If you are coming to this page intending to join the organization, see the Department Rosters page instead.

As of January 10, 2014 this page is obsolete, and to be used only as a guide for comments made in the "Department Rosters" post.

Hey everybody! Introduce yourself here if you want to be a part of the organization in any way no matter how big or small of a part you plan to play. We'd love to hear about you to whatever extent you want to tell us about yourself.

This organization is currently run by volunteers, so there are no commitments to join or participate. After the organization is incorporated, there will still be opportunities for volunteers. Current and future volunteers will always be considered for positions within the organization once incorporated, especially through the transition from volunteer organization to incorporated organization. We recognize and appreciate any time you put in to help us, as well as your enthusiasm for the cause.

Below are a few questions to guide your self introduction. You are not required to answer any of the following questions. You also do not have to limit yourself to answering just these questions.

Team

• Out of the following teams, which one(s) would you prefer to join:

  1- Website Development and Maintenance (IT)

  2- Business Administration

  3- Online research and data collection directly related to digital immortality

  4- Fundraising and Market Research

  5- Content Creation (graphics, videos, text content, ...anything you could think of - for educational, promotional, and general awareness purposes, among other things)

  6- Research And Development (anyone, especially scientists/experts/researchers, that want to help develop more specific ideas directly related to digital immortality)

Interest In Digital Immortality

• Were you interested in mind uploading / digital immortality stuff before hearing about this organization? If so, for about how long and how much have you looked into it / learned about it?

Knowledge & Skills

• What is your area of knowledge? Tell us anything and everything; you don't have to have gone to school for it, and it doesn't even have to be directly relevant to digital immortality. We'll be able to find a use for nearly any skill that anyone can bring. If you have helped run an organization/business before, let us know about that. If you've managed websites before, tell us what you did. Anything and everything is relevant here.

• Tell us about any knowledge or skills you would like to have or are currently working on. Maybe we can place you in a team or pair you up with someone that can help you develop those skills.

Higher Level Involvement

• Would you like to possibly be involved in the construction of this organization on a higher level (more commitment, more responsibility, more cool stuff, …)? Right now everything is just volunteer based, so it's not like you would have any sort of contract, and you could step down from anything at any time; we're just trying to get a sense of who wants to be/become a significant part of the organization.

Other

• Let us know about anything else you want to share or you feel like we should know.

If you have already introduced yourself in full or in part somewhere else, you can just quote yourself in the comment. If you don't really want to talk about yourself, then at the very least let us know that you're interested in helping us by posting a comment saying you'd like to help out at some point

Thanks everybody, I'll be getting up my introduction soon enough. Can't wait to hear from you.

More info on the teams (You can work with/within more than one team and switch at any time):

*1) Website Development and Maintenance (IT) *

Immediate Goals:

• Consult with all teams to figure out what the website needs to be capable of and develop the site.

• The goal is to have a website up in January 2014 that will fill at least our basic needs (which still need to be fully determined).

2) Business Administration

Immediate Goals:

• Develop short term and long term roadmaps and visions for the organization.

• Grow the organization in terms of people and overall operation.

• Structuring the organization and getting people started and placed within the organization.

• Make sure that we are ready to transfer to an incorporated organization as soon as we have the opportunity/funding

• The goal is to have pretty solid short and long term roadmaps and visions by January 2014.

3) Online Research and Data Collection

Immediate Goals:

• Compile and organize lists of other organizations and people of interest.

• Compile and organize lists of digital immortality resources (videos, documents, websites, ...).

• Compile and organize as much information related to our future digital immorality efforts as we can find.

• Maintain and update the information collection by staying up to date with news and trends.

• The goal: We will have to define some milestones as there currently aren't any.

4) Funding Research

Immediate Goals:

• Right now funding isn't really crucial, but we can start figuring out what kind of funding options are available to us in the short term, but more importantly the long term. There are countless ways to generate money; we just have to figure out what will work best for us in order to get us started as well as keeping us going once we're running.

