There is also a theory of universal consciousness called panpsychism that has been around for millennia, but which has been recently given a more modern twist. Basically, the theory states that everything in the universe, animate and inanimate alike, participates in a cosmos-spanning consciousness. If you Google panpsychism you can find a wealth of information, but I’ll leave you with an excerpt from an article from NBC News (2017), entitled, “Is the Universe Conscious.”
EXCERPT: For centuries, modern science has been shrinking the gap between humans and the rest of the universe, from Isaac Newton showing that one set of laws applies equally to falling apples and orbiting moons to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff”—that the atoms of our bodies were literally forged in the nuclear furnaces of other stars.
Even in that context, Gregory Matloff’s ideas are shocking. The veteran physicist at New York City College of Technology recently published a paper arguing that humans may be like the rest of the universe in substance and in spirit. A “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space, he argues. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware.
The notion of a conscious universe sounds more like the stuff of late-night TV than academic journals. Called by its formal academic name, though, panpsychism turns out to have prominent supporters in a variety of fields. New York University philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers is a proponent. So too, in different ways, are neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, renowned for his work on gravity and black holes. The bottom line, Matloff argues, is that panpsychism is too important to ignore.
“It’s all very speculative, but it’s something we can check and either validate or falsify,” he says.
Three decades ago, Penrose introduced a key element of panpsychism with his theory that consciousness is rooted in the statistical rules of quantum physics as they apply in the microscopic spaces between neurons in the brain.
In 2006, German physicist Bernard Haisch, known both for his studies of active stars and his openness to unorthodox science, took Penrose’s idea a big step further. Haisch proposed that the quantum fields that permeate all of empty space (the so-called “quantum vacuum”) produce and transmit consciousness, which then emerges in any sufficiently complex system with energy flowing through it. And not just a brain, but potentially any physical structure.
Nanites
Nanites are another technology I have used before, and which I’ve addressed in previous texts and notes. For this reason, I didn’t use any space in this novel to describe how they might work, basically just taking them for granted.
I’ll briefly provide additional information on this tech below. If you’ve read about nanites in one of my previous novels, I’d encourage you to skip this section, as I won’t be introducing anything I haven’t before.
So here goes. Nano is short for nanometer, which is one twenty-five-millionth of an inch. Nanotechnology, nanofabricators, nanobots, and nanites all basically stem from ideas popularized by the peerless physicist Richard Feynman, who gave the first lecture regarding this technology in 1959, one entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics.”
During this lecture, Feynman indicated that it should be possible to make nanoscale machines that “arrange the atoms the way we want,” and “perform chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation.” He also presented the idea of creating a microscopic surgeon that could patrol our bodies, a concept he called “swallowing the doctor.”
Marry this concept with the increasing power and miniaturization of computers, advances in sensor technology and artificial intelligence, and extrapolate a millennia into the future, and you arrive at nanites like those depicted in the novel.
Nanite technology has a long way to go (to say the least) but scientists are continuing to get better and better at visualizing and moving matter at the atomic scale. As early as 1989, IBM used a scanning tunneling microscope to manipulate individual xenon atoms. Only two years later scientists managed to create an atomic switch, a critical first step in the design of atomic-sized devices.
I’ll leave this section with excerpts from two articles that I believe will provide a better sense of the possible future reality of nanite technology.
The first excerpt is from an article from The Nano Age.com, entitled, “Respirocytes—Improving Upon Nature’s Design: breathe easy with respirocytes.”
EXCERPT: A respirocyte is a theoretical engineering design for an artificial red blood cell—a machine that cannot be constructed with current technology. Respirocytes are micron-scale spherical robotic red blood cells containing an internal pressure of a thousand atmospheres of compressed oxygen and carbon dioxide. At this intense pressure, a respirocyte could hold 236 times more oxygen and carbon dioxide than our natural red blood cells. Respirocytes are an elegantly simplistic design, powered by glucose in the blood and able to manage carbonic acidity via an onboard internal nanocomputer and a multitude of chemical/pressure sensors. 3D nanoscale fabrication will allow respirocytes to be manufactured in practically unlimited supply very inexpensively, directly from a computer design.
An injection of such nanotechnological devices would enable a person to run at top speed for fifteen minutes or remain underwater for four hours on a single breath.
The second excerpt is from a 2008 article in The Economist, entitled, “Biomedicine: Tiny medical robots are being developed that could perform surgery inside patients with greater precision than existing methods.”