Carbon, Silicon and the Right to Remain Human

The Book and Its Central Question

The book was published by China Machine Press in Beijing: about 216,000 Chinese characters, four parts and 26 chapters. It completes a tetralogy: the first three volumes covered technology, the economy and social institutions, while the fourth turns to the human body, habitat and consciousness. Forewords and endorsements came from academician Wang Wei, Qi Faren, the first chief designer of the Shenzhou spacecraft, Feng Jianfeng, director of the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence at Fudan University, BGI Group CEO Yin Ye and others. This lineup suggests the book addresses not only the general reader but also the official debate on technology policy.

The author draws his key distinction from the first pages: the question is not what humans will become under the influence of technology, but who they can become by using it. In the first case a person rides a conveyor belt toward an unknown destination; in the second, a person stands at a fork and chooses. So the author argues with two camps at once. To techno-utopians who call the shift “from carbon to silicon” an upgrade, he replies that if no body remains after the change of carrier, no human remains either. To alarmists, he says fear is as poorly grounded as enthusiasm. Both camps relieve people of responsibility for the choice.

Three Levels of Certainty

The book’s most practical device is a scale applied to every technology it discusses:

• already achieved: CRISPR-Cas9 in clinical trials, neural interfaces that restored movement to paralyzed patients, large language models, and a prototype of 3D printing from lunar regolith;
• theoretically possible: therapeutic germline editing, full brain emulation, human hibernation, self-healing materials and orbital data centers;
• science fiction: self-replicating silicon life, warp drive and “digital immortality.”

Readers can use the scale beyond the book, and it obliges the author to state each time which “floor” he is on.

Why Life Chose Carbon

Carbon and silicon both have four valence electrons, and the idea of silicon-based life was proposed as early as 1891 by astrophysicist Julius Scheiner. But chemistry closed that door. The Si-Si bond energy is about 30% lower than C-C: the longest known pure silicon chain has six atoms, while carbon chains run to thousands. Si-H and Si-Si bonds are unstable in water and ammonia, so silicon life cannot have an Earth-like liquid internal environment. There is a deeper quantum reason: the energies of carbon’s 2s and 2p orbitals are close and hybridize easily, whereas silicon’s 3s and 3p differ more. This difference is written into physical constants and will not change in any galaxy.

A telling ratio: silicon makes up 27.7% of the Earth’s crust by mass, carbon only 0.03%. Life chose the rare element over the abundant one, and for the author this is the best proof that carbon is irreplaceable. Today’s “silicon life” is AI, where silicon serves as a semiconductor. But AI cannot be called life: it has no metabolism, self-replication, consciousness or desires, only intelligence.

Humans at the Helm of Evolution

CRISPR moved humans from being “readers” of the genome to being its “editors”: the guide RNA works like a navigation system, and the Cas protein like molecular scissors. The technology is programmable and cheap, so it has become a routine tool in thousands of labs. The unit of evolutionary time is no longer a generation but a lab cycle, and the direction is set by human intentions and values. The author highlights three risks: genetic pollution of the biosphere, irreversible changes to animal evolution and malicious editing of pathogens. And a paradox: the person whose genome is being edited cannot give consent.

According to the author, the body has four limits: a “lease” of about a century, demanding environmental requirements, painful and incomplete repair, and slow “updates” through random mutations. For millennia civilization applied external patches to these limits; CRISPR gave access to the foundation for the first time.

Mind Uploading Is Copying, Not Transfer

In March 2026, Eon Systems fully scanned the brain of a fruit fly (125,000 neurons and 50 million connections) and connected the digital brain to a virtual body. The “cyber fly” walked, scratched its head with a leg and searched for food, although these behaviors were neither programmed nor trained on data. The company’s next goal is a mouse brain, 70 million neurons, within two years. The author treats this as an argument for consciousness emulation, although reproducing behavior and reproducing consciousness are different claims.

The strongest logical passage of the book: if a brain is scanned and uploaded to a computer, the original remains in the scanner, while the copy merely believes it is the original. If the body lives on, only a copy has been uploaded. If the body is destroyed after the upload, it is suicide combined with manufacturing a digital ghost. Hence the thesis: consciousness is only one function of the body, not the whole person. The author attributes the technology hype to confusing intelligence (the ability to solve problems) with consciousness (subjective experience and self-awareness). For all their power, large models remain sophisticated pattern recognition machines.

A separate topic is the privacy of thought. At the University of California, Berkeley, researchers used functional MRI data to reconstruct rough images that appeared in subjects’ brains while they watched films. Chile and several other countries have already enshrined mental integrity and the inviolability of neural data as human rights in their constitutions.

Space as a Backup Copy

The chapter on the “overview effect” draws on accounts by Alexei Leonov, Bill Anders, Buzz Aldrin and William Shatner; more than 90% of astronauts say they felt like aliens for a while after returning. The author’s conclusion: space is a backup copy of civilization, not a replacement for Earth. Chemical rockets, with exhaust velocities of up to 4.5 km/s, are unsuitable for interstellar flight; beam propulsion is the most realistic option. The Breakthrough Starshot project envisions accelerating gram-scale probes with light sails to 20% of the speed of light, and in 2025 Nature Communications described a silicon nitride sail just 200 nanometers thick.

Three Conditions for Enhancement

The book’s most applicable construct is a checklist for any human enhancement technology:

• reversibility: a person can return to the original state, and declining enhancement does not lead to discrimination;
• controllability: support can be switched off, adjusted or paused at any time;
• transparency: a person can tell their own thinking from the enhancement’s contribution.

Enhancement should add, not subtract. Drawing on sociologist Qiu Zeqi’s forecast of a “species split,” the author identifies three paths. The professional path: according to a 2025 international survey, more than 60% of workers in extreme professions are ready for functional enhancement, but 80% of them insist on being able to switch it off. The longevity path: by 2050, the author predicts, about 500 million people will adopt some form of life-extending optimization. And the path of expanded perception for those willing to take risks.

Weak Points and the Takeaway

The book is not free of contradictions. In the third part the certainty scale blurs: “quantum consciousness” is placed on a par with biological consciousness. The author first calls an uploaded copy a ghost, then later describes digital consciousness as a form that continues personality. And almost nothing is said about who will own these technologies and set their price.

The book’s value lies not in its forecasts but in clearing up concepts: the “silicon human” hides the disappearance of the human, mind uploading is copying, intelligence and consciousness are different dimensions, and enhancement differs from replacement by being reversible. Technology, the author concludes, can be a tool but never the core that sets the direction of civilization. Tellingly, in the acknowledgments he mentions his dialogue with AI, which helped him organize his thoughts: a machine in the role of an amplifier, not a substitute.