Category: Musings

Star Trek, Computers and Pulling out the Plug!

So…here is an idea. A science fiction idea? I will let you decide.
It is a fact that the processing power of computers is growing exponentially. And there is nothing to make us suppose that this will not continue to be the case. I still marvel at the things that can be done and continue to be done by computers.
I grew up watching Star Trek – in the early seventies I used to walk around the corner with my brother to my aunt’s house to watch it, she had that most wondrous of things; a colour television. Our TV was black and white and you had to get up from the sofa to change between one of the three (yes only three!) channels.
Anyway, my young self marvelled at the original series of Star Trek. It captured my imagination in many ways. Of course I loved the thought of travelling to distant alien worlds. I grew up thinking that if I ever got into a fight with an alien then the worst that could happen was that my shirt would get ripped and a small drop of blood would appear at the corner of my mouth, just like Captain Kirk. I loved the possibility of the Enterprise and all the technology contained within. Phasers and tricorders and replicators and communicators. All of that seemed so impossibly wonderful and distant to my young self.
And yet, here I sit, typing this on an iPad. Just like Star Trek. I can talk to my phone and it can talk back. Just like Star Trek. I can find vast amounts of information on the internet. Just like asking the computer on Star Trek. And some clever scientists and engineers are building machines now that might even mimic replicators (I will blog about that soon hopefully). I couldn’t have imagined those things would happen. And I can’t imagine the wonders of technology that my five year old daughter will experience in her life.
So, here’s the thing. The ‘Science Fiction’ idea. As I said, the capacity of computers grows ever larger as does the things they can do (compare the computers on Apollo 11 to an iPhone!). If this continues then it is conceivably possible that eventually computers will have the processing power to re-create everything within them. Yes, everything. A future computer could re-create our whole world for example, down to the molecular and sub-atomic level. Every animal, plant, human being and object re-created and modelled. And perhaps, the whole universe too.
Now I know this isn’t a new idea (I bet some of you are thinking about ‘The Matrix’). But here’s the part of this idea that gets me thinking; if that will be possible in the future (and we have no reason to suppose it won’t) then how do we know it hasn’t already happened…
I can envisage two scenarios:
1. An alien race has already done this, and our world and universe are part of some vast computer science project.
2. Humans develop computers in the future to do this and they re-create our world in order to study history.
In both scenarios I imagine that we are being watched and observed and studied.
If we are part of some vast computer project, then what will happen when we develop computers fast enough to create and re-create worlds? Worlds within worlds going on forever?
Some of you may think this idea is far-fetched and it probably is. Is this Science Fiction? The truth is that we have no way of knowing. You could be part of a computer generated world right now. And my question is this: what if someone pulls out the plug?

© 2012 Simon Poore

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“It’s life Jim, but not as we know it!”

by simontall

A Cold, Tea drinking and Parallel Worlds…

Illness. It’s that time of year again for illness. I am lying in bed as I write this and my head feels like it is full. Full to the brim with mucus and dullness. I have felt like this for about a week and like most people I struggled into work like a foolish martyr, until I realised that I wasn’t actually getting any better and it was time to stop.
So now here I am in that weird place that is ‘the day off sick’. When you have a cold or flu or whatever you want to call it; when you cough and splutter and you are bunged up inside and your head constantly aches – it is a strange place to be. Like some kind of parallel world almost.
Firstly my head feels like it is too full. Like the acres of mucus being produced endlessly by my bodies’ defence mechanisms is squashing my brain into an ever smaller space. My brain the size of a walnut, like a dinosaur. I make no apologies for my graphic description here, the quantities of phlegm and snot produced are astounding. I do often wonder what the purpose of all that is? Is it simply to make the experience even more unpleasant? Who’s idea was that?
This feeling of having ones head filled and the brain squashed has another strange effect. It can almost be like you are viewing the world the wrong way through a telescope. Everything is distant. Yesterday people were talking to me in a crowded room and I couldn’t for the life of me hear what they were saying properly. My ears were full. Well no, it wasn’t exactly like that, it felt like my ears were too far away from my brain and the sound travelling from them was taking too long to register.
It made me wish I wasn’t so rubbish at lip reading. In my job I encounter some amazing deaf students and their abilities at lip reading and signing are both wonderful and ordinary. I am jealous of their abilities but also at the same time thankful that such abilities become part of ordinary everyday life. For example it becomes habit for me to look at them when I speak. I don’t really like the word ‘disability’; it should just be different abilities.
Anyway, I digress. The weird feelings that this cold/flu thing have induced in me have made me wonder. It got to a point yesterday, when I was ridiculously struggling to carry on working, where I actually began to wonder if I was really there. It was like my body was there, present in the room, but my mind was drifting away somewhere else. If I tried to tackle a complex task (or even a simple one!) my mind wouldn’t let me, I couldn’t focus, as if my mind was saying ‘I am too far away to bother worrying about that!’. It was most odd.
It makes me think about the connection between the ‘mind’ and the body or the brain. Yes I know that doctors and scientists can hook people up to scanners and plot which parts of the brain ‘light up’ when we think or feel certain things. Or listen to music, or whatever. But we still don’t know how the two are connected. And maybe the two aren’t separate anyway, maybe there isn’t a dualism between the mind and brain. Perhaps the physical and the ethereal thinking part are one? If that were true then when the physical ceases then the thinking ceases. I am not a religious man but I like to think sometimes that the thinking ‘mind’ might actually be separate and continue after death. Like a ‘soul’, for want of a better word. Where and how that could be true I do not know.
Of course this is just speculation, as it always is. I do know than when I was privileged enough to be present at someone’s death I did ‘feel’ something, some kind of separation if you will. A moment when the physical is changed and no longer contains life.
So, back to my petty illness. I am not complaining (I know some of you out there might be thinking that I am whining – typical bloke with ‘man-flu’ I hear some of you cry!). In a way I am enjoying the odd ‘out of body’ experience it gives me. Maybe, just maybe, my mind will drift so far as to be in a parallel world…That certainly would make a great story!
As ever any comments or thoughts are welcome. Me, I am going to drink tea today and lie in bed…waiting…

© 2012 Simon Poore

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Is this a picture of the parallel world?

by simontall