[ExI] In memory of Dan Massey

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> -----

From: Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2013 20:04:22 +0100
To: Alison Gardner Massey <alison at venusplusx.org>,
	Martine Rothblatt <martine4 at gmail.com>,
	Linda Chamberlain <linda at boundlesslife.com>,
	Loraine Rhodes <lori at terasemcentral.org>,
	Khannea Suntzu <khannea.suntzu at gmail.com>,
	Aubrey de Grey <aubrey at sens.org>, Kim Violet <kimviolet7 at gmail.com>,
	Lincoln Cannon <lincoln at metacannon.net>,
	turingchurch at googlegroups.com, transfigurism at googlegroups.com
Subject: In memory of Dan Massey
Reply-To: turingchurch at googlegroups.com

In memory of Dan Massey
http://turingchurch.com/2013/02/01/in-memory-of-dan-massey/

Our dear friend Dan Massey is no longer with us. We mourn a
Renaissance man interested in everything under the stars, a visionary
thinker, a relentless social activist, a scientist, a teacher, and a
friend.

I met Dan for the first time at Transvision 2010 in Milan, Italy
(summary and video of Dan’s presentation). The day before the
Conference Dan and Alison came to Como with K&K and went to Bellagio
on the lake by boat.

I remember the intriguing hints that Dan kept dropping about a “Cosmic
Government.” Then I had frequent opportunities to discuss mythologies
and cosmologies with Dan, among many other things. He was really
interested in everything. He was persuaded that death is not the end,
and expected to go on an eternal, infinite journey after death. Dan,
may the eternal cosmic winds be fair and wonderful to you.

Participating in the August 2012 Discussion Group of the Mormon
Transhumanist Association, Dan described very eloquently the idea,
also outlined in his comment to How to cope with death: the Cosmist
‘Third Way’, that other civilizations in the universe may have already
developed resurrection technologies and may be already “providing
resurrection services” to less advanced civilizations like ours. If
this is the case, we and everyone else in the universe will be
resurrected by the “Cosmic Government.”

Here is a (slightly edited, but almost literal) transcript of Dan’s
words, beginning at minute 23 in the video below:

"I think you start out realizing that the universe is vastly older
than the little area within the light sphere that we can see from this
planet on the backwater of the Milky Way galaxy.
Let’s say just for the sake of argument that it is not merely a few
billion years old, but it is a few trillion years old, maybe even
quadrillion years old, I have no idea obviously, no way to find out,
really, right now anyway, but I feel that there is a well organized
cosmic government and civilization, that populates literally millions
and millions, I really should say billions and billions (Carl Sagan)
of planets scattered throughout this part of the universe, and they
are all, you know, most part of them are in some degree of
communication with each other, there is some sort of coordinated sense
of purpose in this community, and they have been at it for a very long
time by our standards.
So during this time, you expect that this kinds of things, life
extension, and mind uploading, and all these other technologies that
we speculate about, would have been long explored, analyzed, built on,
other things developed. Frankly, I think the promises of many
religions of personal immortality on some terms, sometimes the terms
are absurd, but the idea of personal immortality is not absurd at all,
because just as we think that we could resurrect our dead, and we
might go out and help other people to resurrect their dead, well,
rather than being at the front-end of that process, we are at the
back-end of that process, we are the clients, not the service company
for the project.
Why? Because there is some really big project going on in the
universe, and it’s bringing about the universe in unity and harmony.
It has really long ways to go, but on this planet it has incredibly
long ways to go, because, you know, whether you call it the fall of
man or the planetary rebellion or any of these things that are written
down in some garbled form in the myth books of world religions, the
fact is that something very bad happened here a long time ago, and we
have been pretty much in the backwater, cut off from cosmic
civilization ever since."

This eulogy honors only one of the many, many facets of Dan. See also
this long video interview with Dan and Alison on sexual freedom, the
occupy movement, transhumanism, the singularity, physics, religion and
spirituality, and their forthcoming book. LGBT rights and quantum
entanglement in the same talk, and see his articles here and on his
website Venus+X.

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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