Friday, July 28, 2006

Earth : A failure report

Earthlings had known and enjoyed the effect of hallucinatory substances for a long time. But serious research on this subject began only in the ‘year 1920” (note: this was the unit of time as followed by the earthlings). This was the sequence of events that followed:

1920: Psycho-analysts discover that children do not acquire the capability to distinguish between reality and fantasy till they reach the age of five. When children listen to stories and folklore, they get completely absorbed in the fantasy world, these analysts point out.

1920-80: Desperate attempts by adult earthlings to find any means to be transported back to the world of fantasy they had experienced as children. This deep urge finds outlets in movies, roller-coaster rides, theme parties, juvenile sports, etc

1980: The birth of the personal computer and video-games.

1995-2002: Scientists at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) introduce a device called VirtuSphere. With it, a person wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) inside the sphere could be transported to an entirely virtual environment with an awesome 3-D effect.

2003: Cyber-philosophers raise the profound question, “When one is inside the VirtuSphere, is one living in the real world and looking at the virtual images or is one actually in the virtual world and staring at reality?”

2004: Scientists at the University of Berkeley carry out painstaking calculations to determine the amount of information that the human brain processes in a life time. Adding up the bytes involved in exposure to books, movies, newspapers and other experiences, the study concludes that ‘in 70 years of life one would be exposed to around twenty gigabytes of ASCII. Less than the storage capacity of a disk drive.

2008: Computer scientists at Bangalore working along with bio-technologists and neuroscientists manage to digitize the entire information in a human brain, by implanting a bio-chip inside the skull and transferring the contents to a hard disk through the USP port of a computer.

2010: Microsoft comes out with a Unified Operating System (UOS) that integrates the work of the computer chips and the bio-chips of the brain.

2015 : Pakistani hackers ( grandsons of Amjad Farooq Alvi, the person who introduced the first computer virus into an IBM PC) find a way to reverse the process – memory from hard disk can now be transferred to the human brain in a split second, artificially inducing various experiences.

2020: Microsoft comes out with an advanced version of UOS, called AUOS that becomes the standard operating platform for these two-way systems

2025 : Cyber-libraries now sell packaged ‘life-experiences’ of famous personalities in 100 GB pen drives, that can be instantaneously downloaded into the human brain. Humans can now live the life of any personality that they may have admired or had been jealous of. They are now liberated from the tyranny of leading a mono-life.

2035: All humans and computers are now connected to one central server running on AUOS- ver 5.0. The entire human population is now on artificial and virtual support, with everybody leading someone else’s life.

2040: AUOS-ver 5.0 system encounters slight difficulty and begins to reboot.........

( Extracted from “ Earth : A failure report” that was prepared by the fact-finding committee at Planet ZZtrys, Proximo Centauri, investigating into the mysterious extinction of the primitive bipeds on the third planet of the adjacent solar system)

5 comments:

Unknown said...

:)

maybe you would be interested in ?

btw, stumbled across your blog long ago and have been a regular since. nice work.

Lalita said...

Accurate if dismal. We are going to extinction in a handbasket and being virtual about it.

Vultures, dying. Tigers, nearly gone. Smaller, less evidently important species, nobody kissed them good-bye.

Ecological niches? Huh? Global warming? It's apparently too early to start worrying.

Going, going, gone.

Bye bye, humanity, have a nice resurrection, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Usha said...

wow. Interesting and not entirely unlikely.
2006 - a lot of people only seem to have a virtual existence. so true huh!
2025 - would like to have one of those experiences. But I guess it would be a little too late for me!

Ram Viswanathan said...

Raj

Interesting.. but no mention of IBM.. how could that be?????!!!!!

Raj said...

yhac, thanks for the idea. Maybe I will send an entry. 10K is an attractive figure.

Lalita :Ha ,that cheerful tone again.

Usha : What do you mean, too late for you. 2025 is only 19 years away.

Ram : Any inside story on what IBM is up to, on virtual reality?