Science fiction authors have written
innumerable stories about human attempts to spread human culture out
into distant points in space (usually by sending spaceships to
different planets). But little thought has been given to another
interesting possibility: the prospect of spreading human culture (or
some part of it) out into distant points in time.
Most people have heard of one way of
trying to project part of our culture to a future point in time: the
humble time capsule. To create a time capsule, you just fill up a
steel chest with various items of your choosing (such as a newspaper,
a bible, or the US constitution), and you bury the steel chest
underground. The idea is that in some future age hopefully someone
will dig up the capsule, and be able to find out about American
culture, perhaps at a distant time when people have lost track of who
we were.
But a time capsule isn't very
technically sophisticated. It's time to dream up a more audacious and
sophisticated method of transmitting our culture to a point in the
future. We can call this invention a chronobot.
We can envision a chronobot as a
specialized robot designed to transmit cultural information into
multiple time points in the future.
Now, it is not at all necessary to imagine any type of exotic time
machine to make this concept work. We can dream up a feasible plan
for a chronobot just by imagining fairly modest technology that man
will almost certainly have by about the middle of this century.
The basic operating procedure for a
chronobot could work as follows:
- The chronobot starts out by being buried (undersea or underground) for a period of decades or centuries. During this time the chronobot is mentally inactive.
- A timer on the chronobot goes off, and the chronobot awakes.
- The chronobot then somehow brings itself up out its buried state, and reaches ground level where it can walk about.
- The chronobot then looks for human life, and transmits its cultural information to various persons.
- The chronobot then returns to a buried state (undersea or underground) for a period of decades or centuries, being mentally inactive during this time.
This cycle can be repeated multiple
times. For example, if the chronobot was originally engineered well
enough to last for a thousand years (almost all of which would be in
an inactive state), then the chronobot could wake up ten different
times, in ten different centuries, and transmit its cultural
information into each of those ten centuries.
The only problematic part about this
procedure is the part about the chronobot pulling itself out of a
buried state, and later returning to such a state. But this isn't
very much of a difficulty. We can imagine various ways in which a
robot could do such a thing.
One way that a chronobot could do such
a thing would be for the robot to simply swim out to sea a few miles,
and deposit itself on the bottom of the sea, where it could rest
undisturbed for as long as a century. Under such a plan there would
presumably be a need to prevent encrustation by barnacles and similar
organisms, but that could be handled fairly easily through some
method such as having the robot bury itself a foot underneath the
sand at the bottom of the sea, or wrapping itself in a protective
sheet.
Another way in which a chronobot could
bury itself for a century-long rest period would be to bury itself on
the land, underneath a large rock that was several times larger than
the robot itself. To reach such a location, the robot would merely
need to burrow underneath the rock, moving almost horizontally,
perhaps using its hands to dig. To get out from such a location, the
robot would merely need to burrow out from underneath the rock, also
moving almost horizontally.
So it seems it would be fairly easy to
create this type of chronobot robot, given the type of robot
technology that we will have later in the century. But why would a
culture want to create these type of chronobot robots, and what type
of culture might they be programmed to transmit?
One can imagine various possibilities:
- A church might wish to create a robotic horde of evangelists to future centuries, who would ensure the propagation of the church's gospel even upon the breakdown of society.
- A nation might wish to create a group of buried chronobots, for the sake of giving rebirth to the nation's culture after some environmental disaster wreaked havoc on civilization.
- A cultural institution such as a scientific group or a university might want to create chronobots for the sake of insuring that some scientific base of knowledge or some cultural legacy gets transmitted to future ages.
Of course, if a future civilization
felt very confident of the stability and survival of its society, it
would be unlikely to go to the trouble of creating chronobot robots.
But if the civilization was facing the gravest environmental
problems, or if it was worried that society might breakdown sometime
in the future, then such a civilization might feel the need to create
the chronobots described here.
Here is a brief fictional example of
how chronobots might one day be used.
Around 2070 everything started to
fall apart. It was fifty years after the peak of oil production, and
thirty years after the peak of coal production. The world was being
plagued by the effects of global warming, and ravaged by biological
wars. Dictatorships were on the rise, and the United States was on
the verge of breaking up into 52 small states, each ruled by a single
dictator. As one of its final acts, the US Congress passed the
Patriotic Chronobot Act, which authorized the creation of 100
chronobots, to be buried at various places around the world, some on
land and some under the sea. Shortly after that, the USA passed from
the pages of history.
But at various times in the next few
centuries, the slumbering chronobots woke up, and dragged themselves
out of their buried state. The glistening red, white, and blue
robots went around the globe, telling all who would listen about the
glory days of the United States. The chronobots preached a gospel of
democracy to a crumbling world that had almost forgot what the word
meant. And the light of 1776 was once again rekindled.
No comments:
Post a Comment