Drones are essentially flying robots, and they have been getting alot of negative press lately, what with all the accidental killing of civilians and fears of a totalitarian police-state being able to spy on everyone and everything 24/7. Take this Dragonfly Drone someone spotted at a family barbecue:

The toothpaste is out of the tube: it is now possible for someone to see everything you do. But wait! There’s more! Someone decided to use the simple formula “Drone + Gun = Great Idea” and build an autonomous, Ipad-controlled flying machine gun that literally self-destructs if it gets shot down.

Welcome to hell, right? How does one defend themselves against something like that? A personal laser defense system? Imagine 100, or even 10,000 of those flying into your city.

However, there is some good news. Farmers have started using drones to view crops, saving money on expensive surveillance services normally conducted by plane. But imagine how much more efficient an army of farming drones would be. You could plant crops in places you can’t get to, schedule watering and maintenance, harvest food autonomously, and even have it delivered to a customer’s doorstep. Supermarkets will be a thing of the past. Also, think about construction.

Drones will allow for the construction and demolition of a building within days, if not hours. Combine this with the benefits 3D printing will provide, and it is easy to imagine an entire city migrating to follow resources.

Here’s where I’m going with all this: We are going to need to completely overhaul the economic system. What is going to happen when China begins to use robots because it is economically feasible to do so? Can our economy support ONE BILLION unemployed people? What happens to the construction workers, farmers, truck drivers, and other assorted service people who will be suddenly unemployed? We are heading towards a post-scarcity society with a scarcity-driven economy.

There is a solution, however. Economic models like the Resource Based Economy Principle dictate a world centered around a vast resource management system, a living wage, using the highest levels of technology available to eliminate corrupt profit models. God forbid any of us be judged by how good we are as human beings and what we contribute to society.

These technologies need to happen like, yesterday. Why? Because there’s a great big Brother eyeing the killswitch; who is quickly realizing he will soon be obsolete, and I don’t think he’s going quietly.

It’s a complex, three part question that we may never be able to fully answer. We do, however, get closer every day. We build things. We revise them, and build them better. We make art to express ourselves, and wage war to defend ourselves. The world today is growing radically different than the world of the ancients — and even the world of our American pioneers. If one were to look at the charts and graphs scientists have developed to demonstrate our ever increasing technological prowess, they may find themselves startled and afraid. The charts are climbing through the roof, shifting towards an exponential trend of growth. Some argue that the Darwinian mode of genetic evolution is being replaced by a new form of evolution dubbed Memetic Evolution. Memes are human habits –art, music, literature, and all other facets of our culture. And our memes, it seems, are copying themselves at an alarming rate.

The time it takes to communicate a thought from one human being to another is shrinking exponentially. The activities of writing letters and sending telegrams have been replaced by the newer, faster methods of email and text messaging. What took a matter of weeks if not months a hundred years ago now takes a matter of minutes if not seconds. If one were to extrapolate that trend of growth into the future, surely in the next hundred years it seems that we may become able to communicate instantaneously, even telepathically.

Yet, in this human frenzy of growth and exploration, we have to occasionally stop and smell the roses. How did we get here in the first place? Why were humans blessed with the gift of knowledge, and the poor chimpanzee left to poke around in the dirt?

Granted, some have argued that chimpanzees and elephants exhibit traits of self awareness and consciousness. This was determined by a mirror test, in which a marking was made on the animal’s face, and consequently shown its own reflection. If the animal immediately began grooming the marking, scientists decided that it must be aware of itself. Yet are chimpanzees aware that humans are superior to them as a species? Do they regard us as we may regard aliens or religious figures, as supreme beings? “Oh dang, a human is coming, I better act busy, and make it look like I’m doing something important.” Regardless of their inner perceptions, all animals except humans lack the mental syntax required for a complex lingual system. We are able to communicate knowledge, information, thoughts, feelings, and emotions to one another through our languages. Yet, how did we get this way? Why are we the chosen ones, blessed with the power to ponder life, time, space and God? Why are we the cursed ones, forced to question our own existence and purpose on this planet, in this universe?

