With the advent of cybernetic immortality in the late 21st century, human civilization was irrevocably changed. The unravelling of the code of human neural activity meant that, for the first time in history, an individual human consciousness could be scanned, duplicated, altered and stored in an electronic medium. The implications of this achievement in every aspect of human society were profound and far-reaching, the most dramatic of which was the near-total elimination of death from the fabric of human existence. The ability to electronically duplicate a human mind meant that individuals could create digital backups of themselves from week to week, ensuring that in the event of an untimely death, their personae could be transferred into new, cloned bodies and their existence would continue uninterrupted, with only a few missing memories as an indication that they had ever died. Humanity became, for all intents and purposes, immortal.
As a consequence of this, philosophers of science and morality across human civilizations were forced to reexamine the traditional definition of humanity as an individual, biological life-form. Their responses to this challenge were many and varied, with some cultures adopting a view of a human being as an abstract construct, a consciousness that could exist either biologically or in digital form as long as the capacity for thought was consistent. The distinction between human and machine life began to blur.
Still others began to reject the idea of human beings existing as individuals at all. The notion of a superorganism, of a human consciousness comprising many individual minds, found acceptance with some of the earliest colonizers of deep space, including the extrasolar development conglomerate Darius-Conrad, which began to put its theories into practice as its reach expanded beyond the jurisdiction of terrestrial authorities.
As humanity branched out into space, these differences went with them. Humanity by the time of Divergence exists as an abstract--not as a species or even a collection of species, but merely as a method of dialogue between the various interstellar factions that still consider themselves "human", even if only in name.