Humans Scaling the Universe

We exist on the tip-point of the large and small.  

There seems to be a limit to how big or tiny life can be.  

We can only exist at a special scale where the universe interacts with itself.  

Life happens in the narrow band between the extremes of galactic super-structures and Planckian indeterminacy.

We can only impact the universe in scales near to our own.

It leaves one with awe to consider we exist in the special range where reality comes to know itself.

From Huge

The biggest organization of matter and energy we know of are galactic super-structures.

Galactic super structures as detected and described

Formed by a newly discovered, but not understood “dark energy”, these collections of galaxies are at 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles long (21 zeros) and 90,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles thick (19 zeros).

At this largest known scale, the galaxies appear grouped together like the skin of soap bubbles in the kitchen sink. 

Great voids of cold, empty darkness fill space between films of galaxies.  These voids are not truly empty, rather sparse compared to the concentration of galactic bubble skins.

There may be larger structures than these; we are still in the process of discovery. 

There are physical limits to how far we will be able to sense because of the speed of light.  We may never be able know the true formation beyond a certain scale.

Two imaginings of  Planck Scale quantum foam

To Tiny

The smallest organization of matter and energy we know is at the Planck Length.

Sometimes called space-time foam, the Planck length is where energy and matter can be no smaller.

The rules we know through math suggest the Planck Length is the very fabric of reality.

Only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000636 inches across (34 zeros), these size scales are so small we can not even measure its existence, rather only guess using formula.

Here matter and energy also vibrate in a foamy like way.  

Some suggest that this is the scale were bits of matter and energy form.  Others speculate the universe vibrates at this level giving rise to matter and energy. 

There may be smaller structures than the Planck Length.

Beyond Planck scales, reality as we know it makes no sense.  It appears as if the essence of reality itself is bubbling in and out of existence at this tiniest of scales.

Humans in the
middle of scale

The Great In-between

Almost exactly in the middle of the scale, life exist. 

Larger structures are too separated by space to have enough effect on each other to develop complex systems like life.

Smaller structures are also too separated to be able to have the intricacy needed in order for life to exist.

Only from the largest of whales to tiniest of microbes does there exists enough interaction of matter and energy for life to form.

A hundred pennies

Measuring Scale by Hundreds

Before we can understand how is big and how small is small, lets review some simple math.

Think about a hundred pennies.  

A hundred pennies is something most people count at one time or another.  A hundred is number we know. 

Scaling in hundreds

Using units of one hundred is something our minds can grasp.  We can see a hundred items and have a sense of just how many that is.

Going from one to a hundred pennies is the same scale as going from a hundred to ten thousand pennies ($100).  

Going from ten thousand to a million pennies ($10,000) is another simple jump in scale.

The same kind of scaling works in the opposite direction.  Imagining a hundredth of a meter is not so hard to visualize.  

Imagining another step down to ten thousands of a meter is a similar leap of mind.

We will use this scale of 100’s to help us understand our scale in the universe.

Each of the dotted lines will represents a jump in a hundred times of size. Going to the left we get bigger, going to the right we get smaller.

Our Place

The scale between a human and a pyramid is similar to a mosquito to a human.  These jumps of up one hundred and down one hundred can be used as a reference point for how big each leap we will make.

Going Big

As we go up the scale, a mountain is to a pyramid as a pyramid is to a human.  Each dotted line represents a hundred times bigger.

Going up from human to moon, from moon to the solar system and beyond, we can begin to understand the enormity of it all.

The planets and stars interact with one another.  They are too far apart to form life in any way that we could understand.  

The forces are so far apart and the time taken to interact so long that highly complex structures simply can not form.

As long as humans only used their eyes, they could not even know how the solar system was formed.  Only when they began to use telescopes did it shape start to be understood.

With larger and more powerful telescopes like the Hubble and others we have begun to probe far beyond what we knew before. 

Amazing structures that slowly form and fade at large scale surprise us and inform us.  Several different measurements indicate that the largest structures have taken about 16,000,000,000 (9 zeros) years to form.

Going Small

 As we go down the scale, a hair width is to a mosquito as a mosquito is to a human.  Each dotted line represents a hundred times smaller.

