From The Maze Where Realities Converge
Transhumanism is the altering of humanity into something higher by technological means. In the future, we will see genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biochemistry, and God knows what else being applied to alter the physical structure of the human brain and the human body. This will give us superpowers, make us immune to disease (maybe even immortal), expand consciousness and intelligence exponentially, and open doors to new possibilities for human acheivement. Eritis sicut dii - Ye shall be as gods!
Natural selection has taken us this far, but it's no longer cutting the mustard. Someone who is born blind, for example, might well survive and reproduce successfully in today's world, so the force of natural selection is no longer causing evolution. For man to continue to evolve, he must take matters into his own hands. Artificial evolution will be exponentially faster and more insane than natural evolution. The first generation of transhumans will be designed by humans, but the second generation will be designed by more advanced, more intelligent designers, and so on, with the rate of progreess increasing exponentially. See The singularity for more on this principle. Projexions from current statistix show these trends coming to full fruition by 2030.
The world nowadays suffers from a serious deficit, not of food or energy or squirrel-fur, but of intelligence. Because we humans are not very intelligent, we consistently fuck up much of the basic running of Spaceship Earth. We need to be guided by intelligence of a higher order than any brain is currently capable of. Aleister Crowley has suggested one way of doing this; another is to improve human cognition by technological means.
Nor, of course, are we as happy as we should be. MDMA is proof that we are capable of experiencing enormous joy without losing motivation or reason. We need to find a more sustainable means of producing this sort of joy.
Transhumanist technologies
We already have nootropic drugs that can add ten or twenty points to a person's I.Q. What level of intelligence do you think we be normal in thirty years? And how will such an explosion in intelligence effect politics, business, economics, art, science, music?
Genetic engineering is really where it's at. The human genome has been now been fully mapped. We need to identify the genetic/chemical correlates of genius, creativity, talent, immunity, happiness, health etc. Geneticists have created mice that live longer and are stronger, fitter and deadlier than regular mice. Once genes have been identified, switching them on is comparatively easy, and it is possible to change the genetic structure of adults as well as developing babies.
Cancer cells do not age - did you know that? They produce telomerase, which allows cells to reproduce and reproduce indefinitely. That's one of the reasons cancer can spread so rapidly. Normal cells have a gene that inhibits telomerase produxion; this gene is inactive in cancer cells. If we could use genetix to safely replicate the reproductive capacity of cancer cells in healthy cells, we would basically have found a cure for aging.
We can expect that within the next few dacades, genetic engineering will be used to enlarge the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems (which will make it a bit like being on ecstasy the whole time), an abolish certain unpleasant neural circuits.
The possibilities of nanotechnology in transhumanism are particularly interesting. In the The Future, there will be tiny robots swimming in your bloodstream, diagnosing diseases, destroying foreign bodies, balancing chemical ratios and performing the functions of biological cells more efficiently. Scientists have already invented artificial red blood cells that carry oxygen more efficiently that those biological evolution has designed for us. It has been calculated that if you replaced just 10% of your red blood cells with these robotic equivalents, you could sprint at full throttle for a quarter of an hour, or spend four hours underwater. Nanobots controlling insulin-release have been used to cure type-I diabetes in mice.
Our understanding of neural networks, of the software our brain runs on, is growing at an explosive rate. 15 of the 300ish proccessing modules of the brain have been pretty accurately replicated on computers. Ray Kurzweil has predicted that we will have fully mapped the brain by the 2020s. If we can understand the patterns of neural proccessing, we can replicate them technologically, or create improved versions of them to implant inside the skull. The applications of this merging of neurology and technology are unlimited: we are talking about the human mind being capable of all the feats of memory, analysis, communication and perception that computers can do (and not the computers of today, but the computers of the 2020s, which are predicted to be about 10,000 times faster).