Here’s an interesting futurist site: The Galactic Public Archives. The GPA focuses on the ideas of visionary futurists, especially the late Transhumanist FM-2030. To quote the words of the GPA:
The Galactic Public Archives (GPA) is an online web series that takes an in-depth look at visionaries of the 20th and early 21st century who presented compelling visions of the future. The GPA gives viewers a glimpse of the mind’s ability for foresight, but also, insight into the hopes, dreams and fears through the words and voices of those visionaries.
The GPA specifically is focusing on a man named FM-2030. FM 2030 was at various points in his life, an Iranian Olympic basketball player, a diplomat, a university teacher, and a corporate consultant. He developed his views on transhumanism in the 1960s and evolved them over the next thirty-something years. He was placed in cryonic suspension July 8th, 2000.
FM-2030 apparently once said, “I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.” And so, the Galactic Public Archives site is presented as a future site that remembers the present as the future past.
Here are a couple of instructive videos relating to FM-2030.
First, Who is FM-2030?
Second, Are You Transhuman?
I remember reading FM-2030’s book Are You Transhuman? way back in the 1990s. It was the first I had ever heard of transhumanism, and it fit so well into that transformative era when the Internet was new and people talked about such things “dot-coms” and the “new economy.” Of course, the dot-com era, too, is future past, but FM-2030’s ideas remain relevant and engaging.
I encourage those interested in the future to check out The Galactic Public Archives.
