Book Teaser

The following is a teaser, the first few pages of a book I am working on called "Through the Eyes of God: How Humanity Can Save Itself."

Enjoy.

Humanity is at a fork in the road. It is a very significant fork, because the choices we make over the next 50 years will determine the future of our race for the next several million years, and once we choose our path we are stuck with it.

You may be familiar with the Kardashev scale. It is a measure of the technological advancement of a race based on the amount of energy it can generate and consume. Type one societies are able to produce and consume the energy equivalent of all of the solar energy available to their planet, type two can produce and consume the energy equivalent generated by their star, and the level definitions go on increasing in energy requirement. Currently, humanity is just over Type .7, which is a pretty respectable level of development if you ask me.

It hasn’t been an easy road to this point, though. Many wars have been waged, many good men have devoted their lives to the study of science, and many governments have invested considerable wealth into energy research. The most significant leap forward in energy technology came with the discovery of fossil fuels. They are so plentiful, so easy to harvest, and so dense in energy that they have enabled humanity to experience a dramatic and sudden leap forward in technological advancement. Everything from the invention of computers, to the advent of the internal combustion engine, to the discovery of plastic, we owe to fossil fuels. They have truly taken society to a place it never could’ve reached otherwise.

There is a problem though: Fossil fuels are a finite resource. In a short span of only about 200 years, our species has consumed almost all of the fossil fuel reserves on the planet Earth, reserves which were created over the course of billions of years. When the fossil fuels run out, what comes next? There are only two choices. We can either use the gift of fossil fuel as an essential stepping stone to an even more advanced level of society and energy generation, or we can take several steps back and become a pre-industrial society again, with limited access to energy or advanced manufacturing materials.

Choosing not to choose is choosing to go back. A type 1 civilization is advanced enough to persist, a type 0 civilization is small enough to persist, but our current level of energy generation and consumption is unsustainable. In order to move forward, we must intelligently leverage our remaining reserves of fossil fuels to enable a new type of human civilization. If we fail, our descendents may have another chance in a few million years, when the reserves have been replenished by the decaying bodies of trillions of carbon based life forms. There is no shortcut however. Fossil fuels are a gift, a necessary step from primitive to advanced civilization.

This book is the story of choosing to move forward. It is the future that man can deliver upon himself should he choose to recognize the precarious nature of his own existence, embrace his own strength, and create something better with the rare opportunity before him.

Overpopulation and Resource Depletion: Does it even matter?

Are overpopulation and resource scarcity legitimate problems for a transhuman society?

Whenever I discuss transhumanism in general, and defeating death in particular, I invariably get the same response. "The world's already overpopulated." It's a major point of contention for almost everyone who isn't familiar with the future that we transhumanists envision.

Generally, this is a problem that transhumanists disregard. Asking a transhumanist how the world will handle population growth is like asking Beethoven if he'll be able to read music in a convoluted key signature. It's really a non-starter, but why?

For many people, there's a bit of a "gut feeling" factor, and it has merit. Can we really a picture a race so advanced that it has defeated ageing, merged it's mind with machines and enhanced it's own intelligence, and presumably elevated its own existence to that of some race of demi gods, being defeated by overpopulation? It's a little strange to think about, as one would think such a radically advanced civilization would have solved such petty problems and moved on to more sublime causes.

I am less concerned with the gut feeling, though, and more concerned with examining exactly why it is that we needn't worry. After all, strongly held but unsupported notions have had a tendency to end up being wrong(See: the Earth is actually round).

Transhumanists will presumably consume more energy than humans do, and thus they will also consume more resources. So how can we be so sure that their population will not be a major factor? Well, a few reasons:

• Space Mining
• There are already several companies in existence which are spending time and money finding asteroids which are suitable for mining operations. It has been estimated that a single asteroid could add more than a trillion dollars to the economy. These include deep space industries and planetary resources.
• Advanced Construction Technologies
• Right now, construction is very inefficient. While the materials have changed some, we still build using scaffolding, hammers, nails, and other tools which are almost as old as reason itself. Some modern companies, such as Deep Space Industries with Micro Gravity Foundry, are already examining advanced construction methods, which will allow us to do more for less, which brings me to my next point.
• More Real Estate
• Using advanced construction methods, it may very well be possible to create a vast amount of habitable real estate for humans to utilize.
• Family Planning
• Imagine that tomorrow morning you get a note in the mail from your doctor, congratulating you on the fact that you are going to live for ten thousand years! Wow, that would be exciting. At the tender young age of less than a hundred, with the vast majority of your life ahead of you, and the best in birth control methods available to you(including the option of spending most of your time frolicking in cyber space, where sexual reproduction is not possible) the first thing you are going to do is get yourself knocked up with a biological child, right? Wrong.
• Advanced Energy Solutions
• There's more than enough energy from just the sun to power humanity several billion times over. Assuming our future selves figure out something a little more efficient than solar panels, we shouldn't have any problems with energy dependence even if we limited our energy source to solar. That said, nuclear fusion appears to be on the horizon, and, once we get that right, our energy problems are a thing of the past.

