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Daily Archives: September 6, 2015
Illuminati | TheDoggStar
Posted: September 6, 2015 at 6:45 pm
The Illuminati is a name that nowadays is used to talk of several groups characterized by secrecy, all groups working together, having one single goal, because they all share the same god. Historically however, it refers specifically to the Bavarian Illuminati, founded on May 1 of 1776, a secret society of people who believed to be enlighten, by this same so called "god" who in the Bible is called Lucifer, who gave them knowledge hidden from the masses which they all use for the ultimate goal of global domination through a New World Order under Lucifer as god. Their first and main rule is "Do not talk about Illuminati". There is much proof that the Illuminati, referring to all these different secret societies, has been behind both World Wars plus the one coming up, as well as many other tragedies around the world, all that may had been necessary for them to come to World Domination, following their motto "Ordo ab Chao" (Order out of Chaos), which I'll point out later.
Adam Weishaupt is the man who is recorded as having started this secret society which would come to involve all Luciferian societies, even those dating back thousands of years ago; all to keep the plan of their ancestors alive ever since Nimrod(One World Government), the first human who rebelled against the Most High and who chose to be king of the world.
Adam Weishaupt was taught by Jesuits and became a Freemason before starting the Illuminati. Freemasonry and Illuminati are not one and the same, although Freemasonry has come to be controlled by the Illuminati nowadays, keeping the Freemasons in the lower ranks in ignorance of their real goal and god, information which is held by those in the 33rd degree
Adam Weishaupt
Adam Weishaupt once wrote:
"I did not bring Deism into Bavaria more than into Rome. I found it here, in great vigour, more abounding than in any of the neighboring Protestant States. I am proud to be known to the world as the founder of the Illuminati."
In the Book Proof of Conspiracy by John Robison we read:
"Weishaupt had long been scheming the establishment of an Association or Order, which in time, should govern the World."
The Illuminati was created in Bavaria, Germany, but the symbol they used as their logo seems to come from Egypt, or even the Mayans, and it holds a very significant meaning, it can be found on the United States one dollar bill.
All Seeing Eye on Pyramid
At the bottom of the pyramid we can see the Letters MDCCLXXVI , which are the Roman numerals equivalent to 1776, which many believe are there to commemorate the independence of the United States but instead, it is there because this was the year that the Plan of the Illuminati for a New World Order would be set in motion on the "New World" called America.
Something particular about this number at the bottom of the pyramid is that if you separate the letters in three groups setting the first letter of each group at the top of the pyramid we get the number or letters DCLXVI at the bottom of the pyramid which is equivalent to 666.
500+100+50+10+5+1= 666
500+100+50+10+5+1= 666
Another instance in which we can find how these people have encoded the number 666 or at least suggest it for the subconscious mind, is in every single barcode of every product you buy on the daily basis. The number 6 is represented by two thin lines in all Bar-codes.
In every Bar-code there are two bars that go all the way down in the beginning, two in the middle and two at the end, which could be said to be a way to put the number 666 without people knowing it, since these are the only lines on barcodes that dont have a numbers below them.
666 on Barcodes
Revelation 13:18
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
One verse before the past Scripture is where the Mark of the Beast is mentioned, which contains the number 666.
Revelation 13:17
17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
It is part of many system beliefs, that this mark of the beast will be a Tattoo, even taking it as far as believing that it may be a tattooed bar-code, which as we saw, could be said to contain an encrypted 666. This came to be as the only interpretation for such a statement found in the Book of Revelations, during a time of a very few technological advances, therefore the only way for a person to imagine this Mark, would have been as a tattooed bar-code making you nothing more than a product. Although it is very close to the truth, it would be pretty obvious for most people who would not get it, just because it would be clearly a mark having the 666 on it, which by now must people know to be the number of the Beast. Actually the real Mark of the Beast its even creepier, since people wont see this one coming, cause the Illuminati is bringing it to the people from every angle possible, this will make the people want it, because of it's many features, not realizing what it really is mostly because of it being virtually invisible, almost the size of a grain of rice.
Mark of the Beast
The Mark of the Beast is this tiny chip that will contain all your medical history, bank accounts and a GPS among other features. It is easily implanted in people with a regular needle in a matter of seconds, just like any other shot you may get at the doctor.
Chip by Needle
Many people have already gotten the chip, some to be able to be located by satellite, in case of a kidnapping, others to be able to pay for their drink s at clubs by the swipe of the palm of the hand.
Implated in Right Hand
While the scientist were working on the chip, they made several tests to try and figure out what part of the body would be better for the implantation of the chip taking in account the use that it would get as well as for the lithium battery. They came up with the conclusion that the hand or the head would be the best place to put the chip because of the thinness of the skin and the many veins that would go around, keeping it continually charged, lastly they decided on the right hand to facilitate the use of it, taking in account the fact that most people are right-handed and as we should expect, this is also prophesied in Scriptures.
Revelation 13:16
He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads,
Unless you have this chip, eventually you wont be able to buy or sell anything as the Bible tells us. If you end up not get it, they will begin labeling you of terrorist calming you must have something to hide or otherwise you would cooperate with the system to bring order, the order out of the chaos that they want, a New World Order out of all the fear they have introduce in the hearts of the people of the world, fear of being broke, fear of being robbed, fear of being kidnapped etc.
Doctors studying the chip realized that if the lithium battery was to spill inside the body of the person or even malfunction, this would create very "painful sores". This is also something that is bound to happen according to the Bible during the first Bowl of Judgment.
Revelation 16:2
And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.
Another reason given to people for the use of this chip is medical situations, in case of an accident and losing consciousness, the doctors or nurses providing you with help could just scan the chip to receive all your information so that in this way they know if you have any previous problems, allergies to any drugs, if you have diabetes, etc, without you having to be awake to inform them.
One of the first companies offering the chip for this use is called VeriChip.
Verichip Logo
When seeing this logo, I couldn't help noticing the resemblance of the of it to the eye of a snake, which should raise some eyebrows first because of the fact that everybody knows who the Serpent in Scriptures and also because the image of a single Eye, is a symbol that Illuminati is known for using quite a bit.
Here's an image of a snake to show you what Im saying:
Eye of a Snake
There are many ways in which the Illuminati subliminally gives messages to the masses and also reveal their plans and following steps among their pears all over the world through the Media and Entertainment industry which they so obviously control, without being noticed by those people who are in ignorance of their symbols and the meaning of these.
One symbol which they use the most, is the "All seeing eye" or the "Eye of Horus"(One World Government) in Egyptian religion, which is the one eye at the top of the pyramid on the One Dollar Bill and is the eye of Lucifer, their god which enlightens them.
Eye of Horus
Next is one of the first designs proposed to be the Confederate Flag of the United States, displaying very clearly the Eye of Horus, the False-Messiah(Antichrist) watching over the United States ever since it's foundation, given the fact that George Washington Himself was a Freemason.
USA Proposed Flag
Illuminati Symbolism Infiltrated
The Logo of the U.S. Information Awareness Office doesn't stay behind with the symbolism, involving this time the whole planet earth under its watch, according to some sources, it was designed by Bill Cleere, a 33rd degree Freemason.
Information Awareness Office
The sign for Radioactivity means world control for the Illuminati, the world of course being the circle surrounded by the power or control of the "Unholy trinity".
Radioactivity
The Secret Service of Britain shows the eye at the top of the pyramid also.
Britain Intelligence M15
Here is also something that may be very revealing for some, the Tomb where the founder of the Church of Jehovah Witnesses was buried, found right in front of a Masonic Temple and having the shape of the Pyramid with a separation at the top.
Watch Tower Freemasons
It is also clear on the picture, the symbol of the Knight Templar, who gave birth to modern Freemasons.
Knight Templar
Like I mentioned before the Illuminati are everywhere and in control of everything in this world and this becomes clear when you know their symbols. A production company Icon Productions, created by Mel Gibson shows its Illuminist influence in the logo showing the one all seeing eye.
Icon Productions
The same influence can be found in the work created by the company as one would expect, in the movie "The Passion of the Christ" the Jesus they show gets hurt on his right eye, very close to the beginning of movie and from then on, their Christ is shown with only one good eye while the other one has been darkened, once again following symbolism, making the Jesus in the Passion of the Christ represent what is know as the Antichrist, the messiah they are waiting for.
Jesus Antichrist
Amazingly enough, the Bible does tell us of these one eye false messiah, which would be the shepherd sent to the world by Satan.
Zechariah 11:17
Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth the flock! the sword shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye: his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened.
The Movie wasnt even based a 100% on Scriptures, but instead Mel Gibson took as an inspiration and guide the Book written by Ann Catherine Emmerich called The Dolorous Passion where she speaks of certain Visions of the Christ which she had, from which also comes out the next image, where the fact that the character depicted in the movie "The Passion of the Christ" is the messiah wanted by the illuminati becomes obvious.
Ann Catherine's Illuminati Christ
Other than the obvious depiction of the Pyramid of the Illuminati and the All Seeing Eye of Lucifer as being part of the vision of Mrs. Ann Catherine, we can also see a weird representation of the known cross, looking a lot like the upside down cross in the peace symbol.
"Peace Symbol"
It is said that certain witches make the new members denied the Messiah and turn their back on Christianity by breaking a porcelain cross upside down, making the symbol in the middle of the sign shown above, giving them a feeling of relieve or peace, because of being accepted, giving birth to the "Peace Symbol".
The architecture of the City of Science and Arts in Valencia Spain is completely Illuminati oriented, by having several building giving the illusion of a giant eye by the reflection of the water, as well as many small pyramids.
Giant Eye
Eye in Valencia Spain
The shape that it is used to make the all seeing eye and other symbols is called the Vesica Pescis in Sacred Geometry, which is one of the many powerful secrets said to have been found in the Temple of Solomon by the Knight Templar, who later became the Freemasons.
Sacred Geometry
The Vesica Pescis is formed by the intersection of two circles and Is one of the basic elements of the Sacred Geometry.
Vesica Pescis
Order of the Temple of the East or the Order of Oriental Templars
Ordo Templi Oirientis
It was the first organization to accept the law of Thelema, which states Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, established in 1904 in Cairo Egypt, when Aleister Crowley wrote The Book of the Law, he claimed that the author was an entity named Aiwass, whom he later referred to as his personal Holy Guardian Angel (or "Higher Self").
Aleister Crowley drew a picture of his supposed guardian angel and it happens to resemble a bit too much to what we now know as a Gray, a certain type of Alien race or may I say a certain type of fallen Angel.
Aiwass
Similar to many secret societies, the O.T.O.'s membership is based on an initiatory system with a series of degree ceremonies that use ritual drama to establish fraternal bonds and impart spiritual and philosophical teachings.
Other than the Eye of Horus and the Pyramid being part of the emblem of the OTO there is also an inverted dove which symbolizes destruction. This same dove symbol is found in the logo for the Trinity Broadcoasting Network (TBN), in between a White horse and a lion, resembling very much the coat of arms of Prince Charles.
TBN
Here is the Coat of Arms of Prince Charles of Wales, which has many details found also in the book of Revelations which makes many people think that he may be the Antichrist.
Prince Charles Coat of Arms
Revelation 13:2
2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
This verse of the Bible describes very precisely the creature on the left side of the coat of arms, since in this type of illustrations of heraldry, a lion is supposed to have 3 claws while a bear has 4. Also, the torso of the animal seems to be a bit too skinny for a lion, looking more like that of a leopard, however the head, or in the case of the scripture, the mouth, is that of a lion.
Next to this characteristics, there is also the fact that when Charles was receiving his power as Prince of Wales, the ceremony was done right infront of a Dragon located in London and during the ritual it was said to him that he was receiving that power from the Dragon.
Dragon City of London
Revelation 12:3
3 And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
Here is a verse speaking once again of the dragon, a red dragon, which can be found on the lower right side of the image as well as the ten different horns and ten different crowns all around the Coat of Arms.
Revelation 6:2
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Illuminati | TheDoggStar
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Illuminati (Earth-616) – Marvel Comics Database
Posted: at 6:45 pm
Skrulls, The Hood, Rabum Alal, Black Swan, Terrax, Avengers, Captain America, Great Society, Namor's Cabal, Black Order, Imperial Guard, Pride; formerly Hulk, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Avengers
Origin
The Illuminati were a covert think-tank team consisting of Mister Fantastic, Iron Man, Professor X, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt, and Namor. They met in secret for a number of years collaborating on information and strategy, operating relatively successfully initially, despite their unique traits and considerable differences in nearly every way.
They each represented a certain something that was very special Namor, of course, was the king of 71% of the planet, of the Atlanteans, and represented a certain mindset of anti-heroes; Tony Stark represented a certain type of hero the Avenger type of hero, one who understood and appreciated that heroes could work with the government, rather than outside of it; Reed was the science side of the heroes; Black Bolt represented the Inhumans; Dr. Strange spoke for the mystical side, and Professor Xavier was there for the mutants. They all brought with them a unique viewpoint and perspective that wasn't shared by the others.
The group formed some time in the aftermath of the Kree-Skrull War, and probably after the Avengers/Defenders war. Iron Man realized that each of the individual members had information about these alien races beforehand, and they could have collectively stopped it. He brought together the Illuminati with the Black Panther in Wakanda, and proposed that they form a government of superhumans similar to the United Nations. However, Namor refused, on the grounds that too many superheroes were violent outsiders (such as Hawkeye and Quicksilver, both former criminals). Xavier refused on the grounds that mutants were already feared and hated, and if Iron Man thought he could fight this with iconic superheroes, it would result in heroes being feared and hated as much as mutants. Dr. Strange refused on the grounds that too many heroes were anti-establishment and that the group Iron Man had assembled to form a governing body would not be 'anti-establishment', but rather a form of 'counter-establishment'.[1]
The group did, however, agree to meet to exchange information regularly. The only individual present who refused was the Black Panther, who took issue with their self-righteous attitudes and feared the association would end in less than altruistic actions. He also predicted that the group would one day find themselves in the middle of the kind of event they had formed to prevent, and would be entirely at odds with each other.[1]
The Illuminati traveled to the homeworld of the Skrulls, who were still reeling from their defeat during the Kree-Skrull War on Earth. The group warned the Empire not to attack Earth again, but were unable to escape afterwards. The Skrulls analyzed their captives (physiology, genetics, technology, etc) and gleaned information from their behavior, until Iron Man was able to lead an escape. The Illuminati recognized that another attack was inevitable, while the Skrull Empire began to make use of the data they compiled.[2] By using a clone of Reed Richards, the Skrulls were able to be undetected by superheroes.[3]
Mr. Fantastic revealed to the group that he had been collecting the Infinity Gems, and hoped to collect them all with the help of the Illuminati. Despite a general apprehension, the group managed to acquire all six gems. Upon doing so, Mr. Fantastic attempted to will the Gems out of existence, but he was unable to do so. Faced with this failure, and a reprimand from Uatu, the Watcher, he made the controversial decision to give each Illuminati member one gem to hide so that they would never be combined and used again.[4]
The Illuminati, minus Tony Stark, whose role as Iron Man was being filled by Jim Rhodes, confronted the Beyonder. The Beyonder was an Inhuman who was a mutant before he was exposed to the Terrigen Mists. Black Bolt, under the guise as the Beyonder's "king", convinced him to go into another dimension in exile.[5]
The Illuminati approached Noh-Varr, a Kree warrior who tried to take over the Earth, in his prison. They demonstrated the Kree connection to the Inhumans, and their desire to protect Earth. They demonstrated the primitive nature of humanity, but also the potential of the race to evolve and better itself. Ultimately, using Captain Marvel (a deceased, Kree-born superhero), they tried to convince Noh-Varr to use his powers to protect the Earth and guide humans to better themselves.[6]
Iron Man informed the Illuminati of the formation of a new Avengers team in light of the breakout from the Raft. All but Namor wished him well in his endeavor, and Iron Man moved on to the issue of the Sentry. Although none of the Illuminati had any recollection of him, Mr. Fantastic discovered that he had files on the Sentry and Professor Xavier discovered that his mind had been tampered with. Mr. Fantastic was able to use the files to get through to Robert Reynolds, aka the Sentry, and help him reverse what has been done to him. Iron Man told the group that the Avengers took full responsibility for the Sentry, should he ever lose control, but dodged their questions about other recent Avengers inquiries.[7]
Maria Hill, Director of SHIELD, approached Iron Man concerning the Hulk, who had recently destroyed Las Vegas with several casualties. Iron Man presented a solution to the problem of the Hulk to the Illuminati (excluding an absent Professor Xavier), suggesting that they shoot him into space, sending him to an uninhabited planet where he could live out the rest of his days alone. Namor, alone, dissented to the plan. He believed that they had no right to banish their ally from Earth and accused them of not helping to cure Bruce Banner to the best of their abilities. The other four members voted in favor of the plan, and Namor departed. While leaving, he said that the Black Panther was correct, and predicted that the Hulk would return to seek justified revenge.
Despite deciding not to meet again, Iron Man called together the Illuminati (excluding Professor Xavier, who is in exile in Scotland after the M-Day) to introduce them to the Superhuman Registration Act. He illustrated the fact that recent events had raised suspicion of all super-powered individuals and groups, and that one wrong move on the part of a hero would trigger disaster.
If the Act passed, a war amongst heroes would result and cause untold damage. In order to avoid it, Iron Man reiterated his idea of a representative body of superheroes, and urged the group to come out in favor of registration prior to a disaster. Namor dismissed the issue as none of Atlantis' business, Dr. Strange and Black Bolt disagreed on principle, but Mr. Fantastic agreed with Tony. The damage was done, however, and the Illuminati dissolved.[2]
Although the Illuminati never met or operated as a group during Civil War, their actions in the conflict reflected their reactions at the last meeting. Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic became two of the leading members of the pro-registration side, and worked closely with the United States government and SHIELD. Dr. Strange stayed out of the conflict, meditating and fasting,[8] though he later admitted, after joining the New Avengers and finding new love, that he regretted his lack of involvement. Afterwards, he joined the New Avengers, who continued to operate underground without registering. Black Bolt and the Inhumans stayed out of the conflict, but began their own Cold War with the United States. Namor was involved only so far as it served his interests. This included avenging the death of his cousin in the Stamford tragedy, and coming to the aid of his friend Captain America's forces in the final battle.[9] Professor Xavier was not on Earth during the conflict.
During Civil War, Reed was contacted by Amadeus Cho, who informed him that Hulk did not land on the intended planet. When the Hulk ultimately returned to Earth, he sought revenge on the Illuminati as Namor had warned. His first act was to attack and defeat the Skrull Black Bolt at the Inhuman settlement on the Moon. After providing New York with a twenty-four-hour time limit to hand the other three Illuminati over to him, the Hulk approached Xavier at his mansion to determine whether he would have supported the Illuminati plan had he been present. He battled the X-Men, eventually beating every single member in Xaviers school. Xavier told Hulk that had he been there, he would have voted yes, and offered himself to the Hulk in exchange for the safety of the X-Men, but after learning of the mutant population's recent severe losses as a result of M-Day, and the deaths of several of Xaviers students, the Hulk decided that the X-Men had suffered enough and departed.
Having then taken over Manhattan Island, the Hulk was attacked by Iron Man in a new Hulkbuster armor, but just when it seemed Tony had triumphed the hulk became enraged allowing him to defeat Starks new armor and Stark Tower. Despite the aid of the other members of the Fantastic Four, including temporary members Black Panther and Storm, the same fate befell Mr. Fantastic. Dr. Strange tried to enter the Hulk's mind, but Hulk tricked Strange into presenting himself in a physical form that he attacked upon appearance. Strange later invoked and is possessed by the demon spirit of Zom, hoping that he could stop the Hulk before it was too late. However he lost control of his new found power, and he almost caused some civilians to die during his battle with the Hulk. Although the Hulk saved them, this action made Strange lose his confidence in his powers and made him weak enough for the Hulk to defeat him.
Hulk then implanted the Illuminati members with obedience discs and forced them to fight each other in his makeshift gladiatorial ring in Madison Square Garden. However the Hulk spared them from killing each other, showing them that he proved his point to the world. They survived the encounter by the timely intervention of the Sentry, who battled the Hulk, but ultimately lost as the two reverted to their human forms and Banner knocked him out with a blow to the head. Hulk then returned, but Stark used prototype defense satellites to negate the Hulk's powers. The Illuminati was also cleared from the responsibility of Sakaar's destruction when Miek admitted he saw the Red King's forces breach the ship's warp core and kept quiet to initiate what Miek felt was Hulk's destiny as the "Worldbreaker".[10] Namor, being the only Illuminati member opposed to shooting Hulk into space from the beginning, was spared by Hulk for that reason, and remained non-involved throughout the conflict.
