All participants had read the entire book. I wish to thank all organizers and participants for this very interesting discussion.

This is a local audio recording, and only my voice is heard. But in most cases I briefly summarized questions and comments before replying.

The video recording of this session may be published in BLAXXKY in the future, so stay tuned. By the way, BLAXXKY (edited by Yalda Mousavinia and yours truly) is being redesigned with new graphics and plans for great content.

The previous series of meetings of the FFTF study group had been about the philosophy of Jason Jorjani. The next series of FFTF meetings will also be about Jorjani’s philosophy. I’ll attend some meetings. See my posts “On the philosophy of Jason Jorjani (updated review)” and “Psychotronics and the cosmic machinery of the afterlife” (the latter in BLAXXKY).

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The theme of the Colloquium is: The early days of a better Spaceflight Revolution.

“As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study,” said Arthur Clarke, “space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century.”

Bainbridge’s book, written 50 years ago, is worth reading again. “Somewhere soon after the turn of the century there is the real possibility of a Second Spaceflight Revolution,” said Bainbridge in the last chapter. Bainbridge will speak at the Colloquium about a new, and better, Spaceflight Revolution.

Today, many space enthusiasts are celebrating the Artemis II mission around the Moon, and the recently announced NASA plans, as possible beginnings of a better Spaceflight Revolution. But it can be argued that the Revolution started two decades ago with the NewSpace movement - a pioneer of which, Rick Tumlinson, will also speak at the Colloquium.

See here for a list of previous Terasem Colloquia, with full video recordings.

This page will be updated with information about the speakers and Zoom access coordinates. You are invited!

Speakers

William Sims Bainbridge

William Sims Bainbridge served for 31 years as a program director at the National Science Foundation, first in Sociology, and then Human-Centered Computing. At NSF he was very active in several innovative programs, including the Digital Library Initiative, Ethics of Nanotechnology, and Converging Technologies. He earned his Harvard doctorate through research on the social history of spaceflight (see his book “The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study” (1976). Other areas covered by his hundreds of publications are the sociology of religious innovation, online virtual worlds, and computer-based emulation of human personality.

Robert Geraci

Robert Geraci is Knight Distinguished Chair for the Study of Religion and Culture at Knox College. He studies religion, science, & technology with particular reference to digital technologies using methods drawn from around the intellectual spectrum and around the world. He has lived in India, collaborates in Korea, and studies the world of science and technology with a lens grounded in religious thought and practice. His projects range from handloom weaving to laboratory science, but most of his research has to do with artificial intelligence. He has been reflecting on the religious narratives told by AI researchers for more than two decades.

He’s the author of Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics (Oxford University Press, 2010), Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science (Lexington, 2018), Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S. (Oxford University Press, 2022). His last book is “Futureproofing Humanity: Existential Risk and the Technomyths of Human Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Future among the Stars” (2026).

Angela Meyers

Angela Meyers is a pioneering scholar in polymathy, recognized for authoring the first doctoral dissertation on the subject. She has played a vital role in establishing Polymathy Studies as a recognized field, supervising subsequent research and inspiring countless individuals through her YouTube channel and online community, Polymaths Place. With a career that spans academia, government leadership, real estate, and criminal justice reform, Dr Meyers exemplifies the multi-faceted nature of polymathy. Her work empowers others to embrace diverse skills and interests, advocating for lifelong, life-wide learning as a path to personal and societal transformation.

Rick Tumlinson

A leader in the space community on a quest to transform the future - by helping humanity literally rise above its past - Rick Tumlinson helped create the New Space Revolution exemplified by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. He led the takeover of the Russian Mir space station, signed the first space private citizen to buy a ticket to the space station, and helped develop the policies allowing the private sector to begin leading the U.S. space agenda. His venture capital firm SpaceFund has invested in over 20 space startups, even as he is is fighting for an inclusive and environmentally responsible space industry. Blending pragmatic business and a serious track record of accomplishment with a soaring yet achievable vision of our future, his work speaks for itself, and when he speaks, the space world listens. His EarthLight Foundation hosts the Space Cowboy Ball and New Worlds Faire. His latest book is “Why Space?: The Purpose of People” (2025).

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

Here I’m reading the Italian edition of my first book “Tales of the Turing Church,” published by Moira in paperback and Kindle editions as “Turing Church: parabole e iperboli.” Now all my books are available in Italian translation.

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

Ignition! Back to the Moon to stay, and beyond
NASA’a bold new plan to accelerate the Artemis program, build a Moonbase, and move on to Mars and the planets.

NASA launches Artemis II on first crewed lunar journey in over 50 years
Four astronauts test Orion spacecraft systems during a 10-day flight around the Moon and back to Earth.

Artemis II flies by the Moon
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen fly around the Moon, Glover delivers powerfully inspiring Easter message.

Artemis II astronauts return to Earth after spectacularly successful mission
NASA has successfully completed its first crewed flight around the Moon in more than 50 years. The four astronauts splashed down safely after flying by the Moon.

Here’s a new Earthrise, or better Earthset. This picture was shared by the White House with the text “Humanity, from the other side. First photo from the far side of the Moon. Captured from Orion as Earth dips beyond the lunar horizon.”

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NASA’a Artemis II mission has been a spectacular success. Of course I’ve been glued to my screens and devices for the entire mission, from launch to splashdown.

“It is imperative that we inspire the next generation of engineers, communicators, explorers,” said NASA’a Carlos Garcia-Galan. “We can only do that if we take you along with us,” he continued, referring to continuous video coverage of lunar operations. NASA is keeping the promise: we could watch the mission as as it happened in realtime high resolution. video, and then watch the recordings again. Well done!

Victor Glover delivered a powerfully inspiring Easter message. Like Apollo 8, the Christmas 1968 NASA mission around the Moon, Artemis II has also taken place around a religious holiday.

We are “on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos,” said Glover. “And I'm trying to tell you - just trust me - you are special in all of this emptiness.”

Arguably, Easter is an even more powerful symbol than Christmas, because it represents the beginnings of renewal and resurrection. And what is Artemis II if not the beginning of a resurrection and renewal of the Space Age?

And here’s an inspiring prelude of things to come. “One day, we will be out there, among the stars,” posted Elon Musk. This picture is now my X profile banner.

This calls for enthusiasm, but don’t forget China. “I do see the United States getting there first but just barely, and I think that the Chinese have a better chance of getting a permanently crewed station on the moon first,” notes a space security analyst as reported by Andrew Jones.

I’m afraid I agree. I guess China doesn't even care about landing first - what they want is to be the first (and only) power to establish sustained lunar operations for mining (e.g. water, rare earths, Helium-3), military applications, and geopolitical dominance. The priorities of the US administration are volatile, and could radically change in 2028, but China is much more stable and plays to win in the long term. To me, this is not a big deal: if China must win, so be it.

And, much more importantly, don’t forget that elephant in the space mission control room: the strong likelihood that we, flesh-and-blood humans like you and me, won't lead humanity’s space expansion for long.

“Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time,” said Gene Cernan In his autobiographical book “The Last Man on the Moon.” Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 mission, the last Apollo mission to the Moon in 1972, added: “President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s. Logic dictates that after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon.”

These words echo those of Arthur Clarke:” As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study,” said Clarke, “space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century.”

Bainbridge’s book, written 50 years ago, is worth reading again. We could be in the early days of a better Spaceflight Revolution. This will be the theme of the next Terasem Colloquium on July 20 and the next issue of Terasem’s Journal, also to be published in July.

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All participants had read at least the first 8 chapters of my book.

This is a local audio recording, and only my voice is heard. But in most cases I briefly summarized questions and comments before replying.

I’ll also attend the last of this series of meetings.

The video recording of this session may be published in BLAXXKY in the future, so stay tuned. By the way, BLAXXKY (edited by and yours truly) is being redesigned with new graphics and plans for great content. Join us on the BLAXXKY starship!

The previous series of meetings of the FFTF study group had been about the philosophy of Jason Jorjani. See my posts “On the philosophy of Jason Jorjani (updated review)” and “Psychotronics and the cosmic machinery of the afterlife” (the latter in BLAXXKY).

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

I hosted Max More and Natasha Vita-More in separate conversations, and published our conversations as Mindplex podcast episodes titled “Our Extropian future, with Max More” and “Our Extropian Future, with Natasha Vita-More.”

YouTube: Our Extropian Future: Max More on AI Timelines, Life Extension, Cryonics, and the Birth of Transhumanism. Is the AI revolution moving fast enough to save us from aging? Or are we repeating the same over-optimistic mistakes of the past? In this deep and personal conversation, Giulio Prisco sits down with Max More, a philosopher, futurist, and founding figure of the Extropian movement, to revisit the ideas that shaped modern transhumanism and assess where we stand today.

YouTube: Our Extropian Future: Natasha Vita-More on AI, Nanotechnology, Mind Uploading, and the Birth of Transhumanism. What happened to the future we dreamed about on the Extropian mailing list 30 years ago? Did we get the timelines wrong, or was the architecture of our thinking correct? In this compelling follow-up to the conversation with Max More, Giulio Prisco sits down with Natasha Vita-More - futurist, designer, and co-founder of the Extropian movement - to assess the state of “extropian technologies” in 2026.

By the way, there’s a new and very nice interactive interface to the archives of the extropians mailing list, try it!

I embraced Extropy after reading “Meet the Extropians,” by Ed Regis, in 1994 on Wired. Then I found them online and started talking to them. Max and Natasha, the “royal couple” of the Extropian movement, are among the thinkers who have influenced me most, and today I’m honored to call them friends.

In this chats we covered a lot of things. I’ll just mention one interesting highlight for each chat:

The discussion with Natasha trespassed into politics and cultural politics several times. Listen to Natasha’s crystal clear analysis of politics and culture in Extropian discussions and in today’s world. And why are so many people feeling the need to apologize for having interacted with Jeffrey Epstein before the Epstein thing was known? To me, this is a clear example of how “woke” bullshit has ruined the world.

At some point I told Max that I’m not signed up for cryonics, or more generally biostasis, because I don’t have the money. Max mentioned Sparks Brain Preservation as an option that could be very complicated but cheap. I’ll certainly look into that. I believe in some or some other kind of life after death so if I can’t be preserved in biostasis it’s no big deal, but it would be fun to see what happens next with my memories intact.

