Perhaps one of the most beneficial discoveries civilisation could make is how to live forever (with a body that enjoys healthy youthfulness, and a mind that enjoys open-minded matureness). Making such a discovery even sweeter would be 1) not having to worry about money to pay for your immortality, and 2) not having to worry about dying before immortality's secrets are unveiled.
For us poor mortals (in many cases, deceased mortals), the following method might come to the rescue -
Human cloning could be the second step in a three stage process that would ultimately give every human being physical immortality. The first step would be genetic engineering. Today this is advancing through the Human Genome Project and early work in treating disease with gene therapy. It could one day be used on cell samples to correct abnormalities and prevent all disease. The second step would be cloning. This could be used to grow a genetically treated cell from a sample into a complete body and brain. The third step would be downloading. The cloned brain would naturally produce brain waves. The cells producing waves associated with personality, thought, memory and behaviour would need to be trained to reproduce the activities of the uncloned brain's cells when those cells were younger and healthier.
One way of training the cloned brain might be to send signals picked up by microelectrodes inserted in individual nerve cells of the uncloned brain and previously recorded by a superadvanced 21st century electroencephalograph (EEG). One theory of ageing suggests the process is genetically determined. If that is correct, the above procedure need only be performed once (normally). And if genetic abnormalities produce neurological defects and/or chemical imbalances in the brain which adversely influence behaviour, aggressiveness, mental health, etc; perhaps the most evil and cruel violence could be controlled by growing 'a genetically treated cell into a complete (new) body and brain'.
It may be that implantation of microelectrodes for long lengths of time does not enable enough signals to be recorded to produce perfect reconstructions, so another method of downloading must be used. This is outlined below, involves 'electrophotic' brains being absorbed into physical brains and does not require any change to the person's natural state (the outline below suggests that 'life as we know it is union of the physical and electrophotic').
In constructing the After-death self * (what I term the 'electrophotic' self, from reversal of 'photoelectric'), future medical and scientific technology would use a person's biopsied cells only as a blueprint or detailed plan. The electrophotic self is not made of fermions (particles of matter like electrons, protons and neutrons) but from bosons (force carrying particles such as photons and gravitons that respectively carry electromagnetic force and the force of gravity). But bosons do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle (which was discovered in 1925 by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli and says two similar particles cannot exist in the same state Me they can't have both the same position and the same velocity: without the exclusion principle, there would be no separate and well defined protons, neutrons or atoms since everything would collapse to form a roughly uniform, dense 'soup'). so how do we control force carrying particles and produce an independent structure like an electrophotic body? Possibly, building it from both photons and gravitons is the key. According to Einstein's General Relativity, gravitational fields bend beams of light, so photons of an EP (electrophotic) body can be positioned where we want through the use of gravitons. The gravitons would be held in place because Special Relativity concludes energy is equivalent to mass and the photons of our energetic EP bodies therefore exert gravitational influence on gravitons. Does the mass equivalence / gravitational influence of photons add another dimension to Einstein's 1905 explanation of the photoelectric effect (the emission of electrons from a metallic surface when it is struck by photons - these electrons can form an electric current)?
* The electrophotic self is commonly termed the soul -though I think a soul (whether human or animal) is a union of physical and electrophotic selves. At death the physical brain perishes and, as the Bible Says at Ecclesiastes 9:5, '... the dead know not any thing ...' (the electrophotic brain is not dead but the soul, We the complete self which is the union of physical and electrophotic, is). Speaking of the complete self, here's another letter to TIME magazine in response to their article on the brain and mind called 'Glimpses of the Mind' (the letter was published in the issue dated Aug. 21st, '95):
'So science says, Despite our every instinct to the contrary, there is no self located in the physical brain. If we accept this, we might conclude that self is located outside the brain. Since the producer of a sense of self could only, it seems, be a brain, we would then have to believe that each person has a nonphysical duplicates of their physical brain and that the two are in intimate contact. To give our physical being a sense of self, the nonphysical brain must be housed within the physical brain between birth and death. Thus we could say self is indeed located in the physical brain. Or we could say self is the combination of the physical and nonphysical brains. Though the nonphysical brain would live on after death, the complete self would no longer exist. Is this just crazy, way-out reasoning? "Glimpses of the Mind" suggests it may not be, since the nonphysical brain (and body) might be described as the soul, which the article says scientists may eventually have to acknowledge.'