Going down from human to DNA, life exists on four steps on our scale.  DNA is .000000001 (seven zeros) smaller than us.

Beyond this point, the universe again becomes sparse.  

The matter and energy that make up atoms are so far apart that their interactions do not permit complex things like life to form.

The smallest thing we can see is about the diameter of a hair.  Beyond that scale our naked eyes fail to discern.

With microscopes we began to see the smaller.  Moving from light to electrons we seek to understand the tiniest of things. 

Even these tools have limits to how small we can see.  Indirect evidence and experiment lead us to theories about what actually is below smaller scales.

Human Scaling

As recently as 1900, humankind only interacted with scales between mountains and hairs.  Things a thousand times bigger or smaller than us were only imagined or indirectly sensed.

Atom bombs and atoms moved

Einstein, Goddard, and Crick invented ideas and tools that extended our knowledge to the larger and the smaller. By 1970 humans had reached the moon and begun to understand the structure of DNA.

Our tools have only recently in human history had the ability to move mountains.  With the advent of the atom bomb, we have just now been able to effect reality on the 10,000 scale.

Our tools have only just allowed us to move individual atoms around.  We now manipulate DNA and other small molecules regularly.

Tools that change the universe on larger scales require enormous energy, often out of control. There may be limits to how much energy we can control.

Tools that change the universe on smaller scales require precise control and much less energy.  There may be limits on how accurate we can be.

Comparing Scales

If we think about the scaling of things in the universe, it helps to understand the enormity and tininess of it all:

Galaxies are to stars as stars are to earth.

The moon is to a mountain as a mountain is to an human.

A human is to a hair as a cell is to DNA.

Cells are to atoms as atoms are to electrons.

At each scale, different structures, different organizations of the universe exist.  The relationships between the scales give rise to the structure itself.   The largest galactic cluster is composed of reality on the Planck level.

Limits of Scale

Perhaps someday in the not too distant future, humans will move regularly through our solar system.  It does not seem impossible that we may even manipulate the parts of the atom.

There do appear to be physical limits in both directions, large and small, that will slow down our understanding and our impact on the universe.

It is wonderful to live in times of great discovery.  It may be tragic to not have lived after them.  

Note: If you want to explore the scale of humans to the universe, there is a wonderful online program developed by Cary and Michael Huang.  This tool allows you zoom in and out at different scales, seeing graphically the relationships between Planck length and observable universe.  I encourage you to spend time with this tool and learn just where humans fit in the scale of the universe.  http://htwins.net/scale2/

Are Corporations, Embryos and Aliens Persons?

What is a person?  Our debate defining ‘person’ is emotionally charged and rarely logical.  Words like ‘baby’, ‘corporation’, ‘human’, and ‘person’ are used interchangeably.  We all may have an opinion, but there is no common agreement on what is a person.

Is he a person?

Historically women and slaves have not been considered persons, even in my own country.  Others wish to consider animals as persons and wish to grant them moral and legal rights.  Science mixes it up with tradition, religion, and law to give us a mind-numbing view of what a ‘person’ is.

When we have an opinion and seek facts to prove it, we are not being honest with truth.  Only when we seek facts first and keep an open mind can we seek truth.  Let’s examine some facts then consider what we mean when we say ‘person’.

Person

There is no legal definition of person agreed upon by states or nations. 

In most societies today adult humans are usually considered persons.

If you look-up dictionary definitions of human and person they are circular.  A human is a person and person is a human.

Frederick Douglass was not a
person until he bought it.

To many a ‘person’ can include non-human entities such as animals, artificial intelligence, or extraterrestrial life.

There are even legal definitions that include entities such as corporations, nations, or even estates in probate as ‘persons’.  In some legal definitions those with extreme mental impairment or lack of brain function have been declassified as ‘persons”.

Religious fundamentalists want to push the definition of person to the moment of conception.

Meanwhile science is struggling to find a clear definition of what constitutes a human. 

Some lawyers and politicians maintain that corporations are legally persons.

