Month: July 2000

He was so forward thinking in terms of the human potential that he changed his name to FM-2030 and fiercely proclaimed his belief that he would never, ever die.

But on Saturday night, the Miami futurist – who taught a course on “transhumanism'” at Florida International University, died at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan.

Aware that he had pancreatic cancer, the 69-year-old, Belgium-born author, philosopher, and consultant to corporations such as Lockheed and Rockwell International, was still thinking of what science and the human spirit were capable.

He arranged to have his body immersed in liquid nitrogen – or cryogenically preserved – at a foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., convinced that science will one day bring him and his legendary joie de vivre back to life.

FM-2030 was born F.M. Esfandiary in 1930. Planning to live to be at least 100, he legally changed his name in 1975, using the date he would have turned 100 as part of his new name. The son of an Iranian diplomat was fluent in French, English, Arabic and Hebrew and worked for a while at the United Nations. It was an experience, friends say, that gave him a visceral distaste for argument and discord.

His book, Are You Transhuman? was published by Warner Books in 1989 and won him correspondence with such thinkers as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

His other books about the future, which earned him the attention of companies exploring space technology and teaching assignments at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at UCLA, included Optimism One and Telespheres.

The Los Angeles performance artist Natasha Vita-More – described on a European philosophy website as one of the world’s 75 most original thinkers along with Albert Einstein – was FM-2030’s lover for more than a decade until he moved to Miami.

She said Tuesday that FM, as she called him, will be sorely missed by the community of futurists – those who like to imagine such things as androids, a space Olympics, time travel and immortality.

His many friends loved not only the intense philosophical discussions at FM-2030’s gourmet dinner parties, but the chance to dance with the handsome, urbane thinker at South Beach nightclubs and at Los Angeles-area bistros.

“He defied death,” Vita-More said. “He thought it was a complete waste of time. He thought one day the news that someone died would ring around the planet because death would be so rare. He thought there would be a whole prosthetic body and that we would be able to space or time travel to all kinds of places.'”

Friends in Los Angeles, she said, were mystified by his decision to move to Florida in 1997. Vita-More said he had a large following there and that as many as 200 students signed up to take his futurist course. But he raved about Miami, she said.

Coral Gables resident David Bourgoigne, whose small company is planning for interplanetary Internet service, said he met FM-2030 at the beach.

“Here was this man young people were in awe of,'” he said, “talking to teens about ‘space surfing.’ One kid said to me that FM was the coolest old guy that ever lived.”

Vita-More said FM-2030 told her “He had this feeling you should never live in the same place for 10 years,'” she said, “as well as you should never get married (he never did) because no one should belong to another.

“We talked on the phone a lot,'” she said. “He loved the Miami night life. He was a nocturnal person. He loved the tropics. He thought Florida was the sine qua non.'”

Written by Paul Brinkley-Rogers and published by the Miami Herald on July 12, 2000

A futurist who changed his given name to something a little more forward looking, FM-2030 to be specific, died Saturday night at a friend’s Manhattan apartment. An author, teacher and consultant to corporations, he was 69 and lived in Miami.

The FM might have stood for Future Man, Future Modular or Future Marvel, but he never said. He also did not like to answer questions about his nationality, because he considered himself a global person. He felt the same way about his age, because his latest artificial hip was only two years old, making the question, in his view, meaningless.

But he would have turned 100 in 2030. And, if his plans are realized, he might still.

FM-2030, who was known for his sunny optimism, had directed that his body be frozen by an Arizona foundation specializing in such things in the hope that doctors in the future will find a cure for pancreatic cancer, which his longtime friend Flora Schnall said was the cause of death.

Part of his futuristic vision is the idea that people will eventually become wholly made of synthetic parts, as their minds are transported vast distances through space. He predicted that humans would become ”post-biological organisms.”

He was ”launched,” his word for born, F. M. Esfandiary on Oct. 15, 1930, and legally changed his name in the mid-1970’s. Under both names, he thought very large thoughts, usually about an imaginary future that he described in great detail.

He said that someday a Santa Claus machine would produce three-dimensional objects in the manner of copying machines. This, combined with free energy from the sun, would produce limitless resources and eliminate competition.

Traditional families would be replaced by a Club Med morality, a good thing in the estimation of a man who never married because he resented the idea of humans belonging to other humans. Energy and other natural resources would be essentially limitless, he contended. Humans would become immortal.

”It’s just a matter of time before we reconstitute our bodies into something entirely different, something more space-adaptable, something that will be viable across the solar system and beyond,” he wrote in 1989.

”He thought that death was tyrannical,” said Ms. Schnall, a Manhattan lawyer. ”He wanted to do away with death.”

He saw himself as an anachronism. ”I am a 21st-century person who was accidentally born into the 20th,” he said. ”I have a deep nostalgia for the future.”

Many of his predictions were prescient. In a 1977 interview, he spoke of correcting genetic flaws and of fertilization and gestation outside the body. In 1980, he wrote of teleconferencing, telemedicine and teleshopping. He argued against the assumption that many more nursing homes would be needed in the 21st century, on the basis that health standards would improve, making nursing homes less necessary.

F. M. Esfandiary was the son of an Iranian diplomat. He was born in Belgium and lived in 17 countries in the first 11 years of his life. He said the experience influenced him to think of himself as a global citizen, and said there were no illegal immigrants, just irrelevant borders.

