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First and foremost - there's an article over at the Washington Post which I think we should all read. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:
During the Depression, sickly Steve Rogers lived in poverty with his widowed mother, who died overworking herself to provide for her son, leaving him to survive as a delivery boy.
Alarmed by the rise of Nazism, Rogers decided to join the military but was deemed "too frail." After he begged to be accepted, Rogers was tapped for Operation Rebirth, given a "secret serum" and subjected to a rain of "vita-rays," according to the Encyclopedia of Superheroes. The weakling was reborn as Captain America, a comic book figure who could lift over a quarter of a ton and run 30 mph, with reflexes 10 times as fast as normal.
Nowadays, his treatment would be called a biotech workup.
Orphaned newsboy Billy Batson became the grown-up Captain Marvel with powers that included gaining super strength by saying "Shazam!" He could leap great distances and repel bullets with his body. In today's terms, Billy Batson is somebody who's got hold of the exoskeleton suit with similar attributes the U.S. Army is currently developing at MIT for $50 million.
[read the full text]
Now. Several questions I guess. Would you become ''transhuman'? What effect do you think that might have on the world? What effect would that have on you as a person, a human, a man, a woman, a queer etc. etc.
THere are some great quotes in the article: "The remaining human future is 25 years or 50 years," says Max More, president of the Extropy Institute, a pioneering explorer of the acceleration of technology and trans-humanism."
"In the near term, the world could divide up into three kinds of humans: the Enhanced, who embrace these opportunities, the Naturals, who have the technology available but who, like today's vegetarians, choose not to indulge for moral or aesthetic reasons, and the Rest -- those who lag behind, envying or despising these ever-increasing choices. Especially if the Enhanced can easily be recognized because of the way they look, or what they can do, this is a recipe for conflict that would make racial differences quaintly obsolete."
"There are three scenarios, says Peter Schwartz, chairman of the scenario planning firm Global Business Network. In the first, the secrets of human consciousness and the human brain elude us, and change is stately. In the second, incremental change continues to accelerate, aging is reversed, the revolution has occurred, and we are just trying to deal with the consequences. In the third, new intelligent species roam the Earth in 20 or 30 years, some of them mainly flesh and blood and some of them mainly not." |
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