As everything around us changes, prepare for everything inside of you to change as well. Technology is coming to a body near you within the next 100 years.
Prosthetics are marrying with robotics to return previous abilities to those who have lost limbs through disease or accident, but in the future, expect people to replace undamaged, perfectly fine limbs with machines that enhance and advance capabilities.
Human organs will be replaced by ones grown in petri dishes or created by a 3-D printer.
And that’s just the beginning. Futurists the world over are speculating at how rapidly advancing technology will alter the human body within the next century.
Dr. Andy Hines, Program Coordinator at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight, see cyborgs roaming the earth in the not too distant future. “You know if you’re 50% replacement part at what point are you no longer human?” Dr. Hines says some will look at technical advances as medical wonders. “I also think we’re going to see a real interesting split with people who say they’re going to use technology to make themselves faster, smarter and stronger. Almost like a new species.”
While printing replacement organs with printers is already underway, and gene-splicing is being studied, Dr. Hines says the hardest nut to crack going forward is going to be stopping the clock and delaying the inevitable entropy of cellular organisms. “The aging of the physical body, that’s looking more like one hundred years.”
Other futurists agree:
Samantha Payne, CEO of Open Biotics, makes the point that when procuring prosthetics today, people over age 40 are looking for lifelike conformity to established norms will younger consumers stress individuality.
Zoltan Istvan expects cyborgs to become a new norm as people look to become more than they could without mechanics installed.
Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey DeGrey thinks there is a 90% chance that within 100 years we’ll have cracked the hardest nut – defeated the inevitable entropy of aging.