Martine Rothblatt

United Therapeutics; Terasem Movement

Cosmist Mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it

Martine Rothblatt is a lawyer, author and entrepreneur who founded Sirius Satellite Radio, created PanAmSat, and chairs United Therapeutics. In 2004 she launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist foundation dedicated to technological immortality through mind uploading, and built its public instruments, the Lifenaut.com mindfile service and the BINA48 robot created with Hanson Robotics.

Her 2014 book Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality (St. Martin’s Press) states the thesis directly. A mindclone constructed from a complete mindfile is the same person, because consciousness is the pattern the mindfile preserves, and the pattern survives the move to software. The book extends the claim to rights, arguing for the legal personhood of cyberconscious beings before they exist.

This site covers the book in the Virtually Human analysis. Her position is the strongest operational form of the substrate-independence claim this site develops, paired with an evidential question the book leaves open, whether a stored behavioral pattern suffices for the same experience. Critics including Dale Carrico have called the program wishful thinking, and that dispute is the live edge of her position.

Known for. The mindfiles and mindclone program, Virtually Human, the Terasem Movement, Lifenaut and BINA48

Coverage on this site

• Mindfiles and Mindclones, the Case in Virtually Human July 2025

Related researchers

• J. D. BernalBirkbeck College, University of London. Ireland, 1901 to 1971The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929), the Bernal sphere space habitat, and X-ray crystallography of proteins Cosmist1 article
• Damien BroderickAustralian science fiction author and transhumanist writerDecades of transhumanist writing, The Spike, co-editing Intelligence Unbound Cosmist1 article
• NF Nikolai FyodorovRumyantsev Museum library, Moscow, from 1878The Philosophy of the Common Task, and space settlement as an obligation owed to the dead Cosmist2 articles
• Nikolai KardashevSternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, later the Russian Academy of SciencesThe 1964 classification of civilizations by captured power, the Kardashev scale, and the Byurakan SETI meeting where it was presented Cosmist1 article
• FT Frank TiplerTulane UniversityThe Physics of Immortality (1994) and the Omega Point argument for the resurrection of every conscious being Cosmist1 article
• KT Konstantin TsiolkovskyKaluga, Russia. Self taught, and a schoolteacher for most of his working lifeThe theory of cosmic eras, and the claim that mind ends in a radiant form Cosmist2 articles

Martine Rothblatt is listed with the other cosmists, who hold that mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers. The argument that mind can leave the planet that produced it is covered on Project Consciousness to Orbit.