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Here’s a great article from NPR about evolution and scientist that actually studies it.

Short excerpt:

“I believe evolution. It’s easy. It’s my life. I’m a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of humans, apes and monkeys, and I teach college students about their place in nature.

Of course I believe evolution.

But that is different from believing in evolution.”

Full article can be found here: I Am Evolution

I just thought I’d share a paragraph from Richard Dawkins Ancestor’s Tale. Mr. Dawkins proves mathematically that we all share same ancestors. His logic is truly remarkable and undeniable. See it for yourself.

“All your ancestors are mine, whoever you are, and all mine are yours. Not just approximately but literally. This is one of those truths that turns out, on reflection, to need no new evidence. We prove it by pure reason, using the mathematician’s trick of reductio ad absurdum. Take our imaginary time machine absurdly far back, say 100 million years, to an age when our ancestors resembled shrews or opossums. Somewhere i the world at that ancient date, at least one of my personal ancestors must have been living, or I wouldn’t be here. Let us call this particular little mammal Henry (it happens to be a family name). We seek to prove that if Henry is my ancestor he must be yours too. Imagine, for a moment, the contrary: I am descended from Henry and you are not. For this to be so, your lineage and mine would have to have marched, side by side yet never touching, through 100 million years of evolution to the present, never interbreeding yet ending up at the same evolutionary destination — so alike that your relatives are still capable of interbreeding with mine. This reductio is clearly absurd. If Henry is my ancestor he has to be yours too. If not mine, he cannot be yours.”

Lets talk about something real. Atoms. Everything in the world that’s ever been, was and will ever be, is made of atoms. Period. You, me and everything else around us is made up of different kind of atoms. I remember standing in the middle of the mall the other day and thinking to myself: “Wow, all of this stuff came out out of the earth and ground?”. Everything we see is just collection of tiny entities call atoms. However, current atoms in your body are not the same atoms that were present in you, oh lets say 10 years ago, or even 10 days ago. That’s right. You’re only a temporary collection of assorted atoms. In other words, different kinds of atoms have to come together at some point in time just to form YOU; then to disband and be replaced by other atoms (at different times of course). Some scientists hypothesize that by the age of 30 all of the atoms in our body have been replaced by new ones; and that’s not even the strange part. Think of this: Atoms don’t age. They don’t just die. Radioactive atoms do decay but non-radioactive atoms are permanently stable as far as we can tell. After we die, atoms that make up our body are recycled. Some of them end up in ground, some in air while some end up in other objects. That would mean you might be made of same atoms as Hitler, Plato or even Jesus Christ was made of. You also might be containing same atoms that may have been in Great Wall Of China, bottom of the ocean, moon, dinosaurs and even Turkish hashish from Anatolia’s mountains. As a matter of fact, it’s a statistical certainty that you’re made of same atoms which some famous people were made of; or at least those atoms were part of you at some point in your life.

Question is: if atoms in our body are constantly getting replaced, then how come we don’t feel that kind of change? How come we don’t sense when our old atoms get replaced by new ones? Answer is two part I think. First, change is so gradual and slow that we really have no senses to feel this type of change. There are approximately 7*10²⁷ in a human body. That’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. That’s a whole lot of atoms. Second, atoms in our body have to follow certain rules and paths. Think of water that makes up rivers and streams. Water is constantly changing and cycling, but the river itself always stays the same. It’s always (more or less) of the same shape. So, it’s the interaction between atoms that’s important and not the atoms themselves.

We’re made of the same stuff as everything in our universe is made of. Stars, galaxies, rivers, mountains, and everything we can observe are all made of same stuff. It’s just order of the stuff that makes up different shapes, molecules, cells, tissue and everything else material. That would mean that when we observe (or consciously thinking) our universe, essentially we’re observing ourselves. Carl Sagan once said: “We are the way for The Cosmos to know itself.” Think of that next time you go to Wall-Mart and are surrounded by all of that stuff.

Consider answering following questions about time (Do not just read these questions, but think about them for a little bit). I call them mind-benders.

• Can every moment in time of the past exists somewhere?
• Does past actually exists somewhere? If it does, Is it than stored somewhere?
• How about the future or present? Can future and present exist somewhere?
• Can you define present? How long does the present lasts?
• If you think that present exists, then where is it? If you think that past exists, then where is it?

When you really think about it answer is so simple that even child could understand it, so we conclude following: no past, present and future can exists without violating at least dozens of physics and logical laws; which in turn would imply that time does not exists.
Passage of time is just an illusion we made up to cope and measure the change. No more and no less; Everything else in between is work of our imagination, science-fiction writers and physicist with too much time on their hands. That is essentially what this article will be about. Just a thought exercise to see if we can have a logical world with no time existing.

Let’s first start with the quote:

” A famous philosophical argument says that, if the future were real, then it would be fixed now, and we would not have the freedom to affect that future. Since we do have that freedom, the future can’t be real”

What this quote is essentially saying is that predetermined future cannot exists because we’re the ones that are making it it as we go along. If that kind of future did exist somewhere, than we would not be able to affect it with our own actions. So no matter what I did, my future would always remain the same.

