A glimpse into the next seventy years
By RAPHAEL BONHART
IT IS 2078 and the rapid advance in new technological innovations revved the pace of change to a level unimaginable in the last century.
Two hundred people are thriving on the Gusev plains of Mars, a result of efforts by Americans, Russians and Chinese to terraform this closest neighbor of Earth into habitable abodes under domes of bulletproof glass.
Twenty three years earlier (2055), a breakthrough in the non-electromagnetic world of gravitonics by Americans, not only solved the long delay in electronic communications between Earth and Mars, but also enabled man to access hyperspace from any place and time to take shortcuts in space travel, putting the reaches of the planets to within weeks.
It was coined gravitonics because its chief ingredient -an altered state of matter (Alsom) - was first used to detect gravitational waves directly by a process called reversible electromagnetism.
Alsom is produced by melting certain metals under very defined magnetic fields, bombarded with a stream of subatomic particles, and then rapidly cooled in a magnetized super coolant.
Since gravitonics deals with the manipulation of the fabric of space and time, time dilation effects like ‘slow time’, ‘missing time’ and ‘leap in time’ are a real experience that opened up a new world of time travel since then.
Last Wednesday July 20, 2078, a newspaper featured an article that for the first time, scientists clocked negative time below frozen time in an experimental time capsule, signifying the beginning of time travel into the past and future.
They are now perfecting these machines that will be operational in four years time. After completion, time travel will be launched in Israel, with Christians making reservations for ‘time trips to Golgotha’ to see first hand the crucifixion of Jesus Christ 2078 years ago.
Gravitonics - unlike electronics that is electromagnetic in nature - runs parallel to electronics but are compatible with each other. This enables electronic signals to be converted to gravitational waves for instant universal communications and vice versa for an electronic translation of signals from gravitonics.
With specific frequencies and voltage levels from electronics, other gravitational and ionising effects in gravitonics are achieved that make all spacecrafts fallsafe, space travel efficient, instant universal communications possible and time travel a reality.
By detecting the static strains in the fabric of space and time (universal gravitation), gravitonics is the eye of mankind, monitoring the universe in real-time, searching for other life forms and acquiring the status of being ‘ubiquitous and omniscient’ - two words often attributed to God.
The nine-year period of 2038 - 2047 saw Earth condemned the human race of a crime of mere negligence as the cumulative effects of global warming reached its highest momentum to be solved immediately.
The unpredictable and chaotic weather patterns, coupled with regional heat waves, wreaked havoc across the globe. Then the industrial nations who had been talking green while acting dirty for economic reasons took drastic measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, mainly methane as its warming effect compared tonne for tonne to carbon dioxide is a 100 times greater. It was the quickest and cheapest way of slowing climate change that reduced a third of the effects of global warming and bailed mankind out of a self-induced calamity.
With minimum emissions of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, Earth, a self-cleansing marvel, went through its check and balance processes to return to its normal climate and weather pattern apart from the irreversible effects of melting ice caps and rising sea levels.
The average lifetime of humans is a hundred and forty years and is due to regenerative medicine, mainly stem cells as the cellular spare parts for ailing organs and tissues, and a cure for a myriad of diseases incurable fifty years ago. The world population of 32 billion attests to this.
To provide the needed human spare parts in stem cell therapy, all nations have hospitals with little embryo farms and cloning mills that operate on carefully drawn moral and ethical bounds.
Embryonic stem cells are extracted from embryos created either by in vitro fertilization or from therapeutic cloning, in which a nucleus from say, skin cell is inserted to a fertilized egg whose nucleus has been removed.
After five days, scientists transfer the inner cell mass - with about 40 or so coveted cells - and are cultured in a lab dish lined with feeder cells. After some months, they grow into millions without beginning to differentiate into the 200-plus specialised cells of the human body - brain cells, liver cells, nerve cell, etc - and capable of reproducing ad infinitum.
These unspecialized bits are now coaxed into any human tissues making it a powerful tool for creating healthy human tissues and organs to cure deadly diseases.
By understanding nature’s secret - a complex combination of growth factors with chemical and genetic signal that drive the process - scientists are now directing these naÔve cells to perform, in sterile isolation, the everyday miracle they perform in the womb: transforming them into the different cells of the human body.
And not only they harness and direct cell differentiation, geneticists are altering their genetic codes to create for military purposes, regenerative superhumans with instant healing capabilities that age 8 times slower than humans.
Last year, Japan and Singapore brought back to life the extinct mammoths by cloning one from flesh preserved in the icy Siberian mountains and implanted in a surrogate female elephant.
There’s also speculation that cloning from dead fossils is possible by replicating dead cells using living cells of related species, which means that dinosaurs and their relatives are the next to be resurrected.
The advent of regenerating memory cells in electronics in 2027 gave birth to the true artificial intelligence man longed to create. All levels of society employ machines and computers with brains that emulate the human reasoning and thinking capabilities. Indeed, it made man confront the fact that he now has an intellectual competitor.
From the home to automated factories, these machines are self-aware and their global interconnectivity allows them to talk and ask each other questions, a scenario that requires human watchdogs across the planet.
Like the human conscience - the law of robotics - sometimes called the Asimov principles, guides them. If humans can violate their conscience, then these machines pose a threat from back-door manipulation by remnant global terrorists or their own rebellion against the human race. As a precaution, all nuclear countries must maintain that their nuclear missile launching mechanisms use conventional and manual systems.
The application of nanotechnology is so broad from miniature robots that clean clogged veins and arteries to state security and espionage. And ultrasafe nuclear plants and improved automobile innovations that employ gravitonics technology have radically cut down the world’s dependence on oil.
For the human race, 2078 marks a milestone in technological innovations. And gravitonics alone stands as the technology that opened a new horizon that portrayed the universe as more mysterious than before.
As a great believer in the principle of cause and effect, despite his new discoveries, new inventions and deep search into the heart of creation, man still is nowhere to finding that first uncaused cause that brought this universe into being. With no clear-cut answer yet, he is the effect still searching for the cause.
What was the cause of the Big Bang? If this is one of the eternal life cycles of our universe, then what initiated it? Is it possible for other universes to exist with dimensions unlike our space and time and far too alien for us to understand? “These are very close to religious questions,” Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist once told the New York Times 77 years ago.
It is now evident that science, mysticism and religion are converging to meet on a common ground and declare a creativity far greater than what our frail and feeble minds can comprehend.
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