Planetary Rewind: A Science Fiction Story

When President Walter Douglas woke up on January 17, 2065, he had expected to have a normal day working on his State of the Union address and various budgetary matters. He had no idea that a small extraterrestrial spacecraft would silently land on the White House lawn. A single small individual emerged from the strange spacecraft, and made his way into the White House, where he was quickly granted a meeting with President Douglas.

“So this is the famous Oval Office I have heard about,” said the extraterrestrial. “Somehow it seems a little smaller than I expected.” 

 

President Douglas wondered what to say. Greeting visitors from other planets was not in his list of skills.

“Uh....in the name of the United States, and the entire planet Earth, I greet you in a spirit of peace and cooperation,” said President Douglas.

“There is no need for such formalities, Walter,” said the extraterrestrial. “Let's get down to why I am here. I have some bad news for you. Your time is up.”

“My time is up?” said the President.

“I'm not talking about you in particular,” said the extraterrestrial. “I'm talking about your whole civilization. Your time is up. You've tried hard, but we've decided that you're going to fail catastrophically. Our projections indicate there is a 95% chance that your planet will experience an environmental disaster that results in the extinction of your species.”

“I know about the environmental problems,” said President Douglas. “The planet's getting hotter, and the oceans are getting more acidic. But we're working on it.”

“It's too late,” said the extraterrestrial. “So now we're going to take drastic action.”

“What do you mean?” asked the President. “Do you mean you're going to conquer our planet?”

“No, something much different than that,” said the extraterrestrial.

“Do you mean – you're going to destroy us?” asked the President.

“No, don't be silly,” said the extraterrestrial. “We're just going to...rewind you.”

“Rewind us?” asked the President. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, sorry, I'm not explaining myself,” said the extraterrestrial. “Where to begin? Let's start with the concept of the Arrow of Time. I know some of your primitive physicists use that concept, and they speak as if there was a single Arrow of Time that moves forward throughout the universe at a constant rate. But the truth is there is not a single Arrow of Time for the entire universe. Basically each solar system pretty much has its own Arrow of Time. My race, which has been monitoring yours for a long time, is in control of the Arrow of Time of this solar system. We can move it backwards whenever we think it is necessary. We call that a planetary rewind.”

“A planetary rewind?” said the President.

“Yes,” said the extraterrestrial. “A planetary rewind is what happens when we Overseers rewind your planet back to an earlier time. It's a drastic step, which we don't like to use unless it's absolutely necessary. But sometimes you silly humans dig yourselves into a hole so deep that we come to the conclusion that you have no further chance for surviving. That's when we have to use a planetary rewind.”

“How do you know this 'planetary rewind' won't fail and mess up the whole planet?” asked the President.

“Because we've tried it successfully several times before,” said the extraterrestrial. “Let me tell you the secret history of your planet. The first time the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, it resulted in a global thermonuclear war. So we Overseers did a planetary rewind, resetting the clock of your planet back to 1960. The next time the Cuban Missile Crisis worked out okay. But then in 1982 there was another nuclear war during the early Reagan administration, caused by a training exercise misunderstanding. That caused a 'nuclear winter' that killed almost everyone. So we Overseers did another planetary rewind, setting your planet's clock back to 1970.”

The President listened with his mouth agape.

“Then things went well on your planet until the year 2035,” said the extraterrestrial. “But then there was a horrible biological war which put the human race on the brink of extinction. So we did another planetary rewind, setting your planet's clock back to 2015. We had hoped that would be the last planetary rewind we would have to do, that your fledgling species would finally make it all the way to becoming a successful star-faring race. But now you've got yourself in this hopeless environmental mess, so it's time for another planetary rewind.”

“But won't the same things just happen again if you rewind time?” asked the President.

“Not necessarily,” said the extraterrestrial. “Quantum uncertainty means there's always a chance of a different outcome after we do a rewind.”

“But if you've made up your mind to do this 'planetary rewind,' why did you even come here?” asked President Douglas.

“I just thought it would be interesting to see the famous building called the White House,” said the extraterrestrial.

