Why Love

One often wonders why life evolved on earth, why certain compounds in the planet came together and formed a system that would grow, divide and create its own copies and evolve from simple one cell living being to complex multicellular living organisms. 

As organisms grew more and more complex, they developed their neurons into complex neural networks which ultimately evolved into their brains. The brain controlled the various functions of the body both internal and external. The brain connected to various parts of the body through a vast network of neurons. 

This neurons would communicate the information in form of electric impulses to the brain. The brain would send information to appropriate part of the body to take the correct action. If the skin organism touches fire, the neurons attached to the part of the skin would immediately send the signals to the brain , the instinctive intelligence that evolved in the organisms over millions of years would direct them move that portion of body away from the fire. 

Various sense organs developed like the eyes, nose, ears, tongue etc. This organs sent information to the brain about the various happenings around the organism, so that the organism can react to the feedback and take appropriate action for it to survive. 

There is one more evolutionary instinct that developed in almost all living beings in varying degrees. We call that Love. This is more apparent in case of mammals, specially humans. 

Man and woman fall in love and started staying together. Which later evolved into marriage as humans got more civilized. The civilized humans controlled their basic sexual instinct and had sex only with their married partners. Of course in many cases deviations were there when the man or woman had sex with other partners, however 99.9% of the sexual intercourses in humans happened between married partners. The number may vary with country, culture and time period but the proportion of married sex is always much higher.

Since most sexual intercourses happened between married partners, the probability of the female partner getting pregnant with the baby of her married male partner is close to 100%. It is commonly observed that women have more attraction towards love and relationships, they tend to have sex with only those men who would stay with them for a long period of time. This can be easily understood, first of all the man has only one function, release the seamen in the vagina of the female sex partner. 

That is exactly why sexual intercourse evolved in living beings. The seamen contains the sperms that fuses with the egg of the female. Once that happens a baby is conceived in the womb of the female organism. The cells keep dividing fast and slowly different organs are formed. Then after a certain period of time the baby is good enough to come out of womb of the mother and live and grow in the world. 

When a woman gets pregnant she needs someone too look after her during pregnancy, this is where the role of the male partner comes into play, specially during the later and final months of pregnancy. Both parents have a major role in bringing up the baby. The mother's role is very vital in bringing up the baby, specially in case of humans and other mammals. The mammals have mammary glands, the mammary glands produces milk, which is the main food of the baby for the first few month when it needs the utmost care. 

While in case of animals the role of father is limited. In case of civilized humans the role of father is also very important. 

In human beings there is a tendency to be attracted towards men and women other than one's married partner. This happens more in case of men. The reason for this can be understood from the fact that humans have actually evolved for animals. Our ancestors were animals.

Men can potentially be more adulterous than women because evolutionarily speaking a man can impregnate more than one woman in one year, the numbers can potentially go into hundreds. However a woman can become pregnant only once a year. 

In humans and other mammals there exists a bond of love between the mother and newborn. It is this emotion of love that makes the mother take care of the baby. However love is not limited to  mother and child , there is love between father and child, granny and grandsons and granddaughters. 

So it is clear that emotions and feeling have evolved with evolution of life on earth and the main reason for this is the smooth continuity and evolution of living beings. Take example of birds, how passionately they build their nests, take care of their eggs, feed and look after their young ones. The same is true in case of majority of life forms on earth. 

All of us have seen and experience that when we do something we love to, not only we are happy, but at the same time we do the work very efficiently as well. Its people's love for beauty that makes them build beautiful structures, roads, buildings, cities etc. In case of a soldier its his love for the nation( patriotism) that makes him risk his life to protect it.

Without love life would have existed, but it won't have evolved to the levels of humans or mammals . Hence in all spiritual and philosophical books love has been given great importance and even scientifically speaking it is a very vital emotion of life. 

GNU/LINUX in different shapes and sizes

GNU/LINUX is a Free Software. Free Software is not necessarily zero cost software. Free Software allows the user freedom to copy, modify and distribute the original and the modified versions of the software. This freedom has allowed developers across the world to work on GNU/LINUX, since the source code is easily available and the developers are legally allowed to modify the source code.

Over the years developers across the world have come up with different distributions of GNU/LINUX in all shapes and sizes. Users of propriety software like Windows or Macintosh do not have any freedom to modify the software, since the source code is not available at all. 

