The Conquerors

Transhumanism

modern movement · Modern Western · 1960s onward · New York / California

Death is no cosmic law -- it is a technical bug that can be solved. Don't treat biology as a limitation: edit your genes, embed consciousness into silicon, merge with machines, and export your consciousness across the universe to colonize the cosmos.

Who holds the steering wheel?

The highest agency value on the spectrum: the greatest act of human agency is refusing the death sentence your own cells have written and challenging the creator's very design -- the most head-on challenge to God, even if terrifying, scary and downright disrespectful. Focus on the possibilities of the future, not the patterns of the past.

Agency+88 est.

Estimated from its tier position. Score +88.

Scorecard · eight factors

Agency: +88 est.
Flexibility: 75
Science fit: 90
Pragmatism: 55
Accessibility: 65
Practice load: 35
Community: 45
Wellbeing evidence: 20

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Core idea

The framework

What Is Actually On The Table

quadrant

Sorting transhumanist ambitions by what you can do this year and what remains speculative, and by whether it targets the body or the mind.

1
Cognitive tools — Sleep, training, neurofeedback and early clinical brain implants for paralysis.
2
Mind uploading — Copying a mind to a substrate; no working path exists and the philosophy is unsettled.
3
Longevity protocols — Exercise, metabolic health, biomarker tracking, senolytic and gene-therapy trials.
4
Rebuilt bodies — Germline editing, engineered organs, cryonic revival; largely unproven or banned.

The honest transhumanist position is that the left-hand column is real and boring and the right-hand column is exciting and unproven.

Vocabulary

Key concepts

death as a solvable bugcryonicsmind uploadinggene editingtransitional humanscybernetic species

Where it came from

Origins

Julian Huxley

1887-1975

The evolutionary biologist and first director-general of UNESCO who gave the word its modern meaning in a 1957 essay, arguing that humanity could consciously transcend itself. His association with the eugenics movement of his era is part of the record and is one reason critics treat the lineage with suspicion.

FM-2030

1930-2000

Born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, the son of an Iranian diplomat, he changed his name to encode the year he would turn 100 and expected to be ageless. He taught at the New School, wrote Are You a Transhuman?, and treated his own death from pancreatic cancer as an interruption; his body is in cryonic storage in Arizona.

Nick Bostrom and David Pearce

founded 1998

The two philosophers who founded the World Transhumanist Association, giving the movement an academic footing, a declaration and an argumentative style. Bostrom later founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and wrote Superintelligence, which did more than anything else to put AI risk on the agenda of governments.

The Transhumanist Declaration 1998, revised 2009
A short collective statement of principles: that human nature can be improved, that technological risk must be taken seriously, that access should be broad and choice individual. It is the closest thing the movement has to a constitution, and it is deliberately short.
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant 2005
Bostrom's parable of a kingdom that pays an enormous annual tribute to a dragon until someone asks why. It is the single most effective piece of transhumanist rhetoric ever written, and it takes fifteen minutes to read.
The Singularity Is Near 2005
Kurzweil's book-length argument that exponential technological trends converge on a transformation of human intelligence within decades. Its specific dates have been widely disputed and it remains the movement's most widely read manifesto.

In the long story

Milestones

399 BCETrial of SocratesSocrates is tried and executed for impiety and introducing a personal daimonion over the civic gods — philosophy colliding with state religion.
c. 341–270 BCEEpicurean critique of superstitionEpicurus teaches that the gods do not intervene in human affairs, aiming to dispel fear-driven superstition through materialist atomism; Lucretius later carries the argument to Rome.
1624 CEHerbert of Cherbury's De VeritateFoundational deist treatise deriving religion from reason and five innate 'common notions', rejecting miracles and revelation as unnecessary.
1618–1648 CEThirty Years' War and WestphaliaEurope's most destructive religious war kills 20–40% of Germany's population; the Peace of Westphalia (1648) extends toleration to Calvinism and subordinates religion to state sovereignty.
1670 CESpinoza's TractatusSpinoza pioneers biblical criticism, treating scripture as a historical human document and advocating separation of philosophy from theology.
1687 CENewton's PrincipiaThe clockwork universe of immutable mathematical law becomes the scientific backdrop for deism's non-interventionist creator.
1689 CELocke's Letter Concerning TolerationLocke argues faith cannot be coerced and the state should be neutral among sects — a foundation of religious liberty.
1696–1730 CEDeist classicsToland's 'Christianity Not Mysterious' (1696) and Tindal's 'Christianity as Old as the Creation' (1730) argue reason suffices for religion; Voltaire popularizes the critique across Europe.
1748 CEHume against miraclesHume's Enquiry argues testimony for miracles always fails against uniform experience; his posthumous Dialogues (1779) dismantle the design argument.
1770 CEd'Holbach's System of NatureCalled the first positive, unambiguous statement of atheism in the West.

See the full timeline →

Try it

Practices

Quantified baseline

weekly · 10m

Pick four numbers you can measure without buying anything: resting heart rate, sleep duration, weight, and how far you can walk or run in twelve minutes. Record them weekly in one place. The point is not the numbers but having a real baseline before you change anything, which almost nobody bothers to establish.

the quantified self movement, named by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in 2007

The boring protocol

daily · 45m

Do the two things with the strongest evidence behind them: regular resistance training two or three times a week and consistent sleep at consistent hours. Longevity practitioners with actual credentials keep arriving at the same unexciting answer. This is general information, not medical advice; check with a clinician before changing exercise or medication.

the evidence-based core of contemporary longevity medicine, as distinct from its supplement industry

The mortality paperwork

as-needed · 90m

Whatever you believe about revival, do the documents: a will, an advance healthcare directive, an organ-donor decision, and instructions for your digital accounts. Cryonics members do this too, since membership is a contract funded by life insurance rather than a mystical arrangement. This is one afternoon and it removes an enormous amount of future harm.

the practical side of cryonics membership, which is largely legal and insurance paperwork

The personal archive

monthly · 30m

Once a month, record something durable about yourself: a voice memo, a written entry, an answer to a question you have never been asked. Whether or not you believe a mind can be reconstructed from records, the archive is real and the people who come after you will have it. Keep it in a format that will still open in twenty years.

the lifelogging and mind-archiving strand of transhumanist practice

Get it wrong less

Common misconceptions

MythTranshumanism is science fiction with no real organisations behind it.

ActuallyIt has been institutionally organised since the 1980s. Humanity+ grew out of the World Transhumanist Association founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in 1998; Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have operated for decades and hold hundreds of patients in storage between them; and billions in capital now sit behind longevity ventures such as Altos Labs and Calico. You may think it wrong, but it is not imaginary.

MythTranshumanists think technology will fix everything and have no critics worth reading.

ActuallyThe movement's own founders wrote extensively about existential risk, and Bostrom's most famous book is a warning about artificial intelligence, not a celebration. The external critique is also serious: Francis Fukuyama called it the world's most dangerous idea, disability scholars have challenged its assumptions about what counts as an improvement, and recent critics have argued the whole cluster of ideas functions as a secular eschatology.

Learn it

A short course

Separate what is actually available from what is a promise, then decide what you would do with either.

Module 1
The Dragon
You can state the core argument that ageing is a problem rather than a fact, and feel its rhetorical force.
Do: Read Bostrom's Dragon-Tyrant fable and write down the first objection that occurred to you.
Module 2
What Is Real Today
You know which interventions have solid evidence, which are in trials, and which are aspiration.
Do: Sort ten claimed longevity interventions into evidence-based, in-trial and unsupported.
Module 3
Cryonics
You understand what cryopreservation does and does not preserve, and how it is actually paid for.
Do: Read one cryonics organisation's membership documents and one cryobiologist's critique.
Module 4
The Uploading Problem
You can articulate why a perfect copy of your mind may not be you, and why the answer is not obvious.
Do: Write your own answer to the teleporter problem in a paragraph, then argue the other side.
Module 5
The Case Against
You have engaged the serious objections: access and inequality, disability critiques, and the meaning-of-mortality argument.
Do: Write the strongest bioconservative case against your own current position.

Argue with it

Would you answer like they would?

You have decided to take longevity seriously and you have a budget. A newsletter recommends an expensive supplement stack; a friend says just go to the gym.

A friend argues that indefinite lifespan would drain life of urgency, and that knowing you will die is what makes anything matter.

A new enhancement becomes available. It works, it is safe, and at launch it costs more than most people earn in a decade.

Alive today

Vitality & community

living · trend growing

small formal membership (Humanity+, Alcor's ~1,400 signed-up members) but ideas now mainstream in tech; longevity biotech manages billions

Silicon Valley's longevity scene (Bryan Johnson's Blueprint, Altos Labs), cryonics facilities in Arizona and Michigan, rationalist forums and AI labs.

Where to join

Humanity+ orgThe successor to the World Transhumanist Association founded in 1998; the movement's main membership organisation, publisher and conference host, though smaller now than the ideas it seeded.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation orgBased in Scottsdale, Arizona, operating since 1972, with roughly 1,400 signed-up members and over 200 patients in cryogenic storage; the Cryonics Institute in Michigan is its long-standing nonprofit counterpart.
Lifespan.io and the Foresight Institute orgWhere the practical work happens now: crowdfunding rejuvenation research and running technical workshops on longevity, nanotechnology and neurotech.
LessWrong and r/transhumanism forumThe rationalist forum is where much of the serious argument about minds, uploading and AI risk actually takes place; the subreddit is broader, more enthusiastic and less rigorous.

Future Day 1 March
An informal transhumanist observance proposed in 2012 for celebrating and thinking seriously about the future; low-key, largely online, and about as close to a holiday as the movement gets.
Longevity and cryonics conferences through the year
Alcor, Humanity+ and the longevity biotech sector each run recurring gatherings where members, researchers and investors argue in the same room.

Transhumanists say ageing is a disease and that accepting it is a failure of nerve. Critics say a movement funded by the very rich, promising to abolish the one thing everyone currently shares, is building the most permanent inequality in history. If the first enhancement that genuinely works costs a million dollars, what should happen next?

In the world

Faces & culture

FM-2030 · Ray Kurzweil · Nick Bostrom · Bryan Johnson

Black Mirror's 'San Junipero' and Altered Carbon dramatize mind uploading; Netflix's Don't Die mainstreamed Bryan Johnson's anti-aging protocol.

A 45-year-old treats aging as an engineering backlog -- sleep, VO2 max and biomarkers tracked like server uptime -- betting that staying alive twenty more years buys a ticket to longevity escape velocity.