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Edge of Dark is part space-opera, part coming-of-age story, and part exploration of the relationship between humans and the post-human descendants who may ultimately transcend them.

The book takes place in the same universe as Brenda Cooper’s “Ruby’s Song” books (The Creative Fire; The Diamond Deep). However, you don’t need to have read those books to enjoy this one. The story in Edge of Dark picks up decades after the earlier books.

The setting is a solar system in which the most Earth-like planet, once nearly ecologically destroyed, is now in large part a wilderness preserve, still undergoing active restoration. Most humans live on massive space stations in the inner solar system. A few live on smaller space stations a bit further out, closer to the proverbial “Edge”. And beyond that? Beyond that, far from the sun, dwell exiles, cast out long ago for violating social norms by daring to go too far in tinkering with the human mind and body.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that those exiles have grown in strength and have become, in some cases, not just transhuman, but truly posthuman. What follows is a story that is rich in politics, and even more rich in plausible, fascinating, and nuanced tensions created by this juxtaposition of human and posthuman.

There are a tremendous number of stories out there that simple-mindedly posit post-humans as a grave threat and enemy to humanity. (Think “Terminator.”) There are others that take a view that human and post- or trans- human can all learn to get along. (Think “X-Men”.) Brenda Cooper has done something remarkable here: She’s given us a story that isn’t simple or moralistic. It’s complicated. At the beginning of the book, I expected a simple morality play with a specific outcome. Later, I changed my mind. Then I changed it again. What she’s presented is messy, just like real life. It’s wound up with politics, just like real life.

The early parts of the book introduce new characters and new settings. The later parts of the book are what grabbed me. In the end, I was extremely happy I read this. Edge of Dark is a unique view of the interaction of human and post-human in my experience. I recommend it highly.


Anyone who posts to the Lifeboat Foundation blog gets a chance to win a signed copy of Edge of Dark!

The deadline for the contest is June 30. If you need access to our blog, send an email with the subject of “Lifeboat Foundation blog” to [email protected].

Article: Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Posted in astronomy, big data, computing, cosmology, energy, engineering, environmental, ethics, existential risks, futurism, general relativity, governance, government, gravity, information science, innovation, internet, journalism, law, life extension, media & arts, military, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, open source, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, posthumanism, quantum physics, science, security, singularity, space, space travel, supercomputing, sustainability, time travel, transhumanism, transparency, treatiesTagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Why the LHC must be shut down

CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!

Posted in astronomy, big data, complex systems, computing, cosmology, energy, engineering, ethics, existential risks, futurism, general relativity, governance, government, gravity, hardware, information science, innovation, internet, journalism, law, life extension, media & arts, military, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, quantum physics, science, security, singularity, space, space travel, supercomputing, sustainability, time travel, transhumanism, transparency, treatiesTagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment on CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!

PRESS RELEASE “LHC-KRITIK”/”LHC-CRITIQUE” www.lhc-concern.info
CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!
These days, CERN has restarted the world’s biggest particle collider, the so-called “Big Bang Machine” LHC at CERN. After a hundreds of Million Euros upgrade of the world’s biggest machine, CERN plans to smash particles at double the energies of before. This poses, one would hope, certain eventually small (?), but fundamentally unpredictable catastrophic risks to planet Earth.
Basically the same group of critics, including Professors and Doctors, that had previously filed a law suit against CERN in the US and Europe, still opposes the restart for basically the same reasons. Dangers of: (“Micro”-)Black Holes, Strangelets, Vacuum Bubbles, etc., etc. are of course and maybe will forever be — still in discussion. No specific improvements concerning the safety assessment of the LHC have been conducted by CERN or anybody meanwhile. There is still no proper and really independent risk assessment (the ‘LSAG-report’ has been done by CERN itself) — and the science of risk research is still not really involved in the issue. This is a scientific and political scandal and that’s why the restart is a sad day for science and humanity.
The scientific network “LHC-Critique” speaks for a stop of any public sponsorship of gigantomanic particle colliders.
Just to demonstrate how speculative this research is: Even CERN has to admit, that the so called “Higgs Boson” was discovered — only “probably”. Very probably, mankind will never find any use for the “Higgs Boson”. Here we are not talking about the use of collider technology in medical concerns. It could be a minor, but very improbable advantage for mankind to comprehend the Big Bang one day. But it would surely be fatal – how the Atomic Age has already demonstrated — to know how to handle this or other extreme phenomena in the universe.
Within the next Billions of years, mankind would have enough problems without CERN.
Sources:
- A new paper by our partner “Heavy Ion Alert” will be published soon: http://www.heavyionalert.org/
- Background documents provided by our partner “LHC Safety Review”: http://www.lhcsafetyreview.org/

- Press release by our partner ”Risk Evaluation Forum” emphasizing on renewed particle collider risk: http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/newsbg.pdf

- Study concluding that “Mini Black Holes” could be created at planned LHC energies: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-mini-black-holes-lhc-parallel.html

- New paper by Dr. Thomas B. Kerwick on lacking safety argument by CERN: http://vixra.org/abs/1503.0066

- More info at the LHC-Kritik/LHC-Critique website: www.LHC-concern.info
Best regards:
LHC-Kritik/LHC-Critique

The Mont Order Club hosted its first video conference in February 2015, as shown below.

