future, or the painful suffering and demise that currently accompany old age.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, July 30, 2018

Today, I would like to tell you two short stories describing what your far future might look like, depending on the choices that you—though not only you—will make in the near future. Feel free to leave a comment to let others know which one you’d rather have as your real future.

Story 1: A day in 2140

The blinds in your bedroom slowly whirr open, as a gentle melody gradually fills the environment. Ferdinand—your AI assistant, to whom you decided to give a far less extravagant name than most other people do—informs you that it’s 7:30, your bath is ready, and so will be your usual breakfast once you’re done in the bathroom. Getting up that early is never too easy, but your morning walk in the park is always worth it, because it puts you in a good mood.

As you enter the bathroom, you step into the health scanner, and, after a few seconds, a couple of charts and several biomarkers show up on the display—the final report says that you’re a perfectly healthy 137-year-old whose biological age is about 26. It’d be enough by itself, but you think the charts and the data look cool; Ferdinand knows that.

You’ve got one of those awesome bathrooms with HyperReal WallScreens—well, nearly everyone does anyway—so today you’re taking your bath in the rainforest. As you enjoy your hydromassage, you’re listening to the latest news; your heart almost skips a beat when you hear that the Stephen Hawking Deep Space Telescope, the one that NASA and the African Space Agency sent pretty much to the edge of the solar system, has finally confirmed earlier observations: JSS “Jessie” 431 c, an exoplanet 95 light-years away, harbors multicellular life. They’d been chasing “Jessie” for a while, and now the chase is over; it’s an unprecedented discovery, and while it took surprisingly long to finally get this data, this is a world-changing breakthrough, and it leaves you yelling and splashing around in joy embarrassingly loudly. As you quickly get out of the tub, you imagine that all the geeks at work won’t be talking about anything else.

Your breakfast, freshly out of your molecular assembler, is as delicious and tailored to your specific nutritional needs as Ferdinand got you used to, but you’re too hyped today to spend too much time eating. Ferdinand casts a virtual, disapproving glance at you as you quickly gobble your food up and leave the flat. Your usual walk is cancelled as well, you think as you get into the elevator, because you’re too eager to discuss the news at work. As Ferdinand leaves room for Alice—the building’s AI janitor—you look through the glass walls of the cabin, gaining inspiration from the several other elegant skyscrapers towering over your beautiful city. After a quick descent from the 87th floor, you’re finally on the ground and ready for the commute to work—a quick trip of about 400 kilometers, which, when you were in your 20s for real, would’ve been anything but quick.

At the time, the world was so very different, you think to yourself. Take work, for example: your life depended on it, in pretty much the literal sense of the word. Nowadays, although the word “work” stuck, it is just something you really enjoy doing and you’re good at, and people look back at the whole “having to earn a living” idea in pretty much the same way as they looked at hunter-gatherer tribes when you were a child. It’s unnerving to think that you could’ve missed all of this by a hair’s breadth; when you were in your early 20s, the social movement for the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies really started to pick up, and therapies eventually followed suit. If it hadn’t—and that might well have been—right now you’d be six feet under, just like your poor grandma. She’d have loved the world today, your father always says.

Anyway, there’s no time to get melancholic now; another great day awaits you.

Story 2: A day in 2078

If this story had the same year as the previous one, it’d be very short: you’re dead, and you’ve long been such. The end. However, that’s not how it’s titled, so it is going to be a little longer than that. Whether that’s better or not, I’ll leave up to you to decide.

You wake up in your hospital bed to the beeping coming from multiple monitors and sensors, which by now have become your most consistent companions. It’s not even morning: you fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and now that you think about it, some of your family was there with you. Probably, as you fell asleep, they decided it was best to let you rest.

Not that you’re that much awake, anyway. You feel barely conscious, and most of what you can feel is either pain or tiredness. Up until a month or two ago, you could still sort of manage with some difficulty, although with the help of your caregiver or your children, but then everything changed. You’ve been waking up in the same hospital bed ever since you passed out that day, and one of the first things you heard when you woke up right after they brought you in was that, at 92 years old, you’re lucky to be still alive.

You’d like to know what time it is, but you can’t quite make out the clock on the wall nor any of the screens around you. You could ask the computer in the room, if you had any breath left, but you don’t. If nothing else, it probably has alerted the doctors that you’re awake, and maybe someone will turn up soon. Spending energy to push the damn button doesn’t seem worth it, what’s the point, anyway, you wonder—today might well be your last day, and given the outlook, it’d be as good a day to go as any.

That’s too bad, though, you think, saddened. You’d really have wanted to see your great-grandkids grow up, and all in all, the world has surprised you, turning out much better than you expected. Not perfect, granted, but you’re genuinely curious to know how things will change in the coming decades, with all these advancements in technology and science—and the overall political situation looks okay, too. Well, looks like you’ll be taking your curiosity to the grave with you, because these advancements didn’t happen quite everywhere in science, nor did the bureaucrats do much to make them happen. Tough luck.

Bitterly, you think this was at least a little bit your fault too. You didn’t do much to make them happen either. When you were in your early thirties, there was a lot of talk about rejuvenation biotechnology, and the talk intensified somewhat by your late thirties, but the whole thing never really saw the light of day. Oh, you tell yourself, it’ll happen eventually, but not any time soon. It certainly didn’t happen in time to spare yourself what you’re going through right now—thankfully, it’s almost over.

Back in the day, you were in the “unsure” camp, tending to “best not to mess with nature.” In hindsight, you’re not so sure you actually agreed with that view; possibly, you only said so because so many other people said the same and you didn’t feel like being one of those fruitcakes who wanted to change everything, or something like that—what the heck, that was 60 years ago and the memories are foggy. You do remember, though, that when you saw your own parents go through an ordeal very similar to yours, some thirty years ago, the thought that you might have misjudged the “fruitcakes” crossed your mind, but it was already too late.

Unfortunately, by then, populist discourse appealing to the cycle of life, a bunch of other, supposedly more important issues, and “the future of our children” had won over the crowd, and rejuvenation research had taken a back seat, making way for better services for the elderly instead; they’re not bad, but maybe, if a choice was available between better machines to take you to the toilet and drugs that kept you able to walk there on your own, the latter might have been preferable.

The future for your great-grandchildren is similarly rosy, as they get to watch their own parents and grandparents turn into almost-vegetables and then die, not to mention the financial burden—not just on individual families, but the world as well. With so many old and dependent people, and fewer and fewer young people, the economy doesn’t look so okay. The way they’re going about this is by offering financial incentives for families with kids, which, coming from the very same people who opposed rejuvenation for fear of overpopulation among other things, is quite ironic.

Maybe, you tell yourself, you should’ve listened. Maybe you should have taken the whole issue more seriously and helped the early advocates somehow, rather than having dismissed the idea of rejuvenation. Maybe, if you had helped, and if others had too, it’ll have happened in time to save you, or at least your children—they’re in their sixties and seventies now, and if rejuvenation didn’t happen in the past sixty years, despite the initial wave of enthusiasm, you can bet that it isn’t going to happen in the next twenty years when nearly nobody cares.

You turn your head slightly towards the door. Nothing. No one’s coming, but then again, you’ve only been awake for ten minutes tops, and the doctors have got plenty of other geriatric patients in this wing. Your eyelids are becoming heavy again, and as you won’t accomplish much by staying awake anyway, you decide to let them go down. Who knows if they’ll open again.

Both of these stories are fictional, though the first one contains more fiction than the second, because it describes a future that might or might not come to be. The first story is perhaps overly optimistic and even a tad too Star Trek-ish for your taste, but it’s just my happy story—you are free to replace it with whatever positive future you’d like to see. It’s just a possible scenario, and for all we know, the future might be nothing like that and more like a dystopia. It’s hard to tell for a fact.

However, the second story contains much more reality than the first, because it’s pretty much what it means to be in your 90s these days; depending on a number of factors, even being in your 70s and 80s can be not much better, even if you’re not bedridden. Unless we do something about it today, a story similar to this will be our story—your story—too, just like stories of infectious diseases killing millions would’ve still been very much current even today if we hadn’t done anything to change those stories before they could unfold.

I’ve already chosen my favorite version of the story a long time ago. The question is, which one is yours?

About Nicola Bagalà

Nicola Bagalà has been an enthusiastic supporter and advocate of rejuvenation science since 2011. Although his preferred approach to treating age related diseases is Aubrey de Grey’s suggested SENS platform, he is very interested in any other potential approach as well. In 2015, he launched the blog Rejuvenaction to advocate for rejuvenation and to answer common concerns that generally come with the prospect of vastly extended healthy lifespans. Originally a mathematician graduated from Helsinki University, his scientific interests range from cosmology to AI, from drawing and writing to music, and he always complains he doesn’t have enough time to dedicate to all of them which is one of the reasons he’s into life extension. He’s also a computer programmer and web developer. All the years spent learning about the science of rejuvenation have sparked his interest in biology, in which he’s planning to get a university degree.

Interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey by Yuri Deigin

Interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey by Yuri Deigin

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Yuri Deigin
Aubrey de Grey

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party is pleased to publish this in-depth interview by Yuri Deigin of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Anti-Aging Advisor. Herein Dr. de Grey offers original, in-depth insights regarding the current state of research and public opinion regarding the pursuit of advances in rejuvenation biotechnology that will hopefully achieve significant life extension, one of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Core Ideals, within our lifetimes.  This interview was originally published in the Russian language here. The English-language version was first published by one of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Allied Organizations, the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), here. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, July 29, 2018

Note from the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF): Today we have an interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Research Foundation. This interview conducted by Yuri Deigin, CEO at Youthereum Genetics, was originally published in Russian language and he has kindly translated it into English so our audience can enjoy it, too.

Yuri: Aubrey, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Why don’t we dive right in? I am sure everybody asks you this: how and when did you become interested in aging, and when did you decide to make it your life’s mission to defeat it?

Aubrey de Grey: I became interested in aging and decided to work on it in my late 20s, so, in the early 1990s. The reason I became interested was because that was when I discovered that other biologists were almost all not interested in it. They did not think that aging was a particularly important or interesting question. I had always assumed, throughout my whole life, that aging was obviously the world’s most important problem. I thought that people who understood biology would be working on it really hard. Then, I discovered that wasn’t true and that hardly any biologists were working on it. The ones that were weren’t doing it very well, not very productively as far as I could see. I thought I’d better have a go myself, so I switched fields from my previous research area, which was artificial intelligence.

Yuri: By the way, do you think there are disproportionately many people from computer science in aging research these days?

Aubrey de Grey: There are a lot, and there are lots of people who are supporting it. Most of our supporters are, in one way or another, people from computer science or from mathematics, engineering, or physics. I think the reason why that has happened is actually very similar to the reason why I was able to make an important contribution to this field.

I think that people with that kind of background, that kind of training, find it much easier to understand how we should be thinking about aging: as an engineering problem. First of all, we must recognize that it is a problem, and then we must recognize that it is a problem that we could solve with technology. This is something that most people find very alien, very difficult to understand, but engineers seem to get it more easily.

Yuri: So do you think that people who don’t have such a background, this way of thinking, have a chance of understanding the importance of this problem, or are they better off letting people with an engineering mindset figure it out?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, of course, there is always an overlap. The reason I spend so much time doing interviews and running around the world giving talks is precisely in order to help people, for whom this is not obvious, to think about these things. For any new idea or any new way of thinking, there are always people who understand it first and who then communicate that knowledge to other people.

Yuri: Right. And you have been running around giving talks for a very long time, as I understand. It’s been, what, twenty years?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, at least 15 years that I’ve been doing a lot of it.

Yuri: So between the time in your twenties, when you realized that aging is not something that’s being adequately covered by biologists, and the time when you decided to have a go at it yourself, how many years have passed? And can you give a bit more background on when you founded SENS and what SENS is?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure! The year in which I switched fields properly is probably 1995. For the next five years, I was basically just learning. I was going to all the conferences, getting to know the right people, leaders in the field. Learning a lot of what was known and doing a huge amount of reading, of course. The big breakthrough came in the summer of 2000 when I realized that comprehensive damage repair was a much more promising option then what people had been doing before. Since then, it has been a matter of persuading people of that.

There were a few years when I was just ignored and people thought I was crazy and didn’t think I made any sense. Then, gradually, people realized that what I was saying was not necessarily crazy. Some people found it threatening, so in the mid-2000s, I had a fair amount of battles to fight within academia. That’s normal; that’s what happens with any radical new idea that is actually right, so that happened for a while. This decade, it’s been rather easier. We founded the SENS Foundation; we’ve started getting enough donations into the SENS Foundation to be able to do our own research, both within our own facilities as well as funding research at universities and institutes. Gradually, this research had moved far along enough that we could publish initial results. Over the past two or three years, we’ve been able to spin off a bunch of companies that we have transferred technology to so that they can actually attract money from investors.

There are, of course, an awful lot of people out there who believe in what we are doing, but they fundamentally don’t like charities; they don’t like to give money away. They have been waiting for the point when these projects move far enough ahead that they are investable, and that’s resulting in much more money flowing into these areas.

Yuri: This is a good point you bring up – that a lot of wealthy people for some reason aren’t prepared to spend money on fundamental research on aging but somehow desire a financial return on their investments in this field. Do you know why that is? Why can’t they realize that in their position, it is much more rational to try to convert their wealth into something much more valuable that they cannot yet ever get back, which is years of healthy life. Why do they try to also make money on this research?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, it’s not really a rational decision, and it’s different for every individual, whether it’s for that reason or any other. Let me first say that it actually seems less of a problem in Russia. Our single biggest donor at the moment is Vitalik Buterin, the guy who created Ethereum, who is a Canadian of Russian heritage. Another major donor of ours is a guy named Michael Antonov, one of the co-founders of Oculus. I think maybe Russians have less of a problem with this. However, in general, the kind of people who have a lot of money and who are also visionary enough and understand technology enough, they tend to be the kind of people who made their money by doing certain things; they got it through the capitalist system. So, those kinds of people are inherently biased in favor of that system and against philanthropy. Then, of course, there are many other reasons. There are some people who won’t give us money because they don’t think it’s a good idea to defeat aging. There are plenty of people who want to give us money, but their wives think it’s crazy. I am not kidding! There are at least a couple of our major verbal supporters who I know for a fact that that’s why they are not giving us significant amounts of money. Another reason, I think, is that some people just have overly big egos, so they think they can do better than us even when they can’t.

