Life after Humans

If at this point in time, you happen to be young and a city-dwelling citizen of a rich, technologically advanced country, it’s unlikely that you will appreciate how truly distant the world of your grandparents is to your current existence. In some cases, your grandparents may have lived in homes with mud floors, without electricity, running water, antibiotics and of course, no internet. Not too long ago, your relatives may have grown their own food and made their own clothes. Many of the grandparents of which we speak, born around the World War II era, are currently engaged in knee and hip replacement surgery, cataract operations, organ transplants - and with an access to pharmaceuticals with properties that would have been astonishing not too long ago.

What will the future hold for someone who is 10 years old today? One possible vision of life after the next hundred years is described by a group of people who believe that the concept of being ‘human’ is about to become a cloudy issue. These are the posthumanists.

The basic idea of a posthuman is someone who once was a human – or one of their ancestors was a human – but this future person has now modified themselves to the point where they are not quite the same as we are today.

What would such a person be like? In which ways could an individual modify themselves so that they would become ‘different’ than human?

Some of the ways in which the idea of human-ness is changing are already with us: moving slowly but present nonetheless. For example, knee and hip surgery and artificial organs – these are clearly not ‘parts of us’, yet we use them as replacements for organs that have been damaged or failed. In the future, replacement parts grown through nanotechnology may lead to even better mechanical replacements that we can produce at this time. Further in the future, biology and nanotechnology together may produce replacement organs which are indistinguishable from the original – but young and healthy. Continuing on further, there is no necessity to stop at the elements of the body which we currently view as ‘hardware’ – parts of the brain as they are fail or are injured can be replaced.

This, of course, opens up a very interesting debate. At what point does a person stop being a ‘human’ – or even, at which point does a person stop being ‘themselves?’