THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT MOVIE Independence Day contains a brief scene parodying UFO cults. In the movie, ecstatic members gather on the top of tall buildings in Los Angeles and other major cities to welcome the extra-terrestrial invaders. They are promptly zapped, along with everyone else within firing range of the powerful laser beams. When I saw the movie in the West End on release, a huge cheer went up.
The most notorious of these cults was Heaven’s Gate, which gained notoriety in 1997, with the ritual suicide of 39 members in California. They were convinced that the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet allowed them to escape the “Human Evolutionary Level”. Today we can hear echoes of this rhetoric among technoutopians. They also share an eschatological vision, in which an ecstatic future awaits. They range from wealthy transhumanists, such as Elon Musk’s former partner, the popstar Grimes, who advised us in song that “Biology is superficial/Intelligence is artificial” to Google’s spiritual mentor