Iron Man called the Illuminati together one more time to show them the body of the Skrull that was posing as Elektra. He felt that the Skrull represented a secret invasion of Earth, and that the group was responsible (after traveling to the Skrull home-world years before). His suspicions were proved correct when Black Bolt revealed himself to be a disguised Skrull. The five remaining members were able to barely defeat it, and its two compatriots, and began making plans to detect and defeat the remaining Skrulls. They soon realized, however, that this was pointless, as they couldn't trust each other.[11]
Iron Man and Mister Fantastic were the two chief fighters of the Secret Invasion, taking central roles in the main battles, and key to the ultimate failure of the Invasion, though surviving not unscathed at all. Iron Man brought the Skrull corpse to the world's top minds, and summoned Criti Noll (in the form of Henry Pym) and Mister Fantastic to examine and dissect the body. Stark was soon, as planned by the Skrulls, called in, along with his Mighty Avengers to the Savage Land, where one of the first and most significant of battles of the invasion took place, starting when a spaceship crashed there, several dozen superheroes came out, and the New Avengers, too, arrived on the scene. Just as Mister Fantastic ingeniously discovered the method of concealment the Skrulls had been utilizing to become virtually undetectable, Criti Noll acted, using a special, Skrull-designed gun to subdue Reed Richards and prevent him from maintaining solidity; the remaining members of the Fantastic Four were also swiftly taken out elsewhere for most of the invasion, though all survived, if but barely. Agent Abigail Brand of S.W.O.R.D. freed Mister Fantastic and took control over the Skrull ship he was held in to the Savage Land, but sadly not before the Skrulls managed to infect Iron Man with an alien virus disabling himself, his armor, and S.H.I.E.L.D. itself. Veranke, disguised as Spider-Woman, also attempted to crush and destabilize what remained of Stark's morale, will and faith by trying to convince him he was actually a Skrull sleeper agent, but the Black Widow convinced him otherwise. Richards and Brand arrived, with Reed using a self-designed machine to reveal the Skrulls in the midst of the Savage Land battle, which were quickly disposed of by the heroes. Reed and Tony led the other heroes back to the now chaotic New York for the final battle, in which Reed exposed the Skrulls and which he was a prime target in, but Reed survived, and Tony, though his secondhand and relatively crude armor he had quickly constructed suffer enough damage to force him to initially retreat from the battle, used a spare old Iron Man armor to enable him to aid the struggle against the Skrulls, freeing the prisoners, including Pym and Jarvis. The blame for the invasion was placed on Stark, who lost S.H.I.E.L.D., a great deal of public support and popularity, and much of his pride and hope, becoming, essentially, a fugitive from the now-powerful Norman Osborn.
The Fantastic Four were hit hard when Osborn, knowing Reed Richards' intellect well exceeded his own, attacked the Baxter Building when the Four were in another time and another place. Richards was more shaken by his own internal conflicts than any outside threats; nevertheless, Norman Osborn's H.A.M.M.E.R. agents nearly succeeded in capturing the Four. Richards, after taking a long, hard look at the life, was inspired to construct a machine that was capable of bending reality itself. H.A.M.M.E.R. arrived just as Reed activated the machine, interfacing with the Baxter Building's power supply and resulting in an energy fluctuation that sent Sue, Ben and Johnny back to the prehistoric era. Reed searched for answers which could only be found in alternate timelines as the three found themselves in a super hero Hyborian-age civil war. The Richards children, Franklin and Valeria, were the only ones available to confront the agents Osborn had sent. Richards studied other parallel Earths to see if any found a peaceful solution to the Civil War, which resulted from the Superhuman Registration Act. Reed peered into different worlds, some more bizarre than our own, to see what they did differently. Reed met with the other five Illuminati to handle the problem.
Feeling compromised by his use of dark magic, Doctor Strange left the New Avengers during the late stage of the infiltration and departed to parts unknown. He eventually resurfaced, alive but having lost nearly everything, from his house to his position as Sorcerer Supreme. What he did retain were the enmities of the Hood and Dormammu, both of whom wanted to slay Strange more desperately than ever, and a sense of duty to find the new Sorcerer Supreme and hand over the artifacts of the office. Feeling a desperate lack of power, he fled to the New Avengers for help.
Black Bolt (along with his son Ahura) was captured before the World War Hulk and did not even know about the invasion. His voice was intended by the Skrulls to be used as a powerful weapon of mass destruction, but the Inhumans, aided by the renowned Kree, Ronan the Accuser, found their former king, rescued him and returned to Attilan, with Black Bolt and Maximus sharing power, only for the Inhumans and Attilan, shaken by the invasion, angered by the Skrulls, and tiring of humanity's treatment, themselves to depart from the Sol system, destroy the fleeing Skrull ship along the way, took control over the Kree Empire from Ronan, and realized their ultimate destiny in a conflict shaking the cosmos.[12]
Namor, along with his new ally Doctor Doom, were struck at least somewhat less hard, though certainly affected. Neither was successfully replaced by Skrulls, and it was unknown whether their forces were assaulted, either covertly or openly. Doom was at first unaware of even the Skrull invasion, before it outright exploded, though Veranke named him one of the "bigger guns" to be taken down. Doom was released from The Raft by the Skrull virus that infected Stark's armor in the Savage Land and rendered StarkTech inoperable (it was unknown whether Doom was considered as part of the release). Namor and Atlantis were affected to an uncertain extent, with Namor, too, one of the "bigger guns" Veranke wanted removed and acknowledged as one of the Illuminati. Both separately arrived to the first Cabal meeting after the invasion, held by Osborn and attended by three others, though it was revealed afterwards they had been concocting secret plans that even Osborn was unaware of. Namor's allegiance afterwards was unclear, from helping other heroes defend New York from the menace of the Red Hulk and aiding the new Captain America in searching for the first Human Torch's body, to hunting down Tony Stark and insisting T'challa join the Cabal.[13] However, most recently, when an Atlantean sleeper cell launched a terrorist attack on California, Osborn ordered Namor to publicly denounce the rogues and execute them, leaving one alive to parade before the media. Namor vehemently refused and walked out on the Cabal.[14]
Even the Black Panther, T'Challa, after successfully fighting off a Skrull fleet attacking Wakanda with his wife Storm, forewarned by the discovery of the Brother Voodoo Skrull, was taken down, due to the cunning and might of Doctor Doom, an ambushing force of Doombots, and the Cabal, with a new female Black Panther (his sister) active, and Wakanda's spirit shaken.
The Illuminati were technically no more, with its members so scarred and divided, along with the problem of working together during crises: Black Bolt was worlds (and galaxies) away; Doctor Strange's strength was significantly reduced without the role of Sorcerer Supreme and the Sanctum Sanctorum; Tony Stark was blamed and heavily mistrusted as a fugitive and a failure; Xavier was no longer in charge of the X-Men but still in constant peril; Namor was working for sinister purposes once again as the Illuminati's opposite, the Cabal, emerged in the shadow world that was rising; and Richards was occupied with the Fantastic Four and his own troubles with Osborn. Even the Black Panther was in severely critical condition. The Illuminati continued to exist in alternate realities.
To handle the problem of alternate-reality versions of the Civil War, Reed reassembled the Illuminati. It was unclear where Namor's loyalties were and if the Illuminati would continue to unite against the threat of the Cabal.[15]
Parker Robbins, aka The Hood, escaped prison and started a search for the Infinity Gauntlet. While at the Raft, he had received a tip from an imprisoned Inhuman which led him to the Reality Gem at Attilan. Then he teleported himself to the Baxter Building, where he used the first Gem's power to bypass security and take the Power Gem. The two Gems sent him unwittingly to the desert, where he found Red Hulk and defeated him. Red Hulk managed to get to Avengers Tower and bring news of what had happened. Realizing that the Gems were back in circulation, Iron Man quickly gathered the Illuminati, with Medusa in the place of her then-deceased husband Black Bolt.
The team went to Atillan to investigate but were discovered by three teams of Avengers, revealing the continued existence of the Illuminati to the superhero world. Their teammates were visibly hurt that these men had been operating secretly and considered it a breach of trust -- the wound between Iron Man and Steve Rogers was particularly deep. However, the Avengers teams united to search for the Gems before Robbins could obtain them. Namor, Thor, and Red Hulk recovered the Time Gem at the bottom of the sea. Xavier, along with the Secret Avengers, Wolverine, Spider-Woman and Maria Hill went to the ruins of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, where the Mind Gem was guarded by the Danger Room. The Space Gem was hidden at Area 51 in New Mexico, but when Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Doctor Strange, and some of the New Avengers arrived, Robbins already had it in his possession. The Space Gem brought Hood to the Time Gem, which was being protected by the Red Hulk, Thor, and Namor. Red Hulk managed to take the Power Gem from Hood when he was distracted by the presence of Uatu, the Watcher. The combatants were teleported to New Mexico again, where Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers woke up from being knocked out by Robbins previously.
Faced with a cavalry charge of angry Avengers, Robbins escaped to Professor Xavier's school and obtained the Mind Gem, with which he defeated Xavier in a telepathic fight. After knocking him out along the rest of the heroes there, Robbins teleported to the location of the Soul Gem on the Astral Plane; there, Strange met Robbins under the illusion of the mad titan Thanos. He attempted to talk Robbins into giving over the other Gems, but when that failed he took them both out of the Astral Plane and into the middle of a group of other heroes. Red Hulk attacked Robbins with the Power Gem, allowing Namor and Ms. Marvel to take the Mind and the Space Gems. Parker was unaware of these losses until Reality Gem was taken from him by the other Gems, which were in the Infinity Gauntlet held by Iron Man, making him the first human to wield this artifact.
Iron Man used the Gauntlet to send Robbins back to prison and then apparently willed it out of existence. In reality he sent it to a secret location, to which he regathered the Illuminati. Now counting Steve Rogers among their number, they divided the Infinity Gems again and took them to new hiding places. The re-formation of the group appears to remain a secret.
When the Phoenix Force returned to Earth and created a war between the Avengers and the X-Men, Captain America re-convened the Illuminati to convince Namor, who was possessed by the Phoenix, to cease his activities and convince the rest of the Phoenix Five to do the same. The meeting proved to be unproductive as most of the members were split in opinions on the conflict, and all of them left, thinking Namor wouldn't come. Namor arrived in the room after the others had left and Captain America asked him to stand down, but Namor refused, although he acknowledged that he still respected Captain America as a friend, an ally and even a brother, which was why he wouldn't capture him or reveal any of their secrets to the other Phoenixes.
After a mysterious portal to an alternate universe opened in the middle of Wakanda, Black Panther had an encounter with a mysterious figure claiming to be a "Black Swan", who was trying to destroy another universe from colliding with hers. After realizing the threat that his universe would collide with another, T'Challa captured Black Swan and re-convened the Illuminati deciding to join them officially to face this new threat,[16] Beast later joined the team as asked by Professor X in his last will.
