Sunday, February 19, 2017

The FUTURE...?

A sunny day or a cloudy day, both stem from the same nature. Success and failure are fugue states in a quantum foam that collapse into perceived outcomes. But beneath it all is the daunting spirit of humanity to forge ahead.

Whether by words or by deeds, humans continue to imagine the future. Through science that retracts sometime from editing or art that gets plagiarized, the incremental advance of what endures, continues in the pursuit of the future.



Immunity was masqueraded in scientific circles to help in the fight against cancer many years ago alas without the tools of molecular technology. What were considered miraculous cures in cancer (no less miracles today) seem to have walked the less traveled path through the eye of the immune surveillance needle. 

Today inhibiting the Immune cellular dysfunction and enhancing the killer cell function by coopting the over-expression of the cancer cells’ exposed vulnerability, we can control and collapse the structure of this infirmity.


Many years ago, the movie Minority Report image manipulation on virtual screens has turned into a reality as two-year-old toddlers know how to do that effortlessly. 


Indeed, the convergence of technology and knowledge of molecular biology of the state of the cell and its future is determinable. For instance, today, disrupting certain cell-surface signals within the wayward cancer cell, one can propel these life-threatening mischief mongers into self-destruction (apoptosis) or targeted for cannibalism (autophagy).



Medicine continues to press against current self-imposed limits. Today’s evidentiary basis of care continues to morph into tomorrow’s therapy.

We can peer with a hand-held ultrasound into the body with amazingly accurate diagnoses. What was the realm of listening with a stethoscope can now be fairly accurately determined by sound-waves. 


Wearables are proliferating as engineering scientists and biology experts merge their respective disciplines into creating gizmos, which record vital signs that transmit to a machine and the machine via algorithms deciphers change and demands a human intervention (for now). 


Some foretell about days ahead when the human eye and touch will be a thing of the past in healthcare, but that is ways away. Humans need humans. Trust and empathy are not borne of an algorithm, yet the latter can be faked by a machine defying the Turing test almost akin to a sociopath’s maneuverings. Perhaps when we have silicon embedded in our brains to enhance our intellect and function and we can tweak function as we do today with heart defibrillators then maybe we will have arrived at the Start Trek Hologram-doctor who can cure illness with a magic gizmo wand. 


Presently however, we remain consigned to testing our technological limits of embedding gold nanowires and nano-discs to warn us of our health threats that might be inhabiting the human body. are restricted to research science. The trend to recognizing cell free DNA in a patient's blood to determine a cancer's state in the body is however in use today,



Meanwhile outside of the human body and its blood vessel highways, the streets and roads are getting ready to accommodate driverless vehicles, and air-transport drone machines to ease the burden of human travel. meanwhile, technology and Moore’s Law is constantly fanning the flames of better processing power to allow us to speed across the ends of the earth and see a holographic fellow human being in an instant with a simple act of pressing the Return button on the computer, hand held device or virtual reality device.



From the world of IFTTT we are slowly marching towards a machine driven Artificial Intelligence that will one day upend the way we live and function. Asimov’s dream just might come true and Robot Laws might yet have to be enacted to protect humanity itself from this self-recognizing robotic entity. When armies of robots designed to help the aging human race and arm themselves for self-preservation, humanity will face a test. Perhaps the soft tentacles of the gooey brain cells merged with the silicon or ceramic or biological wafer charmed by a quantum computer CPU in each cybernaut might organize the next coming of a new race? Or perhaps the endeavor might devolve this utopian future into a dystopian dust bowl. Time will tell, if there is a robot to record such history.



For its own survival, humanity will hurtle in deep sleep through deep space to reach and populate distant planets. Colonies on the Moon and Mars and perhaps on Kepler 22b might herald us into populating new planets. 


Perhaps the art of imagination will tailor the future, determined by the reality of worm-holes and tesseracts (currently in our art and inspired via mathematics), which might give us an eye into these distant lands.

With every turn of the screw…and time…

The universe awaits.



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