It is my intention to devote my life to the goal of turning science fiction into fact. I am a proud science fiction buff. I love to watch spaceships whiz across my TV and computer screen. I take pleasure in demonstrating some new sort of technology or scientific idea to people who do not understand it. I swoon over the progress that mankind has made in terms of science. Humanity, however, can only hope to live out the technological fantasies they have dreamed up if people are willing to let go of the past and expand their perception of the future.
My infatuation with science fiction probably routes back to my favorite kinds of kid shows. You know, the ones where some random superhero ends up fighting the creation of an evil and/or insane genius? Now one would assume that I would subconsciously root for the superhero, the pillar of justice and peace, but this proves not the case. The mad scientist is perhaps the greatest of characters in any of these shows in my opinion. Rather than having every technological innovation already set up for him in the beginning, the villain usually has to work from the bottom up using his mind to tackle all things that stop him from achieving his goals. After all, what does the superhero usually have in contrast to the villain? Let us take Superman for instance. He has the power of flight, super hearing, super vision, laser eyes, super strength, freezing breath, super speed, and overall super everything. Evil geniuses on the other hand usually have to rely on only one thing; their mind. Super villains sometimes create the most amazing, creative, and powerful things this world has ever seen. But the things they create are always destroyed, caged, or banished. If I were asked whether I would want to be Superman or Lex Luther, I would probably say Lex simply because of the things I have seen him create, control, and destroy. Evil geniuses fashion the most creative scientific achievements in the history of man, and I would rather want to build a superior piece of technology than fly around all day in my underwear being proud of how everything has just been given to me from day one.
Because the creations of evil geniuses often prove nightmarish and terrifying, new technologies used by these animated caricatures often seem too outlandish to utilize in our real world. Thus, these glimpses of new scientific advances have the ability to stifle progress by fueling support for regressive ideals to suppress new technologies. For instance, in the movie “Bicentennial Man” a robot, played by Robin Williams, develops new organ technologies that allow people to live life spans much longer than those we live today. However, when bicentennial man’s wife says she feels a calling from God that seems to tell her she should not live any longer than 120 years, her husband decides that he must stop the organ treatments given to himself and his wife, and both of them die in the end. This movie should be offensive to all scientists (or any future scientists, for that matter) because it commits the historical sin of denying the possibility of change. We do not live in a world where people choose to live no more than 120 years. We live in a world where nobody can live any longer than that, and so most people cannot even fathom living to 200, much less 1,000 years old. If given the chance to live any longer than the most positive estimate for age of death in the late 20th century, bicentennial man and his wife both would have chosen to live as long as possible. Many people in history are left behind because they choose to fear progressive, yet logical conclusions and desperately hold onto archaic beliefs.
There are many new technologies approaching the field of science that can help promote progress and increase the standard of living for people that will be questioned because of antiquated “moral” values. Nanotechnology will allow microscopic robots to perform virtually any feat by manipulating matter and energy at the atomic level, making animals and plants, even humans, no more complex than computer chips and polymers. Sentient technology will allow full analysis of the human psyche from a completely logical point of view. Artificial intelligence (AI) will blur the lines between what is possible and what is not, by allowing computers to become millions of times more intelligent than any human being, discouraging the belief that technological minds will always be less than the human. By combining these three technologies together humanity might be able to create something so powerful as to become no less than what most people conceive as God -- an all-powerful being who knows everything that will happen and everything that has happened. If humanity were able to create this sort of God-like creature, and construct it in such a way as to only do things that would help humanity, we might end up living in a dream-like reality more similar to heaven than ever conceived of in our wildest fantasies, where we would be able to ask the AI for anything we wanted, and the AI would know exactly the most positive way to give it to us.
We hold society back from the sort of futuristic wonderland we all hope will come someday because we fear some of the outlandish and distorted possibilities these new technologies might produce. It is my belief that only by embracing what we humans have the ability to create in totality, can we turn our dreams into a reality. It is my intent to spend my every waking moment working in some way towards what I feel is humanity’s collective destiny.