Legal Definitions

Initially, only white males over 21 years old who owned property were considered persons in the United States.  Individual states were allowed to determine how much property they must own to achieve personhood.  All others, including the young, poor, women, slaves, and indentured servants were legally considered less than people.

Are corporations persons?

There has been a long struggle across the world to expand the definition of what it is to be a person. In the United States, slaves became persons with the passing of the 13^th Amendment. Women became persons with suffrage. 

Today, children are not considered full persons before the law, only partial persons.  Their rights are limited and controlled until they reach 18 or even 21 years of age.  Voting, driving, and even the freedom to be alone are controlled for children by law.

In 1819 Dartmouth College was granted an initial form of person status as a corporation with Dartmouth v. Woodward.  Later rulings have expanded the definition of corporations giving them many of the legal rights as persons. 

In our most recent election for President one candidate even declared “corporations are people, my friend.”  He meant that corporations are a means for people to enact their powers as persons.

Corporations are widely considered to be owned as property by people and therefore are an extension of the persons who own them.  With multi-national and stock owned companies, the line between what constitutes a person is legally blurred.

Embryo

Conception occurs at the meeting of sperm and egg.  After cells begin dividing they are known medically as an embryo.  At conception a single cell has human genetic material.  If no replication errors occur, there is a potential that an embryo cell will develop into an adult human being.

Is an embryo a person?

Mississippi is attempting to define embryos as a persons.  The legislation says that:

“The right to life begins at conception. All human beings, at every stage of development, are unique, created in God’s image and shall have equal rights as persons under the law.”

Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma have similar legislation in process.  

Recent attempts to define embryos as persons have run against In Vitro fertilization technology.  Couples who have difficulty reproducing may use In Vitro fertilization to generate 15 (or more) embryos. Two or three of those embryos are then implanted into a woman’s womb.  The remaining embryos are kept in storage or destroyed.  Defining an embryo as a person classifies this technology as murder.

Others are claiming that a distinction can be made between In Vitro and sex-based fertilization, by denying person-hood to what they call ‘pseudo-embryos’.

Stem cells are cells that can become any other cell.  Stem cells can theoretically be used to clone a human being.  Embryos created using cloning technology could also be granted person status.  Many nations are actively working on an international ban for cloning humans.

Another consideration about embryos as having life is an often unconsidered moral dilemma.  If a In Vitro fertilization clinic is burning and you only have time to save the technicians inside or the embryos in the freezer, which would you choose?  The most popular choice by far is the technicians, yet thousands of embryos would cease to exist.

Fetus

At nine weeks, the embryo is redefined to be a fetus.  Human-like features only begin to appear after this point of development.  In the first trimester all mammals appear similar.  There are no uniquely human characteristics that can be observed until the second trimester begins.

Is a fetus a person?

The Catholic Church has legally argued for fetuses to be considered persons.  Lawyers representing the Catholic Church have also argued the opposite case that fetuses not to be considered persons. 

Often the debate about a fetus being a person struggles around the issue of when human thought starts.

Brain waves do not start until the 30^th week of pregnancy. Brain waves are not a sign of humanity, rather of animal-like brain function.  Cats, mice, elephants and human fetuses are highly similar in brain function at this time.

Some have been pursuing a definition of a person that starts at independent viability, when a body can live outside of its mother.  These advocates claim that the fetus is a part of the mother until it separated from her body.

Some technologies have been developed that can substitute for a womb, however prior to nine months of development, death outside the womb without these tools is almost certain.  Fetuses are generally not able to live outside the mother until birth.

Most agree babies are persons

Baby

Medically, upon leaving the womb a fetus is redefined to be a baby.

It is scientifically inaccurate to use the word ‘baby’ when referring to an embryo or fetus.  While this may be emotionally satisfying or appeal to our paternal or maternal instincts, it is not a factual scientific or correct legal definition.  

Religion and Spirit

Some religions, like Sunni Islam and fundamentalist Christians, claim that souls are attached to bodies at conception and are therefore persons.

Jewish law defines the legal status of a person at birth, claiming that a fetus is not yet a person until the umbilical cord is cut.

Sunni Islam maintains
persons start at conception

There is no scientific evidence that a soul is attached to a developing human at any point in the development process, embryo, fetus or baby.  Only religious claims based upon faith use this terminology, not the law or science.

