As a species, we will evolve. Our children shall inherit the genes inhabiting our bodies, the memes inhabiting our behaviors and the rich history and environment belonging to the planet Earth.

Evolution, like rivers, currents, wind and tectonic plates, follows an unguided path. As humans, we’re going to touch that path - we’ve already have. Every war, every famine, every ethnic cleansing, every technological discovery, every choice to or not to procreate is a very small push to further the path.

Engineering, however, can take the forces of nature - physics, chemistry, genetics - and direct them to a higher level. The first time a human ancestor pulled a tooth, rather than letting themselves die in horrible infectious agony, is the same enlightened effort to improve ourselves.

We simply do not have a choice: we can either partake in our evolution to engineer ourselves or we will die out like the many species that die every day.

We Must Move Forward.

Iconoclasm. “Foreward Thinking”. Progressive. These words inhabit an ideal of pushing ahead in new thinking - but they are not enough. Too many humans want to push us back, by laws, by societal pressure, by religious zealotry, by economics: they have bought into an assumed status quo that they can prosper at the expense of others.

To simply resist the status quo isn’t enough. Criticism on all fronts is necessary: the way we think, the way we breed, our lives and our loves. Humans, in order to guide the future, need the freedom to attempt the future they see. I’ve yet to meet one of us that doesn’t have some dream of a better world. We need the liberty to attempt to achieve those dreams.

I invite you to be Heretics

Not just in the sense of religion, but everything you do - think about why you do it, and question if you can do it better. The freedom to seek improvement comes with both the freedom to fail and succeed, to admit where our ideas didn’t work out and try harder. To understand the intrinsic values of those things.

I want everyone in this world to have the freedom to think big: journeying to stars, living hundreds if not thousands of years in stronger, healthier bodies with smarter, sharper minds than we have today.

For the first time, humanity is within the grasp of living a potentially ever-brightening future. If you and I don’t attempt to seize this opportunity, some one else will. I’d rather it be us.