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Friday, August 02, 2013

Transhumanoid Prophets and Losers Statement

This post is by my friend Jim Fehlinger [with a few snarky editorial additions I could not resist --d] upgraded from a comment of his in the Moot:

F. M. Esfandiary ["FM-2030," Father of Transhumanism --d] in 1980:
I am universal. I translive all over the planet. Learn via telecom. Have many professions. Am involved with many people. Consider all children as mine also. [And all before Facebook! --JimF] Neither right nor left -- I am Up. [Tho' "up" usually ends up right. --d] I have no age. Am born and reborn every day. I intend to live forever. Barring an accident I probably will. [He died at age 69 whereupon he was cryonically hamburgerized, the corpse disposal method preferred by most Robot Cultists over cremation, burial, mummification, compression into diamond jewelry, or being shot into space. --d] I also want to help others to live on indefinitely. [Like futurological gurus everywhere, he settled for helping people think indefinitely instead. --d] My philosophy: optimism -- abundance -- universalism -- immortality."

Around 2010 the world will be at a new orbit in history. We will translive all over this planet and the solar sphere -- at home everywhere. We will be hyperfluid: skim on land -- swim in the deep oceans -- flash across the sky. Family will have given way to Universal life. People will linkup/linkout free of kinship and possessiveness. We will stream ahead propelled by a cornucopia of abundance. Life expectancy will be indefinite. Disease and disability will nonexist. Death will be rare and accidental -- but not permanent. We will continuously jettison our obsolescence and grow younger. At 2000 plus ten all this will be the norm -- hardly considered marvelous...
Nevertheless, hope springs eternal:

Enhanced Post-Humans Face Star Trek-like Future by Dick Pelletier [Scroll to his entry in the Superlative Summary for many pellets of Pelletierian nonsense], July 29, 2013:
In the 2040s, non-biological body parts became safe, affordable and socially acceptable [transhumanoids make no actual contributions to technoscientific developmental but like to pretend that social hostility to useful therapeutic techniques and handy gizmos will be rampant -- as it never actually is in reality -- and hence that their endless indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasizing therefore constitutes some kind of progressive activism. --d]; and by 2050, doctors could transfer ["transfer" here is a metaphor, not a technique or even a proposal, do please make a note of it. --d] minds from damaged bodies into newly-cloned ones. Dying became no more disruptive than a bee sting. By 2060, death -- which many scientists had defined as a disease to be erased –- has finally been conquered.
Easy To Understand an Amazon.com review of [Ray & Terry's] Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Hardcover) by Dick Pelletier, July 11, 2009:
As a 78-year-old senior [in 2009, so he's 82 now --JimF], I found it easy to comprehend the steps necessary to improving my health in order to survive to the time when regenerative medicine and medical nanotech can come to my rescue.
Oh, that Dick! Well, it must be very frustrating, if he really believes the stuff he writes about, for him to think that he's likely to just miss the boat to heaven on earth. Curiously enough, Dick Pelletier was born within 10 days of Esfandiary (both in October, 1930).

2 comments:

dang said...

Skimming through your posts, I honestly thought that first quote by F.M. Esfandiary was an ingenious bit of satire. Then I read a little closer and saw that it was the real thing.

If he had only said that by 2013 many more like him would be living in a dream world, he'd have been right on the money.

Daniel said...

Update on Dick Pelletier

Posted on July 23, 2014: http://www.kurzweilai.net/dick-pelletier

"Dick Pelletier passed away Tuesday July 22. He was 83."