8/30/2003 09:48:18 AM|||Travis|||

Watched a cool movie last night.

Solaris was its name, and heaven was its game. It was a story about a space station orbited around a living planet. The planet itself is like a giant mind that can consume anything that gets close to it. By consume, I mean that it can take all the memories of a person and then understand them. It then goes ahead and creates a split of the person by replicating someone important from the original person's past.

It got me thinking about uploading all over again and what it would be like to actually jump inside a computation device and live. Would it really be like Heaven?

We got to talking about the Genisis wave from one of the Star Trek movies. Aparently, Captain Kirk got sucked out of his ship and swallowed by the Genisis wave, and was thought to be dead. Jon Precard came to the rescue by going into the Genisis wave and pulling Kirk out. BUt this was no trivial task, because the Genisis wave allowed you to completely relive your past memories and was great. So Kirk was there with his wife, in the little cottage that they used to have with all the land and the horses. It was a great, simplistic existence. But Precard came along and told him that the confederation needed him out in the real world, because some alien race was threatening the universe (as usual). So Kirk then decides to get off his ass and go out into the "real" world and save some people.

Solaris was missing this key element right there, because in Solaris there is no present. You only live in the past, there is no now. No problems to solve, no mystery to life. The key ingredient that makes life interesting is the prostpect of the future, seeded with the problems of the now. The great mystery of life is revealing in this present moment, all that is going on around us, and how we can change our futures.

I got no such feeling from Solaris, so if it was me on that ship I would be the first one off. My final take on the movie- go watch it. I haven't been in that much suspense for years, and the sci-fi is really light. They don't go into any of the technical details of how the gadgets work, they just do. So you don't have to worry about things being "realistic".

I reallly need to clean my room. It has fallen into a horrid state of disrepair, with laundry strewn about, disorganization abound and nothing where I need it to be. It needs a complete reboot, and perhaps I can install some ant-dirty technology this time around to keep it clean.

Ok, so that computer metaphor sucked. But so do you.

|||106226209844803208|||