Transhuman Page

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OFFLOADING: Removing the cognitive load by various means, such as enhanced reality, knowbots, graphical user interfaces, hypertext or information screening. [Felix Ungman 1995]

OMEGA POINT: A possible future state when intelligence controls the Universe totally, and the amount of information processed and stored goes asymptotically towards infinity. See the Omega Point Page. [Origin: Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. See also Barrow and Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle or Tipler's The Physics of Immortality for a more modern definition.]

OMEGON: An intelligence turning itself into a neutron star, black hole or even a baby-universe in order to increase its computing speed or to evolve towards a Omega Point. [Vic Stenger, 1995]

OMNESCIENCE: The widespread lack of understanding and knowledge of science. [Raymond Tallis, Newton's Sleep, 1995]

O'NEILL CYLINDERS: A pair of cylindrical space colonies that rotate around their respective axis to produce simulated gravity (one rotates clockwise and the other counterclockwise to minimize torques). See O'Neill cylinders in Island One for discussion and some good pictures. [Named after Gerard O'Neill who described them.]

O'NEILL COLONY: A rotating space colony, especially large ones with internal ecosystems, such as O'Neill cylinders or Bernal spheres. See my space-colonization section. [Named after Gerard K. O'Neill]

ONTOLOGICAL CONSERVATIVES: "Basement reality dwellers", people who regard physical reality as fundamentally important and simulated/emulated realities as bad, due to fear of the unknown elements or the effects of such simulated realities. They regard solid state civilizations as a bad idea. [Natasha Vita More November 1997]

OPTIMAL PERSONA: An imagined model of the ideal person we want to become. The Optimal Persona is the ideal self, the higher (and continually developing) individual much like Nietzsche's conception of the ubermensch but applied to the individual. [Max More,1993; same term but different conception from that used by Bruce Sterling in Islands in the Net.]

ORBITAL TOWER: See beanstalk.

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