"Space is not only high, it's low. It's a bottomless pit." Sun Ra


x
The MNS Roadmap

Preface Introduction I. I.1 II. II.1 II.2 II.3 II.4 II.5 II.6 II.7 III. III.1 III.2 IV.

A beautiful story Beyond the human horizon The Metaverse Puppeteering Bio- and Neurotechnolgy Revolutionizing Prosthetics Brain Boosting Age of Ageless From Mouse to Mars Proof Reading Magic Bullets Artificial Organs Supercomputation Blue Brain Wetware Morphological Freedom

Preface - A beautiful story

[<]

Anaxagoras said 2 keen things. First: The human being is the smartest being ever because of its use of hands.[+] Second: Life on Earth originated from outer space.[+] That should motivate us to try the brave attempt to start a voyage into interstellar space to check out if there are any guys like us or different. Anaxagoras (500 – 428 BC) was member of the Ionian School, known for the first dispute on mysticism.[+]

Imagine a huge explosion on a far away planet catapulting water into outer space caused by a meteoroid impact. The water containing microbes and spores would have been shock-frozen in cold interstellar space and start a long, long trip all the way through the universe until hitting our home planet. Mother Earth would have been pregnant. The idea is called panspermia. It's Greek and means primordial seed or seed of life.

Louis Pasteur revived the idea in 1864 by his disprove of the theory of spontaneous generation.[+]

Svante Arrhenius, Nobel Price winner of 1907 considered the idea appealing that all organisms in the universe are related and the process of evolution is everywhere the same.[+]

Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted in 1953 the Miller-Urey experiment on the origin of life. It established that the early Earth atmosphere, as they pictured it, was capable of producing amino acids, the building blocks of life, from inorganic substances.[+]

Fred Hoyle's book Evolution from Space even rejects Darwin's theory of evolution and claims "biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design."[+]

Francis Crick, together with Leslie Orgel, refined the panspermia hypothesis to the directed panspermia, that could have been spread by an extraterrestrial civilization.[+]

Freeman Dyson, a anthropic principle friendly physicist and mathematician, considers it plausible that the origins of life are not just a matter of natural selection, but rather a spontaneous, even conscious formation of a self-perpetuating mechanism.[+] His thoughts seem to be related to the Greek concept of Nous (universal mind) and Anaxagoras' cosmogony itself. Might Nous give quantum-mechanical structure the freedom of conscious choice over itself?

Chandra Wickramasinghe, influenced by Fred Hoyle, developed the theory of organic grains in comets and interstellar medium. He claims that even the SARS-virus could be extraterrestrial because of its uniqueness.[+] Wickramasinghe:"I think the origin of life must have taken place on a cosmological scale. It required all the resources of all the stars in the entire universe to get started. But once started the incredible survival properties of microbes makes it inevitable that it spreads across the universe."[+]

The Murchison meteorite impacted in Australia in 1969. It contains common amino acids such as glycine, alanine and glutamic acid.[+]

Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center found glycine, an amino acid in captured samples of comet Wild 2 returned to Earth by NASA's Stardust mission. "We are interested in understanding what was on the early Earth when life got started," Elsila said. "We don't know how life got started … but this adds to our knowledge of the ingredient pool".[+]

Most important, there is extensive activity to find bacteria on Mars[+] and a new "space-race" to find earth-like exo-planets.[+]

Steven Vogt of the University of California and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington announced the discovery of Gliese 581g, an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist. It is 20 light years away from Earth.[+]

True or not, the panspermia hypothesis - at least - is a beautiful story of life and should be very inspiring to the space exploration industry to create an artificial panspermia by the human, a space ship to realize an interstellar voyage.

Introduction - Beyond the human horizon

[<]

The Mare Nostrum Spaceship (MNS) is the attempt to create such an artificial panspermia. The first step towards this aim is the compilation of a roadmap (The MNS roadmap) that seeks, observers, evaluates and categorizes cutting edge research, brand new ideas and key-technologies relevant to the construction of an interstellar space ship hopefully during our life-time! The "propulsion system" of the MNS is mainly based on medicine to overcome our biological limits and to turn us into a self-designed astronauts as the premise to overcome the space-time-barrier of the universe.