Attempts to use the religious doctrine of some to make law for everyone are the equivalent of trying to establish religious law.  In the United States this is expressly forbidden by the constitution which states: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.  

A Fourteenth Amendment was passed to say that rule is also applied to individual states.  

Since not all religions or even sects within a religion agree on person-hood, no one church can say what a person is for all persons, only their own.

The US Supreme Court has made it clear that until objective evidence can show a soul is attached to a body, declaring an embryo as a person will remain a matter of religious opinion and not law.

Animals

Are dolphins persons?

Some view animals as persons.  They advocate vegetarian diets and rights for animals.  Some even go as far as advocating non-violence on animals.  While it may seem extreme, their moral and logical arguments are worth considering in our quest for a definition of what is a person.

Gary Francione thinks we should go so far as to enact animal welfare laws.

Desiring protection for a special subset of non-human species, they wish to see rights defined for animals like chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins and even some birds.  They claim that if we would not do it to a human, we should not do it to these animals either.

If we were to make a genetic modification to an animal, like we do with engineered plants today, that allowed them to speak with us even in a limited way; would we start to see them as persons? 

Science

The debate in science about defining person is not from over by a long shot.  Several definitions have been tried and each has failed in its turn.

Birds use tools, have language, and act morally

At one time, persons were those who used tools.  Evidence that birds, primates, and other species built and used tools took this definition away.

For many years language was seen as the division between person and animal.  Slowly dolphins, chimpanzees, crows, and even ants were seen to have language.  Language alone can not be used a definition for what is a person

Morality is often used as a way to separate humans as persons from other animals.  This definition is under serious threat as sharing, fairness, and even intentional self-sacrifice is documented in animals.

If we could create a clone from a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon would we consider them a person?

If we meet an alien life form that can think, communicate, and has morality would we give it rights as a person?

How much of a brain can be taken away before stop considering a human body to be a person?  If the brain mostly dies and the body is kept alive by machines, are they still a person?

Conclusions

We do not share a common definition of what a person is. 

Science provides no clear definition.  Religious views vary.  The law adds entities that disturb us.  New technologies will push the boundaries even further.

For any one of us to claim they have the one and only answer is only opinion.  There are no clear facts defining person-hood. 

Attempts, largely by religious fundamentalists, to enshrine their opinions into law, will fail.

Perhaps we should simply admit we are not sure?  Perhaps we should allow ourselves to be more open to others views?

We single persons do not have the right to pick for all other persons what a person is and what a person is not.

Extending compassion and understanding seems like minimal steps for persons to share.

Meme Wars (Part 7)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In the last part of Meme Wars we consider how on science and commerce are effected by battles between memes for minds.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Market Memes

Commercial memes spread through advertising
everywhere on the planet

Business uses branding to create demand for their products.  Branding is a type of meme associated with a product or service.  Images, words, and feelings are generated in the brain by the meme that meet needs, create desires, or inspire lust.  Advertising is the art of creating thoughts in human minds.  Advertising, when effective, generates and propagate memes, that reproducing in people’s minds.

Adapting to new meme reproduction methods, advertising has begun to shift meme creation and reproduction strategies to internet, social media, and other information technologies.

This revolution in meme reproduction has disturbed centralized broadcast replication.  Print media is struggling for access to mind share with web pages.  YouTube is capturing eyeballs once controlled by network television. 

Advertisers have long known that younger minds are more receptive to new memes.  Humans now spend three billion hours each week playing video games.  These gamers are largely younger minds.  In order to circulate their memes, business must learn means of reproduction inside these media.

Even in the poorest of societies, pervasive
commercial memes are hard to ignore

Immunity Avoidance

Global consumer business has boomed by being successful and spreading memes.  The poorest countries in the world know what Coca Cola is.  Nike’s meme of “Just Do It” is in most of the planets brains. 

Entertainment media uses meme’s sexuality to grab our attention so that businesses can place their ideas in our brains and associate them with the other attractions.  Sporting events that grab us emotionally are used in similar manners to allow more receptive brains to get meme’s about automobiles.  Demand is thrust upon us unaware.

