Richard James Leis, Jr. is a modern human passionate about technology and its impact on humanity. He is currently a HiRISE Operations Specialist at the University of Arizona while pursuing an undergraduate degree.
When Richard was four years old, his mom took him to see Star Wars, leading to a lifelong fascination with planetary science. During the 1980s he cut out articles and images from the newspaper about the Voyager 2 spacecraft and pasting them into a scrapbook (along with articles about horse racing.)
By the time he graduated from high school in 1991, Richard wanted to pursue a career in planetary science but he also had his asshat head in a pseudoscience cloud of UFO’s, the Face on Mars, the Loch Ness monster, and ghosts (he even swore he saw ghosts flying about in his bisabuela’s – great-grandmother’s – bedroom curtains when he was a little kid and trying to take a nap!)
From Oregon where he was born and raised (with a stint in Lyle, Washington on a farm for his first three years), Richard moved to upstate New York to attend the University of Rochester. An overdose on “Coast to Coast AM” during his first year of college cured him of pseudoscience. He worked as an office assistant and microbiology laboratory technician. After drifting between a variety of majors for a few years, he decided to move back to Portland, Oregon where he worked as a word processing and administrative assistant for Boeing.
During this period, the internet was booming. Richard taught himself HTML and CSS while crafting simple websites and browsing the web for hours on end. By 1997 he was ready to pursue an education in graphic design and headed off to Salt Lake City, Utah for the opportunity at a small technical school. He worked as a customer service representative for DirecTV and eBay. By the beginning of the new century he was suspending eBay sellers who listed their naughty adult items outside of the adult auction area, and he was co-founder and Vice President of Enoosphere, a web design firm for strip clubs and bars. Unfortunately, UtahNights with one strip club website in development became ArizonaNights with no club or bar websites at all. Now in Phoenix, Arizona, Richard was beginning to feel the pull of his old interest in planetary science.
In the fall of 2004, Richard was accepted by the University of Arizona to continue his education and so he moved from Phoenix to Tucson, Arizona – where he still resides – and began the slow process of retaking classes, catching up on required electives, and taking a few geology courses.
During that time and as Web 2.0 began to reach new heights of hype and opportunity, he also brought his various personal website attempts together into Frontier Channel. It was not enough to read about the incredible renaissance occurring in planetary science and all the new results from spacecraft like the Mars Exploration Rovers Opportunity and Spirit and the Saturnian system touring Cassini-Huygens; he also wanted to write about them – a journalistic streak that began early in his elementary school years – and other news from the “Great Frontiers of cyberspace, outer space, the ocean, and destinations in between.” In 2005 he even attempted a podcast: RADIO Frontier Channel.
While taking a class on “Mars” taught by Dr. Alfred McEwen in the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory/Department of Planetary Science, Richard asked if he could interview the professor for his podcast. The interview went well, except for Richard mispronouncing “Enceladus”, that exciting geyser moon of Saturn. At the end of the interview Richard asked if there were any job opportunities for undergraduates with Dr. McEwen’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument set to launch on board the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter in 2005. An hour later Richard had his first dream job. Several hours after that he discovered that he had somehow deleted the interview recording. He kept his new job but the audio of that interview with Dr. McEwen was lost forever.
A year later he took a break from school to focus full time on his downlink operations duties. He traveled with the HiRISE team to see MRO launch, learned how to interact with computers at the command line, began writing Perl scripts, learned about image calibration and validation, tested software, helped lead tours of the HiRISE Operations Center, and gave public talks about the mission, among other duties. After MRO arrived in orbit and then used aerobraking to lower itself into an appropriate orbit, HiRISE began its Primary Science Phase in November 2006, taking high resolution image after image of the surface of Mars and forcing scientists to radically update their understanding of the Red Planet.
While planetary science seemed to be front and center in his life, Richard was also exploring the rapid and seemingly accelerating pace of scientific discovery and technological progress. Breakthroughs in human cloning and stem cell research, radical life extension, rapid DNA sequencing, brain-machine interfaces, nanotechnology, intelligent agents, Artificial General Intelligence, augmented reality, virtual worlds, quantum computers, photonics-based computing, the Petabyte Age, automation, and robotics, to name a few, seemed to indicate accelerating progress and outcomes beyond human comprehension. Vernor Vinge suggested that soon after the advent of superhuman intelligence “the human era will be ended”, an event he labelled the “Technological Singularity“. Ray Kurzweil suggested that ALL technologies were converging toward this event. Both claimed that the Singularity was only a few decades away.