But the MNS roadmap has not the exclusive goal to seek for strategies to realize an interstellar voyage on the long term. Likewise, on the short term, it features a panoramic view over present knowledge and technologies related to the field, thus beneficial to a range of all kind of objectives of humanitarian value. All above it supports the advance of medicine next to other solutions for urging problems of our home planet, objectives with much higher priority than space exploration. It deploys as a futurologist analysis scrutinizing the fallowing domains with a critical eye:

- regenerative and nano medicine, stem cell and gene therapy
- brainboosting, nootropics and adult neurogenesis
- neurotechnolgy, brain computer interfaces and neuroprosthetics
- neurally-controlled animats, biomechanics and artificial organs
- supercomputing, neurosimulation and molecular computing
- the metaverse and the socio-psychology of the avatar and the internet
- bioethics and human rights

The final utopian goal, the realization of an interstellar voyage, no matter if feasible or not, serves as a vanishing point on our terrestrial, human horizon to open it up. The MNS roadmap works as a psychological propulsion system to conquer far away lands even they won't be those of our final goal.

When will be phase II. of the project, the design of a tangible plan of the spaceship? It is unpredictable at this point, since there are still to many incalculable factors of future scientific and technological development. But the more precise the MNS roadmap becomes over time, the more determinant will be its predictions, the more adequate its advices and the more satisfying its answers to consulting. The MNS roadmap is under continuous development, current chapters will be updated, outdated information will be taken out and new breakthroughs will be added. You are invited to participate, suggest and criticize.

I. The Metaverse

[<]

Today it is impossible to realize an interstellar voyage. We would need to overcome the space-time-barrier which separates us from other planetary systems for many light years. Even if we could travel at light speed it would take us 26 000 years to reach Sagittarius A*, the centre black hole of our galaxy. We only live 100 years - biologically - and if we are very lucky.

In the material world objects have two purposes: One physical, like gravity withstanding, weather protection, transportation, etc. The second purpose is communicative and aesthetic: telling people it is a museum of modern art or a racing bike. In metaverse (the over-term of all existing Virtual Reality) the first purpose, the physical one, becomes obsolete, because VR is pure information and communication. Its "physical laws" are man-made and exist only in order to communicate. Consequently in the metaverse doesn't exist a space-time-barrier and therefore it permits interstellar space-travel. In VR are neither biological nor physical limits at all, we don't breath air and we travel by beaming. A voyage of one million years in real-time would appear to us only like one year if we change the clock in a 1:1 000 000 ratio inside VR. But there is an essential condition: If we want to crack the space-time-barrier by the help of the metaverse, we need to turn virtual ourselves! We need to merge with the metaverse by loading our savvy on hard disc and shoot it into outer space. Let's call this idea "panspermic metaverse". The technology of the MNS is based on this concept.

How we can merge with the metaverse? How do we upload our savvy on hard disc? Probably we need to transform into an entire new (human) life form.

I.1 Puppeteering

[<]

"The ability to truly transform oneself has been regarded in myths and legends as both dangerous and powerful.", write Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University in their research report: "The Proteus Effect"[+] VR has to turn into Real Virtuality (RV)[+], a VR as real as the material world.

David Howard from the Universitiy of York, works to develop a Virtual Cocoon, a Real Virtuality device to stimulate all five senses.[+]

Mandayam Srinivasan, of the MIT Touch Lab has tested BlindAid, a device for blind people to feel their way around a virtual environment. When a virtual obstacle is encountered, the computer produces a force against the user’s hand, mimicking the reaction force from a real obstacle. The New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, used BlindAid during an event called "Art Beyond Sight," to help blind people experience visual arts.[+]

How could we leave our body to enter another one: an avatar? What happens to our brain during an out-of-body sensation while experiencing near-death, under drug intake or meditation? Is this effect simulative? Sensory streams like vision, touch, balance, body awareness usually work together seamlessly to create our feeling of being. "When information from sensory sources does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.", says Matthew Botvinick of Princeton University.[+]

Henrik Ehrsson from the University College of London was able to cause the sensation of being outsidethe body and seeing it from a distance by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick.[+]

Olaf Blanke of the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne does similar experiments. He stimulated a brain region called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and caused the sensation of floating above the own body and looking down on itself.[+]

Will these discoveries be applied to the next generation avatar technology? Can our brains directly connect to VR and perceive it as a distinctively real experience? What happens to our inmost self if we consign it to an artifact like an avatar?

