Do All Transhumanists Want Immortality? No? Why Not?
Immortality is a primary goal of many transhumanists, but not all. How many do or don’t want eternal life, and why? I recently conducted a survey - funded by Terasem Movement Inc., and fiscally sponsored by World Future Society - that queried hundreds of transhumanists on this question.
The Terasem Survey was conducted via a surveymonkey poll that was set up by my project collaborator, Teresa Dal Santo Ph.D., a Research Associate at University of California San Francisco, with expertise in conducting qualitative and quantitative studies, and specialties in research methods and statistical analysis.
Getting transhumanists to complete our poll was easy; we garnered a total of 818 respondents very quickly.
My thanks to everyone who assisted us, especially:
David Orban, who notified his 2,798 Facebook friends, his 3,480 Twitter followers, and his 5,732 Google+ people-in-whose-circle-he-is
Alex Lightman who notified his 5,000 Facebook friends
Rachel Haywire, editor of hplusmagazine.com, who made our survey the feature article on July 12.
IEET also permitted me to post an announcement.
Amara Angelica declined to post a link to the survey at KurzweilAI.net, where she is Editor, due to various reasons, such as concern about privacy issues and the methodology of the survey.
The completed survey left me with about 500 pages of raw data. I will be delivering all of this info to the funder, Terasem Movement Inc., plus I’m preparing a summary for one of the Terasem Journals online.
Additionally, I will be publishing statistics and comments from the survey in multiple short sections, at IEET and the World Future Society website.
The following statistics and comments are in response to my question: “If you don’t want immortality, what is your primary reason?”
All of the respondents are self-defined as transhumanists. The result?
76.2% replied that they “did want immortality.”
4.6% replied that they didn’t want immortality because “the earth would be overpopulated.”
8.1% said they didn’t want immortality because of the “boredom” they feel they’d endure as a consequence.
3.7% said they didn’t want immortality because they wanted “to go to an afterlife.”
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Essays and comments posted in World Future Society and THE FUTURIST magazine blog portion of this site are the intellectual property of the authors, who retain full responsibility for and rights to their content. For permission to publish, distribute copies, use excerpts, etc., please contact the author. The opinions expressed are those of the author. The World Future Society takes no stand on what the future will or should be like.
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Comments
Immortality
As a Bible believing Christian I already know that I will receive eternal life through my Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ. I would not wish to receive immortality in my present body as it was not designed to last forever but my spiritual body is. None of us ever 'die', we simply go on to the place which God has prepared for us and if we are joined to Him through His Holy Spirit that place is Heaven!
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