We all know stories and science fiction novels about traveling back to in time and further into the future. We also know about time travel paradoxes. Most famous being grandfather paradox. It goes like this:
If you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you would not exists since he would not be able to have children of his own. He would be dead and you would’ve never been born. But, if you weren’t born you would not be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place since you didn’t exist, but obviously you do exist and you did go back in time and you did kill your grandfather. This creates a logical paradox and big inconsistency in logical thinking. But we’ll come back to this later in the article.
There’s another paradox which physicist don’t talk about, but to me it seams like even stranger paradox than the grandfather one. I’m sure someone else though of this but I’ll just state it. It goes like this:
Today is 2008, and let’s suppose you go back to 2006 and meet yourself. Now there’s two of you. How would that be possible without violating Conservation of Energy Law, which states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. Obviously since there’s two of you occupying same space and time, one of you was created. Either that or you are leaving copies of yourself on every instance (frame) in time which would violate the law even further.

Another example: Imagine taking the whole earth back with you to only yesterday. You would now have two earths in the same orbit! You would have increase in mass and God knows how would that affect the space in our Solar System. You might try to counter this argument by saying that it would not be possible to take anything with you back in time; But with that logic you wouldn’t be able to take yourself back in time either, so time travel would still not be possible.

Let’s take that little further and say that from 2006 you wanted to jump to 2000 and look up yourself there too. Now there’s three copies of you. Two copies of you exist in the year 2000 and one that you left in 2006. Or would that 2006 copy of you just disappear? How would that actually work?
It gets even more complex and illogical if one wants to define instance. What’s one instance? What is NOW? Is it one second? One microsecond? Nanosecond? How about picosecond? You can pretty much go to infinite regression and make no progress of defining NOW.
It seems that we’re creating problems that don’t really exists, and and then trying to find a solution for it.

Einstein wrote extensively in his papers about time. The whole premise of General Theory Of Relativity revolves around time. However, Einstein did claim that traveling to past is not going to be possible. I happen to agree with that, but for different reasons. Einstein’s relativity claims time is directly correlated to mass, speed of light and energy (E=MC2) and that nothing could travel faster than light. Faster you go (higher your velocity), slower the time passes for you.
If you were to ever reach speed of light you would have to become one dimensional and would have no mass. Like photon particles. Time would then stop for you. You would not be affected by time. Just like light is not affected by time. It is the only constant in universe. But you would never be able to catch up with the light anyway.
If you would to travel along side of light; It would not matter how fast you were going; from your perspective light would still be going 186,000 miles per second. For example: If you were to travel close to the speed of light (185,000 miles per second lets say), light would still be going 186,000 miles per second respective to you. Not only you would never be able to catch up with it, but it would look as if you were just standing still and light is just zipping by you regardless of your speed.
Now, in order to go back in time you would have to travel faster than the speed of light and have negative mass. Einstein believed that is not possible.

Lets now see solution for all these inconsistencies and paradoxes. New speculative-theory which states that time does not exists solves this and many other problems. It states that time is just an arbitrary concept we made up and it’s only a measurement of change. Nothing more. Every kind of change for that matter. Just like mile is a measurement of distance. Mile doesn’t really physically exists. Same thing with time. Time as a physical or multidimensional entity doesn’t really exists. We use concept of time to measures changes in our body, motion, aging etc. Nothing more.
Without time there’s no grandfather paradox. Here’s how:
You would not be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather because your grandfather is here! There is no such a thing as “before”. Maybe your grandfather is not alive right now, but in whichever form, he is definitely here. Yes he was alive 20 years ago, but right now he is physically HERE, in a different form, made of different particles, but that doesn’t mean that there’s another copy of your grandfather existing back in 1950’s or 1968 or any year you happen to pick.
The only proof of your grandfather existing in the past you have is memories of him. Having memories of your grandfather don’t mean he still exists in the past. If you for example look at a photograph of your grandfather to remind you of him; would that mean that your grandpa from the photograph still exists somewhere? And if he does exists somewhere in time; that would mean that every other instance of your life also exists somewhere in time.
Here’s another example with photograph: Lets say you pick up the photograph of yourself, and in that photograph you have a black eye. That black eye has healed so far. But does it mean that your black eye from the photograph still exists somewhere? I think we can see false logic here. Your black eye cannot exists because the eye you’re reading this text with now, and the black eye from the past are actually the same eye. The only difference is in change. Black eye has healed (dead cells got replaced by healthy ones etc…) and turned into normal healthy eye, but it’s the same eye.
We created paradoxes like “grandfather’s paradox” only because we assume that there are multiple copies of your grandfather you can go back to. I think it is more natural to assume that time as a physical entity does not really exists, and that the only way to go back in time is to UNDO the changes that affect you and your surroundings. That would mean to put everything (and I mean everything) back the way it was let’s say 20 minutes ago. You might as well say “going back in change” instead of “going back in time”.
I will give you analogy for this example but before I do that let’s define what it means “to age”. To age simply means cell death. Your cells are dying and getting weaker and weaker so you have sense of aging. That’s it. Time has nothing to do with it. Time as a physically (or logical) entity cannot make you age. Change is the only thing that takes place. The only reason you feel weaker as you age is because of billions and billions of your cells are dying ever day but they don’t get replaced by the same amount. Remember this since you will need it for the next experiment.

