#original cyborgs

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Why Are Animals Having Sex In Space?

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Original Cyborgs

Tim Maly's summary of  Cyborgs and Space [PDF]:

The origin of cyborg is intricately tied to the origins of the space program. When Clynes and Kline proposed the term to describe cybernetically enhanced organisms (they meant humans), no person had ever been sent into orbit. But they had big plans...

The 17 Upgrades

Drug regimes to keep you awake and effective for weeks or months at a time (they call these “short-duration” flights).

Automatically administered anti-radiation drugs.

Hybernation for long flights to reduce the weight of food required for the journey.

Solar or nuclear-powered air exchangers hooked directly to your veins. (No atmosphere in space? One solution: “Don’t breathe!”)

Urine recycling and intravenous feeding to reduce bodily waste to near zero.

Modified enzymes. Kline and Clynes are quite clear that no one really knows what enzymes are for, but they’re pretty sure that they could be modified in some useful way.

Draining or perhaps filling the inner ear to reduce disorientation and dizziness.

Rewiring the brain to change the regulation of your heartbeat.

Drugs to counter muscle atrophy from long periods of weightlessness.

Systems to simulate atmospheric distortions in light transmission, so that we will see things in the manner we’re accustomed to.

Reduction of operating body temperature so that your blood does not boil when you step out into space without a pressurized suit.

Self-adjusting, colour-changing cloth that darkens or lightens to help maintain a consistent body temperature.

Drugs and temperature controls to adjust the metabolism for differing amounts of gravity.

Something to retard or facilitate the effects of magnetic fields, depending on how that will affect us, which we don’t know because no one’s ever been to space.

Regimes of sensory stimulation and variance to prevent you from having a psychotic break due to the monotony of space.

Remotely controlled, automatically administered anti-psychotics in case you end up having a psychotic break due to the monotony of space.

The ability to put yourself into long term limbo in case you find yourself in a situation where you’ve had a terrible accident, you’re in extreme pain, and you need to wait — perhaps for years — for rescue to come.

[grinderbot]

Accompanying text - http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/ :

The whole task of social organization would alter: beginning with the creation of synthetic wombs, and later entire synthetic bodies, the task of producing and organizing human society would exceed its impulsive origins and be replaced by a rationalist schema of collective direction control; efforts to prolong life to the point of immortality, a completed project of medicine, would be entwined into this transformation of basic human functions, finding its ultimate filial duty in the eventual recreation of every human being who ever lived. This is Fedorov as he is still best known: a curious prophet not only of human immortality, but of the resurrection of the dead.

...

Many are the observers who have seen in this the paradigm of craft more broadly writ, the ability to coax effects from the world, rather than imposing effects on it by the application of force alone. Following the grain of wood, knowing the melting points of various ores, the toughening of metal through its tempering: all these are not domineering strategies, exactly, but situations “in which the intelligence attempts to make contact with an object by confronting it in the guise of a rival, as it were, combining connivance and opposition.”

...

Fedorov’s cosmism is a project, ultimately, of freedom, commissioning an assault by practical reason on the things that bind us, irrespective of their historical ubiquity; the perception that a life subjected to 1g gravity is inevitable is among the casualties already listed. The conception of the world as a field of nested traps renders this vision of freedom quantitative, a series of practical achievements, proceeding by degree—we are free of this, and then of this, and then of this, new end points emerging rather than an a priori finish line at which, on breaking the ribbon, we can at last rest easy, luxuriating in a genuine liberty.

...

What is revealed is the irreducibility of design to stated motivations of capital interest, social progress or scientific advance, in place of a programme of incursions across any and all borders, violations of every truce, an insurrection not only against gravity but also human beings, a process by which sociotechnical structures are taken hostage by precisely what they make possible, a process of ungrounding in more ways than the most obvious. This is the genuine injection of the offworld into terrestrial affairs, in which through progressive alienation freedom stacks up in the longest of cons.