Yuri: Let me probe you a little bit more on this. You brought up wealthy Russians and people who think they can have a go at aging themselves. Would Sergey Brin qualify as one of those people who decided they know better and founded their own company, Calico, for precisely this reason?

Aubrey de Grey: Yeah, I had a funny feeling you might ask me about that. I have a very low opinion of Calico. The fundamental reason for this is because of Larry and Sergey. In fairness to Sergey, my understanding is that Calico is mainly a Larry project, or at least more so than a Sergey project. Of course, they are both on the Board of Directors, and they both share the responsibility. At the end of the day, Calico is a catastrophe, and it’s their fault. They just created it wrongly.

They’ve known me for fifteen years; they could easily have told me, “Listen. We don’t like charity. We want to create a company, and we want you to run it,” and I would’ve said “No problem!” and they knew that. Instead, they decided to be more traditional about this. I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t like people who have beards.

The fact is that they made an absolute catastrophe of it. They started out reasonably sensibly by hiring Art Levinson, the world’s best biotech CEO, but what they didn’t do was tell him what to do next. They gave him a job to cure aging, and he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to cure aging, and he knows that he doesn’t have the slightest idea. So, he hired someone who he thought would have an idea how to do it and made him Chief Science Officer. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to make that decision either, so he hired completely the wrong person. He hired a completely inveterate basic scientist, David Botstein, who is a fantastic scientist but who doesn’t understand technology. In fact, he went on record saying that he doesn’t have a translational bone in his body. You don’t get that sort of person to run an outfit that’s supposed to be solving a technological problem. Sure enough, they are doing fantastic research that will understand aging better and better as time goes on over the next century, but they will never, ever, if they follow their current strategy, actually make any kind of difference in how long people can stay healthy and, therefore, how long they can stay alive.

Yuri: Why do so few people have a sense of urgency that we need to do everything possible to combat aging within our lifetimes and not centuries to follow?

Aubrey de Grey: There are two answers to that. The David Botstein answer, the Calico answer, is that they just don’t understand the idea of knowing enough. People who work on basic science understand how to find things out, but that’s all they understand. For them, the best questions to work on are the questions whose answers will simply create new questions. Their purpose in life is to create new questions rather than to use the answers for a humanitarian benefit. They don’t object to humanitarian benefit, but they regard it as not their problem. You can’t change that. Botstein is a fantastic scientist, but he’s in the wrong job.

The other part of your question, why people, in general, do not regard aging with a sense of urgency, has a different answer. People weigh up the desirability and the feasibility. Remember that everyone has been brought up to believe that aging is inevitable, I mean completely inevitable in the sense that stopping it would be like creating perpetual motion. If the probability of doing something about this thing is zero, then the desirability doesn’t matter anymore. So, under that assumption, we really ought to put it out of our minds and get on with our miserably short lives. That’s all we can do.

Yuri: So it’s a case of learned helplessness?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, exactly, it is learned helplessness, and it’s a perfectly reasonable, rational thing to be thinking until a plan comes along that can actually solve the problem: a plan that demonstrates that we actually might be within striking distance of genuinely solving the problem. That only happened quite recently. Of course, I have a huge mountain to climb to persuade people that we have crossed the boundary from this being just a recreational, exploratory field to it being a technological, translational field.

Yuri: Have you had success in the past fifteen years that you’ve been climbing this mountain; have you seen that the public’s perception has greatly improved?

Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely. Things have got hugely easier. I mean, there is a huge amount of the mountain still to climb, but we have climbed a hell of a lot of it. Just the nature of a conversation, the kinds of people who want to hear about this. The way in which credentialed scientists with reputations that they need to protect are willing to embrace this. We could not conceivably have created the scientific advisory board that we have now fifteen or even ten years ago. There are thirty people there who are all world-leading luminaries in their fields, and they are all signed up very explicitly to the ideas that comprehensive damage repair is a thing and that it actually has a good chance of genuinely defeating aging. So, I’ve won the scientific argument.

People are even reinventing the whole idea of comprehensive damage repair and pretending it’s a new idea. Five years ago, there was a paper called “The Hallmarks of Aging” published by five very senior professors in Europe. That paper is saying pretty much exactly what I said eleven years before it. The key difference is that unlike my work, this work is being noticed. In fact, it’s been more than noticed. It’s become the definition of what’s useful work to do. This one paper that was only published 5 years ago has been cited more than 2,000 times already. There’s no question that it’s going to be, by far, the most highly cited paper in the whole of the biology of aging this decade, and it has the same ideas that I put forward the previous decade. So that’s fantastic. I’d like to have more credit, but I really don’t care about that; what I care about is that the idea is now in the mainstream.

Yuri: You mentioned your plan for comprehensive damage repair; could you elaborate a little bit more on what the plan actually is?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure. The idea is to emulate what a mechanic would do to maintain a car. We know that this works; there are cars over a hundred years old that are still running and are doing so just as well as when they were built. We know that they are not doing that because they were designed to last that long; they were probably designed to last only ten years. They’ve vastly exceeded their warranty period, and they’ve done so because of comprehensive damage repair.

The only reason that we can’t do this to the human body already is that the human body has more complexity and more types of damage. However, it’s a manageable amount of complexity. In particular, the big thing that led me through to this route was when I realized back in the year 2000 that we could classify all of the types of damage that the body accumulates into seven major categories, for each of which there’s a generic approach to fixing it.

For example, one of the categories is cell loss, which is when cells are dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. The repair, of course, is stem cell therapy. We simply put cells into the body that have been pre-programmed into a state where they know what to do to divide and transform themselves into replacements for the cells that the body is not replacing on its own. That’s just one of the seven types of damage that I enumerated, and, of course, that direction is very well advanced. We have hardly ever done any work in stem cells because we didn’t need to; other people are doing all of the work that’s necessary.

The other six categories are more neglected; they are in an earlier stage. That’s why we created the SENS Foundation to push them forward. We’ve been very successful. A number of those things have reached a point where we could actually create a startup company and transfer technology into it, so it would attract investment from the kinds of people I was mentioning earlier who don’t like to give money away.

Yuri: So you’ve created several startups, could you elaborate on the ones that have the most potential?

Aubrey de Grey: They’re all doing pretty well. Let me just focus on one as an illustration: Ichor Therapeutics. Ichor is all about macular degeneration, which is, of course, the number one cause of blindness in the elderly. The category in SENS that it comes under is the accumulation of molecular waste products inside cells. They accumulate in different cells in many different ways. It’s a side effect of their normal operation. Different cells accumulate different types of waste products. One of them is a byproduct of vitamin A that is created in the eye as a side effect of the chemistry of vision, and it poisons cells at the back of the eye called retinal pigmented epithelial cells.

What we’ve done is identify enzymes in bacteria that are able to break down this toxic waste product. If they can break it down, the waste product no longer accumulates. We have identified the genes for these enzymes, and we’ve been able to incorporate them into human cells in such a way that they still work. Ichor is pursuing that, and it will probably soon start clinical trials to pursue this as a cure for macular degeneration later this year. This is dry macular degeneration, the major form in the elderly.

Yuri: Could you tell us about some other startups that you’ve spun out from SENS?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure. Ichor was part of LysoSENS. Another one that we’ve spun off is called AmyloSENS. We’ve got a problem of waste products that accumulate not inside the cells but in the spaces between the cells. In theory, those waste products are easier to get rid of, because they’re inherently easier to break down. The way we do it is by actually getting cells to swallow this stuff, internalize it, and then break it down. There are various ways to trick the immune system into doing that. In the case of Alzheimer’s, this was done some years ago, and it’s already working in clinical trials.

Our focus has been on other types of waste products that are similar to the plaques in Alzheimer’s disease, but they consist of different proteins, and they occur in different tissues. We’ve been able to fund a group in Texas that was able to create some antibodies that could break down the extracellular garbage which is actually the number one killer for really old people, people over the age of 110. That’s now been turned into a company.

Another example is a company that’s being run by the person who used to be our Chief Operating Officer. It’s a company focused on organ preservation. It’s well-known that there’s a huge shortage of organs for transplants. Many thousands of people die every year on waiting lists, just waiting for an organ that is sufficiently immunocompatible for them and that happens to be donated by somebody who dies really nearby. That is a requirement for that organ to be given to the recipient fast enough before it breaks down. We want to solve that transport problem and create whole banks of organs with a variety of immunological profiles. In order to do that, we need to be able to freeze them, but in order to freeze them, we need to develop ways that will not cause damage to the organ in the process of freezing. The company we spun out has got a wonderful new technology that is really good at that.

Yuri: Is that Arigos? The company that uses helium persufflation for cryopreservation?

Aubrey de Grey: That’s the one. You are very well-informed!

Yuri: Can you comment on Human Regeneration Biotechnologies?

Aubrey de Grey: That was our first spin-off, actually. It’s now got a shorter name. It’s called Human Bio, and it’s run and funded by a guy named Jason Hope, who was, for some time, one of our most major donors. He’s now focusing his funding on the company. It was initially created to do something very similar to what we’re doing with Ichor in macular degeneration. In that case, it was for atherosclerosis. The target was not this byproduct of vitamin A; instead, it was oxidized cholesterol, and they have kind of run into the sand a little bit on that. We’re trying to reactivate it right now, but they’ve got other interests as well. They’re working on senolytics, drugs that will kill senescent cells. They are potentially going to be quite a big player in a number of different areas at SENS. At the moment, they are a bit stealthy; they don’t need money, because they are funded by this wealthy guy. They are not going around telling everyone all that much about what they are doing, the way that most of these companies are.

Yuri: What about enzymes that are meant to break glucosepane crosslinks? Is there a startup for that?

Aubrey de Grey: We have funded research on glucosepane at Yale University. We’ve funded that for about 4-5 years now. They had a fantastic publication 2 years ago, where they made a huge breakthrough in this area. Essentially, they first had to be able to make glucosepane in large quantities without a high expense. That was published in Science; that’s our highest-profile publication in any area. It was important because it allowed them to proceed with obvious things, such as identifying enzymes that could break it. That was very successful: they have identified half a dozen enzymes that seem to be promising. For a couple of those enzymes, there’s a pretty good understanding of how they work. Now is the right time to create a company out of that, and that’s exactly what’s happening. That company is a month or two from being incorporated, and its funding is established.

Yuri: Great, so we’ll be on the lookout for an announcement for that company to be spun off.

Aubrey de Grey: It’s going to be called Revel.

Yuri: Ah, let’s hope we can one day revel in its accomplishments.

Aubrey de Grey: That’s right!

Yuri: We might have gotten a bit too deep into science for a casual reader. Maybe we can step back and you could elaborate on what you think actually causes aging? I know there are different schools of thought on that in the scientific community so maybe you can share your perspective?

Aubrey de Grey: I get rather sick of this question, actually. You know, there’s nothing that “causes” aging. What causes the aging of a car? You wouldn’t ask that question: you know that that’s a stupid question. All I really want to tell you is that the aging of a living organism is no different fundamentally than the aging of an inanimate machine like a car or an airplane. Therefore, questions like “What causes aging?” are no more sensible for a living organism than they are for a car.

Yuri: If the underlying causes of aging are the same for all organisms, why do you think there’s such a big difference in lifespan between different species: some live for just a few months, while others for centuries?

Aubrey de Grey: The analogy with inanimate machines like cars works perfectly well there too. Some cars are designed to last 50 years, like Land Rovers, for example, but most cars are only designed to last 10 years. It’s just the same for living organisms. Some living organisms have evolved to age more slowly. A perfectly good question is what causes evolution to create this disparity? Some species in a particular ecological niche, say, at the top of the food chain have an evolutionary imperative to age slowly, whereas species that get eaten a lot don’t need to have good anti-aging defenses built into them. That’s really the basis for why there is this variation in the rate of aging across the living world.

Yuri: The more interesting question is when will humanity actually conquer aging?

Aubrey de Grey: It all depends on how rapidly research goes, and that depends on money. Which is why when people ask me, “What can I do today to maximize my chances of living healthy and for a long time?” I tell them to write me a large check. It’s the only thing one can do right now. The situation right now is that everything we have today – no matter how many books are written about this or that diet or whatever – is that basically, we have nothing over and above just doing what your mother told you: in other words, not smoking, not getting seriously overweight, and having a balanced diet. If you adhere to the obvious stuff, you are doing pretty much everything that we can do today. The additional amount that you can get from just any kind of supplement regime, diet, or whatever is tiny. The thing to do is hasten the arrival of therapy for the betterment of what we have today. That’s where the check comes in.

Yuri: Some people probably couldn’t afford to write a sizable check; maybe they can do something else?

Aubrey de Grey: What I always say in relation to that is that the poorer you are, the more people you know who are richer than you. Therefore, the less you can do in terms of writing your own check, the more you can do in terms of persuading other people to write checks.

Yuri: So it’s activism, being vocal about aging research?

Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely. It’s activism and advocacy: it’s all about spreading the word and raising the level of people’s understanding of the fact that aging is the world’s biggest problem.

Yuri: Do you see any increase in funding for longevity research over the past 10 years?

Aubrey de Grey: Things have certainly improved. I mean, there’s more money coming into the foundation, a little bit more money, but there’s a lot more money coming into the private sector, into the companies I mentioned and other companies that have emerged in parallel with us. The overall funding for rejuvenation biotechnology has increased a lot in the past few years, and we need it to increase a lot more. The private sector can’t do everything, not yet, anyway. There will come a time when SENS Research Foundation will be able to declare victory and say, “Listen, everything that needs to be done is being done well enough in the private sector that we no longer need to exist.” For the moment, that’s not true. For the moment, there are still quite a few areas in SENS that are at the pre-investable stage where only philanthropy will allow them to progress to the point where they are investable.

