 Our next speaker will be Julio Prisco. Julio is a writer, technology expert, futurist, and transhumanist. A former manager in European Science and Technology Centers, he writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including science, information technology, emerging technologies, virtual worlds, space exploration, and future studies. He is especially interested in the convergence of science, technology, and spirituality. Please welcome Julio. Thank you very much, Lincoln. Well, those who listen to me already know that I don't always repeat what's written on the screen, so I'm going to ask you to read the screen and to listen to me at the same time. It's kind of a double attention effort. This is a very high tech. Do I move to the next one in the normal way? Okay, yes. Okay. Yes, I will. So looking at today's world and looking at our society, I realize that we, and by we, I mean, we living in the western, between brackets, developed world, I belong to this group. We have lost two very important things. The first is the happiness that comes from the ability to believe in traditional formulations of religion. And the simple example is how to cope with the unhappiness when someone who is close to you dies. The traditional answer to that is that, okay, you don't have to worry, you don't have to be so sad because you will meet again all of your loved ones in an afterlife. That's a very good consolation. Perhaps many of us know too much science to believe in traditional formulations of afterlife like that. We have kind of lost the ability to suspend this belief. Another thing that we have lost is the sense of the frontier. Now, I see that most of you are Americans here and this means that your grandfather, or perhaps their grandfathers came here to America from somewhere else. And the fact that you are here today means that things worked out well, at least for their descendants. The frontier is somewhere else where you can go. If what is around you is not interesting enough and it is not good enough for you, when your grandfathers arrived in America, maybe their children went waste, came, for example, here in Utah. So you had always something else where you could go. Unfortunately, for many of us today, it seems that there is nowhere else where we can go. We have lost this dream of the frontier, but the new frontiers are the stars. We will go to the stars, we will make wonderful things, we will see wonderful things, and one of the things that will happen is that we will find ways to make the promise of religions come true. For next year, I suggest to make the thumbnail here on the screen a bit bigger. Okay, this is what happened. We will move to the stars. We will meet and merge with extremely advanced beings. Thank you so much. That's great. The power of technology will enable us to meet with super advanced beings among the stars and perhaps to become super advanced beings ourselves. And this is what I call the new cosmic frontier. I want to... Right. When we think of all things that will happen in the future of our species and the future of the universe, it's important that we can find the way to think that we ourselves will be part of that. Even if these things will happen thousands of years from now, we need to think, at least I need to think, that somehow we will be part of that. We will be resurrected in a future where these things will happen. And we, here, are all transhumanists. We think that technology will create a radically better future, but that will not necessarily happen next year. Or in 10 years, some of the things that we want to see will need hundreds and thousands of years to happen. I think in order to make peace with ourselves, we transhumanists must embrace the concept of technological resurrection and religion should not fight science. It happens so often that religion is against science because it sees science as a threat. Actually, science is not a threat to religion. I believe that science is the very means by which the transcendence promised by religion will be achieved. So we need new spiritual social movements to say all that, or perhaps old spiritual movements that reformulate their message in a suitable way. I like to use very much this image. There is a unicorn, and I like to believe in unicorns. It makes me happy. Being happy makes me a better person. So unicorns can make me and all of you a better person. There is a little problem here. And the little problem is that we have been all over the earth. Don't forget that there is no frontier anymore. So we have been everywhere, and we have never found any unicorn anywhere. This is so bad. So I must be very unhappy, but wait a sec. Okay, maybe there are no unicorns here and now, but we can always go somewhere where we can find unicorns, maybe on some other stars. And if there are no unicorns, we can make unicorns ourselves through biotechnology or virtual reality technology. The bottom line is that if unicorns are something that we want to have in the universe, we can engineer a universe with unicorns. Of course I'm using the unicorn as a metaphor for all the kind of religious concepts that we would like to believe in. Here is to the unicorns. Let me come to my most important point. I've been talking of technological restoration, thousands of years in the future. Is that going to happen? If you ask me the question, of course my answer is I don't have the foggiest idea. That's for very future scientists to find out. I can give you a couple of hints. What things that we can think now that may be somewhat reasonably similar to future resurrection technologies. We are all familiar with mind uploading. It basically means that you make a copy of your mind to a computer file. Or a concept to a land that technological details