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Conspiracy file · Since 1957

Transhumanism

The movement that wants technology to carry humans past their natural limits: aging, disease, maybe death itself. It is a real philosophy with real labs and real money behind it. The theory is about who gets upgraded first.

Also known as H+ · Humanity+ · Extropianism

On the recordTimelineFrom the comicsIn Paranoid American comicsSources & further reading

Transhumanism, a panel from a Paranoid American comic
From Time Samplers #5

The story

Transhumanism is the belief that people can and should use science to improve themselves beyond biology: longer lives, sharper minds, failing parts repaired or replaced by machines. The biologist Julian Huxley popularized the word in a 1957 essay, writing that the human species "can, if it wishes, transcend itself".

The modern movement grew out of California in the 1980s and 1990s, through Max More's Extropians and then the World Transhumanist Association, founded in 1998 by philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce and renamed Humanity+ in 2008. Its ideas run through cryonics, life-extension research, brain-computer interfaces and Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near.

Critics have called it elitist, and some tie it to eugenics: Huxley himself was president of Britain's Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. Conspiracy theorists go further and cast it as a plan by tech billionaires and occultists to make themselves immortal. Time Samplers #5 runs with that, and brings in Aleister Crowley, the occultist who called himself the Great Beast 666.

Memorandum for the recordSubject: Transhumanism

On the record

  1. J. B. S. Haldane's 1923 essay Daedalus imagined humans taking control of their own biology.
  2. Julian Huxley popularized the word in his essay "Transhumanism", in New Bottles for New Wine (1957).
  3. Huxley was the first director-general of UNESCO (1946–1948) and president of the Eugenics Society (1959–1962).
  4. James Bedford became the first person cryonically preserved, on January 12, 1967. He is still in storage in Arizona.
  5. Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998; it renamed itself Humanity+ in 2008.
  6. Rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, a founder of what became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led the Pasadena lodge of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis in the 1940s.
  7. Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near (2005) predicted that humans and machines would merge by about 2045.

The theory

  • The super-rich are funding life extension and mind uploading so that they, and only they, get to live forever.
  • Brain implants and digital IDs are the first step toward a population that can be tracked and controlled.
  • Transhumanism is eugenics in a lab coat: an elite deciding which humans get upgraded (a charge some academic critics make too).
  • Its roots are occult: some writers trace it to Crowley's "Do what thou wilt" and the alchemists' dream of making a homunculus.
  • Some versions say the endgame is uploading elite minds into machines while the rest of humanity is left behind.

Timeline

  1. 1923J. B. S. Haldane publishes Daedalus; or, Science and the Future
  2. 1943The rocket group Jack Parsons co-founded at Caltech becomes the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  3. 1947Aleister Crowley dies in Hastings, England (December 1)
  4. 1957Julian Huxley's essay "Transhumanism"
  5. 1964Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality launches the cryonics movement
  6. 1967James Bedford is cryonically preserved (January 12)
  7. 1988The first issue of Extropy magazine, from Max More and Tom Morrow
  8. 1998The World Transhumanist Association is founded
  9. 2005Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near
  10. 2008The WTA renames itself Humanity+

From the comics

Panels straight from the page. Click one to read it full size.

From Time Samplers #5: The Falling Star · Pages 10-11

Transhumanism Is the Future

Zarota pitches the council on Project G.R.A.I.L.: forget cloning, move your mind into a machine and get upgrades for life. It is the transhumanist dream of mind uploading, sold as a luxury package. Nobody has ever uploaded a mind, but the argument the council has here, whether a copy would still be you, is a real one.

Transhumanism Is the Future, 1 of 5 Transhumanism Is the Future, 2 of 5
Transhumanism Is the Future, 3 of 5
Transhumanism Is the Future, 4 of 5 Transhumanism Is the Future, 5 of 5
  1. Pineal gland: a pea-sized gland deep in the brain that makes melatonin. René Descartes called it the principal seat of the soul, which is why it keeps turning up in theories about consciousness.
  2. "Just a copy of us": the oldest objection to mind uploading. Philosophers still argue over whether a perfect digital copy of your brain would be you, or a new person who only thinks so.
  3. Walt Disney was not frozen. He died on December 15, 1966 and was cremated; his ashes are at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. The first person actually frozen, James Bedford, followed less than a month later.

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