Going 20 minutes back in “time” in a world with no “time” experiment

I have been thinking of an analogy to use here to accurately describe what happens in a world with no time so hopefully following analogy will explain it well. As you read following scenario please try to visualize events happening.

Imagine yourself siting in the middle of a small room on a wooden chair.
There’s nothing in the room but you, four walls, ceiling, floor and that wooden chair.
You absolutely are not doing anything but motionlessly stare at the wall.
It seems that nothing is happening and that time is standing still. But that is not true. Atoms in your body as well as atoms and molecules in walls around you and chair underneath you, are in constant motion and are changing constantly. Even the air around you is in constant motion.
After 20 minutes, wooden chair breaks and you fall and bruise your butt. The act of chair breaking is the only thing you’ve been aware of in those 20 minutes. If chair did not break you would not be able to tell the difference between minute 2 from minute 5 lets say, but since now you have a reference point (chair breaking), it seems like some time did pass and you would be able to pin point differences between minute 2 and 5. It would be easy because you would use breaking of a chair as a reference point. Keep with me here, we’re almost done.
Now ask yourself: What would it take for you to go back in time when chair was whole and your butt was bruisless? Can you guess by now? No, not a time machine or a worm hole.
To truly go back in time, all you would have to do is to revert changes back to way they were 20 minutes ago. And that includes everything: the chair, your body, floor, ceiling, air molecules and four walls around you.

• That would mean putting back and re-arranging every molecule back where it was.
• Every atom in that broken chair would have to be repaired and reassembled the way it was 20 minutes ago.
• That would also mean you would have to cure your cells from aging and revert them to state they were in 20 minutes ago. Cells don’t just disappear after they die. They turn into energy, so you would also need to convert some of the lost energy back into cells. That would also cure your bruise.
• You would have to rearrange your neurons in your brain to reflect original state which was 20 minutes ago, which would in turn erase your current memories.
• Every molecule and atom in the walls, ceiling, floor and air around you would have to be rearranged, converted and reverted back to the 20 minutes ago.

Once everything is done, you could say that you truly went back in time without time. Then there would be no difference between you (and the room) right now and you 20 minutes ago. None whatsoever. You went beck in time without time really existing. But that would only apply to you. Outside world would still be unaffected by your molecule rearrangements and would continue aging and changing, but you would be 20 minutes younger.
Of course in current practice all this is impossible and irreversible without using up godly amount of energy. Just imagine the feat of trying to revert changes just for the room example!
That is exactly why we have grandfather’s paradox. If your grandfather is dead right now, the only way to see him alive is not go back in 1950’s but to revert changes that lead to his death. And that includes everything. Going back in time with a time machine would created logical paradox which doesn’t make any sense since it would require multiple copies of grandfathers to exists which violates not just logic but our fundamental laws of physics. We only have illusion that time exists because we use it to measure the actual change. It’s simple as that.

I realize that some of these examples are really simple and maybe point of view a true realist would have, but sometimes in order to see the truth, we need to oversimplify things to get past the clutter and fog.

This is the point where you ask: “What about relativity? If there’s no time, how come that we’ve observed that time does slows down for a person in motion?” Good question, but that’s illusion too. Person’s perception of time slows down because everything in his/hers body slows down as they go faster and faster. That includes: heart rate, brain neurons, cell division, cell death, protein forming and the whole enchilada. At this stage person’s perception of everything slows down. Relativity also treats time as one and the same entity as space. If there’s no space there would be no time; so “no time” theory would not affect relativity at all. Think about it. If there’s no space than it would be impossible for matter to exists. If there’s no matter and space, there would no occurrence of any changes taking place and time would still not exists.
The fact is that time still remains more of philosophical question than anything else.

I am going to try to explain basic differences between scientific theory, law, facts and hypothesis. There are lot of misconceptions about these so I thought I’d try to explain it as best I can.
I am no scientist but I do have friends (from both sides of Atlantic) that are so I pick their brains every once in a while. Also, I still remember this from the science class when I went to school and I did great deal of researching about the subject through out the years.
Amazingly, scientific theory is something all scientists agree on, with no exception regardless of geographical location. So this article will not be me speculating. These are coming from the actual scientists themselves.
We all heard following phrase: “Oh it’s just a theory and not a fact.”
Theory in every day life is indeed just a speculation, but in scientific world theory is something totally different as we will see from the following article.

It’s important for a somewhat educated person living in 21st century to know what scientific theory is and be able to name basic differences between Law and Theory. This is elementary knowledge but people forget these things quickly. That’s why “Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader” show works so well.

Lets take matters from the beginning and see how scientists form theories.