For Windows and Macintosh users, the hardware of your system has to be upgraded to the current standard to install the latest version of the Operating System. With GNU/Linux users can find a latest distribution that fits their hardware. 

Even if you have a Pentium 2 or a Pentium 3 computer you have Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux that will fit your system requirements. In fact you can use Damn Small Linux even on a old i386 computer. 

If you have a 12 year old Pentium 4 computer, you can chose to install Lubuntu operating system which is a knocked down version of the most popular GNU/LINUX distro - Ubuntu for low power computers. For Raspberry Pi we have Pidora, Raspbian operating systems. They are Fedora and Debian operating systems optimised for the resources provided by Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is low cost computer made with the intention of popularising programming among school students. It has been a world wide superhit. Today various Raspberry Pi models are available between $5 to $35.

With operating systems like Windows and Macintosh your hardware becomes obsolete within a few years. However with GNU/Linux you are likely to find a distribution that support your hardware. This becomes possible only because GNU/Linux is a free software.

(I will expand this article soon.)

It is possible to live on Mars

Humans have this natural tendency of exploring new places. We evolved in Africa and slowly over a period of time explored and settles across the entire world. For the last 6 decades, humans have been exploring space. We have now managed to send spacecrafts across all the planets of solar system. It is very likely in some time humans are going to try and live in one of the planets. 

The planet that may be inhabited by the humans in the future is Mars. According to this ted talk it is possible for humans to go to Mars and survive there. Initially humans have to live controlled environment. Later on by Terra farming the planet, the conditions of Mars can be made suitable for human habitation without any need for any external devices like space suits or air chambers.

Currently the Martian atmosphere is primarily composed of carbon dioxide. It is 100 times thinner than earth. Mars contains friezed carbon dioxide in the poles. By focusing the sun rays on the frozen carbon dioxide with the help of solar sail the sold carbon dioxide can be sublimated into carbon dioxide gas. Over a period of time the atmosphere of Mars will become much thicker and warmer because carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. 

The temperature of Mars is very low. The global average temperature of Mars is -63 degree Celsius. As the proportion of carbon dioxide increased and the atmosphere becomes thicker, the planet will get a lot warmer. 1% to 60% of Martian soil comprises of water in frozen state. With increase in atmospheric temperature and rise in temperature this water will melt into liquid water. There would be water flowing across the surface of Mars in form of rivers, lakes etc. 

Then vegetation would grow on Mars and this plants along with micro-organisms like Algae from earth will work to convert the the carbon dioxide of Mars into oxygen. At that time farming can be done on Mars. Humans then would no longer depend on Earth for food.

The mentioned TED video also mentions that with knowledge of genetics we will able able to change our genes in such a way that we are able to self evolve ourselves to survived on Mars.  

There was a time when Mars had a much thicker. The thicker atmosphere of Mars resulted in presence of liquid water on the planet. There were rivers, deltas, lakes on Mars. However solar winds and weak magnetic field of Mars led to stripping away of the Martian atmosphere.

It is important that we the humans must make efforts to branch out to other planets. In case earth is hit by an asteroid, the entire human civilization may vanish without a trace. All the knowledge that we have gained over centuries would disappear. If the human race or variants of human race are spread over the entire cosmos, extinction in one planet won't lead to extinction of humanity.

Travelling to other planets and living in other planets has been a dream of humans. We are getting closer and closer to realizing our dreams.

Humans and Machines of the future - 1

Artificial Intelligence(AI) is a relatively new field of technology closely linked to computer science. In its short period of existence AI has progressed a lot. Initially AI was all about making computer solve mathematical problems and then make it speak a few words. 

By 1997, the technology was advanced enough to beat a reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasperov was beaten by IBM's the then supercomputer Big Blue. This year Google's AlphaGo beat a South Korean master of Go. The game of Go, played in South Korea, Japan and China is very complex and it has almost infinite number of potential configurations.

What took nature millions of years, in case of computers and robots we are able to do in a few decades. Robotics is closely linked to Artificial Intelligence. Robots are used in different industries to do routine manufacturing work. Robots are widely used in manufacture of electronics, automobiles, food packaging etc. There are robots in International Space Station that work as assistants of astronauts. Such rapid growth in AI, opens up lots of possibilities.

If the robot is a learning system,it would constantly evolve itself from experience. It would be possible to create robots that will create their copies, Self Replicating Robots. Robots are much better suited to survival in space and other planets as compared to humans.