Transhumanism is a philosophy and social movement that focuses on emerging technologies to solve our biggest problems, ease human suffering, and reduce human constraints like aging and fragile biological bodies. Once dismissed as a fringe idea, transhumanism came under increasing scrutiny in 2004 with the publication Francis Fukuyama’s response to a call from Foreign Policy magazine for “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas”. He asked “is the fundamental tenet of transhumanism—that we will someday use biotechnology to make ourselves stronger, smarter, less prone to violence, and longer-lived—really so outlandish?” Critics were no longer scoffing at transhumanism; they were instead threatened by the emerging technologies they feared could lead to futures they did not want.
Richard began to become more involved in the transhumanist movement and related activities. He occasionally had dinner with Extropians (an earlier label for transhumanists) in Phoenix, stumbled across the Immortality Institute (ImmInst) forum, and began attending and reporting on transhumanist-related events like the Singularity Summit on Frontier Channel. He also realized that there was a fine line between the fringe and real science and technology. It has became increasingly important to be able to tell the difference as science fiction becomes science fact at the same time salespeople selling snake oil and other purveyors of pseudoscience increasingly chose the trappings of science to mask their fraud. Richard turned to the writing of Carl Sagan to learn how to best approach this problem. He learned that real science combines “skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder,” two skills Carl Sagan repeatedly highlighted in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
The possible development of greater-than-human-level artificial intelligence, for example, can only be accomplished, confirmed, and validated by those skeptical at every turn but still in awe of the prospect that we humans can accomplish such a feat. We must not blindly accept any claim but neither should we ignore the opportunity to pursue what is possible.
Walking this fine line – being enthusiastic but critical at the same time – is something Richard continues to practice. When it comes to transhumanism, the relevant emerging technologies may or may not come in a timely fashion, but the movement continues to grow as more and more people take note of how different things could become through their use. Transhumanism is very simple: emerging technologies will allow humans and humanity to radically benefit the human condition. It is also very complex: should we make use of these emerging technologies, and if so, what opportunities and existential risks are involved? Add the nuances of politics, identity, gender, sexuality, classes and other domains of social science and the humanities and perhaps we truly are faced with the world’s most dangerous idea.
In 2008 Richard served on the Immortality Institute’s Board of Directors as Treasurer. He donated to the Methuselah Foundation, a research organization seeking a cure for aging, first in mice, and then in humans. He attended the Singularity Summit in 2006, 2007, and 2008 organized by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence to learn more about the work to develop greater-than-human-level artificial intelligence and the convergence of various technologies at an accelerating pace. He joined Alcor, a cryonics service provider, with a quarter million dollar term life insurance policy and monthly dues, should he die before there is significant progress in slowing down, halting and reversing aging. Technologies to revive the cryopreserved may never be developed, but that “may never” is worth a lot more than the “absolutely never” of burial or cremation.
An email in 2006 from another member of ImmInst who happened to live in Tucson led Richard to discover local transhumanists, life extensionists and technology enthusiasts. After meeting weekly over lunch to discuss a variety of topics, they decided to form h+ Tucson, a transhumanist journal club at the University of Arizona. The club exploded in membership during its second semester. They began experimenting with new visuals to express transhumanist ideas, created amusing flyers and participated in the university club fairs with a provocative poster that demanded to know “Do YOU want to DIE?” before admitting that “Neither do we.” In 2008 Richard launched a similar h+ Phoenix club and an affiliation of local transhumanist and related clubs called h+.
Eventually, the h+ clubs and their members became known in the larger transhumanist and related movements. Several of the members began to interact with notable researchers, organizers, and thinkers. Some leaders of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) - several thousand members strong and historically representing the global transhumanist movement – began to consider a change in branding, partially based on the success of h+. The new name would be H+, or Humanity+. A successful matching grant fundraising effort in 2008 raised enough money for the WTA to launch a digital magazine and hire design firms to begin working on a new logo, branding, and website.
Humanity+ is now an organization “dedicated to promoting understanding, interest and participation in fields of emerging innovation that can radically benefit the human condition.” In early 2009, Richard was briefly the Executive Director of Humanity+ before leaving to refocus on his personal pursuits and growth. The (near) future promises a radical departure from anything humanity has ever experienced before, and so it has become important to him to enjoy and appreciate the present.