On a mailing list I subscribe to, someone recently asked me if I subscribe to any philosophical or spiritual beliefs, and what they are. If you don’t care, then I won’t bother you with the answer; otherwise: Continue reading
I have a lot of things to post about our recent trip to Key West, and (as usual) lots of bandwidth-devouring, not-safe-for-work photos to go with. This isn’t that post, however.
On the way to Key West, i saw a truck with a patriotic bumper sticker–the one that has a picture of the American flag and the slogan “These Colors Don’t Run.” The sticker was printed with cheap inks, which had faded almost to nonexistance inthe sun–the red stripes on the flag were sunbleached to pale yellow, the slogan was barely readable. How appropriate, I thought.
Right now, America is the world’s sole superpower. Right now, we can do pretty much as we please on the world stage; right now, there is nobody who can out-muscle us. problem is, right now we’re facing an adversary who isn’t competing with us on our own territory. The Cold War, that bitter war of attrition with the Soviet Union, was largely about who could out-muscle the other, an arm wrestling match fought with nuclear weapons and with conventional weapons in thousands of indirect ways all over the globe. The Taliban in Afghanistan was an American creation; we found, trained, armed, paid, and equipped the most virulent, anti-Western, reactionary, xenophobic bunch of fanatic whackos we could find and set them loose against the Russians, hoping to bog the old USSR down in an unwinnable quagmire in Afghanistan. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
So the Soviet Union is no more, and we’re the supreme military power in the world. These colors don’t run; that’s not what happens to solitary superpowers. These colors, instead, gradually fade away.
Being a solitary superpower is not a sustainable proposition. Ask the Persians, or the Romans, or the British. Indeed, we find throughout history that Afghanistan and Iraq are the places where world superpowers go to die.
During the fading days of the British empire, the British found themselves up to their hips in the quagmire of Afghanistan, spending what was left of its resources in a feeble and ultimately fruitless effort to bring order to that part of the world. Meanwhile, across the ocean, America was quietly and steadily building its own political, economic, technical, and military might. By the time the British realized what was happening, they’d been consumed in Afghanistan just as the Soviets would later be, and in Iraq, and they looked around and realized that the world had passed them by…the British Empire had faded, quite without anyone realizing it, and the nation that was once the reigning superpower was suddenly an also-ran.
So. Fast forward to today, and we have…a world superpower slowly being consumed in Afghanistan and Iraq, while across the ocean, another country, this time China, is quietly and steadily building its own political, economic, technical, and military might. The Chinese economy, which depends far less on the rest of the world than ours, is slowly becoming a mammoth juggernaut; the Chinese now publish more research papers every year than we Americans do; the Chinese are developing their own ambitious manned space program; the Chinese government is investing heavily in manufacturing, R&D, and technical firms abroad… Haven’t we seen this script before?
Afghanistan and Iraq is where world superpowers go to die. You’d think someone would have noticed by now.
I voted today. I doubt anybody will be surprised at the way I voted. Had a dead mackerel been running against Bush, I would’ve voted for the fish. “Vote smelly fish for a stronger America!” “The fish–it can’t do a worse job, right?” I did, however, jump outside the Democrat/Libertarian paradigm in my local elections, where I actually feel those votes might be of some use.
On a completely unrelated subject, I got my Alcor paperwork yesterday. Once I have it filled out and notarized, I’m in. I have to find some witnesses who’ll sign it as well; coordinating the witnesses and the notary, and a bit of luck, is all that stands between me and having a life that’s long enough to have some prayer of seeing a time, far far in the future, when human beings the world over will actually learn something from history. But then, I’m an optimist. I know that because OK Cupid says so.
This weekend, Shelly and I both got some new tattoos. We both got the same tattoo, but not for the reasons you might think.
The tattoo itself is the Kanji for “Hope,” and looks something like this:
We each got the characters on the inside of our right wrists. And no, it has nothig to do with the fact that we’re dating, and everything to do with a set of shared values about the future.
Every day since I was very young, every single day without fail for my entire adult life and most of my childhood, I have been aware of the fact that someday, I’m going to die. This has been a universal constant of the human condition since we first began using language and making tools. There’s no getting around it; the unescapable, inexorable reality of death has fueled the fabrication of entire complex paradigms and mythologies, all designed to reassure their believers that once you get past the grave, if you but only follow some arbitrary and manufactured set of rules, nothing can go wrong.
