Veeky Forums I'm trying to work on a post human setting with competing branches of human evolution, be they natural or artificial. Tell me what are your ideal visions for human evolution and what do you think are likely paths we will take
Pic sort of related, looking for more ideas then just all tomorrow's
No organics!
Well one obvious route is transhumanism. The flesh is weak so stick your brain, or at least a copy of your brain's data, into a robotic body.
Thats... not evolution
check out Fragged Empires. awesomeness.
That's literally what transhumanism is, though: artificial evolution through technology.
Honestly this is also the most realistic option, also.
I like to look at dog breeds for inspiration about this stuff.
Contrary to what transumanist propaganda claims, neither flash-freezing yourself alive, nore cutting yourself into waifers of flesh will grant you immortality.
How soft can our sci-fi go for this?
Humans are extremely adaptive, and thanks to our ability to fashion tools, weapons, clothes, and more recently machinery and other advanced technology to help us survive in hostile environments, even in the case of a complete collapse of civilisation worldwide, it's unlikely that humans would evolve into all kinds of strange new shapes and forms. There would probably be more selection for health, physical fitness, and inventiveness, but this is probably not what you have in mind.
If you look at the genetic history of Tibetans, they took gene variants that allow them to live at high altitudes from a previous people who lived there, and whom they absorbed; likewise with some Ethiopian highlanders. My point is that humans in extreme environments are already well-adapted to them, and they pass these on to other humans who might conquer and slowly replace them.
Rather, look at what selective pressures culture and society places on people. An open society without incest breeds people who must adapt to cooperating with unrelated neighbours, while in a society with a lot of inbreeding, nepotism towards the clan would be rewarded.
You could extrapolate from current trajectories, working out how things like the welfare state, declining and differing birthrates, or affirmative action reward certain traits and inhibit others.
If that is too mundane for you, go for the transhumanist way and consider how people would adapt to the advances of technology, which would relax certain selective pressures by compensating for low fitness.
>a copy of your brain's data
Fucks me up every time I think about it
You should play Soma sometime.
Sort of a cyberpunk space opera, ftl is limited but existant, the light Is at the end of the tunnel so to speak
Wow thank you. It looks brilliant
Why?
I've only seen screenshots and the trailer, but I like the visuals. Bioshock + Dead Space + creepy depressing robots.
Sorry, I'm an idiot that can't read. It's just the thought of it being an exact copy of you. It thinks the same and acts the same, it even believes (as much as a robot can) it is you. But it's not. It mimics emotions it can't possibly feel and remembers things that never happened to it. And everyone would treat it like it's you, but you're dead.
Bump
Admit it OP you were waiting for someone to mention futas
Sorry to shoot you and possible OP down, but such a form of hermaphrodite would of functional provide an unstable breeding population, easily breeding being resource capacity and lacking anyone in a reproductivly semi disposable role to act as the front lines, also I'd suspect hormonal imbalances up the ass
>if functional
>beyond resource
And my spelling is crap too, sorry
Gene terapy or Gene splicing? But that can turn really fetish if you aren't carefull.
It would depend what caused these human races to evolve in different ways. The most i can think of is adaptation to a extreme enviroment for a long period of time or usage of tech be it bio-tech or normal technology and how each society or human group is willing to change themselfs.
Look up the book "After Man"
And yet you would step in a teleporter pad knowing that the end result would be the same, except instead of a roboclone it'd be a laserclone.
Not that user, but I really hope we get a Ship of Theseus robot duplication method running in my lifetime. I enjoy maintaining an unbroken consciousness.
Who said he would? I wouldn't use a teleporter for shit unless they showed it worked on wormholes or something, rather than lightspeed 3D printing.
Posthumans presumably evolve in a way that makes them more suitable in their environment. What is the world like? Are there multiple ecosystems/biomes?
You can give a chick a dick without making them a hermaphrodite.
But OP is looking for weirder things.
We all regress into mindlessness from our technology. Primarily from the internet.
Considering car crashes are one of the leading cause of deaths...
