THE MAN OF THE FUTURE

Taranaki Daily News, 21 December 1929, Page 11

THE MAN OF THE FUTURE

BRAIN IN MACHINERY NETWORK. The future of man when science has successfully cut him adrift ' from the earth, divested him of his body, suppressed most of. his present desires and appetites, and at last abolished his separate individuality, is the theme of briskly dogmatic and provocative essay by a young Cambridge scientist, Mr. J. D. Bernal, who has published a book entitled, “The World, the Flesh and the Devil.” Mr. Bernal starts with the exploration of space. JThe new ballistics will produce a travelling rocket in which man will set out to colonise, not the greater planets, but the asteroids. Why this curious goal? Because these little bodies, perhaps ten miles in diameter, could be transformed lock, stock and barrel into inter-stellar caravans and travelling carriages, in which large bodies of humanity could, by diverting their home from its orbit, make their way right out of the solar system to any desired part of the universe. A LONG WAY TO GO. Of coufsq they would have a long way to go and “it would be necessary —if man remains as he is—for colonies of ancestors to start out, and it would be

their remote descendants -who would arrive at the other end. But will man remain as he is? Mr. Bernal is prepared to change him out of all recognition. He goes far beyond even Mr. Shaw’s ancients and depicts the man of the future, after living to a normal old age, submitting to what is practically the amputation of the whole of his worn-out body. The brain alone will be retained and fitted into a network of machinery, providing it with a score of artificial senses in place oi the five natural ones and endowing it with the power to attain an intensity of knowledge and experience beyond present conjecture. More than this, electrical machinery will so link up brain with brain that their separate individuality will in time disappear, and they will function as corporate personalities. (Mr. Bernal seems at times to be aware that he has failed to distinguish brain from personality; but the method of observational science gives him no instrument to grapple with the difficulty, and he has to pass it by unillumined. THE END NEGATION. But does the scientist, as a man,, want these things himself, and, if ■ so, why? Mr. Bernal admits something repulsive in his own picture, yet can resolve his difficulty only by assuming in the man of the future an increasing power to desire his own grim handiwork. The end is negation. All the familiar apparatus of man’s self-knowledge disappears. God, of course, is left behind at the start; so is the soul. The physical earth is abandoned. The body is soon superseded, and then the mind; consciousness seems to survive for a time, a diffused collective phantom, but that, too, ultimately resolves itself, by radiation, “entirely into light.” Do we want this more than the old heaven and the old earth ? And if we do not, is man or is he not master of i his fate? And what is science if it does not help him to that mastery? ■: J h rwek ion ■ ' • J •; sc-b<';. xiilou to