This is more interesting than you expect it to be.
Last time I posted this I think all of you skipped over it, since memes are ordinarily so boring. So I'm posting it again. I picked up this meme from jeffreyab and rikhei. Take the timeline and fill in the story of your past and your plans for the future.
30 years ago - 1974. I woke up in my mother's womb. This came as a surprise because the last thing I remembered, at the time, was going to sleep in 2012 at the age of 38.
25 years ago - 1980. By this time enough of my motor functions had developed that in order to pass as a child I had to begin to seriously fake it. My crankiness, however, was genuine due to having lost my whole life and been forced to endure diapers and mashed peas. If you turned into an infant tomorrow you'd be cranky too. Began setting up secret investment accounts through the mail and bought a $50 chemistry set. Church services were less boring this time around since I learned how to conceal books more effectively. Because I was unusually erudite for a six-year-old (I was 44 subjective years) I was suspected by the church members of being the Antichrist.
15 years ago - 1990. Stopped looking up other kids who I had known as adults. I couldn't maintain a relationship without revealing that I knew more about them than I was supposed to, which creeped them out. I scared off my former wife that way. By this time I had a 400 square foot headquarters under my parents' house, with a magnetically-levitated underground train to a much smaller one under our old house, and to a trap door in the floor of the room where they kept a scanning electron microscope at MSU. With this microscope I began to employ bottom-up nanotechnology to complement the top-down approach of my chemistry set.
10 years ago - 1995. Encountered another person who was born with a head start, through whom I learned of yet another. One of them had exceeded my age by half before reversion; another had been a little younger than me. And yet in both cases it took place in 2012. They had both spent the years honing secret financial and mental advantages as I had done. I came late-- my only advantage was that they had spent so much of their resources attempting to destroy each other. The fight to rule the Earth was begun in earnest. I also met R.
5 years ago - 2000. I lost. One of my competitors drove me temporarily insane using mental backdoors she had planted in the de-novo origami language that the three of us used to communicate. I spent three months penniless sleeping in a cardboard box behind a Starbucks in Barcelona that had a wireless hot spot, and told R that I was on a business trip.
Last year - 2004. Adjusted to normal life, especially after a meditative self-diagnostic discovered a small remote surveillance device and detonator under my brain stem.
This year - 2005. I have now experienced 68 subjective years.
Both of my competitors' headquarters used to be hidden at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. That would explain the tsunamis... I know for sure which one carried out the attack on the other, but wonder which one (if any) is still alive.
Next year - 2006. Finally get the hang of the UNIX command line, web administration, and my first programming language.
5 years forward - 2010. I hope to be contacted by my autonomous assets in LaGrange Point 5. It/they/vim/ver might do something about my brain stem. Until then, if I try to be too intelligent I don't know what will happen.
7 years forward - 2012. Celebrate my rebirthday and hope it doesn't happen again. So far, no amount of research into the Aztec calendar has revealed why it ends in 2012, or if there is any connection.
10 years forward - 2015. Hack into the interface between body and brain to gain system-administrator access that blind evolution neglected to give us. Through this means I could, for instance, voluntarily adjust hormone and enzyme levels to control my ability to reproduce. I can think of several dozen systems of medical nanorobots which I would use so that I wouldn't degenerate in zero-g and would possess higher radiation tolerance, cells hardened against viruses, and the ability to hold my breath for hours, among other things.
25 years forward - 2030. Backup a snapshot of my mind to a secure server at LaGrange Point 5.
50 years forward - 2055. Direct the design and robotic construction of an O'Neill cylinder space habitat. I would definitely have to rent a lot of computation hardware from Earth in order to run all the copies of myself that would be acting as a team to engineer and teleoperate the effort.
100 years forward - 2105. Use computer simulations to run through hundreds of billions of genetic codes per minute to simulate an accelerated evolution. Then I could use this to set up several different genetically-engineered ecologies in my giant space habitats, totally unrelated to Earth phylums. Inventing an ecosystem with a new intelligent species capable of inhabiting the seas of Europa would be nice-- especially if I take Arthur C. Clarke's idea of igniting Jupiter into a miniature sun. Of course I'd have to ask permission from the rest of the solar system.
Human race goes extinct - Dateline unknown. Put up a memorial plaque. I like the suggestion for the epitaph that I recently read in a story by Bruce Sterling. The Great Wall of China will be rearranged to spell out (in Chinese of course, because most of the humans were always Chinese) "THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS BUT NOT AT ALL FARSIGHTED."
