[ExI] Folding at Home

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Sat Jan 3 21:51:30 UTC 2009


"Transhumanism is both a reason-based philosophy and a cultural movement
that affirms the possibility and desirability of
fundamentally improving the human condition by means of science and
 technology." (Max More)

Yet, many of us from time to time brings up the idea that organised
transhumanism should "take things into its hands" and directly deal with
advancing techno-science and applications that may be relevant to a
posthuman change.

Now, I personally have nothing against grassroot efforts, but I have always
very skeptical on the opportunity to invest direectly the very scarce
resources of organised transhumanism on garden-variety space programs,
biohacking, domestic-refrigerator cryonics or backyard AI research. After
all, neocon intellectuals or business lobbyists eager to see Iraq under
attack did not pack their kitchen knives or hunting rifles for a plane trip
to Babylonia, but made what was necessary to have the US armed forces
involved and to direct their actions to this effect. :-)

Accordingly, I believe that H+ activists wishing to get involved in the
practicalities of H+ tech should rather get in their private capacity a
research job with IBM or Pfizer or Novartis or DARPA or NASA or CERN or the
academia, establish a visionary startup company and have it listed in the
NASDAQ, or launch an Open Source project.

Yet, I think that a nice opportunity to do something good in practical terms
*and* for the visibility and promotion of transhumanism is currently offered
by the Folding at Home Project <http://folding.stanford.edu/>. I believe that I
need not emphasise here the importance of proteomics in biotechnological
terms, nor to explain what distributed computing is and why it can make a
difference with regard to "intractable" issues such as protein foldings.

Thus, I am pleased to inform you that as a personal initiative I have
established a TranshumanistFoldingTeam within such project, whose ìnumber is
*157440*, to which I strongly encourage all of you to subscribe by offering
your spare computing cycles, be they those of a x86
CPU<http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download>,
or even more profitably those of an ATI or Nvidia
GPU<http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther>or of the
Cell processor in a PS3.

If a sufficient critical mass of transhumanists around the world could be
involved, and collectively make the project's top ranking
contributors' list<http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Points>this
would pay the additional dividend of showing everybody that a
significant group of transhumanists exists who are ready to put at least the
relevant minor effort involved where their not-so-loud mouth is.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20090103/a3ead180/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list