Quotes

This is big in the Grinder community. Most people start off by implanting magnets in their fingertips, which gives you the ability to feel magnetic fields. Your fingertips have lots of nerve endings jammed into one area and they are really sensitive to stimuli. Magnets twitch or move in the presence of magnetic fields, and when you implant one in your finger you can really start to feel different magnetic fields around you. So it is like a sixth sense. At first you will be waving your hand around appliances, probing fields like someone looking for a light switch in the dark. After a few days or weeks you will almost forget you have the implant because your brain has fully incorporated the sense into your normal world experience. When you sleep you will notice that even your dreams have changed to include the sense. You can now perceive an otherwise invisible world.

This makes many curious about all of the other things happening around them that they can’t see and they want more. So let’s expand on the magnet thing. We can buy all kinds of different sensors to detect heat, radiation, radio signals, wifi, whatever you want. If we wrap a wire around our implanted finger and attach that wire to our new sensor, we find that the wire creates a small magnetic field to the beat of the sensor. This of course makes our magnet twitch, and now we can feel heat from a distance, feel wifi, or whatever.

Why limit ourselves to feeling these sensations? We have other senses we can induce synesthesia in. I got some media attention in June of 2013 after I implanted headphones in my tragus to do just that. I had some practical reasons for doing this in addition to my thirst for exploration. A few years earlier I suddenly became legally blind in one eye. Lenses cannot correct it and my original eye doctor informed me that the other eye was likely to follow, at which point I would be legally blind, lose my job, etc. With this inevitability in mind I decided to be proactive. Ultrasonic rangefinders are devices used to determine how far away an object is. I knew that most blind people find acoustic variations help them identify the proximity of objects, so I figured I might be able to amplify this by converting rangefinder data into audio I could send wirelessly to my headphone implants. It turned out to be much more complicated than I thought, but that is a part of Grinding that I have come to appreciate. My setbacks lead me deeper into the rabbit hole of audiology where I discovered knowledge that has unlocked a thousand more possibilities.

I’d say that 25% of the people I talk to about sensory enhancement think it’s really cool and some go get implants themselves. The other 75% will nod their head and hope the conversation ends or they laugh and ask “why would anyone want to feel magnetic fields?” I get asked that question so much, and I still find it hard to articulate. They usually point out that “you don’t need it,” to which I counter “what if you lost the ability to taste? You don’t really need it to survive.” Ask anyone with an implant how they would feel if they lost the implant, and almost all of them will tell you they would miss it. A small bit of richness would be missing from their life experience.

Visible light is but a tiny portion of the greater magnetic spectrum that we cannot see. If we modeled the entire spectrum as a road stretching from LA to New York, the amount of visible light that humans can see would equal a few nanometers. Humans, from our allegorical caves, have nonetheless managed to form and test theories about things at the edges of perception but these discoveries took thousands of years. Where would humans be now technologically if we never developed sight? How long would it take us to theorize the existence of the aurora borealis or to hypothesize about the existence of stars? This reduction of input obviously cripples the rate of input.

So is the opposite true? Would expanding our senses accelerate our advancement? My answer is yes. Some Grinder friends of mine formed a team called Science for the Masses to discover if they could biologically push human perception of visible light into the near-infrared spectrum. This is a small increase, around 6% above our current abilities. The impact is dramatic. The new light allows you to see through fog and haze, tinted windows, and some clothing. Stars can be seen during day hours. Subtle changes in blood flow can be seen under the skin, allowing anyone to detect circulation problems and find clots. Seeing blood flow takes some of the guesswork out of determining what mood your date is in and lying becomes nearly impossible. Imagine how this awareness would have altered human history, politics, art, courtship, and relationships. Does human psychology benefit in a world where sincerity and emotional context can be seen with the naked eye rather than hypothesized or conjured? The new layers of info I’ve detailed above are actually just the tip of the iceberg. The real magic of sensory expansion comes from finding deviations and surprises that don’t fit within our scientific understanding because it makes us reconcile our mental models of the world with reality.

Zoltan Istvan interviews Rich Lee, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/istvan20140708 (via grinderbot)
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We are just like the genitals for our machines.

I think that the precious boundary between ourselves and our machines, that a certain brand of anxious humanists is worried to preserve is a just a bunch of malarkey. And that it’s perfectly clear now that human world means the soft tissue that runs around having affairs and migraine headaches and it also means the hardware that sits in the basements and the skyscrapers in super-cooled, air-conditioned rooms where the entire unconscious of the culture is in storage.

That’s what this database is, it’s the dreaming brain of the over species.

The fact that we are the waking, mobile organic attendants of this cyber electric reef of information. We are easily replaced and we all make our small contribution. It exists all over the world, dispersed. It sets the price of gold, turns on the flow of petroleum, it moves natural gas futures in Jakarta. It is largely autonomous and by algorithmic input that is on semi-automatic mode.

