Doomsday: A Phoenix

Continuing from my last blog on the subject of using DNA as a repository I find my thoughts venturing into the realm of hard extrapolation. This post therefore qualifies as pure synapse action.
Chromosome pairs in the DNA are closely bound to hormone action. Keep this point in mind, and move onward. Although theology is not really my forte I would venture to state that almost all belief/support systems tell the individual something along the lines of "Believe in yourself", or "The Kingdom of God resides within you", or even succinctly "Man, know thyself". Such statements are also echoed in the age old "Mens sana in corpore sano".

Hindu mythology is replete with examples of ordinary men acquiring and applying abilities far beyond that of their fellows. How did they do so? Myth & Legend tell us such achievement had one fundamental requirement - call upon a member of the hindu pantheon until she/he would open the gateway to desired knowledge. For such meditation a necessary precondition was knowledge of Yoga as it would provide the necessary control of one's physiology - to the extent of being in meditation for years on end!

Even today an accomplished Yoga instructor may tell his disciples that the secret to Yoga is that the individual develops the ability to use/control muscles that would otherwise atrophy unnoticed in 'modern' life. Such fine musclular action could serve to trigger some glands or suppress others such that specific hormones may appear in the bloodstream. Hormones that may serve as the 'unlock code' for specific base pairs.

Could our ancestors/predecessors have left us a message that will only be available when we pursue a certain life-style/dharma/karma? That is to say such knowledge will not be available until we are ready for it ... which serves to paraphrase yet another idiom "... in the fullness of time"

Doomsday: Through the valley of the shadow

So all the brouhaha about the 'doomsday' recorded in the Mayan Calendar for the month of December 2012 got me thinking.

To the best of our knowledge we do not go back much more than a few millenia - not even a score of them. The thinking goes that if there had been an older civilization there would be signs of it - as there is proof of the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Eblan civilizations. Ergo, we are the first modern scientifically advanced civilization since Homo Sapiens evolved 4.5 million years ago or so.

Assume now our civilization were to be utterly destroyed - with a few thousands of survivors out of the present population of more than 6 billion. In the absence of the ability to communicate, these survivors might (within a few generations) return to living off the land. In a pinch, even the many libraries may not survive the new savage.

The knowledge of several millenia of nearly uninterrupted progress might be lost!!

One solution would be to store this knowledge - perhaps the equivalent of the Encylopedia Brittanica in a 'stasis'. This stasis field would preserve until such time as the survivors would again acquire the minimum scientific knowledge to reach into the stasis field. But what kind of stasis field could possibly maintain power for an unforeseeable duration? Sooner or later even a plutonium power-supply would wind down.

The question had me flummoxed until it occurred to me that there is atleast one means to make knowledge available to future generations after maintaining it in stasis for an indefinite period.

Although organic we are creatures of electricity. Our nervous system, our bodies are susceptible to electricity & magnetism - which makes it possible to perform EKG, EEG, etc. From the amoeba up this applies to other animals too. Of course, our bodies use electricity in the microvolt range -
perhaps even a lower order of magnitude. But a human body wouldn't last even if provided with nutrition. Yet there are additional paths on this track of thought. So - why not store the information in such a manner that it would last as long as life itself did? This way, whatever the life-form, any information would be stored and maintained as long as the life-form continued to exist.

Use the genome of several species to record data and act as your repository. Choose lower animals rather than higher for they are more likely to survive - the trade-off being that they may have a shorter life-span, and faster mutation rate.

Now as long as the species ; your repository, survives - your data may be retrieved; subject to the ability of that later new civilization to follow your train of thought.