If gravity is the Einsteinian curvature of space-time, then gravitons may be considered to be 'bits of curvature'. And if space-time, gravitons and photons are all composed of quantum waves; then it is possible to also think of photons as 'bits of curvature' (and as possessing gravitational influence). If photons are gravitational, why would gravitons exist (these carriers of the gravitational force have not yet been detected, but they are predicted by the quantum theory of gravity. Quantum gravity seeks to unite the general theory of relativity [which describes the force of gravity] with quantum mechanics [which describes subatomic phenomena], thus forming a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe)?
Maybe photons and gravitons (along with all other particles - bosons and fermions) are different aspects of a 'superparticle' that arose from the primordial mini black hole.
The temperature of the universe was originally more than 10 exponent 32 (over 100 million trillion trillion) degrees Kelvin. As it expanded and cooled, it underwent a transformation known as a phase transition (in which energy is released) similar to the one water vapour undergoes when it cools and condenses into liquid water, then ice. As cosmic temperatures fell past key values - analogous to freezing points -conditions snapped swiftly from one physical state to the next eg gravitons could have 'condensed' out of the 'superparticle', leaving behind the boson of the electronuclear force (in which the electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces remained indistinguishable or unified). As temperatures continued to plummet, more bosons condensed out, as did the fermions eventually this condensation produced all the matter and energy in the universe. Gravity would then be reconciled with quantum mechanics and included in the theories physicists have devised to unite the four forces of the universe (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force).
('Through the Looking Glass' by George Greenstein - ASTRONOMY magazine, Oct. '89: and 'The Infant Universe' - a chapter in 'The Cosmos' by Time-Life Books, 1990)
When divorced from its natural condition (ie when no longer united with the physical body) as a result of death, the electrophotic self may be what is called a ghost in some circles- and might also be what is called an angel in different circumstances. When separated from the physical during life, EPs might account for OBEs (out of body experiences) and NDEs (near death experiences). (Flight might be explained by projecting gravitons to a point and being attracted to that point, ghostly temperature changes might be explained by the absorption or emission of infrared photons, and luminous appearances by controlling photons of visible light.)
How might one's electrophotic body become united with the physical body in the first place? First, it needs to use time travel to journey from the future where it comes into being. Second, this electrophotic self needs to enter our individual bodies (energy often enters, or is absorbed into, particles of matter - likewise, the electrophotic often enters, or is absorbed into, the physical). If an electrophotic self entered a cloned body years or centuries after the death of that body's original counterpart, would the phenomenon be called Resurrection? (See the poem 'Little Grey Man' in the next section, 'People Factory', which briefly mentions medical procedures citizens of thousands of years ago could never have understood and thus given informed consent to nevertheless, Little Grey Men and Women surely have the right to originate the human race and, according to the ideas in Science Wish List, that would seem to make the procedures necessary.)
To show how the discovery of how to live forever could be applied in a 'money free' manner so the poor (eg Third World citizens and the homeless) could take advantage of the discovery, the following thoughts are included in this letter -
Inflation may be inevitable in modern society. This is simply because the value of anything seems to basically depend on 1) how much demand there is for that thing, and 2) how rare it is. As prices continually rise and everyone earns more money (these two things represent increasing demand), any nominated amount of money (such as $5) becomes more common and is thus of less value (while $5 might have been necessary to buy a certain item a few years ago, today's price might be $10 and it might cost $20 in a few more years).
One way of eliminating inflation would be to eliminate demand for products and services by returning to the Stone Age and making those products/services unavailable. But most people want growth and productivity to keep increasing . Another way is to get rid of money - but any nation that ignored its trading partners and unilaterally adopted this course would merely doom its own way of life. So the only practical way of eliminating inflation seems to be to get rid of money on a worldwide scale (work out a nonfinancial system for the global village to operate under one benefit is to enable the poor to live forever without being worried by the cost of the procedures for gaining immortality).
Another benefit is: compared to today's world, a nonfinancial world (which would have given away all its money) would obviously have to be less concerned with what we receive from others and more interested in what we can give. This new, more altruistic order could see the whole world on the road to becoming one large family that looks outward from itself (thereby taking even more interest in matters such as the environment and space exploration than it does at present) and willingly shares information (giving even more importance to near-instant planetwide communications and resulting in a new understanding of the universe and our place in it).
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