Mormon Transhumanist Association Member Survey 2012 Summary

Speaker 1

Our first speaker this morning is going to be Brent Alsup. And Brent has always been a transhumanist, and I think always should be probably taken in the most literal sense. Without beginning, Brent also has been a transhumanist. and has been active in the extropian and transhumanist movements. Oh, he says just he’s only been active since 1994. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in psychology from the University of Utah, and he’s currently working as a software engineer. Brent is the founder of Canonizer. com, which he talks about a lot. He is an ardent advocator of Canonizer. He was raised in the LDS Church, and he served a mission to Japan. He was married in the Jordan River Temple in 1985 to Malia Fairbanks. They have three adult children, and they currently live in Sandy, Utah. Brent is going to be sharing with us the results. of the twenty twelve member survey of our association members.

Brent Allsop

Okay, yeah. So I basically just have a quick summary, some of the highlights of the survey to focus on in the interest of time. But all the data is available, so if anyone has more interest of getting more details, you can contact us after about what we’ve got here.

Brent Allsop

And here’s a historical graph showing the number of participants in the survey. And like everything, you can see there’s significant increase since previous years, the continued growth both the number of people in the survey and the number of people in the organization. And you can see that growing over the years.

Brent Allsop

And then if we go in, this shows the distribution of where the people are from around the world. It’s we’re obviously focused in the Americas. But no one can deny that we got some other members from we welcome Julio from Europe and stuff like that. So we are an international organization

Brent Allsop

And here, this is the one that I was really interested in, because some of you know I was kind of a I’m an a Mormon transhumanist atheist. So I’m always interested in tracking consensus theories. Are some theories emerging and coming To the future and our other theories popular in the past and kind of descending. But if you look at the atheist here, I guess, but if you look at just the first three years, erase the last two years. And you might be able to see, oh, atheists is growing while theists are decreasing. So if you didn’t know the last two years, you might have. But as you can see, It looks like the theists have also increased significantly. Like everything else in the MT, there’s just lots of everyone everywhere. So there’s some of that. But it’ll it’s going to be very interesting to me to see that going forward as we increase the size and get a more Hopefully, we can increase the percentage of participants in further years and get more interesting and maybe see if we can do some filtering and see if we can see some trends despite the noise of the growth of everyone’s growing to see if we can see it. Anyway, that was just kind of fun for me.

Brent Allsop

And then this one here is showing the membership distribution, so on that we’re not all Mormons. Some of us are other religions and stuff like that. Julio was telling me last night, he said last year when he was at the conference he had his MTA sticker on and so was the Mormon transhumanist and he was here and he walked across the street to the coffee shop to get coffee and he had this Mormon Walks in and says, You’re Mormon, you can’t have coffee. And so it’s really cool to see we’re breaking some of the stereotypes that we’re not all exactly the same, and all Mormon transhumanists aren’t from a religion. But yeah, so I got to kick out of that. That’s seated. I went back one. Okay, cool. Glad again.

Brent Allsop

So, and this was another interesting one here that’s You think of the baby boomers right now, there’s a large bubble of population, and that’s over the 1945 and 1954. We’re clearly not baby boomers. But yet there’s not a long lot of us that are real young either. We seem to be sort of like Generation Xers. Most of us are kind of in that range there.

Brent Allsop

And then this is the membership education. So obviously we’re very educated. I just have a mere bachelor’s degree, so I kind of feel like an idiot here because I don’t have a PhD degree like all of you guys. So we’re obviously a group of very educated people.

