Thursday, December 29, 2011

Daydreamers rockin' lab-coats

In keeping with the character of this blog, it is once again time for me to pretend to have enough wisdom to dabble in philosophy.

Today we take a swipe at the current crop of leading scientists. Judging by recent newspapers, today's scientists are occupied with various multi-billion-dollar research activities. Everybody associates research with progress, but any right-thinking person would be disheartened at the research being undertaken by these expensively-educated lab-coat wearing geeks.

I hereby apply my liberty of expression to declare their research projects "Vain Imaginations." They all fail to consider our core question for the day: WHAT IS LIFE? Read on and consider my meaning.

Vain Imagination #1: The search in Outer Space for habitable planets

Humans, well, we know ourselves. We have this our planet Earth. Say we discovered another planet out there that was actually habitable (we haven't), and we could somehow relocate masses of humans to inhabit it (we can't). What ludicrous thinking informs us that we will manage Planet New any better than we can manage Planet Earth? Keeping in mind pollution, overpopulation, wars, etc; why would anyone think exporting death is any way to begin life afresh on a new planet? Our convenient consumerist lifestyle does not promote life, not with all its waste and inefficiency. We pillage from nature more than we give back to it, as evidenced in the global decline of forest cover, spread of global warming, ever-sprawling concrete jungle, petroleum fumes choking our cities, capitalism toasting greedily to profit.

What is life? Poisoning another planet will only expose how much we don't know about it.

Vain Imagination #2: The Hadron Collider - trying to recreate 'Big Bang Conditions'
First of all, what Big Bang?

Secondly, the details of this venture raises even more questions. One of the Hadron Collider's chief objectives is to find evidence of one of six basic sub-atomic building blocks which make up the entire universe. The question logically follows: how did they know to name a sub-atomic particle whose existence they had no concrete evidence of? Jumped the gun, did they?

Alright, I admit having no expertise in microscopic things. But if Hadron Collider succeeds in discovering the particle, we've always had it amidst us all along and were no worse in our ignorance; if it backfires, there's probably no market for used Hadron Colliders except for the scrap yard. What a waste.

WHAT IS LIFE? We won't find that out by colliding subatomic particles at light speed. (Is that what scientists attend instead of demolition derby?)

Vain Imagination #3: Attempts to fuse Robotics with Biology

Most notoriously, certain scientists extracted the neurons of rats and arrayed them into a "biological brain" of some sort. As though that weren't nutty enough, they go and connect this so-called brain to a robot via Bluetooth. Now they sit around with their clipboards ready to record what it will do.

At this stage, all sorts of hard questions present themselves in the form of moral and logical pitfalls.

First, is this robot a rat?

Despite appearances to the contrary, robots are dead things - in early primary school we were taught to make distinction between living and non-living things. Rat neurons on the other hand are living cells. What 'communications' would they have with each other VIA BLUETOOTH? Humor me as I propose that a sane living rat, with all it faculties intact, would not know what to do with a robot if it saw one. Robots generally do not feature in rat dwellings.

Consider the little matter of identity. Is there any chance that surgically excised neurons of various rats, combined into some sort of brain, would eventually identify that they constitute a record-breaking first robot with a biological brain? Already they say it is displaying multiple personalities. HA.

And since when did automatons need biological brains of their own?

And isn't it more likely that rat neurons find live rats to be their preferred working conditions?

How does the robot decode and respond to the specialized syntax of rat instincts? Or were the 'instinctual parts of the brain' left out of this one?

And how do the scientists differentiate dead neurons soaking in a nutrient bath with live ones?

Here is an artificially constructed brain, nourished on life support, for purposes of running a robot for tests, otherwise dead. The concept is a rare sort of horrible. (Spare me if I'm confused. I dropped Biology in Form Two.)

WHAT IS LIFE? Whatever it is, one suspects it has no compromise with death.

Summary

If I may say so myself, I find these research projects useless. If you ask me, they are headed exactly nowhere. And they burn major holes in our collective human race pockets. The billions of dollars poured into these projects could have been far better used, for far more humane purposes, with far greater impact. I should have added 'Vain Imagination #4: nuclear weapons' to that list above, but hippies, activists and tree-huggers have made noise and cried about nukes since Hiroshima/Nagasaki - and no one who can do anything significant about it has listened.

What is life? Life, which we experience without fully understanding, comes exclusively from the Most High GOD, the Creator of heaven and earth. By His power all things exist, and by His love and mercy are all things sustained. He alone gives life. No amount of human research can ever replicate or overrule His work.

Close the labs and go home. Life is a miracle.

1 comment:

  1. life without God equals those daydreamers rocking lab coats!!

    ReplyDelete

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