Sir Martin Rees believes that colonizing Mars may very well include ‘bio-modification and cyborg techniques’.
Royal Astronomer Sir Martin Rees has predicted that colonizing Mars will create a distinctly “new species” of humans in the future, which he has suggested will be a natural byproduct of “post-human evolution.”
As the Daily Mail reports, the Royal Society president has also stated that this new species of humans may very well include “bio-modification and cyborg techniques,” and personally believes that the first humans to build a colony on Mars will almost certainly be “thrill-seeking adventurers rather than normal people.”
Rees has written a new book called On The Future in which he analyzes life on Earth for humans and what may happen when colonization of the Red Planet eventually begins. However, unlike Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others, he doesn’t believe that heading to Mars is the right solution for overpopulation on Earth. But what is missing from this argument is that individuals like Musk, while trying to get us to Mars, are also working extremely hard to make life on Earth more stable in the future for the humans that are here with companies like Tesla that aren’t reliant on fossil fuels.
“There is the idea that we should despair and evacuate this planet and go somewhere else. That’s a dangerous delusion. I know it’s been promoted by Elon Musk and also by my late colleague Stephen Hawking, but I think there’s no Planet B. The world’s problems can’t be solved by escaping from the world. They’ve got to be tackled here.”
Rees has concluded that while humans are almost certain to colonize Mars in the future, his theory is that this will be a migration of only select individuals rather than a large-scale migration.
When it comes to the actual colonization process, Sir Martin Rees also suggested that this is not something that will come from space agencies like NASA but will instead be conducted by private companies like SpaceX. And with all of the work that will go into colonizing Mars, humans will need to adapt in whatever way possible, which may include the use of machines that they will be tied to in some manner, leading to the creation of a completely new type of human in the distant future.
“They will have every incentive to use bio-modification and maybe cyborg techniques — linking to electronic machines — to adapt to their alien environment. They will quite quickly become like a new species. The key question is to what extent it will be flesh-and-blood, organic intelligence and to what extent it will be electronic.”
Whether the prediction of Rees comes true and humans eventually turn into a new species of cyborg humans after colonizing Mars is impossible to say, but it is certainly likely that humans living on other planets will need to modify themselves in ways that would be unnecessary for survival here on Earth.
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