No, I definitely wouldn't. You don't teleport, you die and a copy of you is made somewhere else. The copy on the other end would have your memories of getting in the teleporter and would think they were the same person. This is why it fucks me up
I don't think humans will change all that much to be quite honest.
The only thing that will change is probably the way we reproduce new humans.
Although if we DO evolve into something else it will probably be at a industrial scale.
Ever gone to sleep? Yesterday you has died and so did countless other you's.
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Don't you have some ruins to haunt?
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All of these problems can be fairly easily overcome by technology.
To prevent breeding past resource capacity, birth control could be used.
Nobody needs to be disposable when you have robotic servitors, and the technology to grow children in vats.
The hormonal system would probably be reworked and regulated by either biotech or cybernetics.
How's that then?
When biotech and cybernetics become sufficiently advanced, they become absolutely indistinguishable from biological or technological systems. Or at least that's what I hope would happen.
Different types of brain mods.
Imagine humans who can tune their emotions and have networked this with social media. Turn up determination and focus during work, turn up openness at the club, etc.
With sufficiently low lag, sub-species could evolve that fuse consciousnesses into a single mind. Other people might turn off the safeguards and wirehead themselves into addicts, or fanatic saints.
Or imagine a group of uploaded minds that tries to colonize time scales, instead of entering space or waiting for a distant future. Compressing themselves into denser computers with ever-less lag, until any communications farther than a few kilometers take subjective days.
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Your identity is a mere spook.
>Nobody needs to be disposable when you have robotic servitors, and the technology to grow children in vats.
Isn't that backwards? If you have robots and vats, Malthus' predictions are no longer wrong.
Today, humans have economic value. If they can be mass-produced (though they may still have spiritual or political value) their economic value is going to crash, and that's a big source of value in general.
I'm not sure what you mean? As long as I'm in one piece my identity is as much a part of me as my skin or liver.
>Everyone is John.pdf
Transhuman fetishists are so scared of death they'll kill themselves to avoid it.
In the timeline this comic takes place in, the original humanity was been wiped out, the transhumans that evolved from original humanity either went extinct as well or have evolved and remained isolated in the distant fringes of the galaxy for so long they don't see themselves as "humans" anymore, the only remnants of original humanity are their cloned slaves, their psionic brain mother and brain father overseers and ancient super tech littered throughout the galaxy.
The babel mothers are one example of these transhumans aliens.
You aren't in one piece.
In spacetime, you're cut into planck instants.
Chemically, every atom is swapped out every ~7 years.
Physically, each atom is mathematically interchangable.
Biologically, your consciousness turns off completely under general anesthesia; and arguably some kinds of sleep as well.
Continuity is more like software version control than a ship of theseus. Your clone is more "you" than you 10 years ago.
and apparently Buddhist nihilism seems to be popular trend in transhumanist sci-fi
Orions arm has plenty of interesting transhuman clades.
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What was, will be. What will be, was.
Morlocks and Eloi.
Read H.G. Wells, 'The Time Machine'
what comic is this?
Prophet Issue 21 to 45
Prophet Earthwar issue 1 to 6
And Prophet Strikefule volume 1 and 2
We just need to get Destiny-level tech where they manage scientifically isolate the soul.
There was a sci-fi short story from mid 2000s, Green Leopard Plague, that kind of touched on transhumanism. I think it won a Nebula award or something.
In short, sometime in 21st century a rogue scientist releases a modified human papiloma virus that allows affected humans to utilize photosynthesis to feed. Just standing in the sun for a few hours would generate a thousand or so calories, making starvation a lot less of an issue. The entire societal order changes as people no longer need to work to survive and cannot be herded towards causes so easily.
In the farther future, it leads to a pretty weird post-scarcity post-human existence where even murder isn't a big deal because people can be restored from a back-up.
>planck instants.
So we exist in multiple simultaneous layers of spacetime?
Or only in one.
Not the guy you're responding to, but it has the best story in any game I've ever played.
Your consciousness is a shadow over a cave's wall.
Is it? Or is it an extension into the noosphere, like a geosphere and a biosphere.