I'll make no other predictions, because after that, I expect history to start getting seriously wierd.
30 years ago - 1974. I woke up in my mother's womb. This came as a surprise because the last thing I remembered, at the time, was going to sleep in 2012 at the age of 38.
25 years ago - 1980. By this time enough of my motor functions had developed that in order to pass as a child I had to begin to seriously fake it. My crankiness, however, was genuine due to having lost my whole life and been forced to endure diapers and mashed peas. If you turned into an infant tomorrow you'd be cranky too. Began setting up secret investment accounts through the mail and bought a $50 chemistry set. Church services were less boring this time around since I learned how to conceal books more effectively. Because I was unusually erudite for a six-year-old (I was 44 subjective years) I was suspected by the church members of being the Antichrist.
15 years ago - 1990. Stopped looking up other kids who I had known as adults. I couldn't maintain a relationship without revealing that I knew more about them than I was supposed to, which creeped them out. I scared off my former wife that way. By this time I had a 400 square foot headquarters under my parents' house, with a magnetically-levitated underground train to a much smaller one under our old house, and to a trap door in the floor of the room where they kept a scanning electron microscope at MSU. With this microscope I began to employ bottom-up nanotechnology to complement the top-down approach of my chemistry set.
10 years ago - 1995. Encountered another person who was born with a head start, through whom I learned of yet another. One of them had exceeded my age by half before reversion; another had been a little younger than me. And yet in both cases it took place in 2012. They had both spent the years honing secret financial and mental advantages as I had done. I came late-- my only advantage was that they had spent so much of their resources attempting to destroy each other. The fight to rule the Earth was begun in earnest. I also met R.
5 years ago - 2000. I lost. One of my competitors drove me temporarily insane using mental backdoors she had planted in the de-novo origami language that the three of us used to communicate. I spent three months penniless sleeping in a cardboard box behind a Starbucks in Barcelona that had a wireless hot spot, and told R that I was on a business trip.
Last year - 2004. Adjusted to normal life, especially after a meditative self-diagnostic discovered a small remote surveillance device and detonator under my brain stem.
This year - 2005. I have now experienced 68 subjective years.
Both of my competitors' headquarters used to be hidden at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. That would explain the tsunamis... I know for sure which one carried out the attack on the other, but wonder which one (if any) is still alive.
Next year - 2006. Finally get the hang of the UNIX command line, web administration, and my first programming language.
5 years forward - 2010. I hope to be contacted by my autonomous assets in LaGrange Point 5. It/they/vim/ver might do something about my brain stem. Until then, if I try to be too intelligent I don't know what will happen.
7 years forward - 2012. Celebrate my rebirthday and hope it doesn't happen again. So far, no amount of research into the Aztec calendar has revealed why it ends in 2012, or if there is any connection.
10 years forward - 2015. Hack into the interface between body and brain to gain system-administrator access that blind evolution neglected to give us. Through this means I could, for instance, voluntarily adjust hormone and enzyme levels to control my ability to reproduce. I can think of several dozen systems of medical nanorobots which I would use so that I wouldn't degenerate in zero-g and would possess higher radiation tolerance, cells hardened against viruses, and the ability to hold my breath for hours, among other things.
25 years forward - 2030. Backup a snapshot of my mind to a secure server at LaGrange Point 5.
50 years forward - 2055. Direct the design and robotic construction of an O'Neill cylinder space habitat. I would definitely have to rent a lot of computation hardware from Earth in order to run all the copies of myself that would be acting as a team to engineer and teleoperate the effort.
100 years forward - 2105. Use computer simulations to run through hundreds of billions of genetic codes per minute to simulate an accelerated evolution. Then I could use this to set up several different genetically-engineered ecologies in my giant space habitats, totally unrelated to Earth phylums. Inventing an ecosystem with a new intelligent species capable of inhabiting the seas of Europa would be nice-- especially if I take Arthur C. Clarke's idea of igniting Jupiter into a miniature sun. Of course I'd have to ask permission from the rest of the solar system.
Human race goes extinct - Dateline unknown. Put up a memorial plaque. I like the suggestion for the epitaph that I recently read in a story by Bruce Sterling. The Great Wall of China will be rearranged to spell out (in Chinese of course, because most of the humans were always Chinese) "THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS BUT NOT AT ALL FARSIGHTED."
I'll make no other predictions, because after that, I expect history to start getting seriously wierd.