Bringing Transhumanism Down to Earth – Part 1

Originally published by Propaganda in Focus

“All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal”.
Albert Einstein, in a letter to Heinrich Zangger (1917)

With the coordinated global release of the Covid-19 narrative in late 2019 and the subsequent illogical demands of governments — allied with transnational organisations and pharmaceutical giants — many people around the world began questioning the hasty, unprecedented, and sweeping technological and technocratic changes being made to societies in the name of a highly marketed “medical emergency”.

Despite new policies emanating from authorities to isolate, to mask, to restrict all social contact, to accept without question unique experimental gene- and nanoparticle-based injections, and to abide by novel and absurd social norms, many people pushed back against the apparent tyranny. The more enthusiastic that governments were in deleting civil rights, suppressing freedom of speech and due process, the more that people sought to expose the story behind the mainstream Covid-19 narrative.

This article, the first in a series of four, considers that story as it intersects with the trajectory of transhumanism. Here in Part 1 we examine how the current uninterrupted global push for a total top-down alteration of humanity, of human biology, of human emotions, and social relations, relates to a philosophy and history of well-funded and highly efficient business and military operations framed as necessarily rational and inevitable.

We address the obfuscatory meanings of transhumanism so far propagated, and begin uncovering transhumanism’s roots in the military-intelligence complex, taking NASA and its purported demand for cyborgs in space as our starting point. With a focus on primary sources and military-intelligence material, we lay the foundations for the subsequent three articles in the series, which offer an alternative possible way of understanding the current unfolding process as one aimed at transforming human beings from natural and sovereign creatures to controlled synthetic forms of life.

Introduction

In these times of great political, economic and societal uncertainty, we can be certain of one thing. Communities across the globe are beset by all the insidious forces of radical change that wo/men in power can dream up for the people they pretend to speak for and rule. The forces of change rank in the command and control of a larger war striving at every turn to camouflage the long-planned transition of humankind.

Everything is subject to capture in the programs of transformation for nationhood, personhood, personal identity, agency, and sovereignty. Some people recognise the tensions and the weapons deployed to bring about total captivity and change. Others deny the evidence of the campaigns waged against them.

The difference between these extremes might be explained by the most contested space in the present war — the struggle for the heart and mind. As Edward Bernays reminds us, the mind must be continuously occupied, “every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers”.[] Fear and a deep sense of urgency, therefore, must be engineered so the projected sacrifice of bodies will, in the final tally, be found justified.

So it is, also, with warnings issued to people today that we must be on edge and ready to confront the threats posed to the environment by our own diseased bodies, carbon footprints that must be reduced, poisoned ecosystems, and the intelligent machines our self-proclaimed masters fund and deploy for our “salvation.” The trans-human turn into a post-human world, populated by compliant cyborgs, is claimed as an inevitable step in directed evolution. “Enhanced” humans, the technocratic PR assures, will possess new superhuman abilities and will defeat their own mortality with routine nano-upgrades.

How are we to contend with such antihuman operations conspiring against us?

In the words of Elon Musk, we must merge with machines to avoid becoming like monkeys.[2] ’Futures’ strategist to the Rockefeller Foundation and Chinese Department of Education, Michell Zappa,[3] similarly warns that humanity has “no other option than to be dragged, kicking and screaming”, to the “precipice” of a future involving gene therapy, artificial organs, synthetic blood and vasculature, and bioelectronic drugs.[4] Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, the self-styled “International Organisation for Public-Private Cooperation”,[5] likewise portends that the future of technological innovation, “doesn’t change what you are doing — it changes you. If you take genetic editing, just as an example, it’s you who are changed”.[6] He says technology will “in the end” lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities”.[7] The technological determinist mindset behind all such pronouncements is designed to leave no room for resistance or contestation.

Organised by transnational elites, the lockstep march of humanity into what has been called the Bio-Nano Age, the Virtual Era,[8] or the Fourth Industrial Revolution,[9] reflects the transhumanist aspiration toward a post-human future. The gradual, inexorable march has been ongoing for decades, rooted in eugenic misanthropy while packaged in false promises that man can transcend the limitations of the flesh and, aided by new and novel technologies, live forever.

The intellectual, physical, and spiritual move for a transhumanist form of immortality is also grounded in a socioeconomic transition that reduces humankind to hyper-rational “market actors configured always … and everywhere as homo economicus”,[10] serving not human welfare but monopoly capital’s bottom line. In other words, a billionaire class. As a consequence, it further means that the new technocratic colonists, funding these emerging markets in bodies, brains and bloodstreams, will seek control over all means of human (re)production.

Given that the value of human data is morphing into a key commodity[11] and given that the corporate “state must be involved in the [process of capital] accumulation, [by] mystify[ing] its policies and call[ing] them something they are not, or … try[ing] to conceal them”,[12] who better than state-corporate, “public private partnerships” to manage the emerging market of trans-humans for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Bodies (IoB)?[13] The movement finds at its centre the world’s wealthiest and most influential actors, spanning all sectors of power: a transnational elite urging a host of technological adulterations advertised as upgrades to biological lifeforms (humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms).

