I had a thought one time, many years ago, about the rising of The Beast of Revelation. This particular vision of the anti-christ was far subtler than most have thought, and yet, at the same time, more terrifying in its implications than any other horror I have ever dreamt of.
I have long thought, because of the numerical significance
involved, and the technology present, that this terrible enslaving Beast
that was foretold of was never a Human Being at all, but more of what I
call an "Artificial Deity" constructed by man.
From the very beginning, it seems, our species
has seen fit to modify and transform the world into something that is always
totally different from the way that GOD created it. Our cities and
towns have almost always been places where the natural world is put under,
out, and away from us. We tear up the forests and meadows to somehow
make the ground more useful to us. We do not find any natural places
of shelter as other living creatures do; We build them of our own
design. We dam and divert and force the rivers into pipes and ditches.
We drain and create lakes where we wish. We knock down hills and
fill in valleys as we see fit for our own purposes. The natural world
has never been good enough for us as it was made by the Creator.
I shouldn't speak in such absolute terms though. There have been,
and yet are, cultures that wish to live in the real world. Mostly they
have been wiped out and pushed aside in the name of progress, like every
other thing that does not suit us as it is.
Some areas today, one can walk miles without seeing the real world as it was created. The natural landscape has been replaced by asphalt, concrete, steel, and glass. It is artificial. It is the world as we have made it. It is as a parasite existence upon the world that was created for us. We find ourself frightened and cursing GOD for the powers of nature that we have yet to harness. Floods, Droughts, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes are the works of the devil, we say. No one seems to realize that all we have built to be so permanent is founded upon a very much alive, and everchanging Earth that we can never hope to control entirely. But we shall continue to try. We fight the very planet we live upon as if it was the enemy somehow. How much more out of balance can we get? Actually, we can go alot further. We might even be able to kill the planet as a living organism, (which I believe it is in fact.)
Seems to all be about making life and living easier. We don't like it when things change. We fear what will happen next. We fear the changing of the seasons and the movements of the entity of total Earth that lives around and about the artificial world we have created for ourselves. Even those who really seem to appreciate the beauty of nature are always at war with her. They plant gardens and lawns, and fight continually to keep it under control; the way that THEY wanted it to be. Mowing, weeding, pruning cleaning, always messing with things. Nature is always working to change things and revert back to a natural state, and we are always right there fighting her every step of the way.
From this silly game, I get the idea that we would do just about anything to keep nature from being what it is. If we could find a way to stop the endless cycle of change and renewal, we might just do so. We want to be in control of everything around us. We are always searching for ways to do just that. At our presently high level of technology, combined with our low level of actual understanding of either ourselves or our place in this world, there are some rather frightening possibilities on the horizon.
In our laziness and ignorance, we have put a lot of power to control into the hands (so to speak) of these wonderful machines: our Computers. So much so that we are now terrified and predicting global chaos in just a couple of months as the year 2000 approaches, simply because of a human error regarding the way they were programmed. I think more and more things will be turned over to the control of electronic life as we find ways to do so. We see the possibilities of solving some of our most important issues by virtue of these machines. We are using them to fight diseases and develope cures. We are using them to model and design DNA and genetic code to make the species stronger and more enduring. We use them to design and build just about everything around us; from our dwellings and vehicles, to even more powerful and sophisticated machines. They control our electricity, sewer systems, traffic signals and communication networks. They are behind our banking, trade, and financial systems. They can process information with such great speed and volume that they are very beneficial to "improving" our way of life. And we are looking at ways to improve even more.
What if we could use them to keep track of food production, consumption, and distribution? We could almost wipe out starvation on the planet if we could just manage our resources better. Piles of crops that are allowed to rot to keep prices high in one nation could be sent to another starving nation that wasn't really involved in the world economy as much. What if we could eliminate cash and currency altogether and have our financial transactions all electronic? There are many considering this idea right now, and also putting it into practice. At work, there is a computer that keeps track of how many hours you work and how much money you make. When the pay period ends; you don't even need to take your check to the bank, it is deposited into your account automatically. When you go to the store to buy groceries and other necessities; you just use your debit card to pay for them. You don't need to carry any cash at all. Then, you can go home to your PC, get connected to the net, and pay the rest of your bills via electronic funds transfer. Isn't this great? Dealing with real cash will only occur among criminals whose transactions are illegal in the first place, such as buying stolen property and drugs.
