Don't miss the Terasem Space Day Colloquium on July 20!
Don't miss the Terasem Space Day Colloquium on July 20!
Cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion. Rick Tumlinson, Riccardo Campa, Elaine Walker, Frank White, Frank Tipler.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
You are invited to attend the Terasem Space Day Colloquium next Wednesday, July 20, from 10am ET to 1pm ET, via Zoom.
I look forward to seeing you on July 20 at the Terasem Space Day!
Zoom access coordinates:
CLICK HERE to join the Zoom meeting
Meeting ID: 824 4597 9923
Passcode: 770541
I hope a special girl will be in the audience and listen to both her parents speak on our future in space!
We didn’t assign topics to the speakers but asked them to talk about what they think needs saying, today, about the cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion. So I don’t know what they’ll choose to talk about. I hope they will talk about my favorite aspects of their work, which are:
Rick Tumlinson is a legendary space activist and a co-founder of the Space Frontier Foundation. He wrote most of the “Frontier Files” - a series of e-mails that the Foundation sent out in 1995 to a select list of space activists. The series generated great interest.
“Rick philosophized on the prospect of humans in space in such a dramatic way that it affected me for life,” says Elaine Walker in her book (see below). “I became immersed in the pro-space movement, as we called it then. The same crowd now calls it the ‘new-space’ movement.”
The “Frontier Files” don’t seem to be available online but backup copies like this one can be found via the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive. I downloaded a copy in case these historic documents disappear from the internet for good.
My favorite is Message 15, contributed by Arthur Clarke no less:
“Nuclear Scientists at Harwell have discovered the heaviest element in the Universe, which they have named Bureaucratium. This extraordinary element has no protons or electrons, and its atomic number is zero. What it does have is one neutron, eight assistant neutrons, ten executive neutrons, 35 vice-neutrons and 256 assistant vice-neutrons. These particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called 'morons'. Bureaucratium is completely inert but can be detected since it impedes every reaction it comes into contact with.”
This summarizes the libertarian spirit of spaceflight and space expansion promoted by the Space Frontier Foundation.
Rick’s talk will be titled “The Orphans of Apollo Grow Up.” We have done it all wrong after Apollo, but what happens if we do it right?
Riccardo Campa is a professor of sociology and the founder of the Italian Transhumanist Association.
Riccardo has recently written academic papers on the sociological and spiritual aspects of spaceflight, including “The sociology of lunar settlement” (in the book “The Human Factor in the Settlement of the Moon: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” published by Springer), “A Theory of the Merging Noospheres: Teilhard and Big History” and “Expanding Ecotheology to Embrace the Earth-Moon System,” published in Theology and Science.
Riccardo is the author of many books. My favorite one, titled “Trattato di Filosofia Futurista” (“A Treatise on Futurist Philosophy”), analyzes the philosophical aspects of Italian futurism, a movement related to transhumanism and Russian cosmism. The full text of the book is available here. See my review.
From my spaceflight book:
The Italian futurists… were enthusiastic fans of aviation and early ideas of spaceflight. Today, they would be enthusiastic fans of spaceflight.
I think today’s sedate Western culture could use an injection of vitality, and I stand with Marinetti on the summit of the world to “fling our challenge to the stars.”
In Campa’s words (my translation): “Marinetti and the futurists set themselves objectives like, no less, ‘to challenge the stars’, ‘to ascend to the sky’, ‘to reconstruct the universe’, ‘to create the mechanical man with interchangeable parts’…”
I think transhumanism, Italian futurism, and Russian cosmism are a powerful philosophical foundation for humanity’s expansion into space.
In “A Theory of the Merging Noospheres: Teilhard and Big History,” co-authored by Christopher Corbally and Margaret Boone Rappaport and published in Theology and Science, Riccardo proposes a modern interpretation of Teilhard. Perhaps “we are destined by contact with other thinking planets, across the abysses of space and time, some day to become integrated within an organized complex composed of a number of Noospheres.” In late writings, Riccardo explains, Teilhard considered this as the most plausible hypothesis for the future of humanity.
