Mapping · More Everything Forever, Adam Becker
Seven overlapping movements, roughly a century apart at their oldest and newest, converge on one story: that technology will let a small number of people escape death, scarcity, and Earth itself. Circle color runs cool to warm from oldest idea to newest. Click any circle, name, or billionaire to read more.
Each circle is a movement, positioned by roughly when it coalesced. Overlaps mark direct intellectual inheritance. Lines below connect billionaires and VCs to the movements they've funded, founded, or echoed publicly.
Paraphrased from reviews and summaries of Becker's book — treat this as a reading guide, not a substitute for the chapters themselves.
Founded, loosely, around the writings of Nikolai Fedorov, a Russian philosopher and librarian who believed advancing science would eventually let humanity resurrect everyone who had ever died and spread them across an endless universe. Becker treats it as the deepest root of the whole bundle — the first version of the "technology as salvation" story.
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The umbrella idea: that we should deliberately use technology to transcend ordinary human limits — longer life, sharper minds, stronger bodies. Biologist Julian Huxley coined the term in 1957; its philosophical roots stretch back to the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's idea of an "Omega Point," where an intelligence explosion would let humanity merge with the divine.
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Philosopher Max More founded the Extropy Institute in 1992, built around "extropy" — a system's intelligence, order, vitality, and capacity to keep improving. Believers pursued cryonics, mind uploading, and life extension as near-term, achievable projects rather than distant sci-fi. The institute closed in 2006, but its conferences and mailing lists fed directly into the rationalist and singularitarian scenes that followed.
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Mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized the idea of a coming "intelligence explosion" in 1993. Ray Kurzweil built it into a full worldview: an exponential curve of technological progress culminating in the Singularity, which he's dated to around 2045. Becker devotes a chapter to arguing Kurzweil mistakes our logarithmic memory of the past for evidence of accelerating progress — a category error, not a law of nature.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky built the LessWrong community and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute around Bayesian reasoning, decision theory, and AI risk. Nick Bostrom's thought experiments — the paperclip maximizer, the simulation argument — became central texts. The core claim: humanity can reason its way to correct beliefs about the future, especially about a coming superintelligence, through formal probability.
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Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord built effective altruism around getting the most good per donated dollar, then extended it into "longtermism" — the idea that the sheer number of potential future people should outweigh people alive today. Becker argues this reasoning can flip philanthropy on its head, making a bet on speculative AI research look more "moral" than curing a disease right in front of you.
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Started online in 2022 by an anonymous account, then given mainstream visibility by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's 2023 "Techno-Optimist Manifesto." The core claim is nearly the opposite of EA and rationalism: accelerate technological and economic growth with as few brakes as possible. Becker still folds it into his critique — for him it's the same salvation-through-technology story, just with the caution stripped out.
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Six people the book keeps returning to — click a name to see which movements they're tied to above.
SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink. Frames Mars colonization as making humanity "multiplanetary" — transhumanist and quasi-cosmist reasoning — and talks about AI risk in terms borrowed from rationalist and longtermist circles.
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An early funder of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute, publicly interested in life-extension research, and a long-time presence around rationalist and longtermist circles and funding.
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Leads OpenAI, explicitly pursuing artificial general intelligence in singularitarian terms — a self-improving AI that transforms civilization. Moved in effective-altruism-adjacent circles in OpenAI's early years.
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Blue Origin's stated mission — get people living and working in space — echoes both transhumanist and cosmist ideas about a technologically transformed, off-world humanity.
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Ran FTX and its "Future Fund" on explicit longtermist logic, directing money toward speculative far-future causes. Convicted of fraud after FTX's collapse in 2022 — a collapse Becker treats as the movement's chickens coming home to roost.
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a16z co-founder. Published the 2023 "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" and became e/acc's most visible mainstream champion — explicitly rejecting EA and rationalist calls for AI caution.
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