S.T. Rogers's Blog

Sara was one hundred and twenty six years old. Her colleagues were all under seventy and it was obvious that they expected to live forever. They were probably right. It was entirely probable that Sara was of the last generation to die. She received her injections when she was seventy-two years old, a series of shots of serum containing tiny computers as small as blood cells. She was filled with these tiny computers, everyone was filled with them, and they monitored her health. She was one of the first people to ever receive the serum which was newly patented at the time. Though they couldn’t stop the breakdown of the cells, they slowed the aging process dramatically. So much so, that Sara didn’t look much older than she did the year she received the treatment. While the technology could slow the aging process, it could not reverse it. No one knew for sure, but Sara would be considered lucky if she lived passed one hundred and seventy. Sara’s Green Robot theories called for brain transplants into environmentally friendly machines, but the idea was pie in the sky. 

The human body grows from birth until the age of twenty-four. At twenty-four the growing process ends and the decaying process begins. The body was living and then it was dying. Everyone who received their injections before the age of twenty-four could, barring a physical accident, expect to live nearly forever. 

It was the mission statement of the project: Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will always have food. 

John had a loud voice. His mother used to say that God forgot to give him a whisper. But whispering was for people who had things to hide and John believed everything should be out in the open. 

He read, “And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all of them who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” 

“In the story it is clear that Jesus is referring to the temple as his father’s house and that he believes the temple should be a place to worship God and nothing else. There is no place for money inside the temple. But as we know, as we’ve discussed many times in this building, the stories of the Bible are both literal and metaphorical. Did the events in the Bible actually happen as they are described? Yes. Yes, they did. But if we read the stories of the Bible as a dry history we are missing out on God’s plan. These stories were important in the days just after Jesus’ death. They were important during the dominance of Rome. They were important during the Black Plague. They were important during the Revolutionary War. They were important during the Industrial Revolution and they are important today in the face of the Singularity.” 

“Just the other day I read that a young man set a record for the most amount of time spent in a virtual reality. He awoke from a five-year stint strapped into a chair, wires inserted into his body, living in a world created by computer programmers. Is the world the Lord created for you not good enough? Do computer programmers have to spend countless hours building a new one so that all your lewdest fantasies can be fulfilled? The young man’s mind went into shock. His muscles had atrophied like a coma patient and he may never walk again.” 

“This is why it is so sad to be conservative. You can only win the short term battles. In the long run, liberalism will win every time.” 

“Because there is the short term, which a conservative has the ability to win, there is the long term, which he does not, and then there is eternity. Conservatives will be looked upon favorably when eternity comes.” 

Like every other aspect of life, the naming of eras had gotten more efficient over time. The Stone Age was named by historians and paleontologists nearly ten thousand years after it ended. The term “Industrial Revolution” was coined approximately twenty years after the event died down. The Age of Information was named while the ripples of its effects were still shaking the world. And the Singularity was called the Singularity even before it happened. The term Singularity was copy-righted by a major technology company and the robotic serum that would turn men into gods was actually called the Singularity.