Elon Musk’s plans to build a Cyborg Dragon

The human fascination with hybrids – part man and part machine – dates back to centuries ago. This insatiable thirst for creating such a being gave rise to the concept of the ‘Cyborg.’ The term was first coined in 1960, by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, when they co-authored a paper for a space exploration NASA conference.

According to the duo, a cyborg is a combination of ‘cybernetics’ and ‘organism’. However, it does not merely mean that the cyborg is a simple amalgamation of organic and synthetic components. To Clynes and Kline, it represented a unique “approach to tackle the technical challenges of space travel—physically adapting man to survive a hostile environment, rather than modifying the environment alone.”

Soon after, in 1963, “The Cyborg Study” was published. The purpose of the study was to assess “the theoretical possibility of incorporating artificial organs, drugs, and/or hypothermia as integral parts of the life support systems in spacecraft design of the future, and of reducing metabolic demands and the attendant life support requirements.”