Commercial memes are intentionally crafted and delivered to avoid our mental immune systems.  There economic success depends upon meme-crafter's ability to do circumvent our minds immunity.

Opinion Makers

On a more strategic level, owners of businesses try to convince get us to act in their best interest by creating memes that distract us.  Pointing to people and branding them as lazy, leeches on society, and “takers”, memes can cause us to act in ways that are not beneficial to us.  Driving down expectations for compassion while driving up anger and fear, these memes warp our view of reality.

Non-compassionate meme generator

Shell Oil has tried to cast itself as caring and for good, while destroying thousands of livelihoods.  Wal-Mart convinces that lower prices are most important for consumers while Main Street dies and wages plummet.  Goldman Sachs did severe damage to the world economy in the 2007 financial collapse yet advertises on public television for how they build small business.

News networks and online media build and circulate memes that tear at the fabric of society.  Belittling their opponents with personal attacks, bad memes about government, economy and society are allowed access to unwary minds. 

Appealing to frustrations and remapping it onto their own desires, meme crafters shift public opinion.  Calling public servants useless, they devalue our ability to help each other.  Politics devolves to personal attacks, civil debate disappears, and solution finding becomes nonexistent as memes wage war in peoples minds.

We have yet to build meme immunity systems that will allow us to keep such bad ideas out of our minds.  Until we do, bad ideas will reproduce and cause havoc.

Religion and Science

A meme war between science and religion is being waged in brains.  Religious memes have a huge “head start” on scientific ones. 

Science and religion engage in a meme war

Around the planet, religion is taught to us when we are very young.  Science is kept from developing minds until much later.  Religious stories enter our brains while they are still forming.  Most western society’s children know of Noah, Adam and Eve, and Christmas before they know of numbers, letters, or discovery methods.

Most religious people acknowledge that other faiths have “bad ideas”.  Immunity memes against other religious beliefs are placed in children’s minds early on, thus barriers for science memes are also set high.

Some memes are more complex and complicated than others.  Complex memes require more time and space in minds to reproduce than simple ones.  Entrenched complex memes are much more successful at holding onto minds.  

The new information technology is allowing education to be individually tailored.  Home schooling, especially for religious people, surges in western cultures.  This permits minds to form without common concepts.  Science memes that were delivered in public schools not long ago are allowed to die out.

Science tends more toward facts and religion tends more toward faith.  In the meme war between them, science will continue to press that advantage.  Will it be enough to overcome early indoctrination by religion into young minds?  Perhaps science needs to shift it's memes to the battlefield of younger minds?

Conclusions

There is a war of ideas struggling to control our brains and thereby our actions.

By examining previous meme wars, we can learn more about those ideological struggles in our own time.

Ideas replicate in human minds in ways similar to biological systems.  New technologies alter how meme’s reproduce.  Our current communication technology is accelerating and focusing meme reproduction. 

Meme wars may never end.

Good ideas (facts) do not always win over bad ideas (myths).  Memes are engaged in an ongoing struggle for supremacy.

Memes can develop immunity to other ideas.  Some memes can stop the entry of other memes into brains.

There are too many ideas for any brain to handle, so we specialize and move toward familiarity memes. We also are trending toward simpler, easier to mentally digest memes and trending away from complex, subtle ones.

Business, religion, governments, and media create memes intentionally.  We are usually unaware of their existence.  They can and do cause us to act against our own interests

Conflicts of ideas occur in our brains regularly.  We need to become aware of these conflicts and build our own immune systems. 

We can build better minds by expending effort to allow complex memes to enter our brains.  Resisting the simple, we must learn to think more deeply to avoid bad memes.

Crafting memes is a relatively new idea itself.  Like DNA, words and pictures are the tools that we can use to build memes.  Technology is providing us with powerful ways to reproduce memes.  

In this new revolutions, each of us as individuals can and should engage in the meme wars.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Please subscribe to this blog, so I can put more of my memes in your head!