And this new way of business has other benefits too, though mostly only to those who are trying to get you to spend more money on their products, and the government. With electronic transfers, the people who run the networks can keep track of everything you do. They know where you work, and when. They know what you buy, because everything has a sku number or UPC to identify it. Every place that anyone either makes their money, or spends it, can be closely monitored. This is very useful to persons who are trying to figure out your spending habits to better their marketing techniques. They know who you talk to on the phone, and where you surf on the web. They know where you travel to and where you have been. Information is Power; and some people and organizations just can never get enough.
Of the machines though, they are not the monsters.
They do not possess any will or desire. They know nothing of Good
or Evil. They are but tools. Every nightmare that has thus
far come from turning control over to the computers has been the result
of human error or lack of foresight. The machines follow PROGRAMS.
Many programs today are no longer being written by human beings at all,
but by other computers. And this is nothing to really worry about,
as the computers make fewer programming errors, and the programs they produce
for other computers to run are more precise, faster, and more efficient.
All there is to worry about, at this point, is the potential for an error
or bug in the program that will not be realized to exist until it fails
under some important circumstance. Again though, it is not the fault
of the machine. They only do what we think we tell them to do.
The real problems come from programming errors and electromagnetic interference. Programming errors are the result, mostly, of imperfect human beings looking at a program code and interpreting it for errors. We do not always see the space that was added in error, or the command that was supposed to be given in all lower case, or maybe a slight spelling error, or other "syntax" error that screws everything up. We even create other programs to check for such human errors, but they will fail under the proper circumstances. Those who have worked with various word processing programs have a great deal of confidence in the "spell check" attributes of such programs. Maybe you have seen in reality how Spellcheck will only catch an error if it is not a real listed word in it's dictionary. If you type them, for example, but you meant to type then, (the M and the N are right next to each other on the keyboard, and often mis-keyed.) Spellcheck will not catch this. "Them" is not a mis-spelled word, and the grammar check is not so aware as to even be able to catch such a typo. Hunt and peck typists, such as myself, are quite prone to this sort of error. But this is only part of the problems inherent with modern (1999) computer technology.
There are other errors that can occur. These are problems that few are able to understand. I will do my best to explain these other sources of errors and mis-information, but please forgive me if I am found to be wrong:
To those unfamiliar with the nature of Electricity,
I shall attempt this quick primer:
A current that passes through a wire, or contact,
produces an electromagnetic wave that affects nearby wires and paths.
When any voltage is passed through a wire, it gives off a wave that is
of the same frequency around it, as well as through it. This
is the power behind a Transformer: or two coils linked. (I realise most
of this will be far above those without any understanding of electrical
theory, Ohms Laws, or the like, please forgive.)
An electrical current passing through a line such as a wire will radiate waves of electromagnetic energy in a circle around that line or wire. A loop passing through this wave will itself be induced with a current from that electromagnetic wave that it is in the realm of influence of. What this all means, to those who do not know of electronic Laws, is that a wire or connection passing a current that is close to another wire or connection, will be induced with the power of that circuit that it is close to, if it is too close to be immune from it. Every wire and line in your dwelling gives off an electromagnetic wave. Most of these voltages so induced are too minute to affect anything at all, except microcircuitry like the kind found in any type of common PC.
In summary, this means that the lines of travel through microcircuitry are so close together that sometimes the charges get confused. Microcircuitry, as in your processor chip of your modern PC, is very thus prone to interference from outside waves and currents. What the program line is for one aspect becomes connected with a totally alien line of communication and therefore corrupted. Those who work with MS Windows, as most of us do, are well aware that this very advanced operating system has a propensity to lock up or crash unpredictably. This is not a fault of the machine, or even of the operating system. It is a force of nature.
