Rapture. A raucous tour of cloning, Transhumanism and the new era of immortality

Eric Mahleb
yume.co.uk
April 23, 2007

Recently, at work, I mentioned that I felt that we humans are living at the most exciting time of our history in terms of changes, opportunities and dangers. The reply was that surely there have been many other periods before when humanity faced major opportunities and challenges and managed to continue moving up the ladder of moral and technological progress.

I have since read Brian Alexander’s Rapture, and I am now convinced that, indeed, Humanity has never been confronted with such possibilities, and in the process, with such risks and perils. We, the people of this Earth, are about to redefine the meaning of human nature (if such a meaning ever truly existed in the first place). We are about to take control of our own evolution.

Visions of Utopia have been around at least since the days of Plato’s Republic, gaining momentum in 1516 and 1627 with the publications of Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, and finding a new energy throughout the end of the 19th century and the early stages of the 20th, at a time when the promises of the industrial revolution filled people’s heads with dreams and a hunger for the possibilities of the future.

But this thirst for the unknown and the merits of technology soon lost ground to the emergence of a new way of looking at the future. The dystopian vision, embodied by Orwell’s 1948 novel, 1984 (Huxley’s Brave New World is naturally also often cited but most people are unaware of the fact that Huxley was actually fascinated by technology and later fully embraced it, especially its mind-enhancing possibilities), became commonplace in the second half of the 20th century, leading humanity towards an uncertain and hesitant relationship with technology (see Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema).

But while the masses entered this period of technological ambivalence, small groups resisted the uncertainty and continued to embrace the future and its wonders. Scientists, Sci-Fi writers, dreamers and visionaries, architects and designers, politicians, mad or sane, and regular people fed up with what they saw as the imperfection and limitations of the human body and mind, marched fearlessly towards the unknown, towards the next step in human evolution. From these various groups evolved the ideology of Transhumanism and Extropism, the movements that want to free the human race, or rather, only its willing participants, of its limitations.

In Rapture, Brian Alexander offers an entertaining and accessible look at history and development of genetic engineering and at the convergence of the Transhumanist movement with ‘traditional’ science. For many years, scientists have tried to disassociate themselves from what has been perceived by many as the extravagant rants of a few delusional individuals whose only purpose is to become immortal übermensch. Yet, in the past 15-20 years, words such as cloning, gene therapy, designer babies, artificial intelligence, stem cells, and nanotechnology have taken their place in the everyday language of millions of people. And many scientists are no longer afraid to state that they are working on ways to stop disease, aging, death, and on how to improve human performance and appearance. Whether you are against them or for them, these technologies are slowly becoming part of our lives. And they promise to take us to a new level of evolution and to what some are calling the Transcendence, a new level of global consciousness that has its roots, at least for many Transhumanists, in the works of the French monk, Pierre Theilhard de Chardin.

Parallel to the convergence of science and transhumanism is the convergence of the four main areas of technological development that promise to redefine humanity. They are called the GRIN technologies and consist of Genetics, Robotic & Cognitive, Information Systems and Nanotechnology. Through the increasing pace of expansion and growth of these technologies, which, according to transhumanists like Vernor Vinge, Kay Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, and many others, will result in the next 20 years in the Singularity, the point at which technological development will happen so fast and exponentially, that, really, almost anything will be possible, we can expect, for example, the following to take place:

- Life span is extended to 150 years and increasing continuously thereafter, leading in the near future to immortality

- Believers in Cryonics who have had either their heads ($50,000) or entire body ($150,000) frozen or vitrified in the past 7 years or so, will have a chance to be reborn thanks to the power of nanotechnology in your veins and cells

- The human body will be enhanced to be rid of all diseases, organs will be re-grown, muscles will be stronger, lungs more powerful, joints will flex whichever way is convenient, beauty will be a given…until the body is no longer the body as it is known today…until the body is replaced by something else or is no longer needed…

- The cognitive powers of the brain will be augmented, memory and processing power increased, mood will be altered so that negative emotions can be avoided if needed, consciousness will be amplified through connections to others via technology and artificial intelligence

- Reality will be altered as ‘humans’ learn to evolve in non-physical spaces

There is a counter movement, naturally, that tries to warn humanity of the perils of such a direction. Francis Fukuyama, Leon Kass, Bill Joy, Christian neo-bio-cons and other bio-Luddites, and even the recent film The Fountain, fear for the human race and warn of potential catastrophes and of the end of what makes us human. For them, disease, sadness, death, all are part of our human nature. Try telling this to someone whose son or daughter are in a wheelchair or were born with an incurable disease that will prevent them from living past the age 30. The future can be scary, but the future is inevitable. Part of our ‘nature’ is to continuously move towards it, good or bad. I am prepared.

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