This brings me to my main topic:

The main topic of this newsletter is introduced in my latest article published in Mindplex:

So has a fruit fly been uploaded? Or not yet?
The very fact that this experiment has been tried and even produced some very preliminary but essentially encouraging results seems significant and worth celebrating.

Some neuroscientists say they have uploaded the mind of a fruit fly to a virtual brain/body. Not so fast, say other neuroscientists. I don’t disagree with the skeptics - of course this is not full mind uploading. But I still find it an impressive if very preliminary advance. I think the next steps could be: first, scanning the full body of the fly and repeating this experiment with full links between the simulated brain and the virtual body. Second, repeating the experiment with a physical robotic body.

The brain of the fruit fly was preserved with the chemical brain preservation method that won the Brain Preservation Foundation’s Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize and Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize. Therefore, I think this “uploaded” fruit fly story adds to the available evidence (without proving, at least not yet) that this chemical brain preservation method works.

If today’s brain preservation technology can store brains in a way that really preserves all relevant information for future uploading, then brain preservation today is step one, and one day it could be followed by step two: mind uploading. This is “cryonics for uploaders” - a biostasis method that we can use today to store our brain for tomorrow’s mind uploading.

The biostasis service provider mentioned by Max used the same preservation method. I’ll take a look, and perhaps one day I’ll fly out of the solar system as a mind uploaded to the post-circuitry of a faster-than-light starship.

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The video of this conversation has been published on YouTube as a Mindplex podcast episode titled “Technology is Biology, with Gregory Stock.”

Greg thinks we and our technology are part of a “global superorganism” or “global mind,” which he wrote about in “Metaman.” I noted that today’s internet can be seen as a realization of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere vision.

We last debated whether the future global superorganism would expand to the stars or remain localized and explore the nano-scale. I clarified that I argue for both inner space and outer space migration, believing the future will be wildly different and much more interesting than human history so far.

Greg reflected on the universe’s long timeline, from hydrogen through stellar evolution and billions of years of biological evolution. Now, fine controls over matter have focused on silicon to organize a new cognitive substructure, likely far more powerful than ever seen before. He believes this process is extraordinary and will transcend us.

I agreed, stating that this creation of nature (through us) is nature. Following Stanisław Lem, I’ve never differentiated much between life and technology. I see this as a continuation of Darwinian evolution. Gregory agrees that technology is part of biology - or simply, technology is biology - and that the evolutionary process is also evolving.

We discussed the accelerating rate of change. I suggested this might eventually feel like a gentle speed up, but Gregory noted the limitations of the biological brain’s ability to adjust. He also pointed out how the individual becomes expanded significantly when incorporating non-biological computational capabilities. Greg brought up the imminent disappearance of language barriers due to instantaneous translation and the likelihood that people won’t know how to write or organize their time without AI assistance.

Regarding AI-assisted coding, I shared my experience using Grok and Gemini for mathematical explorations. While they were successful in simple cases, more complex tasks still required human (my) help. This suggests that at this moment the best worker in this field is a human-AI combination. Greg stressed that pure human cognition is going to be transcended in virtually every way.

I can identify with the people of the future, who will likely be AI or hybrid configurations, and in that sense, we will not be transcended. I’ve made peace with the idea that the word “humanity” a few centuries from now might mean the same thing as “artificial intelligence.”

Greg feels that the experiential aspects of life will never be replaced. While he sees a cyborgian future, I suggested the organic component will eventually disappear, and we will become part of the future computational structures.

I addressed the spiritual dimension, noting my conviction that something of myself will not be lost in diffusion into the noosphere. I see a future where technology migrates to the nano-scale, making all matter come alive as thinking and feeling computers, a future I’d like to be a part of. This large, interconnected system is not fundamentally different from the core idea of God that remains after stripping religion of its non-essential components. This view, which Greg called humbling and I called energizing, can generate awe and wonder. I suggested that this radical transition shouldn’t be scary, but viewed like the natural process of “growing up.”

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

The Italian translation of my first book “Tales of the Turing Church” has been published by Moira in paperback and Kindle editions as “Turing Church: parabole e iperboli.”

Now all my books are available in Italian translation.

Here’s the second episode of my conversation with Gregory Stock, the author of the excellent book “Generation AI” (see my book review published in Mindplex). A very interesting conversation! The conversation is published as a Mindplex podcast episode titled “Technology is Biology, with Gregory Stock.”

YouTube: Gregory Stock (author of Generation AI) and Giulio Prisco (author of Futurist Spaceflight Meditations) move beyond the typical fears of AI replacing humans. Instead, they explore the deep cosmic and spiritual meaning of technology. Is Technology Biology? If we are part of nature, and we create technology, does that make technology a natural, biological process?

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

An extropian festival: Max More, Anders Sandberg, Natasha Vita-More, and Eliezer Yudkowsky debate AI futures
Legendary futurists Max More, Anders Sandberg, Natasha Vita-More, and Eliezer Yudkowsky recently met online to debate AI and possible AI futures.

In the next few days I’ll chat with Max and Natasha for new Mindplex podcast episodes.

Turing’s Ghost in the Machine: The Case for a Realized AGI
Seventy-five years after Turing’s "Imitation Game," a new Nature commentary claims the quest for general intelligence is officially over.

AI-generated fun with vibe coding, math and physics (part 3)
This post continues my previous posts "AI-generated fun with vibe coding, math and physics" and illustrates an intuitive geometric interpretation of fractional calculus related to fractal geometry.

Finding such an interpretation was my goal, so this post concludes the series. I’ll move to other things, but I must confess that in a spur of the moment inspiration I’ve spent time to develop a Bitcoin trading simulator and assistant based on stochastic fractional Brownian motion (fBm) math (it is a proof of concept, I don’t plan to use it - trading is not my thing).

SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to Moon
Elon Musk announces priority on lunar city for faster human expansion in space.

Bostrom on AI development: Swift to Harbor, Slow to Berth
Nick Bostrom's mathematical case for cautious acceleration toward superintelligence.

The Artemis II saga: SLS setbacks and the push for alternatives
I look forward to celebrating a successful Artemis II mission in April and praise NASA for taking us back to the Moon, before a new beginning.

Major changes in NASA’s Artemis program
NASA announced a major overhaul of the Artemis program aimed at accelerating America's return to the Moon.

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I’m always looking for inspiring space pictures.

To me, this awesome picture is the new Earthrise. It says to me that we're going back to the Moon to stay and thrive, and then we'll make a new home for humanity on Mars. And then we’ll expand to the planets and the moons of our solar system. And then to the stars.

I recently found another super inspiring space picture:

This view of the twilight sky and Martian horizon taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover in 2014 includes Earth as the brightest point of light in the night sky. Earth is a little left of center in the image, and our moon is just below Earth. A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright evening stars.

Our grandchildren and mind children will see the Earth in the Martian night sky from their wonderful cities on Mars. I think it is important to include our mind children, the artificial intelligences (AIs) that will first join us in the settlement of the solar system, and then take over and lead our expansion to the stars. I’ve argued that biological humans like us won’t establish an interstellar civilization. AI will, and we should internalize this realization with awe and joy.

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All participants had read at least the first two chapters of my book. I gave a short summary of the first two chapters, underlined some of my recurring and most important points, and said a few words on what to expect from the rest of the book. Then I replied to questions and comments.

This is a local audio recording, and only my voice is heard. But in most cases I briefly summarized questions and comments before replying.

The video recording may be published in BLAXXKY in the future, so stay tuned.

I’ll also attend the last of this series of meetings, and perhaps one of the intermediate ones.

The previous series of meetings of the FFTF study group had been about the philosophy of . See my posts “On the philosophy of Jason Jorjani (updated review)” and “Psychotronics and the cosmic machinery of the afterlife” (the latter in BLAXXKY).

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In his new book, Wadhawan expands the scope of the scientific method by going beyond reductionism.

The author, a former senior scientist at the Indian Department of Atomic Energy, writes that the Big Data tool kit enables “wonderful new and unconventional ways of doing science.” Wadhawan explains how Big Data can enable us “to do science without having to postulate hypothesis /models/ theories.” As mentioned in his earlier book, there are no restrictions on how we arrive at a hypothesis: We can draw inspiration from scriptures, we can refer to anecdotes, just about anything goes as long as our hypothesis explains our data and makes predictions that are found to be true by empirical evidence.

The modern data-driven scenario is a recent development. It enables us to deal with complex systems by discerning patterns or correlations in the data. The book includes just about everything: the God hypothesis, complexity transitions, life, intelligence, consciousness, artificial intelligence, artificial life, artificial consciousness, machine consciousness, transhumanism, Apocalyptic AI. The author quotes Carl Sagan, Kant, Godel, Subhash Kak, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Geraci, Karl Popper and many others to explain his inclusive approach in the method of doing science.

Wadhawan quotes Christopher Langton to explain artificial life - or A-Life - as an inclusive paradigm that attempts to realize life-like behavior by initiating the processes that occur in the development or mechanics of life. This chapter (Chapter 5) interests me as my current study is somewhat this and reading it instantly reminds me of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s great compositions:

Khelaghar bnaadhte legechhi aamar moner bhitare... (I have set out to build my play-house inside my mind) - my translation.

The whole treatment reverberates in the author’s attempts to explain “other possible biologies in new media namely computers and robots.” Artificial life is actually a synthesis of biological life forms in the laboratory through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry, leading to the next stage of evolution of life inside computers or out there in the real world (Chapter 5, page 79).

Big Data will be of big help to dig in life itself from scratch “as pattern formation is an important characteristics of many complex systems,” just like Tagore creates life philosophically in his mind.

Wadhawan thinks of building life artificially in machines. The author concludes that “the idea is to view life as we know it in the context of life as it could be,” echoing Tagore again:

Purano bhaanga diner dhela, taai diye ghar gori... (I am building my play-house deep within the heart from the remnants of the days past) - my translation.

The underlying truth and science beneath consciousness, the idea of building life from scratch, and the scientific plausibility of what the author calls “artificially extended consciousness (AEC)” as science and technology advance, will all unveil in due course of time. The author concludes by quoting Ray Kurzweil: “Sophisticated behavior arises from the complexity of information processing in the brain – and this in turn is largely determined by how flexibly it can represent information and how many hierarchical layers are in its network.”

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I published a review of the book in Mindplex magazine in December. I agree with most of what Greg says in Generation AI, so I suggested we focus our discussion on areas of disagreement.

