Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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HOFFMAN: Don't save a seat for me quite yet, John. Take the human mind. I agree that we are not close to an understanding of consciousness, despite the efforts of some of the best minds in science. And perhaps you're even right that we may never understand it. But what is the evidence for your position? You've criticized scientists for having faith--a dirty word in the scientific lexicon--that our era of explosive progress will continue unabated. Isn't it at least as much a leap to think that the progress will abruptly end--particularly since...
...diseases are things of the past, at least in so-called developed nations; a widespread outbreak of infectious disease is impossible unless the microbe is casually transmitted; the kind of virus found in animals known as the retrovirus doesn't exist in man; and no virus causes cancer in humans. By the end of the 1980s, these four truisms had hit the dustbin. Or take a more recent example: the newfound plasticity of the human brain. Until a year and half ago, it was a dogma taught in every medical school in the country that the adult human brain...
...fundamental theory by making measurements of what happens at scales 10 million billion times smaller than those probed in today's laboratories, but this may always be impossible. With any technology we can now imagine, measurements like those would take more than the economic resources of the whole human race...
Third, and most exciting, geneticists are finding many "pseudogenes" in human and animal DNA--copies of old, discarded genes. It's a bit like finding the manual for a typewriter bound into the back of the manual for your latest word-processing software. There may be a lot of interesting obsolete instructions hidden in our genes...
...probability of a macroscopic object--like a human--doing this trick is infinitesimal. But thanks to Albert Einstein we know that time travel of a different sort does happen in the macroscopic world. As he showed back in 1905 with his special theory of relativity, time slows down for objects moving close to the speed of light, at least from the viewpoint of a stationary observer. You want to visit the earth 1,000 years from now? Just travel to a star 500 light-years away and return, going both ways at 99.995% the speed of light. When you return...