Chronological step by step:

1. Observational Facts - Are collection of data through observation methods. If I drop the ball from my hand it will fall to the ground. If I repeat this many times, I will get same results over and over. Ball will fall to the ground every time. This is an observational fact. Some more observational facts: Rivers running in certain direction, bees pollinating flowers, etc..
2. Law - Getting back to ball fall. if I get same results with other objects after repeated experiments, I can form some kind of law with probable certainty. This is Newton’s Law of Gravity. However, this law does not explains why did ball drop on the floor. It just describes the event. That’s it. There’s not much difference between law and observational facts. You could in a sense say that Scientific Law is just body of predictable observational facts. Nothing more.
3. Hypothesis - After the law is formed, scientist will try to explain it by observation and repeated experiments. Eventually they will form different hypothesis. Hypothesis are ideas that could be falsified, changed and modeled as the new evidence comes in. Does the ball falls because earth is bigger than the ball? Does the ball falls because there’s an invisible force that is attracting the ball towards the earth? Will the ball fall at the same speed in vacuum? Etc… Scientists will continue to hypothesize until there’s no new evidence to dispute their hypothesis. But they’re not done yet. Hypothesis has to pass scrutiny of grueling tests under different conditions and repeated experiments. All of those experiments has to conform to their proposed hypothesis every time. If they don’t, hypothesis is thrown away and the scientist moves on.
4. Scientific Theory comes the last. Only if hypothesis passes all of the above stages, it can be formed into Scientific Theory. Scientific Theory is crowning achievement in science. In science, there’s nothing higher than theory. It’s Creme De La Cream. You can describe Scientific Theory as following: Theory is a comprehensive explanation of natural world that is supported by factual observations, independently testable and repeated experiments. Theory is explanation. So theory contains facts and laws. Laws and facts are part of the theory.

But it doesn’t end there. Theory then has to be peer reviewed. It will be bombarded by skepticism from other scientists with their own hypothesis and theories from same field of studies.
Who do you think is the major debunker of scientific theory? It’s other scientists. They will try to debunk and disprove new theories and replace them with theories of their own all the time. It’s a constant battle.
Every scientist wants to get recognized and possibly get Nobel Prize, but you don’t get Noble Prize by just confirming already established theory. You want to debunk it and replace it with better theory or at least make a noticeable correction (like Einstein did with Newton’s) worth the Noble Prize.
Scientific theories are constantly evaluated, peer reviewed, bombarded and critically examined by other scientist. That’s how we get well established theories. Just imagine scientific theory that passed all that scrutiny and criticism for hundred years. It’s the closest thing to the truth and explanation of natural world as we know it. That’s why all well established theories are almost unshakable and last for long time. Theory of Evolution and Cell Theory are one of them. Plate tectonics, General Relativity, Atomic Theory are all examples of well established theories.

Theory Of Evolution (by Natural Selection) being the most criticized and attacked, withstood test of time for 150 years! That is more testing, evaluating, examining, collecting evidence than any other well established theory we have.
The fact that some us (who don’t practice science professionally 14 hours or so a day, every day!) just don’t believe part (or whole) of it has nothing to do with theory being true or not. As long as it’s accepted within scientific community (you know… people who dedicated their whole lives to theories like these) theory will remain true. Public should be educated of course, but if you as a non-scientist want and try to debunk or argue some theory and you think you have the knowledge, roll the dice, write the paper and see if your thesis withstands same scrutiny as the theory you’re trying to debunk.
I cannot just tell to the carpenter how to make a table. Especially If I have never picked up a wood saw in my life.

Scientific Theories are less certain than laws. That’s true, but that’s only because law is just bunch of observational facts. Nothing else. It’s meaningless without the theory. It doesn’t provide any explanation. Theory of Evolution for example can never be a fact since it’s comprised of many facts and biological laws. It’s like a deck of cards. Theory Of Evolution being the deck and cards being the facts. It would make no sense to call the whole deck “a card”.

As the new evidence comes in theory will get tweaked and improved. But that’s the beauty of it. It will get modeled into comprehensive set of explanations of our natural world.
Think about this. Even if you see, with your own eyes, something that contradicts well established theory, it would not mean much. Eyes can deceive and we all know that brain is the best 3D software there is. Schizophrenics for example see and hear voices that ARE real to THEM. That doesn’t make it real. Scientific method is the only and the best way we know how to explain actual reality since it requires independent testing under different conditions regardless if public agrees with it or not. It’s up to science and teachers to explain their theories so we can understand them well. I agree that is something scientists and teachers have not been doing a great job at, but that’s for the whole new article.

Life could indeed be beautiful and just a thought of dying could be enough to put you in a temporary state of depression. Most of us like to live. We love life and want more of it, but at the same time we’re all aware that one day we’re all going to die. Every human on this planet knows, that one day they will too cease to exist. Some people are terrified by this, but some just accept it and are fine with it, while on the other hand majority of us wants and needs to know if there’s life after.

Let’s first look at the facts and what we DO know about death:

1. Heart stops and cells get deprived from oxygen so cells start irreversible process of dying
2. Lungs cease to function and person stops breathing
3. If CPR is not administered within 6 minutes brain starts to die from lack of oxygen.
4. After 10 minutes brain damage is certain and irreversible
5. Muscles starts to stiffen and body begins to cool down
6. Skin and bone cells die latest and could survive up to 36 hours without oxygen
7. After 36 hours (and extensive tests) person is pronounced brain dead and there’s nothing that could be done for him/her anymore.
8. No one has ever came back after 72 hours of his/hers heart stopping.
9. Your body decompose and you eventually cease to exists
10. Your molecules and atoms become part of the soil and eventually end up in rivers, water air and perhaps some other person’s or animals body.

