sexta-feira, 12 de setembro de 2014

POST MODERN ALCHEMISTS

I remember having discussed this topic several times. Intriguing subject, sometimes poetic, sometimes scary: the pursuit of eternity! "Who wants to live forever? What do we do with eternity? What do we do with the infinite? I remember the Highlander theme :

At 2:38 Fred Mercury sings "touch my tears with your lips/touch my world with your fingertips/and we can have forever/love forever/forever (forever is our today).....A poetic ritual to obtain eternity.
I remember Dr Jekyil : something darker and shadowy yet.
 Maybe dark is the vampire eternity  that communicates it and maintains it  through blood and bites .... they infect victims with eternity!
Parallel to this artistic vision the fiction takes  form of reality.Science and technology join each other ,making fiction and speculation feasible goals. We cannot stop the aging of our bodies, but we may transfer our lives for another container ! How? By mapping the brain.
The question is,” what do we mean by "Life ?".The neurosciences have accepted, with good margin of certainty, which aspects of our personality, memory, knowledge, experiences, our consciousness, in short, are directly linked to our brain connections established by synapses.Thus, a comparison with something real:It would be like forging a "Google Streetview” of the brain !
Specialized texts report that the brain mapping with unprecedented level of details, could allow the ability to transform the synapses into data.So, doing an "upload" of the contents of our brains it  could transmit these data to other bodies, not necessarily organic.That reminds me again of "The Bicentennial Man".
Then "Life" is to make our mind  immortal ? Those who, like me, who have had intimate contact with Alzheimer's knows that this can be a really scary truth .
In 2009 was released in the United States the "Human Connectome Project" ,  a more advanced stage of the genome project, which aims to understand how the 100 billion neurons make the 100 trillion possible connections between them, in which moments, how and with what goals.This data will be available on-line for scientists from all over the world.
At the moment, beyond the” Human Connectome Project”, “Genome” and “Brain”, there are in the world 10,000 laboratories developing related searches.The forecast is that we will have such mapping ready in 15 years.From then on, further research will try to unravel how connections are made.The forecast is that we will reach immortality (in that respect) in 2045.
Joining concepts that probably will guide the future, the next generation of computers will be represented by the  so-called "quantum computers".In addition to other quality that we wont discuss here, the main advantage of the quantum computer is speed. Our brain is able to Exchange signals at speed 150 m/s (meters per second).For those who aren't familiar with these units, this equates to a speed of 540 km/h.Compared with a computer, our brain is a turtle.
So imagine this exchange of signs made at the speed of light, i.e., 300,000 km/s.
Another particularity of our brain's transference to another "container" refers to the emotions.Instead of trying to describe an emotion, or how you feel about something you may picture your mental state in another person.In this respect the role of art as transmitting emotions would have to be redefined .
Anyway, while in ancient times alchemists dealt with the youth elixir and the philosopher's stone our “post modern alchemists” sublimate this elixir in Informatics and nanotechnology.The notorious chips will form a new universe redefining concepts of space, time, emotion and memory, confining them in a cold database where a step or a hug or even the "Kiss of tears" sung by Fred Mercury can be transmitted by a single laser beam.
 Who wants to live forever?
Remembering Einstein, "The day that   technology overcomes human interactivity the world will have a generation of idiots!"(And it is already starting to happen).

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