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Is It Time For A Genetically Engineered Superman?
As bio-engineers explore how to design our way out of human limitations, Carl Frankelasks if we’re poised on the threshold of the ultimate upgrade – to humanity itself.
Hugh Herr lost both his legs below the knee as a teenager when a rock-climbing trip went awry. If you’re thinking “Poor man, how does he manage?”, you might want to let go of that. Herr gets along just fine.
The director of a bionics research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Herr develops high-tech prosthetic devices that level the playing field for amputees. Or even tilts it their way. He amasses legs the way most people buy shoes. He has one set of prosthetics for walking, a longer set for jogging and multiple pairs of climbing legs, including one that stretches him to over seven feet tall and another with built-in aluminum claws for Spiderman-like gripping. “I’m able to climb at a more advanced level with artificial limbs. I view [them] as an opportunity, a palette from which to create,” he told a TED audience before closing his speech with some zesty Irish dancing.
And then there’s the stunning Aimee Mullins, a gifted athlete and model (oh, and double amputee) who walked the London runway in 1999 for fashion designer Alexander McQueen wearing hand-carved wooden prosthetic legs with integrated boots.
Herr and Mullins aren’t just extraordinary people: they’re walking, climbing, sashaying provocations to conventional notions about disability. They invite us to imagine a time, not far away, when high technology and the physical body are married in ways that endow people with entirely new capabilities. Super-abilities, really – the stuff dreams and comic books are made of.
With their elegant artificial appendages, Herr and Mullins dramatically embody the emergence of what Steve Fuller, a professor at the University of Warwick, calls Humanity 2.0: “an understanding of the human condition that no longer takes the ‘normal human body’ as given.” The performance artist Stelarc puts it this way: “We can no longer think of the body as simplistically bound by its skin and containing a single self… We are very much a meat, metal and software system now.” In his work he makes this point dramatically, for instance with a cell-cultivated ear, surgically implanted onto his left arm, that for a time had a built-in microphone and transmitted what it ‘heard’ wirelessly to the Internet.
People as discrete flesh-sacks of bones and body organs? That’s so … yesterday. Already, human augmentation is crossing over into sci-fi territory. What the imagination can conceive, technology is increasingly able to deliver.
So: want to have Superman-like strength? The military is developing exoskeletons that strap onto soldier’s bodies and do the heavy lifting, literally. Soldiers in the field typically tote upwards of 100 pounds on their backs. Strap-on exoskeletons could make this vastly less stressful while also reducing the back injuries that are endemic in the army. Want to stave off the cognitive deficits caused by too little sleep? Or how about getting by on four hours a night? Something called transcranial magnetic stimulation can help you do that. Or maybe you’d like to move objects using only the power of your mind? It’s possible – and you don’t have to be Uri Geller. In 2011, the Guinness Book of World Records issued an award to the NeuroSky MindWave, a brainwave reader, for the “heaviest machine moved using a brain control interface.” The award-winning team used such a method to steer an industrial crane that hoisted a Volkswagen off the ground.
This is seriously mind-bending stuff – and other organs are getting involved, too. Soon to come, from the same company that brought you the MindWave: an electrocardiogram chip that lets you control your electronic devices using your heart energy. That’s right, your mobile will feel the love.
And this is just the beginning. As progress accelerates across materials science, robotics, neuroscience, biology, artificial intelligence, genomics and a host of other disciplines, human capabilities can be expected to emerge that seem utterly fantastical today.
Read more here: http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/6923
Problem is, all these enhancements will not be used for improving the lives of normal people, this technology already has been hijacked & dominated by the financial elite & PTB. They introduce enough so we think it’s ‘progress’ but really they are in the midst of building a ‘barless prison’ with technology & what we ever get in the public domain is 100′s of years behind the alien tech they have. They will create, or attempt to create a super elite, whilst the rest of us poor paupers will be the slave race they look down on, since we won’t be ‘enhanced’ like them. Don’t be naive. Look around you.