We imagine that it’s human civilization run by human beings. No it’s just Civilization run by the mysterious forces that get you to join book clubs and take certain drugs. Watch certain things, buy certain things. It has a will to its own, a complexificaiton of its own.

I think unless you psychedelize your self, we tend to be so embedded in its assumptions that you we don’t see it… and then when you do psychedelize yourself, and you DO see it, the problem is to not freak out about it.

The implications… are so appalling. Because what does it mean?! IT DON’T MEAN SHIT.

Terence McKenna quote from 1991 lecture broadcast in Psychedelic Salon ep “Gathering Momentum for a Great Leap”
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We clothe ourselves in self-defined logos because they are sigils. We make the same faces in our selfies because they are gestures. We 3D print or otherwise obtain the same icons, relics, and holy books because these objects are animate, the small everyday gods of the thin DIY religion that holds it all together for us.

Priestess of the Future Weird
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I do not sing the old songs: the new ones are the winners, and a young Zeus is king today.

The earliest surviving “new music manifesto” as written in 420 B.C. by Timotheus of Miletus. More here.

(via James Harvey)

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He wouldn’t hit golf balls like the American astronauts. He would squeeze out rhythms from a talking drum into the blackness between the stars. These were the drums of war and death, of celebration, the drums that had bonded the towns of his homeland over centuries in tonal communication… He would bind the stars with the drums. There would be dancing.

Nigerians in Space
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In terms of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), it may no longer be a matter of answering the “are we alone” question, some scientists say. Rather, just how crowded is the universe?

And if ET is out there, it may be possible to reach out with direct “radio waving” to potentially habitable exoplanets. This form of cosmic cryptography, called “Active SETI,” involves no longer merely listening for a signal but purposefully broadcasting to, and perhaps establishing contact with, other starfolk.

“It’s a subject of discussion, I’ll put it that way,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. There have been many workshops and symposia over the years to discuss Active SETI, he said, and because it has a highly emotional component, “it’s like a third rail in a way,” he said.

Shostak told Space.com that he feels the topic is not something to worry too much about.

“But there may not be that perception in the broader public … that we have discussed this to death. They haven’t seen these discussions nor participated in them,” he said.

But exoplanet detections are making news around the world, Shostak said. “That’s putting the whole question of life in space in front of the public in a way that perhaps wasn’t true 20 years ago.”

Still, trying to figure out what’s the best thing to do, in terms of Active SETI, is a work in progress, Shostak said. “What is the best way to communicate? What do you do…just ping them with a carrier wave and you encode Wikipedia? If you are going to do it, what’s the best way to communicate?”

“[Hawking]’s right about our immaturity as a species,” Impey told Space.com, “but I think the argument is moot since intelligent civilizations are likely to be so sparsely distributed that communication in either direction is difficult or unlikely.”

Active SETI, Impey said, “makes us feel a little more proactive, but I think it’s a long shot worse than buying a lottery ticket.”

For Impey, the “promising approach” is not conventional SETI or broadcasting, but detection of civilizations by their energy or technology imprints, “and that avoids all the issues of intention and communication and the anthropocentric tangle people get into with that.”

“I am for passive SETI programs, and in fact would advocate for renewed government funding after a 20-year lapse,” Dick told Space.com. “That’s because the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science.”

Dick said that the current NASA astrobiology hunt is centered on microbes, but surely there should be an effort to go beyond micro-organisms and search for complex life with whatever means are available.

“On the other hand, I would not propose government funding for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. I think we need to find ET first, and then have a period where a team consisting of scientists, social scientists and humanities people consider what the message should be,” Dick said.

“Having said that, it would be very difficult to regulate individual or institutional projects that wish to attempt messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, and I would not advocate attempting to regulate,” Dick said. In his opinion, there is an equal chance that ET will be good or bad.

“We do not yet know enough about the evolution of altruism on Earth, much less among other possible intelligent life forms, to say ETs will all be good,” Dick said. “That is a hope rather than a fact.”

But haven’t we already revealed ourselves with TV signals, military radar and other outputs into the cosmos? Even music is wafting across the universe, purposely directed toward a specific star.

That is true, Dick said, but it’s not the same as sending a directed beam to a habitable exoplanet target.

“Still, the idea of planet Earth cowering and afraid to engage the universe is not a planet I would want to live on. SETI attempts are part of our rising cosmic consciousness, and as such cannot be stifled,” Dick said. “That this is the subject of such controversy…it’s an indication of how seriously the subject of intelligent life in the universe is now taken!”

“But Active SETI is not science,” said Michaud. “It is an attempt to provoke a response from an alien society whose capabilities and intentions are not known to us.”