The extraterrestrial left the Oval Office, and returned to his small spacecraft waiting on the White House lawn. The spacecraft lifted off into the sky, and returned to its mother ship. Millions of humans watched the event on their paper-thin holographic 3D wall screens.

The next day inside the White House the President of the United States woke up in his bed. It was the new president's first full day in office. President Barack Obama thought to himself: I have no idea whether I can handle this job, but I'm going to try my best.

If Mankind Were To Perish, What Would Be Its Epitaph?

An epitaph is a short statement (often only a single sentence) honoring someone who has died, or summarizing his life. An epitaph is often written on a tombstone. Some classic epitaphs include the following:

Here lies dear old Fred
A great big rock fell on his head.

Here lies Lester Moore,
Four slugs from a 44
No Les, no More

Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.

The death of an individual is sad to contemplate, but there is a possibility vastly sadder to ponder: the possibility of the entire human race becoming extinct. If that were to happen, perhaps someone or something might erect a memorial for the extinct human race. In such a gloomy case, what epitaph might be written for the human species?

The following would work pretty well as an all-purpose epitaph for the human species, no matter how we might become extinct:

But what about specific extinction scenarios? One possibility is that we might invent super-intelligent machines which learn how to make copies of themselves. The number of super-intelligent robots might grow larger and larger, and the number of humans might grow smaller. The new super-brainy robots might take over entirely. The new robotic species might keep us humans around for a while, but they might eventually decide: the only intelligent beings that should exist on this planet are super-intelligent beings. Then they might get rid of us fleshy humans entirely. In such a case they might erect a memorial for the vanished human race, and it might look like this:

Still another possibility is that the human race may become extinct because of a gradually deteriorating environment. Rather than cutting back our wasteful ways that put the planet in peril, we may continue spending more and more, shopping more and more, eating more and more, and driving more and more. This may cause global warming to get worse and worse. The result might be runaway global warming, as various feedback loops kick in, which cause global warming to accelerate more and more (such as the melting of methane deposits in Siberia and Antarctica). Temperatures may rise so high that the human race perishes. In such a case the following might be a suitable epitaph for mankind:

Another possibility is that the mankind may destroy itself in a war. There need not be any fancy technological breakthroughs for this to be a possibility, because the USA and Russia still have many thousands of nuclear weapons. One day they might be used, in a deliberate attack, or a war that escalates from a small-scale use of nuclear weapons due to an accidental launch or a limited launch by a madman. Or the human race might perish in some new type of war, such as a biological war using genetically engineered germs. In such a case, the following might be used as an epitaph for our species:

But let us hope that none of these gloomy epitaphs ever get written. Let us hope that instead someone one day writes a book that tells the story of the first million years of human civilization, a book that might look like this:

Can Ketamine Explain Near-Death Experiences?

In the blog of time.com yesterday there was a post on near-death experiences (NDE).
The author suggests a possible explanation: “Scientists realized that virtually all of the features of an NDE—a sense of moving through a tunnel, an out-of-body feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, intense memories—can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine.”

Ketamine is actually a horse tranquilizer. It seems farfetched to suggest that we all have in our brains a secret stash of a drug like a horse tranquilizer, waiting for the moment of death to be released. But let's look further at this idea before dismissing it too fast.

The claim sometimes made about ketamine by NDE skeptics is that all (or virtually all) of the features of a near-death experience “can be reproduced” by using ketamine. But even if such a statement is true (and it probably isn't), such a statement might not mean too much. It could be that the users of the drug have a thousand and one freaky far-out experiences, and that if you cherry pick elements from a wide variety of accounts, you can piece together something resembling a near-death experience.