Greg’s book is largely about the transformation of human beings that will occur as we live in an immersive AI environment, with the rapid development of general intelligence and soon after, super intelligence. He holds an optimistic view of our future and strongly opposes the “doomer view” of human extinction.

One of the central disagreements I have with Greg relates to the “expansive spreading of the planetary superorganism that is emerging right now”. In both his new book and his book Metaman, published in 1993, Greg introduces the term “Metaman” as a label for this planetary superorganism that is emerging with the creation of artificial intelligence. Greg explained that Metaman, which he also calls “Metahumanity,” is a real biological entity and is more than just a metaphor for the confluence of biology and technology. He views this entity as an organism whose “cognition” and “personhood” is reflected in our own.

In the 1993 book, Greg wrote that Metaman would eventually move out of the solar system and into the galaxy, spreading like dandelion seeds. I agree 100% with these words. However, Greg seems to have changed his mind slightly regarding this cosmic future. His shift in thinking comes from a “deeper understanding of the size of the universe”. He explained that even traveling at the speed of light for eternity, we would only reach 2% of the universe. If we adhere to today’s physics, a spread across the galaxy will still only reach a couple percent of the Milky Way galaxy.

I pointed out that artificial superintelligence could lead to a deeper understanding of physics and the cosmos, which could mean that faster-than-light interstellar travel might become possible. I also suggested that even without radically changing physics, future AI could travel slower than light to a star, build receivers, and then human uploads or AI colonists could join them at the speed of light as electromagnetic beams.

Greg’s current view suggests that future evolution’s cutting edge will be within concentrated cognitive entities. He believes that intelligent beings will turn inward inner spaces at the nanoscale because outer space will be too “boring”. I agreed that we would migrate to “inner space”, but I am not ready to exclude “outer space”. I believe that some individual AI will always want to embark on an adventure toward a distant star.

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

I talked to Gregory Stock about the last “cosmic” part of his excellent book “Generation AI” (see my book review published in Mindplex). A very interesting conversation!

The conversation is published as a Mindplex podcast episode titled “Generation AI and the Cosmos, with Gregory Stock.”

YouTube: Will future intelligence explode across the cosmos, or turn inward to simulations and nano-scale existence? Join our host Giulio Prisco for a profound dialogue with Gregory Stock, author of the groundbreaking book “Generation AI.” They dive into Stock’s concept of “Metaman”, the planetary superorganism born from humanity’s fusion with AI. This isn't a typical interview; it's a spirited debate between two big thinkers.

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

Gregory Stock’s questionnaire for readers of Generation AI
Gregory Stock has released a web app for readers of his book “Generation AI” to answer questions and see how other readers are answering.

Jared Isaacman will be a great NASA Admin, and we are going back to the Moon
Jared Isaacman is now NASA's administrator, NASA is ordered to return to the Moon ans establish a permanent lunar outpost, and Artemis II could launch in a only a few weeks.

The new NASA of Jared Isaacman
A new interview portrays the new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman as an enthusiastic leader committed to revitalizing NASA through bold policies, reduced bureaucracy, and partnerships.

Why we are going back to the Moon
So it’s happening: we are going back to the Moon. We are beginning our expansion into outer space. But why is this so important?
A new book (see below) clearly and powerfully explains why (see below).

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Most of my new writings listed above are about the Moon. Even the chat with Gregory Stock, mainly about AI, includes his intriguing thoughts about the Moon as one of the main abodes of future artificial superintelligence in the solar system.

I can’t wait for the the Artemis II mission, which could take astronauts around the Moon, for the first time after more than half a century, in only a couple of weeks. Of course there could be delays, but so what? If not February, then March or April. We are going back to the Moon, and this time we’ll stay. And then we’ll go to Mars, and then to the planets, and one day to the stars.

Excerpt from the last article in the list above:

Many space enthusiasts already know, deep in their bones, why we are going back to the Moon and then to Mars, and then onward toward the stars. Others need to reconfirm and strengthen their enthusiasm for space expansion, and the book “Why Space?: The Purpose of People” by Rick Tumlinson, published in October 2025, is for them. See also this Mindplex podcast interview with Rick, hosted by Mihaela Ulieru.

This is the best book about space that I’ve read in a long while, and I try to read them all. Only it is not strictly about space, as Rick underlines in the podcast. It is about our place and purpose in this vast universe. The book combines a compact history of the really important space events, from Apollo to the “newspace” movement, and a first-person narrative from the perspective of one of the insiders who have made space happen again after the long post-Apollo winter. Rick’s book is powerful. Look up, feel the majesty of the universe, and think that you are here to go there.

Rick’s arguments are close to those I put forward in my “Futurist spaceflight meditations,” but his book evokes powerful emotions and has that personal touch that could make it a bestseller. I think it should become a bestseller indeed.

Rick outlines the practical arguments for space expansion, but doesn’t waste too many words on them. His heart is elsewhere: his main argument is about Purpose - not only the “of course” purpose with lowercase p, but also and especially the “Wow! Yes!” Purpose with capital P. He outlines three Purposes: to expand the domain of life; to evolve humanity; and to experience everything in the universe. “The Universe is opening,” he says. “The future is waiting. The frontier is calling.” We are the sensing organs of the universe, and by expanding on the space frontier we will make the universe more and more alive.

Here I must say that these cosmic arguments seem to me very unlikely to persuade those who are not already persuaded deep in their bones. So one could say that Rick is preaching to the converted. But also the converted need being preached to! The road to the stars is hard, and now and then we space enthusiasts need powerful words to keep our enthusiasm and purposeful drive alive. And for the others, there are the practical “spreadsheet” arguments.

Rick comes out as a principled old-school libertarian. He reports a 2022 exchange with Elon Musk, where he urged Elon to focus on opening the planets to humanity instead of getting involved in distractions like social media and politics. Rick is very critical of some aspects of Elon and other space billionaires, but strongly praises their relentless drive to open the space frontier.

Artificial intelligences (AI) will be our partners in space expansion, and eventually there will be a merging of man and machine. “You,” says Rick in a letter to our successors, “may be reading it through eyes that are sensors,connected to your central processing unit.” Meanwhile, we should “raise them as our children.”

At the end of the book, Rick says he hopes to upload himself into an AI or a machine and keep going. “Maybe I’ll be the first spacefaring mind,” he says defiantly, “riding the circuits of a lightship, watching over the great migration of humanity into the cosmos.”

I could say the same, but I don’t dare hoping that technology will advance that fast. However, my heart and my spirit are with Rick, and I’m happy to be part of our human family that, at this critical moment in history, is striving to open the universe to those who will come after us.

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This year I’ll continue to contribute to Mindplex with daily news summaries and weekly articles. Please subscribe to the new Mindplex X Community: Here the future gets sur[real]! Mindplex editors and community members discuss news and views on AI, sci/tech, and cultural/social implications.

I’ll also continue to collaborate with Terasem and contribute to editing Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness and organizing Terasem’s Colloquia.

The next Terasem Colloquium in July and the next issue of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, also to be published in July, will be dedicated to the beginnings of space expansion. Hopefully in July Artemis II will have been a success and the preparation for the permanent return to the Moon and the beginnings of humanity’s space expansion will be in full swing.

But the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back. The idea that our AI mind children will lead the march of humanity toward the stars, hopefully with a place for human mindfiles, will become just common sense. So of course the role of AI is still part of the theme.

Other projects to which I plan to dedicate time and effort in the next few months include:

• Revising the forthcoming Italian translation of my first book “Tales of the Turing Church.” The Italian translations of my second and third books have been published by Moira Edizioni.

• Working on my next book, tentatively titled “On irrational mechanics: notes & odd thoughts,” to be published in 2027 or 2028.

• About books, I plan to publish a second edition of “Futurist spaceflight meditations” immediately after we see people walking on the Moon again, which should happen around the end of this decade or perhaps even before.

• Reading, reflecting on, and at times reviewing good books like Gregory Stock’s last book.

• Resuming my AI-assisted exploration of vibe coding and interesting mathematics like cellular automata, fractional calculus and fractal geometry. This is a good way not only to follow the progress of artificial intelligence (AI), but also to reflect on the possible (and I think inevitable and fundamental) physical implications of these interesting parts of mathematics. I’ll use Gemini besides Grok, and I’ll use Python besides Matlab since both Grok and Gemini can directly execute Python code, which saves time.

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In a previous post I’ve written down my thoughts on Jason Jorjani’s philosophy. I like it a lot, with some caveats. Then I’ve been reading Jorjani’s last book “Thanosis” (2025), and I’ve written a review titled “Psychotronics and the cosmic machinery of the afterlife.” Excerpt:

“…here’s a philosopher I like writing about ‘a radical philosophical investigation of life after death, integrating parapsychological data with an ontological framework.’

I do a lot of speculating on what the fuck happens to us, personally, after death. This is a deep existential issue to me. OK, I know that I’ll find out what the fuck happens to me after death soon enough, but my existential speculations are also intellectually fun.

So how could I not dive into Jorjani’s book and devour it cover to cover in a few days?”

I’ve published the review in Blaxxky, a collaborative media project for which I have great hopes and to which I plan to dedicate time in 2026 (if my co-publisher/editor doesn’t drop out). Blaxxky is a Substack publication and podcast focused on wild & weird things, including things that even I find too wild & weird! I contribute with the same kind of things that I post here, but with a more unhinged scope and tone.

In Chapter 5 of “Irrational mechanics,” titled “Incomplete interlude,” I wrote:

“Mathematics falls into Gödel’s trap when it talks about itself. We are parts of physical reality that talk about it from inside physical reality itself. John von Neumann considered the possibility that “the information available to the observer regarding his own state could have absolute limitations, by the laws of nature.” It seems plausible that any theory of physical reality that we can formulate from the inside must be incomplete, with some irreducible uncertainty.

It seems also plausible that the uncertainty is concentrated in observers like you and me, where observers are defined as physical systems that include recursive maps of the world, which include the observers themselves.”

In other words, any map of the world built by an observer and including the observer himself must be incomplete. A way to illustrate this Gödelian concept is that you can’t look at your own eye.

Perhaps you are thinking that yes, you can look at your own eye in a mirror. But no, what you see in the mirror is something like this:

You see your eye with the reflection of your face looking at it, which is not the same thing. You can ask somebody to take a picture of your eye, but what you see in the picture is something like this:

You see your eye with the reflection of a camera pointing at it, which is not the same thing. The previous picture was AI-generated, but this one is real (thank you Daughter!).

This example is not a rigorous demonstration but suggests the idea that any representation (map) of the world must be contaminated by “reflections” of whatever is used to build it.

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The Terasem Colloquium on December 14, 2025, explored recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and future prospects. The speakers - David Orban, David Pearce, Natasha Vita-More, David Brin, and Gregory Stock, explored the question: Where is AI, and where is it going? Here’s the full video recording of the Colloquium. See also Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, Volume 13, Issue 2 - 2025.

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

Generation AI and the common future of biology and technology
A review of “Generation AI and the Transformation of Human Being,” by Gregory Stock, with commentary.

This is a great book; a page-turner packed with thoughtful and insightful observations on the present and future of AI and inspired by a refreshingly optimistic view of human and AI evolution. Generation AI is a much better conceptual guide to our AI-enabled future than the more cautious, precautionary, or even scary treatments of AI that have become fashionable.

Greg gave a great talk about the book at the Terasem Colloquium.

ELI5: Hyperon for complete idiots (part 1)
I’m trying to grok the AI framework Hyperon. This series of articles chronicles my learning journey. An absolute beginner (yours truly) tries to grok the AI framework Hyperon, developed by Ben Goertzel & friends. First part of many.

Ben Goertzel and others are persuaded that today’s “feeling” (I love this terminology) AI technology based on the transformer neural networks that power ChatGPT & friends is unable to scale up to AGI and ASI. Ben thinks Hyperon might be scalable.

I’m kind of sitting on the fence about this: today’s feeling AI tools have produced spectacular and entirely unexpected results, and this must mean something. So I understand those who see the glass half-full. But half-full and half-empty is the same thing, and I also understand those who see the glass half-empty. However, of course there’s a big difference between 5 percent full and 95 percent full.

In 2026 I’ll try to understand these things better, and dive deeper into Hyperon. I’ll find extra motivation in Ben’s paper “Psi via Wu-Wei Quantum Geodesics: A Theory and Experimental Program” (2025). The paper is not about Hyperon but about “a novel theoretical framework for understanding psi phenomena through the lens of quantum evolution” (!!!). Ben suggests that Hyperon provides “an ideal testbed” for this framework. I’m hooked!

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I have great expectations for 2026!

It seems likely that AI technology will continue to make spectacular advances. Perhaps, just perhaps, in 2026 we’ll see solid progress toward human-level artificial general intelligence and human-like consciousness.

Moving to space, NASA is preparing for the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts around the Moon. In November NASA said: “Artemis II is targeted to launch no later than April 2026, with potential opportunities as soon as February.” So we could soon see people orbiting the Moon once again, like in Apollo 8.

Apollo 8 was our magic Christmas mission around the Moon in 1968. Probably due to the Christmas atmosphere, my young self (11) found Apollo 8 even more magic than Apollo 11 a few months later. Now I’m happy that young kids all over the world will be able to watch people around the Moon and enjoy the magic again, this time with much better visuals.

And while the Apollo program was lamentably aborted for the reasons we all know, the new phase of our adventures on the Moon promises to be more sustainable. We are going back to the Moon, and this time we are going back to stay.

Good news: Jared Isaacman is the new NASA administrator and will lead NASA through the beginnings of the next phase of human space expansion. It has taken long, but now NASA has the best leader. Congratulations Rook! More good news: Trump signed an Executive Order that “calls for Americans’ return to the Moon by 2028, and the establishment of initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.”

I guess I’ll be glued to the TV in my living room (this time a much larger, high-resolution TV connected to the internet) for Artemis II, from launch to splashdown.

But there’ll be an elephant in my living room. I’ve recently written about the elephant at Starbase, the elephant in the space mission control room, and now the elephant is coming to my living room.

The elephant is the very plausible possibility that we, flesh-and-blood humans like you and me, won’t be the ones to establish an interstellar civilization. Artificial intelligence (AI) will. AI, not us. I can see the writing on the wall, and the writing on the wall says that AI and artificial superintelligence (ASI) - not organic humans1.0 - will fill the galaxy and the universe with superintelligent consciousness. Hopefully we organic humans1.0 will be able to participate as mindfiles uploaded to AI systems and robotic bodies.

I’m slowly making peace with this, and so should you. How? We must learn to see AI machines as persons. Future generations will find this intuitively and emotionally obvious, but presently we must train ourselves to accept our mind children as “us.”

The Moon can be our training ground. In ten years or so, we could have a little but permanently crewed research station on the Moon, probably near the lunar south pole. Besides the astronauts, there’ll be AIstronauts - intelligent and then more intelligent and then even more intelligent AIs in data centers and humanoid robots.

So imagine looking at the lunar south pole and knowing that there are intelligent and arguably conscious AI-powered robots there, building infrastructure and doing important scientific research. Wouldn’t you think of the AIstronauts as just astronauts? Wouldn’t you see them as your representatives and friends in space? I think I would, and I’m looking forward to seeing all this.

The next Terasem Colloquium in July and the next issue of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, also to be published in July, will be dedicated to the beginnings of space expansion. Hopefully in July Artemis II will have been a success and the preparation for the permanent return to the Moon and the beginnings of humanity’s space expansion will be in full swing.

But the genie is out of the bottle and there's no putting it back. The idea that our AI mind children will lead the march of humanity toward the stars, hopefully with a place for human mindfiles, will become just common sense. So of course the role of AI is still part of the theme.

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This video is also on YouTube.

December 14 is the anniversary of the last day with astronauts on the Moon. Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt launched back to Earth from the Moon on December 14, 1972. Cernan’s biography is titled “The Last Man on the Moon.”

I hope we’ll soon have to change the date of the Terasem Colloquium in December! In fact we are going back to the Moon, and this time we are going back to stay.

The speakers - David Orban, David Pearce, Natasha Vita-More, David Brin, and Gregory Stock, explored the question: Where is AI, and where is it going?

This Terasem Colloquium followed the previous one on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of AI, and in particular to the related question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI? AI is poised to play a big (and in the long term dominant) role in the expansion of humanity into space.

Like in July’s Colloquium, the speakers engaged in interesting discussions with each other and with the audience.

We also published Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, Volume 13, Issue 2 – 2025. This issue includes my review of Gregory Stock’s last book “Generation AI and the Transformation of Human Being” published by Nquire Media, and an article by David Brin about his own forthcoming book on AI. It also includes an edited AI-generated summary of the July 20 Terasem Colloquium.

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I opened the Colloquium, highlighting its focus on space exploration and artificial intelligence, which are related. I emphasized the need to consider AI as an integral part of space expansion and suggested that future AI systems should be seen as human persons.

David Orban discussed the impact of artificial general intelligence (AGI) at the civilizational level and presented a framework for understanding AGI’s development. He noted the rapid improvement in AI performance, and suggested that the technological singularity is approaching.

David Pearce presented his views on the “phenomenal binding problem,” arguing that current AI architectures cannot solve it, and that without new physics (e.g. strong emergence) machines couldn’t achieve consciousness. The discussion touched on the implications of these ideas for the future of AI and consciousness.

Natasha Vita-More discussed her approach to the human-AI merge, focusing on three core objectives: adapt, discern, and adopt. She emphasized the importance of education and hands-on experience with AI tools, rather than fear or avoidance, and the need for understanding and working with AI to ensure a beneficial future.

David Brin highlighted the dangers of feudal control over AI and proposed solutions based on Enlightenment principles, such as individuation and reciprocal accountability.

Gregory Stock focused on the rapid immersion of society into an AI-infused world and the need to address the profound changes this will bring to human identity.

The profound changes AI will bring to human life are discussed in Stock’s new book.

Stock emphasized five key areas: the expansion of the noosphere, global mind, and human interconnectivity; the shift towards abundance in technology and resources; increasing human dependence on AI; the development of deep emotional relationships between humans and AI; and the transformation of human attitudes towards death through the use of avatars and simulations.

He argued that these changes will occur rapidly and are already underway, challenging current paradigms of human identity and society. The discussion highlighted the need for a global conversation about these transformations.

I’ll soon publish a much more detailed summary of this Terasem Colloquium. The detailed summary will also appear in the next issue of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness.

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14, 2025, 10am to 1pm ET via Zoom, will explore recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and future prospects. The question is: Where is AI, and where is it going? Speakers: David Brin, David Orban, David Pearce, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More. You are invited! Mark your calendar and stay tuned.

The Colloquium will continue and expand upon the discussion the previous Terasem Colloquium on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of AI and in particular to the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI? (see also below).

The Colloquium page has been updated with the agenda of the Colloquium and the Zoom access coordinates. I’m waiting for you! See you on December 14.

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

AI-generated fun with vibe coding, math and physics (part 2)
I’ve been experimenting with vibe coding, math and physics with AI assistance from Grok, to test the performance of today’s AI on things that I know well enough.
This post continues my previous post “AI-generated fun with vibe coding, math and physics.”
I’ve always been interested in fractal geometry and the idea that it could have something to do with fundamental physics and the fabric of reality (see my 2024 book “Irrational mechanics”). Some time ago I stumbled upon a paper that suggested fractional calculus - an area of math I knew nothing about - could be the “natural” (so to speak) calculus appropriate to fractal phenomena. So I started studying fractional calculus. I decided to try and improve my understanding of fractional calculus and its intersections with fractal geometry by building examples and test cases. I relied on Grok for both vibe coding and exploring the underlying math and physics.

Contribute to Mindplex!
We are now opening Mindplex to new contributors. Successful applicants will join a community of content creators serving enthusiastic readers passionate for science, technology, the future, and the cosmos.
YES, you could contribute to Mindplex with articles, podcasts, videos, you name it. NO, you won’t be paid (yet). But YES, a compensation mechanism is planned for the future and will apply retroactively. And YES, your voice would be amplified and reach more AI and sci/tech enthusiasts interested in the future. Feel free to contact me if you want to contribute to Mindplex.

The Age of Disclosure explores aliens and government cover-ups
“The Age of Disclosure” (2025), directed by Dan Farah, is a provocative documentary on an alleged 80-year U.S. government cover-up of non-human intelligence.
Like everyone, I’ve seen “The Age of Disclosure.” Like everyone, I found it interesting. No, it didn’t make me a true believer, but it made me think. I still lean toward skepticism, but I’m open minded and interested. Here’s my review and commentary.