The opposite. Each point 'you' exist at in time and space is separate. There's no simultaneity.
Buddhist nihilism is popular now because it's the closest to reality as we know it, especially after computational neuroscience and the fMRI.
Immortality is a dualist illusion. There's no continuity, so anything you do is simply copying or deleting, and copying your brain can't save you from death.
Bump for interest
bump
I like the idea of completely virtual post-humans. It's cool aesthetics, but it also really limits any actual interesting interaction with them. Consider Virtual Endless from Endless Space, or that weird ship from Mass Effect (2 or 3, I think?) inhabited by purely virtualized aliens. Once you ascend into that kind of existence, you just create your own reality so you don't really interact with the rest of the universe.
It makes for a pretty good excuse to have strange pre-cursor ruins or finding a forgotten bank of servers holding millions of sentient beings, each experiencing their own personal reality.
>Late-Proto-Imperial psionic emperor guy has big buck teeth, a thin moustache and big goofy glasses
Can't unsee.
Meh. As long as no information is lost, it's the same to all observers and the dead are non-observers.
Most of what I think and do is forgotten by myself anyway. My present self is fleeting, my self-identity is a construction by my present self.
kek
SMBC picked up that last concept. Made a comic about how humans essentially achieved subjective immortality and our remains were discovered by an alien: a tombstone that conveys our apologies for not sticking around.
Depends on what we're trying to do. Obvious stuff is things like eradicating genetic diseases, optimizing things like muscle growth, bone density, etc. More specialized things could be done for particular environments.
If they're so fuck they grow beyond resource capacity (like mankind in any Age if Empires game) then their main trait will be explorers, warriors and terraformers. Like mankind in any RTs game. Ever.
The other solution would be to make them Panda-tier of shy and uninterested.
Either way, Futas confirmed as ultimate evolutionary step.
That's no dick, it's a crotchtit
This, there's probably at least one race of superhuman genetically engineered demigods.
Or at least they consider themselves as such.
Man, everything can always be improved. I'll take that to heart.
If you mean specific organisms, I imagine a suit of armor covered with arms and techno gadgets, with only a thin web of nerves covering the inside of the suit like spiderwebs. That's all the organics left of humanity in the robotic suit, just nerves supplied energy by a nutritive solution coating the webs. You could take off one arm and see the nerve webs, dripping with the solution coating the interior, nothing resembling a 20th century human, let a lone a chordate.
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bump
Dolphinoplasty.
>Tusk (2014)
That's walroplasty you pleb
For Earth humans, discounting any genetic manipulation, would most likely lead down a more predictable path: taller, smaller mouth/jaw, flatter faces and noses, larger eyes, longer fingers, heads that are more oval shaped, less hair.
Some bonuses could include:
Lighter or darker skin depending on the conditions of Earth and how much sunlight there is, Larger lungs, smaller but more efficient organs, more dense bones, new eye colors, new hair colors.
Personally, I think something like the hiveminds from echopraxia is the most likely forwards 'evolution' of mankind.
Take Elon Musk's prospect of high throughput neural interfaces, and then just wire a few hundred people together this way. Previous animal studies have shown that this rapidly results in dramatically improved cooperation and intuitive load sharing protocols. Abruptly, there is now an individual from the masses. It is EXTREMELY effective at any physical or intellectual task compared to a human, and unlike any kind of post-human beep boop bullshit, it can replenish and expand itself with a bare minimum of cost, since humans are a plentiful resource, and even a self-replicating one at that.
>Buddhist nihilism is popular now because it's the closest to reality as we know it, especially after computational neuroscience and the fMRI.
It really isn't. Anyone who believes that bought japanese Buddhist heretic propaganda from a hundred years ago hook line and sinker.
That's pretty much Blame!, if I recall correctly, what with the two distinct factions of posthuman races bitch-fitting at eachother. Check out Blame!.
In what way is that line of thought even remotely Buddhist? Buddhism is fundamentally phenomenalist even without the soul. You're just thinking materialistic nihilism. There is some Zen thought that borders on that, but I'd hardly say that approaches the materialism you're referencing.