Yuri: It’s great to hear that there is money coming into SENS because from what I understand, there was a time when you had to use your own money to fund the foundation, is that correct?

Aubrey de Grey: That’s right. I inherited 16.5 million dollars of which I donated 13 million. That was back in 2012 before we had any projects that we could spin out into companies. That inheritance was very timely, but the point is that I would still do it even now. If my mother died today, I’d probably do the same thing, because the foundation is still the engine room of the industry. For the foundation, it’s kind of double aid. The more progress we make, the more credible the whole idea becomes, which, of course, improves our ability to bring in money. We are also creating new opportunities where you can invest rather than donate, so it’s kind of a disincentive to donate. There’s a balance there. Of course, every donor is different; some donors are more philanthropically inclined than others.

Yuri: From what I understand, you’ve had some high-profile donors like Peter Thiel who’s been supporting the foundation for a number of years. Is he still a supporter?

Aubrey de Grey: Peter started supporting us in 2006, 12 years ago. He’s actually pretty much phased out now. I understand that. Ultimately, he’s much more comfortable with investing than donating. He wanted to be sure that we’re actually creating something, and sure enough, we are. We speak all the time to his investment advisors, who focus on investment opportunities in the biotech sector, especially in the anti-aging sector. I’m sure that he will continue to contribute financially to this field, though the contributions are quite likely to be focused more on the companies rather than the foundation.

One way in which Peter is donating indirectly right now is that he funded Vitalik Buterin four years ago as a Thiel Fellow under the 20 Under 20 program. That was how and where Vitalik created Ethereum, which of course made Vitalik very wealthy, and Vitalik donated 2.5 million dollars to us a few months ago. He is very much philanthropically inclined. So, Peter is still donating to us by proxy.

Yuri: What about his PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk? Has Peter ever connected you two or maybe you spoke to Elon yourself?

Aubrey de Grey: I have indeed met Elon many years ago, probably 10 years ago. I haven’t met him recently. In general, I think it’s quite unlikely that Elon will get heavily involved in this just because he’s got other things to focus on. It’s a bit like Bill Gates, though in the opposite direction. Bill Gates has pretty much explicitly said that his priority is to help the disadvantaged. He’s much more interested in mosquito nets in sub-Saharan Africa and less interested in people who already have advantages. Elon is kind of at the other end of the spectrum. He is more of a “toys for boys” kind of guy. He’s more interested in space travel and solar energy and so on. The thing is I don’t want to take money away from either one of those two people. I think that both of them are doing fantastic work that really matters for humanity. There are plenty of other people, such as Peter Thiel, who are in the middle, who do understand the enormous value of defeating aging, and who have the vision to understand who is likely to be able to do it, so I don’t want to distract either Elon or Bill from what they’re already doing.

Yuri: Do you think Elon might be moving in a somewhat different direction of mind uploading for circumventing aging?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes and no. I kind of pay attention to what he is doing with Neuralink and what people like Bryan Johnson are doing with Kernel. I am closely connected with those groups. I know a lot of people in that space. At the end of the day, I think they know as well as I do that it’s very, very speculative. Ways in which we might transfer our consciousness, our personality to different hardware, while still satisfying ourselves that we are genuinely the same person after the transfer rather than just creating a new person – those are pretty speculative ideas. There is a long way to go to make them even slightly comparable to something that competes with medical research.

Yuri: So you think that mind uploading, even if theoretically possible, is still far off in the future as something feasible?

Aubrey de Grey: It’s always dangerous these days to say that such and such technology is definitely not going to be developed until some particular number of years in the future. At some point, people said that the game of Go would never fall to a computer, but then AlphaGo came along. However, it is a certainty that the distance that we have to go is much larger in the case of mind uploading than in the case of the boring “wet approach” of medical research.

Yuri: Speaking of AlphaGo and AI, some researchers in the aging space are working AI as a kind of proxy to help us solve biology. What do you think about that approach?

Aubrey de Grey: There is definitely an intersection there. I actually know a lot of people who are at the cutting edge of AI research. I actually know Demis Hassabis, the guy who runs DeepMind, from when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge several years after me. We’ve kept in touch and try to connect every so often. I think it’s reasonable to view these things as very linked. I certainly agree with you that there are some AI researchers who are working on AI precisely because they don’t trust people like me to get the job done by the “wet approach”. That’s fine; they may be right, and if they are right, I’ll be just as happy for them to save my life rather than me saving their lives.

Yuri: Do you think we’re close to having AI help us with biology, or do you think it’s still years away?

Aubrey de Grey: There are some medical AI startups that are looking at ways to use machine learning against aging. One of the most prominent is InSilico Medicine led by Alex Zhavoronkov, which is largely focused on identifying drugs that can work in particular ways. It’s a very important area. I’m sure that we will use AI a lot in medical research in general. Whether we will go as far as supplanting medical research with the mind uploading approach, that’s a different question altogether.

Yuri: One of your most famous quotes is that you think that a person who will live for over 1,000 years has already been born. Do you still think so and what are the chances for, say, a 50-year-old person today to reach what you call Longevity Escape Velocity?

Aubrey de Grey: I certainly think what I used to think, and it is indeed as a result of the concept of the longevity escape velocity. I do not believe that even within the next hundred years, we’re likely to develop therapies that can completely 100% succeed in repairing all the damage that body does to itself in the course of its normal operation. I do believe that we have a very good chance within the next 20-25 years of fixing most of that damage, and most are good enough because it buys time to fix a bit more and then a bit more. The reason it buys time because the body is set up to tolerate having a certain amount of damage without significantly declining function. I think we’ve got a very good chance of getting to that point while we are staying one step ahead of the problem by improving the comprehensiveness of the therapies faster than time is passing.

Yuri: So that is essentially the definition of Longevity Escape Velocity, right?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, to be precise, Longevity Escape Velocity is the minimum rate at which we will need to improve the comprehensiveness of these therapies subsequent to the point where we get the first ones working so they get us a couple of decades of extra life. The good news is that longevity escape velocity goes down with time, because the more we can repair, the longer it takes for the stuff we can’t repair to become problematic.

Yuri: If you had unlimited funding, how long do you think it would take for us to reach Longevity Escape Velocity or the technology necessary for it?

Aubrey de Grey: It’s actually pretty difficult to answer that question because the amount of funding is kind of self-fulfilling. Every increment of progress that we achieve makes the whole idea more credible, makes more people more interested, and makes it easier to bring in the money to make the next step. I think that, at the moment, unlimited funding could probably let us increase our rate of progress by a factor of three, but that does not mean that we will change the time to get to Longevity Escape Velocity by a factor of three, because when we get even a little bit closer to it, it will be easier to get money, and that factor of three will come down. I think that right now, if we got like a billion dollars in the bank, then, in the next year, we would probably do the same amount of work and make the same amount of progress that we would otherwise make in the next three years. In the year after that, only two years of progress, and in the year after that, only a year and a half, and so on. What that adds up to is that if I got a billion dollars today, we would probably bring forward the defeat of aging by about 10 years. And it’s a lot of lives, maybe 400 million lives.

Yuri: Yes, given that 100,000 people die per day from aging-related causes, it’s a lot of lives.

Aubrey de Grey: Yup.

Yuri: So, you said, “if I had a billion in the bank”. The Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative – they said they are prepared to spend 3 billion dollars to eradicate all diseases by 2099. Maybe they can set aside 1 billion for your work. Did you ever communicate with them?

Aubrey de Grey: All I can say is that my email address is not very difficult to find online. No, we have not been in talks, and they have not made it easy for us to get in touch with them.

Yuri: That’s disappointing, especially given your close geographic proximity and the fact that you probably have an overlapping social and professional network.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, it is very disappointing. Of course, you can argue that it’s not quite as disappointing as the situation with Calico. Because in the case of Calico we are talking about people with equally deep pockets who have known me for 15 years and who have already decided that aging itself is a thing to target. Zuckerberg, first of all, he never met me, God knows how much he knows about what we even do. Certainly, none of the pronouncements from the Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative indicate that they even understand that aging is a medical problem. They may have a long way to get to the point of even considering this.

Yuri: Yes, they do use some odd phrasing, speaking about “eradicating all diseases”, considering that all age-related diseases have one root cause – the aging process.

Aubrey de Grey: This is part of the problem. People simply should not be using the word “disease” for age-related diseases. The fact is that if a medical condition is age-related, then it’s part of aging, as it mainly affects people who have been born a long time ago. That means that it shouldn’t be described using the terminology that makes people think that it’s a bit like infection. People will often tell each other that I say that aging is a disease or a collection of diseases. But that’s completely wrong: I say the exact opposite. I say that not only should the word “disease” not be broadened to include aging, it should be narrowed to exclude the so-called diseases of old age.

Yuri: So that would be cancer, Alzheimer’s and all kinds of heart conditions…

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, and atherosclerosis, everything that’s bad for people who have been born a long time ago but that very rarely, if ever, affects people in young adulthood.

Yuri: So would you call Alzheimer’s a pathology then? If it’s not a disease?

Aubrey de Grey: I would call it part of aging. The problem is the idea of carving up little bits of aging, pretending that they are separate from each other. They’re not; they’re all parts of – consequences of – a lifelong accumulation of damage.

Yuri: Interesting. There’s been quite a large ongoing effort among the aging research advocacy community to persuade WHO to include aging as a disease in its International Classification of Diseases.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, it seems to be going quite well, and I am very pleased to see that this effort is being led by some Russians: Daria Khaltourina, who is very much Russian, and by Ilia Stambler, who is from Israel but of Russian extraction. Again, the Russians seem to “get it” much easier than most people and it’s very heartening to me.

Yuri: Do you support this inclusion of aging into ICD as a separate disease?

Aubrey de Grey: The ICD is a little bit different. The “D” in the ICD stands for disease, but the purpose of the ICD is to determine which things medicine should be attacking. It really should be the IC of “medical conditions”. We should be distinguishing medical conditions that are extrinsic, such as infections, from the ones that are intrinsic consequences of being alive, that are age-related. I believe that it would be better if we did that by using different words, but medical conditions of old age are medical conditions, and they ought to be listed in the ICD.

Yuri: I see. Thanks for clarifying! Can I ask you about your new role with Michael West at AgeX and BioTime?

Aubrey de Grey: Michael West and I have been friends for 20 years, and, of course, we have very closely aligned goals in life. We’ve never been able to work together in a formal capacity until now, but we’ve been very much mutual admirers. I’ve always looked up to Mike as someone who, way before anyone else, did something that I thought was impossible with the creation of an actual gerontology research company, as was the case with Geron 20 years ago. He’s done it three times by now: Geron, then Advanced Cell Technology, and now with BioTime.

AgeX is a new subsidiary of BioTime that is about to be floated independently on the stock market. The goal, of course, is very much our goal: damage repair. The area that AgeX is focusing on is stem cells. There are two main themes within AgeX. One of them is stem cell therapy in the normal sense: in other words, injecting stem cells. The particular differentiator that AgeX and BioTime have is the ability to create particularly pure populations of a particular type of stem cells, ones that will only do what you want them to do – they are lineage committed in a particular way. That’s something that other organizations don’t have the ability to do nearly so well, and it’s very important; you want to be able to give the people the type of stem cells they need and not give them the other ones in the wrong place, which might do damage. That’s one side.

The other side of AgeX, which is at a much earlier stage of development, so you shouldn’t be looking out for any products on the basis of this yet, is induced stemness. In other words, it’s giving an organism not stem cells per se but rather reagents that would cause cells already in the body to revert a little bit, become more stem-like and be more able to regenerate the tissues. We already have one compound that has this effect, but we have lots and lots more work to do that will allow this to be done safely and effectively.

Yuri: Is this based on Michael West’s work in planarians, axolotls and other animals that demonstrate the ability to regenerate lost limbs even in adulthood?

Aubrey de Grey: No, not really. Certainly, we pay attention to the regenerative capacity of lower organisms, but the main focus of AgeX’s work is on what happens in early development in mammals, particularly the phase change that happens during early development, which we call the embryonic-fetal transition. It’s a little bit imprecise; we are still characterizing it, and there’s still work to do and stuff to be understood. Basically, what happens is that over a relatively short period of time during development, there is a change in the level of expression in a number of genes; some of them go up, and some go down. The particular change that happens across the entire embryo seems to coincide with – and we think it’s causally related with – the loss of regenerative capacity. In other words, before this transition, a particular type of injury to the embryo is entirely reversed by regeneration, whereas after this transaction, the same type of injury is not reversed, it’s rather patched up with scarring. That’s what happens in the adult as well. We believe that this is very indicative of something that’s going on across the whole body and that has a close relationship with the decline in regenerative capacity and repair capacity against various problems within aging.

Yuri: Is that the COX7A1 gene that was described in a paper in conjunction with Alex Zhavoronkov?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, COX7A1 is one of the genes that change expression during the embryonic-fetal transition. We do not yet know, or at least we’re not sure, whether it plays a causal role or whether it’s just a marker. We are definitely looking quite a lot at other genes that also change, but COX7A1 is the one we focused on first and most at this point, basically just because it has the sharpest transition in the cell types that we studied so far.

Yuri: Would gene therapy be the vehicle to deliver to the body a way to modulate that gene?

Aubrey de Grey: It might be. Exactly what you do depends on which cell types you decide matter the most in expressing or not expressing a gene and in terms of what gene you want to express. Yes, we might do it with gene therapy. Of course, there are different types of gene therapy. For example, if you want to knock a gene down, you can do RNA interference, which is something that doesn’t involve integrating a new gene into the cell’s DNA. If you want to knock a gene up, you can sometimes also do it by RNA interference, because you can sometimes find the genes that antagonize the gene you want to knock up. If you knock down the gene that antagonizes the gene you want to knock up, then it happens indirectly. There are lots of tricks that are specific to the details of the genetic network, but in general, we would want to manipulate the level of expression and effectiveness of certain genes that change during the embryonic-fetal transition.