NASA's attempt to do space exploration via the metaverse can be found at NASA CoLab. The director of the NASA Ames Research Center, Pete Worden, wants to live-stream data from space missions directly into VR.[+]

Now we got a basic idea of the metaverse, a term coined by science fiction author Neil Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.[+]

II. Bio and Neurotechnolgy

[<]

To merge intrinsically with the metaverse for millions of years of space travel, we have to go much further than discussing VR. We need to connect our brains to VR. We need to overcome the biological limits of our bodies!

II.1 Revolutionizing Prosthetics

[<]

To control prosthetics by thought, just as we do it with our real arm, electrode arrays need to be plugged into the nerves or brain tissue. The nerve signals then can be send in sufficient accuracy and bidirectionally between brain and the chip controlling the artificial limb. The idea is called invasive brain computer interface (BCI).[+]

Michael McLoughlin of Johns Hopkins manages Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL), a project that received $34.5 million by DARPA to develop a prosthetic arm, that will rely on brain-implanted micro-arrays to record and send neuronal signals. The goal is to enable movements to perform everyday tasks, such as picking up and holding a cup of coffee.[+]

Philip Kennedy implanted in 1998 an electrode into the motor cortex of Johnny Ray, a full paralysed. He learned how to control the screen cursor just by thinking. Kennedy is founder of Neural Signals Inc..[+]

John Donoghue of the Brown University, USA, developed a brain chip technology called BrainGate, registered by Cyberkinetics Neuro-technology Systems, Inc. Thereby a chip was implanted in 2004 into the nervous system of Matthew Nagle. He was able to control a robot arm using thought power. The US government allow more trials on humans in July 2009.[+]

Miguel Nicolelis of the Duke University is well known for having accomplished to control a walking robot by the thoughts of his monkey Idoya. He implanted electrode arrays into the monkey's brain to detect its motor intent and to control reaching and grasping movements performed by a robotic arm. Idoya realised that imaging the movement was enough and it no longer needed to move a joystick.[+]

Frank Guenther of the Boston University used a BCI for real-time synthetic speech production. A man with lockedin syndrome was able to control sound output directly, rather than by typing. Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp. A decoder translates the signals into speech commands for the speech synthesizer.[+]

Invasive BCI technology was used and refined for the Cochlear implant, a bionic ear, that made thousands of deaf hear again.[+] The same thing is expected to work for the eye and is already tested. First devices, like Argus II (by Second Sight Medical Products, Inc.) are implanted into persons who now can recognise doors or fallow the white lines of streets.[+]

The advance of invasive BCIs will allow to connect the human brain directly to VR and percive it with all five senses by an avatar. But furthermore it will be crucial for the MNS to replace the human brain and body by an artificial medium resistant to millions of years interstellar space travel.

II.2 Brain Boosting

[<]

"If you can do it better because you’ve got some drug on board, that would be on the face of things seem like a plus." says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania in reference to academic doping.[+]

Amphetamines where first synthesized in 1887. Modern commercial brands like Adderall[+] or Modafinil[+] are in routine (ab)use among students to improve performance and not only to treat attention deficit disorder, its original purpose. But attention: Risks include dependence and psychosis.

Ulrike Rimmele of the University of Zurich tested oxytocin - known as the "cuddle hormone" - on its affect on human memory and it increased the recognition of faces. "One hormone can specifically influence one type of memory," Rimmele said. Further research may lead to treatments for autistic patients.[+]

Fred Gage[+] and Elizabeth Gould[+] shifted strong paradigms in neuroscience by discovering adult neurogenesis a couple of years ago. Brains aren't chunks of wood any more; they are seen far more flexible today; the neuron doctrine by Santiago Ramon y Cajal is updated[+]; mind is a versatile weasel. The finding will progress the better understanding and cure of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, strokes and depression.

