Coming home

There is a semi-popular concept that all sentient beings know where "home" is, and the further that being is from this place, the more they feel it's pull on their center. It's rather unscientific but like most apocrypha, still compelling.

Do nomads not feel the urge to find a place where they will be prosperous, and welcome?

When our nanoscopic ancestors leave Earth in search of whatever basic elements they require for growth, and spread amongst the other planets, our local star, and then eventually, others deemed suitable, it's an interesting question as to whether they will ever feel the need to report back.

Is homesickness simply an evolutionary mechanism, in place to guide us to safety, or is it something deeper than instinct?

At the current rate of acceleration of increase in performance per cost in computing by 2020 we'll see machines with the same capacity for calculations per second as a human brain. They will pass any test put to them by a human to determine their consciousness. We'll be able to plug our own minds into a virtual world with many forms of direct sensory input. We'll have virtual bodies, and feel how they interact with the virtual world. We'll be able to modify them in many ways. By 2030, machine (non-biological) intelligence will be highly affordable and thus accessible, and already surpassing many of the abilities of an unaugmented human brain. Ten years later, we'll have very tiny machines capable of modifying our read-world bodies in an nearly any way we can conceive.

It's only a few steps from here that we'll go out into the darkness just to see what is there. It's comparatively easy to accelerate such tiny things to speeds approaching c, than it is to send one of our primate bodies "out there."

Forget star ships. Try imagining star peas, or star dandruff flakes.

Moving on to other accomplishments. Without the need for breath, with full control over one's senses, and one's body... Is enlightenment as described by all the Zen masters not then possible?

Perfect Clarity, Perfect Stillness, Perfect Love, Perfect Beauty, Perfect Truth. Persistent Perfection, at least in the mind of the observer.

Our world may be on the brink of destruction, but if we survive long enough to shed the need for these worldly bodies, we're in for a complete transformation of consciousness. Maybe the Sacred Texts were onto something after all...