I had lunch today with Christopher Bradford, the newly elected president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, whom I’ve known for most of my life and for an even larger majority of his. He mentioned this soon-to-appear New Yorker article to me . . . et voilà, it has now appeared and he’s sent me the link:
My attitude toward Mormon transhumanism is, as the New Yorker’s author says, one of “cautious interest.” I first began paying attention to it a number of years ago when I heard a Latter-day Saint scientist and engineer talking about about the future-science idea of “terraforming” planets to make them humanly habitable and proposing that the book of Genesis actually describes such a process.
I found the idea intriguing, and I still do.
By contrast, interesting though I find this piece, it’s ultimately rather insubstantial and unsatisfying to me:
I’m reminded of a National Enquirer headline that I once saw several decades back. The Enquirer promised proof! that Elvis was alive in Hawaii.
Wondering how the editors of the Enquirer intended to deliver on their dramatic promise, I looked around to make sure that nobody I knew was watching, and opened a copy.
It turns out that Elvis’s memory lives on in Hawaii for Priscilla Presley, and that, when she visits, she thinks about him there.
Pretty weak stuff.
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