Authors

Britt Hartley is an author, philosopher, and educator whose work explores the intersection of Mormon thought, philosophy, and the human search for meaning. Raised in a Latter-day Saint family in Idaho, she taught high school history and LDS seminary before pursuing graduate studies in theology with a focus on the future of American religion. Hartley is the author of Mormon Philosophy Simplified: An Easy LDS Approach to Classic Philosophical Questions (2019), which bridges the rich tradition of Mormon academic theology—drawing on thinkers like Terryl Givens, Hugh Nibley, and Blake Ostler—with the everyday questions of Latter-day Saint life. She presented at the 2019 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association on how genealogical record-keeping across cultures reflects the priorities and narratives of the societies that produce them, and how advancing technology is expanding the transparency and complexity of Mormon genealogy in ways that may drive theological reflection. In her subsequent work, Hartley has focused on helping individuals navigate questions of meaning, connection, and spiritual practice beyond traditional religious frameworks. She is the author of No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Faith Required (2024) and hosts the No-Nonsense Spirituality podcast, where she draws on philosophy, psychology, and contemplative practice to explore themes of awe, ritual, community, and purpose—concerns that resonate with the transhumanist commitment to human flourishing in all its dimensions. Hartley lives in Boise, Idaho with her husband and four children.

Bryan Johnson (born 22 August 1977) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and longevity researcher whose work explores the technological transformation of human biology. Born in Provo, Utah, and raised in nearby Springville, he served a Latter-day Saint mission in Ecuador before earning a degree from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. In 2007, Johnson founded Braintree, a mobile and web payment platform that powered services like Uber and Airbnb. In 2012, Braintree acquired Venmo for $26.2 million, and in 2013, PayPal acquired Braintree for $800 million, earning Johnson over $300 million. He subsequently invested $100 million of his personal capital in the OS Fund, supporting transformative science startups in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and space exploration. In 2016, Johnson founded Kernel, investing another $100 million to develop non-invasive neural interface technologies for measuring brain activity. In 2021, he launched Project Blueprint—a comprehensive anti-aging protocol involving strict nutrition, supplements, fitness regimens, and medical monitoring by a team of 30 specialists. His self-funded longevity initiative involves over 100 daily protocols, with Johnson claiming to age at a rate 46% slower than average. Johnson’s work represents a contemporary expression of transhumanist ambitions—the application of technology and rigorous methodology to extend healthy human lifespan. While his methods have attracted skepticism from some medical experts, his willingness to invest in and personally test radical approaches to human enhancement has made him one of the most visible figures in the longevity movement.

Bryce Haymond is an American designer, artist, writer, and independent scholar whose work explores the intersection of Mormon theology, mysticism, and the inner dimensions of human consciousness. Born and raised in the Salt Lake City area, he served a mission in El Salvador, studied design at Brigham Young University, and built a career as a professional designer and, more recently, as a developer working with generative AI. Haymond is the founder of the contemplative community and blog Thy Mind, O Human (thymindoman.com), where he investigates perennial wisdom traditions, altered states of consciousness, and the mystical cores of world religions. His scholarship draws on a broad range of sources—from Hugh Nibley and Margaret Barker to Mark Koltko-Rivera and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy—in pursuit of what he regards as the shared divine reality underlying all genuine mystical experience. He has presented multiple times at the Mormon Transhumanist Association conference, addressing the mystical core of Mormon spirituality, the Book of Mormon as literary alchemy, and most recently the use of AI art as a medium for reifying visionary and sacred experience. Haymond’s central argument—that Joseph Smith’s First Vision and comparable experiences across traditions represent genuine encounters with higher states of consciousness, accessible through contemplative practice—positions him at a generative intersection of religion, psychology, and technology. His reading of Joseph Smith as a practitioner of ‘technologies of transcendence,’ and his work using AI tools to render mystical visions into photorealistic sacred art, reflects a conviction that the boundary between inner and outer, spiritual and material, is more permeable than most traditions have allowed. The same intelligence that communes with ultimate reality in meditation, he suggests, can be cultivated, extended, and expressed through the tools humanity is now building—a vision that resonates deeply with Mormon Transhumanism’s aspiration to participate, as full human beings, in the ongoing work of creation and theosis.

