[ExI] Islands of trans-humanity

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Dec 3, 2023 at 1:43 AM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I doubt this is a novel train of thought... but...
>
> One of the more interesting ways that transhumanism could be "bad" is
> the idea that over the next few centuries of transhumanism, different
> "species" of human could rapidly evolve (though not through natural
> selection, unnaturally) into islands of trans-humans that can no
> longer interbreed. By creating this rapidly dividing delta in the
> river of hominid divergence, it could create interesting dynamics of
> "us" and "them" which could lead to a destructive fragmentation of
> society.
>
> I welcome science fiction along these lines...
>

This seems unlikely.  If you have the tech to create non-interfertile
branches of humanity, you likely also have the tech to create offspring for
any given set of individuals from said non-interfertile branches.

I once wrote some sci-fi (the intended publisher rejected it) in a
space-opera-ish setting where humans created catgirls (homo sapiens with
mostly aesthetic feline features, initial generations created via cloning
with a heavy bias toward females as part of the attempted disguise) in an
effort to present some "non-humans" to aliens who had put restrictions on
human activity (basically, get the catgirls to swipe, barter for, or
otherwise obtain certain alien tech that the aliens had forbidden giving to
humans until the humans could invent it on their own).  The fact that they
could crossbreed with humans was among the factors cited by the aliens in
classifying them as human and thus subject to the same restrictions.  (Then
said creators ran into a case of, "just because you made them, does not
necessarily mean they're loyal to you.")
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20231203/2f1ca69e/attachment.htm>