Hawking Considers Computer Viruses Life

A living being like you or me usually has two elements: a set of instructions that tell the system how to keep going and how to reproduce itself, and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. In biology, these two parts are called genes and metabolism. But it is worth emphasising that there need be nothing biological about them. For example, a computer virus is a program that will make copies of itself in the memory of a computer, and will transfer itself to other computers. Thus it fits the...

 Mercurial Identities When Growing Up Online

From October 2015 to the present day, I have lived approximately 168 different lives on the internet. I was Eve the Nobody before I was Eve the Sex Writer before I was Eve the Comedian before I was Eve the Depressed Girl before I was Eve the Drunk before I was Eve the Feminist before I was Eve the Tech Blogger before I was Eve the Democratic Socialist before I was Eve the Hater before I was Eve the Teetotaler before I was Eve the Professional Politics Writer before I was Eve the Sword Girl be...

 Living Things Renew Themselves

Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued a...

 Spelling is an Invention, and May be Modified

Spelling was invented by man and, like other human inventions, is capable of development and improve- ment by man in the direction of simplicity, economy, and efficiency. Its true function is to represent as accurately as possible by means of simbols (letters) the sounds of the spoken (i. e. the living) language, and thus incidentally to record its history. Its prov- ince is not, as is often mistakenly supposed, to indicate the derivations of words from sources that ar in- accessible...

 Technology is Preserving Our Ghosts

Our technology is giving us progressively greater power to keep alive our ancestors' ghosts. First the invention of writing allowed us to preserve their words. Painting and photography allowed us to preserve their faces. The phonograph preserves their voices and the videotape recorder preserves their movement and gestures. But this is only the beginning. Soon we shall acquire the technology to preserve a permanent record of the sequence of bases in the DNA of their cells. This means that we s...

 The Quiet

‘What was it like? Being Quiet?’ I try my food. The zebra is indeed excellent, dark and juicy: she has good taste. Perhaps she picked it up from me. She crumbles a piece of bread on her plate, lost in thought. ‘It’s difficult to explain. It’s very abrupt: when your Time runs out, the transition happens. The Resurrection Men just come to pick your body up, but you are already there. It’s like having a stroke. Suddenly, your brain works differently, in a different body, with differ...

 A Star for Everyone Who Ever Lived

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and...

 How the Computer Will See the World

We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of pe¬ troleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home. History's political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred "idle people" as potential troublemakers. Yet nature neve...

 Accepting Gray Areas in Concepts

Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the “merely mechanical,” ... But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.

 There is No Such Thing as "Rest"

It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, 'rest'. We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial 'door-nail', say, is actually forever in motion. We have merely become accustomed to judge by outward appearances; by the deceptive impressions we get through our senses.