Creating Superhumans: Diversifying The Human Race To Inhabit Other Planets; What Will The Human Race Look Like In A 100 Years? Is Genetic Enhancement Of The Human Species Ethical & The Way Ahead?
As we are thrust headlong into the future at a supermassive speed, with technological advancements forever evolving and becoming more and more intricate and complex, the human race of the future could be considerably different and altered from you and me sitting here today in 2021.
In another post of mine from 2019 called The Next Revolution Of Programming: Programming Biological Cells, I briefly touched upon how genetic editing tools like CRISPR and breakthroughs in DNA enhancement and modification were going to change the way we live by creating super plants, animals, and even superhuman beings to enable people of the future to be more biologically enhanced to combat diseases and super crops that withstand different climatic conditions and those that can produce double or triple their regular yield and also enabling certain species of animals to never go extinct.
Now at the turn of the new decade, we’re fixed firmly in the position of cascading possibilities that could see us create superhumans who not only could be more disease resistant but who could also have prolonged lives, better functioning organs, and body parts, and maybe, in the future, become modified enough to inhabit and live on other planets in the universe.
The human body is a complex machine that functions from an intricate cellular level from the beating of the heart and the mechanism of breathing using our lungs to also give rise to consciousness and our experience of our world and the universe.
Now with emerging technology, we’re beginning to get all the tools together to evolve ourselves and prolong the human species into the foreseeable coming future.
What could human beings look and function like a 100 years from today?
How do we want to evolve human beings over the next century or two?
All of these thousands of loosely connected little questions and pieces are coming together, and we are now faced with the distinct possibility of a race of highly advanced superhuman beings.
We could see humans of the future modified to highly evolved superhumans that could live for more than a 100 years and have excellently functioning modified brains and organs. Imagine super hearing, super sight and super speed, and athleticism. Imagine modified organs that never fail and modified body parts that are enhanced. There’s also the possibility, based on experiments by certain futurist biologists that could see the transfer of memories and consciousness itself from one body as it begins to decay and die into another fully fit human body.
A lot of people are very scared by this. And it is considerably scary, and naturally, there are a lot of risks that come with this kind of enhancement. So why would we want to do this? And why would we really want to alter the human body in a fundamental way?
The answer that biologist Juan Enriquez argues in his TED talk is the question: What if there is a large scale event that threatens the future of the human race on Earth and what if there is such an event that could possibly lead to our extinction however far along in the future it might occur? And so, if we are to provide continuity to the human race and inhabit other planets in the universe in order to survive, it is UNETHICAL NOT TO MODIFY the human body to give rise to a race of superhumans colonising planets and prolonging our species.
“The universe is 100 percent malevolent. So what does that mean? It means if you take any one of your bodies at random, drop it anywhere in the universe, drop it in space, you die. Drop it on the Sun, you die. Drop it on the surface of Mercury, you die. Drop it near a supernova, you die. But fortunately, it’s only about 80 percent effective.”, says Enriquez.
“So as a great physicist once said, there’s these little upstream eddies of biology that create order in this rapid torrent of entropy. So as the universe dissipates energy, there’s these upstream eddies that create biological order. Now, the problem with eddies is, they tend to disappear. They shift. They move in rivers. And because of that, when an eddy shifts, when the Earth becomes a snowball, when the Earth becomes very hot, when the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, when you have supervolcanoes, when you have solar flares, when you have potentially extinction-level events, then all of a sudden, you can have periodic extinctions. And by the way, that’s happened five times on Earth, and therefore it is very likely that the human species on Earth is going to go extinct someday.”
“Not next week, not next month, maybe in November, but maybe 10,000 years after that. As you’re thinking of the consequence of that, if you believe that extinctions are common and natural and normal and occur periodically, it becomes a moral imperative to diversify our species.”
“And it becomes a moral imperative because it’s going to be really hard to live on Mars if we don’t fundamentally modify the human body. Right? You go from one cell, mom and dad coming together to make one cell, in a cascade to 10 trillion cells. We don’t know, if you change the gravity substantially, if the same thing will happen to create your body. We do know that if you expose our bodies as they currently are to a lot of radiation, we will die. So as you’re thinking of that, you have to really redesign things just to get to Mars. Forget about the moons of Neptune or Jupiter.”
“This is taken from six billion miles away, and that’s Earth. And that’s all of us. And if that little thing goes, all of humanity goes. And the reason you want to alter the human body is because you eventually want a picture that says, that’s us, and that’s us, and that’s us because that’s the way humanity survives long-term extinction. And that’s the reason why it turns out it’s actually unethical not to evolve the human body even though it can be scary, even though it can be challenging, but it’s what’s going to allow us to explore, live and get to places we can’t even dream of today, but which our great-great-great-great- grandchildren might someday.”