Elaine Walker is an electronic musician and a long time space activist. See this 2005 profile in space.com:
“what could be more suitable to accompany the technology driven pro-space movement than technology driven music? Elaine Walker is an artist and musician who feels this way. The pro-space movement is also a social movement. As engineers and entrepreneurs are building hardware and carving out new markets, pro-space advocates are promoting a new outlook for humanity on a social level. Pro-spacers are forever finding creative ways to promote the idea of a spacefaring civilization with outreach projects, magazines, local chapters, lobbying campaigns, books, art and even music.”
Art has a unique potential to create support for spaceflight and space expansion. I think the work of artists is equally important as (and perhaps even more important at this moment than) the work of engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs. We urgently need to make space sexy again and make the public fall in love with space again, and only artists can do that.
Elaine is the author of a nonfiction physics/philosophy book, “Matter Over Mind: Cosmos, Chaos, and Curiosity.” Matter and mind are parts of one physical reality that doesn’t necessarily require mind/matter dualism and/or a creator God. The world is deterministic but not predetermined. I have reservations on some of Elaine’s ideas, but her book is most certainly a great book and a page turner.
In the book she comes out as a pro-tech, pro-space libertarian and tells the story of how she became a futurist philosopher and a space activist, citing the Extropians and Tumlinson’s “Frontier Files” among her main influences.
Frank White coined the term “Overview Effect” to describe the powerful mind-changing and life-changing impact of seeing the Earth from space.
Fred Hoyle noted that the Earthrise pictures taken by Apollo 8 astronauts during their 1968 mission around the Moon stimulated awareness of the need to protect the Earth’s natural environment. “It seems to me more than a coincidence that this awareness should have happened at exactly the moment man took his first step into space,” he said.
Frank wrote a series of books starting with the seminal and very infuential “The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution” (first published in 1987).
In “The Cosma Hypothesis: Implications of the Overview Effect” (2018), Frank explores a higher level Overview Effect related not only to the Earth but to the whole universe. He says:
“[We need] to think about how our exploration of space, or evolution into the universe, (as I prefer to say) would benefit the universe as a whole … we need a more complete perspective, yet another ‘Overview,’ if you will.”
From my spaceflight book:
Frank White extends James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia, the living Earth, to the whole universe. The universe itself will become a living whole and we are “actively encouraged by larger forces” to expand beyond the Earth and “help the universe become increasingly self-aware” … According to Frank White we will create, or become part of, the universal mind.
Frank Tipler is the physicist who dared to suggest that our descendants will take over the universe, remake it over and over, build eternity, and use their God-like powers to resurrect everyone who ever lived.
I have reservations on some of Frank’s ideas, e.g. his conviction that we essentially already know all the physics we need to talk about these things. But this doesn’t diminish the extreme importance of his work, which is not always appreciated as it should be. Frank says, loud and clear, that God (or something so God-like that the name God is appropriate) comes to being in the far future of the universe, and we are part of the process.
More and more scientists are saying similar things, including Nobel Prize winners:
“God is under construction.” - Frank Wilczek
I guess Wilczek doesn’t mean this in a strong literal sense, but this is too good a quote to miss!
The concept is also found in Terasem, e.g.:
“4.1.4 - Terasem becomes omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient when it encompasses all consciousness and enough multiverse.” (source)
Frank Tipler participated in the first Terasem event on July 20, 2005 (video). The chapter “Omega Point: Frank Tipler’s physics of immortality and Christianity” in my book “Tales of the Turing Church” is entirely dedicated to his ideas. See also my 2016 video interview with him. Frank sits on the Academic Advisory Council of the Christian Transhumanist Association.
Thank you, Giulio Prisco, for hosting physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler at the Terasem Space Day Colloquium on July 20, 2022. For those who would like to know more about Tipler's work on his Omega Point cosmology, in addition to the work of other elite physicists proving God's existence per the known laws of physics, see my following article:
* James Redford, "God's Existence Is Proven by Several Mathematical Theorems within Standard Physics", Theophysics: The Physics of God, May 16, 2022, https://jamesredford.substack.com/p/gods-existence-is-proven-by-several , https://jamesredford.livejournal.com/1015.html .