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The Dream of Mass-Produced People
I recently heard about a tech startup called R3 Bio, which intends to produce literally brainless human clones of wealthy clients, which can be harvested for organs or used for full-body transplants. Theoretically, this would allow for people to live forever, since their failing bodies can be replaced to preserve their minds. This is a… — read more
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A Promised Land in Space?
In The Expanse, one of the major early plot points is that the Mormon church, far in the future, is building an enormous generation ship to travel to another star. The ship is called the Nauvoo, and it was supposed to go to Tau Ceti. Ultimately, the ship does not go on its interstellar journey,… — read more
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Problem Gambling
Everyone hates paying for laundry. If you’re lucky, it works like an old-school vending machine, where you feed in your card and it spits it back out and you’re ready to wash. If you’re not, you have to deal with getting rolls of quarters from the bank to feed into a coin drop that only… — read more
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Deep-Space Prehistory
As part of a project I have been doing research for, I recently did a bit of reading into the Toba catastrophe hypothesis. The theory goes that, at one point, the human population was fairly large and spread out into several parts of Eurasia, but then the eruption of the Toba supervolcano 74,000 years ago… — read more
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World-City Biomass
Did you know that there is less biomass of human being in the world than there is biomass of virus? I found this fact a bit unintuitive when I read it, but it does make sense on further consideration. According to a paper released by PNAS, there is about 0.06 gigatons (Gt) of carbon in… — read more
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Transhumanism is Occultism
Recently, I have been taking the time to study a variety of occult movements, and I have been struck by the similarity between occult literature and transhumanist theory. On some reflection, I believe that transhumanism can be classified as an occult system of belief. First, what does it mean for something to be an occult… — read more
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Rewilding – A Short Story
My boss got de-domesticated. It’s all bullshit, of course. Just alpha male marketing spin, like nootropics and boner pills, for guys who are insecure. I figured that I couldn’t judge too much, back then. I got my face chopped up in my teens, around the same time I got top surgery. We all do what… — read more
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Alternate Singularities
I’ve been thinking a little bit about the idea of the singularity, recently. It’s a common tech idea, dating back to at least the 80s. The general premise is that computers make research faster, which lets people make faster computers, which makes research faster, until the process starts automating itself with artificial intelligence and then… — read more
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The Holiday – A Short Story
My boss thought that the office needed a morale activity. I don’t know why, and I was in a bad mood after he told us that it was mandatory and that it was happening on Saturday. When he stood in the middle of the office and announced it, things got quiet for a bit,… — read more
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The Broadening of Cyberpunk
I recently read the 2023 novel The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O’Keefe, and I found it moderately enjoyable. It’s somewhere between a zombie horror story, a (very contemporary) romance novel, and a space opera, but it also has most of the characteristics of cyberpunk. So do a lot of novels, these days. In The… — read more
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J. E. Landau 