A feel good story on 3D printers.
This lil’ kitty named Sonic is now bionic.
The black-and-white cat, who was surrendered to Denver Animal Shelter over three months ago, had been born with a leg deformity called radial agenesis, according to Meghan Hughes, communications director for Denver Environmental Health.
Because of the deformity, Sonic was forced to drag his leg on the ground to move, she told ABC News today.
My new article for Vice Motherboard on extreme biohacking that compares the Uncanny Valley to Speciation Syndrome:
Transhumanism tech like CRISPR, 3D printing, and coming biological regeneration of limbs will not only change lives for those that have deformities, but it will change how we look at things like a person with a three-foot tail and maybe even a second head.
At the core of all this is the ingrained belief that the human being is pre-formed organism, complete with one head, four limbs, and other standard anatomical parts. But in the transhumanist age, the human being should be looked at more like a machine—like a car, if you will: something that comes out a particular way with certain attributes, but then can be heavily modified. In fact, it can be rebuilt from scratch.
In the future, there may even be walk-in clinics where people can go to have various gene treatments done to affect their bodies. Already, we have IVF centers where people can use radical tech to privately get pregnant—and also control and monitor various stages of a child’s birth. Eventually, if government allows it, gene editing centers will also offer a multitude of designer baby traits, some which also would come via CRISPR. We might even eventually use artificial wombs for the whole process.
Economically, a trillion dollar industry could be created by the burgeoning genetic editing industry—one that greatly benefits human health and science innovation. But of course, first we must get over our fears of modifying the human body and the effects of speciation syndrome.
Bionic Power makes wearable technology for charging batteries. Today, we are focused on developing our PowerWalk® Kinetic Energy Harvester for military use and will begin multi-unit field trials with the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps next year. In the future, we see our walk-recharge technology being used in disaster zones and remote worksites, and by consumers in recreational, emergency preparedness and backup applications.
Here’s an article on transhumanism in Oregon’s largest paper, The Oregonian: It highlights something I’m trying to create: the impact of a “longevity vote” in the elections to make a difference for the length of people’s lifespans.
Zoltan Istvan is ready to encourage his supporters to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in November — if one of the major-party candidates agrees to put him to work in the White House.
And they’d better take his offer seriously, because he figures he just might be able to tip the election whichever way he wants.
“If we’re getting down to the end, and it’s close, as expected, this could be appealing to a candidate,” Istvan told The Oregonian this week. He believes he could bring a candidate somewhere between 250,000 and a million votes.
If neither Clinton nor Trump takes him up on his proposed deal, he’ll keep those votes for himself. Istvan, a former journalist, is the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, which he created in 2014.
I’m excited to see I’m the fourth most searched 3rd party presidential candidate. Thanks for your support of a science, longevity, and technology platform as an alternative to the establishment. If this continues a nonreligious transhumanist could end up #4 or #5 in the final elections, and even get enough votes (maybe a million or more) to push the US election one way or the other if it’s close.
So much about the 2016 presidential election is unprecedented. But perhaps nothing is more unusual than the electorate’s level of dissatisfaction with both major parties’ likely nominees.
An NBC News-SurveyMonkey poll released earlier this week found that, while Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton maintains her lead in a head-to-head match-up with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, neither candidate is popular with the public at large.
Approximately 60 percent of respondents told pollsters that they either “disliked” or “hated” Clinton, while 63 percent felt the same way about Trump.
Pollster Laura Wronski noted that 23 percent of respondents said they disliked or hated both Trump and Clinton.
This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I’ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It’s out in print today too.
When John Lennon released “Imagine” in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even anodyne, response to the Vietnam War. Although politically liberal, Lennon was no doctrinal Marxist — only three years earlier, his song “Revolution” had shrugged off people who “go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.” But the song struck many evangelical Christians as ghoulish, and for some, “Imagine” eventually came to be a sort of national anthem for the repressively secular, globalist state that was thought to be emerging: the anti-Christian New World Order that later became talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fever dream.
Left Behind, a series of 16 books written between 1995 and 2007 that details a possible end-of-the-world scenario, starting from when all good Christians go to heaven in an instant (the Rapture) until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, specifically calls out “Imagine” as a weapon in Satan’s arsenal of seductive propaganda. The Antichrist in Left Behind is a suave, cosmopolitan Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia — the product of the fused sperm of two gay atheist academics, as it happens — who uses the global confusion in the aftermath of the Rapture to become Secretary General of the U.N. and eventually dictator of a world government that tattoos its citizens with the Mark of the Beast, damning them for eternity.
However clumsily written, Left Behind was for a time the best-selling adult fiction in the United States (partly because megachurches bought copies in bulk to distribute among their congregations) and a major cultural artifact whose high-water mark coincided with the 2004 election. Muscular, evangelical-inflected Republicanism has declined somewhat, as libertarians and later xenophobic populists gained ground in the party, but the anxieties that Left Behind played off of are very real: secularization, cultural dissolution, and the loss of something innately human to encroaching technology.
Zoltan Istvan of the Transhumanist Party is the closest thing to the Antichrist — as imagined in Left Behind, anyway — whom I’ve ever met. Telegenic, articulate, and blond, the 43-year-old Marin technologist who formerly worked in real estate cheerfully advocates for a post-capitalist future of artificial intelligence, DIY genetic modification, and the eventual demise of death itself. To put science and technology to the fore of the national agenda, he’s running for president.
Posted in alien life, cyborgs, existential risks, geopolitics, policy, robotics/AI, solar power, space travel, sustainability, transhumanism | Leave a Comment on Space exploration will spur transhumanism and mitigate existential risk
Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:
When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.
In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.
I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.
These types of advancements are one of the most important reasons I am hoping our next U.S. president will try to jump-start the American space program — both privately and publicly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear any of them are talking about the issue. But they should be. As we enter the transhumanist age — the era of bionic limbs, brain implants and artificial intelligence — space exploration might once again dramatically lead us forward in discovering the most our species can become.
