Giulio is a physicist and computer scientist, and former senior manager in the European space administration. Giulio works as a consultant and contributes to several science and technology magazines. In 2002-2008 he served on the Board of Directors of Humanity Plus, of which he was Executive Director, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Italian Transhumanist Association. He is often in Hungary, Italy and Spain. You can find more about Giulio at Turing Church and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET).  

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Participating in the August 2012 Discussion Group of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Dan described very eloquently the idea that other civilizations in the universe may have already developed resurrection technologies and may be already “providing resurrection services” to less advanced civilizations like ours. If this is the case, we and everyone else in the universe will be resurrected by the Cosmic Government.

Here is a (slightly edited, but almost literal) transcript of Dan’s words:

“I think you start out realizing that the universe is vastly older than the little area within the light sphere that we can see from this planet on the backwater of the Milky Way galaxy.

Let’s say just for the sake of argument that it is not merely a few billion years old, but it is a few trillion years old, maybe even quadrillion years old, I have no idea obviously, no way to find out, really, right now anyway, but I feel that there is a well organized cosmic government and civilization, that populates literally millions and millions, I really should say billions and billions (Carl Sagan) of planets scattered throughout this part of the universe, and they are all, you know, most part of them are in some degree of communication with each other, there is some sort of coordinated sense of purpose in this community, and they have been at it for a very long time by our standards.

So during this time, you expect that this kinds of things, life extension, and mind uploading, and all these other technologies that we speculate about, would have been long explored, analyzed, built on, other things developed. Frankly, I think the promises of many religions of personal immortality on some terms, sometimes the terms are absurd, but the idea of personal immortality is not absurd at all, because just as we think that we could resurrect our dead, and we might go out and help other people to resurrect their dead, well, rather than being at the front-end of that process, we are at the back-end of that process, we are the clients, not the service company for the project.

Why? Because there is some really big project going on in the universe, and it’s bringing about the universe in unity and harmony. It has really long ways to go, but on this planet it has incredibly long ways to go, because, you know, whether you call it the fall of man or the planetary rebellion or any of these things that are written down in some garbled form in the myth books of world religions, the fact is that something very bad happened here a long time ago, and we have been pretty much in the backwater, cut off from cosmic civilization ever since.”

I hope an alien “service company” has taken good care of Dan, and he is now a happy and productive part of the cosmic mind at the end of space and time. But even if at this moment there are no alien service companies providing resurrection services to the little people of infant backwater civilizations, we will become the service company ourselves, if we progress in the New Age. From his subjective point of view, Dan is still with us, out there.

See also my longer video interview with Dan and Alison on sexual freedom, the occupy movement, transhumanism, the singularity, physics, religion and spirituality, and their forthcoming book. LGBT rights, quantum entanglement, and new cosmic religions in the same talk, it’s really awesome.

For more, see Part 1 and Part 2.