This is an edited and abridged excerpt from Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber’s new book Boom, published by Stripe Press. Pre-order a copy here.

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Last month at Hereticon, we had the great opportunity to watch Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber discuss their new book, Boom, which reverse engineers some of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the past century, and provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation in major technologies of the future. In the excerpt below, they argue that some of the biggest ascendant technological paradigm shifts are driven by narratives of transcendence, share characteristics with religious movements, and are often pushed forward by religiously motivated individuals. Enjoy.

The technological breakthroughs and scientific megaprojects of the last century have all contained a religious or spiritual dimension, and each envisioned a future that was incommensurable with the present. The Manhattan Project introduced a novel and unprecedented source of energy that granted humanity the ability to hurl thunderbolts like Zeus or bring about unlimited destruction like Kali; the Apollo program slipped the bonds of Earth and engineered humankind’s technological ascent to the heavens; Bitcoin promises a new civilizational base layer and a world in which nothing will need to be adjusted for inflation ever again. While superficially technological, secular, and hyper-rational in nature, each endeavor represents a fundamental yearning or quest for transcendence, redemption, and salvation. This suggests that one way to identify future domains of technological progress is to identify their spiritual potential for transcendence.

In this article, we’ll look at four areas — money, space, life and mind, and energy — that have given rise to what could be called technologies of transcendence, and, correspondingly, to narratives of the sacred that have catalyzed the extreme commitment, risk-taking, and investment characteristic of inflection bubbles. The self-reinforcing feedback loops between money, energy, and intelligence these bubbles have instantiated are precisely what we need to reignite techno-economic progress. We believe these are domains where one could expect future bubbles to form or, in some cases, to continue to expand. In them, we can observe that no matter how secularized the present appears to be, the yearning for transcendence, redemption, and salvation from the “iron cage” of soulless rationality remains an irrepressible historical constant.

Incorruptible money

The adoption of cryptocurrency has given rise to various quasi-religious practices and insignia. Bitcoin in particular provides a forceful example of the cypherpunk belief in the transcendent potential of cryptography and cryptocurrency. Unlike its copies, Bitcoin has a unique founding myth: It begins as an obscure and radically novel technology invented by a mysterious, pseudonymous creator who later disappears. The immaculate conception, as it’s often referred to in the community, spawned the innumerable cryptocurrencies that have — so far unsuccessfully — tried to replicate Bitcoin’s genesis and network effects. Bitcoin’s founding narrative manages to nod toward every major branch of religion. It has rabbinic Judaism’s tradition of lively debate around a frozen, unchangeable bedrock belief; Catholicism and Orthodoxy’s official doctrine based on an otherwise inaccessible scripture; Protestantism’s fractally schismatic nature; even Islam’s aesthetic elevation of geometric and mathematical purity over depictions of the human figure (there are no photos of Satoshi Nakamoto, just as there is no official portrait of the prophet Mohammed; similar to those branded infidels and cursed with a fatwa, a real person named Satoshi Nakamoto was briefly ensnared in the intrigue surrounding Nakamoto’s pseudonymity in 2014).

For many hardcore adopters, the Bitcoin protocol itself, with its hard-coded 21-million supply, has become a transcendent absolute beyond human control, manipulation, and corruption. Because of its algorithmic nature and preprogrammed supply schedule, in Bitcoin’s cryptotheology, the “difficulty adjustment” that self-regulates the network’s energy and compute expenditure instantiates a form of universally valid, absolute, and almost deified truth. It is, for example, used as Bitcoin’s unit of time. (Bitcoin, like many religions, has its own calendar; the algorithmically pre-programmed supply reduction known as the halving marks an event endowed with quasi-religious meaning.) Similarly, Nakamoto’s white paper can be viewed as a sacred scripture. Competing exegeses have aimed to recover the true meaning of Nakamoto’s code and writings, which has resulted in incompatible interpretations of the white paper that ultimately triggered a series of so-called hard forks — heretical imitations of the original Bitcoin blockchain — around which different sects have emerged. Consequently, conflicting interpretations and competing cryptocurrencies are deemed heretical. Bitcoin’s diffusion depends on the intense evangelization of the core message that the white paper, the code base, and other written fragments encode. Evangelists must be willing to be publicly fed to the lions of the IRS, the CFTC, and other regulatory powers in order to get their message across.