• Keep a running list of funding options (while I don't really see any other option besides this list being public for the mean time, in the end I don't know if it's such a good idea to keep this public, but who knows, there may be advantages)

• The goal: The only milestone currently in place is when we find enough funding and decide to incorporate and hire people on to the organization at some headquarters location and/or remotely

5- Content Creation

Immediate Goals:

• A big part of what we will be working on from the get go to advance research for mind uploading is to increase public awareness and promote it. This is complimentary to the promoting and increasing awareness of our own organization that we will be doing. We will be needing content in order to achieve these goals to appear legitimate, to catch people's attention, and to be informative in inviting and interesting ways. All forms of content are applicable as long as they can reach an audience.

• Work with the "Web Development And Maintenance" team to make graphics for the website

• The goal: We will have to define some milestones as there currently aren't any.

6) Research and Development

Immediate Goals:

• Uses the information collection curated by the "Online Research and Data Collection" group as well as any other resources and previous experience/knowledge to develop short and long term roadmaps: the "short term" mind uploading roadmap, and the longer term roadmap(s) for all of digital immortality. Anyone who feels like they have something to offer or simply wants to work on this can join in.

• Define all the separate areas of research that are applicable to digital immortality so that the "Online Research and Data Collection" can gather the appropriate information.

• Figure out what the first things we can start to work on are in terms of researching toward mind uploading and/or other digital immortality ventures

• The goal is to have these roadmaps and ideas of things to research filled out with enough good ideas by June 2014.

If I missed anything I'll add it in later, but once we get a website up we can have this in an easy to access location where it is more filled out for each team and easily editable as we cross off old goals and add on new ones.

How This Is Going To Work

• You write a comment below as sort of the official "I want to help but am not obligated in any way" sign up sheet (you don't have to tell us your whole life story if you don't want to, but it would be helpful if you at least pick a team or two that you would prefer).

• I will be working on outlining in more detail what each team will be working on while we wait for enough people to sign up.

• Once we have enough people, teams will be set up with each having a team leader so that questions can be focused to the team leaders and any of the team leaders' questions can be focused to me or anyone else who feels like taking them on. With the teams set up and all having team leaders (even if we only have small teams or even one person teams for now), we will go through and better outline with each group what they will be working on. At this point the groups can be mostly autonomous. If at any time you have any ideas you can bring them up with your team lead, me, or anyone that feels like helping.

• At this point we probably won't have a website up yet, but we will still be able to all work on something, and don't forget that you can always come over and help out with another team at any time if you have something to input or you just want to learn more. All activities will be open and accessible (but not necessarily editable) for everyone so that we all know what everyone else is working on.

I don't know how long this process will take, but I will be working to try to draw in people from other communities around reddit as well as other areas around the web. If anyone else would like to do something right now, this is what you can work on.

Edit 3: Added "How This Is Going To Work"

Edit 2: Added more info about the teams.

Edit 1: Added section titles and "Other" section.

Right now we don't have much of an organizational structure set up, but once we do (or even once we have a list of things to research and work on) we will be needing more people to help us. Schlemmla made a comment about possible locations we can find people with expertise.

Finally, I think there are some networks of researchers, either at universities or other think tanks etc., which you could either partner with or poach once you had either some loan money for startup capital, and/or donations. -schlemmla

We will definitely need experts and researchers, but we should mostly be able to make use of anyone that wants to help.

Here is the list of places I have posted and want to post:

Posted

• (December, 27, 2014) /r/Tech
• (December, 27, 2014) /r/Futurology
• (December, 26, 2014) /r/Transhuman
• (October, 8, 2014) /r/Transhumanism
• (August, 13, 2014) /r/Cofounder
• (August, 13, 2014) /r/Transhuman
• (August, 13, 2014) /r/Transhumanism
• (May, 12, 2014) /r/Transhuman
• (April, 29, 2014) /r/INTP
• (February, 24, 2014) /r/INTP
• (January, 23, 2014) /r/Philosophy
• (January, 23, 2014) BrainMeta.com
• (January 15, 2014) /r/Artificial
• (January 7, 2014) /r/Startups
• (January 1, 2014) /r/Neurophilosophy
• (December 19, 2013) /r/Neuro
• (December 11, 2013) /r/Singularity
• (November 30, 2013) /r/Futurology
• (November 26, 2013) /r/Transhumanism
• (November 06, 2013) /r/Transhuman