To describe the process medically we use fancy latin names like following:

• Pallor mortis, paleness which happens almost instantaneously (in the 15–120 minutes after the death)
• Algor mortis, the reduction in body temperature following death. This is generally a steady decline until matching ambient temperature
• Rigor mortis, the limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate
• Livor mortis, a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body
• Decomposition, the reduction into simpler forms of matter

Doctors use instruments like Electroencephalography (EEG) or intracranial EEG (icEEG) to determine that there’s no electrical activity in the brain before they pronounce person brain dead or dead. Once these devices stop detecting brain activity, that’s it. Person is dead, and the process is irreversible.

You might say that this applies only to the body itself and not the soul. Well, neither me or you nor anyone else knows what the soul is. Let alone if it exists, so like I said let’s stick with what we DO know.
As you know it, your body (matter) cannot just disappear (second law of thermodynamics prevents that), but it can turn into energy or some other form of matter. If you consider this kind of energy to be soul then so be it, but that’s not really living after death and it will not be point of this article. I am assuming that when majority of people are talking about life after death, they’re talking about consciousness living. In other words, they would be aware they’re alive.

Sometimes belief in life after death could be overwhelming that it would be hard to put it in words. I’m sure we all had following conversation with our parents, friends or just acquaintances. I will describe brief dialog between myself and my mom:

Mom: ” So you believe that after we die we just go into the ground, decompose and eventually disappear.”
Me: “I really don’t know but yes, based on what we do know today that is what happens.”
Mom: We don’t feel anything and nothing happens afterwards?
Me: “Yes”
Mom: “But that cannot be”
Me: “why not?”
Mom: ” Because it cannot”
Me: “Why do you think that cannot be?”
Mom: “There has to be something.”
Me: “What?”
Mom: “Something. There’s just has to be.”
Me: “But what?”
Mom: “I don’t know what, but I cannot just go into the ground and just seize to exist. Something has to happen. There has to be something more.”
And goes on and on…

Now, I consider my mom to be very rational person of above average intelligence and well read. She is not the only one who talks and thinks like that in conversation like these. We’re just terrified of loosing someone or leaving the loved ones behind. Sometime we want something so bad that it’s hard to put it in thoughts. Let alone words.

Now, consider following quote which comes from one of our greatest thinkers. Mark Twain:

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

Can you remember time of the Napoleon or Roman empire? How about dinosaurs? Of course you cannot, because you did not exist back then. You also did not feel, taste, see or sense back then. You just weren’t here. You have no consciousness recollection on any of those events and you’re not bothered by it.
Mark Twain implies that you will experience same thing after you die. Nothing. For lots of people that is truly terrifying, but there’s something very comforting about what Mark is saying. To me this seems a lot more comforting then wandering around as a ghost, spirit or some kind of non-physical entity. Same thing goes for being stuck in some kind of purgatory or heaven and hell for eternity. Just think about it little further. Doing anything (no matter how beautiful and great) for eternity seems like a torture to me.
Let me give you personal example. I really love playing guitar. I can play guitar for hours, but after six or seven hours it becomes boring and then pure torture. Imagine doing it for eternity! Even something as good as sex will get boring and eventually become true torture. Literary. Think about it. Physically burning in hell will eventually will be equal to having sex. That’s something I never though will hear myself say.

Good number of scientists and theologians believe that we cannot fully answer question life after death without fully explaining the consciousness. So far good number of tests and experiments are conducted and most of them point to conscientiousness being tied directly to brain functions. For example: reason why you cannot remember when you were one year old is because your brain wasn’t fully developed. Basically you weren’t conscious back then. Another example would be that if I would to hit you in the head you would loose conscientiousness and would not remember anything at all while unconscious. Yet, another even more convincing example is that it is the known fact that brain damage could change person’s personality. All of these point to the brain.

Can consciousness survive death? If consciousness is indeed just a brain function then no, it cannot survive death, but If consciousness is more than brain function then where would this consciousness reside? Is consciousness nothing more then our neurons firing at the certain order? Consciousnesses could also just be a measure to describe brain activity. Just like a meter is measurement of distance. You cannot touch or feel meter. Truth is, we really don’t know but lot of smart people are working on it.

What do I think?

We really have no examples of consciousness existing outside of the brain, so why anyone would want to suppose such a thing in a first place. I think fear of unknown plays a huge part in this. Also, not all of us are equipped to deal with harsh realities in same way. Some of us cope with the unknown in totally different ways. Let me name some of them: resurrection, reincarnation, incarnation, heaven and hell, ghosts, NDE (Near Death experiences), 72 virgins (I am being serious here), zombies and probably hundreds of other interesting and inventive ways of surviving death. It became pretty much cultural. Different cultures have their own way of dealing with loss, grief and fear of the unknown.
My personal opinion is that if we (regular schmo’s) worry too much about all possible things that might come after we die, we will miss out on all of the good things in the only life we do know. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to live your life trying to conform to something you have no way of knowing exists. Sometimes it’s ok to say “I just don’t know”, and get on with your current life. The only thing that is going to be left behind you that we DO know is your legacy and deeds you did in this life.