Byron Belitsos is a publisher and evangelist focused on promoting and exploring the Urantia Revelation—also known as the Urantia Papers or Urantia Book, published in 1955. He sees the Urantia Book as a revelatory text with significant implications for understanding human history and the potential for future transhuman evolution. Belitsos is deeply interested in the intersection of spirituality, transhumanism, and integral perspectives. He argues that a spiritually informed transhumanism is essential for achieving sustainable and desirable human enhancement. He emphasizes the importance of understanding deep history, addressing theological and spiritual poverty, and overcoming the limitations of reductionist and materialist views within the transhumanist movement. As a publisher, Belitsos is actively working to disseminate information about the Urantia Book and its relevance to contemporary discussions on transhumanism. He also organizes conferences that bring together diverse perspectives—including those from Mormon, Uranian, Raëlian, and Wiccan traditions—to explore the book’s themes and implications.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a British literary scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist whose work shaped twentieth-century imagination across academic, literary, and theological registers. Born in Belfast, educated at Oxford, and later Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, Lewis combined philological rigor with a gift for popular exposition that few peers matched. His academic contributions, including The Allegory of Love (1936) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), established him as a leading medievalist. But his wider influence came through fiction and apologetics: The Screwtape Letters (1942), Mere Christianity (1952), The Problem of Pain (1940), The Great Divorce (1945), and the seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). A member of the Inklings alongside J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis moved from youthful atheism to a self-described “reluctant” Christian conversion in 1931, an arc he traced in Surprised by Joy (1955). Lewis’s legacy resonates with Mormon transhumanist themes more deeply than his Anglican context might suggest. His doctrine of theosis —that the purpose of Christian life is to become “little Christs,” that God intends to make “the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature”—is among the most striking modern Protestant articulations of divinization, and it sits comfortably alongside Joseph Smith’s teaching that humanity’s destiny is to inherit the divine nature. His ecumenical instinct, expressed in the parable of Emeth in The Last Battle , suggests that sincerity and virtue can be received by Christ even when offered under other names—a posture friendly to syncretism and pluralism. Lewis was no technologist, and his suspicion of scientism in The Abolition of Man (1943) cautions against any easy equation of progress with goodness. Yet his moral seriousness, his confidence that human beings are unfinished creatures undergoing a long and sometimes painful transformation, and his insistence that the universe itself may have been created for the purpose of drawing creatures into divine life all converge with the central Mormon transhumanist conviction: that becoming gods, by grace and through participation, is the actual point.

Caleb Jones is a speaker and thinker deeply engaged with the intersection of Mormon theology, transhumanism, and intergenerational connection. His work focuses on the spirit of Elijah, as referenced in Malachi, and its implications for creating faith-based connections across generations, both living and deceased. He advocates for a broader interpretation of this principle, extending it beyond traditional temple work to encompass a reconciliation of ancient wisdom with modernity. Jones draws upon G.K. Chesterton’s concept of the “democracy of the dead” to frame his exploration of tradition and remembrance. He posits that our ancestors, through their artifacts and influence, continue to participate in the present. He sees the redemption of the dead through these artifacts—books, music, laws, traditions—as a collective human endeavor involving various disciplines such as literary scholarship, archaeology, and religious studies. His perspective emphasizes the importance of engaging with the past to inform and enrich the future, particularly within the context of Mormonism and its emphasis on family history and genealogical work. Jones champions seeking a healthy balance and ongoing reconciliation of the hearts and minds of the dead and dying with the hearts and minds of the living, to redeem rising generations.

Cameron Dayton is an American video game creative director, novelist, and writer known for his work in the gaming industry and speculative fiction. He has held prominent creative roles at several major studios, contributing to well-known franchises and original intellectual properties. Dayton served as creative director at Certain Affinity and has worked in narrative and creative leadership positions across the video game industry. He is also the author of the novel Etherwalker , a science-fantasy work set in a far-future world where technology and myth have intertwined, exploring themes of lost civilizations, human potential, and the rediscovery of powerful ancient technologies. His fiction often inhabits the intersection of epic fantasy and science fiction, imagining futures in which humanity’s relationship with technology is both perilous and transformative. Dayton has roots in the Latter-day Saint community, and his creative work reflects an imagination shaped by themes resonant with Mormon Transhumanist thought—particularly the idea that humanity’s trajectory involves the responsible stewardship of extraordinary power, and that the boundaries between the mundane and the transcendent are more porous than they appear. His speculative worlds frequently explore the tension between knowledge and wisdom, technological mastery and moral responsibility, echoing the Mormon Transhumanist conviction that scientific and technological progress are inseparable from ethical and spiritual development. His storytelling invites readers to consider what it means for ordinary individuals to inherit or rediscover capacities that border on the divine—a narrative arc that parallels the Latter-day Saint doctrine of theosis and the transhumanist aspiration toward radical human flourishing.