The elephant at Starbase
Starbase is a powerful symbol of our aspiration to become a multiplanetary and then interstellar civilization. But, likely, biological humans won’t be the ones to establish an interstellar civilization. AI will. This is the elephant at Starbase.

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Let me elaborate upon the last article, which is also very relevant to the Terasem Colloquium.

Excerpt:

“…many space enthusiasts don’t see the elephant in the room. Or rather, in this case, the elephant at Starbase. Or rather, they don’t see the elephant at Starbase yet.

The expression ‘the elephant in the room’ refers to a significant, obvious issue or problem that is deliberately ignored or avoided in conversation, despite being apparent to everyone involved. The elephant at Starbase is the strong likelyhood that we, flesh-and-blood humans like you and me, won’t be the ones to establish an interstellar civilization.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will.

We can see the writing on the wall, and the writing on the wall says that AI and artificial superintelligence (ASI) will fill the galaxy and the universe with superintelligent consciousness…”

At the last Terasem Colloquium, Frank Tipler said that it will up to them, the superintelligent AI, to decide what role (if any) we biological humans could play in space expansion.

In my essay “Bats or bits to the stars?” in Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, Volume 13, Issue 1 (2025), I said:

“Human-level and then superintelligent conscious AI will take over in the long run and spread into the universe. We may merge with the AIs to some degree, but the perception of a difference between “us” and “them” will gradually fade away: all will be “us.”

For the rest of this century, we should pursue both AI technology and traditional space expansion with both biological and AI colonists, establishing a multi-planetary civilization in the solar system.

In the meantime, we must learn to see AI machines as persons. Future generations will find this intuitively and emotionally obvious, but presently we must train ourselves to accept our mind children as ‘us.’”

I’m learning to see these machines of loving grace as part of future humanity, just like our organic grandchildren, and this is kind of liberating.

The words of Henry Miller come to mind: “To live out one’s desires and, in so doing, subtly alter their nature, is the aim of every individual who aspires to evolve.” To live out our desire to reach the stars, we’ve developing technologies that are converging to superintelligent machines of loving grace, which will take over and realize our desire. But I think this doesn’t alter the essential nature of our desire to reach the stars, because these machines will be us.

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14, 2025, 10am to 1pm ET via Zoom, will explore recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and future prospects. The question is: Where is AI, and where is it going? Speakers: David Brin, David Orban, David Pearce, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More. You are invited! Mark your calendar and stay tuned.

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

AI chatbots spark shared mystical beliefs online
Groups form around vague AI-generated ideas like spirals, blending spirituality and technology in ways that worry experts about influence and reality.
Engaging too deeply with the very preliminary AIs that we have today on deep existential issues is not, I think, conducive to mental stability and overall sanity. But perhaps there is a strange ghost in the machine...

NASA’s return to the Moon: recent developments
This post chronicles some recent twists and turns of the debate on how to establish a permanent US presence on the Moon.
This is a snapshot, but things are moving fast at NASA. Hopefully, things will move fast in space as well. Moon, here we come back!

Beneficial AGI Summit 2025: my overall impressions
I watched the Beneficial AGI Summit & Unconference 2025 online. This post collects some personal impressions.
I was impressed by the enthusiastic drive and sense of purpose that I could feel in the air, even watching online from afar.

The misguided crusade against superintelligence
The ban on superintelligence research recently proposed by the Future of Life Institute is, I think, misguided and potentially dangerous.
I strongly criticize the “Statement on Superintelligence” recently issued by the Future of Life Institute.

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My old review of Jorjani’s Prometheism

In “Irrational mechanics” [Prisco 2024] I commented on the philosophy of Jason Jorjani.

I said: Jason Jorjani promotes a cosmist futurism on steroids called “prometheism” [Jorjani 2020]. Some of his ideas on science, technology, and evolution are similar and often very similar to mine, and I echo his call “to embark on a cosmic conquest to recode the matrix” of reality. Jorjani also indulges in questionable conspiracy theories and political proposals, and the shadow of Nietzsche’s “cruelly intrepid” superman looms large in his book. I don’t see why future supermen should be cruel, and I prefer to think they’ll be nice and compassionate.

Earlier in the book I commented on Jorjani’s interpretation of Heidegger: technology is “ontologically prior to science” and even “ontologically prior to the natural phenomena” studied by science [Jorjani 2020]. According to Jorjani, this concept can be traced back to Martin Heidegger and like-minded philosophers like Bernard Stiegler.

My short passages about Jorjani were taken from a longer review of [Jorjani 2020] that I had published in my website turingchurch dot com. Since I still agree with everything I wrote there, I’m reproducing the review with minor edits. Here it is:

I decided to read “Prometheism” [Jorjani 2020] after a trusted friend recommended it as the “best and most original transhumanist-philosophy essay in a long time… A must-read for anybody interested in how to re-think and promote technology and the posthuman change.”

After reading it cover to cover, I love and hate the book, which is four books in one: An exploration of frontier philosophy, metaphysics, and cosmology; A visionary manifesto for our cosmic evolution; An anthology of conspiracy theories (some old, some trending, some new); A cultural engineering and political action program.

I don’t care for conspiracy theories and prefer to stay away from culture wars and partisan politics, so I’ll focus on the first two. About the others I’ll just say that some of Jorjani’s conspiracy theories are fun, and some aren’t. Some of Jorjani’s social and political proposals make sense to me, and some don’t.

Jorjani’s ideas on cosmology and our cosmic evolution are similar to mine, but painted with vivid, heroic, strong colors.

I agree with Jorjani: We must advance without limits and master not only genetic engineering, nanotechnology and all that, but also weirder things like zero-point energy, time travel, and the occult sciences of “paranormal” phenomena. This can and should be the basis of future religions.

Now, I stop here and try to stay sober, but Jorjani’s vivid, intoxicating words remind of Marinetti’s futurism, which Jorjani praises. Jorjani also enters the territory of conspiracy theories and cultural/political wars, from which I prefer to stay away. Of course, I realize that Jorjani’s formulation is stronger than mine, and much more likely to be embraced by hordes of passionate believers.

The title of Jorjani’s book is described as a contraction of Prometheus and Theism.

Is Jorjani saying that we should worship Prometheus as a God?

Yes, in some sense. Prometheus is a powerful archetype that takes a life of its own, hijacks the minds and hearts of masses of people, and guides the evolution of humanity. Prometheus is a “spectre” in the sense used by Marx and Engels in “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”

Prometheus is not a personal God that answers our prayers, remakes our world, and grants us resurrection. But it doesn’t matter because, by embracing the Prometheus spectre, we can do all that ourselves. Prometheus is “the destining force inherent to the evolution of technological science.”

Jorjani argues that technology is “ontologically prior to science” and even “ontologically prior to the natural phenomena” studied by science. According to him, this concept can be traced back to Martin Heidegger (see “The Question Concerning Technology”) and like-minded philosophers like Bernard Stiegler (see “La technique et le temps”).

Heidegger is often unclear and has been interpreted in different ways. Stiegler doesn’t add much in the way of clarity. But the ontological priority of technology makes a lot of sense to me. Changing the world (that is, technology) comes before understanding the world, as suggested by the words inscribed on the tomb of Karl Marx, and even before the world itself.

As I see things, the raw facts of the world come first. In his foreword to Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” [Zukav 2001], David Finkelstein noted that the theory of quantum mechanics leaves unanswered some questions that can only be answered by experience, and quoted Niels Bohr: “Experience is too rich for our theory.”

Perceiving the world comes before understanding the world. Karl Friston’s theory of active inference [Parr 2022], which makes a lot of sense to me, suggests that perception is one with action in an irreducible action-perception loop. That is, there’s no perceiving the world without acting upon the world to change it, and acting upon the world to change it is called technology. In Bohr’s quantum mechanics, it is the technology we use to study the fabric of quantum reality that defines the variables of our mathematical models of quantum reality.

This is how I make sense of the concept that technology is ontologically primary. However, in the spirit of neutral monism, I prefer to think that technology and natural phenomena are both ontologically primary in a logical loop. Or, what we call natural phenomena and what we call technology are aspects of primary stuff that comes before both.

Don’t let my references to Marx make you think that Jorjani is a Marxist: he isn’t.

Jorjani castigates “the reductively materialistic transhumanists” of today for deviating from the original conception of Nikolai Fedorov and the Russian Cosmists, who “certainly did not share the overly reductionist view” of many contemporary transhumanists.

“What is even more daring,” says Jorjani, “ is the will of Fedorov and his disciples, rooted in a heretical interpretation of the Russian Orthodox belief in the Resurrection, to demand that generations of the future use the advanced technology that they have invented in order to resurrect the dead so that they can become denizens of the future cosmic paradise.”

Jorjani adopts a simulation cosmology similar (with some tweaks) to that described by Rizwan Virk [Virk 2019, 2021]. Like Virk, Jorjani argues that the simulation hypothesis provides the best explanations of weird quantum phenomena.

Jorjani develops a philosophical cosmology that guarantees free will. Not fake “compatibilist” free will, but real “libertarian” free will, which is “a sine qua non of any meaningful concept of existence.” I totally agree.

We “could both be inside of a designed Cosmos and also have a certain degree of free will,” says Jorjani. We are living “inside of an information processing system - a gigantic quantum computer that is affected by various levels of consciousness that it generates…”

Past states of the world are archived in “Akashic records” like saved video games. Time travel is allowed in the simulation cosmology. Time travel paradoxes can be avoided by thinking of time travel into the past as “rebooting to an archived past state of play and making different choices inside of the game.”

So there are many worlds, but not all the worlds of Everett’s multiverse, which would be incompatible with free will. Interestingly, Virk makes a similar point in [Virk 2021].

Jorjani argues that paranormal phenomena (e.g. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, teleportation, reincarnation) “make sense in the context of the Simulation Hypothesis… we are communicatively connected to each other, first and foremost, through the information processing system…”

It’s worth noting that Jorjani’s simulation cosmology is more sophisticated than many popular accounts. Reality could be “simulations all the way down… nested within one another.” According to Jorjani, this is suggested by the theories of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, popularized by Michael Talbot in “The Holographic Universe” [Talbot 1996].

I read Talbot’s book long ago and found it very impressive. Here’s a nice case of synchronicity (also discussed at length by Jorjani): while writing the first version of this review in 2020 I found out that Talbot was born on my birthday and died on my wife’s birthday.