How are we to recognise the key signs of this fundamental transformation? A vivid image of an unfolding posthuman future is now coming into view in the wake of the global push for total compliance with government-mandated injectable bio-nano gene therapies. The Kavli Foundation, for example, ostensibly a grant-making body, has partnered with key agencies in the expanding global network of “public private partnerships” pushing gene-based nanotechnology and synthetic biology around the world, including the US Military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition to their interest in vaccines, all three organisations are part of a White House-funded initiative known as “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies” (BRAIN), including projects in nanoscience, brain-machine interfaces, and bioengineering.[14,15] The European Union also has its own Human Brain Project,[16] which it describes as “one of the largest research projects in the world”, forming part of its Future and Emerging Technologies initiative. The Project brings together 140 universities and institutions across 11 countries to focus on artificial neural networks, neuromorphic computing, AI, neurorobotics, and neuro-inspired technologies.

In the context of this abrupt worldwide turn towards gene-based, bio-nano solutions to purported social ills and emergencies, the following four-part series seeks to build upon existing literatures by critically examining the underlying transhumanist trajectory that drives such developments.[17-19] In particular, it aims to elucidate the role of the military-intelligence complex in transhumanism, as part of an ongoing project to transform humans for servitude in a new ‘utopia’ ruled and managed by the gurus, sages, and supplicants of a presently unfolding technocracy.

Defining Transhumanism

Casual talk of transhumanism in polite company may evoke curiosity or confusion. It may engender in the imagination thoughts of armed survivalists trading rumours of government plans to microchip citizens like livestock. Exchanges may trigger vague memories of popular tropes in pulp fiction or fantasy film, integrating trans-human fascination with morbid entertainment and comic book superheroes who merge with machines. It may recall the cinematic special effects of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) where Maria’s life force is transferred to a sheetmetal cyborg. Perhaps the many approaches to treating transhumanism have been baked into layers of cultural reproduction in order to create the appearance of some conflict between fringe irrelevancy and utopian aspirations shared among elites. These ambiguities may be a feature of social engineering through media and education to incite public indifference and disengagement.

As a global project of control over (re)production and human beings, transhumanism entails a constellation of theoretical, practical, and ideological strands, each of which involves what appears to be a mixture of esoteric mythologies, empirical realities, and media hype, infused with technological developments, political spin, tangible circumstances, and the spectacle of unending public relations campaigns. Separating the material reality of this well-funded global project from the confusing forms of propaganda that support it can be complex and challenging.

Not least among the complications involved in defining transhumanism is that the usual approach to defining the term acts, itself, as a propaganda device. Proponents of transhumanism consistently define their project in evaluative and positive terms, as a quest for augmented ‘evolution’, human ‘enhancement’ and the overcoming of human ‘limitations’. According to the Transhumanist Manifesto, which has been published by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, transhumanism is:

A worldview that seeks a quality of life that brings about perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, visionary solutions, and critical thinking — the transhuman. The transhuman is a biological-technological organism, a transformation of the human species that continues to evolve with technology[20]

Humanity+, the source of the Transhumanist Manifesto, defines transhumanism with reference to Max More, one of the pioneers of the movement, positioning transhumanism as:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities[21]

Such definitions and their supporting elaborations are peppered with concepts connoting perfection, betterment, greatness, and utopianism. Questions such as ‘Perfect for whom?’, ‘Better on what grounds?’ ‘Enhanced according to what criteria?’ go unasked and unanswered. NATO’s Science & Technology Organization, for instance, lists enhanced lethality as an objective of human ‘enhancement’ technologies in the military-intelligence domain.[22] Accordingly, without stipulating what terms such as ‘enhancement’ and ‘evolution’ mean, self-flattering platitudes at best, and lethal doublespeak at worst, can be injected into the very meaning of ‘transhumanism’, with important perception-management implications.

As we have discussed in our propaganda recipe focussed on 9/11 and Covid-19, a tried and true propaganda tactic is to repeatedly pair a target word with positive or negative associations. In experimental research, simply pairing a political candidate’s name with subliminally presented positive or negative cue-words (e.g. miracle, hug, funeral, rabies) is sufficient to influence outcomes such as candidate evaluations and political attitudes. As a form of subliminal messaging and classical conditioning, the repeated pairing of a propaganda target with an emotional association, or ‘affective tag’, in this way triggers unconscious automatic emotional responses with powerful perceptual and behavioural consequences, including for citizens’ voting patterns.

And so it is with defining ‘transhumanism’. By embedding vague terms denoting beneficence and altruism into the very definition of the word, it acquires the power to evoke the kinds of subliminal affective responses often associated with benign material (trust, ease, equanimity, insouciance), while suppressing the responses associated with threat (vigilance, caution, attentiveness, circumspection). Through repetition, defining ‘transhumanism’ thusly turns it into a pacifying cue-word, capable of subtly and subliminally subduing its audiences.

Importantly, the benevolent self-definition advanced by transhumanists has been taken up and uncritically amplified more widely, by dictionaries, encyclopaedias, journalists, commentators and scholars, infecting virtually every effort to discuss the movement more deeply. Consider, for instance, the definitions offered by Wikipedia and Google’s Oxford Dictionary:

Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies – Wikipedia

The belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology – Google’s Oxford Definition

Such mainstream approaches to defining and disseminating the popular meaning of the term constrain analysis within the parameters of, say, “betterment” and “enhancement”. In other words, the conceptual framework within which the definition of transhumanism is propagated leads researchers nowhere outside the narrow boundaries of technological upgrades, which subconsciously affect practically all approaches to understanding the project beyond its claimed overt beneficence.

