Best anxiety reduction can be obtained by lots of little calculations and speculations about uploading and the singularity.

It’s all in fun, guys!
CP, LVN II and Consultant

More now than then, I understand that religion was and still is an invaluable coping tool for our species. It contains elements important to the retention of our sanity in the face of great loss and hopelessness, which cannot simply be discarded absent replacement technology. If we fail to adapt and craft viable replacements for those invaluable elements of religion, we will fail when subjected to the extreme stressors that religion has classically helped human beings to survive. Travel to horribly insecure and chronically dangerous places in the world and what you will see in almost everyone’s hands at almost all times when people are not engaged in labor is some kind of prayer technology. It’s a distraction and stress relieving device. In cultures where it is permissible, you will often see this technology plus one or two pharmacological stress relieving technologies, such as alcohol and/or tobacco – and sometimes three – or four in combination (i.e., betelnut and caffeine)! Devices to inflict pain on a chronic basis, as well as hunger are also used. Almost no one thinks of these things as “coping technologies,” but that, and the belief structures that accompany them, are exactly what they are.

The anguish of uncertainty that accompanied life when I was a boy was already greatly receding. But it was still imprinted upon the poor and downtrodden – especially the women. Many carried rosaries with them everywhere, because they grew up in a world of chaotic uncertainty where, from day to day, they faced the possibility of eviction, hunger, death of a relative, humiliation from lack of proper clothing, tuition, and so on. The problem with immortality is that it is not really immortality. Immortality is an illusion or an ideal, depending upon your perspective – it’s really a constant battle of life against death – extended indefinitely. That sounds great, and it is, but you must realize that once you expand your timescale indefinitely, problems that were invisible suddenly become of great concern. Today, everyone is focused only the fact that their contemporary problems will vanish: no more wrinkled skin, no more cancer… but what they don’t realize is that by expanding their timescale to “forever” they have widened the event horizon of their problems and exploded the degree of the uncertainty they will have to deal with. In fact, they increased it infinitely. Whilst their uncertainty will be infinite, at any given moment their time and resources will always be FINITE. In short, they’re gonna need some mighty big worry bead technology. — Mike Darwin

Another painting for my next show is “Dr Persinger and the God Helmet” based on Goya’s etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”.

I think the religion problem is critical. In my most despairing
moments I think the reason for Fermi’s Paradox is that every evolving intelligent life form will be mortal, as a general law, and thus need to evolve an irrational mental structure like religion to enhance survival while simultaneously being aware of its own mortality. Perhaps this problem has never been overcome by any extra-terrestrial species to allow it to engineer the extended life or suspended animation for deep space travel. Extra-terrestrial intelligent species enter cultural stasis or self-destruct before extended life and space travel become possible.

My paintings will be exhibited in a medium sized city (for Australia) downtown in a contemporary art space to coincide with national science week. They will be humane, purposeful and tender images, for any viewer, not for just dyed-in-the-wool life extensionists.