Grinding - cyborgization - future or fantasy?

  
Hi everyone ;)

Lately browsing web I've come upon some webpages about home made implants - either electronics or some simpler things, like magnets - which people implant themselves at home to gain some additional senses experimenting with augmenting perception - to be able to sense what no human can normally feel...



The most basic one, and most popular one as it's very low budget and doesn't need a lot of skill (actually no skill if you find a piercer willing to do it) is implanting a neodymium magnet under skin of your fingers.

"Why the hell would one do that?" - you'd ask?
In answer I'll quote Richard P. Feynman: "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."
That's pretty much it - because it's awesome. 

And well who as a child (or later) didn't want to have superhero abilities? Would it be some special sense or some special ability giving your body completely new ability... Thanks to implants - it is possible, at least in a limited way even now.

I haven't got any implants myself, but I am considering getting one in near future - when I figure out a few things (I plan to work with hands, may be not good idea to implant stuff into them) - to test it out, because this topic has always fascinated me. 
Wouldn't it be interesting, and perhaps sometimes even useful to be able to feel electromagnetic fields? To be able to feel the waves generated by your cellphone (or any similar device) connecting to network, waves generated by speakers when you're not sure which one isn't working, for checking ignition in your car and possibly a lot of other implementations - as you could feel (and in time possibly recognize by specific feeling) anything that either creates some sparking or has an electric engine, or otherwise generates electromagnetic field... 
I personally started playing with electronics - so it could be useful for checking some electronic devices too - even without specialized equipment...

Just like an additional sense, and all that is required is implanting a tiny (e.g. 2x4x1mm) neodymium magnet into one's finger...


Of course there are some safety concerns. The neodymium or other components of other implants may be toxic and in general do no good in contact with the body. But there are methods of testing and preventing such events from happening most the time by giving the implant a protective coating.



There are people who call themselves grinders. People like Lepht Anonym (on blogger as Sapiens Anonym) - xe became popular after giving a speech on 27C3 (Chaos Communication Congress - an annual hacker scene meeting in Hamburg) which later got broadcast by articles in Wired and other technology zins, so you may have heard about Lepht.
People who experiment at home, often without medical experience and knowledge, taking only pain pills and pain numbing gels generally available without prescription - which isn't nearly enough for implanting, helps just to numb the pain to not be excruciating (Lepht recommends biting on a towel), while it can lead to drug dependency by taking opiates or searching for illegal pain killers.
Because not being tested and approved it isn't considered a medical procedure - meaning they can't get anesthesia - best one can hope for is finding a piercer who will agree to implant a magnet, but with larger implants it would be probably out of question as most doctors wouldn't risk getting sued if it gets nasty later...

Just imagine though, if it got tested and safe methods were found, and it would be possible to quite painlessly acquire a new, additional sense by going to a surgeon and getting it implanted under local anaesthesia - taking just a few minutes, in sterile conditions, by a person who knows what they're doing and know what they could damage, how to do it best to avoid trouble later, and who could give you an antibiotic in case it gets infected or help with any other complications... Plus you wouldn't get scars or barely noticeable, few millimeters one.


Currently 'mainstream' implantology is concerned almost only about medical - life saving, or disability reducing implants (which of course I deem a good thing to take care of first and mainly). There are a few other - GPS implants some want to implant to their kids in case they get kidnapped (or they go again to meet that boyfriend they told them not to! - of course it causes concerns), or to notorious criminals for monitoring and RFID subdermal chips - which could become electronic IDs or medical IDs of the future (or as some want 'the mark of the Beast'). 
But there is a room for so much more, with almost every electronic device we can make possibly being in future implantable...

Photo of Amal Graafstra, a Washington state native and business owner, just after an operation to insert an RFID chip implanted in his left hand. The yellow coloring is from disinfectant fluid. Source: Wikipedia

In my opinion it is quite a good opportunity to make ourselves better. I'm sure not everyone would agree - but it made me thinking. With current quick pace of technological advancement (hey, think how cellphones and laptops looked 20 years ago, or 50 years ago ;> ), won't body enhancement become a future?