With these considerations in mind, rather than perpetuate the propaganda effect of an acclamatory approach to defining terms, we offer a definition cleansed of dogma, affective tagging and positive spin. Cognisant of the reality that ‘enhancement’ is in the eye of the beholder, we define transhumanism as:

A project to engineer human biology by technological means on a mass scale.

The technological means in question could involve genetic engineering, synthetic biology, bioelectronics, and human-machine interfaces among others, encompassing biotechnology, nanotechnology, and bio-nanotechnology. The reengineering of human biology could occur directly or indirectly via transformations to the human habitat, such as through engineered adulterations of the natural environment, atmosphere, air, water, plant life, livestock, weapons, and pharmaceuticals.

Sanitising Atrocity by Definition?

In addition to the power of pacification, defining transhumanism as betterment leaves the transhumanist movement open to questionable agendas. Were agendas such as lethality and harm-doing to attach themselves systematically to ill-defined notions of enhancement, the term transhumanism would double as a morally disengaging tool, by sanitising atrocity under the rubric of ‘advancement’. As we wrote in Covid 19: Mass Formation or Mass Atrocity:

Moral disengagement is a psychological process by which a specific event, such as mass extermination, can be placed outside the boundaries of one’s usual moral frame.[23, 24] A common device for achieving this is sanitizing language.[25, 26] Wrapped in the balm of neutral and forgettable terms, harm is rhetorically cleansed,[27] the reality fails to emotionally register, and indifference is invoked.[28] Hence, the banality of evil. Just as sexually assaulting victims with medical equipment was described as ‘enhanced interrogation’ in the War on Terror, so mass killing is disguised using anodyne-sounding medical language for the War on Covid-19™.

In a related vein, throughout transhumanism’s strands, misanthropic, eugenicist and even democidal goals are set alongside claims to pursue human enhancement for the betterment of civilisation, human safety, security, and well-being. Consider the sort of conflicted thinking needed both to communicate and to effectively obscure the processes of total transformation of the human being, prepared for a technocratic posthuman world:

…already today we have the technical ability to start redesigning humanity … The inorganic way, of linking humans to computers, brains to computers or even creating completely non-organic entities, artificial intelligence — perhaps even artificial consciousness — which is even a more radical change. You can say that genetic engineering is just playing with the same bits and pieces that evolution has played with for billions of years. This is something completely new — to create really inorganic entities.[29]

Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer life.[30]

Fast forward to the early 21st century, and we just don’t need the vast majority of the population … because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology like artificial intelligence, bioengineering. Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except for their data.[31]

The ultimate value of human beings will be just as consumers that will do nothing useful at all …. However, you could have consumers which are not humans, which are not conscious.[32]

If you’re not part of the revolution fast enough, then you’ll probably become extinct.”[33]

In his 2018 presentation to the World Economic Forum and 2020 interview above, Yuval Noah Harari, futurist, historian and frequent guest in ‘elite’ circles, perhaps the most notorious academic commentator on transhumanism, exalts the purported power of human ingenuity to supersede the natural pathways of evolution. Today’s leading engineers and programmers, he claims, are able to upgrade, for the betterment of human flourishing, human beings and their uninterrupted social, economic, and neural connections to the global central nervous system — the Internet.

The implication is that humans, reengineered as partly inorganic entities with enhanced synthetic computer/brain power, will enjoy new superhuman abilities to defeat mortality and live forever. Spoken plainly in public, such talk is often portrayed, however, as lunatic and thus largely confined to the periphery. The overt disdain for ‘elite’ proclamations such as these passes as acceptable because most people appear to remain steadfast in their willful blindness to the ongoing class warfare being waged against them.

In contrast, Harari’s other talks take a more sinister turn into eugenics and the necessary reduction in value of human beings with inherent dignity and moral worth. Similar contradictions run throughout transhumanism’s disquisitions. With the rise of advanced robotics, machine learning and a future prospect of quantum computing, most creatures produced by natural processes of biological procreation are unnecessary to a world measured only by what is highly efficient and economically expedient.

It is hardly any wonder that the World Economic Forum stands at the centre of this global programme in which the spheres of corporate power and influence have fully merged with the state. If all this sounds eerily similar to some “friendly” form of fascism, it just might be — a clear warning elaborated by Bertram Gross in 1980. “The collection of information is now possible through increasingly sophisticated systems”, he observed, “including the more ominous forms of remote electronic surveillance”.[34]

Gross foresaw in this emerging order a beguiling sort of fascism in which “more concentrated, unscrupulous, repressive, and militaristic control by a Big Business-Big Government partnership [would] preserve the privileges of the ultra-rich, the corporate overseers, and the brass in the military and civilian order”.[35] He pointed out that this fundamental redesign of the social world is framed in public discourse as exceedingly “reasonable” and inexorable because it is overtly friendly — to business — and, thus, part and parcel of the logic of an efficient and ‘free’ market.