The list actually goes on and on, the end conclusion being that the technologies we are creating today will vastly reduce our concerns regarding overpopulation and resource depletion in the future. We will, judging from what we see today, be a much more efficient and resource rich society decades from now. This is our response to the "we can't live forever because of overpopulation" argument, but it doesn't mean that we should ignore the question of resource management and overpopulation entirely. 

Our civilization is at a precarious spot in its development. We are, every day, faced with new and exciting developments and challenges, the likes of which we haven't matured enough as a society to fully understand and manage yet. The steps we take between now and the day that Artificial Intelligence assumes control of our destiny will be the difference the twenty second century being a time of rapid expansion into both space and cyberspace, or a time of rubbing sticks together to start fires in caves.

While the future can certainly be devoid of overpopulation problems and resource scarcity, in order to enable the development of those grand technologies we must become a more sustainable society TODAY. If, due to our own negligence, we are still completely reliant on fossil fuels thirty years from now, and those fossil fuels run out, we WILL NOT become a transhumanist society. We will become a pre-industrial society, and irreversibly change the course of human history. A society which does not have fossil fuels available as a stepping stone cannot maintain the energy levels required to advance beyond our current stage of development, and we would never achieve this level of progress again.

The choice, the responsibility, is ours. Which future will you enable? 

Zoltan Shrugged

Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan's book, The Transhumanist Wager, has been compared to Ayn Rand's classic. What role does libertarian philosophy play in Transhumanism?

Cyberpunk.

Mind uploading.

Eternal Life.

Enhanced awareness.

Transhumanism has an unavoidable appeal to the ego, but has it become dangerously selfish?

When I read a recent review comparing Zoltan's book, which describes a militant transhumanist colony's takeover of the world, to Ayn Rand's ode to the self, I became concerned. Transhumanism is a global effort, the most purely and truly altruistic endeavor possible. Through acheiving a transhuman reality, we can eliminate suffering, eliminate death, spread knowledge and the freedom it brings throughout the world- but that's not what some individuals are focusing on.

I believe that the movement should do everything it can to distance itself from a libertarian philosophy. When I say that, I am not saying that libertarianism is wrong, I'm saying that it's wrong for transhumanists. In today's world, there is a legitimate debate as to how big a role government should play in the lives of the individual. To focus on a libertarian transhuman future, however, is false advertising.

To transhumans, the concept of government and government involvement will seem archaic. We will all be the government, as our minds will be connected and for the first time we will face the world and its problems as one united human race. While I believe that any attempted connection between humanity's transhuman future and the political ideals of today will be irrelevant, I think that attempting to do so with libertarianism can actually be harmful.

Here's why: Transhumanism is scary and powerful.

We can't really fathom exactly what it is that the transhuman era will bring. We know it will be great, we know it will be sublime, we know that we will experience things which we have never experienced before, and that frightens people.

While I believe that the transhuman era will arrive regardless of how many people resist it, the last thing that we should be doing is focusing on individualism. We should be welcoming people and easing their concerns, encouraging them to help us all seek a brighter future. For starters, transhumanism is not about being individual, its about being connected, so I think that this is a poor representation to begin with. Even more important is that on the path to transhumanism we should be fostering acceptance, diversity,and empathy. We should not be selling transhumanism as the ultimate form of wealth, or as the great escape from the tyranny of government and into self gratification. In order to ease the pains of this transitional time ahead of us, we should instead be spreading a message of goodwill, of wellfare, of happiness and kindness.

As a transhuman, you will be smarter and even more loving and capable of making the world a better place for everyone else.

Transhumanism is not libertarian, it's not liberal or conservative. It is, at its heart, altruistic. Let us not focus on political comparisons or on making transhumanism some sort of ego trip, instead, lets focus on it for what it is:

A WAY TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.