This has been the reality of the human experience for all of human history…until now. Now, for the first time ever, we can see a mechanism by which aging and death can be circumvented. We aren’t there yet, but we know it is possible. On the horizon, we can see a reality in which old age is no longer a part of the normal human reality, and death is not inevitable. We can see the mechanisms responsible for these things. We can see that these mechanisms can be manipulated. We know that altering these mechanisms does not violate any fundamental law of physics. At this point, it’s simply a question of figuring out how to do it.
Two years before the Wright Brothers flew, Lord Kelvin, the famos physicist who lent his name to the Kelvin scale of temperature and whose work was instrumental in understanding the nature of heat and energy, the man who helped contribute to our basic knowledge of thermodynamics, stated flatly and absolutely, “Heavier than air flight is impossible.” When it was pointed out to him that birds are heavier than air and birds fly, he answered to the effect of “That’s different–birds are alive.”
In fact, he was wrong for one simple and obvious reason: The fact that birds can fly demonstrates clearly and beyond refute that heavier-than-air flight violates no fundamental law of physics. History shows us that that which does not violate the fundamental laws of physics can, eventually, be done; it’s simply a matter of having the will and the time to figure out how to do it.
Nanotechnology promises something no other branch of human exploration has yet promised: the ability to, on an atomic scale, order molecular systems in any way we wish that is not prohibited by the laws of physics. Human beings are molecular systems; the laws by which cellular biology work are becoming very well understood, and when reduced to its simplest components, any biological system is simply a complex system of self-replicating biological machinery, operating in accordance with physical laws to construct large-scale macroscopic systems from small-scale molecular assemblers. Molecular assembly, like heavier than air flight, does not violate the laws of physics; we know this because we see large-scale systems built by molecular assemblers every day. Biological systems which do not age and die do not violate the laws of physics; we know this because we have examples of such systems, in trees that live for four thousand years and microbes that can survive for twenty-five thousand years or longer. Changing the operation of biological systems in arbitrary ways can be done without violating the laws of physics; we’ve known this since the advent of the first drugs, and advances in gene therapy have demonstrated that almost any result we want in almost any biological system is at least theoretically possible.
So, back to the tattoo. I am living in one of the first generations in all of human history where we can honestly say we are beginning to understand the physical mechanisms of aging and death, and we can see ways those mechanisms may be altered. Will it happen soon enough to save me? It’s a long shot. But make no mistake about it: we are fast approaching the first generation of human beings who will be born into a world where old age and death are not inevitable. There is hope–not only for me as an individual, but for us as a species. Erasing old age and the inevitability of enfeeblement and death will transform the human condition in ways that we can not hope to predict, and are at least as profound and as deep as the development of language.
I will do everything in my power to be there to watch it happen.
There’s a good chance, of course, that the technology will not develop before I die. In that eventuality, there’s a backup plan: Alcor. It too is a long shot, but now that I have a better understanding of what they hope to accomplish, and the mechanism by which they hope to accomplish it, it’s not as much of a long shot as it seems.
So. Now I have hope, and hope is a powerful thing.
Ganked from ladytabitha:
Search 4 billion digits of Pi looking for your phone number. The odds of finding any arbitrary seven-digit sequence buried somewhere in Pi are almost 100%. Wasn’t there a science-fiction story about God hiding a secret message somewhere inside of Pi?
Ganked from mobiusmuse:
Given its record of abject miserable failure, how can the Republican Party possibly persuade people to vote Republican? This hilarious movie, taken directly from the speeches of top Republican leaders themselves, spells it out pretty nicely.
Plusses and minuses:
+ Going to FantasyFest in Key West over Halloween!
+ Necronomicon starts next weekend!
– Shelly has a cold… 🙁
+ Tampa Fetish Party the weekend after Necro
– Shelly will not be going to San Francisco with me in January; school starts the same week as MacWorld.
+ I’ve got a quote for Alcor life insurance, and should have the insurance in four to five weeks, which means I’m well on-track to have my Alcor bracelet by year’s end. Yay!
+ Alcor will be offering whole-body vitrification soon!
+ We’ve drafted datan0de and merovingian to help develop the characters and art for the post-apocalyptic Flash cartoon that will (soon? eventually?) be hosted at Doomsday Sex.
I just checked the mail, and…
SHELLY’S ALCOR BRACELET WAS IN IT!!!
So yesterday, I was dreaming about nanotech.
Specifically, I was dreaming about Shelly, datan0de, and nanotech. In a weird kind of way.