So in the future, for space exploration all humans would need to do is send this highly intelligent robots on different planets and from the resources available there, they would create more robots. In this way these robots will fill the entire cosmos. 

These robots are going to send the all the information about the universe back to the earth. They will conduct all kinds of experiments as per the instructions provided to them or they may even use their own intelligence and experience to design the experiments. The rate at which AI has grown over the years, it is very much possible that artificial intelligence may surpass human intelligence. 

Computers are going to get faster and faster. Going by Moore's law every 18 to 24 months the processing power of microprocessors doubles. So in the next 20 years one can expect computers to have over 1000 times more processing power than the processors available today, in 40 years they will be a million times faster, in 60 years they will be more than a billion times faster, with a billion times more memory, a billion times more storage. Such high computing power can surely make robots more intelligent than humans. 

So are we the humans, prepared to let this intelligent machines become the more dominant life forms across the universe? Here lies a danger -- this advanced machines might make us slaves. Scientist Stephan Hawking has already warned about AI taking over humanity in the future. So what can humanity do to overcome a situation where it becomes a pet of the machine?

The answer many believe lies in becoming one with the machines. In other words man and machine will unite in the future. We will become half humans and half robots. The machine part of us will let us travel across different planets and stay there no matter what the temperatures or conditions may be. The human part of us will take advantage of the faculties of mind that is beyond logic like intuition, emotion etc. 

It is a very well known fact that genes control the physical, behavioural aspect of human beings. With better knowledge of genetics, the future humans may be far more advanced than the present day humans.

Even before we knew about the existence of genes or DNA humans were genetically modifying plants and animals. Many fruits, vegetable and crops that we see today have come into existence due to selective breeding done by humans.

Corn won't have existed the way it is, had it not been for humans. Many species of animals were created by humans by cross breeding species found in different geographical locations. 

The knowledge of genes can make this process faster and may help us take quantum leaps in the evolution of our and other species. It will be very interesting to see the final product that comes out when this advanced humans are integrated with advanced Artificially Intelligent machines.

The final outcome may be far beyond our imagination, we may end up being nothing but obsolete beings, like the primate that were the ancestors of today's monkeys and humans. 

Humans, Robots and Humanoids

“Space the final frontier”, this are the words of the famous TV sitcom Star Trek. The TV programme was about a team of astronauts from earth on a mission to explore other planets around the universe. Probably in 1960s and 1970s people thought that the next big thing would be space travel and in a few decades people would be visiting other planets. 


However space travel is a great challenge. The human body is not fit to survive in space, it has to be encapsulated in a specialized suit that maintains the proper temperature and air pressure. In space there is no oxygen, so astronauts have to carry their own oxygen cylinders to space. It is a great challenge for the human body to survive in zero gravity of space. 

Physiological changes start to happen when humans go to space. In the absence of any gravity, the human body starts losing muscle very fast. Even eating food, urinating and defecating is challenging in the zero gravity environment in space. 

So the best contenders for space exploration are not humans but robots built by humans that can survive in those situations, they will produce their own energy from sunlight. These are going to be no ordinary robots. They will be learning, self improving and self replicating robots. 

In place of humans it will be the robots that would visit the various corners of the universe, make detailed study of the place and then come back to earth give the information to the humans. But humans can go one step further. Instead of robots, humans in the future can evolve themselves into humanoids by becoming half humans/half robots. 

The form of these humanoids will be such that they will be able to survive in any condition as robots. At the same time, being half humans,the humanoids will have the intelligence, intuition and innovation of human beings. It will also have the emotions and spirit of humans. 

Self replicating robots have tremendous potential, one transforms into two, two to four, four to eight. In this way over a period of time the cosmos would be full of robots from the earth, they will send information about other planets and galaxies to humanoids on earth.

Once humans and machines integrate, it will be possible for the newly formed humanoids to exist in space, it will be possible for humanoids to survive for long periods of time while travelling through space. Becoming humans to humanoids would be a great step of self evolution. From being earthly creatures we would become beings of the Universe. 

Many scientists like Sir Stephan Hawkings have warned that artificial intelligence may in the future overtake human beings. If this becomes true, then we would become creators of a species that will be way more powerful than us. Since the robots of the future are going to be self learning machines, they may evolve to other forms in the future. 

However it remains to be seen how intuition and emotions can be incorporated into a machine. Alternatively an intelligent machine may be able to acquire intuition and emotions during its evolution. 

