Here we are, in 2007, gaining the technological acumen to upgrade our bodies and minds at the biological level. We’re Homo sapiens, a species that has been around for 200,000 years with minimal genetic changes. Early members of the genus Homo go back two and a half million years, and they weren’t stupid. Homo habilis routinely used purposefully-crafted stone blades and had a voice box for primitive speech. They colonized most of Asia, successfully surviving in extreme environments like Siberia.

Here we are, with 200,000 to 2.5 million years of the same behind us (depending on how you look at it). Now, we have the ability to mess with our bodies and surroundings in all sorts of new and interesting ways. For thousands of years, we’ve put ourselves in large artificial shells called buildings to supplement our natural defenses against the elements. We’ve even isolated metal from ore and shaped it into various implements. More recently, we’ve gone off-planet, built buildings many times taller than the tallest trees, harnessed nuclear energy and weaponry, and built a worldwide computer network that allows us to share information at about the speed of light. Impressive? Yes, but not a big deal in comparison to our ability to remake ourselves in the image of our choosing: coming to your neighborhood in the early to mid-21st century.

We are building synthetic body parts that will soon — within a century, and probably sooner — be able to replace every single component we’re made of. Artificial hearts, lungs, hands, and outer ears already exist. Before we know it, there’ll be artificial muscles, skin, bones, stomachs, kidneys, liver, intestines, eyes, faces, and yes, brains. I don’t even feel any special need to defend these predictions because everyone knows it is already happening all around us.

The same basic bodies and brains for 200,000 years, at least. And in the next 100 years, we could change it all.

Some might say “what a time to be alive!”, but that gets into depressing anthropic issues, so I generally avoid this pithy phrase.

However, this coming period is worthy of explicit acknowledgement and respect for its tremendous potential. We could turn ourselves into completely cybernetic organisms, and many people on the planet today seem to be entirely unaware of it. Advances in low-cost and custom manufacturing will make these technologies available to a few, then many, then everyone on Earth. Rather than arguing that these advances should never be pursued because they will initially be only available to the rich, this insight only encourages us to hurry along research, so that the products can be introduced and costs can come down for everyone. The transistor started out as an expensive piece of electronic equipment, and now you can buy millions a dollar. Old technology is being passé at an ever-increasing rate.

What amazes me is when people act as if this future inevitability isn’t completely transformative and transcendent. This includes people who presume to be aware about the progress of technology. If you know anything about technological progress and human history, you realize that we are at an extremely special time in humanity’s development. So special in fact, that “Humanity 1.0″ will could become a minority player behind in the coming changes. Our importance may be dictated primarily by the way in which we develop and deploy the next evolutionary step.

If we realize that the future course of events in history will primarily be dictated by post-human or trans-human players, then we realize that what we humans do may only be of marginal relevance to directing the course of the future. This can cause us to dismiss the idea and go into denial mode. “If I can’t participate and win, I refuse to play!” is the attitude taken by those terrified of the coming cyborgization. But these denials are purely superficial, because unless Homo sapiens is the ultimate being, some spectacular improvements on our form and function should be possible. Combining together the strength, speed, precision, and durability of artificial systems with the natural intelligence, creativity, social adeptness, imagination, morality, and curiosity of the human organism will create not just one new species, but billions of “one-member species”, self-designed persons who frequently modify and update their minds and bodies, directed by conscious evolution and foresight.

One implication from this eventuality is power. A single human being taking full advantage of cybernetic and AI technology as it unfolds over the 21st century could turn him (or her) self into a powerful entity. Taking advantage of synthetic body parts, a person could make themselves much more difficult to kill than any conventional human being. Combination nanotube/aerogel armor or exoskeletons could stop bullets and survive grenade blasts at close range. Combined with great speed through artificial legs and making use of personal jets a la Yves Rossy, a cyborg could run far away quite quickly in case of true danger. Using a neural interface coupled to constantly updating satellite and radar data, such a person could even be made immediately aware of an incoming ballistic missile more than half an hour in advance, giving them sufficient time to escape from the blast zone of even the largest nuclear weapon. How would you kill something like that? Maybe using a large cloud of lethal UAVs set up on an ambush, or a powerful laser equipped with a precision targeting system. But conventional arms such as tanks, helicopters, and ground infantry would be relatively powerless against such a threat.

Imagine an army of thousands such cyborgs, equipped with their own supersonic flechette guns, UAV swarms, microwave beam projectors, optical and radar camouflage, and let’s not forget, nuclear weapons, and you gain a bit of an idea for what war could be like in the 21st century.

Two adjectives come to mind: quick, and extremely destructive.

To any scientist or military strategist who has looked a few decades into the future of technology, these scenarios are taken very seriously. They are just as afraid, if not much more so, as transumanists and futurists to talk about such scenarios in public, to avoid being branded as kooks. But “science fiction” scenarios will become reality in the 21st century. Not even science fiction. Science fiction fails to see how strange the future could be because science fiction is written by people from the past. They are just guessing using their own primitive frame of reference. Less than a couple decades before the first manned space flight, most “experts” thought it would be impossible. The future will be stranger than any fiction.

But here you have people telling us to calm down, that “there’s nothing new under the sun” and never will be, that we’ll be experiencing more of the same, and humans will stay pretty much the same for another 2.5 million years until natural evolution gives us cone-shaped heads to hold our expanding brains. Idiocy.

There will be a transformation — including extreme upheaval, possibly fatal for everyone on the planet — when the advanced technologies of NBIC (nano, bio, info, cogno) mature. They will unleash a bombshell greater than anything in the five billion year history of this planet, perhaps larger than anything in the 13.7 billion year history of this universe. Has there even been a species with the potential to colonize every asteroid in its solar system and build millions of square miles of thin solar collectors circling its Sun? If so, we don’t see one in our own galaxy. Maybe they all wipe themselves out before they get to that point, or maybe intelligence is extremely unlikely to evolve in the first place, and every intelligent civilization is separated by gulfs of billions of light years. I don’t know. What I do know is that if we don’t get our act together and make the intellectual and academic communities thoroughly aware of these coming transformations, we’ll be blind-sided by them. This could be the last mistake we ever make.