Brent Allsop

And then I wanted to get in and I’ve got some historical graphs that shows the growth of the MTA. But before I get into that, I just if it if it’s okay, I’d like to just talk a little bit about why this kind of growth is so significant for me. And when I got back from my mission, I was exploring other belief systems, and I started achieving an interest. And I specifically focused on atheism and humanism. And I was kind of like a kid in a candy shop. Well, you can believe this kind of stuff, and there’s going to be other people that you’re you’re not all alone and everything. And so I was kind of exciting, and so I joined groups like Atheists of Northern Colorado and Humanists of Utah and stuff like that. But all those groups were like just a handful, four or five people that would kind of meet at someone’s house or something like that and there. And I realized that, oh, there’s a lot of these humanists in Atheists, where’s the humanist church that I can go to? And how do I join that? One time I sent my PayPal statement, I wanted to join. The human the atheists of Utah, and I sent my PayPal due statement in because I asked him how do I join, and here’s the PayPal address he said it to. And a week later, I sent my payment in. And it came back to me because there was no one at the other end to receive the payment. So here I was trying to join all these availability

Brent Allsop

And then, in contrast, let me relate one small snippet and a sea of help everyone in the LDS church was providing our family. When our oldest son turned 18, he Decided to join the Marines and he head down to San Diego and went down to Camp Pendleton down there. And of course, parents, when their oldest son heads out the first time, you know, all the things that can happen that can ruin a kid’s life for the rest of their life, you’re just Scared to death of that. But of course, there’s a ward down there that encompasses Camp Pendleton. And like all wards all over the place, they’re so well organized. They had set up groups of people that would go to Camp Pendleton every Sunday and they would pick up any Mormons that wanted to go to church today. There. And they didn’t just pick them up. They would take them to their houses after and give them a family dinner. And it’s just sorry. But just those kind of things that the church does for us, and that’s just one small snippet of sorry, didn’t think I was going to do that. But yeah, just all of the stuff I I can’t say enough what the church has done for us. And and so I was kind of really spoiled.

Brent Allsop

But when I w looked at atheist organization, there was and and the same thing when I discovered uh extropian groups, like the extropian group in nineteen ninety, I tried to get took me over a year to get on the mailing list there. It was like You’re not one of us. Why should we let you on the list? I mean, that wasn’t what they said, but that’s just kind of the way I felt. But it was hard to get on, and then I tried to volunteer, and it took me quite a while. And finally, I found out they need a web administrator, so I joined up with them and helped with that, but I was just sitting in my basement administering the web page, felt like I was the only one working on the stuff, only doing not accomplishing anything. So I was It just didn’t, I don’t know, it didn’t feel like the same as when I went to church and you were a big part of that excitement and everything. And

Brent Allsop

Let’s see. And oh yeah, then the WTA was founded in the late 1990s, or yeah, before 2000. And it got started, and right out of the bat. Does the World Transhumanist Association and a group of them split off and form the World Transhumanist Society. And they set up their web page, and it’s primarily just critical of the World Transhumanist Association. Well this is and and and then of course there’s the infamous time when a few years ago the World Transhumanists excommunicated the Mormon Transhumanists Association as their as one of their chapters in their group. And so the Mormons, they get all organized together and they work together and they produce lists of who during the next elections they produce lists of who would be supportive of reaffiliating the MTA back with the World Transhumanist. Association. And of course, the large membership and the work that went into that, they were able to elect people in the next election and get those in office. And so after the next election. We’re now and everyone’s still working in that. And so now we’re an affiliate with the World Transhumanist Association again. Humanity Plus. Humanity Plus. Humanity Plus. Sorry, yeah. Their name’s now Humanity Plus. But anyway, that was really exciting to me. And I recognize that all of that stuff just doesn’t happen. Like it takes lots of work. And so there’s lots of all of you that have done all of that, that made all that happen. And I’m just so thankful for all of that. And all of that happens.

Brent Allsop

And um and oh yeah, and then even just the recent World Humanity Plus elections. I don’t know if any of you heard about that, but there was board members that were threatening legal action to other board members if they didn’t resign. And And it was just but anyway, so um but anyway, so th there’s a funny script in or funny Monty Python script. On YouTube, that talks about that. It’s basically World Transhumanist Association versus World Transhumanist Society, but in the script, it’s People’s Liberation Front versus the Popular Liberation Front against the Romans. And it’s a real funny skit, but there’s some family members. Here, so in the interest of time, and it’s kind of got some crude language in it, so just a warning. But so I’m going to skip over that for this time. But to me, that’s the story of my life: life of Brian, life of Brent trying to join the transhumanist movement. So, anyway, so let’s go on to the next slide so I can show you some of the growth here.

