He was formerly a researcher at CERN, a staff member at the European Space Agency, and a senior manager at the European Union Satellite Centre.

He is currently the president of the Italian Association of Transhumanists and a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers and the Turing Church, organizations which claim that the benefits of a technological singularity, which would come from accelerating change, should or would be viable alternatives to the promises of major religious groups.

Prisco has published three books: Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology (2018), Futurist Spaceflight Meditations (2021), and Irrational mechanics: Narrative sketch of a futurist science & a new religion (2024).

They share the same theme, creating a new cosmic religion (cosmism?). The main sub-theme is spaceflight moving human life off the dying Earth.

In Turing Church, he writes..

This isn’t your grandfather’s religion.

Future science and technology will permit playing with the building blocks of space, time, matter, energy, and life, in ways that we could only call magic and supernatural today.

Someday in the future, you and your loved ones will be resurrected by very advanced science and technology.

Inconceivably advanced intelligences are out there among the stars. Even more God-like beings operate in the fabric of reality underneath spacetime, or beyond spacetime, and control the universe. Future science will allow us to find them, and become like them.

Our descendants in the far future will join the community of God-like beings among the stars and beyond, and use transcendent “divine” technology to resurrect the dead and remake the universe.

Science? Spacetime? Aliens? Future technology? I warned you, this isn't your grandmother's religion...

If you want to reconcile your belief in God with your scientific worldview, this book is for you.

If you are a transhumanist who wants to believe in a transcendent reality, this book is for you.

Perhaps you have been told that science has (or will soon have) all the answers, and religion is a fairy tale.

Not so. Current science is very far from having all the answers, but future science and technology will validate and realize all the promises of religion.

My message is that, if you want, you can hope to live again with your loved ones, without abandoning the scientific worldview. If you want, you can believe in the essential core of your religion without betraying science.

Or isn’t it?

Turing Church, pp.5-6

In Futurist Spaceflight Meditations, Prisco writes..

We must strenuously push toward our cosmic destiny among the stars. Beginning to expand beyond the Earth before it’s too late is our most important task at this moment in history. Many actors have important roles to play, and there’s room for everyone. Spaceflight will also help find viable solutions for current developmental, environmental, and social problems.

But the road to the stars is full of impediments and roadblocks. We will not advance as fast as we wish. Therefore we must keep our mood strenuous and our drive strong. We need an optimistic spaceflight culture oriented to the future, with energizing visions of interplanetary, interstellar, and cosmic futures. We also need a futurist space philosophy.

Futurist Spaceflight Meditations, p.1

And in Irrational Mechanics, he writes..

In one of the most important books ever printed [Newton 2016], first published in 1687, Isaac Newton defined “rational mechanics” as “the science, expressed in exact propositions and demonstrations, of the motions that result from any forces whatever and of the forces that are required for any motions whatever.” The mathematical formulation of classical (Newtonian) mechanics is often referred to as rational mechanics.

It can be argued that modern science started with Newton. His work has had a long lasting impact on philosophy and culture as well, which continues today. Science has been moving forward beyond Newton for quite a while, and will continue to move forward beyond today’s science and far beyond Newton. But Newtonian concepts continue to inform our basic, often unquestioned and even unstated, intuitions and assumptions on physical reality. In some sense, science is still chained to rational mechanics, the Newtonian conception of physical reality.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena,” Nikola Tesla supposedly said, “it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” I’ve never found the source of this quote, but it definitely sounds like Tesla.

The idea of science studying non-physical phenomena seems odd. If Tesla really said this, what did he mean? I think he meant the study of physical phenomena beyond the Newtonian conception of physical reality. And of course, moving beyond old conceptions is exactly how science makes spectacular, world-changing advances now and then. Tesla’s new science wouldn’t be non-physical but physical, of course, only different from today’s physics.

The Italian futurists, a group of early 20th century artists and provocateurs , would agree with Tesla. In a brilliant exploration of the philosophy of the Italian futurists , Riccardo Campa quotes a 1916 manifesto of futurist science, which starts with a ferocious condemnation of science when it is “superficially precise, pettily accurate, idiotically sure of its own infallibility” (I translated this and other quotes from the manifesto).

Irrational Mechanics, p.9

And Prisco says further about Tesla...

What should we call the new science, foreseen by Tesla and the Italian futurists, which will penetrate deeper and deeper into the thickness of reality and unveil more and more of Shakespeare’s more things? I call it irrational mechanics. Just like irrational numbers extend the little set of rational numbers into the infinitely bigger set of real numbers, irrational mechanics will extend science as we know it into the infinitely bigger world of thick reality.

I call it irrational mechanics.

Just like irrational numbers extend the little set of rational numbers into the infinitely bigger set of real numbers, irrational mechanics will extend science as we know it into the infinitely bigger world of thick reality.

Irrational Mechanics, p.11

The world is friendly to life and intelligence. Free will and consciousness are built into the fabric of physical reality. We are not deterministic machines, but free agents of change. At the same time, we are also parts of Mind at Large.

Irrational Mechanics, p.19