In this thread users of ketamine report their experiences, which include the following: closed eye visuals; sensations of being able to squeeze your fist out of existence; spatial distortions (such as shrinking rooms); mental peeking (being able to sense thoughts or feelings of others); language disintegration (hearing words that make no sense); the mind reeling with images of sex; comprehension lost; feelings of interconnectedness; time warp; “fuzzed” sensations; digitization (“Your cat walks past and the whole event happens in 8 distinct still frames one second apart”); dreamlike feelings; flesh rippling; sliding of furniture; deja vu (you think you have previously experienced whatever you are now experiencing); thought echo (your thoughts reverberate like echos); “2-dimensionalism” (in which everything seems flat); feelings of moving or contorting in space; coming back to the wrong place (“at its most extreme, re-entering your own body, but being convinced that it is the body of an alien in another, different reality”); roller-coaster sensations; visions of alien worlds.

All in all, this list is not a very good match to typical accounts of near-death experiences, although it is possible to cherry-pick particular elements and say that several aspects of near-death experiences “can be reproduced” by using ketamine.

Another web site listing ketamine experiences is here. 47 accounts are listed as “difficult experiences,”17 are listed as “bad trips,” 15 are listed as “train wrecks and trip disasters,” 30 are listed as “mystical experiences,” and 63 are listed as “glowing experiences.” Here are some random comments from the experiences listed as mystical experiences:

Everything lost its meaning
I was experiencing every emotion at once
An atomic bomb went off in my head
Total utter darkness for what seemed like forever
A feeling of living other people's lives
A feeling your body is gradually dissolving
A feeling of transcending your body and then returning to it
In a roller-coaster ride in a multidimensional giant fractal for eternity
A sensation of feeling colors
The essence of my husband and cat blended in with me and we all became one
I was floating around the Fourth Dimension 

How it feels to use ketamine

I read the 30 accounts listed as “mystical experiences,” which is the subset that should be most likely to resemble a near-death experience. None of the experiences strongly resembled the accounts given by those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Almost all of the accounts had numerous dreamlike rapid-change hallucinatory elements not found in typical near-death experiences – “acid trip” type of things. Only one of the 30 accounts mentioned a tunnel (a common element in near death experiences), but that tunnel led not to some glowing "Being of light" (as in a near-death experience), but to a vision of a pool party.

  "Pulled Through the Tunnel" -- a depiction of 

a common element in a near death experience

Some ketamine trippers did report seeing a glowing light, and some identified the light with God, but I suppose if you've taken a strong enough drug, a nearby lightbulb might look like God. Those who have near death experiences often report a strong intuition or feeling of benevolence or love coming from the mysterious glowing light they see, but I read no such accounts by the ketamine users (although there were several along the lines of “I saw this bright light, and I thought, wow, that must be God.”) I don't remember any of the accounts mentioning a sight of dead relatives (a common element of near-death experiences). A large fraction of those who claim near-death experiences seem to remember a kind of “life review.” While at least one ketamine user claimed to relive every experience he had ever had, such an experience (or an experience of “life review”) seems to be a very rare element of ketamine experiences.

Quite a few ketamine users reported being in some sense disassociated from their body (something like “beyond their body,”), as one might experience during a heavy drug trip. But in the 50 or so accounts I read, there seemed to be no users who reported floating above their bodies and looking down on them, a common element of near-death experiences.

In summary, while ketamine drug trips sometimes have some parallels with near-death experience, the typical experiences of these drug users seems to be something very different from the reports of near-death experiences, without any close similarity. One scientific paper (Corazza, 2010) reported several dozen ketamine users with experiences similar (in some ways) to near-death experiences, but the paper did not use a random sample of ketamine users – instead it specifically recruited or advertised to find ketamine users with such NDE-like experiences (which means that it gives us no idea of what fraction of ketamine users have such experiences).

But perhaps there is some other type of drug in our brains released at the moment of death – not ketamine, but something like it. There is a problem with the idea, however. We could not explain the origin of such a thing from any evolutionary standpoint, as it would have no survival value. Natural selection is only interested in giving us things that help us live long enough until we reproduce. Evolution and natural selection have not the slightest preference for whether we might have pleasant experiences at the moment of death. And if we did have in our brains some “secret stash” of something like a hallucinogenic drug or chemical released at the moment of death, we would expect that it would also be released at less traumatic moments, such as a non-fatal moment of enormous injury. But there is no evidence that any such drug or chemical is released when people have horrible non-fatal injuries.

