The Human Code
One genre I’m quite interested in is that of Science-Fiction, or “Sci-Fi”. I admit I don’t watch much of Stargate SG-1 or Star Trek (although my Dad is quite a big fan of both shows) but I am quite interested in the themes usually present in “Sci-Fi”. Namely, that of technology and how it relates to Human biology, or the Human condition. Perhaps there may be a grain of Fact in Science “Fiction”.
Those of us who live in the 21st Century are, in some respects, the fortunate ones. We live in a time, in an era, in which we can communicate with others around the world in a matter of seconds thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web. We have e-mail, social networking, video links, SMS and GPS. But it’s not just communicative technology which has changed and advanced. New and improved medical technology allows people to have artificial limbs and hearts – and not just simplistic ones at that but sophisticated devices which mimic the real-life counterparts. New and better methods of carrying out surgery are now available – what surgeons couldn’t perform decades ago is now standard procedure. Even in Pharmacy, more powerful drugs are available which alter a person’s body and helps them fight illnesses.
Of course, I think it’s wrong to say that we live in a “miracle era”. While there have been many advances in technology and medicine, we are not invincible. However, saying that, what interests me is the prospect that, some day, Humans may be “invincible” (or near it). Will there ever be a day when Humans are no longer biological creatures but machines incapable of being “killed”? I know it maybe sounds absurd but I don’t think the idea of “Human machines” is as fictional as we might believe.
The glorious thing about technology is that it always changes. It seems like every month, or every couple of months, there is a new-and-improved gadget on the market. Indeed, most televisions today are “HD-ready” and with the growing popularity of Blu-ray, many people can get the same sort of picture quality at home as they can at the cinema – it’s even possible to have your own surround sound system. Indeed, some new TVs even have 3D built into them (I tested one in a shop a few weeks ago and, while the 3D wasn’t excellent, I do think there is potential). In fact, the idea of 3D without the need for special glasses to be worn is even being explored. In gaming, there may be (if not are) 3D games in which the player can totally immerse themselves in the environment, whether it be the realistic feel of driving a Ferrari or hearing bullets whiz by.
My eldest sister is a Pharmacist and receives issues of “The Pharmaceutical Journal“. I admit I don’t read the issues from cover-to-cover but as I was flicking through one of them (dated 16th October 2010) I came across an interesting story about invisibility cloaks (which, admittedly, I thought was odd in a journal about Pharmacy. It’s now official that Pharmacists like invisibility cloaks!):
A study published earlier this year in Science showed that it is possible for a cloak to render an object invisible in three dimensions. Researchers created a metamaterial cloak from a polymer crystal made of tiny rods. Altering the thickness of the rods changes the refractive index of the material. By tailoring the refractive index, the object under the cloak becomes invisible to a wide range of wavelengths slightly longer than visible light.
The same rate of technological growth is also evident in the phone market. For a couple of years, I’ve had the iPhone: the original, the 3G and, currently, the 3GS (my Dad has the iPhone 4). Even though I’ve had the 3GS for just under a year, I’ve noticed many improvements to the phone even just with software updates. When I first started Grammar School, I had a Nokia 3210 and then, later on, the 3510i. In the space of ten years (maybe even less), phones have evolved from having black-and-white screens to colour screens with incredible (in some cases, HD) picture quality. As well as that, phones today can access the Internet, record videos, take pictures, store music and play games (and the quality of the games can even rival those on consoles and computers). What’s also astonishing is that the hardware (or, rather, the size of the hardware) is not sacrificed – a phone can have many features but be thin and compact.
I often wonder how people years from now will look back at our time. What technological (and other) marvels will there be ten years later, or even fifty years later? Will we, if we are still alive by then, be able to travel far into Space (and will the price be significantly lower)? Indeed, will we be living in Space? Will there be, like in Star Wars and Star Trek, holographic communication? Such endeavours are even “in the works”. In the military, for instance, there are more efficient weapons, such as infra-red (or heat-seeking) missiles; there is even new (or soon-to-be new) armour designed to give soldiers much more protection, and awareness, in the field of combat. Perhaps we are not too far off from having our own, real-life Iron Man, or even Master Chief. Indeed, there could be a Police Force with officers like RoboCop.
