Transhumanism and posthumanism

Transhumanism goes beyond simply crushing death and aims to allow humans to overtake the limitations of their bodies through technology. Slow Darwinian evolution, working through millennia, has very little chance to compete with Moores law in terms of speed (the yearly doubling of computing capacities) and there is a very good chance that technology could allow the human kind to evolve faster than natural selection would.

This rapid change in the transhumanist community will probably give birth to a new humanity which is difficult to imagine today much like it would have been challenging for Turings contemporaries in the Second World War to picture the computing power and capacities of todays smartphones, just sixty years down the road.

As previously stated, predicting and even picturing the result of exponential change through time can be challenging. Todays transhumanists will first look just like the next person, before things fire up exponentially. Besides the prospect of a limitless lifespan, yours truly cannot tell you what other changes might have occurred with your regular transhuman two centuries from now (but maybe we can bring it up again then.)

Some scientists believe that people alive today could end up living for a thousand years a figure commonly used because of its striking effect, and because it is a fair estimate of a regular French person spared by the effects of aging.

On that matter, no scientist can give a definite answer as of today unless Calico, Googles eternal life pet project, or any company versed in biotechnologies are keeping secrets from you. However, just like some organisms dont age because their DNA repair system doesnt get damaged with time, I assume that in the future, humanity will unveil aging mechanisms and stop them. Our 21st century is undergoing such technological convergence and acceleration that it could one day bust open the locks that keep us from living a forever healthy, limitless life. This convergence of technologies is called NBIC convergence (Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, IT, Cognitive science).

As for the timing, however, it will be a question of will, financial means and serendipity.

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Transhumanism - Work for human longevity