Our machines are able to function due to LSI: which is Large Scale Integration of circuitry. Some more advanced chips work in VLSI: or Very Large Scale Integration. The most advanced chips are of ULSI configuration: Ultra Large Scale Integration. Most of these chips operate on a level of actual atomic configuration. They are microcircuits only a few ATOMS apart. These most advanced type of circuits and processor chips are only a few atoms in width. What these type of chips tend to do is called "Whispering". The currents flowing through them have a tendency to "Talk" to each other through the electromagnetic waves that occur when any current passes through a line. Weird things happen when information is conveyed through such compacted organisations of electrical charge. We cannnot begin to make our CPU's smaller until we conquer this invisible enemy of "Whispering". BINARY sees everything as Positive and Negative: or ON and OFF. This language is simply of YES and NO. In such incredibly tiny circuitry, and even at the smallest micro-voltages of current; occasionally enough of a phantom voltage is induced to make the machine respond to an incorrect string of charges. What was sent through the system and intended to be representative of an OFF charge, picks up a transient voltage wave from some unknown source and appears to the system as ON instead. Something that was supposed to appear to the system as 10011000110110001010010, comes through as 10011000110110101010010 instead. As you have to take some time to find the difference between these two strings of characters, so does your CPU. But it does not always do so. Even though the chip is perfectly constructed, and the program itself might be perfectly written without any errors or bugs whatsoever, the strings of binary information can be thus corrupted in transit, by whispering, at almost any place within the circuitry of the machine. Anyone who has worked with the modern operating systems knows how frequently this happens. And when it does, the system hangs up, locks, fails a command, or just crashes. It is not a fault of the chipset, motherboard,(or Microsoft!) but the natural system of planet Earth. Electrical currents and voltages passing through any type of wire, line, or connection ALWAYS generate an electromagnetic field that has the possibility of inducing an alien current in nearby lines. Any time the machine uses a signal that is intended to be NO SIGNAL, (a dead charge,) there is the possibilty that it will instead receive an ON charge, and so respond to it - or try to.
Every computer program in existence today uses this system that is so flawed at the level we are using it. A single "bit" is really a BYTE which is a character containing 8 units. This is a character the machine uses that has the volume to contain an 8 digit binary value. An 8 digit binary value means that it can convey a bit of information that is equivalent to 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2. A single byte, therefore, can mean up to 256 different things. One kilobyte, or 1k, is a thousand times this amount of information. One megabyte is a million times this amount of information. A 24 bit "bitmap image" thus allows the display of up to 6144 different colors. And a 32 bit program can process input at the rate of 8192 values at a time. Do you have any idea what a string of 8192 characters looks like? The confusing string of binary shown above, in the last paragraph, contains only 23 characters. To actually show a string of 8192 characters would take up more of this page than I am willing to sacrifice for the point. But if only ONE of the OFF characters of the binary required to convey a line in a 32 bit program is corrupted by whispering to have a value of "Psuedo ON" instead, the whole program might crash. This is why Windows screws up and crashes so often. It is not the fault of Intel or Microsoft at all.
We want to call it a software problem that Bill Gates should fix for us, but it isn't. Microsoft has very simply developed an operating system that exceeds the possibilities of the hardware we are working with. Rather than curse Microsoft, we should instead appeal to Intel to design a processor that is not the same as the rest at all. Once the folks at Intel catch a clue and give us the NEXT generation of chips, we can then talk to Microsoft and request them to build the ULTIMATE operating system.
What we really need is to change the machine language. I do not even know enough about microelectronics to fathom how this might be possible, but I know that a different language could solve the problem. Logic circuits that could distinguish between not only the charges of ON and OFF, but a third possibility of MAYBE, would be immune to whispering for the most part. Instead of continuing along the line of "more SPEED!" as the contemporary geniuses of CPU engineering are, they should redirect their efforts toward this new language. Because, as the scale of integration increases, CPU clock speed will increase, but so will the number of errors. Machines that could be made to operate with the TRINARY language would be able to see strings of information that would allow for fluctuations of micro-voltages.
This has its own frightening implications, however,
for this language of Trinary is that of Life and Creation itself, I feel.
We might not just create a PC that is more advanced than any before it.
We might, and it seems a very REAL possibility to me, create nothing less
than an Artificial Deity.
With circuitry being manufactured at the atomic level, with Silicon being the most abundant material on the planet, and the Trinary language being able to convey ideas of quantum order, we might build a machine that has the potential to alter Matter itself, and our entire reality of existence here.
The great Beast of Revelation may not be some curse
that GOD has planned to throw at us to begin the Apocalyptic demise of
life on Earth at all. We might have to create it ourselves.
It may well be the time that we finally accept our Divine lineage and prove
to ourselves just how much power we have the capacity to demonstrate and
invoke. Surely, with the broad acceptance of the terrors inherent
with Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological technology, a new type of Computer
isn't going to scare us any. We won't even see it coming.
More>
How MICROSOFT has built in holes to allow advertisers to control your computer
Copyright 2000 by J.S.Graham