Sometimes robots in Sci-Fi movies are portrayed as maniacal, anti-Human killing machines who have a “mind” of their own. Will there ever be a time when robots gain independence from Human Beings and go on a murderous rampage? A part of me doubts it. No doubt they could gain independence in the sense that Humans no longer need to manage them, or continually tweak them, but machines are often, if not always, at the mercy of their Human creators. If a machine does go hay-wire, or is destructive to its environment, its fault is usually because of Human error, whether in the programming or something else, and not because the robot has freely gained its own “autonomy” (indeed, that “error” may be intentional – someone could intentionally program a robot to harm others).
This year, world-renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking starred in a three-part television series entitled, “Stephen Hawking’s Universe” (also called, “Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking“). As well as that, he also co-authored a new book, alongside Leonard Mlodinow, entitled, “The Grand Design” (admittedly, at the time of writing/publishing, I haven’t read the book so I can’t really comment on it). In the second episode of the television series, the idea of time-travel was examined, in particular with relation to wormholes (I found the series fascinating. If you get the opportunity to watch it, I highly recommend you do).
I suppose the common objection, or problem, to time-travel is the classic “grandfather” argument. If you went back in time and shot dead your grandfather, would that mean that your future existence would be jeopardized? Is there a paradox? Perhaps it depends on whether or not your father was conceived (or born) before you shot dead your grandfather. If your father hadn’t yet been conceived then there could be a paradox; however, if he had already been conceived in his mother’s womb (your grandmother), then there might not be a paradox (because, ultimately, his existence would rest with his mother/your grandmother). Even-so, isn’t that all well-and-good with regards to your father’s existence? What if you went back in time and shot your father dead? If you were already born or conceived, then it might not affect your future existence; however, it might be a different story if you hadn’t yet been conceived.
If I could travel back in time to five years ago when I was fifteen-years-old, would I be able to interact with my fifteen-year-old self? Could the twenty-year-old me walk into my room of five years previous and stand face-to-face with my teenage self? Or would I, the twenty-year-old me, physically “de-age” so as to become fifteen-years-old? Would I morph into my self of five years previous (to become one “version” of me, not two)? And, finally, if that were possible and I were now fifteen-years-old, would I lose all knowledge that I actually, originally, came from the future, from 2010? Would I be stuck in 2005, forced to re-live the next five years of my life?
Indeed, what would the Theological implications be of time-travel? Imagine we were able to travel back in time to the time of Jesus. Would it be possible to travel to Jerusalem and stop Jesus from being crucified? How would that impact the Christianity of the future? Indeed, would time-travel even jeopardise the idea of Pre-Destination? If we could reverse time, would we be messing with what God has predestined? Or did God Pre-destine that we would travel back in time and mess with Pre-Destination? Indeed, and this may be the most interesting question of all, what if we were able to travel back in time to the moment of Creation (or shortly after it)? Would such a feat be possible? Would we keep travelling back in time until we hit a “wall”? Could we even alter the Creation of our own Universe?
Albert Einstein is perhaps most famous for his ideas of General Relativity and Special Relativity (which I’ll not go into in-depth here because, quite frankly, I don’t think I’m capable enough to explain them!):
Many creative minds have wondered that since time slows down as you approach the speed of light, if you could find a way to travel faster than the speed of light, could you travel back in time? In order to travel faster than the speed of light, I assume that you would at some point have to travel at exactly the speed of light…Now SR [Special Relativity] tells us that at the speed of light, time stops, your length contracts to nothing, and your resistance to acceleration becomes infinite requiring infinite energy (as observed by a frame of reference that is not in motion with the system).
Of course, I am somewhat (perhaps wrongly) assuming that time-travel is possible. I think the concept is a very interesting one although it may be very difficult to carry out in reality. Saying that, however, I don’t think it’s completely out of Humanity’s reach. The speed of light is 186,000 mi/sec (miles per second). Achieving that speed, as well as constructing an adequate ship, may seem like an impossible task and, no doubt, it will probably be tens, if not hundreds, of years before Humanity arrives at that point. However, the optimist in me (or is it the child?) still thinks that it might be possible. Hundreds of years ago, people probably thought it was impossible for Humans to “fly” in the sky; even a century ago the idea might have seemed ludicrous. We somewhat take it for granted that the idea of Human flight in an aircraft (particularly over long distances as a commodity) even to people of a hundred years ago seemed like the work of fantasy. Now, it is a stark reality.
