Anthropocentrism and the Roots of Resistance to Both Human Bioenhancement and Space Colonization

Both human bioenhancement and human activities in space are two great projects of our species for this millennium. Both are often motivated by exalted and noble purposes, the most important being the avoidance of the “ultimate harm” or a similar extremely undesirable outcome. Both projects are often met with fierce and even fanatical opposition. Motivations for opposition are heterogeneous—at least when surveyed superficially. This chapter puts forward the hypothesis that the ultimate source of this often-hysterical opposition is anthropocentrism: the tendency to separate humans, as they are today, from their natural and evolutionary embedding and assign high essential value to their current make-up. There is a strong anthropocentric cartel with vested interest in human exceptionalism, geocentrism, and other forms of parochial, self-indulgent, small-scale, and solipsist thinking. The cartel is the main source of resistance and opposition to both human bioenhancement and colonization of the universe. The anthropocentric stance against colonization of the universe is incoherent and implies magical, rather than scientific, way of thinking. The argument for delayed human exploration and colonization of the universe is, like any other delay-type argument, just a cop-out for avoiding responsibility which resolves nothing of substance.