The various attempts to slow the utilization of advanced materials, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and robotics is akin to keeping certain gender or ethnic groups out of the games. Not just discrimination, but impeding the flow of progress.

If the ultimate goal of world-level competition is advancement of human physical ability, then athletes, coaches, physicians, and biotech engineers should be able to choose the very best tactics and strategies to achieve that goal.

A Transhuman Olympics would be wildly entertaining, but would also spur the development of biotechnology at a pace that public and private science could never keep up with.  While the ethics of such an event might be hotly contested, the benefits to humankind would be lasting and far reaching.

Competitors involved would sign a medical waiver and hold harmless agreement.  Education for both athletes and trainers would be mandatory so that participants and competitors understand the risks. Athletes in particular would have to attest that they are willingly participating in the games and that at the time of their consent to do so, they were of sound mind.

Performance enhancing substances — anabolic steroids, human growth hormones — would be permitted. Safer formulations would be encouraged. Experimentation would also be encouraged, insofar as it would drive the development of substances with less extreme, more commercial applications, outside of the games.

Biotechnology augmentation and bioengineered device integration would also be advised. Biotech is still in its relative infancy and the mainstream medical benefit for technology spun-off from this kind of competitive arena would be amazingly valuable.

In short, virtually any edge that provides enhanced performance times, distances, heights, or otherwise advances human competitive ability — be it mechanical, pharmaceutical, biotechnological, or genetic — would be considered fair game.

Boredom and sport would never again occur together in the same sentence. The performance-enhancing scandal that supposedly hurt the image of baseball in the late 1990s, led to new records from players like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Roger Clemens, as well as a substantial lift in audience attention at the world level.

Some of the most competitive and gifted athletes in baseball watched as their reputations were dragged through the proverbial mud, as members of US Congress and the Federal judiciary presided over efforts to jail both trainers and athletes alike.

In reality, the use of performance enhancing substances in baseball goes back to 1889, when pitcher Pud Galvin used, and vocally endorsed, Brown-Séquard Elixir, a monkey-sourced testosterone supplement.

“Doping,” as it is commonly referred to, remains an American taboo subject.

The Transhuman Olympics would provide a venue for science to be more competitive and for athletes and trainers to take measures that they deem befitting to secure the best performance results.

Rather than laboratory-based timelines — often handled in academic settings, with limited access to financial resources — scientific improvements would need to find practical applications in the real world. Research efforts would have to provide meaningful, actionable improvements to athletic performance, within real world timeframes.

Imagine for a moment the incredible entertainment value.  Perhaps countries with the most money just emerge victorious. Perhaps smaller scientific efforts with less access to resources would be forced to find novel innovations to gain a competitive advantage.

Watching athletes push the limits of humanity to achieve new records and break through established competitive plateaus is a fundamental facet of human evolution. The Transhuman Olympics would simply better facilitate that process.

Over time, the opportunity to invent new sports based on emerging capabilities and new technological developments would emerge.  When the 1896 Olympics revived the ancient Olympic tradition, only one sport was excluded from the games (for you history buffs, the sport was pankration, a mild mixed martial art).  However, with new technology and advanced human capability comes new competitive territory. Imagine a real-life Icarus competing with other airborne humans.  Underwater games or sports in low-Earth orbit — the competitive horizon is endless.

Robotic elements, like chaser drones, helping athletes to see around corners or from other perspectives would be spectacular. Imagine force multipliers to provide boosts of strength or improve the strength and resilience of joints, muscles, tendons, and/or ligaments.

Once tested and proven in the venue of competitive sport, these technologies would have the widespread potential for mainstream medical adoption. Think of elderly patients who have trouble walking or individuals dealing with neurodegenerative disorders, now empowered thanks to the sacrifices and risks taken on by these gladiators of evolved sport.

Until modern society overcomes its resistance to unencumbered, more loosely regulated sporting events, the Transhuman Olympics would need to be held in a country with fewer controlled substance laws.

This country would likely receive a substantial windfall of medical tourism, so long as the technology being utilized was also developed there.  Cuba springs first to mind but other present-day medical tourism destinations include Argentina, Brunei, Jordan, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand and many others.

In modern Olympic competition, corporate sponsorship was first forbidden.

It wasn’t until 1972, when the medium of television opened up new channels for advertising, that corporate sponsorship began to emerge. In the Transhuman Olympics, corporate and/or government sponsorship would be essential and robustly encouraged.

With each passing Olympic games, the amount spent increases dramatically.  Russia spent $51 billion on the 2014 games in Sochi, in the hopes of capturing and drawing the international spotlight.

In the Transhuman Olympics, the core benefits would include not only spectators and advertising sponsors, but tangible medical advancements and beneficial intellectual property.

We’re already living in the age of the technologically enhanced athlete.

LZR Racer swimsuits, made of woven elastane-nylon and buoyant polyurethane provided swimmers the ability to shave relatively substantial amounts of time from races.  Those suits were banned in 2010, following the 2008 Beijing games.

The 1936 Olympics in Berlin showed Hitler that preconceived notions of superiority were no match for the power of diversity.

