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Iranian-American futurist, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who defined the transhuman as a transitional being and was cryopreserved on his death in 2000.
FM-2030 was an Iranian-American futurist, novelist and teacher, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who argued that some people alive in the twentieth century were already transitional beings — no longer fully bound by the biological, national and family categories that had defined human life, and not yet whatever comes next. He called such people transhumans, and the usage passed into Transhumanism as a movement. He took the name FM-2030 in place of the one he was born with, a designation pointing at the year he would turn one hundred.
Esfandiary was born in Brussels in October 1930 to Iranian diplomats and spent his childhood moving between postings in Europe and Asia; biographical accounts repeat his claim to have lived in seventeen countries as a child.1 He played basketball for Iran at the 1948 Olympic Games in London,1 and from 1952 to 1954 served on the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine.2 That combination of early rootlessness and direct exposure to the machinery of international institutions shaped a lifelong argument that national and ethnic identity was a residue rather than a fact.
He published three novels in English: The Day of Sacrifice (1959), The Beggar (1965) and Identity Card (1966), the last a study of bureaucratic identity in Iran. From the late 1960s he turned to futurism, teaching long-running courses on the future at The New School in New York, at UCLA Extension and later at Florida International University.2 His futurist books are Optimism One (1970), Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto (1973), Telespheres (1977) and Are You a Transhuman? (1989).
Accounts of the name disagree. The New York Public Library, which holds his papers, dates the change to 1988; a profile in Bidoun places the adoption around 1985 with the paperwork filed in 1988; shorter biographical sketches give 1970.231 The stated reason is consistent across them: a surname presumed a family and a nationality he did not accept, and 2030 marked the hundredth year after his birth.3
FM-2030 held that the left–right axis was obsolete because both wings argued about the distribution of a fixed set of goods within a fixed human condition. He proposed an "upwing" orientation concerned instead with expanding what is possible: abolishing scarcity, disease and death rather than redistributing their burdens.4 The framing anticipates arguments now made under Effective accelerationism and, in a more careful form, under economic cases for aging research, though FM-2030's version was closer to a countercultural utopianism than to either.
His most durable idea is definitional. A transhuman, in his usage, is not an enhanced person but a person whose way of living already points beyond the traditional human template. The markers he listed were mundane and deliberately so: prosthetics and implants, reproductive technology used without embarrassment, life without fixed geographic roots, non-religious orientation, androgyny, comfort with telecommunication as a primary mode of contact, and a rejection of the family as destiny.5 The claim was that transition is gradual and already underway, not a future event.
Two meanings of "transhuman"FM-2030's transhuman is a transitional human — a person in the middle of a species-scale change. The later movement's usage folds this into a general commitment to enhancement, and the intermediate status between human and Posthuman is what survives. The two senses are often conflated.
Are You a Transhuman? (1989) is structured as a set of self-assessment instruments, asking readers to score their own rate of change, exposure to new technology, physical modification, mobility and openness to future institutions.6 The tests are not psychometrics in any validated sense, and were not offered as such; their purpose was to make the argument concrete by forcing the reader to locate themselves on a trajectory. The device also explains much of the book's reach outside academic futures studies: it turned an abstract thesis into something a reader could do.
FM-2030 died of pancreatic cancer in Manhattan on 8 July 2000 and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.7 He had been an advocate of Cryonics and had argued that death from disease should be treated as a solvable engineering failure rather than an occasion for consolation. His choice is often cited as the movement's most literal statement of principle, and as an illustration of the gap the practice depends on. An account of protocol history published in Alcor's own library dates the switch from glycerol perfusion to vitrification to late 2000,8 so the procedures available when he died were not those of current Brain preservation work, and no revival of a cryopreserved human has been demonstrated or is close to being demonstrated.
He did not live to see the year he named. Nothing about 2030 in his writing amounts to a technical forecast; he described it as a symbolic marker, a period he expected to be "a magical time" rather than a dated prediction.1
FM-2030 was a public figure in a way later transhumanists mostly have not been, appearing on American television — including a long session with Larry King — as a professional optimist at a moment when futurism was dominated by resource-depletion pessimism.3 Critics then and since have noted that his work is exhortation rather than analysis: it contains almost no quantitative argument, no engagement with the biology of aging as it stood, and no account of how any of the changes it anticipates would be paid for or governed. Even sympathetic historians of the movement have found the transhuman criteria arbitrary, since nothing in them explains why cosmetic surgery and frequent air travel should put a person closer to posthumanity than anyone else.5
What survived is the vocabulary and the stance. Max More and the extropians took the transhuman terminology and gave it a philosophical structure; Natasha Vita-More, who worked alongside him in the Los Angeles futurist scene, carried the aesthetic and design side of the project forward. His deeper claim — that identity is a variable rather than a fixed inheritance — now runs through arguments over Morphological freedom and Personal identity and continuity that are considerably more rigorous than anything he wrote, and that have not settled the question he raised: whether a person mid-transition is still the same person at the end of it.
His prediction record is poor in the ordinary way and interesting in a specific one. The 2030 date attached to his name was never a forecast so much as a target, and almost none of the concrete changes he expected by it — the end of nation-states, the dissolution of the nuclear family into fluid affiliation, the routine reversal of aging — is close. What he got closer to is the direction of travel on identity: the assumption that ethnicity, nationality, family structure and eventually biology are things a person negotiates rather than inherits is now unremarkable across much of the world he wrote for, arrived at through social change rather than the technology he expected to drive it.
That gap is the most useful thing about him. The futurist habit he exemplified — reading a cultural shift as evidence that a technological one is imminent — recurs throughout this field, and the record suggests the two decouple more often than not. Read as a diagnosis of what people were becoming willing to want, his work holds up; read as a schedule, it does not, and he insisted on being read as a schedule.
reportOlympedia. "Fereidoun Esfandiary." Athlete record, olympedia.org.↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4Confirms the 1948 basketball appearance and the birth date; the attached biographical note is the database's own summary, not a primary document.
reportManuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "F. M. Esfandiary / FM-2030 papers." Collection finding aid.↩ ↩2 ↩3The repository that holds his papers; it gives the teaching dates, the UN commission years, and 1988 for the name change.
newsTiven, B. "The Future Takes Forever." Bidoun, issue 19, Winter 2010. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
bookEsfandiary, F. M. Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto. John Day, 1973. ↩
paperBostrom, N. "A History of Transhumanist Thought." Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 14, 2005.↩ ↩2Bostrom writes as a participant in the movement whose history he traces, which makes the passage criticising FM-2030's criteria an internal objection rather than an outside one.
bookFM-2030. Are You a Transhuman?: Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World. Warner Books, 1989. ↩
newsMartin, D. "Futurist Known as FM-2030 Is Dead at 69." The New York Times, 11 July 2000. ↩
statementde Wolf, A. and Phaedra, C. "Advances in Cryonics Protocols, 1990–2006." Alcor Life Extension Foundation library.↩Written by cryonics practitioners and published by the organization whose protocols it describes; it dates the switch to vitrification to late 2000.