In the dream, the three of us were in a huge industrial factory of the kind that was built at the start of the industrial revolution–an enormous brick building, with spinning metal shafts along the ceiling that drive great pulleys connected by long belts to machines that did the actual work (and sometimes lopped off people’s fingers). For some reason I’m not quite clear on, it was desperately, vitally important that we come up with a way to construct generic, programmable nanoscopic assemblers, soon (like in six months), or we would all die.
During the dream, the three of us were arguing about the best way to go about constructing prototype assemblers. datan0de, who was wearing his DragonCon gear, was arguing for a “bottom-up” approach: design a molecule that would do what we wanted, then figure out a way to make that molecule spontaneously self-assemble when the correct ingredients were brought together in the correct way.
I was arguing for a “top down” approach, where we first design the assembler, then construct it on a molecule-by-molecule basis by using devices such as atomic force microscopes to place every molecule in position. Once the first assembler had been hand-built in this way, we could then program it to build more assemblers.
Shelly was arguing for a third approach–namely, designing the assembler, then constructing protein-based machinery to build the assembler by using custom strands of DNA to create the protein-based machinery. She argued that datan0de and I were trying to reinvent the wheel; the mechanism to create proteins from a strand of DNA already exist, so if we could figure out how to build a machine out of proteins that would construct the assembler, then we could use the machinery inside a living cell to cause the cell to churn out assemblers just by cooking up the appropriate DNA and introducing it into the cell.
Shelly finished all her Alcor paperwork today! datan0de and I witnessed it, so it’s all signed and notarized and ready to go. She should have her bracelet soon, and I’m getting started on my own paperwork soon as well.
We’re thinking of having a party when Shelly gets her bracelet, and another when I get mine, because hey, two parties!
[From a post I made on the newsgroup alt.polyamory]
It seems like a simple enough question. Why do I want the human race to get its eggs out of one cosmological basket and spread to other planets? Why do I care what happens after I die? What difference does it make if the species succeeds or fails? What does it matter if we do not escape the earth by the time the sun dies? Is it a parenting instinct? A desire to see human civilization succeed? A bid for some sort of immortality?
For me, none of the above.
I appear to have no parenting instinct to speak of; apparently, that option wasn’t installed at the factory. Nor am I particularly up on human civilization, which I find flawed at best and ridiculous at worst. And I don’t want to be immortal though my work, through children, or through my species; I want to be immortal by not dying. 🙂
While I’m not particularly impressed by the vast bulk of humanity, I have a tremendus faith in the human potential: I see humanity in its current form as a beginning point, not an endpoint. I believe we have the potential to become something that is to our current civilization what current civilization is to Neanderthal civilization, and that many things we accept as a fixed and immutable part of the human condition–including death and even being fixed in the physical forms dictated by our biology–are actually not a necessary or permanent part of the definition of humanity at all.
Further, I do not see humanity as separate from the universe. I do not believe any part of the human soul or spirit comes from outside the universe; we are a part of the universe just as surely as comets, asteroids, and stars, but unlike comets, asteroids, and stars, we are that part of the universe which has the ability to comprehend itself–and to me, that gives us a value lacking in comets and asteroids.
It’s not us-in-our-current-form I want to see succeed; it’s those things which we have the potential to become. We have virtually limitless potential–potential that would be unrealized should life on this planet fail.
Yes, I do believe that we are not unique in the universe; there is almost certainly life elsewhere. However, it’s just as probably not like us, and in all probability is extremely different from us; that means that even if we are not unique in our ability to comprehend, we still have a unique *perspective* to offer…and that, too, has value.
If Earth dies, if we and our children die, what makes it matter that some branch of humankind is somewhere surviving?
Our ability to comprehend. We are that part of the universe which knows itself, and by extension, we are the way the universe can understand itself.
This is probably an argument that either makes sense to someone or it does not, and if it does not, I do not think I have the skill to explain it in a way that makes it accessible to someone who does not feel it. But there it is.
A microbe that grows in the Dead Sea is teaching scientists about the art of DNA repair.
Halobacterium appears to be a master of the complex art of DNA repair. This mastery is what scientists want to learn from: In recent years, a series of experiments by NASA-funded researchers at the University of Maryland has probed the limits of Halobacterium’s powers of self-repair, using cutting-edge genetic techniques to see exactly what molecular tricks the “master” uses to keep its DNA intact.
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“We have completely fragmented their DNA. I mean we have completely destroyed it by bombarding it with [radiation]. And they can reassemble their entire chromosome and put it back into working order within several hours,” says Adrienne Kish, member of the research group studying Halobacterium at the University of Maryland.
Slowly but surely, we’re getting there…
“‘I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner’ doesn’t technically qualify as transhumanism, does it?”