In 2012, for the first time since the inception of the International Olympic Committee, all countries participating in the Olympics sent delegations that included both male and female competitors. That same year, 204 countries sent competitors to the games.

Now that the human race has achieved an even playing field for global competition, the next step is technologically empowered, superhuman competitors.

Kindly join me in supporting the call for a Transhuman Olympics.

Planet Earth, Zemlia, di qiu, Avani, la monde, la tierra, der erde — each of these names, in their respective language, puts significance on the physical stuff held together by gravity beneath our feet, the foundation upon which we’ve built our ever expanding civilization.

We did not fully understand that stuff to be a planet until a few hundred years ago.

How quaint. How archaic.

How utterly primitive to think that in our ongoing effort to categorize and name the stars, planets, galaxies, and other celestial objects around us, we fail in the most basic sense to understand our own place in grander scheme of nature.

Discovery, science, and exploration missions from a variety of countries continue to elevate our understanding of nature into a clearer context. With each discovery, there seems to be a clearer need to name our home planet.

The globally diverse make-up of some of the more advanced technical and scientific institutions like NASA, ESA, Caltech, and MIT, show that there already exists a self-selecting intellectual elite shining a widening light into our understanding of the natural world beyond our planetary confines.

Our curiosity knows only temporary bounds. In time, even the most complicated mysteries become science, fact, human history.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, observing nearby stars, has shown us that the presence of planets around stars is more common than not.  There are estimated to be between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.

Kepler turned up some very interested potential destinations.  What we call exoplanet Gliese 581 g, might already be populated with life and if that life is advanced enough, that exoplanet might already have a name.

A senior astronomer at SETI recently stated publicly that the research center expects advances in computing to discover evidence of life on another planet in the next twenty years.  Space archaeologist Alice Gorman is looking in a slightly different direction, toward the structures, orbital debris, and other related relics that an extraterrestrial civilization may have left behind.

Beyond the extra-stellar destinations of worlds we have yet to closely explore, there are also existential threats, like the possibility of near Earth objects colliding with our home planet, which should compel us toward a stronger sense of planetary awareness.

Until Elon Musk and SpaceX solve the transportation challenge to take humans to Mars, we should regard our home planet as singular and worthy of a name that all of humanity understands, supports, and ideally can pronounce in roughly the same way.

While the name Gaia, from Greek mythology is occasionally used to describe “mother Earth,” the truth is that such a name is far too Western-centric to resonate globally.

There is no urgent need to continue the tradition of naming planets after Greco-Roman gods and goddesses.

Ours is an era of distinctly connected global culture.  The fidelity, speed, and reach of that connection grows daily, linking not just the developed world, but emerging cultures, further afield.

The name could be a symbol, a phrase, a proper name, or a single sound.  In a perfect world, a vote would be taken, providing consideration by countries around the entire world.

Currently, the International Astronomical Union governs the process of naming newly discovered exoplanets and would likely be the leading candidate to manage or oversee such an effort.

The need to name our planet is not merely some sugar-coated idealism, but a legitimate, concrete gesture toward recognizing a single human identity. It would demonstrate that our planet, despite nuanced cultural and genetic diversity remains ultimately unified.  The differences that appear to separate the citizens of each country are far outweighed by the many similarities we share.

Following World War II, the United Nations organized and assembled to prevent the unchecked atrocities that brought the deaths of tens of millions humans during the war. That effort fell short of its originally intended charter, largely due to the concentration of veto power of a few influential nations (China, Russia, France, the UK and the US, all permanent members of the UN’s Security Council).

By concentrating power among a few elite nations, the democratic power of the UN was reduced to yet another forum for potentially divisive geopolitics.

In the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, the World Wide Web offered a different kind of global democracy, facilitated largely by the sharing of knowledge, information, and technology.

Either by commerce or by charity, countries whose governments and business built-out the Web have an obligation to continue that infrastructure development in such a way that will bring the Web to a truly global audience.

When that future day arrives when a lucky few on our home planet are able to communicate in meaningful dialogue with intelligent life from another planet, we will naturally want to compare our understanding of the natural world, on both a scientific as well as a cultural level.

We’re going to want to know what they call their planet and they will likely want to know what we call ours.

Should the possibility exist that space archaeologist Alice Gorman, or someone like her, happens upon the remains of such a civilization, so too will we seek to unearth the details of their understanding of their particular corner of nature.

If they were advanced enough to escape the gravity well of their home planet and make it into interplanetary space, we will expect that they have hammered down and fleshed out some of the same fundamental physical laws that first bedeviled and later empowered humanity over the centuries.

In preparation for that eventual contact, we’ll need to first foster better awareness of our own planetary identity, if only for the sake of more clearly and succinctly articulating the shared genetic heritage that evolved and spread across our particular globe.

There will come a day, when entirety of human civilization looks back with a knowing smile at how simple we once were, how blindly unaware of our position in nature we seemed to be.

Naturally, of course, once we name our planet, the need shall also arise to name our only moon and our parent star.

Alas, one step at a time.

A concerted global effort like naming the planet might very well be the best anti-war cocktail this planet ever imbibed or an answer to the most important question we’ve ever been asked.

In one sweeping gesture we can think and act, both locally and globally, and thus solidify humanity’s future history.