A while ago, I’d written about my fascination for lifestreaming, and the role it could play in storing our memories and giving it context. In fact memories and the possibility of losing them have always been food for thought for me. One memory from a long time back, when I was an avid reader of Doctor Who books, is of one of the Doctor’s villain sets – Cybermen – a fictional race of cyborgs. From Wikipedia
Cybermen were originally a wholly organic species of humanoids originating on Earth’s twin planet Mondas that began to implant more and more artificial parts into their bodies as a means of self-preservation. This led to the race becoming coldly logical and calculating, with emotions usually only shown when naked aggression was called for.
The connection. I saw an article recently on what has been called Homo Evolutis (original video here). Human beings have been the dominant species on the planet for a short while now, and as the author explains, there’s no guarantee that the current situation is a stable one. And in this context is seen the beginnings of speciation, in broad terms the evolution of our own species.
The author talks about three different tracks of speciation -prosthetics (from limbs to hearing aids and beyond), stem cell and tissue engineering (where we are reaching a stage when a single cell can be rebooted back to its original factory settings and can rebuild any part of our body, and lastly, a track to improve the brain. The author says that the last track will be the slowest to evolve, but the one with the maximum impact.
And these tracks would create a new race or races- in fact a prosthetic body part, a plastic surgery etc are all the common manifestations of this process. As technology becomes more advanced, it will become affordable to a lot more people. From a physical perspective, who wouldn’t like body parts whose wear and tear can be controlled, an end to pain and suffering. And it doesn’t stop there, because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…
We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality? How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?
until next time, a man made man….
The man.. the machine http://tinyurl.com/bkbl6f
..and on the blog today, The man, the machine https://manuscrypts.com/?p=1544 (no, no street hawk :p)
I’ve always considered human memory similar to a hard disk. Runs out of space after a while, since it has to store everything it sees.
btw, Asimov and Dan Simmons have humanity evolving into separate species on its own in the extended Foundation (Spacers and non Spacers) and Hyperion Cantos series. And it almost happened in real life 150,000 years ago, when two strands of humanity was isolated in E & W Africa and Southern Africa for 100,000 years
I am not sure if we can call such a development ‘progress’. It will only be known when things are gauged across time.
Flip side being just like we’d never know what and how it is to literally hunt for food, the “artificial limb man” would never really know what it is to experience the finer elements of life as we do perhaps?
Arby: dont know about Dan Simmons, well versed with Asimov though.. the africa tale is very interesting!!
rads: progress is so relative and subjective that it really can’t be judged at all… and we’d think hunting for food would be such a tedious thing, maybe it wasnt 🙂