At the time of this writing (2008) IBM has already released their Blue Gene/P (see image below) supercomputer which reached its peak speed of 3 Peta flops. I’ve calculated that is 3,000 trillions of calculations per second and you can take it another way: 3 million billions of calculations per second, or 3 quadrillion calculations per second. Believe it or not this is still not at capacities of a human brain which speed was clocked at around 20 million billion calculations per second or 20 quadrillions per second. So Blue gene is approximately 7 times slower (1/7) compared to human brain. However, technology is not growing linearly but exponentially. Processor speed is doubling every year now (used to be every decade, then every two years, then ever 18 months), which by some calculations home computers will reach human intelligence levels by 2025 (probably sooner) while commercial and military grade (like Blue Gene) computers will reach it by the year 2010 or 2012 at the latest. And those are the most conservative estimates. Scary stuff eh?

Update: IBM announces that the last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is aimed to reach 10 Peta Flops in the 2010-2012 time frame.

Image of IBM’s Blue gene

Lets think about that for a second. What could we accomplish once we have a non-biological technology equivalent to a human brain in our arsenal? Well for one, with that kind technology we will be able to make even faster processors and exponentially even better technology. This will make technology grow even faster at neck-breaking speeds. It’s inevitable.
One of those technologies are going to be nanobots ( Nano robots). They are micro scale (10^-9 meters) programmable robots that can perform variety of duties with breathtaking accuracy and speed.
In medicine for example nanobots can be let into your blood stream to regulate your blood pressure, cholesterol, repair and rejuvenate cells, kill cancer cells, viruses and even make new and better proteins. They can even replace or at least interact (improve) neurons in our brain. Possibilities are truly endless, but the last one sounds the most interesting one so lets stick with that one.
In about 2025 nanobots will be able to map and copy our brain (every neuron, ever synapse, axon and every pathway) very accurately and save that information somewhere in a digital form, external from our bodies. We will be able to save our scanned brain to a hard drive or whatever medium will be used at the time. Our home computers will actually have enough power to sift through all that information and process it.
Now, the only thing we need in order to awaken our digital brain is software. Nanobots can take care of that too. Since they’re already in our brains mapping and copying information they can also simply mimic and learn from our biological brain and model appropriate software for our newly crafted digital brain. With the help of exponential growth, nanotbots will be able to make even better and more efficient software to run that digital brain than the one we have in our brains right now.
Next thing we need would be to find a way to communicate with our digital brain. This will be done wireless. Just like your wireless mouse can communicate with your PC right now, uploaded neurons would communicate via wireless with your biological neurons simulating all sensory experiences. This will probably be achievable through specialized glasses or implanted wireless chip into your brain.
We will have same memories, same senses and some scientists believe that our digital brain will indeed be conscious of itself.
As far as we can tell all of our current senses come from the actual interactions of neurons in our brains. Our digital mind will be able to do the same thing. Imagine now if we uploaded our brain to Internet. We would truly have endless sensory capabilities. Everywhere you went online, it would be communicated back to your true self through Internet back to your PC and then back to your biological brain. Everything from smell, taste, fear, ecstasy will be so realistic that you will not be able to distinguish it from reality. Words like online chat, blogging and Cyber-sex will reach a whole new meaning. Your digital self will be able to roam Cyber-space freely and unrestricted. Not only our digital brain will enable us to have true remote experiences, but it will be able to act as its own entity and think for itself and feel itself. Independent of our physical bodies. That means that after we die, our mind would still live on somewhere in a digital form, and since it’s modeled on our actual brain it will probably act as real us, have same or similar personality as us.
It will be able to interact with other digital humans and experience sensory stimulants beyond anything imaginable by today’s standard.
The word travel for example will also become meaningless. Lets say for the sake of argument that in the year 2030 you would like to travel to Paris and wanted to see The Eiffel Tower. Would you be able to send your digital mind (which will have exact same sensory experience as your whole-self would’ve had) instead? Yes you would. What’s experience anyway? You digital mind would have the same experience and same sensory outputs/inputs as your true self and would be able to beam that info back to your true self via Internet. Think of it as an extension to your brain. Think of it as if your neurons can reach all the way to Paris. No physical body is needed since even now, everything we see, feel, smell, touch, hear and remember is done in our brains. Everything. Period. You arm does not feel pain when you poke it. Your brain does. Your heart does not feel love. Your brain does. So you would indeed have the same experience as if you were really in Paris with your true physical body. You would not be able to tell the difference.
Even today we cannot distinguish some dreams from the actual reality even shortly after we wake up. Virtual Reality software and hardware is so advanced now that you would have a hard time making out what the reality is while using one of those things. Brain is the best 3D software there is.
Now, lets take the travel one step further.
Since all forms of communications will be done wireless, we would actually be able to upload our digital brains to a space satellite and for the first time see the Earth from outer space. And to take it even further; we would be able to make as many copies of our digital brain as we want so we could send number of them on the way to different planets and stars. We would drift away on our galactic plane into the vastness of the Cosmos and be able to safely explore mysteries and dangers of our universe.
Think about it. All of that from the comfort of our living room. Of course since our digital brains would be able to travel just at the speed of light (radio waves travel at the speed of light), we would be limited on how far we would be able to go. For example: we could explore our solar system within minutes, but closest star would take about eight years (4 years in each direction) so it would not be really practical.
Physical property (housing, cars, buildings, etc) will loose it’s value and will give way to a virtual property. As our digital brains are multiplied and self replicated, demand for online property will grow exponentially. More and more our lives will consist of less physical interaction. We could actually hibernate ourselves and live out our entire lives in a virtual environment (Matrix anyone?) and essentially reach virtual immortality.
Eventually our digital brain will want its own body, and it will be able to make it. It would probably first look like hologram (see picture below), but by the inventions of organic printers (printers that can print organic material on atomic and molecular level) it will be able to produce exact copy of you.

