Cell

Reading over my blog, I find it interesting how I started talking about cell phones, and am now being amazed by the leukocyte cell.

Calling our cellular phone cell's is misleading, but now that we're using nanotechnology, it's becoming more fitting. I'm not an expert on the subject, but are we not designing our own simple cells?

It's almost scary to think about it. If we're designing cell phones that have their own cell-like structure, we're almost designing a new type of organism.

Sometimes new ideas like these, and particularly biological studies, like cloning and stem cell research, are downright frightening. Terms like "playing God" are thrown around.

We have to remind ourselves that the fear of knowledge is a mistake. Like an evolutionary leftover. A deep sub-conscious irrational fear.

Like the first creature that evolved wings and being afraid of a precipice before it flies for the first time.



I wonder how advanced we could be if the term "tree of knowledge" was never used in the particular version of Genesis which is popular today.

I say this because according to Shai Cherry, one of The Teaching Companie's brilliant professors, there were two very different versions of Genesis. The first one being one where the world was created in one day, not the much more popular seven. The very calendar that we have continued to base our lives on for thousands of generations was based on this story of seven days. Yet, when you think about it, what day are you talking about and from who's perspective. From Einsteins point of view, space-time is not as simple as it looks, and it's difficult for us in our era to comprehend. Never mind the perspective of someone from 6000 or so years ago. So even if someone did get a divine vision from God of how the Earth was created, and wrote it down, we have to assume that he wouldn't have been able to understand what he was seeing. The writing skills were undoubtedly primitive, and he probably couldn't translate what he seen properly, and it just got worse from there as it was passed from person to person.

And yet, somehow, some way, there is this deep fear of knowledge, a fear of getting kicked out of the Garden, a fear of building the tower of Babel. fear of "the number of the beast", like if we put a chip in our skin, we'd some how jump-start the rapture, and all the sinners of the world would die like in the flood. The Y2K scare was inspired from this kind of nonsense. Millions was made on the "Y2K-compliant" scandal. This man-made "doomsday is coming view" has been passed from generation to generation. You can see it in our movies, in the news (Global Warming), and I hear it all the time.

And yet history has shown that technology has made our lives easier. We live longer, see things we'd never see, learn things we'd never be able to know.

For example, if your interested in the alternate version of Genesis, but can't afford to buy it from the link above or perhaps you just want to see if I'm bullshitting you. Youtorrent it, the title is "introduction to Judaism".If you enjoy The Teaching Company, support them in their cause, and buy a few when you can afford it. I highly recommend TTC, I can honestly say I am much more "mentally healthy" since I began to listen to their mp3's.

I can get all that information from electronic signals sent through wires. I listen to it on my tiny cell phone.

I sincerely doubt that a man-made doomsday will come, but we can't ignore the fact that the Earth is not new to mass extinctions.


If we want to survive the next one, we need to change our perspective. We need to dump this fear of the future.

We need to try and view things on the long term.

Ideally, mankind should have two planets, so if a disaster happens on one, the species can continue to exist.

On the very long term, we should have two solar systems, so if a solar disaster happens, we have a back up star.

And if you want to get imaginative, in the extremely long term, we should have two galaxies. Who knows? The milky way could collide in to the Andromeda galaxy in 3 billion years. Perhaps with disaster in all habitable planets.

Freeman Dyson has some interesting far future concepts.