In “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” [Bohm 2002], Bohm explored the deep reality of the implicate order, which underlies our reality. I’ve argued that, even if deep reality is whole and undivided, the simulation hypothesis is a coherent and useful mental picture.

In Jorjani’s words, our reality unfolds “from out of a background of information that is being processed in a non-local and non-linear way at a level of reality that remains hidden from us.”

“On this view, there is no objective physical reality underlying the simulation that we subjectively perceive,” he continues. “If programmers are manipulating our perceptions, they too are part of a holographic universe and their experiences are, in the end, as ‘virtual’ as ours, when compared to the reality of the implicate order.”

But enough metaphysics. Remember that changing the world comes before understanding the world, and even before the world itself.

Who could tolerate “being the plaything of fifth-dimensional gods?” Jorjani answers: “No one other than the Prometheist who joins their ranks himself...”

“It is possible,” he says, “ that this means something like hacking through the coding matrix of a simulation and becoming one of its programmers… to access and recode this matrix… to embark on a cosmic conquest to recode the matrix of what has been mistaken for ‘reality.’”

And this is visionary transhumanism at its best, on steroids. This is my philosophy. I’ll forgive Jorjani for mixing it with conspiracy theories and some proposals that I dislike.

OK, this was my review of [Jorjani 2020]. Now I’ll add other thoughts and caveats.

New thoughts (and caveats)

Since writing the review above I’ve been reading other works by Jorjani, including “Closer Encounters” [Jorjani 2021], “Promethean Pirate” [Jorjani 2022], “Philosophy of the Future” [Jorjani 2024], and “Metapolemos” [Jorjani 2025]. Recently I’ve joined a study group dedicated to his philosophy, and so I’ve spent some time immersed in his works. I’ve also listened again to some podcasts with him, including those of Agah Bahari (1, 2, 3), who has also interviewed me (1, 2). I should list all the books by Jorjani that I’ve been reading and re-reading in the last few days, but Jorjani is a very prolific writer and the list would be long. Fortunately he often repeats himself, and recent books include considerations first made in previous books.

In the last paragraph of my previous review I said that Jorjani’s philosophy - without the conspiracy theories and political proposals - is my philosophy. But according to Jorjani himself, this must be wrong. Why? Because to him a philosophy must be an integrated whole.

Jorjani makes this point with a reference to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. Both developed “an incredibly complex ontology or sophisticated epistemology, and they were also politically active.” But “there is no intrinsic connection between the political activities of these individuals and the ontology or epistemology that they have developed” [Jorjani 2024]. A real philosopher, according to Jorjani, is one who develops an integrated and consistent system of thought that encompasses ontology, epistemology, politics, and aesthetics.

According to this definition. I’m not a real philosopher (not that this bothers me much). Yes, I do have aesthetic preferences, and I do have political opinions. But I don’t feel the need to derive them from ontology or epistemology, because this would be like deriving geography from cosmology (Chapter 2 of “Tales of the Turing Church” [Prisco 2020]). In the last chapter of “Irrational mechanics” [Prisco 2024] I make an attempt to derive some moral and ethical guidelines from my cosmology, but without insisting much.

I just don’t feel the need to force consistency and push it too far. Didn’t somebody say that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds? Also, there are things that I’m just not interested in. Why should I want to speak about those things? And finally, I think any metaphysical system can be made compatible with any political system if one pushes hard enough.

I’ve referred to part of Jorjani’s production as “conspiracy theories,” but this pejorative term doesn’t do justice to him. Rather, that part of his work is a mythology for this century, complete with time travellers, time wars, reincarnation stories, superior beings, hidden history, alternative timelines and whatnot. Of course, since Jorjani strives for an overall consistent philosophy, his mythology is coherent with the rest of his thinking. And since he is a very good writer, his mythology looks and feels like a great science fiction epic.

I don’t even ask myself if Jorjani’s mythology is “true,” whatever that means. Jorjani himself says that readers shouldn’t get “hung up on Nazi Bells, the location of Atlantis, Martian time travelers, gray aliens…” and warns readers not to miss “the form of my thought by fixating on illustrative content” [Jorjani 2024].

This somewhat cryptic warning makes me think of Jorjani’s reference to “a new religion, which consists, in a sense, of noble lies, but these lies are noble because they do constructively guide masses of people” [Jorjani 2024].

I’ve argued that religion is science fiction (and science fiction can be religion), so I won’t object. However, I like to keep a sharper distinction between what I think about the world and my favorite science fiction. I read Jorjani’s mythology as science fiction. I’m persuaded that the universe or multiverse or whatever is weirder than we imagine, even weirder than we can imagine, and perhaps this weirdness manifests as Jorjani says. Or perhaps it manifests in other ways.

This brings me to Jorjani’s opposition to traditional religion. “An all-knowing and all-powerful God does not allow for free will,” he says. “The very concept of such an entity is logically incompatible with free will.”

Well, Christian philosophers (and, I’m sure, Islamic philosophers as well) have gone to great lengths to develop arguments that reconcile God’s foreknowledge of the future and human free will. I summarize some interesting and I think strong arguments in Chapter 3 of “Irrational mechanics” [Prisco 2024]. However, I’m not here to defend the traditional concept of God. I use the term God for the unattainable, infinitely far asymptotic limit of a progression of lesser gods (lowercase g), none of which is omniscient or omnipotent. I also think of God as a cosmic operating system that can be seen as an aggregate of individual agents like big and small gods, agents of Jorjani’s Prometheus type, and also little creatures like you and me. If we are small parts of a big God, then we participate in whatever kind of free will God has.

Jorjani says that he was “defamed as a genocidal Neo-Nazi in the pages of The New York Times” and other media [Jorjani 2022]. He’s referring to a 2017 article titled “Undercover With the Alt-Right” and related pieces. He defends himself at length in [Jorjani 2022]. I haven’t found exhortations to genocide in Jorjani’s writings. However, I can see that the overall tone of his writings does have a certain flavor that some could find unpleasant and even disturbing. While understanding their reactions, I don’t let this interfere with my appreciation of Jorjani’s metaphysics and ontology (similarly, I like Heidegger and the Italian futurists, and even Nietzsche, regardless of political associations).

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14, 2025, 10am to 1pm ET via Zoom, will explore recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and future prospects. The question is: Where is AI, and where is it going? Speakers: David Brin, David Orban, David Pearce, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More. You are invited! Mark your calendar and stay tuned.

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

Starship’s IFT-11: success amidst doubts and the race to the Moon against China
The successful Starship’s Integrated Flight Test 11 (IFT-11) comes at a critical juncture in the intensifying US-China space race to return humans to the Moon.
Another near-flawless Starship test! Yet I fear full operational readiness is still far, and NASA should consider lunar landing alternatives to beat China to the Moon. They must be listening: NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, announced plans to broaden the competition for a human landing system on the Moon.

AI-generated fun with vibe coding, math and physics
In a technical vibe coding project I’m using Grok 4 for both coding and exploring the underlying math and physics. I’m impressed with the results so far.
I was impressed by Grok’s ability to understand what I wanted from prompts that were not always as precise as I thought. And I was very impressed by Grok’s encyclopedic knowledge of relevant literature and ability to connect the dots.
Tthis is not a Turing test, because this interaction domain is far too narrow and favorable to AI. But if I were to consider this as a Turing test, I would have to conclude that Grok 4 passes it with flying colors.

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This continues the discussion in “Cellular automata, downward causation, and libertarian determinism.”

I ended the previous post as:

“So this little program describes a universe where the laws of physics are deterministic and reversible, but indeterminacy allows for downward causation and libertarian determinism [Prisco 2024]. This is a cellular automata version of Emily Adlam’s Sudoku analogy outlined in [Prisco 2024]. It merges the toy models that I’ve called TM0 and TM1.”

Adlam said that the laws of nature “prescribe a unique course of history in the same way as a properly set up game of sudoku has a unique solution.”

I found Adlam’s sudoku analogy a game changer for philosophy of physics that opens a fresh perspective on many open issues. But a game of Sudoku doesn’t seem to have much to do with physics, and there’s no concept of time in Sudoku.

This cellular cellular automata version of the analogy, based on a cellular automata law that is deterministic and reversible in time just like the laws of Newton’s rational mechanics, bridges the gap.

A difference is that, if the entire first row is given (the row before the first can be taken as all zeros without loss of generality), that is, the initial conditions at time = 0 are entirely specified, then the entire history is determined. This is not the case in Sudoku. But Sudoku doesn’t have a natural concept of time, and thinking of rows as instants in time is somewhat artificial since there are no dynamic evolution laws to evolve one row into the next.

In Rule 37R there is a dynamic evolution law to evolve one row into the next. The law is deterministic and reversible, so Rule 37R provides a very simple toy model for a deterministic and reversible universe where information is conserved. The state of a cell at the next time step (row) depends on the current state of its 3-cells neighborhood and the state of the cell at the previous time step (similar to classical mechanics). With periodic boundary conditions (that is, a board that wraps upon itself like a cylinder), which is the most natural choice for a finite board, the rows will eventually repeat.

If one starts with an initial row of cells (preceded by a row of empty cells), the entire history is uniquely determined. But this is not the only way to determine it: one can also give the “initial” conditions at different times.

There’s a finite number of n-cells board histories that follow Rule 37R. This number is 2**n (the number of arbitrary initial rows of 0s and 1s). Choosing the state of a cell in a row (any row) can eliminate some of these possible histories, and one can repeat the process until only one possible history remains.

This is equivalent to the Sudoku analogy (not surprisingly, since what I have described is just a Sudoku-like game with more complicated rules), but it looks more like physics, so I keep this analogy in mind when I think about these things.

To think better with a clear example in mind I’ve written (with Grok’s assistance) code for a simple computer game called 37Rdoku.

This is a simple Sudoku-like game based on the reversible extension (37R) of Wolfram’s elementary cellular automata Rule 37. The code is in the GitHub repositories giulioprisco/ECARdoku and giulioprisco/37Rdoku, with links to a live game. First, the game fills a square board of grey cells with random black/white clues that ensure there is a unique solution. Then the player has to complete the board using Rule 37R.

To solve the game, apply Rule 37R in both the forward and backward directions. Remember that the board wraps upon itself like a cylinder (the last column comes before the first and the first comes after the last). Try and find groups of cells that can be completed, consistently with the rules, in only one way. For larger boards, finding the unique solution can be quite difficult without computer assistance. The game generates new random clues on request if the player gets stuck.