Digital Brain Hologram

Estimates are that by year 2035 technology will far surpass human intelligence and nanobots will be able to replicate itself with terrifying speed. And not only that but they will be able to learn and share information instantaneously between each other which will in turn jump start development and technological advance even faster. Law of cumulative returns dictaes exactly that. The fact is that there’s nothing we can do to surpass our biological brain speed limit of 10²⁶ calculations per second. That might seem huge to you , but non-biological entities (computers and technology itself) will far exceed that number by the year 2035. Law of accelerating returns almost guarantee that. Some scientists and mathematicians think that will exceed it by a factor of thousand and by the year 2099 by the factor of trillion. By that time computing will be done on quantum scale (qubits instead of bits) and true immortality will be reached. Taking over humans race is inevitable. If that’s the case than there’s no doubt in my mind that we will reach a whole new level of evolution and human race as we know it will probably become obsolete at some point. It will be replaced by a new digital species that might resemble humans at some point but probably not in a distant future.
Once we could not develop ourselves any further on our biological evolutionary scale (at least not without destroying ourself and consuming every little resource this planet has to offer), we’ve jump started natural selection and created a whole new species on the fly.
Think about what we’ve created here.
It took universe 9 billion years to create earth.
It took evolution 3 and half billion years to create humans.
It took humans about 10,000 years (only 200 of technological advancement) years to create entity better, smarter and more efficient then the actual creators themselves. This is what some call Singularity. They in turn are able to create yet another species that is even more advanced and so on. This will go on until there is bodiless super-intelligence in the universe that lives (if you can call it that) in a totally different dimensions and can create matter, energy, worlds, other beings and anything it likes at will.
I’ll leave it to your imaginations to guess what we’ve created here.

This article was inspired by scientists, free thinkers and transhumansits like: Isaak Asimov, Carl Sagan, John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Feynman and Ray Kurzweil.

Problem with calling something infinite is multi fold.

Problem 1: If there’s some being we can call infinite in the universe than there would be no more room for anything else to exist so infinity in itself is contradictory term (aside from some abstract mathematical possibility). For example: If we placed a ball with infinite 3 dimensional properties (infinite height, width and length) in the middle of our universe, that ball would occupy infinite space (all of it to be exact), therefore there would be no chance for anything else to exist but that ball, because if you’re capable of placing something else, lets say a secondary ball along that infinite ball, then infinite ball suddenly becomes finite, because space that our secondary ball occupies would displace some of the space that our infinite ball previously occupied.

Problem 2: Now, you can say that infinite being is outside of our time/space (or even higher dimensions). But if that’s the case then being like that cannot, will not and never was interfered with our affairs since was never present in our time/space and therefore its existence is meaningless to us.
Problem 3: You can also say that Infinite Being is everywhere. If it’s everywhere, then why can’t we see it?

Just some random thoughts I put out there even if it does not make sense.

I read an interesting article in space.com today and I thought I just put some of my thoughts down on the subject before they drift away into oblivion..

Here’s excerpt from the article:

“A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun’s gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not.
After a billion years or so you’ve got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, way above the boiling point of water,” Smith told SPACE.com. “The Earth will become dry basically. It will become completely impossible for life of any kind to exist. It’s a pretty gloomy forecast.”

Read full article here.

Some of you might say “start packing”, or start purchasing that “doomsday insurance policy”, but we have a long way to go, and I thought up a perfect solution on how to escape this really horrifying demise anyway, so put your suitcases away and listen up.

Easy three step solution to avoid earth’s destruction:

Current trend on how to avoid disaster of this magnitude is to simply pack our bags and colonize other planets or send city-sized spaceships filled with people into the space and have them drift away until they reach habitable planets. That’s all nice and dandy but why spend time, resources and probably lives colonizing other planets and building huge spaceships when we already have one. You’ve guessed it. Earth. The only thing we have to do is to move the Earth away from the Sun before sun gets big. That’s it. Or better, transform the actual earth into a spaceship itself. Let’s call it The Earth-Ship. Imagine the possibilities. If you thought that this would have some challenges you were right. Not only we have to escape expansion and horrid heat of our sun, but we would have to find a new one, since as soon as our Sun expands as far as its own gravitational core allows it, it will implode and probably become useless white dwarf, so I made following instruction in three easy steps just to prevent that from happening. So Astro-Physicists and Cosmologists pay attention.

