In Mr g Alan Lightman posits a world where the creatures of the planet developed a method to extract the information from their brains and encode it in high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. These creatures then no longer had the need for a body and their world turned into a field of titanium balls containing all the mental radiations of the planet.
These creatures, since they maintain the knowledge of their original brains, could still experience things like emotions and, by electrically communicating with all the other shiny balls, could experience relationships, even if in reality they were just modulations in the frequencies and amplitudes of their electromagnetic selves. Other than the eventual decay of these electromagnetic properties, this world had solved the problem of death and could live virtually forever.
(Note that Lightman has Mr. g discover this planet where life is eternal; he does not have Mr. g create it himself or even monitor its progress.)
But here is the problem with the bodiless creatures:
When one visits this planet, one beholds entire cities of these creatures. But instead of buildings, avenues, solar domes, bridges, one sees rows upon rows of little titanium spheres covering the hillsides and valleys. Love affairs, arguments, paintings, the discovery of scientific principles, even warfare are taking place within these spheres, yet are totally invisible from the outside. From the outside, one sees only rows upon rows of little spheres, motionless, soundless, serene. But I, who can see everything at once, know all that transpires within. I know that many of these bodiless creatures yearn for the bodies and physicality they once had. They are tormented. They worry that because their entire existence is now interior existence, then the exterior world might be only an illusion. Carrying this logic one step further, they worry that even their interior world might be illusion, that all is illusion. For how could they tell, within the confines of their little spheres, whether anything exists? All they know for sure is that they think. In a certain sense, isn’t this true of creatures with bodies as well?
Is it true? What do you think of the proposition that this unique (possibly) form of life developed independently of any God controlling it’s existence other than as the result of a few laws that were designed to control all animate and inanimate objects in the universe? Did God write Star Trek but ignorant humans failed to include it in the canon?
A Celebration of Reading 