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Waiting on research advances is the rationale behind cryopreservation, and more broadly, a worldview known as transhumanism. A person killed by cancer or heart disease could reasonably be revived in a future when such ailments no longer exist. “They believe in the advance of technology,” says Giuseppe Nucci, an Italian photographer who visited with transhumanists and toured the facilities of Russia-based cryonics company KrioRus. “They hope that someone will wake them up.”

This hope, that the future will vanquish the ills of the present, is as old as the first civilisations that realized that with each passing year life got a little better. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov helped create an early 20th-century movement known as cosmism that was rooted in the idea that, given enough time, humans could defeat evil and death. If the human life span was too short, then the simple solution was to extend it, even after death, and suspend its decomposition until the world caught up.


Employees of a liquid nitrogen and dry ice factory on the outskirts of Moscow are shrouded in fog while refilling their liquid nitrogen tanks. Founded by former KrioRus employees, the company now supplies them. PHOTOGRAPH BY GIUSEPPE NUCCI

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While the Winter Olympics are going on, here’s.

A story of mine on the dream of a future Transhumanist Olympics: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/is-it-time-for-…77194.html #transhumanism


Oracle Team USA made a historic comeback to beat Emirates Team New Zealand in the American’s Cup in San Francisco last month. I have closely followed the sport of sail racing for over 30 years, and what astonishes me is how much faster and better the boats are today than they were three decades ago. Sailing speeds and performances have doubled in some cases.

The same cannot be said about most other major sports. Even Michael Phelps, considered by many the greatest living athlete, is only a few seconds faster than swimming world records set 30 years ago. Most sports have not allowed scientific improvements or technology upgrades to their athletes and the equipment they use. I find that disappointing.

What is on the rise in athletics, however, are multi-million dollar campaigns and testing measures designed to ensure athletes don’t cheat by using performance enhancing drugs and technologies. Some athletes even complain about undergoing TSA-like testing procedures right before their events. Does anyone else see a problem with that? Does anyone else see something anti-progressive about the state of our competitive sporting industry today?

As an advanced society full of technological wonders, perhaps it’s time we consider upgrading our idea of sports and rethinking what constitutes an exemplary athlete. Perhaps it’s time for something more modern and exciting, such as the transhuman athlete.

So will we ever be able to do this or is this just a pipe dream? Plenty has been written about the future and what we may be able to do one day, but not much attention gets paid to the hurdles we have yet to overcome. Forget all the techno-babble, philosophy, and transhumanism – how close is this brave new world to our present time?


“Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in a bucket.”

Taken from 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, this sentence perfectly sums up the complexity and ambiguity of the human mind and the brain. Despite enormous advances, our ignorance on what lies within our cranium remains vast and sometimes unyielding. Those drops, and their relation to the bucket, are profoundly enigmatic.

We understand how different parts of the brain communicate and often what they specialize in, but what exactly is a “thought” made of? Where, amongst the 86 billion neurons in our brain, do they come from, and where do they go? What, scientifically speaking, is consciousness – is it a single entity or the sum of trillions of permutations? Is it the addition or average of all those firing neurons?

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