Meme Wars (Part 3)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In Part 3 of Meme Wars we continue our journey considering the war of memes that occurred when printing technology became common.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Libraries held memes

Minds  Begin to Specialize

The secular world began to form as old minds were rediscovered.  A fight for control of minds was waged in books.  Facts and myths memes struggled for control of the human mind.

For many centuries it was possible to read all the books.  The total sum of human knowledge could be, and often was, put into individual brains.  With the advent of printing, knowledge accumulated.  Past voices piled up and libraries spread. 

With this revolution specialization in knowledge began to occur.  There was more information available than a single person could know.  The concept of knowledge experts was born. The number of professors, physicians, philosophers, and lawyers grew exponentially. 

People of wealth and power had greater access to new, growing piles of knowledge. 

Those with freedom and time to read could explore others ideas, while most occasionally continued their lives as they were and read newly translated Bibles.

Catholic and Protestant meme's competed for minds

Past Fights Future

Fictional ideas competed with factual ideas for access to people minds.  Old power bases created ideas that kept their power intact.  New discoveries by inquiring minds demonstrated that the old power bases were wrong. 

Memes about King’s power struggled with thoughts about individual freedom.  Memes about human rights struggled with beliefs about Church dogma.  New art forms emerged that threatened traditional moral values.  Old taboos on corpses struggled with dissection and forensics.

To traditionalist and conservatives of the Renaissance era the world seemed to shift from under their feet.  Old, assumed values, the very nature of what was right and good and proper came into question.  Books were burned that had profane, secular knowledge.  Inquisitions from the Church tried to stop new and threatening ideas. A violent reaction from the status quo, threatened to unseat new ideas and discovery.

Erasmus created a humanist meme
leading humans to seek new learning

Martin Luther advocated abolishing Church control of marriage.  Descartes said that wisdom could come from discoveries outside Church teaching.  Galileo pointed out that the earth went around the sun.   The first stock companies and international banks formed allowing money and power to be accumulated without church or king.

The progressives and liberals of this time saw new hope for the future.  They advocated changes to society that were shocking and disturbing.  New ideas led to understandings that transformed views of what a human life could be.  Seeing the old order as a threat to new possibilities, a war of new ideas was waged upon the old thoughts.

The concept that each person must perfect their mind and body while on earth in order to achieve salvation became popular.  This humanism drove individuals to seek excellence by learning all they could.  New learning threatened the established order.

Copernicus challenged conservative thought
showing earth wasn't the center 

Meanwhile established order and power saw each advance of ideas as a threat.  Many thought the world would end or society crumble as it changed in front of them.

These struggles often led to violence and strife wars between new and old lasted for generations.  Mankind resorted to terrible actions to enforce their world views upon the other.  Religious wars between Catholics (old bible conservatives) and Protestants (new bible liberals) killed huge numbers of people and ruined many more lives.

Eventually a truce between conservatives and liberals evolved, allowing localities to identify with their own ideologies.  Parts of Europe remained largely traditional, adapting some new ideas where it did not threaten church or king.  North-western Europe adapted the new ideas and prospered until its culture spread around the world.  However, spasms of violence continued until the French Revolution finally over threw the conservative powers continent wide and the modern age brought a new kind of nation states into existence.

Meme’s Meet Reality

Some new ideas were not factual and failed or brought great disaster upon societies. 

Combining memes of progress and king
Conquistadors brought down civilizations

Conquistadors thought to grab wealth for personal gain and destroyed civilizations, ruining centuries of development and diversity.  Slavery, almost unknown in medieval times, restarted allowing people to become property.  Frequent, violent political upheaval in emergent city states caused populations to live in terror for decades. 

Many new ideas were factual and changed the world for the better.

The seeds of the scientific revolution where planted and fertilized by wide spread transfer of thoughts between minds.  Our sharing of knowledge about anatomy allowed more people to survive.  Improved farming techniques disseminated holding back famine.  Novels and plays could be performed and enjoyed far from their authors, by printing the words and actions into books.

Those ideas that aligned with the factual reality that existed did well.  Other memes that did not, slowly or rapidly failed.  The competition between ideas was fought on a battleground of reality and myth.  Ideas that succeeded tended to be based on facts.  Ideas that failed were often believed fictions.

