Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Transhumanism and the Third Frontier

For my Anthropology 101 class I was required to read an excerpt from Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods about American culture's changing relationship with nature. This particular chapter was about what he called the third frontier.

Basically, he stated that America has gone through two frontiers and each one changed how we interacted with nature, from direct utilitarianism during the first, to romantic attachment during the second, and now intellectual detachment during the third. He attributed the third frontier mainly to the rise of urbanism and suburbia, but that wasn't what intrigued me, it was the role of technology in this new frontier. As people become less personally attached to nature but know more about it, biotechnology is blurring the lines between humans and animals, and life-forms and machines. At least that is what he said.

Personally, I don't see why he's so concerned. So what if people have less of a connection to nature, it's because we are able to create our own environments and are reducing our need for nature every year. In a few decades it's likely that people will start living in arcologies, artificial ecologies/self-contained cities that will be even more isolated from nature than modern cities, and in a couple centuries we'll have colonies in outer space. As for the supposed lines dividing humanity from animals and machines, what lines? Humanity is nothing special really, we're just really smart social animals capable of using tools, if, for example wolves had hands and more complex brains they might have done what we have. Also organisms are really just complex chemical machines, why not improve them with silicon and metal, or vice-versa.