Mike Modo of the King's College London injected a biodegradable polymer loaded with neural stem cells directly into stroke cavities of mice, where complex scaffolds where build and connections with the surrounding brain tissue established.[+]

Li-Huei Tsai of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the MIT's Picower Institute works with an enzyme called histone deacetylase (HDAC), a epigenetic regulator. Her goal is to boost selectively gene expression in the brain. HDAC inhibitors might  promote growth of dendrites and increase synaptogenesis, improve plasticity, strengthen the neural circuits and enhance memory.[+]

Keith Muir of the University of Glasgow will lead the first clinical trial involving neural stem cell therapy in ischaemic stroke by a therapy called ReN001 and developed by the ReNeuron Group after the company received approval from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).[+]

Enterprises like BrainCells Inc.[+], Neuronova[+] and Stem Cell Therapeutics Corp.[+] already test drugs like BCI-540, BCI-632, sNN0031 and NTxTM-265 to stimulate neurogenesis.

StemCells Inc. announced an important milestone to have successfully transplanted purified human neural stem cells (HuCNS-SC™) into patients with Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis or Batten Disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disorder.[+]

Neurologix, a biotechnology company, has developed a therapy now tested in clinical trials. A gene called GAD codes an enzyme that catalyses the production of GABA, a chemical messenger. Dopamine is a chemical precursor to GABA, and the cells that produce it are lost in Parkinson's.[+]

In the coming decades this kind of investigation could lead to treatments for neurodegenerative disorders like Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Will it also be possible to tune our brains and keep them fresh without scary side effects? Nootropics, neurogenesis, neuronal stem cell transplantation and neuogenetics could help to conserve our brain until we are able to replace it by an other medium.

II.3 Age of Ageless

[<]

Aubrey de Grey, gerontologist of the Cambridge University, UK and founder of the Methuselah Foundation wants to cure senescence, like any other disease. It makes SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) [+] to people who like life. He claims there is a 50% chance to gain an additional 30 years of life expectation in about 25 years[+]. To push anti-ageing science Aubrey's Foundation pays the Methuselah Mouse Rejuvenation Prize (Mprize) to researchers who prolonged mouse lives up to five years, what is the equivalent of extending a human life up to 200 years.[+] The Foundation's own research programmes with names like LysoSENS or MitoSENS have a clear bio-engineering approach to target ageing related cell damages. Searching for microbial enzymes to recycle and remove cellular junk or trying to save vulnerable genes of the cellular "power plants", the mitochondria, it burns a funding budget of several million dollars per year.[+]

Judith Campisi of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory works on telemeres, cancer and related mechanisms like tumour suppressors, DNA repair and transcription, genetic and epigenetic damage, mitochondrial function. She also works for the Buck Institute for Age Research,  dedicated to increase our health-span, the healthy years of life.[+]

Richard Walker of the University of South Florida sequenced the DNA of a 17 years old girls whose size and development corresponds to that of a baby. Walker hypothesizes the cause is the disruption of an unidentified master ageing gene or regulator of development.[+]

Tomohiro Kono of the Tokyo University links the gene Ras-GRF1 to women's longer lifespans. He produced one third longer-living mice by the DNA from two mothers but no father. The gene is expressed in men, but silenced in women.[+]

Paola Sebastiani and Thomas T. Perls of Boston University analyzed the genomes of 1055 centenarians. 150 genetic variants were associated with extreme longevity. The technique could show the genetic roots of common diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer.[+] It predicts extreme longevity with 77 percent accuracy. But other scientists criticize the New England Centenarian Study.[+]

Tim Spector from King's College London co-led a study where more than 500,000 genetic variations from human gene maps where analysed. The gene TERC regulates the length of telomeres and plays a key role in aging and cancer. People carrying a particular variant of the gene had shorter telomeres, and appeared biologically older, found the study. "Some people are genetically programed to age at a faster rate." Spector said.[+]

