When I think about the evolution of life on our planet, it amazes me what and how life has become the way it is today. I mean every living thing on the planet can be traced back to that one single celled organism that somehow ‘came to life’ when the right elements came together.
Over billions of years, life became multi-cellular, more complex and evolved into millions of different species all co-existing on the same planet. We humans are the result of that same evolution process also.
For these billions of years, mother nature has been in charge and has done a marvellous job of diversifying life so much through the process of evolution, even creating better versions of the same species over generations.
But for the first time ever, things will begin to change now. And that will be possible because of one species and what it possesses. Us and our intelligence. Thanks to it, we could begin taking our evolution, into our own hands.
Hacking Life Itself
You see, I was watching this movie the other day called “Lucy” starring Scarlett Johansson. The whole movie was about how she began using more and more of her brainpower and started gaining access to supernatural abilities and to “life” itself and in the end, she sort of gets assimilated into the fabric of universe itself.
This made me think a lot. What if we humans evolve into something that is perhaps not physical in nature? Yes, I know, that sounds really sci-fi and something that is not possible according to current technology. And that’s right!
Still, who knows what our technology a few hundred years down the road will enable us to do. We are already getting better and better at genetic modification that already allow us to make a lot of changes to our very building blocks.
As time progresses, biotechnology could allow us to have full power over our own bodies and the very evolution of our species, enabling us to choose any direction we so desired.
A Glimpse of A Possible Future?
I have talked about consciousness and uploading our consciousness to the cloud before, but the movie kind of convinced me that it could indeed be the ultimate destination for us as a species. Slowly, we humans could become more comfortable with being connected to the internet at a biological level.
I mean, Elon Musk’s NeuralNet is already researching connecting our brains to AI and as an extension to the internet itself. Over hundreds of years, it doesn’t sound far-fetched to me to be able to do that with consciousness itself.
That would sort of make us immortal and such a life is actually pretty unimaginable right now. Living as a consciousness in a virtual environment of our choosing forever? Yup, scarily sci-fi, and yet, future humans might actually go that route! Things change a lot over the course of time.
Another interesting point is that, alien beings in different parts of the universe might have already reached that state as well. Maybe that’s why we haven’t found signs of any. They are all non-physical. Are all intelligent species destined for this fate?