X-Message-Number: 16865
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Re:  Rael himself on the Art Bell show...
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 21:11:51 -0700

In Cryonet #16839, "john grigg" wrote:

>  From: "john grigg" <>
>  Subject: Rael himself on the Art Bell show...
>  Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 04:02:36

[snip]

>  What worried me was that people would make some sort of comparison
>  between the Raellians and the extropians.  There are seeming
>  similarities for those who are not aware of the gaping differences.  >  I 
>would almost call the Raellians a "counterfeit" religious version
>  of transhumanism.  If any of you had listened to him for four hours >  
>you would have picked up on this.

I heard the first hour of the interview with Rael -- barely.  I could only 
pick it up on a distant station.

Setting aside the sleezy aspects of Rael's character -- because he seems to 
have invented a religion based on science-fictional premises to make money, 
like someone else I could name, except that I don't want the harassment -- 
what impressed me with Rael's message is that it reminded me of a kind of 
creative problem-solving technique I've encountered before.  Basically you 
try to imagine how an advanced civilization would solve a problem, then try 
conceptually to reverse-engineer the solution in terms of what we could do 
given what we know today.  Hence his elaborate scenario of conquering death 
through the growth of adult human clones and the transfer of your 
neurological structure from your dying body onto the "blank" brain of the 
clone.

Rael proposes this because of his contention that the "Elohim" in his 
ufological fantasy do something similar, or else that this is how we could 
attain the same result that his advanced aliens attain through other means.  
(I didn't pick up on whether he makes a distinction like that.)

So I do find an interesting signal through all the noise.  If Rael had 
proposed this idea as a speculation verging on a serious proposal -- How 
would technologically advanced aliens conquer death, and could we just about 
be able to try it? -- then he would definitely belong to at least the 
fringes of defensible Transhumanist thinking.  But I agree that because he 
mixes this superficially plausible idea with a lot of weirdness about space 
aliens, he is promulgating a "counterfeit" perversion of Transhumanism.

Meanwhile, I was wondering if we could try to "borrow" some feasible 
solutions to the death problem from thinkable future civilizations.  I found 
a link which describes this sort of creative thinking, for what it's worth:

http://www.winwenger.com/beachhd.htm

Trans-millennially yours,

Mark Plus, Expansionary
"Working to make death obsolescent in the 21st Century."


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