Yuri: Can I ask you about a different potential gene therapy, for example, partial reprogramming using Yamanaka factors? Do you think it has any potential as a systemic anti-aging therapy?

Aubrey de Grey: This is the idea that’s actually very similar to what I just described when I talked about the idea of restoration of stemness that we are pursuing at AgeX. Mostly, we don’t know which way is going to work better. We believe that we have a priority in terms of intellectual property, which, of course, is important for investors, but that’s not my problem; I’m focusing on the science.

Obviously, we don’t know which way is going to work best. There are lots of possibilities. The guys who pioneered the idea of partial reprogramming in vivo – there’s a group in Spain led by Manuel Serrano, who is someone I know very well; he’s spoken at one or two of our conferences in Cambridge. He’s a great guy doing a number of other really useful things; he’s got a brilliant new innovation in terms of killing senescent cells as well, which is a completely different area of SENS, of course. More recently, someone in San Diego named Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte developed a similar technique that he was able to make work, and his technique involved the intermittent inducible expression of the Yamanaka factors. Essentially, what will determine which of these approaches is the best is not just how well it works but how much harm it does, because there is always a possibility with these things that you will cause cells to become more regenerative that you wished were less regenerative, such as cancer cells, and we need to find a way to control that. It’s possible that AgeX will be able to do this better by using different genes.

Yuri: Okay, great. The reason I knew about Arigos earlier is that I am a big proponent of cryonics. I wanted to ask about your views on cryonics and whether you would personally consider it for yourself?

Aubrey de Grey: Cryonics in general – my position is well known. I’ve been a member of Alcor and a member of its scientific advisory board for 16 years now. I am definitely a very strong supporter. I think that it’s an absolute tragedy that cryonics is still such a backwater publicly and that a large majority of people still believe that it has no chance of ever working. Complete nonsense! If people understood it better, there would be more research done to develop better cryopreservation technologies, and more people would have a chance at life.

The question is what can we do to make cryonics work really well? I certainly don’t have a strong philosophical position with regard to what kinds of revival constitute actual revival and what kinds constitute creating a totally new person from information that you got from the old person. I am not a philosopher, so don’t ask me about that. My personal inclination is that if I have to be cryopreserved at all, and I hope not to be just like any cryonicist, then I prefer to be woken up by being warmed up rather than by being rebuilt from some kind of information restored from slicing and scanning my original brain. Therefore, I am really interested in improving the cryopreservation process: in other words, reducing the amount of damage that is inflicted by the process of cryopreservation and therefore would need to be repaired for successful reanimation; of course, this is along with the damage that the body already had that led to it getting declared legally dead in the first place. Arigos, with its helium persufflation approach, is, in my mind, a massive breakthrough, a breakthrough even bigger than vitrification, which was made 20 or so years ago by Greg Fahy and his peers at 21st Century Medicine when they identified a rather elaborate cocktail of cryoprotectants called M22 that allows biological material of any size to be cryopreserved without any crystallization at all. It eliminated over 90% of the damage that cryopreservation would hitherto have done to biological tissues. After that, it had become the standard of care at Alcor, the Cryonics Institute, KrioRus, and elsewhere.

We need more because the fact is that we still got a lot of cracking that happens – large-scale fracturing – and we’ve also got the toxicity of cryoprotectants, which is mild but non-trivial. Persufflation appears to solve both of these problems pretty much 100% by pumping helium through the vasculature, thereby stopping cracks from propagating, and cooling so much faster that you can vastly lower the concentration of cryoprotectants and still get no crystallization.

Yuri: Did you work with Greg Fahy or Mike Darwin at all on this technology?

Aubrey de Grey: I don’t work with any of these people, but I certainly talk to them. I am not sure what Mike Darwin has done, but Greg, as far as I know, had no work with persufflation itself. Obviously, he pioneered vitrification, but persufflation is something that was first explored in the Soviet Union, I don’t know exactly where, decades ago. Rather like parabiosis, it’s an area that was explored in the Soviet Union and then fell into neglect, and then everyone forgot about it for a long time, and then people in California found out about it and started to do something. The big innovation that Arigos has introduced was using helium, which has a number of advantages for cryonics purposes, but we are definitely building on what was originally done in the Soviet Union.

Certainly, Greg Fahy has been involved in the conversation. He has been advising a lot, and my current understanding is that he is very optimistic about the promise of persufflation, which tells a lot about Greg. The fact is that if persufflation works as well as it’s probably going to work, it’s going to blow Greg’s last 20 years of work out of the water. It takes a lot of honor.

Yuri: Absolutely; Greg is an amazing scientist and human being. I think for him, just as for you, it’s all about defeating aging first, and everything else is secondary. In any case, do you have any other cryonics research planned as part of SENS or Arigos?

Aubrey de Grey: Not as part of SENS, but, of course, I talk to all these people all the time. Something that you might be aware of, which happened very recently, was that Alcor received a very large donation of 5 million dollars specifically for research from Brad Armstrong, one of the people who made plenty of money on cryptocurrencies.

Yuri: It’s great to see crypto millionaires donating money to longevity research.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, 5 million dollars is a hell of a lot of money for research in cryonics compared to what’s been available up until now. I am actively helping Max More, CEO of Alcor, to decide how to spend it.

Yuri: That’s great to hear. Maybe we’ll get some research done on the restoration of brain activity after cryopreservation. I know that Greg Fahy has done some prior work on assessing LTP preservation, but it’s probably outside of the scope of our interview.

Switching topics, there’s a lot of talk about the biohacking community lately, and a lot of people call themselves biohackers these days. Some claim that taking supplements or working out qualifies as biohacking. Do you consider yourself a biohacker; do you take any supplements or nootropics like Ray Kurzweil or Dave Asprey or do anything else that could be considered as biohacking?

Aubrey de Grey: I don’t take any supplements; I don’t do anything special with my lifestyle. I am not saying that that’s my recommendation for other people. My situation is very strongly that I am prepared to listen to my body. I know that I am just a lucky guy. I am genetically built so that my aging is slow, and I am fortunate enough to have been tested for a total of five times now over the past 15 years; they’ve measured 150 different things in my blood and did all manner of physiological and cognitive tests. I always come out really well, way younger than I actually am, so I should be conservative: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I eat and drink what I like, and nothing happens. I will pay attention to the situation when it changes, but it’s not changing yet. There’s a couple of things that I do that are bad for my health, especially the fact that I travel so much that I am not getting enough sleep. I think I’ve been coping with that so far as well, and, of course, the reason I do this is to hasten the defeat of aging with all the work that I do. Maybe it’s a net win. The bottom line is that I’m lucky.

I don’t say that Ray Kurzweil is being dumb in doing what he’s doing. On the contrary, Ray is one of the unlucky people; he came down with Type 2 diabetes in his 30s, and his family has had a lot of cardiovascular problems. It probably makes sense for him to be taking all of these supplements in order to largely normalize his rate of aging. For somebody whose rate is normal or better, there’s no evidence that taking supplements could actually have any benefit.

Yuri: What about the cognitive enhancers that Dave Asprey is recommending? Have you ever found anything that works or that you have considered trying?

Aubrey de Grey: No, I let my brain do what it normally does. Even for jet lag or needing to go to sleep, I don’t need these things. I can get to sleep whenever I am tired, whatever time of day it is. I occasionally thought it might be good to have a stash of modafinil just to be able to get through times when I need to stay awake for a long time, but I managed to work my way around those periods, so I haven’t done that either.

Yuri: Maybe your brain is already overactive – I read that you do math problems for fun, and what was this preprint that you published that made a splash in the media?

Aubrey de Grey: I’ve always played with maths for fun. I am reasonably good with certain types of maths, especially those that don’t need too much background knowledge because I don’t even have a degree in maths like graph theory or combinatorics. Yes, earlier this year, I got lucky and made some progress on a very famous long-standing maths problem called the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, and that got a bit of attention. The thing that strikes me the most about all that is that a number of people said, “I always thought Aubrey de Grey was a bit of a lunatic and never paid any attention to what he said about aging, but now that he made progress in this maths problem, he’s obviously smart, so now I will pay attention to what he says about aging.” I think that’s the most fucked-up logic you can possibly imagine, but I’ll take it.

Yuri: From what I understand, despite your background in computer science and no formal training in biology, you actually also have a Ph.D. in biology for your work in mitochondrial respiration back in the 1990s. Is that correct?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, that’s correct. I benefited from the fact that I’d done my undergraduate degree fifteen years earlier in Cambridge. Of course, that was in computer science, but there’s a system at Cambridge where if you do your undergrad degree there, then you don’t have to be a Ph.D. student to get a Ph.D. from Cambridge. You can just submit published work, it gets evaluated like a dissertation, and you do a thesis defense. Mitochondrial respiration was probably the first area in biology that I got interested in and that I was invited to write a book about, so I did. It included the material for the first six papers of mine, and that’s what I ultimately got my Ph.D. for.

Yuri: It seems that the mitochondrial theory of aging was all the rage back then but has lost a lot of its appeal over the past two decades.

Aubrey de Grey: Yeah, that’s a problem. The reasons why things move in and out of fashion in a biological field are often overly superficial. Nothing’s really changed. Twenty years ago, people were overly breathless about mitochondria and free radicals, and they were neglecting the importance of the shortcomings of those theories, which my first couple of papers helped to repair. I pointed out that you can’t just say “mitochondrial mutations matter because free radicals matter.” You’ve got to flesh it out, and I did flesh it out in a way that nobody else had bothered to do.

Conversely, what happened more recently is that people have swung the other way, saying “there’s various new evidence that free radicals don’t matter, therefore game over.” Again, they are being overly simplistic in the opposite direction. In fact, what this new evidence shows is that certain, particularly simplistic, versions of the free radical theory of aging are not true, but people like me who actually pay attention knew that all along. For me, nothing’s really changed.

Yuri: You make an excellent point that there seems to be some kind of fashion in the field of biology in general or aging research in particular. I wonder why; is it just human nature to jump on the bandwagon and reject all other ideas, or is it groupthink? What is it about science?

Aubrey de Grey: In science, I would say it’s even worse than groupthink. It’s not a question of people just being sheep because they can’t think for themselves. Scientists can think for themselves. The problem in science is that people are forced to follow fashion in order to get money, whether it’s in the form of a grant application, funding, getting promoted, or tenure, which is appalling, because the whole point of science is to go against the grain, to be in the minority of one as often as possible, and to find things out that people didn’t know before. However, the way that the scientific career structure these days actually works opposes that. It’s a tragedy.

Yuri: Indeed, the incentives for going against the grain seem to be misaligned. Is there any way to mitigate this?

Aubrey de Grey: The only solution is to throw a lot more money at science so that people can be career scientists in a way that they used to be 200 years ago when no scientists were without patrons, wealthy noblemen who kept them as pets. They were getting stuff done, and they didn’t have to worry about justifying how they were getting stuff done.

Yuri: Well, let’s hope some philanthropically inclined wealthy noblemen hear you and create more fellowships. Okay, final, semi-serious question: once humanity does reach negligible senescence, what would that do to relationships, family institutions, marriage, and children?

Aubrey de Grey: Nothing at all. The only things that would happen as a result of increased longevity are simply the continuation of societal changes that have already been occurring over the past century. What I see is that as people live longer and stay healthy longer, there’s a rapid increase in the number of divorces, the number of people who have multiple relationships over their lives, and it’s just going to be a continuation of that. It’s not interesting.

Yuri: And overpopulation is never going to be an issue, right?

Aubrey de Grey: This is the one that everybody is worried about, but it’s just so silly that people worry about it. I’ve been saying this since forever – and nobody contradicts my answer, they just ignore it – the answer is that the carrying capacity of the planet, the number of people it can sustain without a problematic amount of environmental impact, is going to go up much faster than the population can possibly go up even if we completely eliminated all death. It’s going to go up as a result of renewable energy, artificial meat, desalination, and all those things. It’s just so painfully obvious, and I’ve been saying this in so many interviews and so many talks, and people just ignore it. I think the only reason people are ignoring my answer is because they need to. They need to carry on believing that aging is a blessing in disguise and thus be able to put it out of their minds, get on with their miserably short lives, and not get emotionally invested in the rate of progress that we will make.

Yuri: Well, let’s hope we can shake them out of their learned helplessness in the face of death and aging.

Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely.

Yuri: Great, thank you so much for this interview! I really look forward to seeing you in Moscow soon and discussing some of these issues in person as well as hearing about your latest achievements in the fight against humanity’s biggest problem!

Aubrey de Grey: Indeed! Thanks so much, Yuri, it’s been great.

Yuri Deigin is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in drug development and venture investments in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Yuri brings almost a decade of drug discovery and development experience from his previous role in a biotech startup where he oversaw research and development of original medicines aimed at treating diseases like Alzheimer’s and rheumatoid arthritis. Yuri has a track record of not only raising over $20 million for his previous ventures but also initiating and overseeing 4 clinical trials and several pre-clinical studies, including studies in transgenic mice. He also has experience in pharmaceutical product launch, promotion, manufacturing, and supply-chain management. Since 2013 Yuri also serves as a vice-president of the non-profit Foundation “Science for Life Extension” whose goal is the popularization of the fight against age-related diseases. To further this cause, Yuri frequently blogs, speaks, writes op-ed pieces, and participates in various TV and radio shows. Yuri holds a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School. Yuri is the CEO of biotech company Youthereum Genetics.