Brent Allsop

And Lincoln has always pointed out how linear the growth has been over the last few years. And if it’s only a group of small group of people like the board of directors that’s doing the work to grow the organization and anything, all you can get is linear growth like we saw. But then as you can see, at the end of twenty eleven and two thousand eight, suddenly something happens. And the only thing that can explain that, if you ask me, is other people are stepping in to help out with that. And you can see the numbers across the bottom. These are percentage growths of the previous years. And you can see the slowest growth that we’ve ever had is is around twenty five percent. That’s the slowest, twenty five percent per annum growth rate. And so to me, that’s just really exciting to see And you can see we’re hit about 250 people.

Brent Allsop

And I did a little bit of research trying to find out how many members are in the World Trend or H, how many members are in the H organization. And I found a document by Mike Anisimov, that he did in 2008, that talked about how they had 5,000 members back then. But I got another number from A recent number from Natasha Vitamore, and she said 250. So I don’t know if maybe Natasha’s number is paying members versus the other ones nonpay and I couldn’t I sent out some email trying to get that, but I didn’t get it in time. But but the bottom line is, is with this growth rate, even if there is five thousand or more members, we’re going to quickly surpass that. If we can maintain this growth rate, we’ll quick we’ll soon have more members than the entire World Transhumanist Association.

Brent Allsop

And then when I was thinking of this, I started thinking, wait a minute, what about the Mormons? And so I went in and found this real interesting graph on On wikipedia. com, where this is the percentage growth rate. So think of ours, where our minimum growth rate is 25% per year since we started. And the LDS maximum growth rate, which is right before the Internet came out, was about 6%. That was their maximum growth rate throughout their entire history. And so, if you take the maximum 6% and compare that with our 25% per year, if you project that into the future, it takes about 50 years for us to have as many matters as that. So, do you think the LDS church should try and execute? Communicatus or anything that anyway, that’s that anyway, this this doesn’t happen by itself. There’s been a lot of work that’s gone in to make this happen. And so I just wanted to take this to thank everyone. And it’s really exciting to me to see everything come together, and it’s an exciting group. So thanks a lot for all the hard work. Any questions?

Speaker 3

Do you know of any particular events right there in twenty twelve? You you start to see a good uptick and and I’m guessing that sharp Jump must be just after last year’s conference? Because that looks like it’s that’s a good question.

Brent Allsop

I wanted to throw that out. Does anyone have any ideas out there? My idea is that it’s simply there’s finally, the first few years it was just primarily the board of directors that was working on it. But after the conference last year, it seems like my bet is that other people are starting to spread the word, other people are starting to contribute to the work. And when you do soon as you get new people coming in and new people contributing, that’s when you start to see the exponential growth.

Speaker 3

And so that’s I think that’s a good point. And I don’t want to I’ll toot my own horn on this, but exactly beginning of 2012 is when I began administering the Terra Sam movement. Oh, interesting. And you start to see it uptick. I I was here last year.

Brent Allsop

That’s awesome. I was extremely impressed. And just as you said, getting new people in here. Board of directors couldn’t do that without help from. Yep. Thank you for mentioning that. Good point. Any other ideas about Lincoln, do you do you have any thoughts about why do you think it suddenly took this knee jerk and crease any thoughts or anyone?

Speaker 1

Yes, I think the conference last year was a big deal. We also started some advertising campaigns. Just about actually a little bit before that, Google gives us $10,000 a month in free advertising. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, Nathan did that online, didn’t he? That’s pretty good. We do some Facebook advertising. We’ve been on a bunch of popular Mormon podcasts. There’s been a whole bunch of things that have happened over the last year, year and a half that have made it different. Interesting.

Brent Allsop

But yeah, just my final slide here was: but if we are united, we all things can do. So that’s my subject for the. So thanks a lot.