Yikes!
Yuval Noah Harari took the world by storm with his bestseller, Homo Sapiens 'a brief history of humankind'.
Four years later his second book hit the bookshelves - Homo Deus 'a brief history of tomorrow.' As much as I enjoyed Sapiens, it was Homo Deus which genuinely blew my socks off.
Homo Deus serves as a future prediction of humankind. Harari hypothesizes many different worlds in which our species could be living in. Some already feeling too close to home as technology develops at a mind-boggling rate today - take self-driving cars and artificial intelligence, for example.
However, out of all the dystopian theories and far-fetched ideas, I am most stunned by the thought of us humans living forever. There is already heavily invested research into such concepts, the billionaires and elite certainly have it on their mind. But how on earth could this be? The idea of living forever just seems so… wrong, unnatural? How could it possibly be…possible? Well, Harari has a few projections of his own.
Take your ordinary human and imagine the next step on the evolution ladder. What might that look like? Do you picture something like wings or extra limbs? Harari suggests that such a level up could result in humans becoming superhumans. Not with any superpowers per se, but there may as well be. Some call it a myth, but Harari likes to call it, a 'cyborg'. A cyborg could appear as simple and familiar as regular homo sapiens, with the same traits and behaviors. But the real magic would lie in the engineering. With technology reaching new heights, we could see a future where such intricate and precise modifications might increase our life expectancy - tenfold.
"cyborg engineering will go a step further, merging the organic body with non-organic devices such as bionic hands, artificial eyes, or millions of nano-robots that will navigate our bloodstream, diagnose problems and repair damage."
With this, cyborgs would never have a chance to get ill. Instead, they would be continually 'healthy' and never reencounter any disease. Would among the superhuman abilities indeed entail a super brain? You would hope so!
It's funny to picture a world like this; for starters, there are many external factors which could surely wipe out our species anyway, like our climate change crisis or even a comet. However, with centuries added to the life span, you'd think humankind would have enough time up their sleeve to unite in peace and fix the problems of the world. Or would this added power only continue to divide the inhabitants of planet Earth, creating a more dangerous environment? Either way, the world as we know it would resemble something of science fiction for sure.
"...a cyborg, in contrast, could exist in numerous places at the same time. A cyborg doctor could perform emergency surgeries in Tokyo, in Chicago and in a space station on mars, without ever leaving her Stockholm office. She will only need a fast internet connection and a few pairs of bionic eyes and hands."
Harari throws a spanner in the works with a different yet just as trippy conception. Who's to say we didn't evolve to this point many centuries ago? Are we already so deep in the cyborg abyss that we are merely taking a trip back in time?
"For all you know, the year might be 2216, and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a virtual world game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century."
I mean, virtual worlds? It's wild. Similar to the infinity of space or infinity in general, our minds cant comprehend such immeasurable ideas. But as Harari is one to lay the possibility on the table, my imaginative mind is loving it.
"Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero."