Superhuman
Superhumans are humans, humanoids or other beings with abilities and other qualities that exceed those naturally found in humans. These qualities may be acquired through natural ability, self-actualization or technological aids. The related concept of a super race refers to an entire category of beings with the same or varying superhuman characteristics, created from present-day human beings by deploying various means such as eugenics, euthenics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and/or brain–computer interfacing to accelerate the process of human evolution.
Throughout history, the discussion of superhuman traits and the idea of the ideal human in physical, mental, or spiritual form has influenced politics, policy, philosophy, science and various social movements, as well as featuring prominently in culture. Groups advocating the deliberate pursuit of superhuman qualities for philosophical, political, or moral reasons are sometimes referred to as superhumanist.
Modern depictions of this have evolved and are shown in superhero fiction or through technologically aided people or cyborgs.
In philosophy
Nietzsche
The Übermensch or "Superman" was postulated in the later writings of Friedrich Nietzsche as a type of supreme, ultra-aristocratic achievement which becomes possible in the transcendence of modernity, morals or nihilism. Nietzsche believed in creating the perfect human, or at least a definition of one, and achieving this perfection through the enhancement of individual and cultural health, creativity, and power, and that to be a successful human one would focus on the realities of our world, rather than the beyond world, or afterlife.Nietzsche explores the idea of a superhuman in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he discusses the reality of humans existing as just that, and their potential to be more, through risks taken to advance humanity. This belief focuses not on a man who is bettering oneself but instead establishes values which create a meaning to life greater than one person, and positively influencing the lives of others with an overarching goal of humanity. These goals help one overcome life's feeling of meaninglessness.
Transhumanism
In transhumanism and futurology, superhuman abilities are the technological aim either of human enhancement by genetic modification or cybernetic implants or of future superhuman artificial intelligence.Human enhancement is an attempt to temporarily or permanently overcome the current limitations of the human body through natural or artificial means. Human enhancement may be through the use of technological means to select or alter human characteristics and capacities, whether or not the alteration results in characteristics and capacities that lie beyond the existing human range.
Some bioethicists restrict the term to the non-therapeutic application of specific technologies—neuro-, cyber-, gene- and nano-technologies—to human biology.
According to transhumanist thinkers, a posthuman is a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."
Fictionalized accounts of transhumanism include the characters from the X-Men franchise and cyborgs such as those found in the Ghost in the Shell franchise.
Ray Kurzweil
In 2005, the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that over a 40-year period between 2005 and 2045, most human beings will gradually evolve into a super race of immortal cyborgs called Transhumans with super-bodies and super-brains by gradually replacing their biological cells with new cells having a more efficient cellular energy processing system that will be based on nanobots manufactured using nanotechnology. These nanobot based cells will enable those who possess these initially quasi android bodies to have much greater physical endurance as if they were permanently on steroids, and many Olympic records will be routinely broken. The five senses will be enhanced first by genetic enhancement and then by additional brain–computer interfacing. By about 2040, most humans will have become fully android.Finally, predicts Kurzweil, by 2045, because of the operation of Moore's law, supercomputers linked together by the Internet will have developed enough memory capacity such that most of the now mostly android human race will be able to upload themselves into the worldwide Internet supercomputer of 2045 and live forever after in virtual reality—an event he calls the Singularity.
Kurzweil predicts that soon after the "Singularity", the worldwide supercomputer will deploy other humanoid androids and robots in the meat world. A space navy of these androids and robots will radiate outward from Earth on large fleets of interplanetary spaceships that will rocket outward into the Solar System and convert all the matter they encounter into megacomputers made of computronium in order to continually expand the computer capacity of the Solar System and thus create ever more realistic virtual reality and solve ever more complex computer problems. Once the matter of the Solar System has been mostly converted to computer substrate, forming a Matrioshka brain, according to Kurzweil, by about the beginning of the 22nd century, life will then expand outward into interstellar space in all directions, deploying miniature starships that will be Von Neumann probes crewed by swarms of nanobots, to colonize the entire Milky Way Galaxy. When these nanobots arrive in a planetary system, the nanobots will be programmed with software to begin converting some of the matter they encounter into more androids and robots. While in the process of doing so, they will continue converting all other matter they encounter not being used to create additional androids and robots into more megacomputers—the androids and robots created by the nanobots will build interplanetary spaceships to fan out into the planetary system and themselves help get this job done. Some of the androids and robots will then settle down in the meat world as immortal colonists on the surfaces of the Matrioshka brains thus constructed, while others will upload themselves into the virtual reality based on these Matrioshka brains, keeping their bodies in cryonic storage. Eventually, the entire Galaxy, then the Local group, then the Virgo Supercluster, then the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex and ultimately the entire Universe will be turned into a gigantic megacomputer.