Nature is all around us, but humans have not always analyzed it in a systematic or rigorous way. That changed with the rise of science, which was birthed when humans began subjecting nature to direct observation and testing. For multiple millennia humans watched their crops grow, and they have been staring up into the starry sky since time immemorial, but it was only when they began writing down their observations and thinking up experiments that their knowledge of the natural world began increasing exponentially. Today we find ourselves flying up that exponential curve, for we are in the midst of a knowledge explosion like never before.

The age of science is upon us, and it is changing everything. From the way we communicate to how we buy products from the store, science is influencing every part of our lives. Science is invading every institution, every field of study, every business; it is being applied to every product and practice. Science, one might think, is taking over our world—and our worldview as well!

Science is continuously rolling back the shroud of nature to reveal the inner mechanisms by which our universe operates, and every day scientists probe the cosmic machine to learn more of its secrets. This knowledge is transforming worldviews and asking us to “see” in completely new ways. One of these ways is in our perception of time.

We hear the sound of a jet engine roaring overhead and we take it as commonplace, but from the perspective of evolutionary time, nothing like this has ever happened before. Yesterday we were primitive hunter-gatherers forging in the forest; today we are the builders of skyscrapers and flying with the birds. This process is not going to stop. One has to ask, then, what implications do science and technology have for our future? This is the question to which the transhumanists have turned their minds, and they believe they know the answer—through the application of science and technology to themselves, humans are destined to evolve out of human form.

In conjunction with this, transhumanists believe we are at the point of an evolutionary paradigm shift: the next phase of human evolution will be evolution by other means; that is to say, the natural biological evolution of the past will give way to sci-tech evolution. The substrate being acted upon will most likely still be humans—at least at first—but evolutionary advance will proceed not by natural selection but by breakthroughs in science and technology which are applied to the human organism. Selection will still occur, but it will act on the level of technology, not on the level of unintentional gene mutations.

As discussed above, we are in the midst of an exponential knowledge explosion thanks to the rise of science. The rise of science is transforming our world at a breakneck speed when compared to the past. Similarly, sci-tech evolution will proceed at a breakneck speed when compared to the eons it took biological evolution to create humans. Biological evolution brought about the transformation of apes into man at, what was for it, the relatively speedy rate of a couple million years. That same magnitude of change will occur gain, with the humans of today seeming like apes compared to the “transhumans” of the future, except that with sci-tech evolution as the operating principle, the timeframe will seem more like the blink of an eye!