Head in the Clouds – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

Head in the Clouds – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

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R. Nicholas Starr

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party has published this perspective from R. Nicholas Starr as part of the ongoing discussion about the interaction of transhumanism with other ideological frameworks, such as libertarianism and socialism. Prior perspectives in this discussion include Zoltan Istvan’s article, “Transhumanism is Under Siege from Socialism“, and B.J. Murphy’s response, “Why the Transhumanist Movement Needs Socialism“. The U.S. Transhumanist Party remains committed to the principle of transpartisanship, which means we will neither embrace any conventional political ideology, nor distance ourselves from people who hold such ideologies but wish to constructively contribute to our endeavors. Nonetheless, our inextricable embeddedness in the world of contemporary political discourse does render unavoidable the discussion of these ideologies and any logical relationships and tensions. It is hoped that such discussions can proceed in a constructive manner whereby various perspectives can be expressed and perhaps result in some creative, unconventional solutions that would further expand our movement, rather than fracturing it, and establish grounds for fruitful collaboration on endeavors that advance the next great era of our civilization. 

Do you agree or disagree with Mr. Starr’s article? Post your thoughts in the Comments section below. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, July 29, 2018

TL;DR – If transhumanism is to grow and gain momentum, we need to distance ourselves from libertarian elitism, and Altered Carbon shows us why.

In Zoltan Istvan’s most recent article (1) he presents, in my opinion, a misguided argument on how the transhumanist movement is breaking from its libertarian roots and morphing into a hard-left socialist agenda. When did this partisan prerequisite appear, and how has the party changed?

Zoltan Istvan’s sensational 2016 Presidential campaign brought a lot of attention to transhumanism. If it weren’t for his dramatic tour across America in a coffin bus, preaching about immortality, morphological freedom, and other transhumanist virtues, we would have never attracted the large diversity of members to the party we have today. With the vision of using science and technology to improve the human condition, we have come together to lift humanity up, not to pull it to the left or right. To bring this vision to life, we need our leadership to embrace and act on the input of all members, not just the libertarian progenitors. This is something that current transhumanist party chairman Gennady Stolyarov II, the person Istvan himself selected to lead the party as he made his departure, has done a great job with. 

Since Stolyarov took the reins, he has created an environment where every member can voice an opinion and suggest policy planks. These planks are then voted on by the entire party, giving the members direct control over its course and message. If the party going in a different direction than before, it is because the members have made the informed decision to do so, and its leadership is acting on their votes. Suggesting that transhumanists reject member input because of a perceived socialist invasion is a slap in the face of the democratic process and deters prospective members. It’s also contrary to a science-based organization.

Perception is veiled in opinion and personal bias, and humans too easily fall into its many traps. But an organization building its platform on evidence-based policy needs to stick to hard data. The available information simply doesn’t support the notion that the goals of transhumanists are changing. An analysis of the party’s Constitution (2), which contains all voting data embedded within it, provides the only measurable data available, at least as far as the American organization is concerned. Simply reading opinion pieces from the handful of us with an outlet to do so isn’t enough to suggest a radical change is on the horizon. However what could be changing are the methods of achieving these goals. This can likely be attributed to the current sociopolitical climate. As a political organization working to improve lives, we need to tailor our message to show how a future-focused message can also address their needs for today. Failing to do so leads many to view transhumanism as out of touch.

We should also consider the impact of the radical life-extension platform, the preeminent transhuman subject, and how it impacts the narrative. To be blunt, transhumanists need to tone down the rhetoric on life extension. When a large portion of Americans can’t even afford basic healthcare or life-saving prescriptions, it is incredibly callous to suggest they should be investing in radical life extension. Modern medicine has already taken huge strides in extending human life anyways, and it will continue to do so. Anyone who ignores these two facts to proselytize immortality is begging to be made a fool. To then double down and suggest that billionaires will buy into the immortality market and save us all is callow and turns a blind eye to history. No wonder many fear that only the elite will achieve immortality. We’ve never shown them how it could be accessible to them. What they have seen are countless selfish acts by sci/tech industry leaders that tear down the average citizen while building up their bank accounts. 

Zuckerberg, Bezos, Shkreli, and Trump are all current documentable examples of how the ultra-rich have publicly exploited Americans for personal and professional gain. Consumers have every right to be skeptical of corporate motives when they have been given overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing by many in those positions. And while we certainly can’t paint every tycoon with the same brush, we also can’t blindly put our trust in them. It would be foolhardy to let a handful of CEOs determine the course of future civilization without deep analysis of every product and policy they create. The libertarian opinion that “the market” will some how regulate these corporations or “generous donations” will provide all the public needs is a fantasy, especially when it comes to bleeding-edge science, medicine, and technology. Pride, greed, and ego are too easy a pit to fall into when exploring uncharted territory. To combat this there must be unrelenting third-party accountability, lest we have a world led by Bancrofts with their Heads in the Clouds. 

Richard Morgan’s novel Altered Carbon provides a perfect allegory for this situation. The entire Bancroft family are precise examples of how many see transhumanism becoming. The novel depicts a world where the ultra-rich can live forever and act without impunity simply because they can afford to do so. Even more to the point, it shows us how the wealthy use philanthropy as a means to pad their own egos. Laurens Bancroft’s humanitarian efforts to assist the plague colony are nothing short of self-aggrandizing. Distributing blankets and candy are nice things to do for victims, but they do nothing to solve the actual problem of their illness. He’s so rich that he can even afford to repeatedly resleeve himself after making himself a martyr to their plight. Nevertheless he is worshipped as a god for doing this. He could surely afford to do so much more to end their suffering by bringing them out of the shadows to get 24-hour medical care until they find a cure, or even resleeve them entirely, but he has decided a minute’s smile on their faces is enough because it’s more than anyone else is doing. This is precisely how Americans today feel about tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. They have made billions turning human beings into nothing more than data and dollars signs. But all is assumed forgiven when Zuckerberg announces he is funding a “biohub” in San Francisco, a city where a staggering yearly income of $105,000 is considered low-income and his own employees are asking for help with rent (3), to develop lifesaving tools. It doesn’t take much effort to determine that this is just another money-making venture, as these are all investments he expects a return on and not outright grants. And if the biohub is successful, who will be able to afford to us the products? Amazon’s Bezos has done even less, placating followers on Twitter (4), only to turn around and bully the city of Seattle out of helping the homeless by the tune of 0.042% of Amazon’s yearly income (5,6). So when a libertarian says, “Don’t worry, the rich won’t let you down,” or “The market will correct this,” it immediately triggers justifiable skepticism and fear among the millions struggling to make ends meet. We shouldn’t hang the lives of millions on a hook of hopes and dreams. That isn’t how government, business, or real life work. A tangible and socially responsible plan is required. But while I think the fiscal libertarian position is folly, we do gain some positive aspects from libertarianism.

Social libertarianism is what I see transhumanism is truly built around. An inherent right to bodily autonomy and self-determination are the pillars that hold the rest of the transhumanist platform up. These also happen to be major components of liberal and 21st-century socialist politics. For example, reproductive rights and morphological freedom are born from the same philosophy. Free and accessible medical care enables life extension for all. Free and continued education is what allows the population to think critically and make informed decisions. We can’t create science-based policy if only a handful understand the science involved! So when self-appointed spokesmen claim that transhumanism isn’t compatible with left-wing goals because of an partisan line they drew in the sand, I have to seriously question their motives and good judgement. It’s divisive and counterproductive to positive change that any sociopolitical movement wishes to achieve. If we truly want to avoid the assorted dystopias science fiction has presented to us, then we must all heed the warnings and take actionable steps to mitigate the risk. If that falls into what some would call a socialist agenda, then fine. But for the record, I don’t see this as socialism; I see it as being an empathetic human being who wants to use science to help everyone. And that’s not a bad thing.

1- Istvan, Zoltan. “Transhumanism is Under Siege from Socialism“. July 18, 2018. Available at https://www.themaven.net/transhumanistwager/transhumanism/transhumanism-is-under-siege-from-socialism-UzA2xHZiFUaGOiUFpc0n5g/ 

2- U.S. Transhumanist Party Constitution. Available at https://transhumanist-party.org/constitution/ 

3- Bloom, Ester.”Here’s how much you have to make to be considered ‘low income’ in San Francisco“. May 12, 2017. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/12/if-you-make-105000-in-san-francisco-youre-considered-low-income.html

4- Bezos, Jeff. “Request for ideas…” June 15, 2017. Available at https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/875418348598603776?s=21

5- Barrabi, Thomas. “What Seattle ‘head tax’ will cost Amazon”. May 15, 2017. Available at https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/what-seattle-head-tax-will-cost-amazon

6- Alcula. Percentage Calculator. http://www.alcula.com/calculators/finance/percentage-calculator/

“Graceful” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Graceful” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston


Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party: “Graceful” is a watercolor painting by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io. 

This vibrant watercolor image of a hawthorn tree in bloom illustrates that beauty and longevity are indeed compatible. Hawthorn trees can live for up to 700 years – another demonstration that there are no insurmountable obstacles to this kind of graceful longevity. Science and technology must, however, advance, to enable us to maintain vitality for centuries to come.

Artist’s Description: There is a cold, hard truth in humanity that we don’t often like to admit. There is no shame in wanting to remain beautiful, graceful, and vibrant for as long as we can. Yet these feelings are often belittled as being selfish or vain.

There is nothing wrong with being healthy for as long as possible. Perhaps we have grown so used to the frailties and sickness that come with time that we might not know how to react without it.

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

Benefit for U.S. Transhumanist Party Members: Discounts Offered for Treatments from AmpliCell Medical

Benefit for U.S. Transhumanist Party Members: Discounts Offered for Treatments from AmpliCell Medical

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AmpliCell Medical

The U.S. Transhumanist Party is pleased to announce that any member who joins us for free via our online application form will also be eligible to receive discounts on procedures from AmpliCell Medical, one of our Allied Organizations, located in the Los Angeles area and specializing in regenerative medicine and stem-cell therapies.

Members who join will receive a confirmation e-mail, which will be sufficient to provide to AmpliCell Medical at the time of a consultation. 

• 40% Discount off of Stem-Cell Treatments: The standard cost is $8,900 for the first treatment and $4,500 for follow-up treatments (if needed). The therapy is investigational and done as part of a clinical trial according to Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved protocols. With the 40% discount, the first treatment would cost $5,340, and a follow-up treatment would cost $2,700.

• 10% Discount off of Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement – First Consultation: The standard cost is $495 for the first consultation. With the 10% discount, that cost would be reduced to $445.50.

Of course, the U.S. Transhumanist Party is not itself a medical organization and does not provide medical advice. Each reader should take account of his or her own individual circumstances, health, medical history, skills, and knowledge when evaluating which courses of action to pursue, and also consult a medical professional with regard to decisions that may have a major impact on health. However, for those individuals whom stem-cell therapies could help, membership in the U.S. Transhumanist Party now offers the opportunity to achieve significant cost reductions in particular treatments.

Description from AmpliCell Medical. Learn more at http://amplicellmedical.com/:

The Fountain of Youth is no longer a myth. It is found within you, in the form of your very own stem cells. Stem cells are our bodies’ own, built-in healing cells, which naturally reside within certain tissues of the body. They start out in a dormant state and are “switched on” by the chemical signals produced by damaged tissues, acting to repair and regenerate damaged cells. Stem cells derived from your own tissues may well be the next major advance in medicine.

While early stem-cell research has been associated with the controversial use of embryonic stem cells, at AmpliCell Medical we use adult mesenchymal cells extracted directly from your own fat. We use a sterile closed surgical system to process 50 cc of fat from a mini-liposuction procedure in order to isolate and implant your own source of regenerative cells on the same day. “Closed surgical system” means that it never comes in contact with the outside world and is kept in a completely sterile environment. The regenerative cells are found in the SVF (stromal vascular fraction) that contains autologous mesenchymal stem cells, macrophage cells, endothelial cells, immune regulatory cells, red blood cells, and important growth factors that promote stem-cell activity. Our technology allows us to isolate high numbers of viable cells.

At AmpliCell Medical we are committed to helping people with wide variety of degenerative and inflammatory conditions. We offer a state-of-the-art minimally invasive procedure that utilizes autologous adipose (fat) derived stem cells.

Diseases and conditions currently being studied:

  • Orthopedics: Neck Arthritis, Back Arthritis, Knee Arthritis, Hip Arthritis, Elbow and Hand Arthritis, Shoulder Arthritis
  • Neurology: Lyme Disease, Peripheral Neuropathy, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, Strokes, ALS Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy
  • Cardiac/Pulmonary: COPD, Post-MI Myocardial Infarction, Congestive Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathy, Chronic Lung Diseases, Asthma
  • Urological and Digestive: Interstitial Cystitis, Peyronies Disease, Erectile Dysfunction, Male Incontinence, Crohn’s Disease
  • Cosmetic Applications: Hair Loss, Skin Health
  • Others: Wellness and Anti-Aging, Hormone Balance, Sport Injuries

THE STUDIED BENEFIT OF STEM-CELL THERAPY

  • Regenerate cells, tissues and organs
  • Repair and reconstruction of joints and strengthening
  • Increase flexibility of joints and articular disc
  • Optimize the immune system
  • Alleviation of menopausal symptoms
  • Improve hormone secretion
  • Increase alertness and mental awareness
  • Refine skin for a healthy glow
  • Improve skin texture, elasticity and thickness
  • Improve sleep pattern
  • Improve blood circulation
  • Enhance stamina and energy
  • Renew sexual abilities and performance
  • Accelerate thinking ability; improve memory

How are stem cells deployed?

There are varying methods for deployment of stem cells based on the condition being treated. The stem cells can be injected directly into joints or even organs as needed, intravenously into the veins, or even into spinal fluid. All redeployment methods are minimally invasive and can be done in outpatient procedures. Since we are using a patient’s own cells, there is no risk of rejection or allergenic reactions that are common in many other procedures.

Will my treatment work, and how long will it take?

Adult stem-cell treatments are currently considered experimental and are not completely understood, how well a patient responds to our treatments will be different in each case and depends greatly on the disease or condition and how severe the case may be. There are regulations by the FDA which will not allow AmpliCell Medical to make any direct claims about the curing or treating any diseases specifically, but, if you want to consult about the procedure, we can lay out expectations based on research data and actual cases prior to treatment.