Our ancestors first began making music and art some 40,000 years ago. Was this a result of some divine entity imparting its wisdom into our souls? Probably not. Most researchers have come to agree that such a change took place over thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years worth of genetic mutations. Was it the fact that our brains grew to be much larger than our predecessors? That was also not the case. Neanderthals had a similar sized brain as the Cro Magnon man, yet displayed very little culture. The Cro Magnon man performed many rituals when one of their loved ones died. They places thousands of beads into the grave, and spent a large amount of time preparing the ceremony. Neanderthals, on the other hand, simply chucked the dead body into a pit. It seems that they had much less regard and understanding of life in this regard. They did not exhibit any signs of art, music, or any culture for that matter compared to the Cro Magnon man.

So then, what was it that set us apart? Why did we ascend to a higher state of existence compared to our animal neighbors? Perhaps it was not the actual size of our brains, but the wiring that gave us knowledge. Hunting was probably the primary reason we invented tools and communication. We designed, built, and redesigned stone tools until they gave us effective results. Then, we used methods of communication to impart this knowledge to our descendants. Then, while hunting, we developed signals and signs to aid in the kill. Thus, we began to devise hunting plans, and tactics. We began to work together. This would have eventually become language as we know it, when our first vocalizations could be heard echoing throughout the ancient landscape. A verbal language would have greatly sped up the communication process. That would have in turn allowed for more efficient hunting and gathering practices, as more knowledge would have been conveyed in a shorter amount of time. This would have resulted in more free time, which would have allowed hobbies like bead making and art to become commonplace.

Thus, the birth of culture. Bead making could have led to a value system, where beads were traded for goods and services. As time went on, our ancestors may have found gold and silver, and traded those. Money is born. The more money an individual had, the more power was associated with that person. Now we start getting into wars to gain more power, more control over land and hunting areas. People start to make more and more art and music so that they can forget about the wars, and the pain of lost loved ones. They may have found that while they were making music or art that time seemed to slow down, and they were able to connect with some hidden force that felt eternal, and more real than reality itself. For in those fleeting moments of creativity, they were becoming eternal by creating something that would live on long after they were gone. These ancestors of ours could connect with one another in ways the physical world could not have allowed them to in the past. Unbeknownst to them, they were building the framework of what would someday become society itself — a network of thought and culture.

Today, this network is more present than ever, and growing rapidly. Even though biologically we may be the same as we were some 50,000 years ago, our minds have expanded out into the universe, and deep into our own souls. As a race, we have become aware of our own limitations — time, space, and ourselves. And as we tirelessly work to break through these boundaries, we may not realize how similar the act of building a space shuttle is to building a stone axe. They are both tools we use to advance ourselves, and now more than ever, it feels as though we are on the verge of another mental big bang. Just as our ancestors broke through the barrier separating action from speech, we may be on the verge of breaking through the barrier that separated our bodies from our souls. For someday soon, we may truly get the chance to meet our true selves and shake our own hands. Someday soon, we may decide not to be human, or anything, at all.

Wisdom falls on deaf ears: An elderly woman talks to a robotic baby seal for comfort.

Sherry begins by explaining something she saw one day that changed everything she believed. She was watching an elderly patient at a hospital interacting with a robot. It looked like a baby harp seal, and it had big, cute eyelashes. It responded to her language, and cheered her up. It comforted her. The older woman had lost a child, which could explain her longing for something to hold again. It made her feel understood. Sherry couldn’t believe how well she was responding to this robot, and realized the possibilities of this robot’s application.