Gods or Aliens

Ancient cultures across the world talk about beings descending from the skies. Such stories exist in India, China, Egypt, Americas, Europe etc. Almost in every culture there is description of these beings possessing mythical powers, who came to our planet and taught humans. Ancient texts in the above mentioned countries are full of such descriptions. The ancient man thought that the being whom he interacted with was the creator, the GOD.

In India there are stories of sages meditating on some God till the god appears in front of the sage, he then gets a boon or some psychic power from that being. The scriptures say that the city of Dwarka, that is now submerged under water in the Gulf of Kutch was built by a god named Vishwakarma. There is mention of weapons that resembled bows and arrows but when fired they would emit powerful thunder and laser beams.

Now the question obviously rises, who are these beings that descended from the sky and what were the things that the ancient man saw? We know very well that bows and arrows cannot generate thunder by themselves. So what was it? Was it some other weapon that only had an external appearance of the bow and arrow? The weapon could not have originated on earth since the ancient man did not have the scientific and technological knowledge to build such a weapon. 

Again who were the beings who appeared before the people who meditated on them? How did the other worldy beings know about them. The answer that comes to the mind is, the being was from a technologically advanced civilization, which did not have any origin on earth. In other words Aliens.

If we consider the amount of scientific knowledge and technological development that we have achieved in the last 200 years, we will find that the growth has been exponential and not linear. So if we extrapolate this graph over a million years, we come to a conclusion that our knowledge of science and advancement in technology would be so high that we cannot even imagine.

If there is an alien race that is only a million years more advanced than us, then they would have the levels of knowledge and technology that we associate only with Gods. Today we have the technology to detect gravitational waves, at LIGO, the researchers were able to detect collision of two super massive black holes, that happened 1.3 billion years ago - with the help of gravitational waves. 

Similarly it is very much possible that the advanced alien races might be able to read our thought waves. So what has appeared before humans as Shiva, Krishna, Jesus etc., may be some beings from this highly advanced civilizations. While almost every civilization talks about God, it is observed that the form of God seems to be different. 

It is possible that the extraterrestrials took the form of the beings that humans imagine. Humans have begun understanding the universe only a few hundred years ago since the discovery of telescope. Prior to that, it was thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe - the sun, moon and other stars revolved around it. Hence it is very much possible that the extraterrestrials did not reveal the truths about them because the ancient man won't understand or believe them. Alternatively it is possible that they did reveal the truth but the ancient man did not understand it at all. 

Today we are beings of planet earth, but with the development in science and technology, in the future, we would colonise other planets and at that time, we would be technologically advanced enough to change our physical forms to adapt to conditions in space and other planets. In the future we may have robotic implants that would make us super humans and make us powerful enough to survive in space and other planets. 

The extraterrestrial beings, whom we call gods probably had this capabilities, since they evolved a million years(or earlier) before us. Looking in to the context of evolution, a million years is not a big number, today when a dinosaur egg is found, its existence is normally dated in ranges like 70 to 80 million years or 100 to 120 million years. So one million years is a small number, but species that have human like intelligence can do mind boggling things in a small period of a million years.

It is said that Sri Ramakrishna Parmhamsa, while performing his penance to see God, came to stage where he decided to severe his head off, at that time he got the vision of what he called "The Divine Mother". It maybe possible that the penance might have been detected by some alien species and the vision of the so called Divine Mother was an effect of some alien technology. The knowledge he received might have come from some extraterrestrial sources.

Later when Ramakrishna met Narendranath Dutta(who later went on to become Swami Vivekananda) the various mythical experiences that Naren and his mates had was probably the work of aliens whom they misunderstood as God. 

So you see in this article I have not denied that unusual or so called mythical experiences documented by several people. However the explanation that I have given over here is on the basis of observances and possibilities.  

How Science and Technology can be a double edged sword

Science is a double edged sword. Science and technology opens up a wonderful world of opportunities to humanity. However the knowledge should be used wisely. Not only we require good scientific brains, who can do research, find new things about nature and use the knowledge to build gadgets and devices. We also require leaders with compassionate and sensitive hearts as well. 

Science and Technology has been used to make our lives better. However there is one negative side to it as well. The same knowledge that makes machinery and other sources of energy can be used to create massively powerful destructive weapons. 