While money has historically been infused with religious concerns for millennia¹, in the case of Bitcoin, the code itself has become absolutized as an incorruptible truth machine that transcends humanity and its sinful tendency to debase money. This outlook is perfectly encapsulated in the popular Bitcoin meme “Fix the money, fix the world.” For many Bitcoiners, this novel monetary technology constitutes a new civilizational substrate that will eventually replace the collapsing fiat system. Embedded in this view is the belief that Bitcoin promises redemption and salvation — in this case, from the excesses and injustices of the fiat system. The unshakeable faith of Bitcoin developers, hodlers, and entrepreneurs has helped boost Bitcoin’s market cap from zero to several hundred billion USD over the past decade, and the network from one user — Satoshi Nakamoto himself — to thousands of nodes. Its genesis in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of adoption, increasing value, and network security makes it one the purest hyperstitions imaginable. Given these dynamics, and the relentless vision and conviction of those involved, Bitcoin’s potential is only beginning to be realized.

Infinite frontier

The promise of transcendence and salvation was also a recurrent theme in the Apollo program. The enchantment of space flight is inextricably linked to the ascent to Heaven — space exploration shatters the bonds of Earth and allows humankind to escape the fallen world. In fact, the first project for a manned space mission had the biblical name Project Adam. Wernher von Braun, who named Project Adam, was deeply motivated by religious and apocalyptic concerns. He envisioned manned space exploration as a millennial “new beginning”; it was humanity’s divinely ordained destiny, encapsulating the eschatological promise of redemption. As he stated in 1959, the proposed year for Adam’s first manned mission, “It is profoundly important for religious reasons that [mankind] travel to other worlds, other galaxies; for it may be Man’s destiny to assure immortality, not only of his race but even of the life spark itself.” Interestingly, more than half a century later, Elon Musk, echoing von Braun’s eschatological concern with humanity’s quest to shatter the celestial spheres, tweeted that “we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization.” This “impetus for extending life beyond Earth” has become a moral imperative for Musk and many others. Humanity needs to leave behind the fallen world, and such earthly concerns as resource depletion and climate catastrophe, and ascend toward the eternal.

The conquest of space thus becomes humankind’s salvation. Or, as von Braun put it, “Here then is space travel’s most meaningful mission... On that future day when our satellite vessels are circling Earth; when men manning an orbital station can view our planet against the star-studded blackness of infinity as but a planet among planets; on that day, I say, fratricidal war will be banished from the star on which we live... humanity will then be prepared to enter the second phase of its long, hitherto only Tellurian history — the cosmic age.” For von Braun, science and theology — faith and reason — are fundamentally compatible. “While science tries to learn more about the Creation, religion tries to better understand the Creator,” he wrote in a letter in 1971. “Speaking for myself, I can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm my belief in the certainty of a Creator.”

Von Braun’s deeply entrenched beliefs did not constitute an anomalous eccentricity. Religious beliefs and eschatological concerns were widely shared among members of NASA’s space program. George Mueller, the director of NASA’s manned spaceflight program, reflected Apollo’s apocalyptic and millenarian spirit when, following the first Moon landing, he asked, “Should we withdraw in fear from the next step, should we substitute temporary material welfare for spiritual adventure...? Then will Man fall back from his destiny, the mighty surge of his achievement will be lost, and the confines of this planet will destroy him.” During Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, the crew broadcast a reading of the first 10 lines of Genesis back to Earth on Christmas Eve, 1968, which Pope Paul VI declared a “millennial event.” Indeed, for most astronauts, the space missions became profound transcendent, mythical, or religious experiences. Buzz Aldrin, who was, along with Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon, later recalled that he would “view the Earth from a physically transcendent stance,” and that through their effort “mankind would be awakened once again to the mythic dimensions of man.” Before Armstrong and Aldrin ventured out onto the lunar surface, Aldrin asked Mission Control for radio silence and proceeded to take communion, reading from John 15:5. “It was interesting to think,” he later remarked, “that the very first liquid ever poured on the Moon and the first food eaten there were communion elements.” Similarly, Michael Collins, who orbited the Moon when the religious ritual took place on the Columbia, later observed that the layout of the command ship resembled a “miniature cathedral.” No wonder another Apollo astronaut called the spacecraft “the most magnificent cathedral you can go to church in.”