1. Building custom atmosphere. We need to build our own atmosphere here on earth and be able to turn it on and off at will. And I’m not talking about just any natural atmosphere induced by algae growth (yawn…) or some other “slow” process that scientist are planning to implement on Mars. We need a complete protection, functionality and transparency from the outside space. Something like artificial sphere or a cocoon with its own weather system controlled completely by humans (or AI if advanced enough to be trusted). Not only this atmosphere will have to protect us from alien outside factors, but also from asteroid or comet impacts so it will have to be also very sturdy or very dense. We would have to be able to control everything from rain, sunshine, oxygen and magnetic fields to photosynthesis. If you all watched movie “The Truman Show” you will get the picture. If you haven’t, spoiler alert now! In the movie the whole city with some of the surrounding area is encapsulated into artificial bubble and everything from weather to sunlight is artificially produced and controlled by mad producer/director/creator Cristof (played by Ed Harris). We will have to build something like that but on a global or should I say “celestial” scale. It will also have to be very transparent so we would be able to get on with our lives uninterrupted. Considering that science progress is non-linear some scientist think we’re actually only 100-300 years away from developing technology like this. Let’s say we’re 1000 years away just to be safe.

2. Harnessing Sun’s energy. Next thing we need to figure out is how we’re going to live on our Earth-Ship without our Sun. Most of the life on earth depends on sun so let’s just all agree that we really need it. We could probably harness enough energy from our current Sun before we fly away into space. That would give us enough manipulative energy until we reach our first closest star. Now, our closest star Proxima Centauri is four light years away (4.2 actually), which would mean it would take us four years to reach it if we traveled at the speed of light, and with anti-matter rocket propulsion and solar sail some scientist really believe we can reach at least 10% of light speed. If you’re worried on how will human body endure 10% speed of light travel, don’t. It’s done by gradual acceleration and deceleration so humans won’t even feel the impact of speed. Moving on… So we need to conserve at least 40 years of Suns energy; probably double or triple that just to be sure. (Ironically one could say we already are doing this by uhmm “greenhouse effect”). Once we approach Proxima Centauri we would have to calculate exactly prefect distance from Earth-Ship to the star so we can stop the Earth-Ship at that point and start harnessing its energy. We don’t want to get to close, but just to be safe bring your sunscreen. When we get bored, we would then move to other stars or simply stay in certain orbit if it comfort allows. We would also need to become masters of not only converting mass into energy (burning a lump of coal for example) but also turning energy into mass (closest example for this is photosynthesis). Some scientists are saying that we’re tens of thousand of years away from achieving something like this. To be safe let’s just say we’re 100,000 years away. Just to put it into perspective: that’s ten times longer then our current recorded human history.

3. Navigate the seas of the stars. Final thing we need to figure out is how to propel the Earth and navigate it the way we wanted it, and thus escape sun’s gravitation pull and basically hurl ourselves away on our own galactic plane into the vastness of space. Closest analogy to something like this I can think of would be “Death Star” from Star Wars movie. There are many things we could do this with. One possibility is to use “solar sail” which is exactly what it says it is. Build a huge sail and have our Sun’s radiation propels us into the space. Scientists are already planning to propel space ships with this kind of technology. But why stop at the space ships? Why not “sail away” with the whole earth. Remember: once in motion, object (our earth) stays in motion until we or something else stops it. That would give us enough power to drift away into space until the need to change direction arises. To avoid asteroid hits would be one of those needs for example. In that case we would have to have some other means of manipulating Earth-Ship trajectory. One way would be to use anti-matter rocket propulsion system where we would just fire up our rockets as needed and basically repel-away from the objects. This way we would also be able to navigate the earth through the space as we wish. Some interesting fact: Right now, antimatter is the most expensive substance on Earth, about $62.5 trillion a gram ($1.75 quadrillion an ounce). To put that in perspective: To produce one gram  of Anti-matter would bankrupted whole world economy. Combining solar sail with anti-matter rocket system (depending on the size of course) should probably give us enough power and energy to escape Suns gravitational pull. There’s another non-conventional way to propel Earth-Ship would by bending (or folding) the space/time continuum to get us from A to B quicker. For example take a flat piece of paper and draw a dot on one end and call it point A. Next, draw a dot on opposite edge of paper and lets call it point B. If you have an ant that wants to go from point A to point B, you could simply have it run along the paper and eventually will get there. But, if you take the paper and fold it in half, two points will reach each other lot quicker. Another good analogy is piano on a carpet. If you want to get to the piano from one end of the carpet, why not just pull the rug towards you and piano will move towards you also. Just substitute carpet and paper with time/space. This is essentially folding of space/time. We’re probably few hundred thousand years away from technology that will allow us to do this. Just to be safe let’s say we’re 5 million years away from this kind of technology.

There you have it. In about 5,101,000 years we will be ready to move away from our Sun and look ahead where our race will drift eternally on a great cosmic journey. All that with 994,899,000 years to spare!

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”

Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.