How Awesome is the Future: Our exciting future
We have come a long way since our ancestors first humble experiments combining elemental natural resources in creating useful materials and using simple tools to facilitate various tasks.
They were constantly improving the way they were doing things, programming their genetic code for generations to come. We embraced their creative spirit. Today we have technologies so sophisticated that most of us cannot even begin to understand them, yet they do not satisfy our hunger for more.
What we have is just the beginning. Transhumanism is an intellectual movement that brings together technological optimists dreamers and doers, from different industrial sectors and various parts of the world, gathered around the promise of technology to extend and improve human lives beyond their biological limitations.
Recent breakthroughs in research and development as well as successes in the convergence of many exciting technologies justify the belief in that promise. Let us imagine you are an average human in not so distant future.
Your parents had decided to genetically modify your genome to make you physically better and much smarter than any human being that was living just a few decades ago.
Your life expectancy is around four hundred years, as genetic engineering reverses the effects of genes responsible for aging. Many diseases have been eliminated using different techniques of genetic manipulation.
However, because biological systems are chaotic and not all health risks could be avoided or predicted, you develop a disease. Your health-monitoring device provides you with an almost instantaneous notification accompanied by some general information about your condition. You are not concerned, as tiny robots or your genetically enhanced immune cells are already fixing the problem.
If their efforts are not successful after a certain amount of time you get a notification that it is probably a good idea to visit an expert for some of the more advanced treatments. Human physicians have has been replaced by advanced artificial intelligence that could provide you with a more in-depth understanding of your condition. It has been determined that you need urgent transplantation of a major organ.
All you need to do is 3D print required tissue compatible with your unique organism. The only thing remaining is surgery, but you are not worried, because robots perform difficult surgical procedures better than any human could. One of the most promising technologies to radically alter the human condition is certainly artificial general intelligence.
Contemporary artificial intelligence is already able to learn. As machine learning algorithms are promptly evolving, AI is constantly becoming more efficient in knowledge acquisition. It will not be long until it is capable of progressive self-enhancement.
Former technological progress has been accelerating, but fairly limited by the abilities of the human mind. However, after we reach AGI, the world will achieve a truly exponential rate of progress. The impact that the emergence of superintelligence will have on us and the universe is beyond the reach of our intellect.
Even though genetic engineering could greatly improve our intelligence, we would still be limited by our frail bodies. But, what if we could interbreed machines and biological organisms?In the future, you are super-intelligent as well.
There are microchips or tiny robots inside your body serving as an extension of your neocortex. These nanobots are connected to the cloud, providing you with access to the database of all human knowledge and computing power of many advanced machines. As all minds are connected to the same network, there is direct mind to mind communication.
You are also able to manipulate your environment to some extent because your mind is connected to the Internet of Things. Different kinds of nanorobots are circulating through your blood helping your immune cells in keeping you healthy.
In that way, nanotech is playing a huge role in fighting disease and promoting longevity. In just a few generations it could help humans achieve their everlasting dream of eternal life. The development of new materials created a whole new range of structures. With the addition of cheaper and more effective propulsion, humans have created reusable spacecraft and space elevators, which significantly lowered costs of transporting people and materials into space, leading to personal space travel and megascale engineering beyond the limits of our planet.
This allowed humans to enter the space colonization era. There are dozens of concepts for propulsion systems that seem achievable in upcoming decades. EM Drive, apparently providing thrust without propellant, already has prototypes that seem to work, even though the whole concept is pretty controversial in the scientific community.
Project Orion was a concept that would use nuclear energy in form of nuclear bomb explosions based on fission to provide the thrust. Project Daedalus later proposed the use of fusion but in a more sophisticated way, as it is cleaner and more effective. If we succeed to contain a fusion reaction shortly, this could be our best hope.
Antimatter propulsion drive is a concept of using annihilation of antimatter as propulsion, as it produces higher energy density than any other propellant we know of. The Alcubierre warp drive is a thought-provoking idea of faster-than-light travel achieved by shifting space itself around spacecraft so it could significantly cut distances it needs to cross.
The implementation of at least some of these technologies is a necessary step for us to take if we want to become a spacefaring civilization. As our environment is becoming more hostile being a spacefaring civilization is the only hope we have for the long-term survival of our species.