Notes from the Transhuman Superpowers and Longevity Conference - 12 July 2015

And now, hopefully sooner than the last set, my notes taken during the Transhuman Superpowers and Longevity Conference held on 12 July 2015 in Oakland, CA. Everything's behind the cut, with references as applicable. Personal observations (are on separate lines in parenthesis) to differentiate them from the speaker's material.Vertical Farm Civilization - Karl Doerrer

• Dr. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University in 1999
• Resource management
• Published his first book on the topic in 2009 - The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century
• People seeing your own rig makes people want to build their own
• Social symbiosis
• Indoor vertical farming
• Raise consciousness of necessity
• Incentives
• Education
• Portable vertical farms for rapid deployment
• /*ponic/ facilities -> organic materials like bamboo and bioplastics
• Capture all possible energy sources
• Minimize synthetic fertilization
• Reciting a speech, not actually presenting
• Highly utopian in vision and scope - nice, but people tend to be turned off by that. Utopianism is antithetical to the twenty-first century zeitgeist.
• ("Minimize irrationality" - good luck)
• A 30 story farm can grow enough food to feed 50,000 people 2,000 dietary calories a day for a full year
• Lots of pretty scrolling slides in an LCARS theme
• Admits that it won't be easy to do
• Neo-Agrarian society
• Plant-based polymers for manufacture
• (What do the economics look like?)
• Aeroponics are fragile and need special care
• Biochem growth medium
• Amazing oxygen production and atmospheric filtration
• (He admits that he hasn't actually done any research into this part of it.)
• Bio-gas digesters, biofuels

#superheroes - Micah Redding

• Superheroes as cultural phenomena and memes
• Inspiring people to become more than they are
• Superman's original byline wasn't "The Man of Steel," it was "The Man of Tomorrow"
• "This isn't just a visitor from another planet, this is what you can be."
• "Superman is a visitor from our future."
• Not to solve problems, but to show how they can be solved.
• Superheroes as projections of what we can become. The ways we grapple with the responsibility of power.
• The meme in a time of global interconnectedness.
• "With great power..."
• Superhero stories as tools to help us ask the important questions that otherwise wouldn't get asked.
• Supervillians are often failed superheroes, e.g., Lex Luthor
• Success and failure where the edges are
• What are the pitfalls we need to watch out for?
• Reboots are variations on a theme - new avenues to explore, new aspects of the story, new questions to ask
• "The Marvel universe is possibly the largest virtual world ever created." --Grant Morrison
• As we (meaning people) become more powerful, superhero characters tend to become less powerful
• "Realistic supers" affecting our own lives in feedback loops
• What is the difference between us and them?
• Functional fixedness - you look at $foo and see a limited number of possible uses for it but forget that there are other things that could be done with it. Case in point, uses for a hammer as a child versus uses for a hammer as an adult. Narrowness of what is and is not possible.
• The ultimate superpower - the ability to redefine your situation.
• The quantified self movement optimizes people in amazing ways
• Negative imitation of perceived groups, the failure of imagination
• As we become more powerful, the stakes of our individual actions become higher
• Decentralized growth of empathy to handle the impact of side effects

Are You Ready For the Future? - Liz Parrish

• Bio-Viva USA, Inc. came out of stealth mode on stage
• Gene therapy treats aging as a diseasy
• 100,000 people every day die of aging
• This translates to 146 million people per presidency
• Aging has been proven to be reversible