Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/356
8 Feb 2009 P eople often assume that radical evolutionists — those who are excited about the potential enhancements and expansions of human possibilities into the future — must be living on another planet. After all, the very weather itself poses a plausible existential threat, the global economy is in the toilet, and then you've still got your weapons of mass destruction, your wars, various potential resource crises, ad infinitum (the list could go on for pages). but, in fact, we live on the same planet (and in the same difficult time) that everybody else does. Those who embrace radical technological change are as involved in down-to-earth problem-solving as activists, environmentalists, and those technoids — engineers and scientists — whose ultimate goals may be a bit more modest than the transhumanist crowd. In this edition of h+, we try to take on — within the limits afforded by our page count — a few of the crisis points that threaten our humanity, not to mention our transhumanity. This issue is, by no means, a compendium of techno-solutions to all our troubles — merely some brief articles and interviews that might hopefully stimulate a few neurons and provoke debate and discussion. one crisis that has not been discussed in the rest of this edition is the increasing threats to human rights around the world. human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other rights-inclined organizations inform us that, so far, the 21st Century has not been kind to our basic rights as we understand them. According to most respected sources, freedom of speech and assembly, habeas corpus and fair justice, and just the basic right to not be abused by authorities and quasi-authorities have all taken a hit in what we might still call the "post-9/11 environment." In this case, though, my purpose is not to suggest resolutions for this problem, but possibly to complicate it. because while much of the world still struggles for the basic rights that many of us have become accustomed to (we may have lost some — at least technically — over the last few years, but that's a discussion for another time), I suggest that we urgently need a whole new set of rights. We need a bio-progressive rights movement — a movement that can keep us free from novel intrusions on novel freedoms that are just now coming into focus as the result of developments in science, technology and culture. SolutionS