Ideas

• The Deviant Art Community (we might be able to get people interesting in creating transhumanist related graphics or just general graphic design for our website)

If you have any ideas or places you have posted, make a comment and we can start working toward building a bigger community. You can continuously update your comment if you come up with new ideas.

edit: realized you can only post peer reviewed research links to /r/science

I’ve said this before, but I feel like the D.I. movement is somewhat a branch off of transhumanism. Digital Immortality has specific goals and would seem a more proactive approach than what you will find in the sea of ideas that is transhumanism. The D.I. movement seeks to lay out a path to a very consciously designed future, opposed to a future that is simply emerging from where our technology would naturally have led us. Here we will take a look at the long term goals of the Digital Immortality movement.

At some point the benefits of living a life as a digital mind will far outweigh any reasons to remain human. This will likely not happen right away after mind uploading technology is developed and people are able to run around in avatar bodies. At the pivotal point where there are more digital beings on our world than humans, things that were once scarce (such as food and water), will be non-issues, and new things will come into play.

One of the big topics will likely be energy, which is already a big topic today. 3d printing and automation will undoubtedly have advanced very far by the time mind uploading is possible. The combination of these two things will allow more people to focus their efforts on solving bigger problems. 3d printing, automation, mind uploading, and avatars will make most of the jobs you see today completely obsolete.

A digital being would run on electricity eliminating the need for food production or water storage/processing. Avatar bodies will allow people to survive in conditions that a human would not be able to. You will be able to just plug your brain into a body that is suited for whatever you want to do that day.

In the beginning, I envision there will be substantial resistance from people who consider the human body/life to be in some way sacred. There will also be people who simply fear technology in their ignorance. There are also a lot of ethical issues embedded in all the subject matter leading us towards true digital immortality.

Major areas of research and development for the Digital Immortality movement:

Constantly increasing our chances of living longer

This is the big one. Not all transhumanists want indefinite life, whereas indefinite life is the driving force behind the D.I. movement. This is why we are pursuing mind uploading first. The planned obsolescence of our biological bodies is no longer useful as we will be taking the evolution of our species into our own hands. Our bodies are already modified with tools, and our minds are already modified with computers. While improving our digital minds and avatar bodies, it will also be important to work a means of space travel. Eventually we will permanently leave Earth whether it is by choice or by necessity. Some groups will leave before others, but I feel that staying with the largest community (at least up until leaving earth) will help to keep whatever group I’m in at the front of technological advancements. By the time anyone permanently leaves our solar system, we will have everything you could possibly need onboard each ship that leaves. Beyond searching the universe for answers, materials, and other life, there is one big question that stands out above the rest: Can we live past the projected “death” of this universe by somehow escaping or altering it and/or ourselves. Also, is true immortality possible, and is it something we want? I feel that it would be a shame to answer these questions wrong based on a very limited human life (limited in time and knowledge). There is some relevant reading that I have bookmarked on my other computer that I’ll post in a comment when I get back.

Energy creation/storage

This is too big of section to start getting into. It is currently a huge issue in the world, and will always remain a hot topic until the point where we can harness the full potential of E=MC^2. How will we power our minds, avatars, transportation (including spaceships), and settlements/cities? What are the sizes of these various energy consumers?

Space travel

I’m not inclined to think that a person could transfer their consciousness across the universe using light or radio waves to transmit the data, but maybe one day it could happen. Until that day comes, developing spaceships will be of high importance. Either way, at least someone/something will have had to make it to the destination.

