A still more glorious dawn awaits

The further beyond our senses we venture, the greater will be our incredulity. We cannot see the teeming cauldron of reactions boiling in each of our trillion cells, and we cannot resolve the titanic grandeur of the galaxies, full of stars. Not from where we stand. In the past, our human universe was limited by our complete inability to see beyond our own "macro" link in the Great Chain of Being, but men like Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek gave us mechanical appendages, allowing a select few initiates to peer beyond, into the micro and the mega.

But the large majority of people do not have access to such tools, and many who read Nature's parables do not know how to interpret them, for "...seeing they may see, and not perceive." We are not actors on the micro and mega stages in everyday life, and we cannot perceive them with our unaugmented senses, so our brains have not yet caught up with our science, and we have a hard time conceiving of both the vast and the infinitesimal.

Science asks us to contemplate the nearly infinite, and religion blinds the man who would look on the face of God. In religion's circumscribed crystalline sphere, we are held comfortable in amniotic embrace (this is my body...) and fed by umbilical vein (this is my blood...) - directly into the gut, bypassing the head entirely. We do not smell, do not taste, do not analyze spiritual nourishment, but imbibe it intravenously. Please don't chew on the body of Christ while He's transubstantiating.

Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, was written to make the case for evolution. Every previous book, he says, started from the presumption that evolution is fact; the latest, though, aims to present the evidence. I agree with this approach. I think the greatest buttress of prejudice is ignorance, and an anti-scientific viewpoint is rarely anything other than prejudgment.

Still, I don't know that a book will go far enough. I've bought into the scientific outlook to the greatest extent possible, and it is still incredibly difficult for me to wrap my head around things like the fact that the largest black holes in the galaxy could be the size of fifty billion suns. I don't even know how big a billion is, really, nor how big the sun is. How can I conceive of such a fact? I can't. This whole line of thought occurred to me in Biochemistry lecture because I made the mistake of thinking about how the glycolysis pathway we were studying is churning incessantly in my cells, and the minute concentrations of reactants and products and regulated by other pathways, and hormones, and gradients... and all in all, the whole system (which is, by definition, life itself) is far too complex to actually understand.

This is actually part of the reason I'm excited about augmented humanity, too. I think that if we can augment our senses, we'll be able to experience a larger slice of the universe's micro-macro-mega spectrum. With our everyday consciousness expanded, we'll be better equipped to confront a vast and complex reality that is daily growing in size and complexity. I guess I'm just saying that as we chew on tougher and more gristly questions, it wouldn't hurt to have sharper teeth and a detachable jaw.



Note: The post title is from that autotuned Carl Sagan music video I posted a little while ago. Really, do yourself a favor and check it out now if you didn't before. Or even if you did - it's worth a few viewings, at least.

"There's a life about to start when tomorrow comes..."

This item [via The Daily Galaxy] makes my heart pound with excitement, because, in the future, that very phrase may become outmoded. That's right, if you've ever cried out in fear and alarm that science is intent on forging a race of heartless cyborgs... well, you're almost right. Meet Madam Salina Mohamed So'ot, the woman without a heartbeat. This 30-year-old administrative assistant (from Singapore, apparently) has a late-model artificial heart that pumps blood at one continuous flow rate and does not beat. Ergo, she has no pulse.

Now, it's not so much the notion of everyday flat-lining that sets my heart a flutter (but oh, dear lord, are we going to have to change our idioms if this becomes prevalent!), it's the notion that this heart is actually more efficient than the meatbag ticker we've evolved with. I'll grant you, the whole four-chamber, dual-circulation adaptation (pictured below)

was a pretty awesome improvement over the old brackish amphibian salad spinner that was popular for a while, but we can do it better now! Technology 1, Invisible Sky-Beard 0! Wait, what's that you say? How can we be more intelligent designers than the Intelligent Designer? I'm sorry, I just couldn't hear you over the sound of your worldview imploding (metaphorically pictured below).

The exciting possibilities for human-driven human augmentation are starting to be realized now, and I have renewed hope that cyborg technology will really take off within my lifetime (and how cool is it to be able to say that with a straight face?). Perhaps I'm alone in not feeling an undue attachment to the clay from which I was sculpted. The human body is a low-efficiency, poorly-(un)designed machine, perpetually degrading toward decrepitude and demise. Once we can cost-effectively replace parts as they fail, or, better, upgrade them to more durable models, we can transcend our fleshy prisons in a way that would make a Cathar swoon. (Note to self: Second Albigensian Crusade against a sect of Cathar Cyborgs in the cyberpunk future - Montsegur 2144, if you will - is fertile ground for... something.) Of course, we are still light-years away from affordable cybernetics, but the pace of medical technological innovation is quick and, it seems, accelerating - so tolerate my sanguine outlook (pun intended) if you must, and join in if it humours you (two for two!).

That said, I think it would take a long time to get used to not having a heartbeat. And it would be creepy as hell for almost all of that time. But I think knowing that I was one step closer to being an optimized, streamlined Man Of Tomorrow (tm) would go a long way toward easing those reservations.

Upgrade Your Neural Implant

Braingate Neural Interface Developing Into Wireless Version

The potential implications and applications of this are, dare I say, mind-blowing.

Motor Synapse

I've recently been giving a lot of thought to augmented humanity, and this short talk puts an interesting spin on it. Aimee Mullins discusses changing the dialogue on disability from one on compensation and disadvantage to one on enhancement and potential. It's really an intriguing talk that may make you prick up your ears, cock your head, raise an eyebrow, etc.

http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/03/how_my_legs_give_me_superpowers.html

Plus, if nothing else, this woman has got some awesome legs. I especially liked the hand-carved ash boot prosthetics:She talks about the importance of "combining cutting-edge technology... with the age-old poetry," and I couldn't agree more. It's that very impulse that draws a person to Victorian science, to dabble in steampunk, and even to illuminate their organic lab notebook. There is a sense that in the 19th century, science and art were more tightly intertwined, and that aesthetics were an important part of progress. William Whewell*-- demagogue, prophet, and hype-man** of the industrial revolution-- discussed at great length the marriage of art and science. He's one of my absolute favorite Victorians, but I think I'll blather about him in a future post. For now, do watch the video, and think about disability and enhancement.


*Pronounced "Hue-ull" not "Wee-well."
**Think of him like James Watt's Flavor Flav, with a giant pocketwatch around his neck and horns on his top hat.

[Edit: the link was working incorrectly, by which I actually mean not working at all. Apologies all around.]