Report070606

From Order of Cosmic Engineers

TRANSHUMANIST DAY IN SECOND LIFE. The official opening of uvvy island in Second Life took place on Wednesday June 7, 2006, 2 pm EST, with a "Transhumanist Day" dedicated to promoting the transhumanist worldview and outlining its scientific and philosophical roots.

About 40 people participated.

The first hour was dedicated to ensuring that as many people as possible could participate in the Vivox -enabled voice chat. This was to be expected as many people had just downloaded and installed the Vivox beta client, and were not yet familiar with it.

Getting things up and running was a learning curve for all participants. Vivox staff identified the source of the audio problems (a couple of users caused strong echos, probably due to Vivox client installation issues), and at the end 20 people were voice-enabled. It is important that participants in large voice-enabled meetings mute their microphones when they do not intend to speak. When the transhumanist presentations started, the quality of the audio was good for all participants.

I hope the event was also useful to Vivox to identify possible problems and pitfalls to avoid in "real" virtual voice-enabled meetings where participants have a wide range of equipment, bandwidth and IT skills. One very important feature which, I hope, will be included in the first operational release of the Vivox client is a moderator toolbox that a moderator can use to, for example, mute all participants besides the speaker who "has the floor".

I think voice-enabled meetings, lectures and events in Virtual reality, as soon as all component technologies are fully operational, will have a huge impact and we will have to become used to spent part of our work time in VR.

Three presentations were given:

"What is Transhumanism?", by James Hughes (James Sleeper in SL) - as usual James gave an excellent presentation, which was also the first transhumanist presentation and one of the first realtime voice presentations in Second Life. I am sure those participants not yet familiar with transhumanist thinking left with a good overall idea. James gave examples of transhumanism becoming more influential in scientific, cultural and political communities, and mentioned the first transhumanist caucus formed within a mainstream political party.

"Virtual Reality - Roots, Status, Perspectives", by Philippe_Van_Nedervelde (Philippe Golding in SL) - Philippe gave an historical overview of Virtual reality, presented some interesting current developments and a roadmap, and outlined his vision of a seamless blend of physical and virtual realities enabled by nanotech and utility fogs.

"The Future of the Body", by Natasha_Vita-More (Natasha Cordeaux in SL) - Natasha had to leave at some point, so I (Giulio Prisco) gave part of her presentation on her behalf. Yes, technology can, and should, be used to improve our bodies and minds. I concluded with three points: someday we will have also the option of choosing a virtual body in a VR world as our "base" - this will not be forced on anyone but will be just another option available to everyone, and improve the life of some - and improving the life of people is really what transhumanism is all about.