From: Borys Wrobel (wrobel@salk.edu)
Date: Sat May 02 1998 - 18:57:05 MDT
I have been lurking on the list for some time, trying to resist the urge to
answer to some posts. I am a molecular biologist and when I am not cutting
DNA to pieces and trying not to get killed by accidentally developing a
biological weapon, I sometimes find time to think about matters divine.
And as meeting an alien civilization can be a bit regretted, so I regret
making a net search on several ideas Ive been thinking about and finding
out that theres an awful lot of people thinking roughly along the same
lines out there...
(I slowly readjust to the idea that it may be some fun after all to be one
of gods instead of the GOD)
:-)))
Oh well, its always like that, darn it, whenever I have a Nobel prize idea
and do a Medline search, I always find somebody already published that. As
a Polish saying goes, Hope is mother of fools. I dont mind being a fool
though.
Anyway, recently I have been thinking about few things and since nobody
came up with those in the past week's posts, let me give one a shot. Maybe
you guys discussed them twelve times before, so I can save myself some
effort - since laziness is the highest human virtue.
Once we start to understand how the mind/brain works and start to make it
work better how do we stop weirdos/terrorist from developing next
incarnations of computer viruses? The fact that there are teenagers who
play at those now is a real blessing, as far as I understand it, 'cause it
allowed for development of the immunity system so terrorist couldnt take
the lead, and I think they would never be able to pose real threat here.
However, I dont know if we can always be so lucky. Many species died
because of a too good pathogen, and many civilizations perished (or did not
develop, which is about the same) because of stupid ideology. And if
somobody would care to hire me for a few million bucks (most of which would
go into equipment and a nice building very deep underground), I dont think
it would be very difficult to develop a biological weapon which would be
very efficient indeed :-))
I dont like the idea of leaking my mind out of its carbon form (not that it
is safe here) and then getting infected and becoming "mad". Backup is a
solution that comes first to mind, but if the 'virus' is good enough, its
not much help.
OK, hope it isnt too naive and I did not contribute to the unspecific
afferent of the discussion. There were a few moans about the s/n ratio
recently, and Id like to somewhat defensively point out that "unspecific"
stimulation of the reticular formation is quite important for the working
of the human brain :-)
best,
b
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