In an example of the market-friendly public discourse that sugar-coats transhumanism, Nick Bostrom, a leading academic transhumanist who hails from what is known as transhumanism’s ‘Oxford School’,[36] wrote in 2003:

Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. [Actually, the term itself was first proposed by Julian Huxley in 1951, reportedly to rebadge eugenics following WWII]. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology.[37]

Bostrom is co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, an original signatory of the Transhumanist Declaration of 1988,[38] and Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University from 2005 to 2024. In a paper titled, ‘Ethical Issues for the 21st Century: Transhumanist Values,’ he explains that:

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.[39]

By way of elaboration, Bostrom offers a vision of posthuman beings that reads like a script for a new Disney fantasy film, entirely divorced from the weaponised reality of human ‘enhancement’ R&D currently underway. Does Bostrom’s seeming unspoken embrace of social Darwinism serve to justify the belief that humans are no more than lab rats to be used as subjects in experimental upgrades? In a paper titled, ‘Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective’, he opines:

We can conceive of aesthetic and contemplative pleasures whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human being has yet experienced. We can imagine beings that reach a much greater level of personal development and maturity than current human beings do, because they have the opportunity to live for hundreds or thousands of years with full bodily and psychic vigor. We can conceive of beings that are much smarter than us, that can read books in seconds, that are much more brilliant philosophers than we are, that can create artworks, which, even if we could understand them only on the most superficial level, would strike us as wonderful masterpieces. We can imagine love that is stronger, purer, and more secure than any human being has yet harbored.[40]

As mere mortals observing Bostrom’s effusive speculation, we can’t help but ask: can we? In human-machine hybrids? Love that is stronger and more pure than any human being has yet harboured? Love — the quality that most decisively distinguishes human beings from machines — will be “enhanced” by technology? How?

Bostrom’s fellow Oxford transhumanists and contemporary co-authors, Brian Earp, Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu, have advanced a vision of technologically enhanced love in The American Journal of Bioethics. The bioethicists and futurists advocate manipulating the experience of love in pursuit of what they call “well suited relationship bonds”.[41] It is striking, to say the very least, that the most powerful human emotion that has motivated the highest forms of sacrifice, service, and culture in history should be dressed up (or down) in such rhetorically banal terms. The key tool that Earp et al. propose for achieving this objective is “anti-love biotechnology”. Is this what Bostrom means by ‘enhanced’?

Laying the blame on love for deviant scourges such as paedophilia, rape trauma and domestic abuse (which is profoundly psychologically flawed), the authors look forward to the prospect of a “love vaccine”, which would work to “prevent unwanted love”. Is the anti-love injection akin to Huxley’s Soma in Brave New World? They stress the “urgency of the ethical project”, including finding a “cure for love”, arguing that “under the right sort of conditions”, anti-love biotechnology could even be “morally required”. Of course, this sort of rationalising of biotech interventions would make perfect sense to minds occupied by the belief that humans are no more than economic machinery whose basic functions must be regulated or replaced altogether by more robots. The Oxford academics, whose transhumanist endeavours have as their base the power and position of the oldest English-speaking university in the world, describe a future in which “we may one day find ourselves with an array of pills, biochips, and neuroceuticals that could successfully ‘treat’ problematic passions”.[42]

A second definitional approach to sanitising transhumanism is to pit it against a devalued notion of unadulterated human beings. A report by the Science and Technology Options Assessment group of the European Parliament, for example, states: “Transhumanism is the idea that humankind can (and should) be perfected beyond its present limits by the use of appropriate technologies. These views are countered by a small but vocal group of conservatively minded opponents of human enhancement”.[43]

Similarly, a 2020 report by the Center for Naval Analyses for the US Office to the Chief of Naval Operations places opponents of transhumanism into one of two camps: “bioconservatism” or “bioluddism”. According to the report:

Transhumanism describes a philosophy of transforming the human condition to enhance both body and mind. In contrast, bioconservatism takes a ‘hesitant’ stance toward the merging of humans and technology, often with a focus on the unnatural and uncertain ends of such merging. And bioluddism (or neo-Luddism, for technology in general) rejects emerging biotechnology and passively or actively opposes its effects on the environment, individuals, and communities.[44]

An illustrative sentence reads: “Bioluddites oppose anti-love biotechnology”.

To be clear, this definition, provided to the US Department of Defense, treats safeguarding unadulterated humanity as a product of one of two things: political orientation (bio-conservatism) or technological backwardness (bioluddism).

Titled Superhumans: Implications of Genetic Engineering and Human-Centered Bioengineering, the report’s purpose was to provide the US Department of Defense (DoD) with recommendations for navigating a future of “cyborgs” and genetically engineered humans. The document alerts the reader that:

Biotechnology — specifically, the physical modification of biology with technology — has a trajectory that goes beyond reversible “human-machine teaming” and ends with cyborg-like possibilities of endless enhancements and modifications. And genetic engineering, particularly with the accessibility offered by CRISPR1 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) and related technologies, has a trajectory that promises smarter, stronger, and ‘better’ humans from birth, heralding the advent of ‘homo superior’.[45]

Having stigmatised those opposed to such developments as bioconservatives or bioluddites, efforts to protect homo sapiens (including from birth) against a genetically engineered takeover by “homo superior” — that is, the prospect of de facto human extinction — are cast as politically and psychologically reactionary. By comparison, transhumanism, and its posthuman, species-altering goals, are portrayed as the evolved, rational, and progressive alternative.

