Suppose you were offered a photographic memory, perfect pitch, ultraviolet-spectrum vision, heightened disease resistance, customized skin and eye color, and a one-thousand-year life-expectancy. Would you accept? Now suppose you were told that by doing so you would cease to be human. Would this make you less willing to accept? If you’re like me, you’ll answer “Yes” to the first question and “No” to the second. I could stand the improvements, and if they make me more than “human,” so what? If you answer “Yes” to the first question but say that leaving humanness behind would actually make you more willing to accept, you may be a “transhumanist,” the new breed of perfectionists who aim at collective self-improvement through direct modification of “human nature.”

According to Nick Bostrom, a young philosopher at Oxford and a leading transhumanist:

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.1

Whereas humanists for centuries have settled for trying to perfect humanity, transhumanists want to transcend it. “Transhumanism has roots in secular humanist thinking, yet is more radical in that it promotes not only traditional means of improving human nature, such as education and cultural refinement, but also direct application of medicine and technology to overcome some of our basic biological limits.”

Examining a Probabilistic Doomsday Argument
Commentary

Is the sky falling? And if so, when? Even when they're baseless, constant reports about nuclear weapons proliferation, pandemic diseases and environmental catastrophes revive these perennial human questions and contribute to a feeling of unease.

So too did the recent passing of an asteroid almost 100 feet in diameter within 30,000 miles of the Earth. Such news stories make a recent abstract philosophical argument a bit more real.

Developed by a number of people including Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and Princeton physicist J. Richard Gott, the Doomsday Argument (at least one version of it) goes roughly like this.

By Nick Bostrom

Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed.