The Future is Now!

Dear Friends,

I present to you at no charge an exclusive look into the recent past, our present and near future as it may be. I am no mind reader nor savant of any kind. I cannot reliably prognosticate nor see into the future. I just read the writing writ upon the mists of Time as the river flows by.

Since the simultaneous rise of electronic computing, advances in modern prosthetics, medicine, surgery and brain science it has been a recently realizable dream to meld Human with machine. You encounter the present result each day when you notice an individual with a small neural implant on the back of his skull attached to a microphone in his ear. That part looks like a hearing aid. The implant’s interface to his brain looks like he’s pasted a quarter-sized piece of Silly Putty® to the left rear of his head, just above the hairline. He is a deaf person given the chosen gift of hearing by technology. He is a Cyborg; a Man Machine.

He is not alone. Today you are starting to see folks with funny looking glasses. They are blind but they can see by means of machine vision that communicates through digital to analog pulses to their Visual Cortex. It doesn’t work all that well yet, but it hold the promise of much better performance. Why settle for normal Human vision when you could toggle a switch to see like a butterfly or bee, see into the radio spectrum or perceive a night sky full of Gamma Ray Bursters making the best fireworks you could hope for?

Meanwhile, a lady in a wheelchair, a paraplegic, took the first sip of orange juice she’d had in thirty years without the help of an aide whom she communicated with only by blinking her eyes. She recently simply thought about having that beverage and a computer wired into her head told a disembodied robotic arm on a rolling table by her bed to give her some refreshment. It obeyed. She controlled a machine that, albeit temporarily, was part of her. She did it by wishing for a drink. That simple.

Well, it wasn’t really that simple. To get to this point of modest Human/Machine integration, a code had to be cracked. It’s the toughest code we know of this side of >Why and How Does Anything Exist?<. The code I refer to is the code of our most basic cerebral and sub-cerebral nervous functioning. It is the code clacking, gurgling and ticking behind our every physical and verbal expression, our very thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. A machine with such capacity would truly be a Mind Reader. Such machines have already been demonstrated in prototype to construct the words that a person is thinking and shine digital images of their visual imagination on fluorescing screens.

Flash forward to 2016. The United States unveils the federally mandated Mind Meters® to be installed in every airport, every ATM, every 7-11 and intersection where there is a stop light. Citizens can no longer get to the curb from the cab without having their minds scanned.

What sort of problems will pop up when brain scanners are perfected and installed on every corner. How will my nation’s economy and social fabric be ravaged as millions of folks from all walks of life leave their jobs to take online courses so that they might qualify as a Homeland Security Mind Readers and thus be able read the rampant pornographic thoughts of airline passengers and all the folks at banks or just walking down Main Street during lunch hour?

Surgeons will leave anesthetized patients in mid-appendectomy on the operating table. Lawyers and real estate speculators will leave money on the proverbial table to lunge at this new opportunity. The food service industry will become bereft of illegal immigrants working the dish washers as they flock toward the opportunity to find out what other illegal immigrants are really thinking about that skinny girl in the summer dress. “Is it what am I thinking or even dirtier?” Grandmothers will abandon their charges in bassinets to examine the secret thoughts of those swarthy fellows with their Mind Meters® as they also mine the imaginations of the very proper business man visualizing a lady’s underwear as she in turn tunes in a “suspect” for a reading of his response to another’s response to the response of another grooving to the spike heels of that “looker” as he ponders what’s on top of those long legs and her girlfriend monitors the entire situation. Teachers will ignore their classes while staring out the window to relentlessly scan the visual imaginations of folks on the town’s streets for signs of secret assignations underway while the kiddies are doodling on the margins of forty year old text books.

The economy will collapse, as will our culture, in a heaving sigh of an infinite loop consuming its own tail. No real work will get done. Children will be left unfed, ill educated and unattended. Every aspect of our civic life will be corroded. Commerce will sputter and belch and eventually swoon in a faint like a Victorian lady mortified that her bloomers were showing at the grand ball.

Oh, that has already happened. We don’t have to wait for 2016 and the perfection of Mind Meters®.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

A Trip to a Far Away Moon…

Dear Friends,

1,216 billion kilometers, about a billion miles away from the pale blue dot that is our home-world, is a very small world that we humans call Enceladus. It is a moon of Saturn, and it circles and swims amidst the most dense portion of the gaseous, ringed and giant planet’s E-ring. Enceladus is so tiny that its entire diameter could be nestled in the distance between Montreal and Washington, D.C.

Something interesting is happening out there. On a patch of dust where ice serves as the fifty-mile thick rocky mantle and crust of a deep frozen speck of creation, there are geysers. How can this be? Perhaps, we thought, under that frigid presentation to early robots visiting from Earth, there is an ocean. The founts that emerge from this world’s surface are rich in water and the chemicals sodium and potassium. Nitrogen makes up a good portion of the ice that cloaks the roiling, hidden ocean that is bubbling in the massage of Saturn’s titanic gravity. Beneath that ocean lies a core of iron, silicates, and carbon. On Eceladus there is the chemistry of life.

We wonder, what sort of life might be bubbling in that dark ocean that has never seen even the dim light of a distant sun? The clever machine, Aldrin II, completed its seven year voyage to the Saturnian system in 2028. It threaded its way through the debris of the great rings to orbit Enceladus and then descended to its surface. There it deployed Aldrin’s cryobot, Armstrong. It took six months (in Earth time) to bore down to the ocean through the mantle of ice. Eventually, however, there the great question was answered; at least in part.

The briny deep was a soup of pre-biotic and biotic materials, detectable to the robot’s “senses.” Amino acids complexed into RNA, DNA and proteins, flakes of what could have passed for earthly flesh and weird bits of what seemed to be vegetation but contained no chlorophyl were abundant near the ocean floor where sulfurous fumaroles vomited out the substances of the ancient world’s core. Peering into the murk, Armstrong detected in this exobiology what appeared, at first, to be bacteria to any doctor born of our terran orb. On closer examination, this first judgement was precisely wrong.

The bugs of Enceladus were all inside out. Exterior to their lipid cellular membranes was their genetic material. It makes sense that nature might direct such an evolution. In a cozy but constrained womb such as this weird ocean, evolution had opted to make the exchange of genes as convenient and speedy as possible. Higher up the food chain were similarly constructed creatures. Their bodies had the appearance of flattened eels that squiggled through the waters. Their guts secreted their gastric juices through a slimy skin that was covered with long cilia that captured their digested food and swept it into pores and thence, apparently to an alimentary canal that had no mouth but the being’s surface. It did, however have an anus, from whence the rich broth of the Enceladan biosphere was, in part, derived.

There was more. That plant like detritus was revealed to be the dissolved remains of plankton-like beings that had evolved to bio-fluoresce to signal each other in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of their home in an encapsulated deep. With this talent they gained the ability to form jelly-fish-like colonies, massive creatures that captured and consumed the eel-creatures. They lived on top of the alien food-chain, died and just fell to pieces.

Twenty years after his arrival in the alien deep, Armstrong still swims this strange ocean. It continues to report back. Alas, almost nobody is listening but kids who are strange, have never kissed a girl, and have time on their hands. The governments of The Allies have cut back budgets for space exploration. There are wars to pay for. Meanwhile, the people of our gloom benighted orb may yet hear news of a species that might want to speak to us through a piece of our technology made from junk made from stuff we dug from this Earth, and flung toward the stars.

Hic Finis Est,

S