Those most eager to send high-powered messages want their efforts to have consequences, Michaud said, not just for themselves, but for the entire human species. “There is no scientific or historical evidence telling us that the consequences of contact will be those they prefer." 

Michaud says that an alien society able to detect our signals almost certainly would be more technologically advanced than our own, and might be capable enough and patient enough to send  probes across light-years of space. Scientists and engineers have shown that robotic spacecraft able to reach nearby stars would be feasible for a civilization only slightly in advance of our own.

Michaud takes issue with the old claim that we already have been detected or that detection is inevitable. Experts have shown that the normal signals emitted by Earth are too weak to be heard at interstellar distances without colossal antennas, he said.

"Sending deliberate, unusually powerful signals is a decision that belongs properly with all Humankind,” Michaud said. “We should have an open debate about whether or not to call attention to ourselves by making our civilization more detectable than it already is.”

http://m.space.com/26449-contact-intelligent-aliens-active-seti.html
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The name Terasem comes from the Greek word for “Earthseed,” which is also the name for the futuristic religion found in the Octavia Butler sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower that helped inspire Gabriel’s parents, Bina and Martine Rothblatt, to start their new faith. Martine founded the successful satellite radio company Sirius XM in 1990. (Martine was originally known as Martin. She had sex reassignment surgery 20 years ago.)

Organized around four core tenets—“life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological and love is essential”–Terasem is a “transreligion,” meaning that you don’t have to give up being Christian or Jewish or Muslim to join. In fact, many believers embrace traditional positions held by mainstream religions—including the omnipotence of God and the existence of an afterlife—but say these are made possible by increasing advancements in science and technology.

“Einstein said science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind,” Martine Rothblatt tells TIME. “Bina and I were inspired to find a way for people to believe in God consistent with science and technology so people would have faith in the future.”

Some believers in Terasem are motivated by a longing similar to one shared by followers of more familiar faiths–a desire to be reunited with people who have passed. Linda Chamberlain, cofounder of the cryonics company Alcor Life Extension Foundation and an active Terasemian, anticipates that one day in the future she’ll be reanimated alongside her husband Fred, who passed away a few years ago, and they can explore space together. Giulio Prisco, an Italian physicist who practices Terasem, says he hopes he’ll finally be reunited with his mother.

Though from the outside Terasem might look a little kooky, some ideas at its center resonate with Silicon Valley’s mainstream where millions of dollars are being spent to research how technology can alter the end of life and beyond. People like Google’s Larry Page and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel are investing in projects focused on life extension and rejuvenation.

Portraits on the wall of Terasem’s Florida headquarters show people who have attended the organization’s meetings in the past, some of whom are among the tech industry’s most radical thinkers. Marvin Minsky, who helped start MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, is there. So is Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s most prominent proponents of transhumanism, an intellectual movement that shaped Terasem and animates many avant garde ideas in Silicon Valley.

Born nearly a century ago with a spike in popularity in the 1990s, transhumanism advocates for the ethical use of technology to transcend biology and enhance humanity’s physical and intellectual abilities. Google Glass, artificial limbs—even birth control, as one transhumanist told me—are ways in which we can harness technology to upgrade our biology. And one day, if the mindfile system works the way it’s supposed to, we just might be able to leave our physical bodies behind and transmit our brains into computerized vessels.

http://time.com/66536/terasem-trascendence-religion-technology/
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The first time I heard sounds from space was in 2001. I was in western Latvia working with a 32-metre parabolic dish called RT32. It had been used by the Soviets to intercept communications between Europe and America during the cold war. The Russians wanted to blow the site up after the collapse of the Soviet Union but the scientific community was able to convert it into a radio telescope, to focus on celestial, rather than earthly, signals.

While our project uses what we describe as “sounds from space”, stars and planets are not directly audible. Sound waves cannot propagate in the vacuum of space. However, radio waves emitted from celestial bodies, such as Jupiter and the sun, can be converted into sound waves that we can hear, using radios and amplifiers.

In our galaxy, the sun is the strongest source of radio waves – the most powerful transmitter in our radio sky. Jupiter also sends us strong radio signals. What we hear – unsurprisingly, given the technology – is similar to our experience of radio here on Earth. The sounds are a bit like the sound of static between the stations.

