Mankind is the greatest art of both creation and evolution, whatever your belief says. We have the choice to make changes in this world (physical world, actually, a subverse of the transcendent multiverse), but the very facility which harnesses this ability to make change is the very limitation itself for us to do more. It’s our body; we can manipulate everything in the universe but only through our body (and though it could be through means of manipulating others, it could only be done by the means of our body).
Our body becomes limitation of what we could do and couldn’t do. This raises a big personal question between me and everything else: can we break through this limit? Can we manipulate the universe outside our body? Can we transcend?
And suddenly the answer of this hit my head like 2012 hit the nonbelievers: our body is a port which harnesses our thoughts from the origin of mankind to this physical realm where we could make difference. What if we create another form of this port which enables us to transcend?
5 years ago, I read Michael Crichton’s book The Sphere. I like the way Crichton broke through limits of perception and explore into possibilities. In The Sphere, he introduced a sort of “catalyst” (the Sphere) which enables human mind to manipulate many aspects in the physical realm without direct contact with their own body, against the known laws of physics. I was intrigued with such possibility, but how exactly it could be implemented in real life was beyond my imagination at that time.
Last year, I saw the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still. It was a remake of a 1951 science fiction of the same name, which coined the famous line “klaatu verata nictu (klaatu barada nikto)” but with a deeper and more contemporary scientific approach. The movie (starring Keanu Reeves) demonstrated the use of nanites (nanoscale robots) as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), and how the use of such weapon could possibly destroy a planet-scale object.
This added another piece of jigsaw in my head, and after a series of research I began to see the big picture. Crichton’s idea of a “catalyst” for transcendence, and self-replicating nanites (Crichton actually wrote about nanorobots in his 2002 book Prey): I think I’ve found a way, a theory of how mankind transcend the physical universe.
Things, manmade products in this context, are both “standardized” and “customized”, based on the necessities of their users. My own idea of how uniform standardized components could end up in trillions of possibilities of customization intrigued me, ever since I learned back then in high school that everything in the universe consists of combinations of less than 120 of substances (atoms). And what this have to do with the article is, I have a concept of molecular self-replicating nanites, with the ability similar of each of our nerve cells plus abilities to getting together forming colonies which makes up for more complex organisms. The nanites, which I called “beta”s, have the ability to transmit, redirect, and respond to human brain’s alpha, beta, and gamma waves. These betas, which are supposed to be everywhere all over the world, serve as extensions of human body, while their ability to work together forming more complex systems makes the possibilities of their abilities almost infinite.
The more technical concepts of these betas, such as how they work, how they get their energy to do things, the possibilities, and why I named them “beta”s will be written in my next posts.
And yes, my novel Lighthouse of Mankind will employ the use of betas.
Can We Transcend?
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