science

Immortality Bus

Immortality Bus is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Immortality Bus rather than just read about it. In short: The Immortality Bus is a 1978 Wanderlodge that has been made to appear as a 38-foot brown coffin. The bus was used by Zoltan Istvan and various other transhumanist activists during his 2016 US presidential campaign to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol and to promote the idea that death can be conquered by science.

Key takeaways

Immortality Bus belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Immortality Bus to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Immortality Bus from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Immortality Bus is a 1978 Wanderlodge that has been made to appear as a 38-foot brown coffin. The bus was used by Zoltan Istvan and various other transhumanist activists during his 2016 US presidential campaign to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol and to promote the idea that death can be conquered by science. The nearly four-month journey of the art vehicle from San Francisco to Washington, DC in 2015 had embedded journalists and documentarians, including those from The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Verge, The Telegraph, and others. On board the bus were drones, virtual reality gear, a 4-foot robot named Jethro Knights, biohacking equipment, posters about transhumanism, and nootropics for riders to try. An open invitation to anyone in America was made to travel on the bus. The Immortality Bus has become one of the most widely recognized life extension activist projects and has been featured in several documentaries and articles on the history of the life extensionist movement.

Journey After a successful crowd funding campaign of $27,380 on Indiegogo, Zoltan Istvan bought the 1978 Wanderlodge in Sacramento, California. In his front yard in Mill Valley, California, he and his team converted the bus into an art vehicle that resembled a 38-foot casket, including plastic flowers on top. The Immortality Bus left the San Francisco Bay Area on September 5, 2015. It headed to Tehachipi, California where it attended GrindFest, and riders of the bus, including Vox’s Dylan Matthews and Zoltan Istvan were implanted with microchips. From there the bus headed to Las Vegas, then San Diego, and then Arizona to visit life extension group People Unlimited and the Alcor cryonics facility. After visiting Alcor the bus traveled to Texas for campaign events and then went to Arkansas to protest against marijuana prohibition. It stopped at events in Mississippi before illegally entering a megachurch in Alabama where activists handed out pamphlets on transhumanism. In Alabama it also visited the historic Freedom Riders museum, where Zoltan argued that cyborg rights will be another upcoming civil rights battle. In Charlotte, North Carolina, John McAfee (then the Presidential candidate of the Cyber Party) visited the bus and debated Zoltan Istvan. The Immortality Bus team later made speeches at Florida's Church of Perpetual Life (co-founded by William Faloon), and Zoltan lectured using his avatar in Second Life as part of a virtual event with Terasem. In its final stages, the bus traversed up the eastern seaboard before arriving on November 14, 2015, to the US Capitol. On the steps of the Supreme Court, Zoltan Istvan wrote the original Transhumanist Bill of Rights before posting it on the US Capitol on November 15. Improved versions of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights have since been made via internet crowdsourcing organized by the Transhumanist Party, with version 2.0 published in 2017 and version 3.0 published in 2018.

After the journey Once a relatively unknown candidate, the Immortality Bus and the media coverage it generated helped Zoltan Istvan place 4th (behind John McAfee, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein) in an iQuanti survey of Google searches of all Presidential candidates not Democratic or Republican. In a feature article on the bus, The New York Times Magazine called the Immortality Bus “the great brown sarcaphogaus of the American Highway. It was a methaphor of life itself.” Short video stories of the Immortality Bus were made by The Atlantic, CNET, BuzzFeed, Vocativ, RT, and Australia's Viceland. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jonathan Weiner wrote that the journey of the Immortality Bus is modeled after Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters famous cross country bus trip, which helped inspire a generation of activists. The Immortality Bus is the subject of the closing chapter of the Wellcome Prize winning book by Mark O’Connel, To Be a Machine, and also the subject of a chapter in Radicals by Jamie Bartlett. The documentary Immortality or Bust [1], which focused on the Immortality Bus campaign, won the breakout award at the 2019 Raw Science Film Festival in Los Angeles as well as the Best Biohacking Awareness Award at the 2021 GeekFest Toronto. Independent distributor Gravitas picked up the documentary and the film is available on iTunes and Amazon Prime. The bus is currently parked in long-term storage in Virginia, and Zoltan Istvan is working to donate the bus to a museum that will use it to promote life extension.

Criticism Some transhumanists were dismayed with the amount of media attention the Immortality Bus received. They believed it was a stunt and sent a frivolous message about the seriousness of the life extension movement. Other transhumanists countered that such activism helps grow the movement and raise awareness. USA Today called the bus "a morbid Oscar Meyer Wienermobile".

External links http://www.immortalitybus.com/

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Immortality Bus

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Immortality Bus claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Immortality Bus before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Immortality Bus ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Immortality Bus

In research: Immortality Bus appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Immortality Bus in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Immortality Bus is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Art vehicles, Customised buses, Decorated vehicles, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Immortality Bus outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Immortality Bus in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Immortality Bus means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Immortality Bus out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Immortality Bus in simple terms?

Why does Immortality Bus matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Immortality Bus?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Immortality Bus.