Debashis Chowdhury

In Our Own Image: Humanity's Quest for Divinity Via Technology Debashis Chowdhury

Once in a few billion years, the conditions are right for life to transcend itself into a higher level of existence. Having spent more than a billion years in the form of single walled bacteria-like (Prokaryotic) cells, a happy set of circumstances happened about 1.5 Billion year ago that gave rise to Eukaryotic cells with a well defined cell nucleus. Those were heady times, and the Eukaryotic cells then went on to create all multi-cellular creatures, including plants and animals - including humans. The meaning of what it means to live life changed completely! To understand the magnitude of the transformation, we need to just ask ourselves, "Which would we rather be?" A human being - or a pile of 'grey goop' consisting of about 100,000 billion cells all trying to figure out how to survive in a highly competitive environment. The exciting times are back again! In this very century, mankind will invent the technologies that give us capabilities which we have thus far associated only with Divinity. What is lacking now is a level of wisdom, and unity of purpose amongst us humans - to seize the opportunity to define a totally new level of existence. If we can develop this transcendental wisdom, and inculcate a joint sense of identity and purpose as humans, we have the opportunity to transform our collective existence into a vastly more powerful presence. The approach illustrated in this book combines the best of many worlds - the Material and the Spiritual, the Competitive and the Cooperative, the Scientific and the Religious, the Biological and the Technological... In the process of developing an integrative 'vision' for the long term success of humanity, we look at the patterns, clues and images that permeate our existence - all the way from the microscopic to the astronomical. If you believe that within us humans lies hidden the capability to scale up our existence to resonate with the potential of the universe around us, this book is a 'Must Read'. In the process, we