If you are on this website, you have no doubt heard the word transhumanism. It refers to our transitioning into Humanity 2.0, or the post-human world. What? you ask ... the post-human world? Where will we be when we get there? Well, we will be merged with technology, on the very level of our cells and tissues. We will no longer be Homo sapiens. We are already moving quickly toward that existence, one in which science will reign supreme as it moderates and modulates biology in order to preserve and enhance what's left of living things as this Sixth Extinction progresses.
Transhumanism sounds awful to some of us, but it is being embraced by others. Imagine a world in which you will never die because there will be a machine-clone of you for your loved ones to enjoy once you "expire." This article from New York Magazine is mind-popping, and very worth reading. Here are some excerpts:
♥ Martine sees herself less as transgender and more as what is known as transhumanist, a particular kind of futurist who believes that technology can liberate humans from the limits of their biology—including infertility, disease, and decay, but also, incredibly, death. Now, in her spare time, when she’s not running a $5 billion company, or flying her new helicopter up and down the East Coast, or attending to her large family and three dogs, she’s tinkering with ways that technology might push back that ultimate limit. She believes in a foreseeable future in which the beloved dead will live again as digital beings, reanimated by sophisticated artificial-intelligence programs that will be as cheap and accessible to every person as iTunes.
♥ “She’s an outstanding conceptual salesperson,” says her friend and fellow futurist Ray Kurzweil. ... With Kurzweil, ... Martine has invested in research, based at MIT, into stem-cell-like cancer therapies. And her friend Craig Venter, who was among the first scientists to sequence the human genome, has joined her project to raise pigs for organ transplantation into human subjects. Martine herself owns a pig farm called Revivacor, and expects to conduct a successful pig-human transplant by the end of the decade. Last year she got her pilot’s license, so that she might speedily transport pig organs to waiting human patients.
... Kurzweil, who is a director of engineering at Google (which has just established a new company, Calico, devoted to life extension), is one of the nation’s most prominent popularizers of the idea of digital immortality, and Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, has contributed more than $3.5 million of his own money to ending aging.
♥ What excites the technologists now is the prospect of intelligent gadgets, which know things and can talk to one another and make judgments for themselves, crossing the threshold into the body and transforming the human organism itself. Martine rhapsodizes about the possibility of millions of nano-robots swimming through living human bodies, directed wirelessly, cleaning up impurities and attending to diseases at the cellular level. Kurzweil has imagined every atom in the physical universe functioning like computer code, making the universe itself a single, giant computer.
Read the full article at: http://nymag.com/news/features/martine-rothblatt-transgender-ceo/
NOTE FROM SOFIA: The above quote in purple, with "directed wirelessly" bolded, should explain to you why our culture already addicted to wireless gadgets and why wireless antennas and towers and routers are everywhere. In my opinion, we are being conditioned to adapt biologically to wireless energy: we are on a big farm, you could say, where certain of us will not survive the tests and conditioning, and others will. These Others will be the successful prototypes for the next wave of humans. Throw into the mix GMOs, vaccines, aerosol spraying -- all of which shower us inside and out with unnatural materials. The best we can do on a biological level is adapt to the influences, if we cannot destroy them.
A handy FYI from NG, just in case everyone's wondering what those streaks and lines are up there: "wispy cirrus clouds with climate change potential"! Didn't you know? Here's the aviation psy-unce: "When water vapor in hot aircraft exhaust hits very cold, moist air, it freezes. That creates white contrails which can spread into wispy cirrus clouds with climate change potential. Some reflect the sun's heat before it reaches Earth's surface for a cooling effect. But overall, cirrus clouds trap heat and, by one estimate, contribute more to warming than aircraft carbon-dioxide emissions do. Planes could be rerouted to avoid contrail-inducing weather, a study in Environmental Research Letters found. In one case, a 13.7-mile detour in a transatlantic flight eliminated a contrail 62 miles long and the clouds it would have spurred -- so even counting extra emissions from the detour, the flight resulted in less warming. Nonetheless, no one suggests rerouting planes yet. Forecasters can predict contrail formation, says study author Emma Irvine -- but whether the forecasts are accurate enough to justify flight adjustments is still up in the air." (See full image