The Illuminati used the Infinity Gauntlet to buy their universe more time by pushing the colliding universe back for some time, but during the process, the gems were destroyed. Captain America upon this failure didn't like the direction the team was willing to go because of the moral grey area and wouldn't back off of his opposition to the idea of destroying another planet. The group decided it was best to move on without Captain America and Dr Strange wiped his mind of any memory of the Illuminati removing him from the group.[17]
The members of the Illuminati began working on solutions to destroy other worlds in the occasion an Incursion happened. Iron Man began working on a partial Dyson Sphere to power a weapon Reed Richards named Sol's Hammer. Doctor Strange retrieved a forbidden tome, with a spell that could destroy a world at the price of the caster's life. T'challa and Reed developed a large armory of world killing devices reverse engineered from the Black Swans tech used to destroy a planet previously. When another Incursion happened, the Illuminati traveled to the other Earth to see if they couldn't save people there before destroying the world. They found that the Galaktus of that universe had come to destroy that Earth to save his universe. They ended up fighting his Herald, Terrax, whom they captured but not in time to stop Galaktus, who consumed the other Earth, averting the Incursion.[18]
While interrogating Black Swan, who revealed that the Incursions began with the birth of the Great Destroyer, another Incursion struck, this time in Latveria.[19] The Illuminati took an Antimatter Injection System they needed to destroy the other Earth. This incursion was different from the others, as the colour of the sky was blue, which Black Swan indicated as the arrival of the Mapmakers, beings which wait for an incursion in order to infect and remake one of the Earths after destabilizing one, making a piece of the dead world collide into the living Earth. After realizing the colliding Earth was already dead, Black Panther detonated the trigger of the Antimatter Injection System, destroying the other Earth and saving theirs.[20]
When Thanos and his Black Order arrived Earth and demanded a tribute in exchange for the survival of its inhabitants, Black Bolt revealed the Illuminati that the Mad Titan used the demand for the tribute of the heads of younglings between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two as a cover for the search of his lost Inhuman-descendant son.[21] Using the Terrigen Codex, the Illuminati embarked on the search for Thanos' son, Thane, but were stopped by the appearance of a new incursion in Australia.[22]
Before reaching a decision about what to do about the other Earth, the Illuminati were greeted by an Aleph arriving from the other Earth. The Aleph led them to the Builders of that universe who explained that the early death of the multiverse had led to the collapse of the Superflow, the space between universes, that they used to traverse them. In order to avert disaster and ensure the existence of the Multiverse, the Builders across the Multiverse had decided to destroy all Earths, thus hopefully stopping the Incursions. Since the Builders of Earth-616 had failed in their mission, these builders urged the Illuminati to destroy their own world for the sake of the Multiverse.[23]
Upon returning to Earth, the Illuminati discovered Thanos had invaded Wakanda and gained access to the Illuminati's antimatter bombs by capturing Black Bolt. The Illuminati managed to fight back.[24] When the Illumianti arrived to the room where the bombs were, they found themselves against Thanos' general Supergiant, who defeated them by mentally controlling Black Bolt. When Supergiant activated one of the bombs, Maximus appeared with the trigger. He triggered the bombs, but also used Lockjaw to transport the antimatter bomb along with Supergiant to a distant uninhabited planet where she died in the explosion.
The Illuminati travelled to Greenland in order to help the Avengers defeat Thanos, but arrived after the battle had ended when Thane trapped the Mad Titan in an amber construct which left him in a state of "living death." Iron Man convinced the Avengers to let him keep Thanos, as he would supposedly "take care" of him, but secretly placed him in the Necropolis, where he and the rest of the Illuminati went about planning for the universe's coming end.[25]
The Illuminati vs. the Great Society
Black Swan prompted them to build a "mirror" that would allow them to look into other universes. Reed Richards realized however that he had already built such a device, The Bridge.[26]
The next Incursion pitted the Illuminati against the Great Society of Earth-4290001, a group of noble heroes who had been able to prevent the destruction of their Earth without bloodshed. However, the Society no longer had the means to prevent this Incursion in the same way as the others. The Illuminati tried to convince the Society to work together with them, but the Society doubted that the Illuminati had any intentions of allowing their own world to be destroyed, and knew that they had the means to destroy the Society's Earth. Knowing that it would come to bloodshed in the end and unwilling to waste anymore time, Namor struck the first blow, starting a battle for the fate of their respective worlds.[27]
Even though the Great Society turned the tide of the battle to their favor, Doctor Strange ended the battle by unleashed a demon which killed most of the Great Society and fatally injured Sun God. As the Illuminati were leaving this Earth having set the antimatter injector, Sun God begged them not to destroy his Earth. Black Panther offered him the chance to return with them, but he refused, preferring to die with his own Earth alongside his friends.
Back at their own universe, and with only ten minutes before impact, the Illuminati debated who would activate the antimatter injector. Both Mister Fantastic and Black Panther tried to will themselves to do it, but failed. Namor admitted that his personal moral beliefs weren't worth more than the survival of billions of lives, and he was the one to finally activate the trigger, destroying the inhabited Earth.[28] Following this course of action, the Illuminati confronted Namor for what he had done. The friction between Namor and T'Challa escalated, and after revealing that he was the one who led the Black Order into assaulting Wakanda, Namor left.[29]
Due to the exposure to the explosion of the Watcher's eye, which revealed deep secrets related to them to those in its blast radius,[30] Captain America remembered the mindwipe the Illuminati submitted him to, and confronted Iron Man about it.[31] He decided that the Illuminati's actions shouldn't be tolerated, and charged the Avengers with hunting them down.[32] At the same time, faced with another Incursion immediately after the last one, Namor had taken over Necropolis, freed the prisoners of the Illuminati and formed a new incarnation of the Cabal, with the purpose of destroying the incursive Earths, doing what the Illuminati were not willing to do.[33]
Eight months into the future, the Illuminati went into hiding, and added to their ranks Captain Britain, Amadeus Cho and Yellowjacket.[34] Because of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s improvement on ways to track them down, the Illuminati had to periodically move from base to base. After Cho infiltrated the Avengers Tower, now the S.H.I.E.L.D. Station: Golgotha, the team recovered the files of Tony Stark, who had gone into hiding and was yet to be found.[35]
While on the run, the Illuminati repeatedly attempted to find a way to solve the problem of Incursions, from trying to create a new Earth with a Cosmic Cube and then with Franklin Richards' powers, to asking the Celestials and Galactus for help, but all these plans failed.[36]
With a new incursion on the horizon, the Illuminati devised a plan to get rid of Namor's Cabal.[37] They let themselves be found by Steve Rogers' Avengers, and set a trap to subdue them with the help of Sunspot's Avengers.[38] Even though the help of the Invisible Woman was needed to make this possible, as Rogers' Avengers had brought their own reinforcements,[39] the Illuminati were able to share their plan with Steve.
Namor, who had become disgusted with the Cabal's needless slaughtering of the people of worlds they could destroy painlessly, was ready to turn himself in, but also set a trap to destroy the Cabal. For this next Incursion, the incursive world had been ravaged by the Sidera Maris. Namor would lead the Cabal to said world, activate the antimatter injector without their knowledge, and leave them to die with said Earth, preventing them from escaping with the use of an A.I.M. platform capable of creating an impenetrable barrier between the two colliding Earths. However, as Namor had left the incursive Earth and prepared to activate the platform, Black Panther and Black Bolt appeared before him. They incapacitated Namor and threw him off the platform to the soon-to-be-destroyed Earth in order to make him personally pay for his crimes. As the antimatter injector began to destroy the Earth, T'Challa and Blackagar returned to theirs, informing the Avengers that not only the Cabal had been destroyed, but Namor was also not going to come back.[37]
With the Cabal seemingly dealt with (even though they had actually survived and escaped to Earth-1610), the Illuminati and S.H.I.E.L.D. reached a truce and started working together.[36] Inspired by Valeria Richards, the Illuminati stopped working on a way to stop the incursions, as they "couldn't win," but started planning the creation of a "lifeboat" to survive the destruction of the universe, in order "not to lose." Meanwhile, the Shi'ar empire discovered the link between the decay of the Multiverse and the Earth, for which they decided that if the universe was to live, the Earth must be destroyed. Even though they planned a sneak attack on the Earth, the Guardians of the Galaxy managed to discover the Shi'ar's plan and warned the Avengers.[40]
While approaching Earth, the Shi'ar alerted humanity that they had two hours left to live until Earth was destroyed by their fleet. Using a super-weapon capable of channeling the Earth's power, Sunspot and A.I.M. retaliated against the Shi'ar in front, while S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Avengers used a Planetkiller seized from the Beyonders to attack from behind. However, A.I.M.'s weapon overheated and exploded, and the Planetkiller was destroyed by the Annihilation Wave. With no options left, the Avengers prepared to meet their end. However, Iron Man had flown to Sol's Hammer, and prepared to use it.[41]
Iron Man saved the Earth when he destroyed the Shi'ar fleet, but the final incursion was still on the horizon. The Avengers and the Illuminati started deciding which people would be allowed into a "lifeboat" they had created, which could theoretically survive the destruction of the universe. Meanwhile, as the final incursion happened, Steve finally confronted Tony for having betrayed his trust.[42]
Equipment: The Bridge, Incursion Detection devices, formerly the Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity Gems, Xavier School's Cerebro Transportation: Lockjaw, Quinjet Weapons: Each members' arsenal, Sol's Hammer, Antimatter Injection Systems
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The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence – CTJ
Posted: at 6:44 pm
Standing before the following three questions:
1. What do we do when the rule of law can no longer keep up with the rate of technological change?
2. How can therule of law address our assumption of the role of natural selection in evolution?
3. What isthe role of the rule of law in the emerging Anthropocene epoch?
The mission of The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence is to educate people on the choices available to them in matters of their minds, bodies, and genomes; and, in so doing, to bring about a legal metamorphosis that will coherently sustain a technological civilization.
The vision of CTJ is to contribute to the founding of a coherently sustainable technological civilization.
Certain technologies are converging to amplify human physical and mental capabilities, to surpass human intelligence, and to create new forms of life. I call their convergence human enhancement enabling technology (#heet). Finding our way throughthe excitement, hope, and fear presented by#heet requires us to make choices about our own human nature and the very nature of nature itself. These choices are some of the toughest weve ever had to make. They ask us to question many of the rock-hard "facts of life" that we've taken as obvious or essential. These choices will soon take on a legal, political, and practical relevance in our day-to-day lives.
The freedom to choose, which includes the freedom not to choose, is essential to our way of life. Being free to choose as an individual usually has limits if were going to live together as a society. In most societies, the limits placed on freedom of choice and who is entitled to make a choice are aspects of what we call a right; and, a right is a privilege given only to people that the law regards as persons. You might think that all people are persons as far as the law is concerned, but this has never been true. Dealing with the question of whether technologically enhanced humans and artificial intelligence entities are persons entitled to any rights is among the many legal issues we must decide.
As of 2015, there are no laws in the United States or elsewhere about human enhancement, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, or artificial life. Welcome to The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence: #lawthathinks about #biologybydesign.
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A Skype alternative worth its salt: Jitsi | usability …
Posted: at 3:43 pm
Ive been using Skype, Google Talk and Facebook chat for years to communicate with friends and family. Theyre all convenient, reliable and easy to use. But there is a big problem: They are all very easy to record and monitor by 3rd parties. We now know that:
So if you happen to live in a surveillance state (think countries of the Arab Spring, think UK with their repeated attempts to introduce surveillance of their citizens, think USA with their record-breaking demands for your personal data from all of the above service providers (Microsoft, Google and Facebook)) then you can expect that all your online communications with your loved ones (voice calls, video calls, text chats) are recorded and stored, or at least eavesdropped upon. Theyre all great free services that allow you to keep in touch with people, with one caveat: the government is listening in.
If you have no problem with that, perhaps because you subscribe to the flawed I have nothing to hide school of thought, read no further.
If you feel that being spied upon constantly, and having no reasonable expectation of privacy for your online life is not cool, read on.
