 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Janati Stolyarov, the second chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, and I welcome you to the Great Transhumanist Game. In the Great Transhumanist Game, how does one win? One wins by fundamentally transforming existing human societies, so as to inaugurate the next great era of our civilization. And of course, one wins by living to see that next great era. Contemporary societies and contemporary politics are deeply flawed and suboptimal, subject to the dynamics of scarcity and a pervasive zero-sum mentality that is left over from humankind's Paleolithic past. Instead of focusing on constructive activities for the creation of wealth and prosperity and longevity, all too often humans today focus on destructive activities, how to gain at their fellow man's expense. The United States Transhumanist Party stands in opposition to that age-old paradigm, as well as in opposition to the age-old limitations that have plagued and shackled humankind for millennia. These limitations include poverty, disease, material scarcity, conflicts such as warfare, but also various interpersonal conflicts caused by the defects of human psychology and the inability to understand win-win potentials in human interaction. And of course, most importantly, the greatest enemy of us all, the finitude of our lives, the great monster that is death that deprives so many wonderful individuals of the chance to actualize their potential. I like to say that when a person dies, an entire universe is extinguished, a precious universe of irreplaceable thoughts, emotions, memories, aspirations, and it is a travesty that since the dawn of life, this has been the predicament of wonderful living beings. It is time for humankind no longer to be a slave to the evolutionary forces that brought it about, but rather to become the masters of our own evolution. Unfortunately, during most of prior history, this was not a possibility, because we were too technologically limited to overcome the most fundamental limitation of all. As a result, humans being the sophisticated thinking and feeling creatures that we are developed elaborate coping mechanisms and entire world views focused around the unfortunately then inevitable fact of mortality and how to deal with it, how to live in the shorter term and perhaps extract some enjoyment from life, not withstanding that grisly ultimate fate. However, even though such coping mechanisms have been understandable throughout our history, now they have become supremely counterproductive through the progress of biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetics, artificial intelligence, technologies of production and automation, and as yet undiscovered technologies that may be on the horizon, we can push back the expiration dates that we have unfortunately been saddled with. We can continue to increase life expectancy and eventually reach longevity escape velocity, which is a condition in which additional incremental increases in life expectancy exceed the passage of time, the rate of our chronological aging. And eventually, we hope that our chronological aging will no longer be correlated with our biological aging or senescence. However, to do that, we must fundamentally transform our politics, our society, and our culture so that policies are friendly toward the most ambitious and dramatic scientific and technological progress that is possible given our material resources and the scope of our imagination. So I encourage you to join us within the transhumanist movement, which is an international movement of thinkers, inventors, and artists and activists who seek to be a part of this next era of humankind and who hope to personally be there along with you. Thank you very much.