Musings on a diverging human future.

Does it seem to you that not only the extremes, but the norms of human characteristics are getting amplified? It seems that way to me. Every few weeks I see some child on the news who can play flawless Mozart or Beethoven pieces, or some man who can life ten times his body weight, or someone who graduated college with a masters in organic chemistry at age sixteen, or something like that. Have you taken a look at photos of boxers, wrestlers or even "strong men" from the forties and fifties? They look like dough boys compared to the heroic physique sported by body builders today. But then at the same time, we here about how there is a rising epidemic of obesity, heart problems, diabetes, and all sorts of preventable diseases. People are becoming more and more heavily dependent on technology to make their lives easier, getting less exercise, and lowering their expectations of themselves and diminishing their own human agency. What if these trends continue, more and more as time goes on. The people who are natural driven individuals have the ability to become more so, becoming better, faster, smarter and stronger individuals while the people who have less motivation, physical or mental problems, etc. slowly become closer and closer to slaves reliant upon convenience. In this Brave New World of extremes that our modern society is bringing us, perhaps this divergence will become so great that there will be little middle ground, and their will over time become two sort of sub-species of humans; The Alphas, that border on super heroic abilities, and the Betas who are devolving into sluggish, machine-bound humans that can't do a thing for themselves. Not since the Pleistocene have there been two different hominids that have co-existed on the globe, and although the genetics wouldn't become distinct between the two in such short a time, even with lack of gene drift for a few generations, these two sub-species might create a bizarre paradigm in which there is a biological class system put in place. The needs of both would be very different, the desires of both, the likes and dislikes, the functionality of technology would necessarily be different between the two. I see this odd science fiction like future where men and women resembling comic book characters walk down the street along side sluggish sacks of flesh, hovering along on metal beds as in the movie Wall-E.

This is terribly far fetched, but it's just a musing. If it happens and I'm still alive due to nanotechnology being inserted into my body, repairing all of cells and tissue, reversing senescence, I plan to be an Alpha.