The work of thousands of visionaries (starting with people like Richard Stallman in the 70s) has today given us the free tools to protect our online communications to a reasonable degree. These are not tools to stop a police investigation against you from succeeding these are tools that empower you to opt-out from the surveillance-by-default communications channels most of us use, and instead keep your private thoughts and words only between yourself and your loved ones.
The easiest one to get us started is Jitsi.
Jitsi gives you voice calls, video calls, instant text messages and group chats. It therefore covers 100% of the communication capabilities of Microsofts Skype, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, IRC channels and the like. Use Jitsi, and you dont need to use any of these again.
Why switch to Jitsi?
Because it protects your privacy as much as possible. If you and your loved ones use Jitsi, you can:
As an additional benefit, its great to have all of your instant messaging contacts in one window, and Jitsi gives you that. It also runs on Windows, MacOSX and GNU/Linux.
Start using Jitsi instead of Skype, Google Talk and Facebook Chat and stop corporations and governments collecting, storing and analyzing the thoughts you share with your loved ones.
PS: You can only have private communications if both ends of the chat/voice/video call support this. If both you and your loved ones use Jitsi, voice & video calls are private by default. For text chats, you will have to click the lock icon in your chat window (as shown below) until it displays a closed lock state.
PPS: No lock icon? That probably means that the person you are chatting with is not using Jitsi or a similar program that can protect your chats with OTR. You can only have a private conversation if both ends support OTR.
PPPS: Looking for something like Jitsi for your smartphone? For private text messaging (using the Off The Record protocol) look at ChatSecure for iPhones or GibberBot for Android phones. For private voice calls on the Android, look into csipsimple and Moxie Marlinspikes RedPhone. Remember, both ends of the conversation need the same technology to create a private channel.
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Censorship – The Huffington Post
Posted: at 3:41 pm
We have been critical of Wikipedia's approach to censorship in the Middle Kingdom. In a recent piece, I lamented the loss of Wikipedia in China. The encyclopedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, reached out to us and agreed to publish our unedited exchange on the difficult nature of dealing with censorship in China.
With every passing day, we're being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called "government speech."
John W. Whitehead
Attorney, President of The Rutherford Institute, and author of 'Battlefield America'
Positing the blame solely on a vocal, but still small group of individuals who voice these concerns, calling this a "movement" in order to fan the flames of reaction, and slapping them with a dismissive label only makes matters worse.
College should indeed be a safe space, but not in the sense of being safe from upsetting images or ideas. College should be a place where it is safe to explain what you believe and to disagree with others.
Student journalists at East Lansing High School will now have editorial control of the school newspaper, Portrait, after last year's policy of prior administrative review that students said led to censorship.
The article likens free speech advocates (like me, I assume) to "gun nuts," claims that campus speech codes have mostly been repealed (which is completely false), then bizarrely questions if people can believe in a diversity of belief. Those of us who are big fans of the concept of pluralism found the latter particularly mystifying.
Greg Lukianoff
President, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Education is not about being taught more and more reasons about why we alone are right and everyone else is wrong. Rather, it is a process of being given more and more air, a wider perspective that affords us a grander, more Olympian sweep of everything.
This kind of crime deeply saddens us, but, what's worse, it spreads fear. As ordinary Mexicans, we deserve better. We deserve to see justice delivered. We are not going to be left blinded, silent and in the dark.
Four years after the Arab Spring, is it still possible to imagine that an ultra-repressive regime is the best defense against instability? Must we turn a blind eye to this regime's human rights violations because of its "secular" nature?
The issue of censorship is one that we as Americans often associate with images of backwards political bodies in third world nations, mass protests dripping with the sweat of revolution and the historical burning of books, magazines and other literary works during the early 20th century.
Neel Swamy
Student and editor-at-large, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
In the real world people face their accusers in court. This might be a little Beach Boys of me, but wouldn't it be nice if Facebook was like that? Instead of anonymous accusations and handed-down judgments, make someone reporting "offensive content" own up to their action.
If Kasich makes it onto the ticket, the election will take place two weeks shy of the 10th anniversary of his guest host interview on "The O'Reilly Factor" in which he did the bidding of an ex U.S. Attorney I criticized in my HarperCollins investigative book "Triple Cross."
Peter Lance
Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy winning former correspondent for ABC News now writing books for HarperCollins website http://www.peterlance.com
When speaking out means sacrificing privacy, we lose points of view, and the quality of our democracy suffers. That should give all of us something to truly fear.
Brynne O'Neal
Brynne O'Neal is a Research and Program Associate at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
When LinkedIn decided to create a China-hosted version of its website in February, 2014, it made a decision to compromise the company's values in the pursuit of the dollar.
If the display or broadcasting of creative works were reliant on a virtue rubric, then our museum walls would be nearly empty, our radio waves and streaming would run rather silent, our bookshelves would be quite bare....or chock full of posted disclaimers....?
At the heart of the Muzzles is a simple but powerful idea: "Congress" -- and all levels of government, thanks to the 14th Amendment -- "shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
Dan Kennedy
Associate professor, School of Journalism, Northeastern University; author, 'The Wired City'
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Pax Gaea Index Page
Posted: at 3:40 pm
Pax Gaea is about our hope for the people of the world, and while it may appear this fledgling website has little to do with the concept, it is but a seed.
We are the Carrolls. On July 28, 2006, we sold our home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and embarked on an adventure that carried us to Patzcuaro, nestled in the mountains of central Mexico. Our purpose was to remove ourselves from the familiar, to experience a culture different from our own and to write a novel - in our own mysterious way, to nurture this idea that we have more in common than our differences tend to dictate. In April of 2007 we returned to the states after completing the novel and have settled for the next year or so in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, while we await publication of
No matter how powerful the forces that try to drive us apart, if our will is greater than those forces of division, we can be drawn back together ...
n 1718, one of the most notorious pirates of all time was killed off the coast of North Carolina. History chronicles the last eighteen months of his life and makes stabs at his origins ... but really, who was this man of many names? Where did he come from? And what motivated him to lead this campaign of terror, striking fear
As part of her home schooling project in 2006 and 2007, Abigail studied all of the countries of the world and a series of compiled comprehensive reports and photographs of each nation. Since then we've attempted to diligently maintain these pages which are some of the most timely and comprehensive on the web.
I
Thatcher is our novel of historic fiction, coming soon! It explores the fascinating and highly edited history of European colonialism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, highlighting the pirates and privateers, illegal and legal, who profited from the expanding global trade of the era. In an age of entrepreneuralism, a man may cross the fine line from capitalist to criminal, depending on who is making the definition. Thatcher explores what happens when a man who is merely
trying to make his mark discovers the rules are written against him, and what happens when he decides to change the rules, following his own code in order to achieve his ambitions.
This is not your typical story of a one-dimensional, filthy brigand with a penchant for saying Aaargh! From the ports of England to the colonial New World, from the frozen winter of Moscow to the balmy shores of Madagascar, Thatcher is filled with action, intrigue and interesting characters, intertwining fact with fiction. As for the man himself, a shooting star of mythic proportion, Thatchers Blackbeard possesses a plausible and fantastical pedigree that forms a highly complex, multi-dimensional man who challenges the bounds of his circumstances and leads him to the inevitable fate written by the powers who, then and now, control the civilized world.
into the hearts of all who plied the high seas from the Caribbean to the Atlantic, causing all to tremble at the mention of the name Blackbeard ...
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The Future of Humanity – Nick Bostrom’s Home Page
Posted: at 3:40 pm
Nick Bostrom
Future of Humanity Institute
Faculty of Philosophy & James Martin 21st Century School
Oxford University
[Complete draft circulated (2007)]
[Published in New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, eds. Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, & Soren Riis (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009): 186-216]
[Reprinted in the journal Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2009): 41-78]
[pdf]
The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation. Yet our beliefs and assumptions on this subject matter shape decisions in both our personal lives and public policy decisions that have very real and sometimes unfortunate consequences. It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity. This paper sketches an overview of some recent attempts in this direction, and it offers a brief discussion of four families of scenarios for humanitys future: extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity.
In one sense, the future of humanity comprises everything that will ever happen to any human being, including what you will have for breakfast next Thursday and all the scientific discoveries that will be made next year. In that sense, it is hardly reasonable to think of the future of humanity as a topic: it is too big and too diverse to be addressed as a whole in a single essay, monograph, or even 100-volume book series. It is made into a topic by way of abstraction. We abstract from details and short-term fluctuations and developments that affect only some limited aspect of our lives. A discussion about the future of humanity is about how the important fundamental features of the human condition may change or remain constant in the long run.
What features of the human condition are fundamental and important? On this there can be reasonable disagreement. Nonetheless, some features qualify by almost any standard. For example, whether and when Earth-originating life will go extinct, whether it will colonize the galaxy, whether human biology will be fundamentally transformed to make us posthuman, whether machine intelligence will surpass biological intelligence, whether population size will explode, and whether quality of life will radically improve or deteriorate: these are all important fundamental questions about the future of humanity. Less fundamental questions for instance, about methodologies or specific technology projections are also relevant insofar as they inform our views about more fundamental parameters.
Traditionally, the future of humanity has been a topic for theology. All the major religions have teachings about the ultimate destiny of humanity or the end of the world.1 Eschatological themes have also been explored by big-name philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, and Marx. In more recent times the literary genre of science fiction has continued the tradition. Very often, the future has served as a projection screen for our hopes and fears; or as a stage setting for dramatic entertainment, morality tales, or satire of tendencies in contemporary society; or as a banner for ideological mobilization. It is relatively rare for humanitys future to be taken seriously as a subject matter on which it is important to try to have factually correct beliefs. There is nothing wrong with exploiting the symbolic and literary affordances of an unknown future, just as there is nothing wrong with fantasizing about imaginary countries populated by dragons and wizards. Yet it is important to attempt (as best we can) to distinguish futuristic scenarios put forward for their symbolic significance or entertainment value from speculations that are meant to be evaluated on the basis of literal plausibility. Only the latter form of realistic futuristic thought will be considered in this paper.
We need realistic pictures of what the future might bring in order to make sound decisions. Increasingly, we need realistic pictures not only of our personal or local near-term futures, but also of remoter global futures. Because of our expanded technological powers, some human activities now have significant global impacts. The scale of human social organization has also grown, creating new opportunities for coordination and action, and there are many institutions and individuals who either do consider, or claim to consider, or ought to consider, possible long-term global impacts of their actions. Climate change, national and international security, economic development, nuclear waste disposal, biodiversity, natural resource conservation, population policy, and scientific and technological research funding are examples of policy areas that involve long time-horizons. Arguments in these areas often rely on implicit assumptions about the future of humanity. By making these assumptions explicit, and subjecting them to critical analysis, it might be possible to address some of the big challenges for humanity in a more well-considered and thoughtful manner.
