My name is Richard James Leis, Jr. My passion for technology and its impact on humanity led to my involvement for several years in the transhumanist movement. I co-founded a local transhumanist club and founded an affiliation of such clubs called h+. I served as Treasurer of Immortality Institute and was briefly involved in a leadership role at Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), but I left both to pursue an undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology.
While continuing my education I work in spacecraft instrument operations as HiRISE Operations Specialist and Downlink Lead at the University of Arizona. Basically I help with downloading and processing the beautiful high-resolution images of the surface of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is truly a dream job!
I also maintain and edit the Frontier Channel website, covering digital media, planetary science, transhumanism, and emerging technologies like artificial general intelligence (AGI), the Metaverse, nanotechnology, radical life extension, cybernetics, the Technological Singularity, and mind uploading. I briefly hosted the RADIO Frontier Channel podcast (iTunes link).
These activities and my interest in communications, especially mass media, eventually led to “The Great Vanishing” thesis. I presented a brief introduction to this thesis at the BIL 2009 unconference.
For more information about me, please visit my personal website.
