Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

Ghosts are the spirits of the deceased.

Ghosts are an expression of psychic energy created by intense emotions.

Ghosts are beings from another plane of existence.

Ghosts are the symptom of a mental disorder.

Ghosts are old myths designed to scare children.

Ghosts are a means by which unethical predators can extract a living from gullible individuals.

Calculation speeds increase exponentially. ExaFLOP computers arrive: reconstruct the human genome; broker peace in Africa, the Middle East, between India and Pakistan; solve the energy crisis. You make tea in your kitchen and wonder about the use of this. Wouldn’t it have been better if those wars had never started in the first place? Your personal set of genes remains unconsidered.

You believe that the theories and explanations for the causes of cancer are as authentic as ghost pictures. Somewhere in the world there’s a doctor whose theory of cancer is the right one, but nobody knows whose. This means that somewhere on the Internet there’s a ghost video that’s real; you just can’t tell which one it is. Maybe it’s the photo where the faces of dead sailors are caught in the wake of their ship; perhaps it’s orbs that can only be seen by cameras, caught as they float beside children and dogs and gravestones; or it could be those mysterious images staring from the windows of empty houses.

Cancer is caused by poor diet.

It’s the result of living in a polluted environment, an accumulation of toxins.

It’s a lack of antioxidants, too much sun, the body’s inability to cope with stress.

It all comes down to an unwise choice of genes before birth.

Cancer is a condition of age; everyone who lives long enough is going to get it.

In a second and a half of blurred, unsteady camerawork, an animal moves across a tiny YouTube insert. The caption is Mystery Creature — Thylacine?? and you wonder if this could be the one. If this could be the one image of a ghost — a real film of a live thylacine in colour –- or if it’s yet another theory of cancer. Meditation, a high-fibre diet, sun-screen before leaving the house.

Comments on the YouTube page claim the animal is a lioness, a zebra dog, a wolf — a fake.

Comments on the YouTube page say of course it's a thylacine: they were cloned years ago so the animal wouldn't go totally extinct.

The Internet is a maze but you follow the clues, turning left at every junction. In 1866, a thylacine joey was preserved in a bottle. There’s a close-up photo of it, and it makes you think of a newborn puppy, so innocent. Paws tucked under its chin, soft fur around its muzzle and its nose just millimetres from air. Preserved in alcohol instead of formaldehyde, the joey still contains intact DNA and, for a little while, back just before the turn of the century, it did seem possible that it might be cloned. That every home could have its own newly un-extinct pet running around the backyard.

There are all sorts of theories about thylacines. Four thousand sightings since that last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. They were brought to the mainland, you read. A colony of them established in Gippsland. There are parts of the mainland where they never became extinct. A pocket of them in South Australia, still surviving.

You wonder how people can believe such a thing in this day and age. There is no physical evidence of thylacines. No footprints or scat mark their passing; there are no middens of wallaby bones decorated in the scrimshaw of thylacine toothmarks. Nobody has found the remains of a thylacine deceased in the wild, or taken a potshot at one raiding the chookhouse. When every bushwalker, hiker, tourist and adventurer has a digital camera with a zoom lens and a mobile phone with at least a 2-mega-pixel camera, bluetooth and 3G roaming, and a personal page on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, the thylacine’s existence remains a grey area.

ZettaFLOP computers construct themselves, reveal the secrets of the human brain, solve global warming. Their processors are cool and silent. Keyboards have been replaced by a thought-activated interface, the screen has been superseded by the self-actualising unit: 3D visuals, surround sound, haptic response. One of these days you’ll upgrade. Your enthusiasm for technology faded when it failed Jase.

You photographed him all the time after the diagnosis. Moments of hope as he endured the treatment. The transience of normality: eating breakfast, resting on the sofa, playing with the dog. You took care to frame each shot, avoiding the bruises on his arms, hiding his new bald patches from view, adjusting light against the pale of his face. You were not stealing his soul, you were preserving it on a 4GB flashcard. It’s still inside the camera. You never uploaded those last images.

Videos of ghosts collect in odd corners of the Internet. Orbs drift on unfelt winds, tiny white lights buzz in spirals like the sparkle in his eyes on that summer day. A door opens, a chair moves, a dog watches as curtains are slowly drawn. There is no apparent reason for the behaviour of ghosts. Cold spots and compass deviations have no connection. Ectoplasm has gone out of fashion; there is no residue of ghosts. You sometimes think there is a sensible, natural explanation for hauntings: odd sounds that are really rats in the walls, the ringing doorbell that just needs its battery replaced, faces that are random patterns resolved into lost loved ones by the yearning mind of the survivor. Haunted houses retain memories of past inhabitants only because the present inhabitants hold them there.

You wish Jase would haunt you. You just want the evidence, to know that something has lasted beyond those final days of morphine nightmare. You know that he would come if he could. You wonder how much of his soul fills the nodes and connections of Internet computers. Thoughts of him pass between you and your new computer