Voulan said:
Heronblade said:
Voulan said:
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We've evolved as much as we'll ever need to, what's the need to have even more? The human body has been more than capable ever since our existence.
Correction, the human body has been sort of capable, with a boatload of help from technology, of surviving the challenges we have faced so far. A lot of our own have unnecessarily died in the process, and are continuing to die in dealing with the challenges we have yet to overcome.
I suppose you could be content with the bodycount, and just hope life doesn't throw us a bigger curveball than usual. I prefer to take the long view however. For instance, the odds of us ever getting off of this rock go up by several factors of ten if the right bodily modifications are available to those who need them.
Much the same holds true when dealing with problems such as AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer's. Perhaps you should explain to some of the cancer patients out there about how their body is working just fine in spite of the fact that their own cellular structure is going rogue and painfully killing them.
I'm talking limb modifications, as I clearly said in the first post, not cancer research. In which case, what you mean there is medicinal progress, not technoligical modifications. And what on earth more "challenges yet to overcome" are you seeing? Unless you're meaning man-made disasters like war, which could involve technology itself, then I don't really see the necessity to have a camera in your eyes. We're becoming far too reliant on technology.
But seriously, giving myself mechanical hands just because my hands are somehow not good enough anymore (which they completely are) is a waste of time and money. But this is all hypothetical anyway.
You don't get it do you? Cybernetic augmentation is a direct result of biomedical research, the two are one and the same. The first and foremost reason for cybernetics is in terms of fixing medical problems such as blindness or muscular dystrophy. The fact that it can be used for so much more is just a bonus.
In addition, there are only two methods on the table to reliably cure/prevent cancer, heavy genetic modification, or cybernetic modification. There is no other prospective method that has a good chance of reliably solving our body's tendency to turn cannibal on us.
As for the rest, speaking as someone who tinkers often, my hands have never been good enough. Not nearly enough precision and too little grip among other things. I can indeed counter some of these problems if I have the perfect tool for the task at hand, but that approach requires multiple times my body mass in specialized equipment, much of which is awkward and slow to use. The right tool also never seems to be around when needed.
And as for my eyes, every couple of days I get up and jam bits of polymer onto them. I do this because I (for some incredibly weird reason) don't like wandering around in a mostly blind haze as nature apparently intended. I can also tell you that even with perfect vision, we are all missing out. There is an incredible world out there that we will never see for ourselves, simply because a low quality nonadjustable camera feed covering less than 3.5x10^-26%, or 0.0000000000000000000000000035% of the light spectrum was "good enough" for our evolutionary path.