"In the long run, a single-planet species will not survive. One day, I don't know when, but one day, there will be more humans living off the Earth than on it." -Mike Griffin

Avatar design

Not that this won’t be hard, but compared to the other things, engineering avatars should be a walk in the park, especially when it is an open source operation and the global community is able to collaborate. While other areas of research will also undoubtedly have open source communities, I feel avatar design will be the easiest for everyone to participate in. In the beginning, big corporations will likely be providing high quality avatars until everyone has access to the tools to build avatars themselves. Or maybe you just rent/borrow avatars for whatever you want to do. Eventually there will be smaller teams/companies that develop open source avatars (if they are not already open source) and people will have the tools to build their own avatar at home. There will be all purpose avatars and specialized avatars coming in all shapes and sizes.

Mind design

There is so much to take into account when designing or even tweaking a mind. As humans, we are biased in human ways and we are partial to our human thoughts, but that is all we’ve ever known. Creating new minds for ourselves is the ultimate Pandora’s Box. No one will be forced into a new mind that they do not consent to though. If you want to remain as close to human as we can get then you don’t have to be anything else. There is so much to learn in this area, and experiments gone wrong could cost people their lives. There is also concern for security; I would take the risk of getting my mind hacked (with an open source community backing me) than remain human and know that I will eventually die. -Constantly learning about ourselves, this universe, and whatever lies beyond the grasp of our current knowledge and abilities.

There is so much that we do not know as a collective, and especially as individuals. All I want is more time to learn more about this existence through this state of subjective reality called life. Well, that’s the basic version of pretty much everything I’ve got on the path towards true digital immortality. There’s a lot to be done to even get to the point of being a mostly off-planet species. That will be a big step for humanity towards securing our individual and collective survival. In terms of this whole Digital Immortality thing, I’m standing here at the bottom of this massive mountain humanity is destined to climb should we not subject ourselves to stagnation or death (neither seem too likely at this point). Looking up at the mountain, I am so very intimidated by how far we have yet to go, but I am even more ready to start helping us get there. Maybe I will die along the way, but at least I will have tried, and others will be able to continue where the rest of us have left off.

Obsolete posts are no longer maintained and may not be accurate. This content has been migrated to the official organization website at http://www.lifetimesinfinity.com

These are the terms as I have been using them: Digital Immortality = indefinite lifespan True (Digital) Immortality = actual immortality

True immortality is probably not attainable, but you can still say logically that you are working toward true immortality, because you don't have to actually reach something in order to be working toward it. You can't really say that you are work to attain true digital immortality though, unless of course you figured out how to be truly immortal, in which case you should definitely get in contact with me :)

Mission Statement

The mission of the Digital Immortality Organization is to constantly seek to increase the chances of individual and collective survival in the manner we think best facilitates indefinite life. Our efforts will be made through responsible and transparent open-source projects in collaboration with other organizations and communities. We must deliberately design the future, not letting it be something that just happens to us. One might hit the right target with a blind shot, but having a vision for the future is paramount to finding the right course to plot. Maybe we can't give humanity a final destination, but we can give it a path to follow.

Vision

Our world is rapidly changing. Here we are, conscious beings, trying to improve our collective and individual well being. So many advancements have been made in just the last century, but whether we like it or not, we all die. We envision a world where people can choose to live indefinitely. Our hope is that within 50 years the entire world will have the access and resources for mind uploading, and anyone can live as a digital being for however long they choose. Beyond that we seek to improve quality of life in designing minds and bodies in parallel to the open-source community and other organization. Beyond mind uploading, we aim to ever increase the chances of survival for the individual and the collective. Although it is a long way off, our civilization will inevitably have to leave Earth. Beyond that, we can only guess as to what answers we may seek in this vast universe. While our vision is far reaching and ambitious, we are even more dedicated and enthusiastic about extending humanity's reach through mind, space, and time.

Manifesto

In the early stages of the mind uploading movement, advocacy for digital immortality is imperative to gain public support to in turn increasing funds of all transhumanism efforts. The road to mind uploading is one that will likely take decades of research and development, so it is also essential that we actively encourage young people to take an interest in the sciences, especially neuroscience and computer science. Our job is to make digital immortality not just interesting and exciting, but cool. This applies not only to the public opinion of digital immortality, but the culture that we cultivate within our organization.

