Author Archives: HFuturist

Images the Human Brain has not Evolved to See

With the advent of the modern entertainment industry, human beings are exposed to a myriad of images each day. Many of the images or sequences of images would have been impossible in the distant past. For example a picture of your grandmother as a teenager, next to a picture of her as an adult approaching senior years. Seeing images of the same person as simultaneously young and old would have been an extremely foreign experience to our ancestors. This luxury of being able to see, compare and contrast an individual’s change over decades, at a glance, is new.

Decades Condensed into Milliseconds

We also encounter an over abundance of gruesome images, sexual images and computer enhanced images. Our evolutionary environment bared only a passing resemblance to the things we see every day on the screen and real life.

Almost everyone reading this will have witnessed a murder or brutal act of violence via television. Yet only a small, small fraction of people would have witnessed such things in primeval times (during peace time). To witness such things they would have had to see them in person. What was once reserved for the unfortunate few who witnessed violent acts, is now seen by nearly all, at least monthly.

Humans also evolved to be in villages of only a few 100 people with tens of potential mates to see and choose from over the course of their entire lives. Now the average person will see 1000s of members of the opposite sex by the time they are 25. What effect does this have on our mating practices?

Mate Selection within the Mega-Tribe

Our minds did not evolve experiencing many of the conditions that are so familiar to us now in modern society. We still have the same brains our ancestors had 1000s of years ago. How do these new types of conditions effect the way our brains operate and evolve?

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A Reset Button for the Human Ape – World “Peace” in a Few Years

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Have you ever noticed how children tend to be so much more open minded than adults? Their minds are like little sponges that absorb information and view points. It seems that as we age, we have a tendency to be less open minded. This phenomenon has been quantified.

Open to New Ideas

We are all the products of our biology, the environment and the interplay between those two forces. The old saying, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” comes to mind. In many ways, most of us have always had basically very similar values to the people we grew up around. Those values were bestowed upon us during an impressionable time in our brain’s development.

What if we could “reset” adults so that they were as open minded and impressionable as children again? Of course we should leave their existing memories in place. Our memories make us who we are to a point. How we view past events depends as much on how we feel at the time of recall as it does on how we felt during the initial event. Nostalgia is an example of this phenomenon. We often recall events far in the past as “the good old days”, “when times were simpler”. Even when those times were not good at all and far from simple.

Good Old Days Weren’t Always Good

Many adults get locked in to a pattern of thinking from which they never escape. A destructive example of this can be seen in what I like to call “Kamikaze’s on Autopilot”. They are the people who continue to carry on unhealthy habits like not exercising, smoking, eating too much junk food etc even when they know it shortens their life span. No matter what you tell them, they never change. People in sustained conflicts show similar traits.

I believe one of the root causes of sustained world conflicts is the inability of the participants to change their minds (mind change) and decide not to be in conflict. If all sides in a conflict decided to stop disagreeing and harming each other, the conflict would cease. It sounds simple. Yet we know it is very difficult. It is possible that inability to mind change is a limitation of our biology that can be overcome with a “reset” drug or treatment.

The pharmaceutical and military industry could spearhead research into a “reset” drug. Working hand in hand they could come up with the best delivery method and chemical composition. It would most likely have to be administered clandestinely to entire communities at a time.

Potential Delivery Mechanism

What would the effects of a working “reset” drug look like?

It would be essential that the drug only have an effect for a limited time. The drug would have to be partnered with a social outreach component. A campaign designed to expose the communities to new ideas. Imagine entire communities, cities or countries filled with adults as receptive to new ideas as children.

Major conflicts in the effected communities might not cease overnight. The saturation of the community with new ideas coupled with techniques for managing internal states of mind and disagreements would be needed.

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Uber Flexible Technology

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How do we go about discussing the gap between our technology’s potential and how well we reach that potential? In many ways technology is the ultimate incarnation of the expression, “more than the sum of it’s parts”. A smart phone mostly consists of simple things like plastic, silicon, glass, metal. Yet, the way in which those substances come together has resulted in a device that has transformed our entire society.

I recently watched an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation where this issue came to mind. The crew of the Enterprise encountered beings with advanced scientific know how. These beings stole a shuttle craft and used it’s existing technology to travel 20 times faster than was previously possible by humans.

Faster than Warp Speed

The technology to accomplish this “uber feat” was already there. It was only a matter of rearranging it or programming it in a new way. This gap between what our technology is capable of and what we do with it could be an important subject to consider.

As our technology advances, it becomes more likely that a single genius or group of smart people can use it to achieve an “uber feat”. It need not come in the form of traveling 20 times faster than is humanly possible.

Mark Zuckerberg 1+1 = 1 Billion

Mark Zuckerberg could be an example. He used existing technologies to parlay a few lines of programming code into a billion dollar industry and a communications revolution.

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Detecting the Human Ability to Morph

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Twins have always held a certain fascination to human kind. Now they may hold the key to determining whether or not human beings have the ability to morph or effect their appearance biologically from within.

Twins Grow Apart Over Time

The study of facial differences between identical twins raised apart by adopted parents could hold the first clue. Identical twins are never exactly identical. There are minute differences that arise in their faces over time. For example, the average variation in distance between the two eyes could be + or – 1.3 millimeters between twins raised in the same family. The average variation of other facial features could be quantified as well. First, quantify those variations between twins raised in the same family. Then do the same for twins raised apart.

What if the twins raised apart have different average variations? Would it then be possible to compare the facial variations with the facial features of the parents who raised each twin? Could we find that humans morph slightly to look like the people who raised them? This would certainly be an evolutionary advantage. We tend to treat people who look like us, a little better.

Identical Twins Morphing to Match Different Environments

Born Identical Twins Morphing to Match Different Households?

In the future we could see parents adopt and adapt their kids by cranking up that inherent morphing ability somehow.

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Are We a Viral Equivalent on the Universal Stage?

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The universe is immense in the extreme. Objects like stars can become so large that it’s almost impossible to comprehend their scale. This video explains it quite well.

When comparing the scale at which we live and that of astronomical bodies like stars we can’t help but feel that we may be small cogs in something much, much more vast. Could that vast something be a life form so massive, and therefore foreign to us, that we fail to recognize it as alive? If we look in the other direction on the scale, toward the very small, it may help us to begin the process of investigating this notion.

A virus is considered to be one of the smallest units of life or psuedo-life.

According to Wikipedia: A virus is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of other organisms [or hosts].

When observing humans from a star’s perspective, an interesting spin to the above definition comes to mind: A human is a small creature with an ever-expanding civilization that replicates only inside the living atmospheres of other astronomical bodies [or hosts].

Human beings and viruses are very different from one another. If a virus was able to think and understand it’s own properties, it would hardly imagine it possible that life forms billions of times larger than itself could exist. Questions like; “How could such a being support itself structurally? Or transmit information within itself? Or have a metabolism?” might be at the top of this thinking virus’s list. And their would be other questions it could not conceive to ask because of the limitations to it’s perspective. It’s possible we have similar limitations when it comes to the universe… at least for now.

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