Terasem Space Day, July 20: Elaine Walker, Riccardo Campa
Two more speakers on the cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion.
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Since 2020 I have been co-organizing and running Terasem Colloquia in July and December. Here are the videos of the last three Colloquia, featuring stellar thinkers like Howard Bloom, David Brin, Martine Rothblatt, Max More, and others: 1, 2, 3.
The July Colloquium, aka Terasem Space Day, will take place as usual on the anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon. Terasem Space Day (July 20 from 10am ET to 1pm ET, via Zoom) will cover cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion.
In February we announced the first two speakers, Frank Tipler and Frank White, respectively of Omega Point and Overview Effect fame. Now we are announcing two more speakers: Elaine Walker and Riccardo Campa.
Elaine Walker is an electronic musician with a deep interest in visual math, physics, neuroscience, longevity, and the future of humanity on Earth and beyond.
She is a renowned microtonal music composer with a long and varied career in electronic music, both in academia and freelance, and also engineers new types of keyboards for performing microtonal music. Her music can be found on bandcamp.com. Elaine is the author of a nonfiction physics/philosophy book, “Matter Over Mind: Cosmos, Chaos, and Curiosity” (2016). Viewing many aspects of life through two different lenses - abstract thought versus the deeper dynamics of the world - Elaine illuminates a more logical and optimistic way forward for humanity. At the age of 50, and with no formal math training, Elaine realized she had a gift for visualizing mathematics, and now has a handful of published math papers (see arXiv.org) with her partner Bruce Olberding.
Since the mid 1990s, Elaine has regularly volunteered for the NewSpace community, promoting the idea of humans living in space. She served 8 years as president of the Boston and NYC chapters of The National Space Society (NSS), and was one of two people to serve on the NSS and Space Frontier Foundation board of directors simultaneously. She spent five summers in the High Arctic on the NASA Haughton-Mars Project doing education outreach. Elaine is also proponent of superlongevity and is a cryopreservation member of Alcor.
Riccardo Campa is Professor of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and director of the History of Ideas Research Centre of this university. He is co-editor of the publishing series Vestigia Idearum Historica (mentis), co-editor of the academic journal Orbis Idearum: European Journal of the History of Ideas, and editor of the publishing series Divenire: Rassegna di studi interdisciplinari sulla tecnica e il postumano (Sestante). He founded the Italian Transhumanist Association, of which he is Honorary President. He is a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and researcher of the Military Center for Strategic Studies of the Italian Ministry of Defense. His research focuses mainly on philosophy and sociology of science, technology studies, medical sociology, bioethics, futurism, transhumanism, and history of ideas.
Riccardo authored 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. He authored many books including “Credere nel futuro: Il lato mistico del transumanesimo” (“Believing in the Future: The Mystical Side of Transhumanism”).
Cover picture from NASA, pictures from Elaine Walker and Giulio Prisco.