“I felt profoundly depressed.  This was a tremendous emotional turning point in my research,” says Sherry.  She is now very worried about where this is all headed, and during her TED talk “Connected, but Alone?” she described it best:

“I felt myself at the cold, dark center of a perfect storm, in which we expect more from a technology relationship than we expect from each other.  I believe it is because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable.  We are lonely, but afraid of intimacy.  We are designing social networks that help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.  But we aren’t comfortable, and we aren’t in control. We are cheering on this emotional connection to a machine, but why are we outsourcing what defines us as people?”

When Sherry gave her TED talk the year before, however, it was like a public confessional — because the year before, she told us how amazing robots will become.

So what changed her mind?

“I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people about their plugged in lives.  These little devices are so psychologically powerful, they not only change what we do, they change what we are.  Some of the things we do with our devices are things we would have found odd only a few years ago.  People text during company board room meetings.  People have talked about the important skill of eye contact while you are texting.  We even text at funerals.  We remove ourselves from our grief and our revery, and go into our phones. Why does this matter? Because I think we are setting ourselves up for trouble, not only in how we relate to each other, but how we relate with ourselves.  People want to be  everywhere at the same time.  The thing that matters most to people is control of where they put their attention.”

So close, yet so far away.

But what if someone is so lonely, they must resort to a device to help them feel better?  Certainly there are people who would otherwise be completely isolated from the outside world without technology.  Sherry understands that there are inherent benefits to these technologies, but in the future, why would we want to do that to ourselves?  Why would we intentionally construct false relationships?

When we construct robots, we are changing ourselves.  We must realize the needs we are serving and become aware of what these needs are.  Sherry wants to hear a more articulated conversation about these human needs.  “I always hear TED talks that talk about this and always end with people saying ‘we will become more human’ if we let these robots advance.  I’m not so sure.  Why do we want that old woman talking to a robot?  She deserves to have people around, and we need to hear the stories of her life to learn from her.”

“Technology is making the bid to redefine human connection.  How we care for each other and ourselves.  How we determine our values and our direction.  We have every opportunity ahead of us, and we have everything we need to start — each other.  We have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability; that we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and make it simpler.  Our fantasies are costing us, and we need to find ways that technology can lead us back to our own lives and bodies.  Lets talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life a life we can love.”

We must find a balance between our technologic and the personal worlds as the lines increasingly blur. Social media profiles still leave much to the imagination, yet can provide more instantaneous information about a person than an average 5 minutes of small talk. Google Glass — which allows one to share videos, text, make calls and browse the web through the user’s eye — is an emerging technology that may prove beneficial in establishing the physical and internet-based demarcations … by completely eliminating those boundaries and turning an individual into a breathing, living embodiment of the internet. You could say we are becoming the internet. Or the internet is becoming us. Whichever you choose, there is a new age of interaction upon us, and we most certainly will have our share of growing pains. Perhaps some new device like Google Glass will help people learn to truly see through each other’s eyes…But most likely, you’ll just use it to watch the Lakers game during your next dinner date.

About Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships with others, with ourselves, with it. Described as the “Margaret Mead of digital culture,” Turkle is currently focusing on the world of social media and sociable robots. In her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Turkle argues that the social media we encounter on a daily basis are confronting us with a moment of temptation.

Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we confuse postings and online sharing with authentic communication. We are drawn to sacrifice conversation for mere connection. But Turkle suggests that digital technology is still in its infancy and there is ample time for us to reshape how we build it and use it. She is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

Passion Pit — A Modern Music Marketing Success Story

Passion Pit is a perfect example of how giving away self-produced and released music can lead to big things.  Lead Vocalist Michael Angelakos took songs he wrote for his girlfriend, burned them to CD, started passing them out around campus and next thing you know?  Sold out tours, major labels, and glowing Pitchfork reviews.  But what can you do as a beginning musician to follow in their footsteps?

• Step 1: Have good music

It may sound ridiculously obvious, but this is sometimes a major factor musicians overlook in the marketing process.  Why spend money on a tour van or radio promotion if no one will even show your music to their Facebook friends first?  You could literally spend $50,000 on marketing and have it go to waste if your music isn’t up to the top quality standards in terms of production, songwriting and mixing/mastering.