Stem cells are part of your body’s natural healing process and can take time for effects to take place; however, some conditions can see immediate results.

Who is eligible as a candidate for treatment?

Only specific medical conditions and problems are being treated by AmpliCell Medical at this time. Patients who want to have the treatment done must be medically stable and may be not be able to participate due to the nature and severity of their condition. Any patients that have uncontrolled cancers or active infections are not able to undergo the SVF (Stromal Vascular Fraction) procedure and must have their conditions treated before undergoing the procedure. Another consideration is that patients with bleeding disorders or taking blood-thinner medication must be evaluated before having treatment. When a patient is selected for the procedure, they must keep in mind that they are taking part in patient-sponsored research, and there are no other incentives other than possible results of the treatment.

Read more at AmpliCell Medical’s FAQ here. 

U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for the Third Quarter of 2018

U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for the Third Quarter of 2018

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The purpose of this post is to facilitate member comments pertaining to transhumanism and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, which might not specifically fit the subjects of any other post or article on the U.S. Transhumanist Party website. This is the place for members to offer suggestions or converse about any areas of emerging technologies and their political, moral, societal, cultural, and esthetic implications. The general discussion thread is also an ideal location to suggest or propose platform planks that may be considered for future platform voting.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party will endeavor to open one of these general comment threads per quarter. This comment thread pertains to the months of July, August, and September 2018.

Type in your comments below. Please note that, to protect against spambots, the first comment by any individual will be moderated. After passing moderation, a civil commenter should be able to post comments without future moderation – although we cannot guarantee that the technical aspect of this functionality will work as intended 100% of the time.

The Longevity Film Competition – Announcement by SENS Research Foundation, The Healthy Life Extension Society, and International Longevity Alliance

The Longevity Film Competition – Announcement by SENS Research Foundation, The Healthy Life Extension Society, and International Longevity Alliance

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SENS Research Foundation
The Healthy Life Extension Society 
International Longevity Alliance

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party encourages its members to participate in the Longevity Film Competition, whose official website can be found here. The more original attempts exist to convey to the general public the feasibility and desirability of indefinite life extension, and to dispel common misconceptions about it, the sooner we will have the critical mass of public support needed to bring about this most vital goal. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, July 15, 2018

Contest Introduction: 

We are living in very interesting times, times of constant change. The scientific community is telling us that soon we could enjoy much healthier and longer lives thanks to technological advancements happening at an accelerated rate. The future can be bright and healthy, and we want more people to know about this amazing prospect and want them to get involved in this important mission – the mission of healthy longevity.

However, describing something potentially beautiful is not always easy. We think you can help by making a (very) short movie conveying that a longer and healthier life thanks to sustainable medical interventions, will be a very positive thing for citizens and society alike.

Help us spread the word in the right way, help us make sure people understand this is about health and that for the first time in history the possibility of tackling aging is not science fiction, but science fact.

Join us in this crusade by entering our competition presented by the SENS Research Foundation, The Healthy Life Extension Society and the International Longevity Alliance and not only potentially help saving lots of lives, but also win the first prize of $10,000!

We look forward to your ideas on how to better communicate this important message to the world.

– The Longevity Film Competition team

Contest Guidelines: 

Even though putting aging under medical control is probably desirable to most humans, this concept is not always clear to everybody.

One of our goals is to use this competition as a vehicle to clarify and demystify some of the misconceptions we hear very often.

You can choose just one or all of them and explain them in any way you choose, using your own language and ideas.

Misconception #1

“Aging and disease are two separate things.”

CLARIFICATION:

— Aging causes disease, and they should be treated as one. —

As we age, we lose our health. We cannot age and become elderly without eventually getting ill as a result of it. If we live long enough, we will all get sick of one or several of the diseases of aging and eventually succumb to them. When we talk about eliminating aging, we talk about putting this process under medical control so that we don’t have to get sick as we age.

Misconception #2

“If I live to a 150, I will be living for a long time in an old, sick body.”

CLARIFICATION:

— If these new therapies help us live to a 150, it will only be because they will keep us strong and healthy. —

When we talk about extending our lifespan, we are talking about extending our health. The extension of our life will not happen unless we fix the health problems that come with aging. Once we do this, more longevity will happen as a “side benefit” of being healthier. As we said before, we get sick with aging, and that’s why most of humans die of old age.

So, if we will still be alive at 150, this will mean we will have a better control of the aging process through medical interventions – hence we should not be living in an old sick body.

Misconception #3

“Aging is natural, and we shouldn’t tamper with the natural.”

CLARIFICATION:

— Combating aging is a great challenge for Humanity, and we have a long history of getting great benefit from tampering with many natural things. —

It is proven that there are endless ‘unnatural’ things created by humans of enormous value and positive outcomes, and we can imagine only a minuscule number of people who would choose to live without them — especially when it has to do with suffering, disease and death.

A few examples of unnatural things we use all the time without questioning much are: pacemakers, antibiotics (to kill natural bacteria), painkillers, cochlear implants, dialysis, plastic surgery, airplanes (it is not natural for us to fly), hair coloring, prosthetic limbs, contact lenses, birth-control methods, and the list goes on forever.

On the other hand, here are some natural things that are definitely bad for us: earthquakes, hurricanes, mudslides, tornadoes, infectious microorganisms, poisonous plants, predators, venomous creatures, fire, gravity (when we fall), tsunamis, radiation, meteor impacts, etc.

It is time to reason and understand that “natural” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”.

Misconception #4

“These therapies will only be for the rich.”

CLARIFICATION:

— Healthy longevity therapies are being developed for everybody to access. —

Rejuvenation therapies could be as little reserved for rich people as mobile phones, cars, electricity, or vaccination may have been in the beginning. Like for most technological progress, the research may be complicated and expensive, but once the technology becomes available, it will become available for everybody. One good example is that the first Human Genome took $2.7 billion dollars and almost 15 years to complete. In 2001 the price of sequencing a genome was 100 Million dollars; today is under 1000 dollars, and it will keep going down without a doubt. Humanity has never stopped advancing just because it was harder and less cost-effective in the beginning; if we had thought like that, we would probably not have most of the technology that is available for everybody today. That’s one more reason why it’s so important not to delay the development of these cures.

Official Rules

  1. Concept of film: The submitted piece should show that medical progress for a healthier and longer life is generally a good thing for citizens and society alike. You will achieve this by using the list of common misconceptions provided in the Guidelines section above. You must choose at least one and may also choose all of them.
  2. Length: The length of the film should be a minimum of 1 minute and a maximum of 20 minutes.
  3. Visual art style: All kinds of visuals are allowed:
    Films, computer animations, whiteboard drawings, live action, infographics, stop and motion, cartoons, typography, screencast, etc.
  4. Genre: All genres are allowed. Science, fiction or science-fiction, a story, sad or funny, a docufiction, a documentary, etc.
  5. Copyright: All material used in the video should be original, or you should own the copyright for it. You may not use copyrighted material for which you don’t have the rights. If you fail to follow this rule, your film will be automatically disqualified.
  6. Submission: The submission deadline is 23:59 GMT September 15, 2018. The final work should be uploaded to the Internet, and a link to watch it should be provided to us via email at contact@longevityfilmcompetition.com, together with your last name, first name, and the proposed title of the work. The winners will be announced October 1st (International Longevity Day).
  7. Language: The official language is English. Videos can also be submitted in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Dutch but would need to have English subtitles.
  8. Work Originality and Permissions: a) Films must be the original work of the applicants, and they must be unpublished before July 1st, 2018. b) If a film is based upon another person’s life or upon a book or other underlying work, applicant(s) must secure any necessary rights to make such adaptations. c) By entering the competition, you represent that you have secured all necessary rights. d) Applicants are solely responsible for obtaining all necessary rights and permissions for third-party materials included in their films, including but not limited to music, trademarks, logos, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights. e) Longevity Film Competition (LFC) expressly disclaims all liability or responsibility for any violations of the foregoing. f) If your submission is selected for a prize, you agree that SENS Research Foundation (SRF), The Healthy Life Extension Society (Heales), and the International Longevity Alliance (ILA) use your movie without restriction to promote the mission of curing the diseases of aging. SRF, Heales and the ILA can show your work on the internet or by all other means. g) SRF, Heales and the ILA are non-profit organizations and may use the films to drive donations from the public, which will be used to advance the mission of healthy longevity. Any funds raised though the films will support scientific research, outreach, and/or education programs.
  9. Selected Films and Winners: a) LFC has no obligation (other than as stated in these rules or on our website) to disclose any of the following information: i) identities of screeners or judges; ii) notes, feedback, or information relating to the submitted project; and/or iii) details regarding the submission review or selection process. b) LFC explicitly disclaims any liability or responsibility for any comments, notes, or opinions expressed about a submission, whether by LFC or by its volunteers.  c) Winners will be announced on October 1st, 2018. The judges’ decision is final. Winners receiving cash prizes are solely responsible for payment of all applicable local, state, and federal taxes.
  10. Legal action: In the event of litigation the competent courts will be those of the Brussels jurisdiction in Belgium.
  11. Additional information: For all issues not mentioned above, the members of the jury will decide. They must decide in equity and with the same rules for all competitors.

COMPETITION LEGAL TERMS

BY SUBMITTING THE MATERIAL PARTICIPANTS  AGREE:

To having read all of the rules, understood, and have complied with these rules.

To warrant that their work is original and that there are no disputes regarding the ownership of their submission.

To warrant that the submitted material does not defame or invade the rights of any person living or dead.

That failure to adhere to the competition rules and regulations will result in disqualification.

That no revisions of materials will be accepted once entry has been submitted.

That to the best of their knowledge, all the statements herein are true and correct.

TO INDEMNIFY, HOLD HARMLESS, AND DEFEND THE COMPETITION, ITS EMPLOYEES, VOLUNTEERS, DIRECTORS, JURORS, REPRESENTATIVES, AND AFFILIATES FROM ALL LIABILITY, CLAIMS, AND DAMAGES IN CONNECTION WITH THE SUBMISSION AND FROM ANY FEES AND EXPENSES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO REASONABLE ATTORNEYS’ FEES, THAT ANY OF THEM MAY INCUR IN CONNECTION THEREWITH.
Fourth Enlightenment Salon – Political Segment: Discussion on Artificial Intelligence in Politics, Voting Systems, and Democracy

Fourth Enlightenment Salon – Political Segment: Discussion on Artificial Intelligence in Politics, Voting Systems, and Democracy

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Bill Andrews
Bobby Ridge
John Murrieta

This is the third and final video segment from Mr. Stolyarov’s Fourth Enlightenment Salon.

Watch the first segment here.

Watch the second segment here.

On July 8, 2018, during his Fourth Enlightenment Salon, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, invited John Murrieta, Bobby Ridge, and Dr. Bill Andrews for an extensive discussion about transhumanist advocacy, science, health, politics, and related subjects.

Topics discussed during this installment include the following:

• What is the desired role of artificial intelligence in politics?
• Are democracy and transhumanism compatible?
• What are the ways in which voting and political decision-making can be improved relative to today’s disastrous two-party system?
• What are the policy implications of the development of artificial intelligence and its impact on the economy?
• What are the areas of life that need to be separated and protected from politics altogether?

 

Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside by filling out an application form that takes less than a minute. Members will also receive a link to a free compilation of Tips for Advancing a Brighter Future, providing insights from the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Advisors and Officers on some of what you can do as an individual do to improve the world and bring it closer to the kind of future we wish to see.

 

Fourth Enlightenment Salon – Health Segment: Discussions on GMOs, Calorie Restriction, Genetics, Artificial Sweeteners, CBD

Fourth Enlightenment Salon – Health Segment: Discussions on GMOs, Calorie Restriction, Genetics, Artificial Sweeteners, CBD

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Bill Andrews
Bobby Ridge
John Murrieta

This is the second video segment from Mr. Stolyarov’s Fourth Enlightenment Salon. Watch the first segment here.

On July 8, 2018, during his Fourth Enlightenment Salon, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, invited John Murrieta, Bobby Ridge, and Dr. Bill Andrews for an extensive discussion about transhumanist advocacy, science, health, politics, and related subjects.

Topics discussed during this installment include the following:

• Why genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are mostly good for you, and most negative perceptions of GMOs should really just be directed at the corporate practices of one company but not genetic modification as a whole.

• What technologies are already aiding the disabled and dramatically extending their capabilities in daily life.

• The role of genetics in longevity and the future of somatic genome editing.

• What the scientific evidence suggests regarding the impact of caloric restriction in humans and other primates.

• CBD and cannabinoids: separating the evidence from the marketing.

• Sierra Sciences’ history of testing over a million compounds for effects on telomerase induction.

• Why artificial sweeteners also should not be maligned, and there is no scientific evidence of their harms.

Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside by filling out an application form that takes less than a minute. Members will also receive a link to a free compilation of Tips for Advancing a Brighter Future, providing insights from the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Advisors and Officers on some of what you can do as an individual do to improve the world and bring it closer to the kind of future we wish to see.

Fourth Enlightenment Salon – Gennady Stolyarov II, Bill Andrews, Bobby Ridge, and John Murrieta Discuss Transhumanist Outreach and Curing Disabilities

Fourth Enlightenment Salon – Gennady Stolyarov II, Bill Andrews, Bobby Ridge, and John Murrieta Discuss Transhumanist Outreach and Curing Disabilities

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Bill Andrews
Bobby Ridge
John Murrieta

On July 8, 2018, during his Fourth Enlightenment Salon, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, invited John Murrieta, Bobby Ridge, and Dr. Bill Andrews for an extensive discussion about transhumanist advocacy, science, health, politics, and related subjects. In this first of several installments from the Fourth Enlightenment Salon, the subjects of conversation include the following:

• The U.S. Transhumanist Party’s recent milestone of 1,000 members and what this portends for outreach toward the general public regarding the meaning of transhumanism and the many ways in which emerging technologies help make life better.