The fact that we need realistic pictures of the future does not entail that we can have them. Predictions about future technical and social developments are notoriously unreliable to an extent that have lead some to propose that we do away with prediction altogether in our planning and preparation for the future. Yet while the methodological problems of such forecasting are certainly very significant, the extreme view that we can or should do away with prediction altogether is misguided. That view is expressed, to take one example, in a recent paper on the societal implications of nanotechnology by Michael Crow and Daniel Sarewitz, in which they argue that the issue of predictability is irrelevant:
preparation for the future obviously does not require accurate prediction; rather, it requires a foundation of knowledge upon which to base action, a capacity to learn from experience, close attention to what is going on in the present, and healthy and resilient institutions that can effectively respond or adapt to change in a timely manner.2
Note that each of the elements Crow and Sarewitz mention as required for the preparation for the future relies in some way on accurate prediction. A capacity to learn from experience is not useful for preparing for the future unless we can correctly assume (predict) that the lessons we derive from the past will be applicable to future situations. Close attention to what is going on in the present is likewise futile unless we can assume that what is going on in the present will reveal stable trends or otherwise shed light on what is likely to happen next. It also requires non-trivial prediction to figure out what kind of institution will prove healthy, resilient, and effective in responding or adapting to future changes.
The reality is that predictability is a matter of degree, and different aspects of the future are predictable with varying degrees of reliability and precision.3 It may often be a good idea to develop plans that are flexible and to pursue policies that are robust under a wide range of contingencies. In some cases, it also makes sense to adopt a reactive approach that relies on adapting quickly to changing circumstances rather than pursuing any detailed long-term plan or explicit agenda. Yet these coping strategies are only one part of the solution. Another part is to work to improve the accuracy of our beliefs about the future (including the accuracy of conditional predictions of the form if x is done, y will result). There might be traps that we are walking towards that we could only avoid falling into by means of foresight. There are also opportunities that we could reach much sooner if we could see them farther in advance. And in a strict sense, prediction is always necessary for meaningful decision-making.4
Predictability does not necessarily fall off with temporal distance. It may be highly unpredictable where a traveler will be one hour after the start of her journey, yet predictable that after five hours she will be at her destination. The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict, being a matter amenable to study by the natural sciences, particularly cosmology (physical eschatology). And for there to be a degree of predictability, it is not necessary that it be possible to identify one specific scenario as what will definitely happen. If there is at least some scenario that can be ruled out, that is also a degree of predictability. Even short of this, if there is some basis for assigning different probabilities (in the sense of credences, degrees of belief) to different propositions about logically possible future events, or some basis for criticizing some such probability distributions as less rationally defensible or reasonable than others, then again there is a degree of predictability. And this is surely the case with regard to many aspects of the future of humanity. While our knowledge is insufficient to narrow down the space of possibilities to one broadly outlined future for humanity, we do know of many relevant arguments and considerations which in combination impose significant constraints on what a plausible view of the future could look like. The future of humanity need not be a topic on which all assumptions are entirely arbitrary and anything goes. There is a vast gulf between knowing exactly what will happen and having absolutely no clue about what will happen. Our actual epistemic location is some offshore place in that gulf.5
Most differences between our lives and the lives of our hunter-gatherer forebears are ultimately tied to technology, especially if we understand technology in its broadest sense, to include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions. In this wide sense we could say that technology is the sum total of instrumentally useful culturally-transmissible information. Language is a technology in this sense, along with tractors, machine guns, sorting algorithms, double-entry bookkeeping, and Roberts Rules of Order.6
Technological innovation is the main driver of long-term economic growth. Over long time scales, the compound effects of even modest average annual growth are profound. Technological change is in large part responsible for many of the secular trends in such basic parameters of the human condition as the size of the world population, life expectancy, education levels, material standards of living, and the nature of work, communication, health care, war, and the effects of human activities on the natural environment. Other aspects of society and our individual lives are also influenced by technology in many direct and indirect ways, including governance, entertainment, human relationships, and our views on morality, mind, matter, and our own human nature. One does not have to embrace any strong form of technological determinism to recognize that technological capability through its complex interactions with individuals, institutions, cultures, and environment is a key determinant of the ground rules within which the games of human civilization get played out.7
This view of the important role of technology is consistent with large variations and fluctuations in deployment of technology in different times and parts of the world. The view is also consistent with technological development itself being dependent on socio-cultural, economic, or personalistic enabling factors. The view is also consistent with denying any strong version of inevitability of the particular growth pattern observed in human history. One might hold, for example, that in a re-run of human history, the timing and location of the Industrial Revolution might have been very different, or that there might not have been any such revolution at all but rather, say, a slow and steady trickle of invention. One might even hold that there are important bifurcation points in technological development at which history could take either path with quite different results in what kinds of technological systems developed. Nevertheless, under the assumption that technological development continues on a broad front, one might expect that in the long run, most of the important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology, will in fact be obtained through technology. A bolder version of this idea could be formulated as follows:
Technological Completion Conjecture. If scientific and technological development efforts do not effectively cease, then all important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.
The conjecture is not tautological. It would be false if there is some possible basic capability that could be obtained through some technology which, while possible in the sense of being consistent with physical laws and material constraints, is so difficult to develop that it would remain beyond reach even after an indefinitely prolonged development effort. Another way in which the conjecture could be false is if some important capability can only be achieved through some possible technology which, while it could have been developed, will not in fact ever be developed even though scientific and technological development efforts continue.
The conjecture expresses the idea that which important basic capabilities are eventually attained does not depend on the paths taken by scientific and technological research in the short term. The principle allows that we might attain some capabilities sooner if, for example, we direct research funding one way rather than another; but it maintains that provided our general techno-scientific enterprise continues, even the non-prioritized capabilities will eventually be obtained, either through some indirect technological route, or when general advancements in instrumentation and understanding have made the originally neglected direct technological route so easy that even a tiny effort will succeed in developing the technology in question.8
One might find the thrust of this underlying idea plausible without being persuaded that the Technological Completion Conjecture is strictly true, and in that case, one may explore what exceptions there might be. Alternatively, one might accept the conjecture but believe that its antecedent is false, i.e. that scientific and technological development efforts will at some point effectively cease (before the enterprise is complete). But if one accepts both the conjecture and its antecedent, what are the implications? What will be the results if, in the long run, all of the important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology are in fact obtained? The answer may depend on the order in which technologies are developed, the social, legal, and cultural frameworks within which they are deployed, the choices of individuals and institutions, and other factors, including chance events. The obtainment of a basic capability does not imply that the capability will be used in a particular way or even that it will be used at all.
These factors determining the uses and impacts of potential basic capabilities are often hard to predict. What might be somewhat more foreseeable is which important basic capabilities will eventually be attained. For under the assumption that the Technological Completion Conjecture and its antecedent are true, the capabilities that will eventually be include all the ones that could be obtained through some possible technology. While we may not be able to foresee all possible technologies, we can foresee many possible technologies, including some that that are currently infeasible; and we can show that these anticipated possible technologies would provide a large range of new important basic capabilities.
One way to foresee possible future technologies is through what Eric Drexler has termed theoretical applied science.9 Theoretical applied science studies the properties of possible physical systems, including ones that cannot yet be built, using methods such as computer simulation and derivation from established physical laws.,10 Theoretical applied science will not in every instance deliver a definitive and uncontroversial yes-or-no answer to questions about the feasibility of some imaginable technology, but it is arguably the best method we have for answering such questions. Theoretical applied science both in its more rigorous and its more speculative applications is therefore an important methodological tool for thinking about the future of technology and, a fortiori, one key determinant of the future of humanity.
It may be tempting to refer to the expansion of technological capacities as progress. But this term has evaluative connotations of things getting better and it is far from a conceptual truth that expansion of technological capabilities makes things go better. Even if empirically we find that such an association has held in the past (no doubt with many big exceptions), we should not uncritically assume that the association will always continue to hold. It is preferable, therefore, to use a more neutral term, such as technological development, to denote the historical trend of accumulating technological capability.
Technological development has provided human history with a kind of directionality. Instrumentally useful information has tended to accumulate from generation to generation, so that each new generation has begun from a different and technologically more advanced starting point than its predecessor. One can point to exceptions to this trend, regions that have stagnated or even regressed for extended periods of time. Yet looking at human history from our contemporary vantage point, the macro-pattern is unmistakable.
It was not always so. Technological development for most of human history was so slow as to be indiscernible. When technological development was that slow, it could only have been detected by comparing how levels of technological capability differed over large spans of time. Yet the data needed for such comparisons detailed historical accounts, archeological excavations with carbon dating, and so forth were unavailable until fairly recently, as Robert Heilbroner explains:
At the very apex of the first stratified societies, dynastic dreams were dreamt and visions of triumph or ruin entertained; but there is no mention in the papyri and cuniform tablets on which these hopes and fears were recorded that they envisaged, in the slightest degree, changes in the material conditions of the great masses, or for that matter, of the ruling class itself.11
Heilbroner argued in Visions of the Future for the bold thesis that humanitys perceptions of the shape of things to come has gone through exactly three phases since the first appearance of Homo sapiens. In the first phase, which comprises all of human prehistory and most of history, the worldly future was envisaged with very few exceptions as changeless in its material, technological, and economic conditions. In the second phase, lasting roughly from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the second half of the twentieth, worldly expectations in the industrialized world changed to incorporate the belief that the hitherto untamable forces of nature could be controlled through the appliance of science and rationality, and the future became a great beckoning prospect. The third phase mostly post-war but overlapping with the second phase sees the future in a more ambivalent light: as dominated by impersonal forces, as disruptive, hazardous, and foreboding as well as promising.
Supposing that some perceptive observer in the past had noticed some instance of directionality be it a technological, cultural, or social trend the question would have remained whether the detected directionality was a global feature or a mere local pattern. In a cyclical view of history, for example, there can be long stretches of steady cumulative development of technology or other factors. Within a period, there is clear directionality; yet each flood of growth is followed by an ebb of decay, returning things to where they stood at the beginning of the cycle. Strong local directionality is thus compatible with the view that, globally, history moves in circles and never really gets anywhere. If the periodicity is assumed to go on forever, a form of eternal recurrence would follow.
Modern Westerners who are accustomed to viewing history as directional pattern of development may not appreciate how natural the cyclical view of history once seemed.12 Any closed system with only a finite number of possible states must either settle down into one state and remain in that one state forever, or else cycle back through states in which it has already been. In other words, a closed finite state system must either become static or else start repeating itself. If we assume that the system has already been around for an eternity, then this eventual outcome must already have come about; i.e., the system is already either stuck or is cycling through states in which it has been before. The proviso that the system has only a finite number of states may not be as significant as it seems, for even a system that has an infinite number of possible states may only have finitely many perceptibly different possible states.13 For many practical purposes, it may not matter much whether the current state of the world has already occurred an infinite number of times, or whether an infinite number of states have previously occurred each of which is merely imperceptibly different from the present state.14 Either way, we could characterize the situation as one of eternal recurrence the extreme case of a cyclical history.
In the actual world, the cyclical view is false because the world had a beginning a finite time ago. The human species has existed for a mere two hundred thousand years or so, and this is far from enough time for it to have experienced all possible conditions and permutations of which the system of humans and their environment is capable.