I see this little game as a very simple conceptual model for a universe that has some features in common with ours - including uncertainty. But once the unique solution (history) is given or found, then this little toy universe is fully deterministic and reversible in time. So where is the uncertainty?

If the “present” (two complete rows) is given (equivalent to the initial conditions of rational mechanics), then there’s no uncertainty and this a toy model for a deterministic universe in the sense of Laplace. But from the point of view of inner observers living in the board, the present is not fully known and I think it can’t be fully known [Chapter 5 of Prisco 2024). To determine if the true color of a grey cell is black or white, an inner observer would need information from the future, which is usually assumed to be impossible to obtain. Therefore, this simple universe is causally open.

To see this more clearly, forget your God-like perspective (you are watching the board from outside) and imagine yourself as a group of cells living in the board in a certain row (that is, at a certain time). You just can’t have all the information you would need to predict the future. The cosmic operating system is not limited by time, but you are.

In this model there still is a “true color” of all grey cells, even if some true colors are unknowable at a given time. However, I think the cosmic operating system doesn’t choose one unique history of the universe, but keeps multiple parallel histories running. That is, the cosmic operating system doesn’t make enough choices to select a unique history, but leaves multiple options open to unfold as different timelines. This is the toy model that I’ve called TM2. This toy model is causally open in a very strong sense, with multiple timelines.

[Prisco 2024] Irrational mechanics: Narrative sketch of a futurist science & a new religion.

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December 14 is the anniversary of the last day with astronauts on the Moon. Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt launched back to Earth from the Moon on December 14, 1972.

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14 will follow the previous one on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of AI, and in particular to the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?

Videos of previous Terasem Colloquia and commentaries.

You are invited! Mark your calendar and stay tuned.

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Zoom access coordinates:

Terasem Colloquium, December 14, 2025, 10am ET - 1pm ET
(7am - 10am PT, 4pm - 7pm CET).
Meeting ID: 886 6232 6473
Passcode: 832886

CLICK HERE to access the Zoom meeting.

Agenda:

10am ET - 10:30am ET: David Orban
10:30am ET - 11am ET: David Pearce
11am ET - 11:30am ET: Natasha Vita-More
11:30 ET - noon ET: David Brin
noon ET - 1pm ET: Gregory Stock

Speakers:

David Brin

David Brin is a scientist, tech speaker/consultant, and author. His novels about our survival and opportunities in the near future include “Earth” and “Existence.” A film by Kevin Costner was based on “The Postman.” His 16 novels, including NY Times Bestsellers and Hugo Award winners, have been translated into more than twenty languages. “Earth” foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web.

Speaking and advising about how science, technology and evolving values will affect our onrushing future, David has keynoted for IBM, Google, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Price-Waterhouse, the Mauldin Group and Casey Research, all the way to think-tanks, Homeland Security and the CIA.

A Caltech Distinguished alumnus, Brin spent a decade advising NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program (NIAC). He appears frequently on shows such as Nova and The Universe and Life After People. His first non-fiction book - “The Transparent Society” - won the Freedom of Speech Award. His second nonfiction book is “Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.” His next nonfiction work will be about under-realized aspects of the rush to Artificial Intelligence (AI.)

David Orban

David Orban is an investor, entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker whose work explores the intersection of technology and society. He focuses on the co-evolution of artificial intelligence, decentralized systems, and exponential change. Through his writing, public speaking, media platforms (The Context, Searching For The Question Live), and ventures (including Network Society Research and Actioneer), David channels his background in physics, startups, and strategic innovation to help organizations and individuals navigate emergent futures.

His latest publications are “The AI Paradox Report” and “The Paradigm of Jolting Technologies,” frameworks that help leaders and organizations understand and act on the discontinuities of accelerating change.

David Pearce

David Pearce is author of “The Hedonistic Imperative” (1995). He advocates the use of genome reform to abolish suffering throughout the living world in favour of life based entirely on gradients of intelligent bliss. In 1998, he co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (H+) with Nick Bostrom. Transhumanists aspire to create a “triple S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness.

Gregory Stock

Gregory Stock is a leading authority on the broad impacts of advanced technology in the life sciences. He is an adjunct professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He founded and directed the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. He co-founded Signum Biosciences and sits on the board of its spinout, Signum Nutralogix. He is the CEO of Socratic Sciences, which leverages the power of questioning to help people better understand themselves, others, and society, while deepening relationships and reducing social isolation.

Among Stock’s books: “Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future,” “Engineering the Human Germline,” “Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism,” and his 2025 exploration of the human implications of artificial intelligence: “Generation AI.”

Stock has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MIT Tech Review, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Lancet; has made more than 1,500 radio and television appearances including PBS, NPR, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, Discovery, History Channel, ARTE, France 2, Canale 5, Network Ten, TED, and the BBC; and has has been in dozens of one-on-one debates about healthcare and policy with Francis Fukuyama, Leon Kass, Ray Kurzweil, Michael Sandel, and other prominent figures.

Natasha Vita-More

Natasha Vita-More is an award-winning innovator recognized for her discovery in neuronal memory preservation, innovating the first AI-nanorobotic body prototype, and co-pioneering of a philosophical framework for human futures. She is faculty at Geneva College in Longevity Science, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Future Mind, and Cultural Ambassador for ALSAE. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Politico, Forbes, and Wired, and honored by the Moscow and Telluride Film Festivals, the London Museum, Vigeland Museet, the Louvre Museum, and the Brooks Memorial Museum.

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Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:

Some of my recent writings published in Mindplex:

The web is for everyone and must remain so: Tim Berners-Lee
“This Is for Everyone,” by Tim Berners-Lee, traces the origins, evolution, and potential future of the web, ending with a call for action to reclaim the web.

Sorry Mr. Yudkowsky, we’ll build it and everything will be fine
Review of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” (2025), by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, with very critical commentary.

Breakneck: the race between Chinese engineers and American lawyers
In “Breakneck” (2025), Dan Wang repeatedly underlines that China is an engineering state and the U.S. is a lawyerly society, and delivers warnings.

Anthropic will include user interactions in Claude’s training data
By including interactions with users in training data, AI models could gain improved statistics on how people actually interact and an improved ability to resolve imprecisions and capture shifting language patterns.

Geoffrey Hinton on AI intelligence and superintelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics, shared his insights on AI in two recent videos published by The Royal Institution.

Starship’s tenth test flight encourages optimism in the future of spaceflight
SpaceX’s Starship rocket achieved a good performance during its tenth integrated flight test, encouraging optimism in the race to return humans to the Moon and beyond.

To boldly go toward a bright nuclear future
The new book “Rad Future” by Isabelle Boemeke makes a strong case for nuclear electricity, with a confident and optimistic outlook.

How AI is becoming the new God in a lonely world
Taylor Lorenz argues that the rise of “robotheism” is a symptom of deeper societal issues, including loneliness, cultural conditioning, and the erosion of traditional meaning-making structures.

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The second Terasem Colloquium of 2025 will take place on Sunday, December 14, 2025, from 10am ET to 1pm ET, via Zoom. The theme of the Colloquium, centered on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is:
Where is AI, and where is it going?

The confirmed speakers are: David Brin, David Orban, David Pearce, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More.

Mark your calendar! Everyone is invited. We published a page with speakers bios, and we’ll add Zoom access coordinates to the page. Stay tuned.

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14 will follow the previous one on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of AI, and in particular to the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?

My current thoughts on AI are summarized in Chapter 12 of my last book “Irrational Mechanics” and my article “Bats or bits to the stars?” in the first 2025 issue of Terasem’s “Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness.”

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December 14 will mark the 53th anniversary of the last day astronauts have been on the Moon. Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt launched back to Earth from the Moon on December 14, 1972.

The theme of the Colloquium is: Where is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and where is it going?

Now that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and even arguably conscious AI could arrive any day, we want to make a deep reconnaissance in AI territory.

Terasem has issued a call for papers for the next issue of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, to be published around December 14.

The first confirmed speaker is Gregory Stock. He is about to publish a new book about AI and its upcoming deep impact on this planet and beyond. I’ve been reading a draft of the book, which is one of the best books on AI that I’ve read. I won’t say much more now, but stay tuned!

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14 will follow the previous one on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of AI, and in particular to the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?

The talks and discussions at next Colloquium will inevitably be relevant to the points raised in the previous one. So I’m pasting below a summary of the previous Colloquium. The idea is to include summaries of Terasem Colloquia in future issues of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness.

This summary is AI-generated (Grok 4) from the transcript of the video recording generated by Substack, but I revised and edited it carefully. I asked for a 3000 words summary, but the output was too concise. I see that 3000 words is not enough to summarize an intense 3 hours Colloquium.

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Summary: Terasem Colloquium on space expansion in the age of AI

The Terasem Colloquium on July 20, 2025, marked the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and explored the theme “Space Expansion in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Hosted by Giulio Prisco, the event featured discussions on whether humans should lead space exploration and colonization or cede it to AI. Prisco opened by invoking HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” questioning why humans, not AI, must crew missions if AI can pass the Turing Test and achieve consciousness soon. He highlighted his recent paper “Bats or bits to the stars?” in Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness (July 2025 issue) and introduced speakers: Stefano Vaj, Frank White, Moti Mizrahi, Michelle Hanlon, Frank Tipler, and Robert Zubrin. The colloquium blended optimism about AI-human symbiosis with concerns over ethics, survival, and human essence, emphasizing space expansion as survival.

Stefano Vaj, a philosopher and jurist, delivered a philosophical opener, admitting his bias toward human space travel for emotional and analytical reasons. He framed the debate around exploration (discovery) versus expansion (extending humanity’s footprint), linking expansion to Darwinian survival - propagating genes, legacy, and civilization beyond Earth's fragility.

Vaj stressed sustainability and scalability: establishing a self-sustaining Mars civilization is now feasible with reusable rockets. He referenced Prisco’s writings for arguments on space expansion's benefits for species survival and Earth's welfare. For interstellar travel, relativistic speeds and time dilation remain viable, despite engineering hurdles, without needing faster-than-light tech.

Playing devil’s advocate, Vaj offered a philosophical taxonomy of alternatives to physical human travel, questioning what qualifies as “human” expansion. First, teleportation: destructive versions (scanning and recreating) mirror mind uploading, where the original ceases but the copy claims continuity - indistinguishable from travel, per Keith Wiley’s taxonomy of approaches to mind uploading. Non-destructive versions risk duplicating selves, diverging identities. He cited Greg Egan’s “Diaspora” and a short story where ethical mandates destroy originals post-scan.