Carl Edward Sagan (1934–1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, and one of the most influential science communicators of the twentieth century. His ability to convey the wonder of the cosmos to a broad public audience made him a defining figure in popular science. Sagan spent much of his career at Cornell University, where he served as a professor of astronomy and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He contributed significantly to planetary science, including research on the atmospheres of Venus and Titan, and played a key role in NASA’s Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo missions. He helped design the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record—messages from humanity launched into interstellar space. His 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage became one of the most widely watched programs in public television history, and his novel Contact (1985) explored humanity’s first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. Sagan was a passionate advocate for scientific literacy, critical thinking, and the search for life beyond Earth. While he identified as an agnostic and approached questions of God and transcendence through a scientific lens, his work resonated deeply with themes central to transhumanist thought: the aspiration to transcend present human limitations, the ethical stewardship of technology, and a profound reverence for the potential of conscious life in the universe. His famous declaration that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself” echoes theological ideas of humanity’s participatory role in creation and theosis—the notion that intelligent beings may grow toward ever-greater understanding, compassion, and capacity. Sagan’s legacy continues to inspire those who see science and wonder as complementary paths toward human flourishing.

Carl Teichrib is a Canadian researcher, writer, and lecturer who has spent more than two decades documenting the ideological and spiritual currents reshaping Western civilization—with particular attention to transhumanism, globalism, and the re-enchantment of secular culture. He is the author of Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment (2018) and served as editor of Forcing Change , a research journal tracking transformative movements in politics, religion, and technology. Teichrib’s work is rooted in on-the-ground investigation: he has attended and reported on events ranging from Burning Man to world federalist conferences to transhumanist gatherings, bringing an ethnographic sensibility to ideological terrain that most commentators treat from a distance. His research focuses on the convergence of technological aspiration, spiritual seeking, and political vision—the overlapping currents through which humanity is, in various ways, reaching for transcendence. Writing from an evangelical Christian perspective, Teichrib approaches transhumanism critically, as a symptom of a deeper human longing that he believes is being misdirected. That diagnosis differs from a Mormon transhumanist reading, which holds that the longing itself—for greater intelligence, longer life, expanded capacity, and participation in divine creative work—is genuine and worth pursuing through rigorous, ethical, technologically-engaged means. Still, Teichrib’s careful documentation of transhumanist aspirations, his recognition that the movement addresses real spiritual hunger, and his insistence that ideas about human transformation carry profound moral weight make him a serious interlocutor for anyone thinking carefully about where humanity is headed and why.

Carl Youngblood co-founded the MTA in 2006 and has served as its President and CEO since 2021. He is engaged with the Association’s efforts to explore the intersection of Mormon theology and transhumanist philosophy. Among the many initiatives that Carl has been involved with, he has designed and built the Association’s current website, which unifies all prior content in a single location using inspiring visuals and animations. Youngblood’s professional career spans more than two decades of full-stack software development at the intersection of Silicon Slopes and Silicon Valley. He was an early employee at Omniture (acquired by Adobe), a founding engineering leader at Divvy (a Utah-based unicorn startup), co-founder of Blockscale LLC (a blockchain services firm eventually contracted into Coinbase), and Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS. His technical fluency ranges from scalable web architecture to blockchain infrastructure—the kind of deep engineering experience that grounds his theological speculation in working knowledge of the systems he writes about. Under his leadership, the Association has developed its mission of promoting abundant human flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology, fostering dialogue across secular and religious audiences and arguing that each has something essential to learn from the other. His writing, collected on his blog From the Depths , spans over a decade of conference presentations and theological essays: meditations on participatory resurrection, the alignment of artificial intelligence read through the Grand Council narrative, intelligence as eternal and multifaceted, and religion as social technology. He writes, as a colleague has observed, with warmth and accessibility on questions of momentous practical consequence—how to navigate faith crisis without losing faith’s power, how to think about resurrection as something we actively participate in rather than passively receive. Youngblood’s distinctive contribution to transhumanism is the integration of serious technical expertise with serious theological reflection. He embodies the Mormon transhumanist conviction that scientific and spiritual development are not parallel tracks but a single path—that the learning required to build better systems is continuous with the exaltation Mormon theology envisions, and that human ingenuity, rightly oriented, is itself a divine imperative.