29 May 1998

Dear member,
The first few months in the life of the World Transhumanist Association have been quite successful. The current membership number is about 120 and steadily growing. Initially, many of the people who joined came from various transhumanist mailing lists, but now most new members appear to come from outside the transhumanist community" narrowly defined. You also come from all over the globe and from a wide range of backgrounds -- professors, students, film producers, science-fiction authors, journalists, interested "lay persons"...

Also encouraging is the considerable media interest in the WTA and transhumanism in general. Several newspapers and a couple of TV documentaries have contacted us over the past months.

The first issue of the Journal of Transhumanism (www.transhumanist.com) has been published, featuring a paper by Prof. Hans Moravec, and the open peer commentary has been of a high quality.


Gustavo Muccillo Alves and Mikhail Sverdlov have translated some central texts into Portugese and Russian, respectively. A transhumanist lexicon, based on work by Max More and Anders Sandberg, has been added to the WTA web site. Artist Natasha Vita More is working on a logo for the WTA site-of-the-week award that we hope to launch "real soon now".

Many people were involved in creating the Transhumanist Declaration, summarizing some fundamental transhumanist principles.
(See http://www.transhumanism.com/declaration.htm)

Berrie Staring, van der Otter and the other members of their Dutch group, Transcedo, are making a great contribution by organizing TransVision98, June 5-7, the first European transhumanist gathering. (Links to more info from http://www.transhumanism.com/events.htm)

How can we continue this good start and take it to the next level?

What the WTA needs to do next is enter a growth phase. We want more members and a greater outreach. Anything that could accelerate this development - ranging from putting up a link to the WTA from our home pages to more ambitious ideas - would be useful.

We also need a better organizational infrastructutre. The associates mailing list was hushed down a bit after having been somewhat noisy (but vigorous). The list is intended, not for theoretical discussions or general inquiries, but for talking about and planning concrete actions related to transhumanism and the WTA. Upon reflection, it might be best to tolerate some level of noise. The unsubscribing mechanism has been fixed so it should be possible for people who so wish to
easily unsubscribe.

Thanks to everybody who have contributed. Onward!

  Nick Bostrom    David Pearce
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk   dave@hedweb.com