People with strong faith can answer the question in one single line but faith itself is again a very questionable term.Religion again is derived from perceptions. I had been thinking of all these questions svaeral times when I was doing projects which are doing some kind of automation. So here is a case which I will assume and try to figure out some answers.
Consider a software running on a powerfull computer. This software creates a virtual world absolutly similar to the one in which we live. How this is possible? We know that every single behaviur of living beings, even the behaviur of individual organs is hard coded into their gene sequences.Offcourse people change and adapt depending upon the environment and situations in which they live, but how they adap is again coded into genes.For instance son of a doctor is more likely 2 become a doctor and not a politician and vice versa and it all depends on the environment he lives in. He might choose to become a politician say if his friends were doing so or he was highly inspired by som politician. In terms of software it can be thought of as a state change based on some environmental parameters. So back to the question how can we create such a software. There are few major challenges.
A Machine powerfull enough to handle immense calculations that will be integral part of this software.These calculations will be beyond the imagination of we humans can think of now.As of today the most powerfull computers cant calculate gene sequences to identify HIV and calculate genes that can serve as medicines.One of my friend Vaibhav made a cluster of computers to enhance the calculation of HIV sequence but he could only find upto 500 genes per hour. and the software which we are talking about should calculate millions(people) * billion (genes) calculations.Will we humans be able to see such a machine before we get extinct? YES I am sure we will. You must be thinking I am talking on the base of Moores' law which says that computation power goes 2 times every x years. No! that will take million more years to see such a machine. I am talking on the basis of latest research going around NanoTechnology. Yes! transistors of nanoscale when integrated can do the trick. I read some where that logic gates which as of now operate on voltage levels(low/high) can be made to work on the state of an atom in gaseous state. So such a machine might be a reality some day (I jus hope it happens before I die :P). To gain More clarity you should read some basics of NanoTechnology here>>
Now given such a machine, the next challange is to define the starting point.When did the first life form come into being, what was the first structure of a human, was he an ape or another monkey we see on streets of India? Good news is that starting point for our software can be any point on time,we can even take starting point which is yet to come (ie somewhere in future). The bad news is its really difficult to define the initial environmental parameters for any random starting point. For example if we
choose present timestamp as the starting point of our software then we will have to map each and every human being as a programme. And that will require each and every state changes he had gone through since his birth. In other words we need to know each and every incident that happend with the human being mapped even the tiniest frequency of sound that reached his ear drums alters the parameters.So choosing such a starting point doesnot make sense and infact is impossible to trace(or may be I am unaware of such possibilities). So for starting point its easiest to start from the most historical time that has been traced by archaeologists. In such a case we have to define a community of humans living on flesh and when
no fire was discovered. I know now I am moving a lil away from the ideal design of our software but that is how all the scientific laws work. So a feasible starting point can be a community of humans struggling for food, with no knowledge of rest of the world and their behaviur well defined based on laws on which genes work.
I have used to term "well defined" cuz it is used as a starting point and which will change once the software has been started. Initial environmental parameters will involve other living beings which were also part of that world,the trees geographic parameters everything will have to be initialized relative to that time.
To be continued...