If you are just starting out, and don’t have the ability to hire a producer or engineer at a professional studio, there are plenty of programs that will allow you to, after alot of trial and error, get close to professional quality sound.  I use Logic Pro, some Pro Tools, and Ableton Live for production.  A full on tutorial of how to produce music with these programs is another article entirely.

• Give it away for free on “the Internet”

If I have never heard of your band before, I am probably not going to buy your music.  Especially if there isn’t even a free iTunes preview available.  This is because there are plenty of bands that I already like giving away music for free, and in the age of Mediafire and Hype Machine, I can download any album I want in about 4 seconds.  So if a potential fan shows up to your website, has to turn off your FLASH AUTOPLAY WEBSITE (caps because seriously everyone hates these sites), and then gets propositioned to enter their credit card information, odds are they aren’t going down to the car to get their wallet.  And that is a catastrophic failure on your part.  Give your music away for free, at least initially.  Get people excited and interested in your sound and what you are doing.  Think about the old adage “Fake it till you make it”, and how that relates to music — you will make significantly more money down the road using long-tail economics — so stop thinking linearly and start thinking exponentially. Consider this:

Chris Anderson wrote a very profound book called The Long Tail: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More that explains how the internet changed the way we do business on a global scale.  A good example is what happened to SEARS, the department store.  It all started back before most farmers could afford an automobile, let alone the fuel to drive into town every day.  Sears had the novel idea of passing out catalogs to each farmhouse, that not only sold things, but sold EVERYTHING.  Wristwatches, thread, lightbulbs, kerosene lanterns, you name it, you could order it right out of the catalog.  This is because Sears invested in the initial infrastructure of large warehouses and trucks to ship things from all over the world to Good Lord, Iowa.  This was great initially, and gave the masses things from far away lands they only dreamed about.

Yet as time wore on, the farmers started showing up to Church with the same wristwatch from the same catalog.  Consumers demanded product differentiation.  They now wanted specialized, niche markets. Competitors and new nation-spanning highways gave people the freedom of choice and customization, which in turn led to Sears’ downfall, and subsequently it is now  market share leader in washing machines.  So, what does this have to do with music?

Back when there were only a few channels for wristwatch distribution, the same held true for music.  There were only a few channels on the local radio, and only a certain number of CD’s could fit on the shelves in the record store.  The major labels owned the only distribution infrastructure that could physically get your music to the major metropolitan areas, and if you didn’t fit their style or genre, you were condemned to play coffee shops and Bar Mitzvahs for the rest of your career.

Along comes the Internet.  Whoa, wasn’t there a record store here last week? The new paradigm of music distribution allows for infinitely reducible niche markets in music.  Nowadays, the New Age Polka enthusiast can not only find their favorite artist’s music, but automatically and instantaneously receive recommendations of other New Age Polka artists they may like as well.  As an old friend used to say, “there’s a seat for every ass in the house”.  If you make good music, you will find fans, regardless of how obscure it may be.

Just don’t expect giving it away for free to work as well as it did for Radiohead.

• Get 1,000 true fans

I went to a music conference in 2011 that was basically a big waste of time, but I did come away with one new idea of what being a musician will be like in the coming years.  Consider this article, written in 2000, about the then current state of the music industry.

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/financial/sunday/062500biz-berenson.html.

In that year, Eminem, Britney Spears, and N Sync all helped paint a picture of a music industry that was still expanding — a record-breaking 312 million CD’s were sold — that’s an 8 % increase.  The warning signs were there — as most of the article debates whether or not Napster will have a long-term effect on major labels.   But statements like “People do like CD’s. They continue to buy about 900 million CD’s every year in this country. I don’t think people are going to change their behavior dramatically,” offer a glimpse into the prevalent shortsightedness that was going around at the time.

