14The Future of Nano-future (Epilogue)
Where do we go from here?
Where do we go when we have our every desire attainable at the speed of light? Where do we go when we can live a thousand lives? When we are Gods and we make the rules.
Well then the largest advancing field will become research. Although our bodies may have left the physical plane it doesn't mean that we don't want to know about it anymore. Where is Atlantis located in the real world? What is the 119th element in the periodic table? Is pi truly never ending and never repeating? We are, as witnessed from the beginning, painfully curious creatures.
Inventing and creating is tiresome without external knowledge. External knowledge is dull and boring if there is no action performed with it.
And so we will advance because we desire to. The Nano-future does not indicate an end by any means. It indicates possibly the greatest survival. We have essentially traded in our biological bodies for time capsules that are programmed to seek out materials and build themselves. As our computation power and memory increases the number of nano-bots required to house the hub of now virtual minds and bodies will decrease.
Even computation, the main focus of our story, will have room to grow. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, there are whispers of quantum computing. From what I understand we take the theory that a photon (the basic unit of light) has a wave-particle duality. That is a photon "decides" to act like a wave or particle and when fired through two slits of diffraction with all variables fixed the photon will end up at different locations for different tests.
We take this theory and apply it to computing. For example our computers at the moment runs on binary code (ones and zeros). We have written computer languages so that we do not have to write binary, instead we have a translator or mediator to understand our instructions and converts it to binary. When we throw quantum computing in the equation the ones and zeros in binary are no longer fixed. Each position of the binary code has the potential to be in an in-between state and only settles when we give a command. This in essence increases our computational power and capacity of memory to a level far beyond the decagon nano-chip.
And what happens when we solve all the mysteries of our earth and oceans? Well there is this unimaginably large thing called space that we have just begun to explore. If we do manage to survive 2012 (I believe that we will because the planets are aligned), make it to the Nano-future, and our earth manages to avoid some large catastrophe with an asteroid for five-billion years or so we will have to contend with the possibility that our sun will become a red giant and swallow the earth.
I can only hope that our research will have pushed us beyond the point where a planet is still necessary to contain the hub of the minds of bodies of people who decided to become immortal in the Nano-future. I can only hope that in five-billion years we will no longer have to rely on solar energy to power nano-bots. And that somehow we will continue on in a different place that was not so different from where we started out.
After all what are we but a bunch of consciences? A collection of memories, souls, and stories vibrating softly and spinning slowly through space.