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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

How to Become the Engineers of Our Own Evolution

The "transhumanist" movement says better technology will enable you to replace more and more body parts—even your brain

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The reports regularly come in from around the world: U.S. engineers unveil a prototype bionic eye, Swedish surgeons replace a man’s cancerous trachea with a body part grown in a lab, and a British woman augments her sense of touch by implanting self-made magnetic sensors in her fingertips.

Adherents of “transhumanism”—a movement that seeks to transform Homo sapiens through tools like gene manipulation, “smart drugs” and nanomedicine—hail such developments as evidence that we are becoming the engineers of our own evolution. Enhanced humans might inject themselves with artificial, oxygen-carrying blood cells, enabling them to sprint for 15 minutes straight. They could live long enough to taste a slice of their own 250th birthday cake. Or they might abandon their bodies entirely, translating the neurons of their brains into a digital consciousness.


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-to-Become-the-Engineers-of-Our-Own-Evolution.html

2 comments:

  1. It is interesting how often it is entering the media of video games. I have now played two games in which in the end they offer you a choice, to condone or condemn transhumanism. They also make it so that the choice to be transhumanist seems to be the correct and best choice. The subtlety in it seems to be going away. We may soon see it more in the mainstream media, but I think that the idea has been started in this realm for a reason. Younger generations are more likely to embrace an idea, especially if it introduced in their media medium of choice. I wonder if the music industry will soon join the rally cry for including synthetics in the makeup of the human body.

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  2. It's the choice once offered in the Garden...the choice to be immortal..."you will not die..." -- many will choose the counterfeit, dissing the truth and believing the lie to their own destruction.

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