Microstory 397: Transhumanism II

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Transhumanism I

I know you love food, and don't want to be transhuman, but you’d get used to not having to crap once or twice a day. Everything you love about being a human is actually what’s limiting you. You have to sleep a third of the day away, which means you can’t be productive during that time. You have to eat tons of calories just to have the energy to keep breathing. You have to breathe, for that matter, which is already restrictive. You can’t spend significant amount of time underwater without wearing all this bulky equipment. You can’t take a walk in space without an even more involved process. There is so much you could do if you could enhance your experience as a human. Ocular implants would allow you to look up in the sky and watch exoplanets revolve around their respective host stars. You could watch molecules floating around. You could record memories for others to see. In the future, you might be able to integrate your senses with virtual worlds, mashing them up with the real world in what we call mixed reality. You could communicate across great distances instantly, and as if you were in the same room together. The world would be less dangerous for you since your body is tougher, heartier, and capable of repairing itself fast enough to keep up with any damage. Supplemented by artificial parts, your organs would last you indefinitely by being capable of self-rejuvenation. Nanites would flow through your bloodstream, monitoring medical issues and acting upon them, probably without you even knowing. Even further in the future, some of us will no longer be organic at all. Our consciousness will exist in an entirely new neural lattice. We’ll be able to travel lightyears away at relativistic speeds, knowing that we won’t starve to death, or get too old to enjoy what awaits us on the other side. When you no longer worry so much about death, you’ll start to be able to focus on long-term goals. Rather than just trying to get through the next few decades, our culture will try spread out to the stars, going boldly where no one has gone before. Transhumanism does not mean that you’re no longer human. That’s why we sometimes call it Humanity+. They say that the future is now, but it’s not; we have more work to do.

Transcendence