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I've been curious about the popular appeal of transhumanism. From my perspective it seems to operate as a low-effort utopian vision that allows people to bypass some real problem that exists by kicking it down the road.
It also reflects I think a search for transcendence which is latent in the Western world and in this aspect acts as a misplaced transference of genuine searching.
Now, I also have a lot of hope in technology - I would describe myself as techno-fix, and I've no interest in predicting against its potential, particularly over time scales that feel very long against the rapid pace of change we see now, say 100 or 200 years, but even so I find the transhumanist visions outlined unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point. Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art. Also I probably lack imagination, so feel free to tear me a new one as they say...
Moving to Mars, space
Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.
More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.
Freezing our body, brain to come back later
The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.
Changing sex
I'll admit changes are afoot in terms of biology. Gene editing is already being tested for rare diseases, organ creation could become trivial, re-enervation to treat spinal injuries etc. But I'll admit I'm still puzzled when people talk about changing sex, and even changing sex back and forth. What do people mean here? Obviously secondary sex characteristics can be changed and new tech could mean surgical techniques become straightforward and remove risk and provide function, so conceivably issues around numbing of sensation in a new nipple could be resolved, or an embryo could be implanted successfully in an implanted/engineered womb, uterus. But are we really calling this changing sex? How far will it be possible to engineer all the internal bits, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc while simultaneously atrophying the wrong bits. I'm struggling to see how you'd ever get ethical permission to establish such an insane idea, or why you would want to try. This says nothing about brain structures developed during puberty and the various complex hormonal interactions that influence structure, function and ultimately behaviour. This would seem to really get closer to some omniscient level of requisite knowledge of exactly what makes us up. Will we ever be able to change all of our cells?
I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.
So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.
You can’t separate “colonizing space” from a kind of frontier, Wild West fantasy. That’s why it captured the imagination of Americans in particular to such an extent. Life on the homestead, on Mars - it even has desert, just the like the real Wild West! You only need to draw a very large dome over the ranch and add some solar panels, and there you have it, ten acres for every family. (Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!)
Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable. Unless or until the technology is developed to quickly travel to other solar systems with planets that might actually support life, there is no reason to settle space - it won’t stop x-risk (as @self_made_human suggests, most sources of x-risk would also affect a Martian colony) and even a nuked, irradiated earth would be easier for humans to live on than Mars. The other planets in our solar system are immeasurably worse than earth in every way for life. Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine. And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans. Any resource gathering or scientific work that one might need to do in space can be done by robots/probes/AI in tandem, there is no need for humans to be out there at all.
I'm not opposed to NASA, planting the US flag on Mars might well be justified from a national pride perspective, or because of technology invented along the way. But let's not fool ourselves that colonizing space, in and of itself, is the solution to any of humanity's major challenges.
In the 10 seconds it took you to type this, over 10^21 kWh of Sol's sunlight was lost to humanity forever. That's $10 million trillion, at cheaper than wholesale energy prices; that's a hundred millennia of current world GDP.
Develop a bolder imagination.
If you read my comment I say that resource extraction in space (presumably including sunlight) might well be justified, but that this can be handled by robots, and does not require people living in space.
Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.
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