Tran­shu­manism and Immortality

August Forecast & Review
January 2, 2013


Economy

Obama rolled the Repub­lican party and the polit­ical damage inflicted may be irre­versible. In his nation­wide speech on New Year’s Eve, Obama called for a “fair and bal­anced” approach to solve the fiscal cliff, using that exact phrase sev­eral times. The press was sub­se­quently fed the “fair and bal­anced” talking points as the sin­gular char­ac­ter­istic of the Obama Administration.
The final bill, which included only tax increases and no cuts in spending, actu­ally added $330 bil­lion in spending over the next 10 years, and ensures an increase of $4 tril­lion to the fed­eral deficit.
After hearing of the bill’s pas­sage, Obama stated,
“Today’s agree­ment enshrines, I think, a prin­ciple into law that will remain in place as long as I am Pres­i­dent: The deficit needs to be reduced in a way that’s bal­anced. Everyone pays their fair share. Everyone does their part. That’s how our economy works best. That’s how we grow.”
Wel­come to Obama’s “bal­anced approach”: Dou­ble­think at its best.
For every dollar spent by gov­ern­ment, an off­set­ting dollar is crowded out of the pro­duc­tive economy. While Obama stead­fastly refuses to cut gov­ern­ment spending, his new mantra of “we can’t cut our way to pros­perity” is the polar oppo­site of what needs to happen, namely, shrink the gov­ern­ment so that the economy can expand. As long as gov­ern­ment grows, the economy will shrink.
In short, nothing has been solved. Obama and his spend-crazy Admin­is­tra­tion are not restrained in the least and the dividing lines between Democ­rats, Repub­li­cans and con­ser­v­a­tives are more vit­ri­olic than ever.
This writer expects that the credit rating agen­cies will be inclined to fur­ther down­grade U.S. debt, based on a) expanding debt to GDP ratio, b) con­gres­sional grid­lock and inability to achieve a rea­son­able con­sensus and c) increasing budget deficits.

Tran­shu­manism and Immortality

As dis­cussed before in these pages, Tech­noc­racy and Tran­shu­manism are Siamese twins joined at a scientific/metaphysical nexus to deter­mine the future of mankind. Prac­ti­tioners of these philoso­phies shroud their meta­phys­ical belief sys­tems with tra­di­tional sci­ence in order to a) avoid intel­lec­tual scrutiny and b) give legit­i­macy to oth­er­wise purely mystic concepts.
While Tech­noc­racy addresses evolving eco­nomic and polit­ical sys­tems required for the con­trol of the humans on our planet, tran­shu­manism is con­cerned with human enhance­ment up to and including achieving immor­tality. In this realm, sci­ence and fan­tasy are often indistinguishable.
For what fol­lows below, I strongly rec­om­mend viewing this infor­ma­tive BBC doc­u­men­tary on the Russian space pro­gram: Knocking on Heaven’s Door.
The father of the Russian space pro­gram was Kon­stantin Tsi­olkovsky (1857 – 1935), a bril­liant sci­en­tist who was driven by the philoso­phies of another Russian, Nikolai Fedorov (1828 – 1903).
According to tran­shu­manist Guilio Prisco*,
“Fedorov sug­gested that sci­ence was a tool given to us by God to enable us to res­ur­rect the dead and, as promised, enjoy immortal life. He added that because the Earth could not sus­tain a pop­u­la­tion that never died, we must first learn to con­quer space. His ideas about human evo­lu­tion, and in par­tic­ular the idea that humans should take con­trol of the process and direct it towards their own goals, inspired gen­er­a­tions of Russian sci­en­tists and led directly to con­tem­po­rary tran­shu­manism. [emphasis added]
Federov believed that the only evil in the world was death, and there­fore it must be con­quered. How­ever, he had not only cur­rent and future inhab­i­tants of the world in mind, but also all humans who have ever lived. If sci­ence could pull it off, having all those humans walking the earth would neces­si­tate the col­o­niza­tion of the uni­verse — to spread us out, so to speak.
The Russian space pro­gram, with its suc­cesses and fail­ures, sparked the USSR/U.S. space race that gave legit­i­macy to the cre­ation and expan­sion of NASA in the U.S. The out­ward con­cern over the space race was mil­i­tary in nature: Who would rain down nuclear mis­siles on whom? The evi­dence is to the con­trary how­ever – the race was to be first to col­o­nize the uni­verse and to dis­cover other life forms who had already achieved god status (immortality).
Some have sug­gested that the space “race” aspect was fab­ri­cated by sci­en­tists to stim­u­late mas­sive funding into their metaphysical/scientific schemes. There is more than a little evi­dence to sup­port this theory, including NASA’s vocal search for extrater­res­trial life on other planets in the universe.
For instance, The New York Times reported in its Sci­ence sec­tion in 2002,
“The pur­suit of that ancient heav­enly con­nec­tion has lately moved near center stage at NASA, which assem­bled some 100 astronomers, physi­cists, chemists, geol­o­gists and even a few biol­o­gists at the Space Tele­scope Sci­ence Insti­tute on the Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity campus recently to talk about extrater­res­trial life.
“In dis­cus­sions on topics like the vagaries of inter­stellar weather and the reflec­tive prop­er­ties of veg­e­ta­tion, they debated the nature and his­tory of life on Earth, which parts of the galaxy were suit­able for life and laid plans for a gen­er­a­tion of space­craft that will prospect the cosmos for planets, sifting pin­points of light for the sig­na­tures of life as humans know or can imagine it.” [emphasis added]
Philo­soph­i­cally speaking, this is a direct takeoff on Tsiolkovsky’s and Federov’s quest from 70 years earlier.
Tran­shu­mans today con­tinue their march toward immor­tality through so-called “con­ver­gence” of tech­nolo­gies such as NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Congnitive) ini­tia­tives at major uni­ver­si­ties all around the world. In the Internet uni­verse, inventor and out­spoken tran­shuman Ray Kurzweil has teamed up with Google.com to create new tech­nolo­gies that will usher in Kurzweil’s pre­dicted Sin­gu­larity in 2045 or there­abouts, which may coin­cide with the achieve­ment of immor­tality. (Inci­den­tally, Kurzweil’s main goal in life is to res­ur­rect his father!)
To the average person, what I have written above may seem too sur­real to com­pre­hend, but I strongly sug­gest that you slog through it anyway. Sci­ence and reli­gion (mystic/metaphysical) are con­verging to create the most pow­erful hege­mony over man that the earth has ever seen. Fur­ther­more, it is being funded almost exclu­sively by unsus­pecting tax­payers around the world.
[* Giulio Prisco is a physi­cist and com­puter sci­en­tist, and former senior man­ager in the Euro­pean space admin­is­tra­tion. Giulio works as a con­sul­tant and con­tributes to sev­eral sci­ence and tech­nology mag­a­zines. In 2002 – 2008 he served on the Board of Direc­tors of Humanity Plus, of which he was Exec­u­tive Director, and serves on the Board of Direc­tors of the Italian Tran­shu­manist Association.]

No comments: