[4]And in a 1951 unpublished revision of the same book: In consequence one is the less disposed to reject as unscientific the idea that the critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, represents our passage, by Translation or dematerialization, to another sphere of the Universe: not an ending of the ultra-human but its accession to some sort of trans-humanity at the ultimate heart of things.
[11] In March 2007, American physicist Gregory Cochran and paleoanthropologist John Hawks published a study, alongside other recent research on which it builds, which amounts to a radical reappraisal of traditional views, which tended to assume that humans have reached an evolutionary endpoint.
For example, the Bioshock media franchise depicts individuals receiving doses of a substance called ADAM, harvested from a fictional type of sea slugs, able to give the user fantastical powers through genetic engineering.
Thus, previously standard humans can gain the ability to summon ice, wield lightning, turn invisible, and commit other seeming miracles due to their enhancement.
[13] A 2014 article from Ars Technica speculated that mutating clumps of mobile genetic elements known as "transposons" could possibly be used as a semi-parasitic tool to raise people to a higher status in terms of their abilities, making at least part of the game's scenario theoretically plausible.
For example, in "Space Seed", the twenty-second episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series that initially aired on February 16, 1967, a charismatic and physically intimidating genius called Khan Noonien Singh attempts to take control of the Enterprise operated by the show's protagonists.
The starship's crew opt to exile the leader and his league of similar beings to a habitable but isolated alien planet instead of assigning a true punishment per se, a ruling which he accepts without protest.