More fundamentally, the reason why the cyclical view is false is that the universe itself has existed for only a finite amount of time.15 The universe started with the Big Bang an estimated 13.7 billion years ago, in a low-entropy state. The history of the universe has its own directionality: an ineluctable increase in entropy. During its process of entropy increase, the universe has progressed through a sequence of distinct stages. In the eventful first three seconds, a number of transitions occurred, including probably a period of inflation, reheating, and symmetry breaking. These were followed, later, by nucleosynthesis, expansion, cooling, and formation of galaxies, stars, and planets, including Earth (circa 4.5 billion years ago). The oldest undisputed fossils are about 3.5 billion years old, but there is some evidence that life already existed 3.7 billion years ago and possibly earlier. Evolution of more complex organisms was a slow process. It took some 1.8 billion years for eukaryotic life to evolve from prokaryotes, and another 1.4 billion years before the first multicellular organisms arose. From the beginning of the Cambrian period (some 542 million years ago), important developments began happening at a faster pace, but still enormously slowly by human standards. Homo habilis our first human-like ancestors evolved some 2 million years ago; Homo sapiens 100,000 years ago. The agricultural revolution began in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East 10,000 years ago, and the rest is history. The size of the human population, which was about 5 million when we were living as hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago, had grown to about 200 million by the year 1; it reached one billion in 1835 AD; and today over 6.6 billion human beings are breathing on this planet.16 From the time of the industrial revolution, perceptive individuals living in developed countries have noticed significant technological change within their lifetimes.
All techno-hype aside, it is striking how recent many of the events are that define what we take to be the modern human condition. If compress the time scale such that the Earth formed one year ago, then Homo sapiens evolved less than 12 minutes ago, agriculture began a little over one minute ago, the Industrial Revolution took place less than 2 seconds ago, the electronic computer was invented 0.4 seconds ago, and the Internet less than 0.1 seconds ago in the blink of an eye.
Almost all the volume of the universe is ultra-high vacuum, and almost all of the tiny material specks in this vacuum are so hot or so cold, so dense or so dilute, as to be utterly inhospitable to organic life. Spatially as well as temporally, our situation is an anomaly.17
Given the technocentric perspective adopted here, and in light of our incomplete but substantial knowledge of human history and its place in the universe, how might we structure our expectations of things to come? The remainder of this paper will outline four families of scenarios for humanitys future:
Unless the human species lasts literally forever, it will some time cease to exist. In that case, the long-term future of humanity is easy to describe: extinction. An estimated 99.9% of all species that ever existed on Earth are already extinct.18
There are two different ways in which the human species could become extinct: one, by evolving or developing or transforming into one or more new species or life forms, sufficiently different from what came before so as no longer to count as Homo sapiens; the other, by simply dying out, without any meaningful replacement or continuation. Of course, a transformed continuant of the human species might itself eventually terminate, and perhaps there will be a point where all life comes to an end; so scenarios involving the first type of extinction may eventually converge into the second kind of scenario of complete annihilation. We postpone discussion of transformation scenarios to a later section, and we shall not here discuss the possible existence of fundamental physical limitations to the survival of intelligent life in the universe. This section focuses on the direct form of extinction (annihilation) occurring within any very long, but not astronomically long, time horizon we could say one hundred thousand years for specificity.
Human extinction risks have received less scholarly attention than they deserve. In recent years, there have been approximately three serious books and one major paper on this topic. John Leslie, a Canadian philosopher, puts the probability of humanity failing to survive the next five centuries to 30% in his book End of the World.19 His estimate is partly based on the controversial Doomsday argument and on his own views about the limitations of this argument.20 Sir Martin Rees, Britains Astronomer Royal, is even more pessimistic, putting the odds that humanity will survive the 21st century to no better than 50% in Our Final Hour.21 Richard Posner, an eminent American legal scholar, offers no numerical estimate but rates the risk of extinction significant in Catastrophe.22 And I published a paper in 2002 in which I suggested that assigning a probability of less than 25% to existentialdisaster (no time limit) would be misguided.23 The concept of existential risk is distinct from that of extinction risk. As I introduced the term, an existential disaster is one that causes either the annihilation of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic curtailment of its potential for future desirable development.24
It is possible that a publication bias is responsible for the alarming picture presented by these opinions. Scholars who believe that the threats to human survival are severe might be more likely to write books on the topic, making the threat of extinction seem greater than it really is. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there seems to be a consensus among those researchers who have seriously looked into the matter that there is a serious risk that humanitys journey will come to a premature end.25
The greatest extinction risks (and existential risks more generally) arise from human activity. Our species has survived volcanic eruptions, meteoric impacts, and other natural hazards for tens of thousands of years. It seems unlikely that any of these old risks should exterminate us in the near future. By contrast, human civilization is introducing many novel phenomena into the world, ranging from nuclear weapons to designer pathogens to high-energy particle colliders. The most severe existential risks of this century derive from expected technological developments. Advances in biotechnology might make it possible to design new viruses that combine the easy contagion and mutability of the influenza virus with the lethality of HIV. Molecular nanotechnology might make it possible to create weapons systems with a destructive power dwarfing that of both thermonuclear bombs and biowarfare agents.26 Superintelligent machines might be built and their actions could determine the future of humanity and whether there will be one.27 Considering that many of the existential risks that now seem to be among the most significant were conceptualized only in recent decades, it seems likely that further ones still remain to be discovered.
The same technologies that will pose these risks will also help us to mitigate some risks. Biotechnology can help us develop better diagnostics, vaccines, and anti-viral drugs. Molecular nanotechnology could offer even stronger prophylactics.28 Superintelligent machines may be the last invention that human beings ever need to make, since a superintelligence, by definition, would be far more effective than a human brain in practically all intellectual endeavors, including strategic thinking, scientific analysis, and technological creativity.29 In addition to creating and mitigating risks, these powerful technological capabilities would also affect the human condition in many other ways.
Extinction risks constitute an especially severe subset of what could go badly wrong for humanity. There are many possible global catastrophes that would cause immense worldwide damage, maybe even the collapse of modern civilization, yet fall short of terminating the human species. An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States might be an example of a global catastrophe that would be unlikely to result in extinction. A terrible pandemic with high virulence and 100% mortality rate among infected individuals might be another example: if some groups of humans could successfully quarantine themselves before being exposed, human extinction could be avoided even if, say, 95% or more of the worlds population succumbed. What distinguishes extinction and other existential catastrophes is that a comeback is impossible. A non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilization is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback: a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.
An existential catastrophe is therefore qualitatively distinct from a mere collapse of global civilization, although in terms of our moral and prudential attitudes perhaps we should simply view both as unimaginably bad outcomes.30 One way that civilization collapse could be a significant feature in the larger picture for humanity, however, is if it formed part of a repeating pattern. This takes us to the second family of scenarios: recurrent collapse.
Environmental threats seem to have displaced nuclear holocaust as the chief specter haunting the public imagination. Current-day pessimists about the future often focus on the environmental problems facing the growing world population, worrying that our wasteful and polluting ways are unsustainable and potentially ruinous to human civilization. The credit for having handed the environmental movement its initial impetus is often given to Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring (1962) sounded the alarm on pesticides and synthetic chemicals that were being released into the environment with allegedly devastating effects on wildlife and human health.31 The environmentalist forebodings swelled over the decade. Paul Ehrlichs book Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, which sold 30 million copies, predicted economic collapse and mass starvation by the eighties or nineties as the results of population growth and resource depletion.32
In recent years, the spotlight of environmental concern has shifted to global climate change. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, where they are expected to cause a warming of Earths climate and a concomitant rise in sea water levels. The more recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents the most authoritative assessment of current scientific opinion, attempts to estimate the increase in global mean temperature that would be expected by the end of this century under the assumption that no efforts at mitigation are made. The final estimate is fraught with uncertainty because of uncertainty about what the default rate of emissions of greenhouse gases will be over the century, uncertainty about the climate sensitivity parameter, and uncertainty about other factors. The IPCC therefore expresses its assessment in terms of six different climate scenarios based on different models and different assumptions. The low model predicts a mean global warming of +1.8C (uncertainty range 1.1C to 2.9C); the high model predicts warming by +4.0C (2.4C to 6.4C).33 Estimated sea level rise predicted by these two most extreme scenarios among the six considered is 18 to 38 cm, and 26 to 59 cm, respectively.34
While this prognosis might well justify a range of mitigation policies, it is important to maintain a sense of perspective when we are considering the issue from a future of humanity point of view. Even the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report prepared for the British Government which has been criticized by some as overly pessimistic, estimates that under the assumption of business-as-usual with regard to emissions, global warming will reduce welfare by an amount equivalent to a permanent reduction in per capita consumption of between 5 and 20%.35 In absolute terms, this would be a huge harm. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, world GDP grew by some 3,700%, and per capita world GDP rose by some 860%.36 It seems safe to say that (absent a radical overhaul of our best current scientific models of the Earths climate system) whatever negative economic effects global warming will have, they will be completely swamped by other factors that will influence economic growth rates in this century.
There have been a number of attempts by scholars to explain societal collapse either as a case study of some particular society, such as Gibbons classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or else as an attempt to discover failure modes applying more generally.37 Two examples of the latter genre include Joseph Tainters Collapse of Complex Societies, and Jared Diamonds more recent Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Tainter notes that societies need to secure certain resources such as food, energy, and natural resources in order to sustain their populations.38 In their attempts to solve this supply problem, societies may grow in complexity for example, in the form of bureaucracy, infrastructure, social class distinction, military operations, and colonies. At some point, Tainter argues, the marginal returns on these investments in social complexity become unfavorable, and societies that do not manage to scale back when their organizational overheads become too large eventually face collapse.
Diamond argues that many past cases of societal collapse have involved environmental factors such as deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting and overfishing, the effects of introduced species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.39 He also suggests four new factors that may contribute to the collapse of present and future societies: human-caused climate change, but also build-up of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and the full utilization of the Earths photosynthetic capacity. Diamond draws attention to the danger of creeping normalcy, referring to the phenomenon of a slow trend being concealed within noisy fluctuations, so that a detrimental outcome that occurs in small, almost unnoticeable steps may be accepted or come about without resistance even if the same outcome, had it come about in one sudden leap, would have evoked a vigorous response.40
We need to distinguish different classes of scenarios involving societal collapse. First, we may have a merely local collapse: individual societies can collapse, but this is unlikely to have a determining effect on the future of humanity if other advanced societies survive and take up where the failed societies left off. All historical examples of collapse have been of this kind. Second, we might suppose that new kinds of threat (e.g. nuclear holocaust or catastrophic changes in the global environment) or the trend towards globalization and increased interdependence of different parts of the world create a vulnerability to human civilization as a whole. Suppose that a global societal collapse were to occur. What happens next? If the collapse is of such a nature that a new advanced global civilization can never be rebuilt, the outcome would qualify as an existential disaster. However, it is hard to think of a plausible collapse which the human species survives but which nevertheless makes it permanently impossible to rebuild civilization. Supposing, therefore, that a new technologically advanced civilization is eventually rebuilt, what is the fate of this resurgent civilization? Again, there are two possibilities. The new civilization might avoid collapse; and in the following two sections we will examine what could happen to such a sustainable global civilization. Alternatively, the new civilization collapses again, and the cycle repeats. If eventually a sustainable civilization arises, we reach the kind of scenario that the following sections will discuss. If instead one of the collapses leads to extinction, then we have the kind of scenario that was discussed in the previous section. The remaining case is that we face a cycle of indefinitely repeating collapse and regeneration (see figure 1).
