Now here’s a thought. Sorry, couldn’t avoid the pun. Seriously folks, we are nothing if not a brain.
To start with, a true but terribly sad story. I once shared a home with a Special Care Baby Unit nurse. Her job was looking after babies with serious problems. When I came home from work fuming at the day’s traumas a word about her day was enough to put me firmly in my small place in this massive firmament. Part of her day was always spent comforting the parents of babies who had died or who would never grow into perfect adulthood, never mind suffer the terrors of the teenage years.
One month, though, she was particularly quiet, almost as though she had lost the power of speech. I left her for a while until my curiosity could stand it no longer. What was wrong?
She was not the tearful sort. A kind of tough London Irish lass whose skill was in working out the best methods of dealing with these babies 24/7. A highly emotional tearful nurse would have simply made matters worse. So, it was without tears that she recounted the following sad story.
For weeks the unit had seen the same problem in nearly a dozen new-born babies. To all intents and purposes there was nothing wrong with these babies. They looked utterly normal, with their internal organs functioning perfectly the moment they were born. I stress ‘the moment’ they were born, because that was about the best it was going to be.
Only when they were looked at closely, face to face, did their particular problem become apparent. They had perfect, beautiful baby faces, but no obvious emotion. These babies had been scanned in the womb and were scanned at birth. There was no getting away from the truth about their condition. Modern medical technology made sure that there was no room for doubt.
These little ones were all coming into this world intact but missing an organ that was vital to their existence: the brain.
Where there ought to have been a baby’s brain there was nothing but fluid. The brain stem ended and led to nothing. She told me that it was so heartbreaking to inform the parents that what looked like a perfect baby was anything but and then she had to prepare the parents for the baby’s inevitable death.
Many theories, some of them wild some of them not so wild, were put forward for this incredible event. The condition itself was not unheard of in medical circles. What was so unusual was to have a cluster, particularly a large cluster. The problem was linked to intense radioactivity around military bases but whether there was any truth in this was never established. My friend had never come across a brainless baby before and within a matter of months was not to come across one again.
Sad but very true that what we are as human beings is not a body but a brain. We seem to spend so much time looking at television, or reading magazines and newspapers worrying about how we look, whether it’s our size, our face, our legs, our noses, our hair that somehow we seem to have lost the reasoning to understand that this is all perceived within the brain. And that without a good brain we may as well become an animal in the field waiting to be slaughtered to provide food for human dining tables.
There may be an evolutionary effect here that we are only now starting to understand, although there have been strong hints about it in our history. Think of Christ’s words in the Bible about how ‘thought’ leads to deeds. There are many other instances where we are warned from childhood onwards that a bad thought will almost inevitably lead to a bad deed, so we must guard ourselves from evil thoughts.
The human being is a thought machine. We worry now about Global Warming. Quite rightly, because it is far too early in the history of this planet to accept that life may become impossible. What we really ought to be worrying about is the real fact that Planet Earth has a sell-by date. The sun is going to burn out, frying everything on the Earth’s crust, including the crust itself most probably, before going dark and cold, leaving Earth as another lost and lonely planet like all the others we can see hovering around us.
A thought, to digress. This may have been the fate of some of the planets in our solar system. It may also have been a fact that some form of life from those dying planets was able to make it across space to reach Earth in its younger days.
Digression over. All human life, if we truly value the lives of our descendants in the way we value the lives of our children and grandchildren, ought to be concentrated on finding a way off Earth, to somewhere more hospitable in a few billion years time.
Why don’t we? Simply because the end of life on earth is just so far away that we find it difficult to comprehend. Also, we can say that once we have solved the basic problems of feeding and watering the entire race after first abolishing war and all tribal/racial conflicts, we will be able to devote the next billion or so years to finding a new home.
Wish that were true. The evidence so far is that some of us humans will simply amass greater and greater wealth with the rest acting as slaves to service these ‘Super Humans’.
Let’s look at our options. Arthur C. Clarke, a wise man indeed, believes we might be able to fix a sort of elevator to the moon. I think what we really need is to establish who we are as human beings and work on that. We all know that the speed of human thought is far faster than any form of communication with other humans. Occasionally we witness how a thought can be expressed faster than words or actions. Think about falling in love across a crowded room. No words, no actions, just two pairs of eyes locking onto each other and exchanging the most powerful emotion known to humankind.
Think again of how fast our brains operate when we are in great danger. Those of us lucky enough to have survived a major road accident while remaining conscious often remark on how long the process took.
A ten second crash might be perceived as though it had taken half an hour, with our senses well aware of the headlights spinning upside down and lighting the tops of the trees we were hurtling through.
Scientists say what happens is that our perception speeds up, not that time slows down. Of course, time does not slow down. Well, does it? I shall tackle that thorny issue later in the book. Time is not quite the exact creature we dumbly accept. Often, when we are facing this great danger we are not in any way scared. Does our brain know something we do not? Can it tell that we are going to escape with minor bruising? If not, why are we not shaking in our boots?
Let’s imagine for one moment that we are going to come out of this accident with a badly damaged body but an unhurt brain. Will we be any the less of a human being? Clearly not. So we don’t have to have a complete set of arms and legs, and several internal organs, to make us a human being. What we do need to function is a brain, preferably in good working order.
When we look at space we realise that it is going to be an incredibly difficult task to travel. Our bodies may die before we reach our destination. Cue Science Fiction novel. No, seriously, that may be one way to travel but then again, we do not yet know what lies at the end of space. Nor whether there is an end to space. It is beyond our comprehension as human beings. But it is surely not beyond our comprehension to believe that we could one day communicate with each other solely by the use of thought.
We are constantly evolving and have many millions of years to train ourselves to becoming pure thinking beings. When we consider the pleasures of the flesh, they are all realised inside our heads. Then, it can only be a small step to work out how we can exist as thought outside the body. Our brains will produce a pure ‘Thought Human’ that no longer needs a body. Once that has been achieved we can travel anywhere within space. It will not take time, any time. We will simply be there.
Scary, isn’t it? We may also discover millions of other life forms doing the same as us.
Now that would be the ideal way for us to escape Global Warming.