Such equating of posthumanism and progressivism echoes a definition of the ‘transhuman’ put forth by transhumanist pioneer Max More in 1994:

[A transhuman is] someone in the transition stage from human to biologically, neurologically and genetically posthuman. One who orients his/her thinking towards the future to prepare for coming changes and who seeks out and takes advantage of opportunities for self-advancement[46]

In reality, we contend, transhumanism is a product of powerful institutions, long believed to serve the public interest, which have been captured by a transnational regime of financiers and technocratic stakeholders who have worked hard to vanquish all memory of the public commons and the sovereign rights inherent to each human being. Freed from long-held universal moral imperatives, the global transhumanist movement that nudges the masses to consume its wares also manipulates, patents, and, in this present “third-wave marketization”[47] of the global economy, commodifies the raw materials of life. It pretends to be not merely a master of mimicry (biomimetics), but an omnipotent all-knowing creator of material substance. God-level: “Divinity,” according to Harari, “is not far enough to describe what we are trying to do.”[48]

Indeed, the charisma with which the industry of transhumanism is sweeping the world is, in Martine Rothblatt’s view, grounded in the ideology of transgenderism. Rothblatt is a billionaire transgender and transhumanist activist who authored the book From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form. The process of transition, according to the Transhumanist ethos, necessitates the construction of neologisms (beme), representing the “bio-electronic human” who has transcended the citizen of an “information society” of the “flesh-and-blood human” but

vitally relies upon vast portions of their life being stored and processed electronically. Such people can be said to be “transbeman” – they transcend both the human and the beman worlds. (2008)

The wealthy and influential Rothblatt got her start in satellite tracking systems following a visit to a NASA tracking station in 1974, after which she worked for NASA in the 1980s, and served on the Space Studies Institute board of trustees. Alongside transgenderism, Rothblatt promotes the use of nanotechnology in life extension, cyrogenics, humanoid robots, and cyber-consciousness.

Accordingly, with its aspirations to outdo Divinity and to transcend the trap(pings) of human flesh, transhumanism represents man’s hubris and degenerate belief in human effort alone to intercede with total precision and success in all natural processes. It involves attempts to engineer artificial evolutionary pathways that lead human beings toward a state of departure from their present stage as the most highly evolved creatures. Infused in this project is conceit beyond measure as wo/men in power pretend to play the role of supernatural creator and arrogate to themselves the right to control the sovereign will and desire of the human being to think, to feel, to act, and to reproduce.

We make the case in this series of articles that, to this end, the persistent campaigns of coerced injections of humankind with experimental gene therapies have served as key signifiers of the transhumanist project, both to rewrite the code of life itself with man’s technocratic interventions on the natural order, and to reengineer biology and merge humans with machines. All as part of an organised and well-funded project to repurpose humans for use in some imagined seamless synthesis of markets, societies, bodies, brains, bloodstreams, battlefields and belief systems, guided by a singular manmade force of unparalleled computational power.

Of course, all of this effort in trying to create and wield nearly omnipresent control over unpredictable, dynamic, and interdependent biological systems necessitates the application of immense “intelligence” — the sort that can operate with nearly unlimited resources, brainpower and funding.

Transhumanism: Flight of Fancy or Military-Intelligence Operation?

In the present age where public perception is tightly managed, censorship, compartmentalisation, and erasure are prevalent. This is why certain primary source materials need to be unearthed from archives and carefully examined.

As a case in point, buried in web pages archived on the Wayback Machine lies a record that on August 14 2001 the Chief Scientist from the NASA Langley Research Center, Dennis Bushnell, gave a talk at a symposium organised by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), on what amounts to a military-intelligence roadmap towards transhumanism.[49] Bushnell was, at the time, a 40-year NASA veteran and remains NASA Langley Chief Scientist today. The presentation was titled ‘Future Strategic Issues / Future Warfare’. It was intended as a “heads up” to NASA’s national security partners on the future of technology as applies to both the military and society, with a view towards the years 2025-2030. The second slide read, ‘The ‘Bots, Borgs, ‘& Humans Welcome you to 2025 A.D”. The slides accompanying the presentation can be found at an archived web page of the US DoD Technical Information Center (DTIC).

Copyright Yena-B, Artist’s impression of slide 1 from the Future Stratgic Issues/Future Warfare presentation in 2001.

The talk’s stated purpose was to guide not only the Department of Defence (DoD)’s military strategy but also military-intelligence procurement decisions, and R&D planning. Its projections and predictions were derived from NASA’s “futures” work with 30+ other national security agencies, including DARPA, the CIA, the DIA, the US Army, the Air Force, and numerous other national security bodies. As part of the talk’s preamble, NASA-Langley stressed that the futuristic technologies it described were “NO PIXIE DUST” (emphasis in original, slide 4). Clearly aware that the technologies and concepts contained in the 113 slides would appear improbable to many audiences, Bushnell explained that new technologies such as those he described often take 15+ years to produce, after which they remain “in inventory” for “40+ years”. Which, if true, would place a 40+ year veteran and head of a national security scientific research institute such as Dennis Bushnell in a prime position to know the status of classified R&D coming down the ‘black science’ pike.