Elisabeth Blackburn, 2009 Medicine Nobel-price-winner of the University of California in San Francisco discovered together with Carol Greider in 1984 telomerase, the enzyme that recovers the telomeres by adding DNA strands. Shorter telomeres tend to be linked with shorter life spans. Blackburn tests how psychological stress can accelerate the shortening of telomeres and how exercise could counteract that decline.[+]

David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, thinks resveratrol activates SIRT1, a gen believed to regulate ageing by encoding Sirt1, a sirtuin.[+] Sinclair co-founded together with Christoph Westphal Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Human trials on SRT501 and mouse tests on SRT1720, both SIRT1 activators are undertaken.[+] It was found to improve insulin sensitivity and lower plasma glucose levels in fat, muscle and liver tissue, and increased mitochondrial and metabolic function. Sirtris Pharmaceuticals was bought by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million in 2008.[+]

Ricki J. Colman and Richard Weindruch at the University of Wisconsin stared a study 20 years ago where rhesus monkeys are put under 30% caloric restriction. The monkeys show significantly less diabetes, cancer, and heart and brain disease. Mice kept on such a diet live up to 40 percent longer.[+]

II.4 From Mouse to Mars

[<]

Regenerative medicine could become a powerful tool to fix and replace broken and outworn body parts. The understanding of stem cells and cell communication is crucial.

Shinya Yamanaka of the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University was able to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from human adult fibroblasts in 2007, a mayor breakthrough shifting paradigms in the stem cell debate. He achieved to create embryonic-like stem cells by inserting four transcription factors into adult cells.[+]

James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin was the first one to isolate human embryonic stem cells in 1998, starting a war on ethics, the stem cell debate. Almost 10 years later he was able to turn adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells. Independently he archived the same result Shinya Yamanaka did, but with a slightly different group of factors.[+]

Kevin Eggan of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute has the goal to reprogram skin and blood cells into iPS cells to use them to make heart cells, blood cells, nerve cells or even entire organs to treat disease.[+]

Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, was able to change cells identity in living mice - not in the dish - to produce insulin. Besides of being a major leap towards preventing diabetes it could give rise to new treatments like growing new heart or nerve cells after heart attack or stroke. Thereby the pattern of active and shut off genes of a cell gets reprogrammed. "It's like a scientist becoming a lawyer without having to go back to kindergarten and grow up again," Melton says.[+]

Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. in Massachusetts, grows blood cells from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). It's a step towards the mass-production of clean and disease-free transfusible blood for example with the rare type O-negative that can be transfused into any patient.[+]

Hans Keirstead of the University of California, Irvine in 2005 was able to make partially paralyzed rats walk - by human stem cells.[+] Keirstead works for Geron Corp., the world leader in the development of human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-based therapeutics. Geron received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin the world's first human clinical trial of an embryonic stem cell-based therapy using a drug called GRNOPC1 for acute spinal cord injury. A success of the trial would mean a mayor in regenerative medicine.[+]

Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota, shows that not only blood can be recreated in vitro, but also organs. In 2008 her lab was able to grow a new beating pig heart by introducing stems cells on the extracellular matrix of a old pig heart. The procedure is called Whole Organ Decellularization.[+]

Laura Niklason of Yale University engineered a lung by growing cells and transplanted it in a live rat, where it exchanged carbon dioxide with oxygen for two hours.[+]

Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine has implanted the first custom made bladders in patients since 2002 preserving kidney function. Scaffolds out of degradable polymers or even carbon nanotubes can be used to seed stem cells on. "A salamander can grow back its leg, why can’t a human do the same?" Atala askes.[+]

II.5 Proof Reading

[<]

Mistakes on the DNA can be inherited or caused by mutation and viruses. Higher DNA sequencing speeds and data processing power allow a quicker finding of mistakes. Genetic engineering and gene therapy rises hope to fix them and cure disease.