LOL I crashed the music industry sry guys

What happened next was a result of that year.  Based on 2000’s growth projections, the industry kept expanding while the actual sales started to dip.  Labels started losing alot of money fast, and could no longer give out big advances.  Thus, the days of the mega-stars like Britney Spears are now over.

Yet there is still a booming music industry out there, with billions of dollars in annual global revenue.  So how will it be distributed in the coming years? We will start to see the expansion of the musical middle class.  No, you probably won’t make $10 Million dollars per album like they did in the year 2000, but your chances of making an honorable $40,000 per year are very high if you can attract at least 1,000 fans that will spend $40 on your brand per year.  Think about it — that’s basically a T Shirt, a ticket sale, and a ringtone. The best way to attract fans is to be real with them, and to be honest.  The idea of being a reclusive, mysterious musician that hides in the studio for weeks doesn’t really mesh well with the age of blogging and Youtube.  Talk to people online.  Share stories and information.  Comment on people’s pictures.  Post videos of your new song idea and ask for input.  Over 50% of the entire internet’s traffic runs through YouTube.  That is a HUGE resource.

Your new best friend in music marketing.

Make customized merch that only your most loyal fans can access, and even think about VIP concerts and events.  It may sound strange, but sometimes it feels like the internet has only increased the distance between people in real life — be someone people can always rely on as a digital friend, and I promise, they will always support your musical endeavors.

Watch Beau Lotto’s talk above on optical illusions and how information can differ depending on perception.

Written by Ben Thomas

The year was 1943, and the Pentagon had a problem. They’d poured millions of dollars into a new voice encryption system — dubbed the “X System” — but no one was certain how secure it was. So the top brass called in Claude Shannon to analyze their code and — if all went well — to prove that it was mathematically unbreakable.

Shannon was a new breed of mathematician: A specialist in what’s known today as information theory. To Shannon and his fellow theorists, information was something separate from the letters, numbers and facts it represented. Instead, it was something more abstract; more mathematical: in a word, it wasnon-redundancy.

As Beau Lotto explains in his presentation, we’re hallucinating reality all the time — but we only take notice when our hallucinations fail to make accurate predictions.– Ben Thomas

Take, for example, the sequence of letters spelling out “Let’s crack the codes.” It’s got a high level of redundancy — not all its letters are essential for getting its message across. As long as you’ve got some practice reading English, you can look at a shorter, less-redundant sequence like “Lt’s crck th cdes” and fill in the missing sounds. Along the same lines, Hebrew and Arabic speakers can read the vowel-free written forms of their languages just fine. Our brains are surprisingly talented at picking up patterns, filling in blanks, and ignoring redundant data — only when we’re uncertain about how to fill in a blank does information become… well, informative.

Shannon’s non-redundancy idea isn’t just handy for cracking codes, though — today, it’s responsible for most of what you see on the Internet. JPEG image compression, for instance, throws out most of an image’s data, and we rarely notice anything’s missing — our brains’ visual system smooths out the rough spots. Same goes for MP3 compression, and for the Flash video encoding used on YouTube. Ever since Shannon’s day, information theorists have been refining their techniques, drilling closer and closer to the bare minimum of information required to convince us we’re not missing anything. (You might say those ancient Hebrew and Arabic scribes were a few thousand years ahead of their time.)

In light of all this, it’s hard to escape the inventor Ray Kurzweil’sconclusion: “We don’t actually see things [at all]; we hallucinate them in detail from low-resolution cues.” As Beau Lotto explains in his presentation, we’re hallucinating reality all the time — but we only take notice when our hallucinations fail to make accurate predictions; when we think we’re certain of something that’s actually not so certain, and our brains have to hunt down new information in order to make better predictions.

Claude Shannon once said, “Information is the resolution of uncertainty.” The more certain we are in our hallucinations, the less information we think we need — and the less open to new information we become. Beau Lotto finishes his talk on a similar note. “Only through uncertainty,” he says, “is there potential for understanding.”

