This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I’ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It’s out in print today too.
When John Lennon released “Imagine” in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even anodyne, response to the Vietnam War. Although politically liberal, Lennon was no doctrinal Marxist — only three years earlier, his song “Revolution” had shrugged off people who “go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.” But the song struck many evangelical Christians as ghoulish, and for some, “Imagine” eventually came to be a sort of national anthem for the repressively secular, globalist state that was thought to be emerging: the anti-Christian New World Order that later became talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fever dream.
Left Behind, a series of 16 books written between 1995 and 2007 that details a possible end-of-the-world scenario, starting from when all good Christians go to heaven in an instant (the Rapture) until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, specifically calls out “Imagine” as a weapon in Satan’s arsenal of seductive propaganda. The Antichrist in Left Behind is a suave, cosmopolitan Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia — the product of the fused sperm of two gay atheist academics, as it happens — who uses the global confusion in the aftermath of the Rapture to become Secretary General of the U.N. and eventually dictator of a world government that tattoos its citizens with the Mark of the Beast, damning them for eternity.
However clumsily written, Left Behind was for a time the best-selling adult fiction in the United States (partly because megachurches bought copies in bulk to distribute among their congregations) and a major cultural artifact whose high-water mark coincided with the 2004 election. Muscular, evangelical-inflected Republicanism has declined somewhat, as libertarians and later xenophobic populists gained ground in the party, but the anxieties that Left Behind played off of are very real: secularization, cultural dissolution, and the loss of something innately human to encroaching technology.
Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:
When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.
In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.
I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.
Nice!
Our skin is our largest organ. A gateway between our brain and the rest of the world.
Imagine then a scene where skin could communicate what’s going on inside a human body. It could inform surgeons, provide alerts when our body is about to fall ill, or even diagnose diseases inside another human being, simply through the sense of touch.
University of Tokyo scientist Takao Someya is making that scene a reality.
Fox 29 — Good Day Philadelphia
http://www.fox29.com/140735577-video
NBC TV 10
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Zombies-from-Phill…65101.html
CNN en Espanol
http://cnnespanol.cnn.com/video/cnnee-encuentro-intvw-joel-o…-cerebral/
Expansion of BMI and Bionics has now come to Purdue University.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) — Researchers at Purdue have been working on technology that will help pave the way for the future people who use artificial limbs.
“The point of these research labs is to discover new technologies that we can translate into the real world and make the world a better place,” Purdue Center for Implantable Devices Director Pedro Irazoqui said.
Bionic limbs are artificial limbs which use signals sent from the brain, nerves and muscles to operate as the user wishes — just like real limbs work.
New story and video on transhumanism from Vocativ:
His name is Zoltan Istvan, and he’s running on the Transhumanist ticket.
By Ethan Harfenist.