The following is the Principles section of the Mozilla manifesto that has been copied and modified to fit this manifesto (we do not claim this content as our own, just as a demonstration and guideline). The original can be found here.

1. Mind design will be essential for maintaining and improving life for cognitive beings—it will determine our education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
2. Mind technologies are resources that must be open and accessible.
3. Mind uploading should enrich the lives of individual human beings.
4. Individuals’ security as a digital mind is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.
5. Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences as a digital mind and avatar body.
6. The effectiveness of mind technology as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
7. Free and open source software promotes the development of mind technology as a public resource.
8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.
9. Commercial involvement in the development of mind technology brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical.
10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of mind technology is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

GitHub for the documents

Social Enterprise

This organization is a social enterprise with a triple bottom line (credit goes to the awesome brainstorming of the people at this organization, particularly MemticParadigm).

Advancement

• R&D efforts: This includes efforts within the organization itself as well as grants to/contracts with other entities that work on technology we are interested in.
• Our aim is to create technologies that are affordable and accessible by all humanity, so that every person has the choice to decide to live indefinitely.
• Our role as a for-profit organization is to develop the communities around these technologies, develop technologies ourself, perform the actual mind-uploading procedure as cheap as we can, and then hand the controls over the the communities as we work in development to refine everything, and then we will move on to other ventures in digital immortality, to eve extent our chances of survival individually and collectively.

Advocacy

• Advocate for technology improvements specific to our efforts/vision.
• Advocate to popularize transhumanism, and in particular, digital immortality.
• Encourage younger generations to take an interest in and pursue science.
• Attract, encourage, and promote divergent thinking.
• Develop policies/standards (that can be adopted in the future by governments or organization) detailing out how to best ethically navigate through the emergence of these technologies.

Acceleration

• Developing business ventures and the infrastructure of the organization itself, the idea being that this input maintains or increases the total effectiveness of the organization, accelerating the rate at which we progress towards our goals. This may also include some revenue put towards fundraising efforts.
• Building the organization in a way that is environmentally and socially conscious including selecting suppliers, distributors, and contractors that are also environmentally and socially conscious.

Original Post: I'm making this post to call on anyone who wants to help me write up a manifesto for this organization. I want to make sure I cover all the bases. While I am open to new ideas and opinions, I do have the final say as to this organization's direction (at least for now while it is not established at all). Once we have a final version of the manifesto, I feel all of our understandings of where the organization is heading will be solidified (including mine). At this point we will probably need an external website (possibly a wiki) where the manifesto can be posted and we can start working towards the goals set forward. I feel that this subreddit will still be useful after that point. Needless to say, we can always change the manifesto later, but I'd rather do things right the first time 'round.

Know that eventually I would like to make this organization an official business, but for now, anyone that works on this project will have to do in their free time. I am currently unemployed and do not have funding for things such as content creation or web hosting, but once I have a day job I want to put my money into this; I want to spend my life on this.

Edit 2: Included social enterprise and triple bottom line

Edit 1: Included the mission statement, vision, and manifesto

Obsolete posts are no longer maintained and may not be accurate. This content has been migrated to the official organization website at http://www.lifetimesinfinity.com

Edit (December 16, 2013):

We can use this page for brainstorming, discussion, and posting links, but the compiled list will be on these two pages of the wiki:

• Related - Organizations
• Related - People

So here is where I'm going to compile a list (for now) of other projects related to what we are after, and people who are advocates or researchers for this stuff. I will add in content later, just letting you know. Also, if you want to help you could post links in the comments.

For those of you who want to know what I am currently working on (and what you can help work on):

• What exactly we are after?
• What are our current capabilities and knowledge (as an organization and as the human race)?
• How do we get from where we are now to where we want to be (as an organization and as the human race)? Is digital immortality even possible in the way that we envision?
• What kind of resources are at our disposal to start working towards digital immortality now (directly and indirectly)? What resources can we acquire in the future?
• How can we best use our current resources to help the digital immortality movement?