Jim Baen's Universe

NonFiction articles

Transhumanism's Universal Success is Unavoidable

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Every goal of transhumanism will be achieved. This is not a possibility, but an inevitability. This achievement will be accomplished with or without the encouragement of transhumanists. Even if tomorrow at noon every person on earth who claims to be, or secretly believes themself to be, a transhumanist were to fall over dead success would still be guaranteed. There is nothing short of the fall of civilization or the wholesale abandonment of the scientific method that can prevent this.

The reason is a simple as it is non-obvious.

Every human alive today, as well as every human who has ever lived, is or was a transhuman. The philosophy we call transhumnaism is so deeply integrated into the thoughts and desires and behaviors of our species that we are inseparable from it. For a human to abandon the transhuman philosophy would be to abandon their humanness. We are not just devout in our adherence to it; it is part of what makes us human. We are it, and it is us; and the two can never be separated.

To be as clear as possible it might be wise at this point to offer a definition as to just what this mysterious, and supposedly new, philosophy is all about. One good place to look for this is the World Transhumanist Association. The WTA describes itself on it's webpage as An international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. In other words, we want people to be better than well.

While there are many flavors and nuances of transhumanism, the phrase "Better Than Well" summarizes them all. Your doctor's goal is for you to be well; a transhumanist's goal is for you to be even better than that.

The principal method of becoming Better Than Well is expected to be through technological augmentation. And so "Augmentation" has become another central concept. Transhumanists believe that it is not only increasingly possible but also increasingly desirable for people to augment themselves. These augmentations are generally envisioned in the near future as being worn mostly on the outside of the body, just as we wear hats and clothing today; but in the far future as being worn to an increasing degree inside the body, as we wear pacemakers and artificial heart valves today.

The ultimate expectation of augmentation is to provide people with abilities that humans have never before had, such as the ability to see in X-rays, or infrared, or ultraviolet, or even sound waves like bats and dolphins; the ability to feel magnetic fields like migrating birds, and to hear ultrasonic sounds like dogs and cats. Some transhumanists (including myself) want to read WebPages and the entire internet inside their mind's eye without using a computer at all. If this is achieved then exchanging email and cell phone calls will also be possible from within the mind without using any outside device, and without any nearby person being able to detect that these things are being done. (One more thing for teachers to lament, since half the students will be chatting on the phone or playing video games while pretending to listen to the lecture.)

Like all beliefs that are universally entwined in our nature and fundamental to what makes us human, this philosophy of augmentation operates below our level of consciousness and so is difficult to observe, identify and examine. Yet history is filled with countless examples of its long-running domination of our behavior. Some of the most glaring examples are from recent times, but many have played themselves out over hundreds or even thousands of years.

For brevity this article will follow the historical path of only one: the magnifying glass.

As children we all toyed with them as a means of making little things appear bigger, but there are indications that this was not the invention’s original function. Instead it was the other thing we did with them. What's more the invention of the magnifying lens or magnifying glass is buried so far back in human history that its beginning is unknown. (see Wikipedia article about lenses)

A play by Aristophanes which was first performed in 423 BCE called The Clouds mentioned a burning glass. In it, a character named Strepsiades says, "Have you ever seen this stone in the chemist's shops, the beautiful and transparent one, from which they kindle fire?" The character playing Socrates then responds, "Do you mean the burning-glass?" (see Wikipedia article about the history of telescopes)

But that was only 24 centuries ago. Thousands of years earlier lenses were sufficiently understood that in 2600 BCE Egyptian sculptors used "double refracting rock crystal lens elements" to produce the optical illusion that the eyes of the statues of Rahotep and his wife Nofret were following all those who looked at the statues regardless of where the observers stood or moved. Constructed 46 centuries ago, these statues are currently located in the Louvre in Paris. (Here is a technical report on these eyes-that-follow)

Assyrians were also using lenses such as the Layard/Nimrud lens as early as 700 BCE.

Other ancient references include the encyclopedia of natural history by Pliny the Elder, first printed in 77 AD, which describes that burning-glasses were commonly known during the height of the Roman Empire. It also mentions what is possibly the first use of a corrective lens: Nero was known to watch the gladiatorial games through a concave-shaped emerald. The possibility that this was to correct for myopia was discussed in detail for The British Journal of Ophthalmology in their technical article Nero’s Emerald.

Seneca the Younger (3 BC—65 AD) described the magnifying effect of a glass globe filled with water. The Arabian mathematician Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn Al-Haitham), (965—1038 AD) wrote the first major explanation of how the lens of the human eye formed an image on the retina.

Between the 11th and 13th century, monks began