With everything there is to see…. with the media pouring forth information beyond the speed of light, ideas coalesce like raindrops glowing with radioactive importance. Each drop demands our attention as closer inspection reveals nano-packed information. Entire television series can be encoded onto a single disk – though they may not be to make it easier to sell each disk separately. Hard drives can contain multiple film trilogies or even entire collections that could fill up a wall-organizer for normal DVD’s or Blu Ray Disks. And our brains seems saturated with everything that has gone before, and everything new as well. Human history (and the technology it has created) has brought us libraries of information, entertainment and virtual worlds.
The root of this tree of media is becoming the Internet and computers. The base from which all things grow. As information seems to grow (by being created or harvested from the past), it seems to grow in the soil of machines able to turn almost anything into a series of 1′s and 0′s. The world is becoming less high resolution and analog, and begining to be made of small grains sometimes visible to the human eye.
Some have theorized that the Fermi Paradox might be answered by virtual reality. What does that mean? It means that since we do see any evidence of extraterrestrial life, aliens or alien civilizations that perhaps they all went digital – literally. Perhaps they’ve all slipped into a alternate dimension known as virtual reality.
If so, we are going to be hard pressed to tear them away from their video games and record collections.
If you could keep a collection of old-style records- vinyl disks- that could become the actual artist and sing for you, or be thrown into your pile without fear of scratching, wouldn’t you spend more time with your favorite music?
Ok, I’m being a bit silly and understating things here, but are we headed in that direction? Would it be a bad thing?
I think it comes down to some fundamental questions that we still haven’t answered about who we are yet? Is a copy of a person – a digitalized brain recording/map or a clone – the same as the original person? For most people, being able to pass the “I can’t tell” test might be enough, but science and society are suppose to look deeper and find ethical and moral dilemma to consider before any such technology is put into widespread use.
As long as human life persists and we have electricity we have the potential to light up the night with our light beams, our projected movies, our incandescent dreams of battling back the night…. As we become more and more entranced by light and all things it may produce…. as we become a part of this great growing tree of information we are going to have to ask ourselves where our human bodies and minds fit into this new paradigm.
Where does human emotion fit into all of this. As something to be coded into a story and digitized onto a disk? Will we still interact? Will be take along those instincts, both good and bad, that make up our animal side? What will brains think like when they are simulated; where there are no biochemical systems to back them up – or if there are…. will they will systems we, rather than nature, design?
Pop Culture raises these questions in fiction and in fact. We ask them because we are curious, and our nightmares, our fears are reflected in the tales we tell. Notice that we rarely tell stories of computers going mad, because we’ve come to know them for the dumb, but useful tools that they are. Until we touch on Artificial Intelligence that begins to frighten people we rarely see such things except as interesting villains – just another type of character.
There is something beautiful about imaging the growth of information as a tree made of light – as a living and growing concept built of thousands of years of knowledge, design and scientific inquiry. Will we literally become 1′s and 0′s in the trees streams of light? Will some of us stay behind to maintain the machinery, or in stubborn (and perhaps wise) refusal to giving up where we came from? Will we become Homo Digital? If so, what will we find when it happens? Perhaps we will access wavelengths of energy that have been waiting for us to add ourselves to a far greater tree of knowledge that has existed since long before humanity was born.
In the end it all boils down to one of the oldest questions around. “Where do we go from here?”
Related posts:
