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Consider
technology today. It continues to
improve to push the limits of what is possible further and further. Not only that, but it is doing it faster and faster. Things once thought
impossible become
conceivable, then
researched and
investigated, then
accomplished - and often
commonplace. The world today, with communication around the
planet in seconds, air travel, people in
space,
calculations done billions per second - all this was
unimaginable just a couple hundred years ago. Computers were only
theoretical in 1900, and a global computer network a
twinkle in someone's eye and the realm of
science fiction in 1970.
Who knows what will be possible?
Human beings are the most advanced form of life on this planet. This is the result of two billion years of evolution. As life gained more complexity, mutation and evolution progressed faster and faster, producing even more complex life forms faster - the advance from primates to homo sapiens is many times shorter than the advance from single-celled life to multicellular organisms.
Humanity has not stopped evolving. But the pace of life, the length of time from being born to death is still a small part of what is needed for the species to visibly alter. Many, many generations could pass as humanity changes, ever so slowly.
Technology won't take as long, however. Even today, people have designed artifical neurons, and managed to connect them to a biological brain, which has accepted them as part of itself, communicating with them. Other advances allow sensors to detect the firing of a nearby neuron, and even cause it to fire. A leech has been controlled by a computer using a large number of these. It is not far-fetched to imagine a time when we can connect up a person's brain to a machine, allowing direct communication and influence between the two. Or even more involved, using these artifical neurons to transfer, or create, an intelligence without a biological body.
Transhumanism is an extension of humanism, believing in the value of life, of the individual. It also believes that the value of a person need not be limited to what they are now, that the biological limitations of our form, illness, memory loss, death, and such. That by using technology as it develops, that we can transcend our human body, with implants, genetic engineering, uploading, nanotechnology, or whatever other technology may come our way.
Transhumanism sees a positive future for humanity, with the potential to become greater than human, to continue to use our discoveries about the universe to better ourselves, mentally and physically. That death need not be a certainty.
Note that transhumanism believes in voluntary enhancement and improvement of the body and mind, and that at no point shall a person be forced, against their will, to take on these enhancements - nor deny them to people. It believes life is for living, and it is only the individual that can properly make the right choices for them.