Luckily for the Allies in World War II, Shannon had just the right kind of understanding for the job. After proving the Pentagon’s X System mathematically uncrackable, he helped lay the groundwork for the next generation of military codes. His most enduring legacy, though, isn’t the codes he created, but the idea behind them: Only in uncertainty do we realize information’s value.

The two that I became soon turned into three and four
I lived a life of peace, and never dreamed I’d start a war
I headed out across the land to conquer and explore
But soon enough I felt the need to split myself some more

The thousands I became began to build their first machines
I started building tiny boats to navigate the seas
I dreamed a few religions, but they all disagreed
So then my new religions started building armies

My boats turned into battleships, across the seas they raced
The soldiers of myself all wore disguises on their face
The war engulfed the planet as my armies swept the land
I couldn’t see which side of me would gain the upper hand

The tiny little soldiers were too small to understand
I made me fight against myself to find out who I am
I don’t feel that responsible, for how could I have known
The enemies I wiped away were soldiers of my own

The winner of the war would know the shape of things to come
For they alone decide my fate when all is said and done;
I almost caught a glimpse of me, reflecting in the sun
but suddenly the final soldier cursed what I’d become

I lost control of everything, and I became confused
I waged a war against myself I never thought I’d lose
But right before I killed myself, I wondered if they knew
That all along their Mighty God was just a point of view

Ancient Lasers @ BIL 2012

[Ancient Lasers is the musi­cal work of Daniel Fin­fer, a Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and vocalist. Artists love to say their music has a mes­sage, but what hap­pens when that mes­sage is “the Sin­gu­lar­ity is Near”? Musi­cian Daniel Fin­fer cre­ates albums that explore the con­cepts and con­se­quences of accel­er­at­ing tech­nol­ogy while still pos­sess­ing enough pop-music chops to make them acces­si­ble. Ancient Lasers has tracks with titles like “You in the Future” and “Replac­ing You.” On first lis­ten they may sound like Finfer’s singing to a girl, but lines like “I don’t need you in the future” are about post-singularity robots dis­miss­ing the need for humans. Pretty trippy stuff, and awe­some to lis­ten to.] — Singularity Hub

By Rachel Haywire

Questions

1. If you could get one augmentation what would it be?

While it would be nice to have titanium skin or lungs that would allow me to breathe underwater, the augmentation I would choose is one that should be the top priority for scientists working in this field. Intelligence expansion. That’s really step one, isn’t it? If I could increase my intelligence, and my capacity to understand intelligence itself, inventing new augmentations on my wishlist would be much easier. I know that is kind of a cop-out of an answer, so if intelligence-expansion wasn’t on the table, it would probably be human flight. I have a terrible fear of airplanes, which I’m fairly confident stems from the fact that I was in a plane crash as a young child. Kind of ironic I teamed up with a band called Idiot Pilot to produce Ancient Lasers, isn’t it?

Selective hearing would come in handy these days, as well.

2. How would you feel about becoming a cyborg?

It depends on who is turning me into a cyborg. One of my biggest worries related to technology is its abuse by world governments or cyber-terrorists. I have a hunch becoming cyborg would in some way involve the internet, and we have a long way to go before someone will convince me to drink any cyber-Kool-Aid. I mean, I don’t want Wikileaks or Anonymous hacking into my thoughts. My mind feels like the last place I can still hide in this world; where no one can get to me. Facebook and Twitter both started out as seemingly innocent, fun places to post your thoughts and digital records of your daily organic life. But look at what’s happening now: the government basically turned social media sites into one giant population-monitoring system, and they love it.

If we are talking physically, sign me up. I would love to take a MechWarrior or a Gundam suit for a spin someday.

