Around 300,000 years ago, a strange, hairless ape emerged from Africa and spread quickly around the world. This creature was like no other animal that had ever existed on Earth: it quickly adapted itself to any environment it found, drove entire species extinct and eventually began to re-engineer nature itself.

Now some of those hairless apes have decided that this is not enough. They believe that the next stage of human evolution is long overdue. And last week hundreds of them met at TransVision, the biggest annual meeting of transhumanists across the globe.

Transhumanists believe in using technology to enhance the human body, making it stronger, faster, cleverer and longer-lived. This year, attendees heard talks on how people can be made to live to a thousand years old, cryogenically frozenCryogenic freezing is a hypothetical procedure involving preserving human bodies at extremely low temperatures to allow them to be revived at a future date. to be resurrected in future epochs and absorbed into an all-consuming artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence, or "AI," is the ability for a computer to think and learn. With AI, computers can perform tasks that are typically done by people, including processing language, problem-solving, and learning..

To some, this all sounds like the stuff of science fiction. They argue that transhumanism is at best a pipe dreamSomething that will never happen - that a smoker might dream about while puffing on a pipe., and at worst actively dangerous.

They fear that transhumanism does not have any philosophical or ethical grounding. According to transhumanists, humans are entirely material beings: even our thoughts and feelings are nothing but chemical processes that can be altered. 

That means that ethics, too, have their origins in chemicals that can be re-engineered at will. Future humans, or an artificial intelligence that we might create to boost our own intelligence, might simply reject the ethical values that we hold dear.

Author Hugo de GarisAn Australian researcher who works on artificial intelligence., a transhumanist himself, has warned that transhuman technology will lead to a global war between two factions: Cosmists, who will want to create god-like, superintelligent machines, and Terrans, who will recognise that these machines are almost certain to wipe out humanity.

To the Terrans, the Cosmists will be genocidal maniacs; to the Cosmists, the Terrans will be god-killers. Each side will know that it has no choice but to wipe the other side out entirely. Billions will be killed in the war between them.

But transhumanists claim that the real question is not whether humans will become transhuman, but when and how.

They point out that huge leaps towards human augmentation are already being made. In April, Elon Musk's neurotechnology company Neuralink successfully wired the brain of a macaque monkey into a computer, allowing it to play ping pong using only its mind.

And some of the world's richest people are willing to back transhumanist technology. Jeff Bezos is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-ageing research; so is Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and one of the key investors behind Facebook.

They argue that since the development of transhumanist technology is inevitable, we need to promote and control it to ensure that it can be used for the benefit of all human beings, and not hoarded by the global super-rich.

Yes, say some. Humans have been augmenting their bodies from the very start: we invented blades to compensate for our lack of claws, ships to allow us to travel long distances over the water, phones to let us communicate with people who are not physically with us. Technological progress is unstoppable.

Not at all, say others. Humans are already living longer and happier lives thanks to technological advances. Although transhumanists talk up the possibility of 1,000-year-old superintelligent human gods, in reality improvements in human life and health will go on being gradual and mundane.