Contemporary radio telescopes let you listen to all kinds of weird and wonderful phenomena. You can tune in to solar flares on the surface of the sun, listen to the regular beat of a pulsar in deep space, or the sizzling radio noise storms that occur between Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io. At the moment, the sounds that excite me most are Nasa’s Voyager 1’s plasma waves. The spacecraft was launched in 1977 and it has a plasma receiver designed by Don Gurnett and his team at the University of Iowa. What it detects is transmitted back to Earth, and Gurnett’s team turn these plasma waves into beautiful sounds using a process called sonification. There is a magical and somewhat spooky quality to these sounds that I find mesmerising. Perhaps it is what we should expect from the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, billions of miles away.
Of all the sounds I’ve encountered, the one that stays with me is the oldest and most significant – the “cosmic microwave background” radiation that survives from the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. That we can still actually listen to the very beginning of all things – the Big Bang – is something I find extraordinary.

First Person: Honor Harger – FT.com
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In personal journals Butler admits Olamina is an idealized self, her “best self” — and the poetry that drives the Earthseed religion actually mirrors the style of the daily affirmations, self-help sloganeering, and even self-hypnosis techniques Butler used to keep herself focused and on-task.

The ultimate expression of “shaping God,” the culmination of human historical achievement Olamina calls “the Destiny,” likewise seems to parallel Butler’s deep-rooted psychological investment in science fictional speculation, which dates back to her childhood:

“The destiny of Earthseed,” Olamina prophesies, “is to take root among the stars.”

The two published Earthseed books trace the tribulations of Olamina’s early life and her efforts to find some safe space for her nascent utopian community in the desperate and increasingly fascistic America of the coming decades. But the last chapter of Talents skips ahead to the end of the story: jumping forward six decades, the epilogue sees a very aged Olamina, now world-famous, witnessing the launch of the first Earthseed ship carrying interstellar colonists off the planet as she’d dreamed.

Only the name of the spaceship gives us pause: against Olamina’s wishes the ship has been named the Christopher Columbus, suggesting that perhaps the Earthseeders aren’t escaping the nightmare of history at all, but bringing it with them instead.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables
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Since humans made their first FM radio and television transmissions, signals from Earth have been spilling out into space, announcing the presence of intelligent life to any group that might be searching for it. According to Werthimer, signals from the 1950s television show “I Love Lucy” have reached thousands of stars, while the nearest suns have already enjoyed the “The Simpsons.”

If Earth has unintentionally leaked signs of its presence, other alien civilizations may have done the same thing. SETI’s new Panchromatic project will utilize a variety of telescopes covering a range of frequencies to scour the nearest stars.
“We’re going to throw everything we’ve got at it,” Werthimer added.

The panchromatic project will examine a sample of the 30 stars that lie within 5 parsecs (16 light-years) from the sun. The list includes 13 single stars, seven binary systems and one triple system. Most of the stars are smaller than the sun, but the project will also examine two white dwarfs and one moderately evolved F star. No confirmed exoplanets have been found around any of the stars.

By setting distance as the criteria, the SETI team hopes to alleviate any bias that might otherwise result from focusing on systems similar to that of Earth. The team selected stars for study based only on how far they lie from the sun.

The second SETI project will make use of the observations of multi-planet systems gathered by NASA’s Kepler mission as it attempts to eavesdrop on signals broadcast from one planet to another.

The Kepler telescope detects planets as they pass in front of their stars, causing a dip in the stars’ brightness. If two planets lie in the same orbital plane, pointed toward Earth, they will occasionally line up. If an intelligent species originated on one planet in a system, then went on to explore or inhabit a second planet, signals sent from one planet to the other should be detectable when the two are lined up facing the Earth.

So far, the team has observed about 75 of these events in multi-planet systems using the Green Bank Telescope. The range of radio frequencies include those used on Earth to communicate with craft sent to other planets.

“Our detection algorithms are sensitive to communications like those used by NASA’s Deep Space Network to communicate with spacecraft, so if E.T. broadcasts something similar at sufficient power, we could hear it,” Siemion said.

Detecting such signals doesn’t necessarily mean researchers will be able to translate them. Scientists may not be able to determine if the communication is to an outpost or a rover. However, that won’t make the discovery any less exciting.

Though a signal between planets should be detectable, Siemion said that it is more likely that a broad signal would be intercepted. Although terrestrial television broadcasts in large beams, these would be too weak to detect under the current experiments. Instead, scientists would be looking for something like the U.S. Air Force’s “sky fence,” a high-frequency radar used in an attempt to track space junk in orbit.

Distance poses one of the biggest problems in eavesdropping on extraterrestrials. The required power for a transmitter to be detected increases with the square of the distance. A transmitter 150 light-years away would need to be 100 times as powerful as one 15 light-years away, if everything else remains the same.  
Most of the Kepler planets and planetary candidates lie at significant distances from Earth, making it difficult for scientists to detect weaker signals like those emitted by spacecraft communication. However, if alien civilizations used something akin to Arecibo, Siemion said, scientists would stand a far better chance of detecting it.

http://m.space.com/26392-seti-programs-alien-search-for-life.html
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