Before I get too carried away, however, it may be good to remember that achieving 186,000 mi/sec would only work in a perfect vacuum. Outer Space, however, may not be perfect for the simple reason that it has objects; objects which move: there are planets, debris of rock and other cosmic barriers. It’s a bit like a car park: you can only park your vehicle into a space if nothing else is occupying that same space. So, even if we did build a ship with a top speed of 186,000 mi/sec, I think it’s unlikely that the ship would constantly be at that top speed – in order to avoid collision and damage, the ship may have to travel much slower.
Even if creating, or discovering, a wormhole were possible, what would we find going through it, or coming out the other end? Would we stumble upon a distant Universe or forever travel in darkness? Indeed, would our Laws of Nature be the same in another Universe? When I think of time-travel, I think of those cheesy (yet surprisingly good!) 1980s movies in which a time machine is developed allowing people to travel back in time (such as “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure“). In most of those movies, the people in the machine crash-land on some past civilisation (like Ancient Egypt, for example). What interests me about those movies is that the time-travellers remain as their present, 20th Century selves – they step out of the machine and the people in Ancient Egypt are baffled at the clothes, hairstyles and technologies of the new arrivals. If we could time-travel, perhaps we could only watch past events unfold as they did, having no power to change their initial outcomes.
Time-travel may not be limited exclusively to the past – indeed, we may even be able to travel “into” the future. In the words of Stephen Hawking:
I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time’s current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in diff erent places and that is the key to travelling into the future. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago. He realised that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up.
If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we’d need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.
Perhaps travelling back in time is different to travelling forward in time. Whereas the past is “done-and-dusted”, the future (or so we believe) has yet to happen (I know what happened yesterday but I don’t know what will happen tomorrow). Maybe this is the crucial point about time-travel (and possibly time in general): perhaps we cannot “jump” to-and-fro between time periods (at least, not those in the “future”) because, in some regards, our actions develop consequences we can’t always predict.
For instance, if I decide to put oil onto a fire, I know that flames will most likely shoot up as a result of my action. If I take (or am about to take) a free-kick in a football/soccer match, I don’t know whether the ball will go over the wall of players, past the goalkeeper and into the net or whether it will go out of play. Or, I’ll make another example.
With regards to time-travelling into the past, we could say, “Let’s go to Civilisation A” and, with that in mind, visit that civilisation. However, we in the present don’t know what, if any, civilisations there will be in the future so we can’t really say, “Let’s go to That civilisation”. Put simpler, it’s like saying, “Let’s visit the France of 2100″. How do we (or how could we) know whether or not France, as a nation or as a geographical piece of land, will even exist in 2100? Maybe geographical France will be gone or maybe “France” will occupy a different geographical piece of land on Earth, somewhere far away from the France of 2010. Indeed, to use a more personal example, what if we said we wanted to visit ourselves of the future? What if we wanted to morph into ourselves living in the year 2050? Well, again, how do we even know that we will be alive in 2050? Maybe we’ll have died long before that time? As grotesque as it may sound, would we “morph” into our dead bodies? So, there is somewhat an element of uncertainty with regards to the future.
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America was often entitled, “The New World” by European explorers. In the same way, we too are exploring “new worlds” in Outer Space: they may not be worlds we can inhabit but discovering them leads us to wonder whether or not there are planets we can inhabit. There are millions of planets, surely some of them are hospitable towards Human Beings?
As romantic as it may sound, I think that, one day, Humans will say goodbye to Earth and travel en masse to other planets. Granted, the man-power to build hundreds, if not thousands, of spaceships would be enormous and expensive (there may also be the issue of how to feed and look after everyone when they are in Space). Still, as cliché as it sounds, we have an intrinsic curiosity that leads us to explore the unknown; to go above-and-beyond what we think is possible. We are never content with present technologies: we want things to be better, faster and stronger. Although it may be said that “curiosity killed the cat” even curiosity can lead to the discovery of treasure…
We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own.
George W. Bush