It would seem, therefore, that there is not yet a drug that adequately explains near-death experiences. I can imagine, however, that future researchers will test various hallucinatory drugs for the sake of finding one that closely matches a near-death experience. It may not get them very far in terms of plausibly explaining the phenomenon of near death experiences, but it will no doubt be a lot more fun than classifying rare species of insects or working on quantum mechanics calculations. 
 

Road Maps to Future Immortality?

Maria Kkonovalenko recently created some cool visuals outlining three “road maps to immortality.” The first one is here, and depicts a path to immortality by genetic engineering. The second visual depicts a path to immortality by regenerative medicine. The third one is here, depicting a path to digital immortality.

The steps Maria has outlined are fascinating to ponder, but I think there are definite moral and practical difficulties we must ponder before getting too excited. First, let's look at Maria's path to immortality through regenerative medicine.

One thing Maria imagines is pigs serving as “bioreactors for growing human organs.” I have a moral issue with this proposal, which is quite similar to the moral issue I have regarding breeding pigs for slaughter. The problem is that pigs are highly intelligent and sociable animals. A scientist once made a crude video game with a large joystick cursor that an animal could manipulate with its snout. The scientist tested whether dogs or pigs could learn how to use the game. Even after many efforts, dogs were unable to learn the game, but pigs learned how to use it very quickly. So there is reason to believe that pigs are even more intelligent than dogs. Would it be moral for us to use pigs to grow some material that we would use in our body, for super-long lives? Possibly not.

Another thing Maria imagines is head transplants, and growing a new body in the lab. We can imagine the scenario: once you get to be 60, you start growing a new body in a big glass unit you keep in your basement. Then when you get to be 80, you arrange to have your head transplanted to the new body.

But there would be two big problems with this approach. The first is that while you would have a new body, you would still have the same old, aging brain. The result might look something like this:

There would also be the moral difficulty involved in growing the second body. Since a body requires a brain to function, how could you grow a replacement body without that body having its own mind and personality? If the body did have such a mind and personality, it would presumably be murder for you to have surgeons decapitate that body and replace its head with your head. Perhaps the replacement body could be set up so that it didn't have any mind. But the idea of having a mindless replacement body growing for 20 years in a lab or your basement is creepy, like the story of Frankenstein.

None of these messy biological and moral difficulties are associated with Maria's third road map to immortality, her vision of digital immortality. But I don't think the scenario she imagines is very plausible. She basically imagines that we will learn more and more about how consciousness works, by scanning and analyzing brain tissue. She imagines us concentrating on animals first, first figuring out exactly how the brain of a smaller animal works, then figuring out how the brain of a larger animal works, and then finally figuring out exactly how the human brain stores memories and produces thoughts. Then once we understand that, according to this vision, we can create computers or robots that duplicate this functionality, and upload our minds into such electronic units.

There are several problems with such a scenario. The main one is that the production of human consciousness by the brain is one of the great mysteries of nature, and there is little hope that we will be able to solve it through brain scanning. No matter how closely we examine a neuron or brain tissue with a scanning device, it seems unlikely we will ever be able to say, “Aha, there is a thought being produced,” or “I see it now; there is a memory being stored.” So brain-scanning offers little hope that we will be able to understand the brain and consciousness enough to perfectly reproduce it electronically. There is also the whole duplication problem discussed here.

We should not necessarily be depressed if digital immortality is not possible. The situation can be expressed through the flow chart shown below. The question is: is the origin of spiritual human consciousness from mere physical matter a kind of “miracle of consciousness” that can never be understood in terms of mere physics, chemistry, and biology – perhaps something that can only be understood through some more transcendent principles? If the answer to that question is “no,” then there is perhaps some hope that some of us may be able to achieve some kind of digital immortality by uploading our minds into machines. But if the answer to this question is “yes,” then there is a distinct possibility that such transcendent principles may open the door to some kind of spiritual immortality. I don't find this latter possibility to be any less hopeful than the first.