Yesterday I was walking though Chinatown and as I usually do when I am over there I stop by the Buddhist Temple and buy a fortune (and by the way, I am soooo happy that Fall has finally come to NY) . Now the fortunes that you buy in the Buddhist Temple are not your fortune cookie fortunes: Buddhist Temple Fortunes are 4-5 lines long, usually rhyme, give a probability of success or failure, and say something clever. So my fortune yesterday informed me that I should be concerned about designing a spaceship. Normally this might be seen as ridiculous, but seeing as I have pretty much defined biospace by giving dimension to mutation/generation, I am tasked with finding a way to travel through it to far away places. So long story short, biospace travel would be to take a person’s brain and somehow insert it into a different body. This is going from one location, one group of mutations, to another location – a different set of mutations. Sure this has been long discussed by academics, sci-fi writers and doctors, but now I get to couch it in my terminology: what we need is a spaceship for the brain. First we will try to get to low earth orbit and come right back (a brain removal and immediate replacement), then we will try to draw out the time that the brain can be out of the skull and then eventually we might get to the moon- a place that given enough resources could sustain the brain for a while. Eventually we will be able to get to other planets – other bodies – after enough time and effort. Long way off, but thanks Buddhist Temple Fortune!
