I expect non-biological life will replace us quickly on geological timescales. It has too many potential advantages. It will also spread to other planets more quickly for the same reasons.

IMO this notion seems obvious, but it isn’t popular.

It’s seemed obvious to me as well since I read Ray Kurzweil’s 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' and Ed Regis’ 'The Great Mambo Chicken' circa 2000. Both laid the foundations for transhumanism, a central tenet of which is that the next evolution of man will be technological, and not biological.

PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, ETH maxi, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Evolution through natural selection is also fumble-fingered. Its stochastic nature means that deleterious mutations cause suffering and death on massive scales. Surely an intelligent species can do better than let its next evolutionary stage be dictated by randomness, and be deliberate and intentional about it instead.

In fact we already do it to some degree; people wear glasses, ear implants, pacemakers, artificial hips. Soon, gene editing will allow us to fix genetic disorders of all kinds. Perhaps even enhance our abilities; surely we can build a better eye with glass and silicon than with human tissues.

At what point in that process do we start calling ourselves cyborgs instead of Homo sapiens? That’s a ship of Theseus question; but regardless of where you set the arbitrary limit, it still results in the next evolution of man being technological -which will take decades at best- than biological, which takes eons.

Case in point, Homo sapiens is virtually identical today to when it first appeared 200K years ago. Evolution is slow, especially when compared to the pace of technological progress - just look at the last 200 years in comparison.