About
Richard James Leis, Jr. is a modern human passionate about technology and its impact on humanity. He is currently a student and a HiRISE Operations Specialist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
He was born in 1973 in The Dalles, Oregon, lived on a farm in Lyle, Washington for the first three years of his life, and was raised in and around Portland and in southern Oregon. 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 about the Voyager 2 spacecraft from the newspaper and pasting them into a scrapbook (along with articles about horse racing.) After graduating from high school, Richard moved to upstate New York to attend the University of Rochester and pursue a degree in Physics and Astronomy. Unfortunately, he had his asshat head in a pseudoscience cloud of telepathy, UFO’s, the Face on Mars, the Loch Ness monster, and ghosts. He was also lazy. School did not go well.
An overdose on “Coast to Coast AM” during his first year of college cured him of pseudoscience and work as an office assistant and microbiology laboratory technician helped keep him busy and learning. After drifting between a variety of majors for a few years, he decided to move back to Oregon where he worked as a word processing specialist for The Standard and an administrative assistant for Boeing.
During this period, the web 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. While in Utah he worked as a customer service representative for DirecTV and eBay. By the beginning of the 21st 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 designing a comprehensive portal for bars and strip clubs. The resulting website –UtahNights – with one strip club listing became ArizonaNights after he and one of his business partners moved to the Phoenix, Arizona area. This entrepreneurial experience was rewarding, but the portal never officially launched.
Richard was beginning to feel the pull of his old interest in planetary science, so in the fall of 2004 he moved to Tucson, Arizona to attend the University of Arizona and study geology. Web 2.0 was reaching new heights of opportunity and hype at the time. He brought together his various personal website attempts with the launch of Frontier Channel, a news and commentary website devoted to the “Great Frontiers of cyberspace, outer space, the ocean, and destinations in between.” He wrote hundreds of articles about the incredible renaissance occurring in planetary science as well as progress in the emerging technologies. He hosted a short-lived podcast in 2005: RADIO Frontier Channel.
While taking a class about Mars taught by Dr. Alfred McEwen at 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). The high-resolution camera was set to launch on board the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter later that year. Within an hour Richard had his first dream job: HiRISE Operations Specialist. Several hours after that he discovered that he had somehow deleted the interview recording. He kept the 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. 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 images of the surface of Mars and forcing scientists to radically update their understanding of the Red Planet. The camera is still actively returning images during its second extended mission.
While planetary science was front and center in his life, Richard was also exploring the rapid and 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, indicate accelerating progress and outcomes beyond human comprehension. Vernor Vinge has suggested that soon after the advent of superhuman intelligence “the human era will be ended”, an event he calls the “Technological Singularity“. Ray Kurzweil suggests that ALL technologies were converging toward this event. Both claim that the Singularity is only a few decades away. The February 21, 2011 Time cover story was “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal” and the article continues the mainstreaming of these ideas about the future.
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. The idea is very simple: emerging technologies will allow humans and humanity to radically improve the human condition. It is also very complex: which, if any, of the emerging technologies should we develop and use, and what opportunities and dangers are involved? Add the nuances of politics, identity, gender, sexuality, and class, among others, and perhaps we are faced with the world’s most dangerous idea! In 2004, Francis Fukuyama declared that transhumanism was in fact just that, in an article he wrote in response to Foreign Policy magazine’s call for “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas”. Fukuyama 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 opposed to a future they also now saw coming.
Richard became 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 for Frontier Channel. He also realized that there was a fine line between the fringe and the real. With science fiction becoming science fact it is now more important than ever to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Richard turned to the writing of Carl Sagan to learn how to best approach this problem. He learned that critical thought combines “skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder,” two skills Sagan repeatedly highlighted in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. The claims made in these years of rapid progress can best be evaluated through skepticism, but you can retain your sense of wonder to embrace and pursue the right opportunities, without becoming a cynic.
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 Summitorganized by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2006, 2007, and 2008 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 other 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 strongly stating “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 Richard’s local h+ efforts. 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. The new name of the organization would be Humanity+.
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 very briefly the Executive Director of Humanity+ before leaving to refocus on his education. The local h+ clubs he co-founded and participated in are now defunct, but members have gone on to exciting projects such as Halcyon Molecular and BioCurious.
Today, Richard is working, studying, and writing a speculative fiction novel about the near future and the impact of the upcoming mass medium called the Metaverse on the consumer electronics industry:
“Within twenty years, a new mass medium – the Metaverse – will emerge to take advantage of a global computing, communications, and sensing platform – the next-generation internet. The Metaverse will quickly subsume all other mass media and internet-enabled services, including the web. The consumer electronics industry will enjoy unprecedented success by providing to billions of people around the world a bewildering number of Metaverse-enabled consumer electronics. The industry will abruptly collapse, however, with the advent and mass consumer adoption of brain-machine interfaces and other deeply integrated biotechnologies. By 2030, the “Great Vanishing” of consumer electronics and other physical human artifacts will have begun as their capabilities are threaded into our biology.”