• The new channel – Science-Based Species – launched by Bobby Ridge and John Murrieta to spread basic knowledge about transhumanism, key thinkers in the movement, and advances on the horizon.

• How today’s technologies to assist the disabled are already transhumanist in their effects, and how technologies already in development can liberate humans from disability altogether. John Murrieta’s story is one of transhumanism literally saving a life – and one of the most inspiring examples of how transhumanism translates into human well-being now and in the future.

Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside by filling out an application form that takes less than a minute. Members will also receive a link to a free compilation of Tips for Advancing a Brighter Future, providing insights from the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Advisors and Officers on some of what you can do as an individual do to improve the world and bring it closer to the kind of future we wish to see.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party’s First 1,000 Members: An Aggregate Demographic Analysis

The U.S. Transhumanist Party’s First 1,000 Members: An Aggregate Demographic Analysis

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Gennady Stolyarov II

On July 7, 2018, the United States Transhumanist Party finally reached its major milestone of 1,000 members.  The U.S. Transhumanist Party collects extremely limited information on its members as a way of respecting their privacy; generally, we only request enough information to be able to contact our members and identify where (in terms of general jurisdiction) they are located. However, it is still possible to derive some general, aggregated insights from overall membership data without compromising any individual member’s privacy. The U.S. Transhumanist Party makes such aggregated data available for the purposes of providing insights as to the composition of the largest transhumanist political organization in the world, which may indirectly (though not precisely) shed insights into the composition of the broader transhumanist movement – at least in terms of identifying where transhumanists tend to be concentrated and areas where the movement is making inroads, as well as continued challenges in reaching certain areas and demographics. Caution should be exercised, however, in considering this information to be “set in stone”, as it is merely a snapshot in time of membership composition, which itself will evolve as new members are added. Furthermore, it is possible that the proportion of individuals who have thoughts or sympathies that could be broadly construed as transhumanist would differ from the proportion of members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party – even based on incidental elements such as the current reach of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s social networks and media presence, which may be uneven across various constituencies, but which we are always striving to improve.

Members by Type (United States or Allied)

United States Members (Eligible to vote in U.S.): 704 – 70.4%
Allied Members (Anyone else capable of holding a political opinion): 296 – 29.6%

Commentary: As was anticipated by U.S. Transhumanist Party leadership prior to this analysis, approximately 70% (70.4%) of members are eligible to vote in U.S. elections, and those members largely reside in the United States, while 30% (29.6%) of members are Allied Members – either U.S. residents who are not eligible to vote in U.S. elections, or transhumanists residing in other countries. All members, including Allied Members, are eligible to take part in the internal votes and deliberations of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, as we pride ourselves on our cosmopolitan, international character and see the future of humankind as gradually rendering national distinctions ever less relevant, since the transformative impact of technological progress transcends all national and ethnic boundaries and will hopefully benefit all humankind to the maximal extent possible.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party began to collect information about members’ specific jurisdictions in December 2017. This information was supplemented in the present analysis by additional information known directly to U.S. Transhumanist Party leadership regarding particular members’ jurisdictions of residence. As a result, 437 out of 1,000 members were able to be matched with a particular jurisdiction of residence, which is at presently utilized for aggregate data-analysis purposes only. The U.S. Transhumanist Party does not collect more granular residence information about its members, other than their U.S. state or non-U.S. country of residence.

Members by U.S. State
(Only members who identified their state or otherwise were known to reside there were tabulated.)

Non-U.S. Members by Country
(Only members who identified their country of residence or otherwise were known to reside there were tabulated.)

Commentary: The plurality of United States Members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party reside in California, while other states of prominent member presence include New York, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, and Washington. This is not surprising, given the concentration of technologically oriented businesses in California, as well as the high population numbers in many of the other listed states. Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon, however, appear to have higher concentrations of Transhumanist Party members relative to their populations. Allied Members have a widespread international presence and representation on almost all continents. Among non-U.S. members, the largest numbers appear to be in the United Kingdom and Canada – where transhumanists often closely interact with their counterparts in the United States – as well as India, where we attribute the prominent member presence to interest in technology, a rapidly changing society and economy, strong ties with the West through immigration and educational exchange, as well as the fact that India is now the world’s second-most populous country.  Unfortunately, the world’s most populous country, China, is only represented by one member (who recently immigrated there). We attribute this to the lack of political freedom in China and the restrictions on information access imposed by the Chinese government. While the Chinese government has numerous favorable attributes – including a pragmatic, pro-economic-growth, generally pro-technology outlook, the unfortunate inclination toward authoritarian control of the social and political spheres prevents what would have been many otherwise highly beneficial collaborations between the U.S. Transhumanist Party and residents of China.

Members by Gender

Commentary: The U.S. Transhumanist Party does not directly inquire about any member’s gender – nor does the U.S. Transhumanist Party take any position on gender issues, the origin of gender, post-genderism, or related matters – other than to affirm its commitment to inclusivity and openness to all individuals who share our Core Ideals, irrespective of their gender, gender identity or expression or lack thereof, or specific views on gender issues. However, an aggregate analysis of member composition by gender may be informative as to the extent to which the U.S. Transhumanist Party could continue to expand its reach and the effectiveness of its message.

For most members, it was possible to discern their gender by considering their names – since names are most often gender-specific – or, if the members happened to be personally known to leadership of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, this information was also utilized to accurately determine those members’ genders. For some members such a determination was not possible based on the information provided, so they were classified as “Unknown” for purposes of this analysis. This is a sufficiently small category that it was grouped with those members who are known to specifically identify as agender or non-gender.  The U.S. Transhumanist Party does not guarantee the complete accuracy of this analysis, but we are reasonably confident that at least 95% of the members’ gender was identified accurately. Based on this confidence, we can also posit that the material conclusions of the analysis would not be affected if additional or revised information about a small number of members’ gender were made available.

Male Members: 854 – 85.4%
Female Members: 133 – 13.3%
Agender Members and Members of Unknown Gender: 13 – 1.3%

There is nothing gender-specific about transhumanism, and the aspirations and values of transhumanism are aimed at benefiting all humans and other sentient entities – so, at first glance, it is rather difficult to understand why a significant apparent proportional difference by gender exists in U.S. Transhumanist Party membership counts. There is no single definitive hypothesis as to why this is presently the case. However, the existence of this difference was anecdotally known to U.S. Transhumanist Party leadership prior to this analysis, and a heuristic figure of 80% male / 20% female composition for the transhumanist movement as a whole was used in communications on this issue. It is noteworthy that, while the actual proportions are possibly closer to 86% male  /14% female, the composition of newer members (those who signed up in 2018) has been 83.4% male / 15.2% female / 1.3% unknown, so it is possible that proportionally more individuals who identify as female are becoming aware of and interested in transhumanist ideas and the work of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Furthermore, many female members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party are prominent public figures whose work appears regularly on our website and whose contributions to the actualization of our goals are highly valued.

One possibility is that the initial gender difference in U.S. Transhumanist Party membership composition is an artifact of a similar gender difference in the “tech” industry, with which many (though not all) transhumanists happen to have some association. Any gender disparities in the “tech” industry existed prior to the emergence of transhumanism and arose completely independently of transhumanism or transhumanist projects or activism. It may simply be the case that individuals in the “tech” industry are more likely to be aware of transhumanism and developments in Transhumanist politics in the first place, and it takes additional work to reach constituencies outside of the “tech” industry. Fortunately, if this interpretation is accurate, then the U.S. Transhumanist Party is one of the best available vehicles for undertaking this task, since its leadership is predominantly not culturally or organizationally tied to large technology companies or the norms of Silicon Valley, but rather tends to be substantially more diverse and independent in terms of backgrounds, skill sets, and outlooks.

Ultimately, we seek to grow our membership everywhere and work toward an entire world which identifies as transhumanist. With this, we encourage everyone, of all genders, countries, backgrounds, and skill sets, to sign up for absolutely free membership in the U.S. Transhumanist Party and begin to contribute to the progress of our mission to put science, health, and technology  at the forefront of politics and thereby create a world of indefinitely long life, universal abundance, rational and policy-oriented politics, and protection against all existential risks. The composition of our membership going forward can be affected by you.

“I Am Transhuman” T-Shirt by Duarte Baltazar

“I Am Transhuman” T-Shirt by Duarte Baltazar

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Duarte Baltazar

Filmmaker Duarte Baltazar of Utopian Focus has made available the “I Am Transhuman” T-Shirt for sale on Amazon.com, in an effort to fund the creation of further documentary films about the transhumanist movement. (See an example of a short film by Mr. Baltazar, “The Hedonistic Imperative“.) The U.S. Transhumanist Party offers this announcement to its members as another possibility for raising public awareness of transhumanism as well as spreading the expression and hashtag #IAmTranshuman, part of the Transhuman Present project.
Order the “I Am Transhuman” T-Shirt on Amazon here for the price of $19.99.

Color Options: Black, Asphalt, Royal Blue, Cranberry, and Purple

Various male, female, and child sizes are available.

Product Description

  • Solid colors: 100% Cotton; Heather Grey: 90% Cotton, 10% Polyester; All Other Heathers: 50% Cotton, 50% Polyester
  • Imported
  • Machine-wash cold with like colors, dry low heat
  • I Am Transhuman – Transhumanist Movement
  • Art, Ethics, Philosophy, Design T-Shirt
  • Lightweight, Classic fit, Double-needle sleeve and bottom hem

Is the Soul Digital or Analogue? – Article by C. H. Antony

Is the Soul Digital or Analogue? – Article by C. H. Antony

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logo_bgC. H. Antony

I am probably not the ideal Transhumanist; I do believe that I have a soul, that it is more the essence of me than the sum of my neurons and how they interact with each other to create my thoughts, and that it is an extremely fragile thing. Should I die and preserve myself to be revived at a later date, I fear that I would never know of the success or failure of that endeavor. That a living breathing thinking person who acts like me and reasons like me will rejoin society is not in question; I only wonder that I might miss it as my essence passes on into some other form of existence… or worse – not. I do not believe that a digital substrate will, in fact, carry my soul on uninterrupted.

I want to explore the question of the soul for a moment. In The Singularity is Near (2005), Ray Kurzweil stated that the Calculations Per Second of the human brain are in the vicinity of 10 to the 14th power, based on the assumption, and rightly so, that each neuron in the brain could be considered a digital on/off or 1/0. Around six years ago, we began seeing articles describing microtubules in the axons of the neuronal cells that seemed to have quantum properties I freely admit to not understanding. I cheerfully invite anyone to correct me on this, but it seems that while the neuron either fires or doesn’t as it communicates with the neighboring cell, the microtubule seems to exist in a sort Schrödinger-like state of possibilities – like a multiplexing wire that might convey one piece of information by doing so at a particular combination of wattage, voltage, and resistance, then convey a completely different set of instructions with another combination of the same. It seems to me that if every neuron is operating in a digital on/off state, then 1014  computations per second (CPS) are likely given the average number of neuronal cells in the human brain, and if that number might be horribly wrong because of what we now know of the activity within the axon – then this suggests that superposition state of neural activity might very well be the essence of our consciousness and, if interrupted, could be lost and what remains would be something else only a comfort to those we would have left behind.

I agree that an entirely biological existence is not only a seriously limiting factor in our future development, but also something we are destined to outgrow and will do so. However, I would say that my ideal manifestation of this is a seamless combination of man and machine. Medical technology could eliminate all the senescence we suffer to the point where the next logical step is enhancement over a timeless organic form. I, for one, would hate to live for hundreds of years and gather all the knowledge and experience of those times only to die because of some future equivalent of a drunk driver. That in itself is good enough reason to fortify my existence any way I can. If that means that my body must be replaced with an artificial one, so be it. But, I want to keep my squishy, limited, fragile brain! I want my cake and to eat it, gleefully, with a nearly indestructible form that doesn’t need the cake, won’t get fat from it, and still let’s me enjoy the flavors and textures as I do now. I want to enjoy all the many hedonistic joys freely and with only greater precision than my limited biological form can experience.

I believe we’re seeing this very trend emerge and that the collective instinct of man is far more ready to accept an enhanced human/cyborg than uploading oneself to a purely artificial substrate. Evidence of this can be seen in the amazing promise of Elon Musk’s Neuralink project, the recent X-Prize challenge for a robot avatar, and the many amazing advancements in prosthetic limbs and organs. As I previously stated, medical technology will soon overcome senescence, allowing our tissues to go on indefinitely, so to essentially cure our brain of degeneration, enhance it with a neural mesh, and go about our lives in a perfected cybernetic body akin to Ghost in the Shell: Altered Architecture is probably a pretty good direction to be steering ourselves as Transhumanists. It’s also the most likely Next Step, if you will, considering how well society is conditioned for these themes. I would certainly feel more comfortable with my own enhanced mind in a perfect and durable body that can be easily upgraded and modified as the centuries pass.

So now I ask the members of this community to bring their thoughts here. What is your ideal existence?

C. H. Antony is a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. He may be contacted here. 

“Squeak” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Squeak” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston



Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party: “Squeak” is a print by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar of which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io.

It is fitting for a project on mouse longevity to involve at least one image of mice – creatures whom life has unfortunately dealt a bad hand, due to their short lifespans (only 3 years for even long-lived mice in the absence of medical intervention), difficulty in getting along with humans, and unnecessary attrition due to disposal practices after lab experiments. “Squeak” invites the viewer to appreciate mice a bit more; if we can extend their lives significantly, we stand a decent chance of achieving dramatic extension of our own lifespans.  Perhaps we can also give some of the mice a break by using photographic markers of aging in experiments, as the MouseAge project seeks to do.

Here, the mice are depicted scurrying along a narrow circular path. The golden circle, with rays emanating outward represents perhaps the great hope that these creatures unknowingly provide to us. One may wonder, as I have done over many months of reflecting on this work, whether these are mutant, two-tailed mice, or whether they each just have their ordinary curly tails, and the track along which they move might simply be painted in the same colors and textures as their tails. (Well, in actuality it is indeed painted that way!) Mutant or not, these mice are rather extraordinary in having become emblems of a species that has added much to our understanding. Unlike most of their brethren to date, these mice have earned their extreme longevity through Laura Katrin Weston’s brush.

