Who Said This? Transhumanist Quote Quiz
Posted: Sun, January 20, 2013
Can you identify the speakers of the following H+ utterances? This challenge is extremely difficult, but here’s multiple hints: 1) four of the quotes are by women, five are by men, 2) authors aren’t all “transhuman” - but their quotes are, 3) six are alive, two died long ago, one died exactly two months ago, and 4) one is Russian, one’s German, one’s Australian, one’s Canadian-born, one grew up in Pakistan, two are British, two from USA…
Good luck! When you give up, the answers are HERE
1. “I see a war coming… the worst, most passionate war that humanity has ever known… the scale of the killing will not be in the millions, as in the 20th century… but in the billions. There will be gigadeath.”
2. “If we change our world view from being centred on machines to being centred on ecology, it starts to become a lot easier to imagine what kinds of technology might complement this approach…. The human imagination is the most powerful technology we’ve got.”
3. “One solution to the barbarities of predation is to use indiscriminate depot-contraception on carnivores and allow predators rapidly to die out… Why fetishise lifeforms endowed with a heritable tendency to prey on and strangulate others?”
4. “the end goal of feminist revolution must be… the elimination… of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally… The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by… artificial reproduction… The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.”
5. “the transcension hypothesis… proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations increasingly into inner space, the domain of very small scales of space, time, energy and matter (STEM), and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination…”
6. “Humanity has had four technological revolutions. We had the Stone Age, the Agrarian Age the, Industrial Age and the Information Age. I believe we have entered a new era, the Hybrid Age.”
7. “Why is nature not a mother, but a stepmother who refuses to feed us? … Even if our hopes of rain-making by means of explosions were to be thwarted, the value of the hypothesis would remain, since it points to an operation involving the whole human race….”
8. “I felt totally at home with (pacifist, not violent) anarchism, just as I always had with Taoism (they are related, at least by affinity.) It is the only mode of political thinking that I do feel at home with. It also links up more and more interestingly, these days, with behavioral biology and animal psychology (as Kropotkin knew it would.)”
9. “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
Good luck! When you give up, the answers are HERE