His looks and abilities helped him play citizen of the world. Courtly and handsome, he spoke Arabic, French, Hebrew and English. In the 1948 Olympics, he competed in basketball and wrestling for Iran. His novels were ”The Day of Sacrifice,” ”The Beggar” and ”Identity Card.”

At the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the novelist Anne Tyler wrote that ”Identity Card,” published in 1966, was ”the perfect way to find out why so many fists are raised in Iran today.”

His books about the future were ”Optimism One,” ”Telespheres” and ”Are You Transhuman?” He was revising two others, ”Countdown to Immortality” and ”The Coming Age of Abundance” when he fell ill.

He taught at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, the University of California at Los Angeles and Florida International University in Miami. He was a consultant for Lockheed, J. C. Penney and Rockwell International, Florida International University officials said.

He is survived by four sisters, Farideh Sadjadi of Baltimore, Fereshteh Jahanbani of New York, Forouzandeh Moghimi of Tehran, Iran, and Behjat Ghanbari of Bushehr, Iran; and a brother, Mohsen Esfandiary of Washington.

For now, his body is in Scottsdale, Ariz., immersed in liquid nitrogen in a thermos tank at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. The foundation noted in a news release that no frozen mammal had been successfully thawed. Though he acknowledged that he would have no money if he woke, he said he would not care.

”I’ll be so glad that I’m back,” he said in an interview in The Palm Beach Post.

Written by Douglas Martin and published by the New York Times on July 11, 2000

F.M. Esfandiary, who legally changed his name to FM2030 because of his confidence that he would live to 100 and beyond, has died at 69.

The “chronic optimist,” who believed age was irrelevant because a person might have artificial body parts of many different ages–he had a hip that was only 2 years old–died Saturday in New York City. Esfandiary, who said immortality could be achieved by replacing worn- out organs with synthetic substitutes, died of cancer of the pancreas–one body part for which no substitute has been created and which he recently denounced as “a stupid, dumb, wretched organ.”

In the event an artificial pancreas is ever invented, however, Esfandiary will be waiting. Flora Schnall, a longtime friend who announced the futurist’s death, said his body has been cryogenically preserved by the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

“He believed,” she said, “scientific advances would lead to the revival of his body–in the future.”

The tall, affable, soft-spoken philosopher, visionary educator, lecturer and writer had been convinced that a life expectancy of 100 would be commonplace by 1998 and that, by his centenary birthday in 2030, mankind would know how to prolong life into infinity.

Far from a crackpot, Esfandiary was respected by scientists, engineers, students who took his classes and intellectuals who read his books or attended his lectures.

A quarter-century ago he was predicting things that are now happening. What he called “teleshopping” and “tele-education” are now ordinary Internet activities. And he foresaw such medical and biological breakthroughs as fertilization and gestation outside the womb and the correcting of genetic flaws.

Esfandiary taught futurist philosophy at UCLA Extension for many years and wrote opinion pieces for The Times.

On the East Coast, he taught classes at New York’s New School for Social Research, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and Florida International University, and wrote opinion pieces for the New York Times.

After writing a series of critically praised satirical novels in the 1960s–“Day of Sacrifice,” “The Beggar” and “Identity Card”– Esfandiary turned in the 1970s to serious futurist nonfiction. Among his upbeat books were “Optimism One,” “Up-Wingers,” “Are You a Transhuman?” and “Telespheres.”

Schnall said he had been working on two other books, “Countdown to Immortality” and “The Coming Age of Abundance.”

Pessimism was not in the philosopher’s vocabulary.

“We are at the beginning of an age of limitless abundance,” he asserted repeatedly. “There is no scarcity; there is only the psychology of scarcity.”

Born in Belgium, the son of an Iranian diplomat, and educated in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, Esfandiary described his own citizenship as “Universal,” explaining, “I translive all over the planet.” He had lived in 11 countries by age 17, and spoke French, Arabic, Hebrew and English. Early in his career, from 1952 to 1954, he served as a member of the Conciliation Commission for Palestine.

He considered nationality anachronistic and often said, “There are no illegal immigrants, only irrelevant borders.” Nationality, he told The Times in 1989, “should be obsolete in a world of global telecommunications, global travel and global economy.”

Political election campaigns to choose presidents and other leaders were also obsolete, he said, advocating instead that issues be decided by frequent referendums submitted to the people and voted on electronically.

A concise writer himself, Esfandiary eschewed long books, plays or concerts as “hopelessly slow for a high-tech people who want interaction and feedback.”

Although he had competed on Iran’s Olympic fencing team in 1948, Esfandiary came to disdain all competitions, from the Olympics to the Academy Awards, as “a wasteful behavior . . . that is divisive and inefficient.”

Personally preferring romantic “linkups” to legal bonds, Esfandiary predicted the disappearance of both marriage and the nuclear family.

“Among the specifics in Esfandiary’s future world,” a Times reporter wrote of the futurist’s vision some years ago, “would be sperm and egg banks where geneticists would select the children to be born–all very computerized and scientific. Children would be raised in Child Center Homes (learning via television and computers) where adults who liked children would visit. There wouldn’t be any Mom and Dad; there would be hundreds of them.”

Esfandiary, known to his friends and fans as FM2030, is survived by one brother and four sisters.

Written by Myrna Oliver and published by the Los Angeles Times on July 11, 2000