Consistent with Bushnell’s claims, Harvard science historian Peter Galison writes that classified scientific research is “on the order of five to ten times larger than the open literature that finds its way to our libraries.” Thus, it is “we in the open world […] who are living in a modest information booth facing outwards, our unseeing backs to a vast and classified empire we barely know.”[50]

With the benefit of access to that vast classified empire, Bushnell, in his 2001 presentation, provided an overview of “ongoing worldwide technological revolutions” in “IT/Bio/Nano” fields, which, according to slide 7, were taking place at “triple/exponential” rates, with “changes occurring at scales of months (instead of decades)”. The talk predicted that the underlying global explosion in technological revolutions would see the advent of a new era for humanity, slated to commence in 2020. NASA Langley dubbed this new era the Bio/NANO Age (slide12). Why the year 2020 was chosen as the dawn of a new Bio/NANO era for humanity was not explained. A Virtual Age, in contrast, was designated to commence at some unspecified time, denoted by a question mark. That ultimate Virtual Age was to bring with it the “robotization” of key developments from previous eras, and a shift from living life in reality-based environments to existing in virtual ones.

On the road to the Virtual era, according to NASA Langley, the Bio/NANO Age would subsist on “social and economic disruption”, just as the Industrial Age had subsisted on raw materials and the Agricultural Age on farmlands (slide 107). Consider the distinctions drawn to frame the major transitions: the new Age feeds on societies, the livelihoods and bodies of human beings, while the preceding Ages fed on renewable resources in the natural world. The technological landscapes of the Bio/NANO and Virtual eras were to comprise genetic engineering of human beings prior to birth; implantable electronics for monitoring, computing and brain stimulation; cyber and artificial life; biocomputing; automatic/robotic “everything”; nanobots; smart dust; and ubiquitous immersive holographic and virtual environments. These and other radical societal transformations were anticipated to occur with the help of “’Trojan horse’ ‘civilian’ systems” (slide 81) — consistent with the alleged rollout of military technologies under the guise of ‘public health’ since 2020 [51, 52, 53, 54] — and the “surreptitious nano tagging (with microwave interrogation) of everything / everyone” (slide 88).

In all, the document signposted key ways in which the path to transhumanism would be paved by weaponry, including in civilian disguise, and arranged according to military-intelligence designs, both in strategic and concrete (R&D and procurement) terms. Despite the immense curiosity-value and potential social impact of the 113 slides, however, they have received little to no attention in the civilian world, with a few notable exceptions.[55]

Ten years later, in 2011, Bushnell told an audience of environmental scientists that “the ongoing bio-revolutions in genomics and synthetic biology offer the very real possibility of designer life forms including humanoids”.[56] One may wonder whether Mary Shelley will be lionised, at some point, with a posthumous Nobel Prize for her conceptual contributions to today’s movements toward manmade monstrosities. These revolutions, Bushnell noted, would form part of a technological future that audience members should expect in their children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes. He explained that “via biomimetics they’ve nano-sectioned the neocortex, and they’re replicating it in silicon, and they’re having great success”. In the interim, Bushnell warned that even without silicon brains, in 2011 “the robots are taking the jobs. And the humans increasingly can’t compete”. Going forward, with more advanced artificial intelligence, “what people will do all day is not clear”. Is this project merely the conclusion to the rapacious logic of central banking — to jettison humans from all areas of cultural, economic and biological production?

“Humans are becoming cyborgs”, the NASA Langley Chief Scientist continued. “We have put brain chips in about 10,000 people … DARPA is working on brain chips for super soldiers. Fifteen, 20 years out if you don’t have all of these chips in you, you can’t compete, particularly with the machines … [In fact] we are merging with machines. There are some really massive effects of the IT/Bio/Nano quantum energetics tech revolutions that are now double exponential … If you want to check where the frontier of this kind of thinking is, read Ray Kurzweil”, who, Bushnell added with zest, is “right on it!”[57]

In his book The Singularity (2005), Kurzweil describes a ‘2030 scenario’ consistent with NASA-Langley’s Virtual Era, under which

Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every inter-neuronal connection coming from our senses … Nanobots will be capable of generating the neurological correlates of emotions, sexual pleasure, and other derivatives of our sensory experience and mental reactions … Nanobots will be introduced without surgery, through the bloodstream and, if necessary, can all be directed to leave, so the process is easily reversible. They are programmable, in that they can provide virtual reality one minute and a variety of brain extensions the next.[58]

Fantasy? If Professor of Electrical Engineering and Cellular Biology at Florida International University, Sakhrat Khizroev, is to be believed, his team had already developed magnetoelectric nanoparticles in 2018 capable of being injected into the bloodstream, “like the flu shot” (or ingested), and wirelessly guided to the brain. In animal studies, the magnetoelectric nanoparticles could be wirelessly manoeuvred to brain areas with single-neuron precision, and brought back out into the bloodstream once their mission was complete. In a talk on the technology and the emerging field of “technobiology” Khizroev said, “every day we are getting closer to the ultimate goal to use [this technology] on people. And we hope within a couple of years we can do that”.[59] The accompanying graphic read, ‘NANOPARTICLE – Unlimited Possibilities’.