took over, but we are going to get a full presentation about mind uploading from Randall Coen in the afternoon. Let's assume the feasibility of mind uploading. You need to have access to the brain that you want to copy, which may be easy if you have the brain. It may be a bit more difficult if you don't have the brain. For example, if the brain took copies of something that doesn't exist anymore because its owner died thousands of years ago. It seems like a difficult problem. How to solve that problem? We don't know now, but there are scientists who work in the remotest fringes of theoretical physics who imagine that maybe some kind of like information link between different regions of spacetime so that from here and now, you can access information of what happens somewhere else. And in other times, thousands of years ago, this is the concept that many people refer to as time scanning or sometimes quantum archeology by using some very weird quantum effects that we cannot describe now, but we know from studying quantum physics that the universe is much stranger than what our intuitive models say. We can access information, we can access very high resolution information from the past. That's what I hope our descendants will find out how to make happen. So with the information recovered from here, you can recover the information that was in this brain, you can upload it to this computer file and resurrect the owner of that brain to the present here and now. Now, if you ask me how long do you think we will need to develop that kind of technology, my intuitive answers will be we will need hundreds or probably thousands of years, but there are some science fiction novels. For example, I do recommend that you read The Light of Other Days, written by Stephen Baxter with the collaboration of Arthur C. Clarke. They imagine the development of time scanning and the resuration technology in only a couple of centuries from now. For those who haven't read the book, I recommend to read so I don't give you any spoilers. I will not tell you exactly what technologies they will use. But if you read the book, you will find that it makes some kind of sense and they may even be correct. I don't really expect to see resurrection technology in 200 years, but you never know. Maybe I'm too pessimist and I'm wrong. Of course, we have to mention those who had very similar idea before. That's basically what Nikolai Fyodorov said. He said in the language of his time, so what he said may seem a little bit naive to us today, but the concept is the same, that science will find ways to resurrect the dead. I recommend that you read this book. It came out last year. It's a very good explanation of the philosophy known as Russian Cosmism. And if you can find it, I recommend that you watch a film which was aired by the BBC in 2010 by George Kerry. The film was called Knocking Heaven's Door. It's a history of Russian Cosmism and the influence that it had on the development of science and especially the space program in Russia and the former Soviet Union. I think you can find it on the torrent side. Oh my, I shouldn't have said that, perhaps. Okay, Emma. I wish to invite you to read. I want to read out this beautiful word by our friend William Bembridge in an article of 2009 called Religion for a Galactic Civilization. It's actually Religion for a Galactic Civilization 2.0 because it was inspired by an article by Bembridge in 1982. What he's saying here is that we need the reformulations of religions that will help us to move, to start moving on our journey toward the cosmic frontier. I hope everyone has had the time to read. So a few years ago, here I and a few others started an organization called Order of Cosmic Engineers to implement something similar to the new spiritual movement described by Bill Bembridge in the article. And we had a lot of interesting discussion for a few years now. The thing didn't go anywhere, basically because there were too many of us. There were too many very motivated people who were fighting about exactly what to write in the first description of our ideas. And when you have many people together, you always have someone who wants to put one idea in and maybe is not so excited by some of the other ideas. So at the end, you have many, many, many discussions interesting in themselves, but then at the end nothing gets done because too many cooks spoil the soup. And this that I call prophecy by commit, it doesn't really seem to work. I'm too pessimist perhaps because Bengersl says that the prophecy by commit is exactly what we should do and we should build new spiritual movements by crowdsourcing their development to as many persons as we can reach. It's very difficult to do. The examples of new religion visions that we have seen in the last few decades normally come from one individual. And the first example that comes to mind is Martin Rothblatt's TheraSem movement which is a very coherent new formulation of spirituality and you have a very coherent new religion also in Ben Goertzel's The Cosmist Manifesto. Also in Mike Perry's book it's really too bad that Mike is not with us today. It seems he had some conflicts in agenda. There's also a new transhumanist religious book came out last year by a British gentleman called Dirk Berure. The book is called The Praxis and I recommend to read it. It's a very small book. You can read that in one hour and it says the important things. Now here I have left many things out because the list is of new religious movements that have been developed in the last couple of decades. But of course if I wanted to extend to the past there is a very simple example that comes to our mind and that everyone here is familiar with which is the example of Joseph Smith who created and everyone