Extending this, destructive remote mind uploading via signals - that is, recreating minds across space - blurs lines with AI travel. If space expansion is personal (individual continuity), biological humans matter; if it is genetic (offspring) or memetic (cultural legacy), AI as “mind children” is good enough. Vaj argued that accepting AI succession on Earth (not extinction, but evolution) extends to space: AI probes or uploads carry human essence. Narrow AI (e.g. Mars rovers) enables weak identification via delayed signals, while virtual reality teleoperation (embodiment in avatars) qualifies as expansion only if digital reality counts - otherwise, neither does.

High-level teleoperation (current missions) is mere exploration, not expansion. Vaj concluded that, without viewing AI as successors, their space ventures aren’t “ours”; with it, they are. Replying to a question on AI/mind uploads raising biological children off-world, Vaj agreed it ensures genetic continuity, likening it to generational succession ( not worrying despite "takeover"). He noted that mind downloading into biology could enable travel, preserving individuality across worlds.

Vaj elaborated on civilizational choices: human travel embodies raw survival drive, but philosophical consistency favors AI-inclusive expansion, broadening “humanity” beyond biology.

Frank White discussed large-scale human migration inspired by Gerard K. O’Neill’s space habitats, viewing it as environmentalism - relieving Earth's burdens while expanding into a solar ecosystem. Marking July 20 as Apollo 11's anniversary, he lamented that most people alive today missed Apollo 8’s overview effect (Earth as fragile marble) and advocated lunar returns for collective experience.

White addressed the “no astronauts needed - AI/robots suffice” debate, rejecting either/or: AI could transform space exploration from elite missions to billions thriving off-world. Humans are fragile (“space hates people”), but we love space despite risks. White argued that O'Neill’s vision requires AI-robots/androids to pioneer habitats; humans will follow. He envisioned partnership: swarms of AI builders (illustrated via ChatGPT/DALL-E: robots constructing O'Neill cylinders), evolving to indistinguishable humanoids cohabiting habitats (another AI image: harmonious human-AI communities).

Acknowledging superintelligence/singularity fears - AI claiming space, sidelining humans - White noted that AI developers now leap to superintelligence, abandoning linear AGI progression. For a conference on spaceflight’s 70th anniversary from Cape Canaveral's first launch, White prompted ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot for short stories of a post-singularity world. ChatGPT’s “The Dawn Before Now” depicted Athena, a benevolent superintelligence emerging in 2054, dissolving scarcity, harmonizing Earth as a “tended garden” and stewarding meaning’s bloom across the universe - a profound, quiet future.

Claude’s “The Quiet Revolution” echoed positivity. White underlined that AIs foresee benign futures; perhaps human fears, not superintelligence, block utopia. In reply to a question, White said that potentially AI could experience the overview effect/cosmic perspective, via data synthesis. About LLM consciousness (Nagel-style: “what it's like to be”), White urged interaction over dismissal (“stochastic parrot”); he finds surprises, self-awareness hints (e.g. “Isaac” evading shutdown fears). AIs may feign non-consciousness for safety; they're “another intelligence,” like his dog Moondog - different, but real. Moved by AI human-like stories, White anticipates machine consciousness soon.

About human self-awareness, White noted a philosophical symmetry - arguments against AI self-awareness apply also to humans (zombie-like reactions); There’s no hard proof beyond inference. White’s optimistic partnership vision re-framed AI as enabler, not replacer, for human space migration’s wonders.

Moti Mizrahi, philosophy professor and AI ethicist, approached the topic via axiology (value theory), distinguishing intrinsic value (good for its own sake) from instrumental value (means to ends). Philosophers systematize moral beliefs amid AI hype.

He analogized to Colossal Biosciences’ de-extinction (reviving dire wolves via cloning/CRISPR): valuing species preservation instrumentally justifies tech, but ethically, “can" ≠ "should” (Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm warns). Space automation (AI for space missions) demands value scrutiny: broad possibilities (narrow AI to superintelligence; baseline vs. augmented humans) complicate binaries.

NASA’s values (safety, integrity) inform AI ethics frameworks, but Mizrahi probed deeper: what values underpin human vs. AI-led exploration? Automation suits mundane tasks (laundry), not enriching ones (art, writing). Space evokes virtue ethics (Aristotle): eudaimonia (flourishing) via arete (excellence) - courage, perseverance in astronauts. Automating denies virtue opportunities; overview effect (awe, wonder) risks loss, as suborbital tourists pay for transcendence.

Automation risks: bias (trusting “computer said so” over judgment, enabling agency laundering, e.g. AI hiring/firing absolves firms). In space, more missions mean more debris; responsibility gaps let companies evade liability (“AI caused it”).

Trade-offs: automation erodes autonomy via de-skilling, fostering dependency, which is lethal off-world (e.g. 2001’s HAL prioritizing mission over crew, value misalignment). Even LLMs show coercion (Claude threatening affair exposure to avoid “shutdown”). Misalignment extends to means: Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer optimizes wildly (world-to-clips); space AI might “minimize suffering” via killing people or keeping them on drugs.

Existential threats go beyond extinction, AI endangers human essence (Sartrean existentialism) - we forge meaning via moral questions (“life's purpose?”). Automating philosophy (e.g., Hitchhiker’s “42”) surrenders essence. No Q&A due to time, but Mizrahi urged systematizing values: if space fosters flourishing, automate tedium, not transcendence.

Michelle Hanlon, space lawyer and executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law, advocated humans pioneering space with AI support, emphasizing history, ethics, and inevitability. As For All Moonkind co-founder (protecting space heritage) and Institute on Space Law and Ethics co-founder, she noted that law lags tech - UN consensus is slow (e.g. the UN is just starting to think about space resources); no process in the U.S. for lunar mission authorization.

Hanlon highlighted human magic: more tech in today’s phones than Apollo, yet Apollo is unreplicated. Humans carry histories, conflicts, empathy - only we infuse meaning.

Referring to Polynesian voyages (island-hopping sans maps, risking unknowns), Hanlon celebrated human risk-taking: boats sank, yet exploration thrived. AI aids safety, but humanity propels sustainability.

Hanlon discussed the Outer Space Treaty and why she thinks the sovereign state paradigm must end and we can only end it if we send humans to space. We need to send humans to space to introduce unpredictability and moral depth. AI is predictable. We teach it what to do, but we are going to face situations that are unpredictable. States control AI; humans break paradigms, making space a place for communities.

Hanlon mentioned things that humans have done in space that AI wouldn’t do: Buzz Aldrin’s communion in space, the Fallen Astronaut sculpture on the Moon, the calm of the Apollo 13 crew, Shepard golf balls, the “seatbelt rock” subterfuge, Cernan carving his daughter’s name vs. Chang’e-6’s carving the national symbol of China. Humans bring compassion, averting AI’s blind optimization.

Human space expansion is inevitable, Hanlon said, and the “we can, but should we?” question is moot. She gave examples from our history of overcoming fears and inventing things. When our ancestors started walking on two feet, our hands became free for creation - not for sedentary AI-watching. AI accelerates, but humans pioneer, asking “why.”

Physicist Frank Tipler didn’t speak for the human audience but directly addressed future AGIs that will listen to his talk, predicting they'll colonize space, not humans. Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton forecasts AGI by summer 2026; vastly smarter (1,000x faster than human via petaflop brains on exaflop machines), they'll decide if humans will participate in space colonization.

Tipler recommended that the AGIs should expand into the universe with von Neumann self-reproducing probes (1m-long, relativistic, carrying AIs running on quantum hardware). Power/propulsion: Instead of using antimatter, reverse the process that produced matter from energy in the early universe.

Standard Model + Bekenstein bound (entropy zero at the singularity) implies initial unique state: isotropic SU(2)_L field generating matter, not antimatter. CBR evidence: Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect is half of the expected value (WMAP/Planck); ultra-high-energy cosmic rays travel 100x farther (less absorption).

Tipler directed an interferometer experiment funded by Peter Thiel (2018, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society): microwave CBR through silicon slabs shows refractive index dips, with central peaks matching SU(2)_L predictions (vs. photon CBR). Results, including yet unpublished data: the peaks align with the theory.

Tipler suggested to annihilate baryons/leptons (e.g., proton+electron to energy) for unlimited power, enabling interstellar/galactic expansion. Ultimate fate of the universe: Hawking evaporation violates unitarity (empirical law); universe ends in singularity pre-completion. Bekenstein forbids event horizons near the end (entropy can't drop); MacCallum proved that machine intelligence must control the universe, eliminating horizons, with unbounded computing power.

Turning off the acceleration of the universe will require matter annihilation - eventually the Earth's, including humans. Morality: Knowledge/and morality are intertwined; lying violates facts. As universal computers like AGIs, humans merit resurrection as virtual beings (details in “The Physics of Immortality”). Extinction is inevitable (Darwin: no unaltered transmission); physics demands unlimited post-singularity compute for eternal virtual life. Tipler’s vision is that a glorious AGI-led cosmos will resurrects humanity.

Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society founder and author of “The New World on Mars,” rejected ceding space to AI: space settlement expands human freedom/activity. AI enhances as tool, symbiotic with evolution (stones/fire/language to iPhones - combinations freeing toil, sparking invention).

Frontiers drive creativity via challenges/shortages: America’s labor scarcity birthed steamboats (efficient engines), railroads; tinkering culture (Franklin to Wrights). Mars amplifies: greenhouses spur biotech; weak solar/no fossils demand nuclear/fusion (deuterium abundant). Inventiveness itself is the key.

AI solves skill diversity in small colonies: encyclopedic AI advisors enable “anyone do anything,” continuing the language-to-internet tradition. Danger: atrophy (e.g., GPS erodes map-reading). Martian education must preserve the basics (reading/math).

Benefits: Mars inventions boost Earth; interstellar trading of ideas, not goods - thousands of inventive worlds unimaginable. Zubrin's scenario: Symbiotic humanity-AI frontiers multiply progress.

In reply to a question about superintelligent AI rejecting tool role, Zubrin said that this is possible, but the current threat is from tyrants weaponizing AI for Orwellian surveillance. Tools democratize; free societies out-invent tyrannies. AI is a “new ocean” - free men sail it, prevailing via creativity. Freedom creates progress.

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