Pro Liberi

The next objective, one I think sadly lacking in our society, is health care. 

● Develop health care to expand our life spans and make us healthier longer

Sure we are finding things out all the time but how little progress we are making and yet we know so much about our bodies and how they work.

I see this working in four ways.    First of all I see us developing cures for many diseases.  Basic cures. Let’s invest some money in this and let’s attack each hurdle in turn until they are all down.  Pretty much as we are doing now but simply more of.

The second way is to cure genetic issues.    Imagine that no matter what your child is born with they can live a normal life with a normal lifespan.   Some children need care all their lives and thus there are several lives improved by this.  We are already working on some of these.

The third way is actually keeping us active.   Developing new limbs where the old ones are severed.  New hips, fingers etc. Attaching new bits to replace worn out body parts.   How is it that we can get a cancer in a lung and it kills us? We know how oxygen is transferred into our body and we must be able to artificially do this in a compact and portable manner.  Either via cloning or via technology.  

The fourth way is enhancing our bodies.   Even grafting our brains into robotic bodies when we can get to that stage.   Brain goes into a sphere.   Sphere has standard interfaces that integrate into anything you want.  Human looking robotic bodies means being able to walk on Mars just like you walk on Earth and you don’t have to worry about wearing a suit or actually being integrated into a machine to explore other planets which would crush you otherwise.   Working as a builder?   Have a body made up as a JCB with all the attachments while you are working.   All this of course is based on my belief that you are your brain and no other part of your body is required.  Plug and Play interfaces allow you to integrate with any body you build or machine you control.   The benefits are endless although I bet many people won’t see that as a step forward today. There are some ethical issues to be considered here but as we progress we can deal with them as they happen.

From what I can see we are discovering things all the time.  Personally I see nano robots being the cure for most of these ills.  Little robots that will analyse your body daily and fix anything it comes across be it physical damage as in a cut or break or medical damage as in cancer or high cholesterol.

There are many bright people out there.  The only ones getting funding now are for global warming or weapons.  We need to point these people in new directions.

Well lets very quickly look at each of the short term objectives which I think we are in a position to work on now.  These are all projects that we can do and our ingenuity could cause giant leaps forward.   These all link together and between them will alleviate most of the ills in our society.

Let’s start with food.   Something we all need to survive.

● Develop a food source that uses less land space to give us room to grow.

The current problem with our food supply is everything takes so much land space and water to grow.   Progress throughout history has meant that we make much more efficient use of these resources but inevitably in the end we will reach a limit with our current crops and livestock and as our numbers will continue to increase we will need more land and water to keep everyone fed.   Obviously this too has a limit.

So thinking outside the box.     How about some Star Trek like replicators for foodstuff?   Mmmm.  A bit beyond us at the moment but that is clearly the next stage.   So where are we now?   What is it we need?

Well where we are now is eating vegetable and animal matter to provide us with the necessary nutrients, proteins, etc.    However when we look at it after the taste and texture of eating it all ends up as an unrecognisable mush in the stomach where it is digested.  So we have a two fold process.   One where we are eating, the pleasure bit and the second where we are extracting the nutrients.  Only one being critical.

I’m sure that we can already catalogued the nutrients that we need for healthy life.   There are so many vitamin pills around that everything must be covered.   We must be close to creating a food pill which covers all our needs.     What exactly is it that is given to coma patients that keeps them alive for years and can be fed directly into the stomach through tubes?    No chewing necessary and I’m sure it is not prime steak.

One popular suggestion is for CHON factories, mentioned in Frederik Pohl’s Gateway series where asteroids are mined for the basic elements and used to create food in automated factories.

The eating part is going to be the most difficult to get over.   We like to eat.  It is genetic and we have evolved to like it.   We like to taste, smell and feel the texture of our food in order to enjoy it.    That’s why we like a good steak so much.  It hits all the right buttons.     We will need to replicate this in some way artificially.    I would imagine nowadays taste and smells can easily be replicated to fool those senses but what about texture and looks.    Soya products seem to be getting better and that is a start.   However in the end it comes down to personal taste and if you really want real steak then you can pay for it and eventually it will be indistinguishable.  Our real food requirements will be significantly cheaper and many of us don’t really have the time to savour our food anyway.

I’m sure there will be a way.  The culture change will come later and in the meantime we can improve our land/water to food ration.    Can’t wait for the replicators to arrive though.   ‘Tea.  Earl Grey hot’ but in the end I see us not eating at all and all our requirements being supplied by a little box inside our body feeding nutrients as required and our stomachs etc. being as superfluous as our appendix and a politicians balls.