Suggested topics included transhumanism, antistatism, world events, movements, collaboration, and alternative media. The Mont Order is an affiliation of dissident writers and groups who share similar views on transnationalism and transhumanism as positive and inevitable developments.

Participants:

  • Harry Bentham (Beliefnet)
  • Mike Dodd (Wave Chronicle)
  • Dirk Bruere (Zero State)

For more information on Mont Order participants, see the Mont Order page at Beliefnet.

In a recent feature article at The clubof.info Blog called “Striving to be Snowdenlike”, I look at the example of Edward Snowden and use his precedent to make a prediction about “transhumans”, the first people who will pioneer our evolution into a posthuman form, and the political upheaval this will necessarily cause.

Transhumanism makes a prediction that people will obtain greater personal abilities as a result of technology. The investment of more political power (potentially) in a single person’s hand’s has been the inexorable result of advancing technology throughout history.

Politically, transhumanism (not as a movement but as a form of sociocultural evolution) would be radically different from other forms of technological change, because it can produce heightened intellect, strength and capability. Many have assumed that these changes would only reinforce existing inequality and the power of the state, but they are wrong. They have failed to note the political disconnect between current government authority figures and political classes, and those people actually involved in engineering, medicine, military trials, and the sciences. Transhumanism will never serve to reinforce the existing political order or make it easier for states to govern and repress their people. On the contrary, transhumanism can only be highly disruptive to the authorities. In fact, it will be more disruptive to current liberal democratic governments than any other challenge they have witnessed before.

There are several realities to this disruption that will convey a profound political change, and would do so whether or not transhumanism pursued political power in the form of the Transhumanist Parties (I still support those parties wholeheartedly due to their ability to raise awareness of transhumanism as a concept and an observation by futurists) or took a political stance for or against these realities. I would narrow the disruption down to these very compelling points of political significance. Please advise any more that you would like to bring to my attention:

  • Some of us will evolve into posthumans prior to others.
  • Such evolution will not be contingent on station, celebrity, political office, political ideology, leadership ability, or other traditional elite criteria.
  • Such evolution will be contingent on injuries (in the case of medical enhancements), vocation (e.g. astronauts), military trials (power armor or other, more invasive enhancements), long before it is marketed to members of the political elite or government authority figures who prefer to stay aloof and avoid taking risks with their lives.
  • This will create a disconnect, early on, between the political elite and the first evolved, posthuman persons.

Therefore, the posthuman elite will not be the current elite, but a completely different elite. Not only this, but they will have a completely different attitude towards authority that will be very disruptive to the status quo:

  • The evolution will create a high-tech “elite” (but only in the sense of capability, and not rule) with a high degree of autonomy.
  • Since all members of the new elite will have the same ability to function alone beyond the abilities of a normal human, they will be able to function without reliance on a hierarchy, even among themselves.
  • Since all will have superior capabilities to those who are not evolved, they will have no desire or need to rule over the people who are not enhanced, as they will not need them.
  • They will function as titans — extremely powerful individuals capable of achieving their political aims single-handedly, independently of organizations or governments (much as Snowden did).
  • The evolved people will be a potential “rebel elite” or “smart rats” (to use Julian Assange’s term from Cypherpunks) because they will not be part of the government authority structures. Their ethos and their political behavior will be the same as hackers, with the exception that they will be able to effect change in the real world in the way that hackers were only able to achieve them via computer systems.
  • Like hackers, they will be dismissive of government authority, able to overcome government safeguards and defenses, and cognizant of government lies. And, like hackers, their power to subvert government authority will cause them to subvert it.

What happened with Snowden is not the first time we are going to witness a single heroic individual challenging existing power structures and winning against the world’s most powerful state.

If technology is going to invest greater power and responsibility into the hands of lone individuals who have been given privileges because of their personal abilities, those individuals are by definition going to be futuristic “insurgents”, at least some of whom will go as far as to dismantle the state. A government, being paranoid of anyone having merely the capability to undermine it, will by definition attempt to curtail the freedoms of enhanced people.

Posthumans, including their early predecessors, will find themselves in the same situation as the current-day “cypherpunk” elite consisting of whistleblowers and hackers. They will listen to few authority figures, they will have the utmost disrespect for the government, and they will be more interested in sharing their abilities indiscriminately with others than adhering to rules laid down by authority figures or obeying the state.

The evolution into posthuman forms will bring with it a clash of ideas about how society should be governed.