Cheap implants increasing our abilities stepping outside the borders of what our bodies can physically do, powered by cells fed by glucose in our own bodies, implanted by medical staff and making us all superhumans?


I'm sure there are people who won't agree because of some religious reasons, maybe other concerns too - but still, probably that is where the evolution of humankind will extend - that's at least how it looks for me when I'm reading about medical and technological advances...


P.S. I'm not encouraging anyone to get a home-made implant even if I legally could encourage doing it. It can in fact be very dangerous without good medical knowledge, plus it's all experimentally done by individuals, not on larger, controlled, scientific scale.

Orbital Mining

Is mining in space viable? Perhaps it's just only a few steps away?

It was thought until a few years ago, that to perform such a feat as mining in space, a lengthy trip to asteroid belt would be required.

Now it seems it might not really be that hard.

I've just stumbled upon a bunch of various web pages and such following reading an article in "Focus" monthly magazine (Polish language), which was a translation of "New Scientist" magazine article by Stuart Clark, discussing Earth's additional moons.

And from looks of it, we might be reaching for what yesterday seemed like science-fiction, to have it happen tomorrow in reality.

It starts from a story of 'meteors' or 'falling stars' path of which was observed across 9200km on Earth, which means that instead of falling straight onto Earth like normal asteroids do, they just glanced on our planet's atmosphere with speed similar to Earth's rotation speed. And that in turn means that they must have been orbiting it, possibly being pieces of a small moon.

Now with development of better telescopes we know that it's nothing exceptional - all the time small asteroids get caught by Earth's gravity and start orbiting it, often doing just a few circles around it to escape later, sometimes entering a bit more stable orbits. Even now probably one or more such miniature moons are above our heads. And thousands of smaller pieces of space rock are orbiting Earth in orbits similar or smaller to our Moon orbit.

With our planet's dwindling resources getting less and less easily available 'importing' some resources from space would be great for our industry (and for us, consumers - hey, cheaper goods!). 

Especially that such asteroids may contain big percentage of gold, platinum and rare earth elements - metals on which most of modern technology depends. While of course, it is very expensive to launch into space, just one single asteroid may contain hundreds of millions to trillions of dollars worth of materials. William Hartmann in Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon estimated that asteroid of 2km diameter (so not very rare size) would be worth 25 trillion dollars (current public debt of USA is at level of 15,78trillion$).

And not just those rare and hard to get metals are worth mining. There are ice asteroids primarily made up of water. 

Exporting water into space - for use in space stations and on space vessels (possible Mars expeditions and other) is extremely costly. And water is vital not just because it's needed for humans to drink, but also it can be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen giving good supply of breathing oxygen as well as very good fuel for rocket engines.

That's why 500-meter water asteroid could be worth 5,5 trillion dollars.

They may also contain large amounts of helium which can be used in ion engines and in future could possibly be used in safe thermonuclear reactors to power ships and stations.

Now with NASA budget cuts and governments in general not spending money on science and space exploration so generously as on military budgets, it seems that progress of space conquest must slow down considerably.

But there is new hope, because private sector has started noticing the opportunities presented by space exploration. Such companies which want to specialize in space business like Planetary Resources start sprouting, space tourism seems to be an interesting idea for private sector too, because there are many people who would love to pay for even just a few hours in space. 

That all means that development of new technologies - more efficient and cheaper now shifts towards private sector, which wants to profit from it.

So making it cheaper will probably get much faster and easier than when government agency pays for things on governmental budget, not for getting monetary profits, because now it's in private sector companies own interest to make it cheap.

There's a huge potential for development in space - with abundant solar power supply, with abundant supply of water needed for living beings (so humans and for possibly later space farms so all food doesn't need to be imported), with iron and other metals needed for construction of stations, spaceships, probes, with all elements needed for electronics.

It seems that when we make just the first effort to colonize the space, make our first beachhead and industrial infrastructure, we'll be able to quite easily develop in space without getting all resources from Earth like it is now.

Those taking part in this first effort might reap huge benefits later on too - as it often happened in all freshly opening areas of market.

That will really open doors to new era of space exploration, and make science-fiction really come true.

It's just another another thing that signifies the fact that we are actually living in the yesterday's science-fiction now ;)