This document promotes the benefits of being a transhumanist, including greater focus on health and longevity, smarter connections with like-minded individuals, early adoption of emerging technologies, potential cognitive enhancements, career advantages in futuristic fields, and an overall happier and more optimistic outlook on the future of humanity. The document lists over 20 reasons why every Stanford student should embrace a transhumanist philosophy.

1. Why Every (Stanford) Student
Should Be a Transhumanist
By Alex Lightman, 3/22/2013
Advancing Humanity Symposium
Stanford Transhumanist Association

2. 1. Adjacent to Quantified Self
Greater likelihood to be paying
attention to the measures that
matter with respect to
health, fitness, longevity, and
possibilities for using new
technologies to improve them

3. Thomas Alva Edison
“The doctor of the future will give
no medicine, but will interest his
patients in the care of the human
frame, in diet, and in the cause and
prevention of disease”

4. 2. Greater Likelihood to Be More
Healthy and Long Lived
Reversing Five Linear Decay Functions
Telomeres
Neurons
Muscle Mass (Sarcopenia)
Bone Mass (Osteopenia)
Respiratory Function (VO2Max)

5. 3. Aging More Gracefully
If you go to Transhumanist-friendly
events over a period of decades
(Foresight, Extropians, Avatars…) you
will notice that your colleagues are
aging far more slowly than virtual any
other conference go-ers.

6. 4. More Smart Clueful Friends
I have 692 friends in common with
Aubrey de Grey, with similar numbers
for other Transhumanists, exposing me
to a new idea every few minutes that I
can use to expand my mind, body, and
life.

7. 5. “It takes a village…”
If it takes a village to raise a child, it
takes new communities of smart
audacious people to fund and build a
new companies that create new
industries that fundamentally advance
humanity.

8. 5. (Continued) Greater likelihood of
getting into incubators and
accelerators
It’s not enough to have an idea for a
new website or app or ecommerce sites.
Transhumanism can give you an edge
and separate you from a sea of the
same.

9. 6. Source for co-authors of articles
on complex, multidisciplinary
topics
22 authors on an article about Myths
about Weight Loss. No one knows
everything about everything, and
publishing sooner can make a profound
difference in credibility.

10. 7. Joint purchase of the new
Maker/DIY tools and lab equipment
Don’t you want to have access to the
latest and greatest 3D printers and tools
to do your own research, without
waiting for grants, to be able to be the
first to make and exhibit, or discover
and publish?

11. 8. Traveling companions for
adventures in knowledge
When I had my international boarding
school, I could get a meeting with
anyone by saying, “25 young people
from 20 countries want to meet you and
talk about how you make the world a
better place”.

12. 8. Great background for a Citizen-
Science and talking/teaching STEM
Millions of people contribute to
scientific knowledge, via projects like
SETI@Home, Folding@Home, Galaxy
Zoo, birdwatching, drone protection of
wildlife, and water sampling.

13. 9. Extra minds to overcome the
two big cognitive limits
Theory of Bounded Rationality:
We overestimate our ability to detect
patterns (Las Vegas)
Bellman’s Curse of Dimensionality:
As dimensions increase
arithmetically, sparcity increases
exponentially

14. 10. Be interesting to billionaires
and the builders of tomorrow
I have spent a statistically improbable
amount of my time talking with
billionaires, and had an even more
unlikely success rate with pitches to
billionaires. There are only 1,456 of
them, so you need uniqueness.

15. 11. sapiosexual advantages
‘One who finds intelligence the most
sexually attractive feature.’
"I want an
incisive, inquisitive, insightful, irreverent
mind. I want someone for whom
philosophical discussion is foreplay.”

16. 12. Fewer surprises from sudden
shifts in economy or policy
Future Shock - overwhelm from more change
that can be adapted to - is a retro term that
deserves to be dusted off and applied, mainly
to non-Transhumanists, who find themselves
surprised all the time by what is happening.

17. 13. Potential expansion of the
senses and memory
There are at least 70 senses used by one or
more living things on this planet, an
increasing number of which can be emulated
via technology closely integrated with our
own senses.

18. 14. Move to the left on the
Stanford VALS curve
Innovators are the first 1% of technology
adoption market.
Early adopters are 2%, followed by the
chasm, the Early Majority, the Late
Majority, and the Laggards.

19. 15. Alpha testers for the first
superpowers
Invisibility
Sleeplessness
Omniscience
Calculator brain/Supernumerati
Flight
Exo-skeleton Strength

20. 16. 50% or more reduction in
cliches.
Less boredom and ennui.
Less wrong
Less time spent arguing for tired and expired
ideology

21. 17. More fun way to be an atheist
Lighter burden if you don’t have to carry around and
defend Iron Age myths and false history.
Alternatively, can be more audacious when
outnumbered by true believer friends, family, and
community.
(Mormons have fewer doctrinal problems with
Transhumanism)

22. 18. Benefits of MENSA without the
baggage and pretenses
There are many advantages to signaling
intelligence and ability to learn faster without
brandishing IQ tests or Ivy League
credentials. Transhumanists are as smart as
any subculture.

23. 19. Futurephilia: Being part of
the most future friendly 0.01%
1 in 100 Americans have a PhD.
A PhD confers a 26% average income
advantage over people qualified for
university who did not attend.
Future friendliness will likely confer an equal
advantage, but without taking the average
8.3 years of post secondary education.

24. 20. Science fiction adjacency
Transhumanists are much less likely to say the
21st century’s most embarrassing words,
THAT’S SCIENCE FICTION!…as if there is no
overlap between what has been, is, or will be
in science fiction, in all its myriad forms, and
reality.
Science fiction is increasingly blueprint
prophecy.

25. 21. Greater likelihood to create a
start up, fund it, and take it public
The big opportunities of the future will be
related to the issues that Transhumanists
want to solve.
The Milken Institute estimated that the value
of curing cancer or heart disease were each
$50 trillion.

26. 22. Greater happiness
The book „The Happiness of Pursuit” makes
the case that it is in seeking that we find
happiness.
Transhumanism is a perpetual search for
improvement, of self and others, and thus
has vast and varied opportunities for
happiness.

27. 23. Chance to become a god or
have god-like powers
Neverness by David Zindell
Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
Marvel comics, particularly Infinity
Quest, Infinity Gauntlet and anything with
Infinity Gems, Celestials, Galactus

28. Alvin Toffler in Future Shock
"Perhaps the greatest cost of wave conflict
in America will be paid by the millions of
children currently compulsorily enrolled in
schools that are attempting to prepare
them - and not very successfully at that - for
jobs that won't exist. Call that stealing the
future."

29. Cesar Chavez
“Once social change begins, it cannot be
reversed. You cannot uneducate the
person who has learned to read. You
cannot humiliate the person who feels
pride. You cannot oppress the people who
are not afraid anymore. We have seen the
future, and the future is ours. “