Being human sucks.

I mean, being a kid is quite alright. You play, you eat, your mama tucks you in at night. That is, unless you're unlucky enough to have abusive parents. Or a serious illness. Or you live in some country were you're likely to starve or die in some other gruesome way.

After -and during- childhood, there are many ways in which your life can get completely screwed, and most of the times our beloved Mother Nature doesn't even give a warning. Out of the blue, you're left with nothing. All you need is a car accident. I'm sure you can think of other examples.

Pain is not optional. It's not something that happens to other people. It's something that either has happened or will happen to you. For sure. You will either see your parents, brothers and friends die or they will see you die. There is no third option. There is no way to escape pain. You will either die young or get old, and when you get old you will decay. You will feel it, you will know. Or maybe you won't and it will be your family who suffers the burden.

Some people say pain is necessary in order to feel pleasure. Let me answer with a quote by Schopenhauer: "A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

Need I say more? So why all this depressing dissertation on pain? Actually, I just wanted to set the right mood. Sometimes people object to meddling with the human condition. Genetic engineering, cyborgs (by the way, we are already cyborgs, but more on that in some other post), uploads. A recurring criticism is: "you are tampering with what makes us human. If you go on, we will lose our humanity."

What makes us human sucks.

Nature is a bitch and natural selection is even worse. We have been (blindly) engineered to suffer most of the time, save for some (rare) rewards, so that we will have a progeny. We are not made to be happy: we are made to reproduce. We are not made to understand the Universe and its mysteries, but merely to survive enough to have children. And that's it.

And my question is why would anyone in their right minds want to keep this status quo? I'm not a singularity fanatic. I don't know if the singularity will come. I don't care if we become smarter, stronger. I don't care about higher consciousness, Gods or anything else. I'm not into the making predictions business. But I do care about avoiding pain and, hopefully, without getting rid of pleasure (otherwise, jumping out the window is a pretty effective way to avoid pain).

And for that, our only hope is technology. Yes, we may screw up. Actually, it is very likely that we will screw things up. But we need to try or we will go the way of the Dodo, if things continue the way they are today. And even if we didn't, even if we somehow managed to keep living exactly the same way we do today for a thousand more years, I ask myself: is it really worth it?

Technology could help us avoid death. Some people say that is a horrible prospect, but I don't get it. Immortality doesn't mean not being able to die. It means not having to die. You're free to shoot yourself anytime! I for once would rather have the choice myself than let Nature make it for me. What can I say, I don't want to die before I know who the mother is in How I met your mother. It would suck to get hit by a bus before.

Technology can help us avoid pain. It already does! And I'm not only talking about physical pain. Our reactions are determined by hormones and neurotransmitters (and a lot of other stuff, I know). We could meddle with that. Why not? Some people could say it would turn us into zombies. Well, if you want to see a zombie, look a someone who just lost a family member, or who just came back from a war. And that doesn't take any meddling with hormones. Some people think we would get bored of being happy.

Again, that is wrong. Boredom is a product of natural selection and can be counteracted, for all we know. We may be able to spend years in a perpetual orgasm, never getting tired of it. Or we could choose to do something else. But the point is, again, we would be the ones to choose, not our loving mother Nature, who kindly programs animals (and plants) to kill each other relentlessly, regardless of the pain they cause or suffer.

Nature doesn't care about our happiness. But we do. Isn't it time we emancipated ourselves from our biological inheritance and decided our own future?

Or, well, tried.