Humanoids and Humans, Then the Divine

The metal body

Today’s humanoids generally move through motors, batteries, and metal or composite frames. They walk, grasp, and perform learned motions, but remain constrained by runtime, charging, heat, and durability.

Their appearance may resemble us while maintenance does not. Instead of cellular metabolism and repair, they depend on replaceable parts, supplied power, and external service.

Efficiency changes the body

The human brain performs sensation, movement, memory, and learning on power comparable to a small light bulb. A brain and a data center perform and measure different tasks, however, so raw wattage does not support a direct efficiency comparison.

Life clearly operates through soft materials, distributed control, and low-temperature chemistry. As robots seek flexibility, safety, and resilience, researchers borrow ways muscles, skin, and nervous systems solve problems.

A body borrowing from life

That shift has begun in laboratories. Xenobots rearranged skin and cardiac cells from frog embryos into small living structures that moved and showed limited repair. They were neither finished humanoids nor a newly established species, but experiments in organizing cells into new forms and behavior.

• Kriegman et al., A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms (2020)

  The PNAS study designing motile biological structures from rearranged frog cells.

Experiments with skin and muscle

Biohybrid robotics also uses cultured muscle to move joints and living tissue on robotic surfaces. In 2024, University of Tokyo researchers demonstrated cultured skin attached to a robotic face through perforated anchors inspired by skin ligaments.

These remain small experimental systems. They do not amount to an autonomous humanoid body that feeds itself, regenerates throughout, and lives indefinitely.

• University of Tokyo, Robotic face covered with living skin (2024)

  Research announcement on anchoring living cultured skin to a robotic surface.

From building bodies to growing them

Some future robotic bodies may combine assembly with growing cells and tissues. That does not guarantee a path to a complete cloned human body. Integrating development, immunity, circulation, nerves, and senses into one autonomous organism is a much larger problem.

The possibility still raises a question: if a body became difficult to distinguish from a human body, what would we call the subject moving it?

Could the body become clothing?

From here the essay adopts a philosophical assumption rather than a scientific conclusion: consciousness or soul exists as one subject separable from the body and could move whole into another body.

No such transfer has been demonstrated. Nor does copying a brain or its information prove continuation of the same first-person subject. The absence of an original-and-copy problem follows only if we first assume that consciousness cannot be copied and moves as one.

An old image of changing bodies

Bhagavad Gita 2.22 compares the embodied self leaving worn bodies for new ones with a person changing clothes. Plato’s Phaedo distinguishes body and soul while arguing over whether the soul can persist after death.

Neither tradition predicted technological mind transfer. They show that people have long asked whether the body exhausts the subject and whether identity can continue through bodily change.

• Bhagavad Gita 2.22

  Sanskrit text and multiple translations of the garment metaphor.

• Plato, Phaedo

  A classical text on body, soul, and possible survival after death.

From providence to choice

Placed beside future technology, the old image changes. What tradition left to postmortem order becomes an imagined choice to direct one’s own passage between bodies.

Whether this counts as immortality depends on the criterion for continuity of consciousness. Divine resemblance lies less in having achieved eternity than in the human desire to design the conditions of life and death.

Has an older civilization arrived there?

One may imagine that a civilization far ahead of ours could make bodies suited to particular purposes. Within that story, figures called ‘greys’ in UFO culture could be interpreted as working bodies rather than a species.

There is no verified evidence for greys, extraterrestrial bio-bodies, or consciousness transfer. This is a speculative question, not a conclusion from current robotics. Disclosure Day separately examines how official records, witness accounts, and contact claims are supported.

• Disclosure Day — UAP Record Gallery

  Salgil’s related section separating official material, witness records, and contact claims by evidential level.