Transgendered and transsexual people clue us in to the attributes that posthumans will have. Like other organisms, humans have no natural control over their genetics or of the conditions they experience while developing in their mother’s womb. Those factors very heavily determine most of a person’s traits, including sex, gender, and anatomy. We accept the crapshoot of unchosen genes and prenatal influences since it is beyond any individual’s control has always been the basic reality of our existence, but technology will free our descendants from it and its severe limitations.
Posthumans will have the inbuilt ability to change their genes and biology to do things like become a different sex, become a different gender with the attendant changes in mental preferences, or to change many other aspects of themselves like intelligence level or height. That kind of adaptability will make posthumans more adaptable to a broader range of environments, will make their lives much more experientially rich than our own, and will let them understand one another in ways we can’t. For example, a person born male might be able to experience pregnancy. Individuals could also create offspring (perhaps clones of themselves) through self-fertilization, which would make them more survivable as a species than we are since just one individual could create a community of posthumans. Space colonization would also be easier for them as a result.
Instead of having XY or XX sex chromosomes, posthumans would all have XXY chromosomes, with one of the X’s or the Y chromosome inactive at any one time to make them male or female, respectively. It might be advantageous for some parts of their body to have different sex chromosome expressions than other parts.
If we create technology that can slow, halt, or reverse the aging process in humans, then it will inevitably be used to prolong the lives of animals. People already spend fortunes on their beloved pets, and some are already cloning their dead pets, so this is just a logical next step. Cryopreservation of dead pets will also happen, if it isn’t being done already.
This raises the possibility of weird scenarios, like 200-year-old dogs running around, and someone putting their dog into cryostasis due to a catastrophic vehicle injury and the slim hope the future surgeries will be able to fix it, and also making a clone of that dog to be a companion in the interim. Like Barbra Streisand bringing her two cloned dogs to the gravestone of the dead original, maybe our fictitious person will bring his clone to Alcor to stand next to one of the vats. Moreover, if mind uploading becomes possible and is a viable means of radical life extension, then some animals will inevitably have their minds uploaded. What would it be like to merge digital minds with a cat?
One explanation for Fermi’s Paradox is all aliens leave our universe for ones that are much better. Maybe in our universe, the Higgs Boson is not at its true vacuum state, meaning our universe could literally cease to exist at any moment (for all we know, the decay has already started somewhere and the shockwave will hit Earth tomorrow). Assume that, once an intelligent alien species reaches the level of science and technology we’ll reach in, say, 2200 AD, it discovers the truth about the Higgs Boson and also discovers how to travel to other universes that don’t have this problem and/or how to create universes that don’t have the problem. Intelligent species by definition make intelligent choices, so they all leave our universe. This happens long before any of them have had enough time to colonize more than a few light years of space.
This might also explain why we have not, to our knowledge, been visited by life forms from parallel universes.
The Sahara Desert is an enormous waste of space, is larger than it should be thanks to the actions of humans, and will probably be radically altered once AIs are in charge of the world. The Sahara was a savannah and had several mega lakes until a few thousand years ago, when humans started slowly desertifying it with animal grazing and, to a lesser extent, plant farming. Ending those practices around the edges of the desert along with ending most water diversions for human purposes would cause the desert to immediately start shrinking. Carefully planting trees and other plants at the edges of the desert would accelerate that soil and climate reclamation process further (various African countries are already trying to do this, but the effort is sputtering).
Building canals could also allow the extinct and nearly extinct mega lakes of the Sahara to be refilled with seawater from the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans, and freshwater from the rainy central part of the continent. Installing massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panel farms in the Sahara would also increase rainfall and lower ground temperatures through different mechanisms. It would also of course generate large amounts of electricity.
A milder climate and an advanced electricity infrastructure would make the Sahara much more suitable for machine and human habitation. Refilling some of the mega lakes with seawater would also slightly lower global sea levels, which would partly mitigate one aspect of global warming. Finally, the return of vegetation to the Sahara as it transformed back into a savannah would sequester large amounts of CO2, which would also combat global warming’s effects.
Having only one organ dedicated to key biofunctions was the “good enough” design solution natural selection picked, and was surely driven by the need to conserve bodily resources, but it also creates single points of failure that can kill the organism. A human has only one liver, one heart, one stomach, and a brain localized in one place. If we were to redesign ourselves as posthumans that were partly or fully organic, distributing key functions among multitudes of smaller organs would be wise. That said, the problem with having more than one heart is that their beats would need to be synchronized.
If we are trying to maximize utility and minimize harm to sentient life forms, and if we throw future technologies into the mix, we are led to some counterintuitive far future scenarios. For example, if we make it our goal to provide the happiest conditions to the largest number of people, then we end up removing all brains from our bodies and putting them in jars, incinerating the bodies, building The Matrix, and plugging all the brains into it. Since a person’s brain consumes 20% of their calories, dispensing with the rest of our bodies means we can support 5x as many “humans” for the same amount of energy.
And if we also choose the goal of minimizing animal suffering, we capture every member of every species that can experience suffering, remove their brains, and put them in The Matrix, too.
The optimal “future way of living” might be a totally industrialized Earth, devoid of wild, complex life forms, and nearly devoid of any natural spaces, with vast warehouses full of brains in jars with wires coming out of them. This sounds horrific, but it seems like the logical best choice.
Earth’s forests would all be cut down to make way for solar panels to power the Matrix’ simulated virtual forests, which would be much more beautiful than their real counterparts were.