Aldrin would be the first in a long line of astronauts to engage in religious rituals. The Apollo 12 crew carried a Bible, a Christian flag decorated with a cross, and other Christian insignia to the Moon. Apollo 14 crew member Edgar Mitchell, who conducted a telepathy experiment from the Moon, left a Bible on the lunar surface along with a microfilm containing the first verse of Genesis in 16 languages. The crew of Apollo 15, who were among the most religious, recited the first verse of Psalm 121 and left another Bible. Commander Dave Scott remarked, upon return to the Earth, that “on the Moon, the total picture of the power of God and His son, Jesus Christ, became abundantly clear to me.”

A deep religious conviction can help explain the massive risk-taking and intense commitment of those involved in the Apollo missions and other feats of space exploration. As James Fletcher, NASA administrator during Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17, put it, humans should explore space because of a “God-given desire,” characterizing space exploration as representing a “frontier of expanding knowledge and the progress of understanding about nature and, by extension, about divinity.” It seems a belief in the transcendent is needed to overcome the “life-denying ritual” of space exploration.

Immortal life, immortal mind

Even while humankind transcends the limits of Earth to explore the infinite frontier, we are still restricted by the flesh — that is, by our biological incarnations. Since time immemorial, humanity has desired to overcome the finitude of the body and create a new immortal life, thereby realizing the “image-likeness of man to God.” Myths about the creation of new life and immortality can be traced from ancient Greece and Medieval Judaism to the most recent developments in artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotech². Superficially, these cutting-edge scientific fields appear highly secular, yet they draw on perennial themes of resurrection and immortality. At their core, these fields share the belief that the human body and mind need to be renewed, perfected, and rectified. Even the earliest attempts in the emerging field of artificial intelligence were motivated by the Cartesian impulse to divorce the mind from the body and create an immortal mind that embodied man’s divinity. Both AI and the field of genetic engineering, which formed around the discovery of the structure and function of DNA in the 1950s, can be understood as attempts at restoring humankind to its God-like perfection³.

While the vision of designing a thinking machine was initially aimed at replicating and emulating the human mind, it soon became an eschatological attempt to create a machine “superintelligence” that, by transcending humans’ biological limits, would herald the advent of a new, artificial form of life. These prophesied bodies and minds would be eternal, perfect, and immortal. The promise of AI, biotech, and robotics, in other words, mirrors the apocalyptic belief that God will resurrect the dead in purified bodies so that they can enter the Kingdom of God. But to do so, the bodies must be upgraded, as the apostle Paul suggests: “We will not all die but we will all be changed.”

Each scientific field tries to achieve the promise of perfection and immortality through different means. AI tends to be characterized by resentment toward the body. The creation of a disembodied artificial mind or an eternal silicon soul, achieved by uploading consciousness into machines that liberate us from the biological constraints of the body, figures as the ultimate aim of many strands in AI research. Even Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of modern computing, invoked the “transmigration of souls” — the transfer of souls to machines — which gave rise to the “spiritual machines” envisioned by futurist Ray Kurzweil half a century later. Other transhumanists attempt to achieve immortality with biohacking, cellular reprogramming, or cryonics, a technology to freeze the human body after death in hopes of a resurrection enabled by future scientific advancements. In contrast, many attempts in robotics aim to perfect our imperfect human bodies by achieving man-machine synthesis; think of the replicants in the Blade Runner films. Similarly, many strands in biotech aim to improve, augment, and perfect the biological substrate of humans. Neuralink, for example, has already started to develop brain-machine interfaces that can be implemented to achieve a true symbiosis between man and machine. And many startups and research labs, such as Silicon Valley’s Sens Research Foundation, are attempting to conquer death by hacking into the fundamental biological and molecular mechanisms of aging to reach, as leading senescence researcher Aubrey De Grey puts it, “longevity escape velocity.”

