historyWithin the past two days I’ve been whipped from desperate pessimism to wonderful hopefulness about our human future.
James Lovelock this week wrote a piece titled “The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years”. Ooooo. That’s bad. He’s a ‘real’ scientist: a NASA associate, nuclear energy advocate and inventor of the idea of earth as an organism in Ages of GAIA: A Biography of Our Living Earth. In the OpEd he a makes a horribly believable case that because of our pathological misuse, inevitably our beautiful Earth/Gaia will soon become an uninhabitable wasteland. Store that bottled water; you’ll need it if you become one of the few initial “breeding pairs” that repopulate the planet after it recovers in a hundred thousand years.
But today I listened to the Ray Kurzweil interview on NPR’s Science Friday where he claims that because information and biological innovations are growing exponentially, within this baby boomer’s lifespan, The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology. I (and you, if you take good care of your current body for 20 years) will be able to stop the processes of aging. Within another few decades that radically-life-extended old fart body will able to able have her (my) brain downloaded to a non-biological entity. We’ll live forever in a technological utopia where the air will be clean, poverty eradiated and life is heaven because of accelerated advances in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. He anchors the flights by keeping it close to current technology. For instance, some patients now download software to their neural implants, and there’s a cure for pulmonary hypertension in animals using gene therapy that’s been approved for human trials. Humans have difficulty seeing exponential advances because they look linear in the short run, but he’s so confident, that it’s rubbed off on this human who’s got a lot still to do.