Ancient Lasers Studios

3. Do you think there is going to be a war between humans and machines?

You could argue there already is one. Certainly in the job market, at least. Machines have achieved a level of complexity that is actually putting people out of work, and I’m afraid it’s only going to get “worse”. I use quotes because it all depends on your point of view. Sure, automation creates unemployment, but that’s because we are currently operating in an obsolete economic system that doesn’t know what to do with the unemployed. I think the definition of a “job” is going to change dramatically in the near future. We are transitioning towards a post-scarcity world (hopefully), so maybe someday our jobs as humans will be to simply imagine and create. The entertainment industry is currently one of the largest growing sectors, after all.

Getting back to your question, however, I do think there would be a cataclysmic event involving a post-human Artificial Intelligence if it was built carelessly. As a human, I have empathy for my infant self, and look back on those years fondly. But how do I feel about myself when I was an embryo? I don’t have any empathy – because I was so drastically different back then I might as well have been someone else entirely. That is how I believe a post-human Artificial Intelligence would regard humanity – some kind of pest getting in the way of its quest to maximize complexity and reverse its own entropy. If it came down to that – a war between humans and a greater intelligence, I wouldn’t even try to fight it. I would throw my gun at its feet, knowing that my role as a human was to build a post-human. I could find comfort dying at the hands of a machine – it would feel like some cosmic passing-of-the-torch. Obviously, I would prefer not to.

Another possibility is a war between humans at various stages of technological progression, much like the war between Homo-Sapiens and the Neanderthal. History is one long race to some distant, intangible finish line – hopefully whoever gets there first still has some compassion for humanity.

4. What is the best way to make people more aware of Transhumanism?

This is a very tough question – in fact one I try to answer every day as an artist focused on educating people about Transhumanism. Clearly many artists and visionaries have tried. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is a perfect example. But as they say, a fish ahead of its time is doomed to die on dry land. You would think by now we’d have figured it out, but the people in charge don’t want us to “figure it out”. Lady Gaga, for example, has a very transhuman message that I think resonates with a lot of people. But most people don’t realize that she actually studied fame, and pretty much had the concept for her career planned out. And at the end of the day, there’s still someone at the record label looking at the bottom line. There is only so much she can do within that business model. Most entertainment is focused on making us forget how utterly astonishing it is to be human; to be alive at this moment in history. This is the bottom of the funnel.

Corporations are excellent at making us feel like we’re important, when in reality they regard us as a dollar sign or a number on the computer screen. And for a while, it worked. It felt good to go to McDonald’s, or Starbucks, or Best Buy. It felt good to be ‘part of the club’. People have an evolutionary need to belong somewhere…to be part of a community. We have always been that way, it is in who we are. Even before corporations, you had Nationalism and Religion – two major systems that are also starting to fall apart. When I was a kid, it seemed like it made sense, and, hey, it was fun. Fireworks on the Fourth of July? Christmas presents? Sign me up! The people at the top of these institutions are experts in marketing.

But to the mainstream, Transhumanism is terrifying. I mean, even to me, it’s terrifying, and I’ve been researching it for seven years now. Clearly the answer isn’t at the bottom of a Coke Zero or in the pages of an ancient book. I think one thing that a lot of us involved in this new movement have in common is that we aren’t satisfied with the answers we’ve been taught in school. We have to spread this message, because it is all we can think about. The message is spreading, thankfully, and hopefully we can turn others on to it. Right now feels like the Sixties on Steroids. And it’s happening because everyone on earth is getting the real information, as they come online.

The bottom line is that we need more money funneled into science. Plain and simple. We need to get it out of archaic systems and institutions, but we need to show and tell people why. That’s what I do with my music, or at least try to.