Whether through cyborgs, robots, or software, these scientific fields converge on the perennial theme of the immortality of the soul. While the concept of an eternal soul seems to clash with the materialism of the natural sciences, AI historian Daniel Crevier argues that the apparent contradiction is compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition. He notes, for example, that Isaiah 26:19 states that “your dead will come to life, their corpse will rise... the land of ghosts will give birth.” This implies that the mind or soul cannot exist completely divorced from the body.

But it’s not only in the eschatological promise of perfecting and restoring humanity’s fallen state that religiosity and spirituality emerge in science and technology. Many technologists and researchers are driven by a religious or spiritual impetus to decode and participate in God’s creation. In the initial conference on the human genome in 1985, the American molecular biologist and biophysicist Robert Sinsheimer declared that “for the first time in all time, a living creature understands its origin and can undertake to design its future.” Sinsheimer was an instrumental figure in the genesis of the Human Genome Project, which was formally launched in 1990 with the primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs that constitute DNA and mapping out the approximately 20,000 to 25,000 genes of the human genome. The project, which cost $3 billion, was one of the largest engineering undertakings since NASA’s Apollo program. Unsurprisingly, the Human Genome Project also exhibited a bubble dynamic, driven as it was by an ambitious vision and characterized by excessive government overinvestment. For Sinsheimer, the discovery of DNA and the rise of genetic engineering enabled humans to unlock the sacred code of life itself. “When Galileo discovered that he could describe the motions of objects with simple mathematical formulas, he felt that he had discovered the language in which God created the universe,” he wrote. “Today we might say that we have discovered the language in which God created life.” Similarly, the director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, a devout Christian, stated that his “work of discovery” is a “form of worship.” Genetic engineering, for many practitioners, resembles a form of divine knowledge, enabling mere mortals with finite knowledge to enhance our image-likeness of God.

While many strands of research in biotech and genetic engineering are concerned with the perfection of humankind and motivated by the transcendent significance of the scientific endeavor, some of the most committed AI proselytizers believe that AI might realize something akin to the technological Kingdom of God by ensuring our immortality⁴. This transhumanist view is often coupled with a belief in the singularity, which––because it designates the historical moment at which machine intelligence transcends human intelligence and silicon and carbon-based life forms merge––marks, for believers, the inevitable historical end state toward which technological progress teleologically converges. Revealing a deep similarity with the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition––the view that at the end of history, God will create a new world and resurrect a glorified and eternal humanity––the singularity represents a rupture with the present. Machine intelligence will transcend human intelligence, and a synthetic form of life will succeed biological life⁵. As one early software pioneer put it, cyberspace will open gates of the Heavenly City “of Revelations.” Therefore, as the postmodern philosopher of technology Paul Virilio concluded, “the research on cyberspace is a quest for God.” In transhumanism, postmodern rationalism collapses into ancient apocalypticism⁶.

Eternal energy

Energy is another field that possesses the potential for technological transcendence. This is most apparent in the field of nuclear energy, which has been indelibly linked with the imagery of salvation and damnation. As early as 1908, a popular book titled The Interpretation of Radium suggested that harnessing nuclear power, which promised a limitless source of energy, could restore the Garden of Eden. This quasi-religious enthusiasm for radium coincided with a deep techno-optimism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was premised on the assumption of infinite progress and envisioned a civilizational future powered by solar and nuclear energy. But the release of nuclear energy could also usher in damnation and annihilation, as Hiroshima and Chernobyl later exemplified. Nuclear energy became the purest form of apocalyptic technology.

Like the Apollo program, the Manhattan Project was suffused with religious symbolism and belief. The first atomic explosion and its test site were coded Trinity, and Oppenheimer confirmed that the term’s religious significance was intended. For many involved in the Manhattan Project, especially Leo Szilard and Niels Bohr, the atomic bomb was “a weapon of death that might also redeem mankind.” While truly biblical in its destructive potential, nuclear weapons also recovered humanit’'s divine likeness, giving humans quasi-divine dominion over nature. As one of its pioneers later reflected, the development of the bomb gave them “the illusion of ultimate and illimitable power, like being God.” When the bomb detonated during the Trinity test and engulfed the New Mexico desert in flames on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer famously recalled a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” Echoing Oppenheimer’s transcendent experience, a reporter present during the first atomic test noted that “this rising supersun seemed to me the symbol of the dawn of a new era… If the first man could have been present at the moment of Creation when God said ‘Let there be light’ he might have seen something very similar to what we have seen.” A general at Los Alamos later remarked that the detonation unleashed forces “heretofore reserved to the Almighty.”

