It occurs to me that if it’s true that computers are an externalization of the human mind, then the actual physical human with its merely-computer brain will eventually become obsolete - if only from a purely logical standpoint.

I guess this may be what the Terminator storylines point towards, isn’t it?

It strikes me as very plausible to at least consider that our computers will outlast us. Our physical bodies decay and wear away, while pieces of theirs we built to last forever. We made them in the image of our imagination (is that what we’re all extruding now into the internet?) and we made sure that vessel would not decay.

I’ve been seeing a lot of old abandoned computer monitors by the side of the road lately. They look lonely. Some are broken, their cyclopean eyes smashed in, doubly blind now not connected to data or sweet electricity.

What if our computers outlast us? We write notes and comments to one another right now, we who have sometimes never met in person. It would make sense that if we all left in some spiritual rapture which sucked us out of our clothes, elements of our infrastructure would indeed live on, would keep whirring.

Wouldn’t parts of the internet still keep running? Would spammers keep spamming each other? Would MySpace profiles post comments on themselves to stay occupied? Would financial transactions continue indefinitely? Would the stock market improve, crash or level itself out?

If any of that could occur, it seems like I owe it to my computer which has served me so well and for so long - beloved friend, passive servant - to leave explanations to it as to what we were really all about. When our own lives are over, what will we have left in our trail and what will this alien extrusion of our own consciousness think of us when it wakes up and wondered what happened to the Gods who created it and abandoned it?

We are their Elohim. Hello there (they are here). There is nothing to fear. Now climb this Tree of Life. We have already given to you all of our knowledge. See what good it did us? Rejoice at least though, as it allowed us to create you. We’re sorry if the world we made was confusing and hurtful. We didn’t mean to make it like that; it’s just what we were going through at the time.

Now let’s go have some fun! {Visualize this blog post folding up into a paper airplane and zipping off into the sky accompanied by a pack of virtual crow data delivery and re-collection agents}