correct me if I'm wrong a new religion basically by himself. Since I was not raised in the church I'm not very familiar with Joseph Smith but I try to familiarize myself with his work by reading what I can find and the impression I always had is that Joseph Smith was a real revolutionary. He said things completely different from what the people around him said and yesterday took him to a friend I said something like well if Joseph Smith was alive today he would be probably excommunicated from the Mormon church. I don't really want to go to detail on that but let's discuss that later and move to other things. Let's move about how to bring our ideas to the market. Yes, we are a handful of enthusiasts who preach to the convert the obscure cartons of the internet we don't want to see any of that anymore. When I come here next year I want to see this auditorium full how many people can fit like a couple of hundred and fifty something like that, okay 300 I want to see 300 people sitting many people standing and many people standing outside waiting for the mount to come in because our ideas are really beautiful they can give you happiness so that's why we must offer our ideas to people because they can make the world a happier and better place. Let me make the example of the Raylians many of you will be familiar with them for the others I recommend to read the excellent book by Michelle Friedbeck I recommend to read it in the original French if you can the translation is not as good as the original it's a very good description of what happens in the world of Rael and perhaps a good description of why perhaps the very irrational aspects of Raylianism are exactly what makes it appealing so basically they say similar things to what we say but on top of that they superimpose a layer of euphos and extraterrestrial who created humanity and we can hear sooner or later and that's why we must build an embassy for them okay perhaps these are the things that make Raylianism appealing for tens of thousands of people but perhaps we shouldn't give up yet we have not been too smart at marketing so far but we can teach ourselves how to do better marketing there is this recent new book Ecosmist Vision Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential Ecosmic Vision for our Future Evolution can those who have read the book raise hand please just Mike okay that makes two of us it's a great book he thinks that we should engineer our successors his talking of combinations of biotech and artificial intelligence technology so we should create in the lab a new humanity that will take our place on the ladder of cosmic evolution it's a great book I really recommend that you can see my review of the book on the website of the Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies the link where you can buy it creating our replacement is not betraying nature on the contrary is exactly what we should do is extreme worship of nature is what nature has done so far and very good and we are the proof because we are here so that is what we should continue to do there is only one problem the problem is that this dazed vision may seem emotionally cold even if it's very beautiful so what we need is a warmer more emotionally appealing reformulation of the same idea and this is the reformulation that I suggest this is my vision I understand that is also the vision of many people here so I think the time has come to say it loud and clear let's skip this beautiful sentence of Arthur C. Clarke I think we are familiar with that of course in traditional religion we have the same concept the MTA is a very good example the MTA is the best example so far but there are ideas to create a Christian transhumanist association as well and I am very much interested in that do I have two more minutes do you guys find anything very strange here I think you do something doesn't seem right why because cosmology is not geography just read what is there it doesn't make too much sense to mix very high level things with very low level things because these are things that live in two different universes and for an example well you can find my review of the book Physics of Christianity by Frank Tepler I will not go into detail just google me Frank Tepler Physics of Christianity he is mixing cosmology with geography the mountains are not the star this is my cosmology I will let you read that hello Natasha good to see you here and especially I want to call your attention on the last two points but I don't think I have enough time I want to come to something more important than that so that we will discuss this later besides cosmology and geography we have some kind of zoning norms yes I am a smoker so my place is here there are things that also it is very salty there are things that we are not supposed to do here you guys have a thing about coffee that's an advice for you Randall you are looking for a coffee before next time you come to Salt Lake Seed it's often the only thing to do this seems something not too serious but when we come to some restriction of what sex is allowed and with whom and all religions have this kind of things these are things that can make the life of many people less happy than it should be in conclusion I think that if we want to really persuade people that our cosmic vision of a transcendent future for humanity enabled by science is a beautiful and they should listen to us I think we should learn how to formulate our ideas by focusing on the technology part the stars are beautiful above us and they are much more beautiful and much more interesting than the things that lie under the stars which is today's world and I don't think I have any time left so I wish to thank you very much no time for questions I guess so thank you very much