5. What would your ideal future look like?

My ideal future would be some sort of ‘consensus reality’, that is, a reality where everyone can find the place where they belong and feel happy. There is a theory about what will come after science called Thalience, a term coined by Karl Schroeder. Assuming that in a post-human world everything will become intelligent, eventually the entire universe will expand to become itself. We would all be one. The universe we would become could play games with time and space, relive past memories, talk to lost loved ones…Anything. But maybe we would get bored after a while and make some sort of ‘surprise button’ – where one day we decide “Okay, we’re bored, so let’s invent a way to keep it entertaining.” Maybe this entire universe is the result of a post-human getting bored and pressing that button. I don’t know. They’re only theories.

In the end, I think an ideal future is one where we can look back on all of this and feel like it mattered.

6. If you could change one thing about humanity what would you change?

Everyone has to crabwalk.

I have never geeked out harder in my entire life.

Aliens

First of all, life-sized R2-D2, C-3PO and a Terminator T800 greet you at the door. Once I collected myself enough to continue inside, I browsed through shelf after shelf of high-quality models and figurines. Some of these were not only rare, I had no idea they were even in production:

• 1989 Batman, Joker, Batmobile
• Luke Skywalker Bespin Outfit
• Batman Begins Batman
• Predator
• Captain America
• Iron Man and Iron Monger

The Space Jockey

Having just seen Prometheus, I was pretty thrilled by this Space Jockey, which has a level of detail that is quite hard to find.

Jabba

Dewback with Sandtroopers

The Dark Knight section was also impressive, featuring a 1:16 scale model of the Tumbler, Bane, Joker, and Scarecrow.

Also of note, there were dozens of life-sized helmets from Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, Terminator, a fully-stocked LEGO collection, and plush versions of most action figures.

Delorean Time Machine From Back To The Future Part 3

Seriously, if I had the Yen to blow, I would have picked up that Space Jockey, DeLorean Time Machine, and Dewback faster than you can say “Get away from her, you Bitch.”

http://www.toysapiens.jp/

The raw excitement of planetary exploration is captured at Celebrate Curiosity, with over 1000 of your fellow explorers, friends, party goers, celebrities, scientists, artists, and space enthusiasts. Join us, as we take a thrilling dive into discovering the possibilities at the cosmic frontier in style!

TICKETS: http://marsparty2012.eventbrite.com/

Our Martian Party kicks off after the first day of Planetfest and spans two floors for an out-of-this world experience! As you mingle with your friends and make new ones along the way, keep your eyes peeled back for space industry persons of interest from Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and NASA. During the course of the evening, catch sightings and conversations from the most interesting Space Entrepreneurs, Sci-fi Authors, Screen Stars, and Personalities.

Bill Nye the Science Guy at BlackStarr’s Yuri’s Night, April 2012 

What to expect at Celebrate Curiosity:

• Customized t-shirts printed while you wait
• Interactive galactic art by Andrea Lofthouse, NASA JPL’s Dan Goods, and others
• CEO of The Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy, hosts breakout talks
• Short speaker sessions from prolific space advocates!
• Enjoy tasty Martian treats and cosmic drink specials
• Interactive video games from GameDesk
• Gorgeous Spacecraft models displayed for your enjoyment
• Giveaways from the Planetary Society
• Get dazzled with spaced out music spun by Ancient Lasers and our Suprise Guest DJ
• Dance to the undulating cosmic lights of the Jellypuss
• Adorn yourself with a selection of complimentary blinky lights and glowey things
• Witness live art in the making, interstellar wall projections, and adult games
• Intergalactic Girls passing out Space Swag from the likes of SpaceX, NASA, and more
• Delicious Astronaut Icecream and Space food Sticks from Funky Foods
• Amazing lightshows with some far-out Tesla Coils!
• LED Hula Artists!

Don’t forget to show off your Martian themed apparal by taking pictures at one of our two sassy souvenir photo booths

We have much more up our sleeves, and will continue to tantalize you with the possibilities of A Party on Mars over the next week!

This is an all ages event, but registration is mandatory and tickets are limited!

Dress:

Dress to impress and be sure to wear your intergalactic best!

Our favorite Mars Rover Costume, so far

Intergalactic Girls