Earlier in his career, when he was a straight-up electrical engineer and physicist, prior to his incarnation as a “technobiologist”, Khizroev had conducted research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and DARPA.[60, 61] For his part, Kurzweil is Director of Engineering and “Principal Researcher + AI Visionary” at Google, which, in turn, was seed-funded by the NSA and CIA[62] and continues to collaborate with US intelligence today.

Consistent with Kurzweil’s Singularity, by 2015 NASA Langley’s Dennis Bushnell was describing the possibility of “uploading the brain into a machine, which would have god-like [sic.] knowledge and would be connected to the emerging global sensor grid and global mind.”[63] Bushnell goes on to cite Hans Moravec’s idea of morphing into our “brain children” and becoming “human contaminated machines.” So, not only are machines deified (”god-like”), but human beings are treated as contaminants — a profoundly anti-humanist vision that is starkly at odds with the transhumanist mantra of “bettering” humanity.

Back to the Future of 2020

While such developments may have seemed too far from reality in 2001 (and 2011 and 2015) for most commentators to entertain, in 2020 NASA Langley’s 2001 presentation gained new salience as key prognostications began making their way into real life. In 2020, “social disruption”, which was slated by NASA Langley to replace the farmlands of the Agricultural Age and the raw materials of the Industrial Age, descended right on time for a 2020 commencement to a new Bio/NANO era, as listed on slide 12 of the NASA document. The social disruption of 2020, moreover, powered, for the first time in history, mass rollout of injectable gene-based BioNano technology (cf BioNTech ‘vaccines’), underpinned legally and logistically by the Military-Industrial Complex, particularly the US DoD and the National Security Council (NSC).[64, 65, 66, 67, 68] In the process, rapid mass transition to the “tele-everything” described in the NASA Langley document (tele-medicine, tele-education, tele-commerce, tele-socialisation etc, slide 16) came into being, laying a practical social pathway to the Virtual Age, in which, “the world and society will shift even more to tele-everything”.[69]

At the same time, in the realms of public discourse, as life was imitating NASA Langley slides, the WEF’s Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari began touting the arrival of Bio/NANO Era developments under the auspices of a “Great Reset” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”,[70, 71] both of which had been nurtured prior to 2020 and hastened by the Great Disruption that was Covid-19. When asked about the significance of Covid-19 to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab said that Covid-19 had “accelerated the ongoing Industrial Revolution” such that “the Fourth Industrial Revolution is now a reality”.

Expanding upon that theme, on April 14, 2020 — a mere month after the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a pandemic — Harari explained that, with the arrival of Covid-19, we were seeing “a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously surveillance was mainly above the skin. Now it’s going under the skin. Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet — above all they want to know what is happening under our skin”.[72]

Harari also told The Late Late Show early in The Pandemic™, on 16 April 2020:

What’s happening now, it’s really a watershed in the history of surveillance. First of all, we see mass surveillance systems entering and being adopted in democratic countries, which previously resisted them. Secondly, we see the nature of surveillance changing from over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance.[73]

By “under the skin surveillance” Harari explained to BBC Hard Talk in May 2020 that he meant not merely medical measurements such as temperature or heart rate. Under the skin surveillance, he stressed, would enable governments and corporations (if they can now be distinguished from one another) to monitor not just what we do, but what we think and feel, to the extent that the corporate state would “know me better than I know myself”. He added that he thought it was likely that “people could look back in 100 years and identify the Coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin. Which I think is maybe the most important development of the 21st century”.[74] But what was Harari talking about? His remarks were made in early 2020, when social distancing, masks and lockdowns were the countermeasures du jour. What did those interventions, or the virus they purportedly addressed, have to do with surveillance under the skin? It is hard to disagree with Harari that had Covid-19 or its countermeasures somehow served as a vehicle for covert mass deployment of subcutaneous surveillance technology, that would indeed qualify as a defining, if ominous, 21st century development. But how could such a thing have occurred? Did Harari know something we didn’t? About Covid perhaps? Or the masks? Or the PCR tests? (See Part 3 for discussion of smart dust and findings of undeclared materials on PCR swabs).

Social Engineers or Space Cadets?

It is certainly true that, of all US national security agencies, NASA’s remit begs the most impossible feats of biology and science. Living without gravity and oxygen, or coping with sensory deprivation are obvious examples. With such interplanetary objectives in mind, it is perhaps understandable that the agency’s interest in cyborgs dates to the 1960s. In a document titled ‘Engineering Man for Space: THE CYBORG STUDY’ (capitals in original), NASA’s Office of Advanced Research and Technology received a report in 1963 on its ‘CYBORG Program’, whose aim was to “obtain the maximum integration of man into a man-machine complex”.[75] Interestingly, this came only one year after the CIA’s MKULTRA Subproject 119 (1962), which explored “techniques of activation of the human organization by remote electronic means” but did not result in any device for doing so.[76]

The rationale for NASA’s CYBORG Program — six decades ago — was to increase the “efficiency and longevity of the life process on board space flights”.[77] In other words, NASA’s space programme provided a rationale, or perhaps a pretext, for funding research into areas that would otherwise be deemed too outlandish/immoral to fund, i.e. cyborgs. Justifying incursions into otherwise unconscionable territory by appeals to a valued collective purpose, it should be noted, is a common psychological tool for sanitising atrocity.[78]

By 2021, NASA had taken its space rationale sufficiently far to establish an international, interagency collaboration involving the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, eight international space agencies, a few universities, and a ‘not for profit’ group with Google’s Eric Schmidt and billionaire transgender transhumanist activist Martine Rothblatt on its board of trustees. That collaboration exploited the R&D opportunities of an international space station hosting a microgravity laboratory, which was orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes.

