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Summary: That '70's Transhumanism
Comment: While F.M. Esfandiary receives a lot of credit for anticipating the current transhumanist world view with his 1973 book "Up-Wingers," Robert Ettinger made a somewhat more substantial but less well known contribution when he published his book "Man Into Superman" in 1972 as a follow-up to his 1964 book "The Prospect of Immortality," which started the cryonics movement. Of these two 1970's "manifestos" announcing a future for "immortal supermen," Ettinger's has aged somewhat better. Ettinger, unlike Esfandiary, grounded his view of the future in the scientific literature of the time (he has masters degrees in physics and mathematics), and he didn't engage in utopian thinking about the potentials of the social disturbances in the late 1960's which had impressed Esfandiary. (Ettinger considered the social, intellectual and political activism of the era's public figures wasted on side issues instead of directed towards what really matters. Imagine, Ettinger writes, trying to interest George Wallace or Herbert Marcuse in cryonics!) Today's transhumanists who haven't read Ettinger's book have often rediscovered some of his insights without realizing that he got there first before many of them were even born.
Events between 1972 and today have shown flaws in Ettinger's forecasts for reasons he couldn't have anticipated. The energetic cryonics situation he described in the early 1970's, when rudimentary organizations had already placed several people into cryonic suspension, amounted to a false dawn; the cryosuspensions of all the earliest cryonauts except James Bedford's failed for complicated and often sordid reasons. The practice of cryonics didn't recover until the 1980's, and it currently exists in a precarious state because of some bad publicity regarding a celebrity and the threat of hostile regulation. Cryonicists have responded in ways which suggest a loss of nerve, for example by changing their literature (including its titles) to de-emphasize Ettinger's "immortal superman" vision, even though he came up with the original idea for cryonics.
And in many ways life in the real 21st Century just doesn't look as "futuristic" as the speculations about it in the latter 20th Century led us to expect. Today some people make a hobby of collecting and republishing on the web examples of "in the year 2000" forecasts which sound ridiculous now. (I've done that myself.) Ettinger assumed that certain kinds of progress would probably, but not necessarily, happen, hence the relatively few predictions with dates in his book. The postponed progress we see around us could signal a dysfunction in our civilization that will delay the implementation of many of Ettinger's ideas indefinitely.
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