In your writing, have you ever made up names for imaginary elements or substances? I'd love to hear about them, and your reasoning behind the name. Apparently, there is available a Periodic Table of the Imaginary Elements, which gathers together 122 imaginary elements from movies, TV, literature and video games. But you have to pay $25.00 to get it!
Rather than me misremembering Heisenberg, I think I'm contending a separate and cruder problem: that science only observes itself, or that we create time for the experiment by conducting it. Only the substratum exists. I know it's more complex than "some quarks" and that the thing that it does is more complex than being, but the point is it's a very small amount of very homogenous stuff spread very thinly in a very empty void. We choose to see objects in it, but if we were differently constituted we might find different objects and different laws in the same substratum. EDIT:- And what if the quarks only exist all-at-once, and the substratum is an inert monolith in the present moment? We look at an Up and a Down quark, and pair them together and call them a neutron - might spacetime be an arbitrary result of (not observation, but before this) scientific reasoning? "Fine" says the universe, "if you want it to be a neutron then it is, but it's going to have objective laws in proportion to your subjectivity. The assumption of quiddity will answer itself with gravity, and the assumption of time will answer itself with energy. And so on."
Yes, but I have no idea what I am doing. I don't describe their composition, since that is beyond my skills. But I do describe their function. In my main work I have plenty of different matter. Some self-repairing, programmable matter used in architecture, that can look like marble, stone, metal, and pretty much anything. That material can also be transparent. It can also change colour. I also have a material that is used together with my weapons. It produces a charge inside projectiles so that when the projectile reaches its target it can detonate with different degrees of power. Then I have blades that can cut through almost anything when used with enough force. My work is a combination of sci-fi and fantasy. I like being able to just explain how it works without going into the details of why it works.
A typical animal cell contains millions and millions of molecules of these types: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and RNA. But only one complete set of DNA to direct the cell's structure and function. DNA is like that precious manuscript that never leaves the special room in the library - the nucleus.
Libraries eh? The ones we have left in the UK are used mostly - 50% or more by floorspace - by illiterate teenagers to access emails from their dealers/find out what time their dole appointment is/do their university admission paperwork. Of the remaining 50%, 12.5% is bodice-rippers, 12.5% is westerns, 12.5% is DVDs, and the remaining 12.5% is for sale. So it's a perfect analogy for the human genome: as a chimp's DNA made even worse by some unfortunate viral mishap, or excessive radon inhalation, or millions of years of sexually selecting for sporting ability. Just as libraries accumulate all the civilized ideals we no longer understand into one, highly-flammable heap... our DNA has telomeres, which are nature's way of killing off everything with DNA as a bad mistake and restoring everything to ooze.
Yes, it's the wearing-away of telomeres that causes aging. A mistake? No, it's all chemistry. But you ignore the wonder of reproduction.
It's safest to ignore the little wonders of reproduction in a library - especially if they've been doing chemistry. Just buy a 10p western and get out of there.
You're being specific and I'm being general. You're being inductive and I'm being deductive. Shall ever the twain meet?
Brisk walking makes you younger. Telomeres are DNA caps on the ends of chromosomes that protect the chromosome from damage. Every time a cell divides the telomeres get shorter, to the point where the cell can no longer divide, called replicative senescence. Senescence is associated with disease and aging. Recent research used genetic data to find a clear link between walking pace and telomere length: Researchers from the University of Leicester at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre studied genetic data from 405,981 middle-aged UK Biobank participants and found that a faster walking pace, independent of the amount of physical activity, was associated with longer telomere. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420133538.htm
An idea for a story: A method to reverse telomere shortening and the accumulation of senescent cells - and thus reverse aging - is discovered.
I swear your idea seemed oddly familiar, and then I remembered that one of the characters in From The New World had an ability to keep herself young forever, so I wondered if it was the same concept. I looked it up and it indeed is, jesus! From the wiki: The story of the show was really unorthodox relative to what else was there in its market from what I remember, but it had some very interesting ideas and concepts. I watched it as a kid and I don't remember much other than how weird the whole thing was. If it was up to me, I'd explore what the consequences of such a possibility would be. For example, if humans do not die anymore, then who gets to be born? Are there instances where people die anyway? Can people bear to live forever, or will they seek death? Is eternal life a privilege? Who gets the privilege? Long-ruling emperors? The list goes on...
The possibility raises a lot of ethical questions! The cynic in me believes that the technology/method would become privatized. Some big corporation will own the rights. Only rich people will be able to afford it. Then rich people live longer. What sort of upheaval does this cause in society? Perhaps a rising of the masses.
I see this concern every often, especially in SF, and have to admit I don't really understand it. If only rich people get the treatment/cure, then ... what? Poverty isn't something you can breed out of people. The life expectancy of rich people might increase, but we all get our 120 years max anyway. It may well be a problem (other than fairness), but I'm not seeing it.
I was only brainstorming directions in which the story might go. And if you have seen this theme in a lot of SF, I would presume it is an effective theme.
Immortality is a recurring theme in fiction. And in most cases, the desire for immortality is depicted as misguided. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality_in_fiction
It's an interesting theme. I have immortals in my own main work. I wonder why it is depicted as misguided? Perhaps it has to do with religion and the afterlife, that our spiritual journey must somehow continue. I believe in an afterlife, not one adhering to any religion, but I still want to be immortal and healthy. My immortal dream life would be to continue writing on my main story as a sort of forever story that never ends, and just watch humanity evolve and reach out to the stars.
Perhaps misguided because if one doesn't comes to terms with their mortality they do not appreciate today. A psychologist might say, "Make friends with death." Then we can make every day count, for today, and for an eternity.
For me, I mostly want to become immortal because I am curious and want to see how humanity deals with the future. I am unsure if I would be able to observe humanity from the afterlife. Death, for me, at the end of the day, is just another process and step we face in our spiritual journey. I said before that immortality is problematic because it keeps the bad guys alive. Well, it might also keep the good ones alive as well. Imagine if we have immortal geniuses like Einstein or Mozart, how much great work they will be able to produce for humanity over eons of time. Sorry, immortality is one of my favorite topics.
Nothing to be sorry for! Immortality has to be one of the most intriguing ideas humans have ever come up with. For sure, if you can keep your curiosity alive, life continues to be worth living. Are you familiar with the connection between Einstein and Mozart? When Einstein had a particularly tough problem to solve, he took up his violin and played. Mozart was his favourite. Playing sharpened his cognitive abilities (as music does). We may well owe his Theory of General Relativity at least in part of Mozart's Violin Sonata in C.
I thought we owed Relativity to Einstein marrying his cousin. The history books don't record if he got different results when he repeatedly cheated on her.
In the future, immortality can be yours thanks to your digital remains. Researchers are currently building an AI application called Augmented Eternity which lets you create a digital persona that can interact with people on your behalf after you're dead. A digital "you" might be a text-based chatbot, or an audio voice (like Siri) or a digitally edited video. It might even be embedded in a humanoid robot. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/18/139457/digital-version-after-death/
Listening to music provides the ultimate sensory experience. It activates all areas of the brain and improves cognitive function and memory. The animation below shows a brain on music. It's based on fMRI data, computational musical feature extraction and statistical modeling.
