Артур Задикян – Quantum entanglement, or The destiny rock (страница 5)

Ruthra waved his hand, then held his index finger up.

– That's me on the subject of other worlds. Looking ahead, I will say: and you will remember those optimal options that allowed only humans to have intelligence, if there are intelligent beings, according to my theory…

He put his finger up again, and afterward he said pathosily:

– They're just like us.

After a little silence, he continued:

– We're focusing on something else for now. When radio waves… or light waves, even reflections from mirrors… travel colossal distances, are transformed into a form we understand, recorded by us, and then, even after a long time, give us the same information we had at the beginning – we see nothing surprising in it. So why can't we record consciousness, then transmit it over a distance and…" he repeated his signature gesture, "inject it into a person. Into another human being. And I'll tell you this: not just another person on Earth, but another person altogether. Not an earthling.

The last word he said again stretched out.

– Here, of course, we should remind about cloning technology. It is possible to put your consciousness into your clone. You're going to say, "How so? And you'd be right. After all, you are your consciousness. And if someone has your consciousness, then they share your past. Yes. But the future is different for everyone. From the moment your consciousness enters the clone, it's a separate person. You either have to disconnect, let's say, the first body… or… you have a twin. There are thousands of twins. And they all have the same past and individual futures. It's another thing to find that body somewhere out there, far out in space.

Ruthra looked around the audience, paused for a moment.

– I don't see the ridiculousness.

The hall was not left in debt, almost everyone smiled.

– There is another technology for this. This product is based on logical thinking. And logical thinking is based on two facts – infinite time and infinite space. Yes, they are infinite. It is difficult for us to imagine it, because we try to imagine a huge distance, some grandiosely large time, and for infinity they turn out to be minuscule. Imagine if you have to walk the circumference of the equator. Now imagine that to the sun. How many stars are there in our galaxy? About 400 billion. Imagine that this is a beach and every planet on it is a grain of sand. How many grains of sand are there on our planet, even around one sea? Can you imagine a galaxy with billions of stars? How about billions of galaxies? If only in ours there are about 400 billion stars, each with planetary systems… Isn't there a possibility that the Earth will form? You'll say, maybe, yes. This is where we get to the Fermi paradox. As you know, it says, if they exist, where are they? That is, over millions, billions of years of development, they must have reached or surpassed the level of our civilization, and we must have seen traces of their activity. Some kind of spacecraft, some kind of radio conversations. Perhaps we don't see all these things because they haven't reached us yet. Not even radio waves. Think about it, even at the speed of light, radio waves take an extremely long time to propagate for human life, even a technical civilization. Well, let's say they sent a signal. Now let's do the math. Our galaxy is 100,000 years across. That's for radio waves to travel through it. They too, as we know, travel at the speed of light. If this civilization took the path of scientific development 10,000 years ago, even if they already invented radio 5,000 years ago, and they are 20,000 light years away, we don't yet know what will happen in 15,000 years on Earth. Catch a thought. Maybe we'll destroy ourselves and never hear them at all, even if the signal gets through. Or we might hear them in 15,000 years. Maybe our signal will reach habitable planets that are 30,000 light years away. Or maybe the habitable planet is in our neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda Nebula, which is 2 million light years away. In 2,000,000 years, we will hear from them… or they will hear from us. So the answer to the question of whether or not they are there is probably there. And I'll tell you, of course there are! It's logic that says they must be. This is the basis for the following paradox. The theory of many-worlds says that there can exist simultaneously many worlds, and absolutely identical, with identical properties, as if parallel, that is, some of them, it is assumed in this theory, are not parallel, not fantastic, really exact copies of ours.

Rutra did his crowning trick again, looking at his listeners with a testy look.

– A miracle is a miracle to be beyond our everyday understanding of reality. The idea is that what happens in our world is somehow reflected in that world. Fantastic? Quite. But only if it is said of a phenomenon on our planet, as if it were a real invisible parallel world. And then – although it depends on how you look at it. And in the infinity of time and space why not to assume the existence of this reality, especially since we accept the theory of probability. There is a certain logical regularity and paradox at the same time. The point is this: you know very well that there is an antiproton, i.e. a representative of antimatter, a substance with opposite properties. Science is working on how to find other substances, or rather, antimatter. If there is such a reality, substances with opposite properties, then on this basis another logic is formed. If there is antimatter, substances with opposite properties, not the ones we are used to – what kind of world do they make up? An opposite world? Then perhaps there is an opposite world near us. After all, there is an antiproton on Earth. When people first found, for example, uranium, they knew about the unusual nature of this substance, they just did not understand what it was. Perhaps, that is why we do not feel the parallel world, not having properties and technologies to look into it. For example, you are walking in the desert or taiga without radio receiver, it seems to you that everything is deserted, godforsaken place, but as soon as you turn on the radio receiver or, say, a radiotelephone, invisible life appears around. You already feel yourself a part of society. With the help of what devices can we define this world a little bit? For example, I will say that it is possible to record the new elements of the Mendeleev table only for some fractions of a second. They are like messengers from other worlds: they appeared, the devices recorded that there they are, and disappeared. It is proved in practice that there is a substance, but in fact… not that you can touch it materially – in fact it simply does not exist. That's enough information for you to start with, I think. And now let's move on to the technique. Please, come to our laboratory, familiarize yourself with new technological innovations that will surprise you. Don't be frightened.

He waved his hand, and the entire pulpit began to descend like a giant elevator, or rather, only the floor, walls, and ceiling remained in place. Soon the ceiling slid down from above, and they found themselves in a new room. To Ruthra's left now floated two magical-looking beds. If not for the instruments and indicator lights, each would have looked like a crystal coffin from a fairy tale. After giving the audience a moment to savor what they had seen, Ruthra continued:

– So much of the fantastic is already in our world. We don't know it, and it's fantastic to us. You realize there are secret technologies. The technology that you are holding in your hands now, that you are using now, used to be secret. If you find out what levels there are in technology now, you will be very surprised. For example, there is technology that can be used to change your genes. Yes, yes. You can slowly change into a different person. If you put your brain into a monkey, you will have a monkey's body, but you will be you. What if you put information into that monkey brain, make it smarter? And if you take information from your brain, write it down and then put it into another person, then the appearance will be the same, but inside you will be you. That's Super Spy technology. It was originally born, as you realize from the name, for spy purposes. You can see why. All of these technologies are already on Earth. They're real. For example, it was once amazing that it was possible to recognize your conversation by deciphering with a special device the vibrations from a window. The vibrations that your voice creates. Even now it surprises many people. It is possible to read conversations in deep bunkers from space. You can read all the data from your computer through the electricity grid. It is possible to probe, let's say, a certain gathering of citizens by satellite and find out the content of their phone books, accounts, i.e. everything where they are registered, all transitions to addresses, pages, with whom they contacted, the content of storages, including cloud storages. And there is also technology where you can point a beam, for example, at a soda bottle, and the content will turn into poison. You drink it, and after a while you die. No one will know what it's from. Your heart will stop. Of course, there must be a special soda, but you can't tell it from the one you like. It is also possible to send a beam to your brain from a distance, to affect it in such a way that you have a hemorrhage. It can even be done through a cell phone. Make a call and send special inaudible sounds. And then there's this technology…