In part 4 of Meme Wars we begin our journey into our current information revolution.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Wham BAM Thank You, Man!

We now have the technology to make a digital model of the human brain. We need but to will it to happen. If we do not, someone else will. Sooner than you may think. Scientists have devised a practical plan to do accomplish this amazing feat. We must fund them.

From humble beginnings in 1987, scientists began to model the human genome. They wanted to make map of the entire sequence of genes that make a human being. With government funding starting in 1990, the project was expected to take 15 years. They accomplished the project in 2003 with international assistance from scientists in the Europe and Asia.

Calling the project Brain Activity Map (BAM) the scientists propose to step-by-step build models of the human brain using software. They would start with a simple worm brain and work up through increasingly complex creatures until they can model a human brain. Brain mapping is sometimes also know by the term “connectome”.

The Science

Imaging techniques would be used to see what is happening with individual molecules in the brain's cells. This imaging technology already exists. Computer manufactures believe they can continue their decades long exponential growth in machine processing power using Moore's Law. This means the hardware to run the imaged brain models will be available before the brain model is completed.

Existing technology to image the brain at the molecular level

The well understood C. Elegans

The plan involves five major stages. Each stage attempts a more complex brain. The plan allows five years for each stage in order to image and model larger and larger brains. Several “brain observatories” would be constructed to allow for competition between research teams.

The first phase would start with C.Elegans, a simple worm that has already been under study for decades. The worm has 302 neurons with about 7,000 connections between them.

The humble Fruit Fly

Scaling up from the worm brain model, the scientists would then attempt a Fruit Fly (Drosophila) next. The Fruit brain has about 135,000 neurons. Current computer hardware is capable of this feat already, the scientists need only do the imaging to make the model.

Depending upon what is learned with the first two phases, the third phase would attempt either the common home aquarium zebrafish brain, a section of the human brain called the hippocampus or perhaps both. Both of these brains have just under a million neurons to image, model, and put into software.

The fourth stage would be to model the entire brain of an awake mouse. This would provide a brain model that could be tested in real time against live beings. Then the project would go on to the fifth stage to map and model an entire, working human brain. The 25 year estimate to finish this entire project is very conservative.  If structured smartly, competition could work for like it did for the human genome project and results could be achieved even sooner.

Costs

The plan calls for a mix of private and public funding in the order of about $300 million a year. Over the proposed 20 years of of the project it would cost about $6 billion to accomplish. This is on the same scale as was the Human Genome project. Even if the real costs double, it will be cheap at the price.

A billion dollars seems like a lot. To understand the scale of this investment, consider that just to build a single aircraft carrier costs almost $27 billion. We have 11 of these ships. The Transportation Security Administration has a budget of $8 billion annually. The Hubble Space Telescope costs $10 billion over its lifetime.

Putting in the Golden Spike

The Payoff

The human genome project has had staggering economic benefits. The under $4 billion invested over 13 years on research returned $796 billion in economic activity. The genome investment generated 310,000 jobs. It also launched a revolution in the bio-sciences that will be felt for generations to come.

The return on investment for mapping the human brain could be much, much greater. There is no accurate way to predict just how many jobs or how much new economic activity this project could generate. Even if the Brain Activity Mapping project were to only break-even in financial terms, the benefits to our knowledge, medicine, and computers will be far reaching.

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Knowledge of how the brain works will have many impacts we know about and more we can only guess at. Understanding how mental illness works. Scientists believe that they can model the effects of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and autism in the brain leading to better treatments and perhaps even cures.

Advances in artificial intelligence could boost our information processing capabilities. Understanding how consciousness emerges from the brain would allow to understand what we humans are even better. We may even be able to build our own new kinds of minds.



Just Do It

As when we decided to put a man on the moon, connect the Pacific Atlantic oceans by rail, and build the interstate system; this project must be done. The benefits to our country and mankind are too great to turn away from.

Already the European Union is funding similar research in Switzerland. We should not give up on this research like we did with the Superconducting Super Collider.  We should lead the world, not follow it into this new frontier.

We should ensure our children and grandchildren benefit. It is a small investment. We should fund this now.