Rees: We Should Take the ‘Posthuman’ Era Seriously

Public discourse on very long-term planning is riddled with inconsistencies. Mostly we discount the future very heavily

Indeed – the source of many problems at the the society/global level; also at the individual level, although here “future” is a shorter time period as on the global level of course.

In particular, we need to keep our minds open — or at least ajar — to the possibility that humans themselves could change drastically within a few centuries.

That sounds very pessimistic to me – if it doesn’t happen by the end of the century I would be surprised (the transhuman step is beginning today: cochlear implants, neuroprosthetics etc etc)

It seems absurd to regard humans as the culmination of the evolutionary tree. Any creatures witnessing the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence won’t be human — they could be as different from us as we are from slime mould.

Indeed, it’s not even clear for how long our descendants would remain distinctively ‘human’. Darwin himself noted that “not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity”. Our own species will surely change and diversify faster than any predecessor

I think the above quotes highlight one of the most important insights which have not yet made it into public thought and discussion.

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Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why.

Spread the word : Article : Nature

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Genetic Engineering – Synthetic Biology – Genes and Heredity – Cloning – Biology – Science – New York Times

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