While there are many conceivable explanations for why an advanced society might collapse, only a subset of these explanations could plausibly account for an unending pattern of collapse and regeneration. An explanation for such a cycle could not rely on some contingent factor that would apply to only some advanced civilizations and not others, or to a factor that an advanced civilization would have a realistic chance of counteracting; for if such a factor were responsible, one would expect that the collapse-regeneration pattern would at some point be broken when the right circumstances finally enabled an advanced civilization to overcome the obstacles to sustainability. Yet at the same time, the postulated cause for collapse could not be so powerful as to cause the extinction of the human species.
A recurrent collapse scenario consequently requires a carefully calibrated homeostatic mechanism that keeps the level of civilization confined within a relatively narrow interval, as illustrated in figure 1. Even if humanity were to spend many millennia on such an oscillating trajectory, one might expect that eventually this phase would end, resulting in either the permanent destruction of humankind, or the rise of a stable sustainable global civilization, or the transformation of the human condition into a new posthuman condition. We turn now to the second of these possibilities, that the human condition will reach a kind of stasis, either immediately or after undergoing one of more cycles of collapse-regeneration.
Figure 2 depicts two possible trajectories, one representing an increase followed by a permanent plateau, the other representing stasis at (or close to) the current status quo.
The static view is implausible. It would imply that we have recently arrived at the final human condition even at a time when change is exceptionally rapid: What we do know, writes distinguished historian of technology Vaclav Smil, is that the past six generations have amounted to the most rapid and the most profound change our species has experienced in its 5,000 years of recorded history.41 The static view would also imply a radical break with several long-established trends. If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as in the last half century, then by 2050 the world will be seven times richer than it is today. World population is predicted to increase to just over 9 billion in 2050, so average wealth would also increase dramatically.42 Extrapolating further, by 2100 the world would be almost 50 times richer than today. A single modest-sized country might then have as much wealth as the entire world has at the present. Over the course of human history, the doubling time of the world economy has been drastically reduced on several occasions, such as in the agricultural transition and the Industrial Revolution. Should another such transition should occur in this century, the world economy might be several orders of magnitudes larger by the end of the century.43
Figure 2: Two trajectories: increase followed by plateau; or stasis at close to the current level.
Another reason for assigning a low probability to the static view is that we can foresee various specific technological advances that will give humans important new capacities. Virtual reality environments will constitute an expanding fraction of our experience. The capability of recording, surveillance, biometrics, and data mining technologies will grow, making it increasingly feasible to keep track of where people go, whom they meet, what they do, and what goes on inside their bodies.44
Among the most important potential developments are ones that would enable us to alter our biology directly through technological means.45 Such interventions could affect us more profoundly than modification of beliefs, habits, culture, and education. If we learn to control the biochemical processes of human senescence, healthy lifespan could be radically prolonged. A person with the age-specific mortality of a 20-year-old would have a life expectancy of about a thousand years. The ancient but hitherto mostly futile quest for happiness could meet with success if scientists could develop safe and effective methods of controlling the brain circuitry responsible for subjective well-being.46 Drugs and other neurotechnologies could make it increasingly feasible for users to shape themselves into the kind of people they want to be by adjusting their personality, emotional character, mental energy, romantic attachments, and moral character.47 Cognitive enhancements might deepen our intellectual lives.48
Nanotechnology will have wide-ranging consequences for manufacturing, medicine, and computing.49 Machine intelligence, to be discussed further in the next section, is another potential revolutionary technology. Institutional innovations such as prediction markets might improve the capability of human groups to forecast future developments, and other technological or institutional developments might lead to new ways for humans to organize more effectively.50 The impacts of these and other technological developments on the character of human lives are difficult to predict, but that they will have such impacts seems a safe bet.
Those who believe that developments such as those listed will not occur should consider whether their skepticism is really about ultimate feasibility or merely about timescales. Some of these technologies will be difficult to develop. Does that give us reason to think that they will never be developed? Not even in 50 years? 200 years? 10,000 years? Looking back, developments such as language, agriculture, and perhaps the Industrial Revolution may be said to have significantly changed the human condition. There are at least a thousand times more of us now; and with current world average life expectancy at 67 years, we live perhaps three times longer than our Pleistocene ancestors. The mental life of human beings has been transformed by developments such as language, literacy, urbanization, division of labor, industrialization, science, communications, transport, and media technology.
The other trajectory in figure 2 represents scenarios in which technological capability continues to grow significantly beyond the current level before leveling off below the level at which a fundamental alteration of the human condition would occur. This trajectory avoids the implausibility of postulating that we have just now reached a permanent plateau of technological development. Nevertheless, it does propose that a permanent plateau will be reached not radically far above the current level. We must ask what could cause technological development to level off at that stage.
One conceptual possibility is that development beyond this level is impossible because of limitation imposed by fundamental natural laws. It appears, however, that the physical laws of our universe permit forms of organization that would qualify as a posthuman condition (to be discussed further in the next section). Moreover, there appears to be no fundamental obstacle to the development of technologies that would make it possible to build such forms of organization.51 Physical impossibility, therefore, is not a plausible explanation for why we should end up on either of the trajectories depicted in figure 2.
Another potential explanation is that while theoretically possible, a posthuman condition is just too difficult to attain for humanity ever to be able to get there. For this explanation to work, the difficulty would have to be of a certain kind. If the difficulty consisted merely of there being a large number of technologically challenging steps that would be required to reach the destination, then the argument would at best suggest that it will take a long time to get there, not that we never will. Provided the challenge can be divided into a sequence of individually feasible steps, it would seem that humanity could eventually solve the challenge given enough time. Since at this point we are not so concerned with timescales, it does not appear that technological difficulty of this kind would make any of the trajectories in figure 2 a plausible scenario for the future of humanity.
In order for technological difficulty to account for one of the trajectories in figure 2, the difficulty would have to be of a sort that is not reducible to a long sequence of individually feasible steps. If all the pathways to a posthuman condition required technological capabilities that could be attained only by building enormously complex, error-intolerant systems of a kind which could not be created by trial-and-error or by assembling components that could be separately tested and debugged, then the technological difficulty argument would have legs to stand on. Charles Perrow argued in Normal Accidents that efforts to make complex systems safer often backfire because the added safety mechanisms bring with them additional complexity which creates additional opportunities for things to go wrong when parts and processes interact in unexpected ways.52 For example, increasing the number of security personnel on a site can increase the insider threat, the risk that at least one person on the inside can be recruited by would-be attackers.53 Along similar lines, Jaron Lanier has argued that software development has run into a kind of complexity barrier.54 An informal argument of this kind has also been made against the feasibility of molecular manufacturing.55
Each of these arguments about complexity barriers is problematic. And in order to have an explanation for why humanitys technological development should level off before a posthuman condition is reached, it is not sufficient to show that some technologies run into insuperable complexity barriers. Rather, it would have to be shown that all technologies that would enable a posthuman condition (biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc.) will be blocked by such barriers. That seems an unlikely proposition. Alternatively, one might try to build an argument based on complexity barriers for social organization in general rather than for particular technologies perhaps something akin to Tainters explanation of past cases of societal collapse, mentioned in the previous section. In order to produce the trajectories in figure 2, however, the explanation would have to be modified to allow for stagnation and plateauing rather than collapse. One problem with this hypothesis is that it is unclear that the development of the technologies requisite to reach a posthuman condition would necessarily require a significant increase in the complexity of social organization beyond its present level.
A third possible explanation is that even if a posthuman condition is both theoretically possible and practically feasible, humanity might decide not to pursue technological development beyond a certain level. One could imagine systems, institutions, or attitudes emerging which would have the effect of blocking further development, whether by design or as an unintended consequence. Yet an explanation rooted in unwillingness for technological advancement would have to overcome several challenges. First, how does enough unwillingness arise to overcome what at the present appears like an inexorable process of technological innovation and scientific research? Second, how does a decision to relinquish development get implemented globally in a way that leaves no country and no underground movement able to continue technological research? Third, how does the policy of relinquishment avoid being overturned, even on timescales extending over tens of thousands of years and beyond? Relinquishment would have to be global and permanent in order to account for a trajectory like one of those represented in figure 2. A fourth difficulty emerges out of the three already mentioned: the explanation for how the aversion to technological advancement arises, how it gets universally implemented, and how it attains permanence, would have to avoid postulating causes that in themselves would usher in a posthuman condition. For example, if the explanation postulated that powerful new mind-control technologies would be deployed globally to change peoples motivation, or that an intensive global surveillance system would be put in place and used to manipulate the direction of human development along a predetermined path, one would have to wonder whether these interventions, or their knock-on effects on society, culture, and politics, would not themselves alter the human condition in sufficiently fundamental ways that the resulting condition would qualify as posthuman.
To argue that stasis and plateau are relatively unlikely scenarios is not inconsistent with maintaining that some aspects of the human condition will remain unchanged. For example, Francis Fukuyama argued in The End of History and the Last Man that the endpoint of mankinds ideological evolution has essentially been reached with the end of the Cold War.56 Fukuyama suggested that Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government, and that while it would take some time for this ideology to become completely universalized, secular free-market democracy will in the long term become more and more prevalent. In his more recent book Our Posthuman Future, he adds an important qualification to his earlier thesis, namely that direct technological modification of human nature could undermine the foundations of liberal democracy.57 But be that as it may, the thesis that liberal democracy (or any other political structure) is the final form of government is consistent with the thesis that the general condition for intelligent Earth-originating life will not remain a human condition for the indefinite future.
An explication of what has been referred to as posthuman condition is overdue. In this paper, the term is used to refer to a condition which has at least one of the following characteristics:
This definitions vagueness and arbitrariness may perhaps be excused on grounds that the rest of this paper is at least equally schematic. In contrast to some other explications of posthumanity, the one above does not require direct modification of human nature.58 This is because the relevant concept for the present discussion is that of a level of technological or economic development that would involve a radical change in the human condition, whether the change was wrought by biological enhancement or other causes.
Figure 3: A singularity scenario, and a more incremental ascent into a posthuman condition.
The two dashed lines in figure 3 differ in steepness. One of them depicts slow gradual growth that in the fullness of time rises into the posthuman level and beyond. The other depicts a period of extremely rapid growth in which humanity abruptly transitions into a posthuman condition. This latter possibility can be referred to as the singularity hypothesis.59 Proponents of the singularity hypothesis usually believe not only that a period of extremely rapid technological development will usher in posthumanity suddenly, but also that this transition will take place soon within a few decades. Logically, these two contentions are quite distinct.
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