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Published: 29th of June, 2023.
Last updated: June 29, 2023 at 5:24 am
For the past seven years, I’ve travelled across the continent of South America over a distance of more than 10,000 miles, back and forth. During my travels, I’ve carried two essential tools with me: my laptop computer on which I’m writing this article, and my external hard drive which stores gigabytes of important files and documents.
Even I myself am amazed at how well I’ve cared for and protected these two “faithful friends,” during my travels. If one of these items were somehow damaged, you might not be reading this article today, and I might be facing some serious financial challenges. After all, my career and my finances are strongly dependent on my computer devices. Consequently, when traveling, I would wrap and pad these items up so well that it was difficult to break or be damaged during my travels. Further, I would advise motorists and airline employees that a “fragile computer” was in my bag or suitcase. Nevertheless, I took such special care in packaging these computer devices that they never broke despite the fact that the bag or suitcase was flung about roughly sometimes.
About ten years ago, an external hardrive was the best safeguard for all your important documents, music, videos, passwords, etc. After all, your computer can crash and you can lose all the data stored on it. But with an external hard drive, if your computer crashes, your data is still safe.
But even with such extreme care, I still fear that one day, something can happen that can wipe out all my data. For example, a meteorite could hit my house and obliterate my computer and hard drive on my desk while I’m not home. It’s unlikely to happen, but it’s not impossible. Or, worst yet, something could happen during my many travels. There is something more I can do to safeguard my decades upon decades of invaluable digital data…and that is…uploading it to the cloud.
You see, back in the days, the ability to upload stuff to the cloud was very limited. It was a luxury reserved for the rich. Fast forward to today, June, 2023, and things have changed. Internet is steadily becoming faster, cheaper, and more readily available. The ability to upload gigabytes of data to Google Drive, and access anywhere, has become a reality. Now, I would feel so much safer traveling the world knowing that my digital assets are safe in the cloud and not on an external hard drive which can break during travels.
I can use the external hard drive as an analogy for the human body, and I can use the data contained on the external hard drive as an analogy for the human mind. During travels, the external hard drive can be destroyed, leading to the loss of the data. In the same way, the human body risks dying during our everyday activities…some being at much greater risk than others. If someone dies in an accident or from an illness, their mind, or consciousness, is also lost and can ever be accessed again.
But here is where things get interesting. Scientists say they have developed a way to store a person’s consciousness out of the body, on “the cloud” just as we can upload the data from an external hard drive to the cloud on Google Drive. They say that this way, we can communicate with loved ones way after their physical bodies have died.
But this idea raises some very serious questions and concerns. Will copying our “consciousness” to the cloud actually be the real deal? And what if, one day, scientists develop technology to replicate living human bodies. Then, one day, they can create bodies and download consciousness from the cloud to the bodies. That way, they can bring previously dead people back to life.
The whole idea of uploading consciousness to the cloud is mind boggling. Further, the idea of copying one’s consciousness conflicts with religious ideals. But historically, when science and religious conflicted, science has almost always prevailed. The question here is, will science beat religion in the quest for immortality? And if it does, will God allow this?