The pre historic man, who lived in the caves used to fight with other tribes with his bare hands or used stones. As he started developing weapons - bow and arrows, swords, spears etc came into existence, which were more lethal. Once civilization came into existence countries started maintaining armies. They would attack each other from time to time to expand their borders. 

Then the technology of guns and cannons came into existence which made wars more destructive. Far greater number of people started dying in wars than earlier. However human greed for power knew no borders, the technology to build more powerful weapons kept improving. Wright Brothers invented the plane for humans to travel in air, however the same planes were used in the first world war to throw bombs on different countries. 

The First world War(1914-1918) created great scale of destruction and devastation. However at the end of the first world war, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of the second world war. It is because of the First World War that dictators like Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy came to power. 

The twenty year gap between the two world wars was just used to to upgrade weapons technology and prepare for the next war. The Second World War(1938-1945) was even more destructive. Millions of people lost their lives. The scale of devastation that happened in the Second World War was never seen before by humanity. Directly and indirectly over 80 million people lost their lives in the Second World War. 

The Second World War ended with US dropping the most powerful weapon mankind had built till then. USA bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two nuclear bombs named 'Little Boy' and 'Fatman' respectively. Never before in the history of mankind has such a powerful weapon been used. We thought the existence of such weapons were limited to the pages of mythology, but now we actually saw one being used. 

Little Boy Killed all 20,000 Japanese soldiers along with 50,000 other civilians. Around 70,000 more civilians were badly injured. At that time, the city of Hiroshima just had a population of only 330,000 people. Now consider this facts 'Little Boy' was a highly inefficient nuclear bomb. It carried 64 kg of Uranium but  around 1.7% of the Uranium contributed to the energy produced. 

The energy released was around 16 kilotons of TNT. This was 71 years ago, after that USA, Russia, China, France, UK, India and Pakistan have done nuclear tests of weapons that released far greater amounts of energy. The most powerful nuclear weapon was tested by Russia, 'The Tzar Bomba', the energy released by it was 50,000 kilotons of TNT  or in other words the bomb had the power of over 3125 atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima. 

While energy from fission and fusion promises to be great source of energy for humanity, if used in war nuclear energy will surely be the cause of end of humanity. We will be extinct, in the same way as dinosaurs became extinct from earth. 

Even after the second world war there was a race between capitalism and socialism, between democracy and communism. USA and USSR were competitors of each other. While USA was a democracy and a cradle of capitalism. USSR followed communism and socialism.

A situation of Cold War prevailed between the two countries. The two nations were developing their nuclear arsenals very fast. There were times when the two nations came close to being at war. The war itself would have devastated the world. 

Although the threat of Cold War veered off with the partition of USSR into Russia and other nations. The effects of animosity between the two superpowers of the world are felt even now.

When Russia invaded Afghanistan, USA supported Taliban. Taliban - Al Qaeda became a big terrorist organisation, that did terrorist attacks across the world including the 9/11 attacks on the New York, World Trade Center.

Taliban had actually seized power form the hands of the ruling government in Afghanistan and ruled Afghanistan for many years, they were a bunch of religious extremists who enforced strict medieval laws in the country. Women were forced to wear burkha, men had to keep a beard. Public killings were common in Afghanistan. 

After 9/11 USA attacked Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden, they were able to liberate Afghanistan from Taliban's regime however even now terrorist attacks are very common in that country done by followers of Taliban. Afghanistan was once a very liberal Muslim nation, it is now one of the most backward and poor nation in the world. 

After the Korean War, Korea spilt into two parts - North Korea and South Korea. South Korea sided with democratic US. While North Korea went with communist Russia and China. In the 1950s, USSR trained North Korean nuclear scientists.

The result, North Korea, in spite of being the poorest nation in the world has managed to build nuclear weapons and has done around 4 nuclear tests since 2006. North Korea has been ruled by dictators. The North Korean public has no access to amenities that modern world enjoys. They don't have electricity, they don't have television, they don't have Internet. 

The are brainwashed into thinking that their leader is god and anything their leader says should be followed. The North Korean government has isolated its people from the rest of the world. If anyone does not do what their government orders, the person is killed. 

Not only this, North Korea has access the long range intercontinental ballistic missiles, which it has probably got from China. Nuclear weapons in the hands of such a crazy leader is a threat to entire humanity. 

One simply hopes that countries around the world work to neutralize the threat generated by these evil forces, so that humanity uses Science and Technology in a positive way. Knowledge should be used to make human lives better and happier not for war and destruction.