Human Survival Depends On Space Exploration, Says Hawking

You seem to assume that there will, in that far future, be a difference between "us" and "our machines".

One of the common misperceptions about nanotech and other such transhumanist, far-future, sci-fi-style guesswork is the failure to understand what radical advances in medical, materials, and computer science actually mean. Biology is nanotechnology that evolved in nature without having been designed... There is no such thing as wars with our "android children". We are the android children, our technology is an extension of ourselves -- not progeny, it is literally ourselves. We won't be "sending robots", we will be sending ourselves who have become merged with "robots". The term you're looking for is "post-biological".

We won't need to engineer robots to escape Earth in our stead, we will be reengineering our very selves. No longer meatbags, we will be more than mere automata, and there is simply no need for this defeatist, mellowdramatic bitter-sweet send-off of our "children" from the womb of Earth. If there develops a significant population of autonomous robots, they will be with us, we'll bring them along and enjoy the experience of a shared evolution.

Life on Earth doesn't just stop once a new species appears -- life keeps going while it forks. There are ancient species still around and just as alive as new ones.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/KFhnDgqKzHE/human-survival-depends-on-space-exploration-says-hawking

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