As was the case in the Apollo program and the Human Genome Project, many key figures of the Manhattan Project were motivated by a deep religious commitment. Not only did they envision nuclear energy as a means of salvation, but atomic weapons were also conceived of as the technological resolution of the biblical conflict between good and evil. Echoing medieval philosopher Roger Bacon, who argued that the Antichrist must be overcome by technological innovation, many involved in the development of nuclear weapons shared the millenarian view that Satan––that is, the Soviets, with their diabolical weapons––could only be confronted with atomic weapons in a final nuclear battle. Edward Teller, who co-invented the hydrogen bomb, exhibited a “religious dedication to thermonuclear weapons,” and many of his followers believed the Cold War arms race to be a holy cause. The Livermore Laboratory, with which Teller was affiliated and where many of his disciples and descendants designed the later generations of nuclear weapons, was described as “akin to a monastery” and “[isolated] from the world by high security as well as by a peculiar set of customs, shared experience, and private language.” In other words, they resembled a religious cult that envisioned itself to be participating in the apocalyptic battle against the Antichrist.

As nuclear energy became increasingly associated with its apocalyptic potential for annihilation, religious and spiritual expectations started to form around emerging technologies such as solar, wind, or fossil fuels offset by carbon capture. By harnessing wind, waves, sun, and carbon, such technologies gave rise to imagery of purification, healing, and renewal — evinced by the terms “cleantech” and “renewable energy” themselves — in contrast to the entrenched imagery of crisis and pollution that nuclear energy and fossil fuels invoked. Like their nuclear predecessors, many founders and investors in cleantech are today motivated by a quasi-religious impetus. Elon Musk often invokes apocalyptic imagery when he talks about Tesla’s mission: It’s “very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport,” he argues, because otherwise “we’re all damned.” Or consider the way John Doerr characterizes the promise of cleantech: “If we face irreversible and catastrophic consequences, we must act, and we must act decisively.” Like manned space flight, biotech, and AI, clean or renewable technologies harbor the promise of salvation and redemption for our corrupted and polluted Earth. By harvesting the pure, divinely bestowed energy of nature, our fallen selves can be redeemed.

— Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber

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FOOTNOTES

¹ Reflected, for example, in debates around the ethics of producing money both within and outside of religious circles — and by the fact that US currency still says “In God We Trust.”

² Historically, the invention of electricity had a spiritual and religious impact similar to the advent of artificial intelligence today. As the historian Ernst Benz notes, the “discovery of electricity and the simultaneous discovery of magnetic and galvanic phenomena were accompanied by a most significant change in the image of God,” which resulted in a “completely new understanding of the relation of body and soul, of spirit and matter."

³ Even the chip industry has its spiritual dimension. Given the miraculous process involved in endowing sand with intelligence, it’s no wonder some have proclaimed that they saw the “face of God” etched into TSMC-produced semiconductors.

⁴ When asked whether he believes that God exists, the preeminent transhumanist Ray Kurzweil replied, “Not yet,” implying that the development of artificial general intelligence represents the active building toward a god.

⁵ Echoing John’s apocalyptic vision in Revelation 21:4 of a New Jerusalem descending from Heaven in which “there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain,” the singularity, according to its believers, will “wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death.” New Jerusalem will materialize in cyberspace, with humans resurrected in new, machinic form.

⁶ The eminent philosopher of media and self-described “apocalypticist” Marshall McLuhan condemns electronic media as the apotheosis of the Antichrist because it produces a “demonic simulacrum” of the mystical body of Christ. “Electric information environments being utterly ethereal foster the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Antichrist,” he writes. “After all, the Prince of this world is a very great electric engineer.” This claim is in stark contrast to McLuhan’s earlier proclamation that computer networks promise the creation of “a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could... create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.”