As I approach the end of my time here on Earth; a natural dissolution of mind and body that I no longer fear, my thoughts today revolve around a long-time friend’s birthday next week and the fact that he is one of the few remaining friends I have that are still living. Neither he nor I can change the inevitable; however, had we been born a few decades later, we might have been able to witness the amazing transformation of humans into…..something else.I see this transformation as inevitable. It is clear to me that after 10,000 generations of Homo Sapiens, we know nearly all there is to know about biological intelligence; its beginnings in prehistoric times, and its limitations for future evolution, a ‘next year’s model of Man’. I won’t go into all of the tedious arguments in support of this thesis, and instead, will get down to the nitty-gritty: we are at the end-times for further evolution of our particular design. As an example, there is much talk about ‘personal immortality’, and electronically augmented brains with memory expansion, computational ability, and perceptions of our external environment enhanced by ‘plug & play’ peripherals that do such things as extend our visual perception to span the entire electromagnetic spectrum and so forth; all to occur within the next 30 years. The problem with this process proceeding very far involves fundamental physics: thermal dissipation of energy within the brain, slow-speed neural connections interfaced to ultra high-speed peripherals, and energy production and management in this enhanced human body.
It will soon become clear to future engineers that the biological support platform of the human body will frustrate their dreams of long-term growth and enhancement of a new man-machine composite. This will occur at about the same time that we give up our dreams of supporting a gigantic human population on a world so fragile that it quit being able to continuously support our human population about three hundred years ago. As the last gasp of humans to repeal climate change (a nice way of saying learning to live within our waste products) occurs near the end of this century, we will, in desperation, replicate ourselves as machines that can function in any conceivable environment, capable of utilizing any handy or convenient source of power. We will no longer be confined to consuming the other biological entities on the planet for energy, and needing to breathe unpolluted air, and consume unpolluted water. We won’t be robots, but we won’t be human as we know it today.
And, as we expand into the universe, we can do it at our leisure; no longer frantically searching for faster-than-light modes of transportation, or bouncing along through wormholes, even if we learn to create them. We will be biologically-enhanced electromechanical devices that enjoy drinking wine and having sex, that never get sick or break down, and retain a sense of humor while dodging space junk at 500 miles per second in our mule-like spaceships. I am convinced that all of this will transpire within the next two hundred years.
Image courtesy of Surveymonkey.com
