Human Paragon

From your smartphone to the computers that run almost every aspect of our lives, these amazing machines are possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century. Computers are, however, devices with far more potential than video games and traffic control. Advanced computer tech will be a major enabler of the key developments that transhumanists predict.

If you think computers had a big impact in the previous century, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Thanks to some great Sci-Fi movies, plenty of people already have a pretty good idea of what cybernetics entails. Think of Robocop or the Terminator, except perhaps less about shooting things and more about making life better for people. Yes, cybernetic technology is about the fusion of human and machine, but it’s also about more than that and comes from an intellectual tradition that’s pretty interesting in its own right.

Genes are the programming language of life itself. Every creature on Earth has their plan written in the same language because we’re all descended from the same ancestors. It’s an incredible story of our origins and nature, but it’s even more astounding that we’re beginning to rewrite that book of life ourselves. An understanding of what makes us human at the most basic level is key in the mission to become transhuman.

The oldest humans reach a ripe age of about 120, and the average is heading towards 80 years before a person calls it quits. By the time you get there, you’re frail and no longer think or perform as well as you did when you were in your 20s or 30s. It all seems like it’s just part of life, but transhumanists treat aging and death as another medical and scientific problem to be solved.

We can fix them; we have the technology! Yes, that’s a reference to the TV series The Bionic Man, but medical technology and science really has come along in leaps and bounds. Many diseases or injuries that would have been fatal when you were a child are now curable. That’s just the pace of change within our own lifetimes; from artificial hearts to lab-grown tissues, soon there will be a fix for every ill.

Nanotechnology is the closest scientific equivalent to magic. Mastery of the very tiny inner space of our universe will allow us humans to do things that we can’t even imagine today. That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun trying! Nanotechnology is also one of the most controversial tech areas, and many experts are incredibly worried about how it could all go wrong. In any case, from nanomaterials to nanorobotics it’s becoming ever more clear that the biggest thing in our future is very, very small indeed.

Who likes to work anyway? The future is filled with automated machinery that will do everything from cleaning your home to actually building it in the first place. Robots come in all shapes and sizes. Some are meant to look like us and interact with us every day. Others are built for one very special job and are shaped accordingly.

Some people are seriously worried that the robots will rise up one day and wipe humanity out. Others worry about the (almost inevitable) replacement of human workers with robots. While all this worrying is going on, robots are getting smarter and more useful with every passing day, and they hold the promise of a human race relieved of drudgery.

Most people would agree that Earth is a pretty great place. At least, we’ve managed to make it fairly safe and livable over the millennia that we’ve been here. Despite how great it may be, the fact is that 99.9% (rounded) of all the stuff in our universe is not here on Earth. So it makes sense to want to get out there and explore all this other stuff. Basically, I’m saying that space is full of all the cool stuff there is.

On a more serious note, if humans want to continue existing and not become extinct, as 99% of all life on earth over time has done, it needs to get its collective bum off Earth and spread those eggs into other baskets. I apologize for the metaphorical overload.

There’s a lot of really cool stuff on this website. We have robots, powered prosthetics, genetic engineering, and so much more. Googling for any of this stuff could have brought you here, but that’s not actually what this site is about.

Instead, it’s about a philosophy and an overarching idea about what it means to be human, and our destiny as a species. It re-imagines what it means to be human and how we can plot our way into the future. It’s a philosophy that holds at its core the belief that human beings can transcend their limitations to become something more than they are.