Works By Australian Authors
Science Wish List by Rodney Bartlett
Fountain Of Youth
(contribution # 7 - written April 24, 1994)
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).