In a set of slides on the initiative, titled ‘Bioengineering at NASA: Towards an understanding of life in space’, a timeline depicting ‘Six Decades of Space Biology Research’ marked the time point “now” with two words: “synthetic biology”.[79]

Earlier, in 2011, a report prepared jointly by NASA Langley and a private government contractor summarised NASA’s R&D synergy with external bodies[80], explicating its intended applications for synthetic biology. Those applications included interactions with electronics such as a “synthetic bio-robot” which the report described as “an autonomous robot resulting from the fusion of synthetic biology, electronics, and cybernetics … This technology builds on the emerging field of synthetic biology by using the principles of biomimicry to develop a micro-scale cyborg”.[81]

Additionally, the report listed “seamless human-computer interaction” involving a “Brain Machine Interface (BMI): also known as brain-computer or neural interface”. Such an interface, the document explained, “monitors the user’s neurons and interprets his or her signals. This provides hands-free control of machinery and software and access to information … [which] could be a very useful technology in space environments”.[82] Thus, since its first Cyborg Program report, NASA’s rationale for cyborg technologies appears to have experienced mission creep, from astronauts’ longevity in 1963 to convenience in 2011.

The 2011 report then described a simulated reality that would be “indistinguishable from real experiences” and “so completely immersive” that the user would be unable to tell the two experiences apart. The technologies that could achieve this state “would work directly on the brain itself — blocking real sensory input and replacing it with simulated input on the level of individual neurons”.[83] A moral line was thereby crossed. Hypothetical space scenarios, probably useful to no one, had provided the justification for the development of real-world technologies that could be used to hijack individuals’ perception of reality.

Next on NASA’s technological agenda was “Super Humans”. NASA’s super humans are based on:

Physical Interfaces includ[ing] physical and neural interfaces that augment human capabilities, such as exo-skeletons and infrared vision …. [Said] neural infrared vision interfaces hard-wire visual sensing capabilities directly into the nervous system. The ability to see in different parts of the spectrum could be valuable for space operations.[84]

And while this may represent just one small step for a cyborg astronaut, it is a giant step for human kind. It betrays a vision of homo superior whereby the ‘super human’ is not the transcendent creative genius of academic transhumanists’ tomes, but one whose perceptions of reality are externally defined and managed for them, in line with their manufacturers’ requirements.

In short, with space exploration serving as the overarching rationale, it might make sense that NASA is simply seeking to create what Dennis Bushnell has called “extremophiles” for space, or cyborgs designed to thrive in extreme environments. However, Bushnell has proposed extremophiles not merely for space. He has also advanced them as a response to “climate change”. [85] In his 2011 talk to the Blue Tech Water Innovation Forum Bushnell mooted modifying humans to “take the heat”. He said:

We have ongoing studies of extremophiles… plus the ongoing revolution in genomics and synthetic biology, that proffers the very real possibility of designer life forms, including humanoids, capable of thriving in whatever mess we make of the planet.

That is, the intended end-use of extremophiles appears to be closer to home than outer space. Which is consistent with Bushnell’s 2001 presentation to national security industry partners, in which cyborg technology was predicted to underpin new Ages for humanity. New Ages, moreover, that were cast not primarily in terms of space flight or even climate change, but more standard national security fare, such as combat, surveillance, and war. Including “PSYWAR” [86], along with new forms of attack encompassing beam weaponry (slides 45 and 103) and aerosolised mechanical micro-dust that bores into its victims’ lungs (slide 43). Not to forget the “surreptitious nano tagging (with microwave interrogation) of everything/everyone” [italics added] for “identification and status info” (slides 41 and 88).

Which only begs more questions: Even if creating extremophiles for space were the true purpose of NASA’s cyborg programs, why is NASA predicting new Ages of humanity and BioNano warfare? Why is it heralding the surreptitious nano tagging of everything and everyone? With microwave interrogation? For identification and status info? Whose info? What status? Why?

To answer these and other questions, in Part 2, drawing chiefly on officially authenticated and formally distributed military-intelligence primary source documents, we explore the evidence of designs plotted out for transhumanism in military-intelligence “futures” materials, which relate to the strategic vision of the national security world beyond NASA, for both the military and the civilian sector.

Dr. Lissa Johnson is an independent researcher who writes about the psychological aspects of public affairs, psychological operations, human rights abuse, citizenship, and the exercise and abuse of power.

Daniel Broudy lectures in areas ranging from communication theory to visual rhetoric and from composition to rhetorical grammar. His research focuses on sounds, symbols, signs, images, and colors as tools deployed by centers of power to shape knowledge and influence human perception and emotion.

David A. Hughes lectures in areas including security studies, international relations theory, foreign policy analysis, globalization, and US exceptionalism.

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