Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: transhumanism

The universe is filled with uncountable amounts of mystery, discovery, opportunity, experiences, marvels and more. So, let’s not die if we don’t have to.

It’s much harder to make the case that radical longevity cannot be engineered into our biology than that it can. Humanity engineers cells in countless ways all the time now, and our knowledge, capability and tools keep growing exponentially.

Now, a mainstream amount of demand to create a bustling global industry of life extension R&D is the only thing standing between you and the ability to live indefinitely.” — Eric Schulke

Fifteen thousand years worth of Netflix are watched every day. Fifteen billion dollars are spent on the Super Bowl and fifteen billion dollars are spent on Valentine’s day. Those aren’t bad things but we need some perspective. Survival is humanity’s main and oldest occupation. We have what it takes to survive if we pay attention and get with the program.

“Yes, the future is transhumanism. Who would ask ‘Is the future being alive and prosperous?’ As if anyone should expect humanity to work for a future of hardship and death.” — Ray Keyes

People suffer in great existential voids these decades, not only do they need life, they need deep meaning and purpose. The movement for indefinite life extension is giving them both.

But where advocates like Foxx mostly see the benefits of transhumanism, some critics say it raises ethical concerns in terms of risk, and others point out its potential to exacerbate social inequality.

Foxx says humans have long used technology to make up for physical limitations — think of prosthetics, hearing aids, or even telephones. More controversial technology aimed to enhance or even extend life, like cryogenic freezing, is also charted terrain.

The transhumanist movement isn’t large, but Foxx says there is a growing awareness and interest in technology used to enhance or supplement physical capability.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that we live in an era where scientists are working to create artificial intelligence that can read your mind and millions of people spend most of their day clutching a supercomputer in their hands in the form of a smartphone.

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Certainly, there are those in the movement who espouse the most extreme virtues of transhumanism such as replacing perfectly healthy body parts with artificial limbs. But medical ethicists raise this and other issues as the reason why transhumanism is so dangerous to humans when what is considered acceptable life-enhancement has virtually no checks and balances over who gets a say when we “go too far.” For instance, Kevin Warwick of Coventry University, a cybernetics expert, asked the Guardian, “What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better – or which might allow you to live longer?” while another doctor stated that he would have “no part” in such surgeries. There is, after all, a difference between placing a pacemaker or performing laser eye surgery on the body to prolong human life and lend a greater degree of quality to human life, and that of treating the human body as a tabula rasa upon which to rewrite what is, effectively, the natural course of human life.

While many transhumanist ideals remain purely theoretical in scope, what is clear is that females are the class of humans who are being theorised out of social and political discourse. Indeed, much of the social philosophy surrounding transhumanist projects sets out to eliminate gender in the human species through the application of advanced biotechnology and assisted reproductive technologies, ultimately inspired by Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and much of Donna Haraway’s writing on cyborgs. From parthenogenesis to the creation of artificial wombs, this movement seeks to remove the specificity of not gender, but sex, through the elision of medical terminology and procedures which portend to advance a technological human-cyborg built on the ideals of a post-sex model.

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Given the speed at which reproductive technology has advanced over the past few decades, it doesn’t feel all that far-fetched: A future in which anyone can have a baby, regardless of creed or need, whenever they feel like it. Already, in our present moment, one can buy or sell eggs and sperm; we can give embryos genetic tests to ensure the children they produce don’t have any life-threatening hereditary conditions; and babies can even be born, now, with the genetic information from three parents.

So it follows that we should soon be able to to have pregnancy outside the body — artificial wombs. R ight?

You’d think. Scientists have already figured out how to mimic many of the body’s processes for techniques like in-vitro fertilization and even hormonal birth control. But the ways mothers’ bodies support and signal fetuses is incredibly complicated — and the science isn’t yet at a point where we can simulate these processes. And because scientists are prohibited from studying embryos 14 days past their fertilization, that’s one sci-fi vision that is not likely to come to fruition.

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A new fascinating feature is out by The Guardian magazine (via writer Richard Godwin) on the future of the human body. Six of us are interviewed and/or wrote about our take on the future. Fun reading! My mini-essay is in this: https://www.theguardian.com/…/regular-body-upgrades-what-wi… #transhumanism

Mechanical exoskeletons, bionic limbs, uploadable brains: six experts’ visions of 2118.

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http://www.blogtalkradio.com/unlimited-realities-with-lisa-zimmer/2018/09/20/hope-for-our-health-future

Our message as Transhumanists has gone eschewed. We have a communication problem and we need to fix this.

We need to find a place where our words are not viewed as a threat.

For some time now, we have an urgent need to focus on our messaging within our Transhumanist community. We also need to focus on the messaging we provide to people outside of our community as well. Below is a video by TruthStream Media, who has taken our messages and put them successfully into a.

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