William W. Hauswirth of the University of Florida developed a gene-transfer technique to cure squirrel monkeys of color blindness. About five weeks after the treatment, the monkeys began to acquire color vision.[+]

Patrick Aubourg of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), showed in a preliminary trial that gene therapy stopped adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a deadly degenerative brain disease caused by mutations in a gene called ABCD1. A normal version of the ABCD1 gene was inserted into cells and transplanted back.[+]

23andMe is a gene-testing company backed by Google Inc. that wants to collect DNA from 10,000 people with Parkinson’s disease to find genes that connect to responsiveness to therapy.[+]

II.6 Magic Bullets

[<]

Drug-delivery agents that can target the site of disease in the body have been referred to "magic bullets". The term was coined by Paul Ehrlich (1854 - 1915), a German scientist and Nobel laureate in the fields of hematology, immunology and chemotherapy. Nanotechnology gives rise to a new generation of magic bullets: nanomedicine.

Robert Langer of the MIT and Omid Farokhzad of Harvard used "nanoburrs" that cling to damaged artery walls and vascular tissue to slowly release medicine. The particles may also could deliver drugs to tumours.[+] "This is a very exciting example of nanotechnology and cell targeting in action," said Langer.[+]

Nanospectra Biosciences Inc. works on clinical trials using tiny gold-coated silica balls to cook tumours while leaving healthy tissue intact[+].

II.7 Artificial Organs

[<]

Dialysis systems that assume functions of organs like liver and kidneys are today successfully in operation for the detoxification treatment of blood. Liver dialysis systems, unlike kidney dialysis, cannot support a patient for an extended period of time yet.

Steven Russell of the Massachusetts General Hospital run a test of an artificial pancreas that monitors blood sugar and delivers both insulin and regulatory hormone called glucagon helped patients achieve near-normal blood sugar levels for more than 24 hours.[+]

Bill Johns of the Swansea University, UK works on an implantable artificial lung, a portable device to allow patients to recover outside intensive care units and offer them a better quality of life.[+]

III. Supercomputation

[<]

An artificial brain to permit mind-uploading is probably the hardest and latest step of the construction of the MNS. The MNS was inspired by Europe's once most powerful supercomputer, the MareNostrum Supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.[+]

Currently the worlds fastest supercomputer is Tianhe-1A (天河一号) at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin with a performance of 2.507 petaflops.[+] But it is far not powerful enough to simulate the human brain with about 100 billion neurons, each linked to another 10.000. However, it is non-sense to compare a human brain with a silicon based supercomputer since both are organized completely different.

III.1 Blue Brain

[<]

Henry Markram of the Brain and Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne together with IBM launched the Blue Brain Project. His goal is to reverse-engineer the human brain via computer simulation, on molecular level, including the mechanisms of gen-expression. An accurate model of the neocortical column works since 2007.[+] Markram said: "It's not a question of years, it's one of dollars. It's a matter of if society wants this. If they want it in 10 years, they'll have it in 10 years. If they want it in 1000 years, we can wait."[+]

III.2 Wetware

[<]

Will a silicon based supercomputer simulate consciousness? A future supercomputer might be based on quantum or molecular processes. Our brain and body could hold as an example, even we don't understand consciousness itself.

"If one day we want to construct computers of similar power and complexity to the human brain, my bet would be on some form of chemical or molecular computing," said Frantisek Stepanek of the Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague to the BBC.[+]

Paul W. K. Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology works on "DNA origami". DNA could align circuits and get destroyed afterwards by the chipmaking processes.[+]

Even a scientific breakthrough, molecular computers are still far from practical applications.

IV.1 Morphological Freedom

[<]

We got a glimpse of the state of the art of the key-technologies relevant to create the MNS. Most of them provide proof-of-concept. It means the MNS might become viable within next decades! But it is not only a question of feasibility, it is also a matter of affordability, utility and delicate ethical implications.

The MNS roadmap is not only of scientific and technological but also of ethical concern. We can destroy our home planet, escape and keep annihilating the universe. Or we can harmonize with Mother Earth and Cosmos. It is our choice!

Human life-extension, enhancement and "morphological freedom" seem to be conformable with democratic principles and the human rights. For example the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 3 says: "Everyone has the right to live, have liberty, and security of person." Using science and technology to reduce the risks of death fosters the security of person. But not everybody desires or can afford radical technological enhancement. What happens if society splits into humans, superhumans and posthumans with ineffable differing levels of existence, capability and intellect? Will superhuman and posthuman existence still be conformable with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? For example with Article 1: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."