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

Thoughts on North Korean Diplomacy – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

Thoughts on North Korean Diplomacy – Article by R. Nicholas Starr

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R. Nicholas Starr

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this perspective from R. Nicholas Starr in accord with our strong opposition to weapons of mass destruction and to the threat of nuclear war – as, for instance, expressed in Section IV of our Platform. The U.S. Transhumanist Party thus welcomes the progress of negotiations that could considerably reduce the probability of a nuclear conflict between the United States and North Korea. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, June 13, 2018

I don’t like, trust, or support Trump. But his approach with North Korea might just work.

From 2004 to 2011 I was an intelligence analyst for the USAF. As such I spent a lot of time reading and briefing about North Korea, especially during my time stationed at Kadena AB, Okinawa, Japan. While most of my knowledge was focused on specific aspects and activities, if you spend enough time reading about a regime, you begin to get a sense of their point of view.

The US military spends a lot of time and money on preparing for a North Korean threat. Constant simulations on how to destroy the North are a provocation. How would you feel if someone was practicing the best way to destroy you, every year, for decades? Not only does it present a clear military threat, we must remember that there are innocent lives at risk – innocent people that live completely in the dark and don’t really know why these exercises happen, Just extremely limited information, often paired with editorial fear mongering, that is distributed through Rodong Sinmun. Any objective observer would notice that the years of sabre-rattling have not created peace, but exacerbated the issue. A promise to limit or completely end these exercises seems like a rational decision.

Treating Kim Jong-un as an equal also seems like the right thing to do. After all, he is the leader of his country, a country tired of fighting to justify its mere existence, regardless of how he stepped into the role. He isn’t his father or grandfather, even though there is significant pressure to be so. He is only playing the hand he was born into. So coming into a summit with a positive attitude towards Kim just might do the trick into diffusing international tension.

From Kim’s point of view, he likely feels weakened now that seismic activity, caused by his underground testing, has made his nuclear program unsustainable, and so he is looking to come out of the situation in the best way possible. He may also see that the work of his predecessors has not had the desired effect. Kim, much like Trump, might believe that a new course of action is necessary. So if Trump needs to lose some military and political leverage to make it happen, then fine.

HOWEVER, if Trump steps out of the strict lines of total peace toward North Korea, we risk a swift decline into war. And let’s face it, Trump has a history of saying one thing and doing the opposite. He also tells people exactly what they want to hear and does what he wants anyways. So the risk of breaking whatever agreement was made is high and very real. If ever there was a time for Trump to be honest, it is now, because Kim Jong-un will hold him to it. The fate of peace stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all. I can’t imagine a better time for Tolkien’s wisdom than right now. This is the closest we have come to resolving the issue, and previous methods have proven ineffective. So maybe it’s worth a try.

Ryan Starr (R. Nicholas Starr) is the is the leader of the Transhumanist Party of Colorado and founder of the Transhumanists of the Sierras. 

“Teeming” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

“Teeming” – Art by Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier

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Laura Katrin Weston


Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party: “Teeming” is a print by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston, a.k.a. Katrin Brunier, the original exemplar which I received in November 2017 due to my donation to the successful MouseAge crowdfunding campaign by Lifespan.io.

Although some may consider the plants depicted in this print to be weeds, Laura Katrin Weston has painted their flowers beautifully. Such plants proliferate in a teeming, but ultimately ephemeral manner – yet this print presents a view that can be enjoyed indefinitely, in effect taming the weeds and presenting their best imagined attributes for our appreciation.

You can find more work by Dr. Laura Katrin Weston at the Katrin Brunier Gallery, an Ethical Investment-Grade Art Gallery for the Neo-Renaissance Era (see its Instagram page). Proceeds from art sales at the Katrin Brunier Gallery will go to support causes such as medical research and conservation.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Congratulates Zoltan Istvan on Appearing on the California Gubernatorial Ballot as a Libertarian Candidate

U.S. Transhumanist Party Congratulates Zoltan Istvan on Appearing on the California Gubernatorial Ballot as a Libertarian Candidate

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Gennady Stolyarov II

While the United States Transhumanist Party cannot endorse any candidate running for any other political party, we can offer congratulations, in our role as political observers, to an individual whose campaign for Governor of California has offered additional exposure for transhumanist ideas. On Tuesday, June 5, 2018, Zoltan Istvan will be on the ballot in California as one of two candidates endorsed by the Libertarian Party of California. While he is not running as a Transhumanist, he is nonetheless a (small “t”) transhumanist running as a Libertarian, and as we are interested in seeing transhumanism become a ubiquitous political presence (such that politicians of all party affiliations become comfortable also identifying as transhumanists), we see it as a highly positive development that the majority of delegates for the Libertarian Party of California were sufficiently enlightened and foresighted to endorse Mr. Istvan, despite his apparent differences from some of the more orthodox or doctrinaire Libertarian Party positions, in recognition that both the growing role of technology and the recent political turbulence necessitate major realignments in order to pursue constructive solutions to contemporary predicaments. Some of Mr. Istvan’s Platform differs from that of the U.S. Transhumanist Party as well, but there are enough similarities to clearly indicate that he is closer to our adopted positions than any other candidate running on the California gubernatorial ballot – and we are pleased that he raises issues about the pivotal role of technology in solving contemporary political problems – a role that is all too often overlooked by “mainstream” or established politicians.

Unfortunately, California has a “top two” electoral system, such that all candidates except the highest two vote recipients are unable to proceed beyond the primary. Nonetheless, having an openly self-identifying transhumanist appear on the ballot at all is still a victory and a step forward for the broader transhumanist movement. The United States Transhumanist Party acknowledges this development and expresses appreciation to Zoltan Istvan for a determined and effective campaign. Whatever happens at the ballot box in California on Tuesday, June 5, 2018,  we continue to welcome Zoltan Istvan as our Political and Media Advisor (a non-leadership role, but one in which he has provided valuable insights), and we expect that he will continue to be prominent and successful in his future personal endeavors.

Note: This statement was issued without any involvement by Zoltan Istvan and is entirely a gesture of good will by Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II of the United States Transhumanist Party.

What It Will Be Like to Be an 85-Year-Old in the 2070s – Article by Scott Emptage

What It Will Be Like to Be an 85-Year-Old in the 2070s – Article by Scott Emptage

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Scott Emptage

I will be 85 sometime in the early 2070s. It seems like a mirage, an impossible thing, but the future eventually arrives regardless of whatever you or I might think about it. We all have a vision of what it is to be 85 today, informed by our interactions with elder family members, if nothing else. People at that age are greatly impacted by aging. They falter, their minds are often slowed. They are physically weak, in need of aid. Perhaps that is why we find it hard to put ourselves into that position; it isn’t a pleasant topic to think about. Four decades out into the future may as well be a science-fiction novel, a faraway land, a tale told to children, for all the influence it has on our present considerations. There is no weight to it.

When I am 85, there will have been next to no senescent cells in my body for going on thirty years. I bear only a small fraction of the inflammatory burden of older people of past generations. I paid for the products of companies descended from Oisin Biotechnologies and Unity Biotechnology, every few years wiping away the accumulation of senescent cells, each new approach more effective than the last. Eventually, I took one of the permanent gene therapy options, made possible by biochemical discrimination between short-term beneficial senescence and long-term harmful senescence, and then there was little need for ongoing treatments. Artificial DNA machinery floats in every cell, a backup for the normal mechanisms of apoptosis, triggered by lingering senescence.

When I am 85, the senolytic DNA machinery will be far from the only addition to my cells. I underwent a half dozen gene therapies over the years. I picked the most useful of the many more that were available, starting once the price fell into the affordable-but-painful range, after the initial frenzy of high-cost treatments subsided into business as usual. My cholesterol transport system is enhanced to attack atherosclerotic lesions, my muscle maintenance and neurogenesis operate at levels far above what was once a normal range for my age, and my mitochondria are both enhanced in operation and well-protected against damage by additional copies of mitochondrial genes backed up elsewhere in the cell. Some of these additions were rendered moot by later advances in medicine, but they get the job done.

When I am 85, my thymus will be as active as that of a 10-year-old child. Gene and cell therapies were applied over the past few decades, and as a result my immune system is well-gardened, in good shape. A combination of replacement hematopoietic stem cells, applied once a decade, the enhanced thymus, and periodic targeted destruction of problem immune cells keeps at bay most of the age-related decline in immune function, most of the growth in inflammation. The downside is that age-related autoimmunity has now become a whole lot more complex when it does occur, but even that can be dealt with by destroying and recreating the immune system. By the 2030s this was a day-long procedure with little accompanying risk, and the price fell thereafter.

When I am 85, atherosclerosis will be curable, preventable, and reversible, and that will have been the case for a few decades. There are five or six different viable approaches in the marketplace, all of which basically work. I used several of their predecessors back in the day, as well. Most people in the wealthier parts of the world have arteries nearly free from the buildup of fat and calcification. Cardiovascular disease with age now has a very different character, focused more failure of tissue maintenance and muscle strength and the remaining small portions of hypertension that are still problematic for some individuals. But that too can be effectively postponed through a variety of regenerative therapies.

When I am 85, there will be an insignificant level of cross-linking in most of my tissues, as was the case since my early 60s. My skin has the old-young look of someone who went a fair way down the path before being rescued. Not that I care much about that – I’m much more interested in the state of my blood vessels, the degree to which they are stiff and dysfunctional. That is why removal of cross-links is valuable. That is the reason to keep on taking the yearly treatments of cross-link breakers, or undergo one of the permanent gene therapies to have your cells produce protective enzymes as needed.

When I am 85, I will have a three-decade patchwork history of treatments to partially clear this form of amyloid or that component of lipofuscin. I will not suffer Alzheimer’s disease. I will not suffer any of the common forms of amyloidosis. They are controlled. There is such a breadth of molecular waste, however: while the important ones are addressed, plenty more remain. This is one of the continuing serious impacts to the health of older individuals, and a highly active area of research and development.

When I am 85, I will be the experienced veteran of several potentially serious incidences of cancer, all of which were identified early and eradicated by a targeted therapy that produced minimal side-effects. The therapies evolve rapidly over the years: a bewildering range of hyper-efficient immunotherapies, as well as treatments that sabotage telomere lengthening or other commonalities shared by all cancer cells. They were outpatient procedures, simple and quick, with a few follow-up visits, so routine that they obscured the point that I would be dead several times over without them. The individual rejuvenation technologies I availed myself of over the years were narrowly focused, not perfect, and not available as early as I would have liked. Cancer is an inevitable side-effect of decades of a mix of greater tissue maintenance and unrepaired damage.

Do we know today what the state of health of a well-kept 85-year-old will be in the 2050s? No. It is next to impossible to say how the differences noted above will perform in the real world. They are all on the near horizon, however. The major causes of age-related death today will be largely controlled and cured in the 2050s, at least for those in wealthier regions. If you are in your 40s today, and fortunate enough to live in one of those wealthier region, then it is a given that you will not die from Alzheimer’s disease. You will not suffer from other common age-related amyloidosis conditions. Atherosclerosis will be reliably controlled before it might kill you. Inflammatory conditions of aging will be a shadow of what they once were, because of senolytic therapies presently under development. Your immune system will be restored and bolstered. The stem cells in at least your bone marrow and muscles will be periodically augmented. The cross-links that cause stiffening of tissues will be removed. Scores of other issues in aging process, both large and small, will have useful solutions available in the broader medical marketplace. We will all live longer and in better health as a result, but no-one will be able to say for just how long until this all is tried.

Scott Emptage is an anti-aging activist in the United Kingdom. 

Third Enlightenment Salon – Gennady Stolyarov II, Bill Andrews, Bobby Ridge, and Mihoko Sekido Discuss Science-Based Advocacy of Transhumanism and Healthy Living

Third Enlightenment Salon – Gennady Stolyarov II, Bill Andrews, Bobby Ridge, and Mihoko Sekido Discuss Science-Based Advocacy of Transhumanism and Healthy Living

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Gennady Stolyarov II
Bill Andrews
Bobby Ridge
Mihoko Sekido

The Third Enlightenment Salon, hosted by Gennady Stolyarov II on May 27, 2018, featured excellent conversations on the rise in public awareness of transhumanism and life extension and what can be done to further increase support for life-extending medical research. Dr. Bill Andrews, Bobby Ridge (a.k.a. Robert Ridge), and Mihoko Sekido shared insights on medical science, promotion of health, and methods of communicating the forthcoming convergence of advances in a wide array of technological fields. Importantly, we addressed how anyone can get involved in the transhumanist movement and improve public acceptance of the emerging technological future.

The following were some interesting areas of discussion:

– The new Telomere Coin, which will help fund Dr. Andrews’s research efforts – http://defytime.group/
– Bobby Ridge’s forthcoming new video channel – Science-Based Species
– Aspects of online videos that help increase their reach
– Factors that contribute to longer lifespans among Okinawans
– Motivators for leading a healthier lifestyle and its relation to the recognition of the possibility of indefinite life extension in our lifetimes
– Some potential health effects of metformin and the importance of the ongoing TAME clinical trials
– What anyone can do to promote life extension and other emerging technological fields – including joining the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free on this page.

This video also contains some excerpts from the remaining conversations at the Third Enlightenment Salon, including discussions of science-based medicine, promotion of transhumanism, autonomous vehicles, and responses to the prospect of longevity escape velocity.

Along with the recorded segment, there was much discussion about future directions of transhumanist initiatives, reasonably healthy food in a refined atmosphere, and previews of excellent video compilations that will become publicly available later this year. Mr. Stolyarov looks forward to hosting more Enlightenment Salons to bring together individuals in various fields of expertise and enable them to synthesize their insights into ways of comprehensively improving the human condition.