The enigmatic future

The future, as I see it, is going to be a little more humiliating for mankind.
Will we have dedicated servers to our minds and thoughts?

History shows how often our arrogance and dogma has been not only challenged but found seriously lacking in reality and truth.
Copernicus, Darwin, Crick and Watson changed the way we see ourselves. They dared to look outside the boundaries layed down for us in early childhood.
But what does the future hold to further dent our pride and question further the indoctrinations we are fed from an early age. The trusted scholars who held our trust still refusing to accept or even contemplate anything that questions the very hubris of our existence.

We have always thought of ourselves as special, and for good reason. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe in churning out great works of art and literature, in formulating the laws of physics, and in the spectacle that is break dancing.

Three major upheavals in scientific thinking have served to remind us that we are not so special after all. Upheavels that shook society and threatened religious doctrine. The major Christian beliefs crying out "heresy"!

The first of these upheavals came from the polish astronomer and mathematician Copernicus in the16th century.
He argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system! He relegated our planet to one of many orbiting the sun and backed it up with mathematics.
At once the whole notion that the earth was special was rendered obsolete and that must have been damn humbling , especially for the church who cried heresy and humbug. Copernicus was even threatened with torture by church leaders for even daring to utter such. Only when his peers and fellow scientists confirmed his findings was the matter swept under the carpet to be held secret from the masses.
But if Copernicus got down and got dirty ruffling a few feathers saying Earth wasn't special, Darwin got more personal 300 years later by implying that humans weren't special either.
In "The Origin of the Species", Darwin promoted the theory of evolution by natural selection, immediately suggesting that humans were just another kind of animal. It meant we weren’t the crowning glory of evolution; we were just hairless apes that happened to be a little smarter than our cousins? The outrage this created is well documented. Church leaders once again crying foul and blasphemy. If only they had realised this wasnt God denying, but an attempt at understanding Gods work. Furthering and enforcing the suspicians of religious dogma.

A hundred years later, James Watson and Francis Crick unravelled the structure of DNA.
It led to a further challenge to human and religious arrogance. We are in short, simply vessels of self replicating molecules, whose only purpose was to pass them on to another generation. All of these discoveries reeked havoc in the churches and in their in doctrines. Imagine 2000 years of "belief" questioned by irrefutable scientific evidence. No wonder early scientists were burnt at stake as heretics.

But what's next? What will be the fourth revolution (revelation?)? Will it, like those before, force us to question once more what it means to be human?
Whatever shape it takes, it may help humans to understand their condition rather than knock it down further.

The big question is why these revolutions don't make us profoundly sad. We are reduced to bags of chemicals with no free will, living on a normal planet, but we still find it exiting.
I believe it's because we see ourselves as part of some grander scheme (maybe organised by God) but now with greater understanding. We're part of something larger than ourselves and once we identify with that, it is not degrading but ennobling.
Can we expect in the next hundred years to understand in a general way how the human brain gives rise to what we perceive as the human mind?

The solution should be interesting, very complex but not in the end mysterious. It will be a great philosophical challenge to take on board, but we shall succeed because of our tremendous ability to adapt.
We should feel, first, a modest pride in our ability to achieve such understanding, and more importantly a huge sense of collective responsibility in what we do with it. A humility that disclaims responsibility for its actions is dangerous and offers a real risk that our journey of exploring the universe will be cut off just as we are beginning in earnest.
It could be that the next revolution will come from a combination of huge advances in genetics and stem cell research. Would it lead to a more egalitarian society?

Assuming that all humanity has access to these advances, everyone will benefit from regenerative medicine, which means we'll cure disease at an accelerated rate, we’ll live longer and finally we’ll be able to affect our genetic makeup.
Hypertension and heart disease will will be a thing of the past.
We will become similar to one another because everyone will want the same thing. The benefits of cosmetic surgery contributing to the creation of our desired look.
We will all be living from the 'hollywood diet".

It raises huge ethical questions. There are those who do not wish mankind to achieve these abilities. But we are in an accelerated evolutionary phase. Personally, I don’t believe it can be stopped.
Perhaps we will discover long lost cousins on another planet.It prompts the question are we alone in this or other universums?
As I see it, the elements that are most abundant in the cosmos; hydrogen, helium and oxygen, make the most common compound of life water.
Next come carbon and nitrogen so four out of the five most common elements can make the organic compounds we all know and love. That says to me there is an accident waiting to happen or has happened.
There is thought of other planes of being unknown yet to our dimensions.

Total arrogance to think that life hasn't originated elsewhere in this great cosmos.
Now how about if life on another planet was based on another code other than DNA?

Dont tell me it's all theory and hypothesis, so was Darwins', Newton's, Copernicus' and Crick and Watsons' wasn't it?

Stumble It!