More Articles in Ir. TO Lau Blog

 

Dear Readers

Please click to the link below for more articles by this author posted inside Ir. Lau Tail Onn blog: 

https://taionn.blogspot.com/search?q=dr++jb+lim+articles

Thank you for reading.

Dr jb Lim

Mineral Wealth from the Oceans

 

Besides protein in fish and seafood for essential nutrition, how many minerals and elements are there in the oceans? Lots of them.

It is estimated there are 3.9 × 10⁹ (3.9 billion) tons of elements carried annually in solution to the oceans.

Rain is constantly peppering over the dry land on its way to the ocean and, in the process, it dissolves a little bit of all the materials it soaks up. Not all are soluble, many are, some less soluble than others. When the dissolved substances reach the ocean, some less soluble substances make their way to the ocean bottom.

The Earth has been in existence for over 4.5 billion years. In the constant bombardment by rain there would be so many materials washed into the oceans that every element in all known compounds is found in the ocean mixed up with the water molecules.

Scientists who analyze sea waters found there are approximately 3.25 percent of dissolved elements including gold in some 1370×10⁶ cubic km or 1.4522 × 10¹⁷ litres of waters in the oceans. The total weight of solid and dissolved material comes to 50,000 trillion (50,000,000,000,000,000) tons out of which 75 % of them is salt as sodium chloride with a bit of all other elements in the remaining 25 %.

The seafloor holds rich deposits of minerals such as copper, zinc, nickel, gold, silver, magnesium, and phosphorus. These deposits exist as crusts on volcanic and other rocks and as nodules on abyssal plain sediment. They occur typically about 3 to 10 centimetres in size.

The oceans contain vast quantities of other materials that humans use today. However, direct extraction of these mineral resources is limited to salt, magnesium, placer gold, tin, titanium, and diamonds and of course fresh water through desalination in countries like in Arabic countries where fresh water is scarce.

For a start, there are enough magnesium compounds present in the ocean to yield a total of 19 thousand billion (1,900 000 000 000 000) tons of that metal.

Such an ample supply in the ocean is enough to last our human needs an enormous length of time, especially since whatever we extract and use eventually gets washed back into the ocean.

Magnesium is distributed evenly in the ocean unlike pockets of minerals on land. Even with uniform dilutions throughout the ocean, it will take us, working with perfect efficiency, 360 liters of seawater to get a 0.5 kg of magnesium. Advances in extraction methods have allowed us to do this economically, and magnesium is now profitably extracted from sea water in almost any amount we want.

Another element present in substantial quantities in seawater is bromine, a chemical relative to chlorine called halogens.

Under the Mendeleev periodic table, group 7A (or VIIA) are the halogens: fluorine (F), chlorine (Cl), bromine (Br), iodine (I), and astatine (At). The name "halogen" means "salt former", derived from the Greek words halo- ("salt") and -gen ("formation").

The sea contains dissolved halogens – besides chlorine as sodium chloride, bromine compounds that would yield a total of a hundred thousand billion (100,000,000,000,000) tons of pure bromine. 

This is about a twentieth of the supply of magnesium, so twenty times as much seawater or about 7000 liters must be searched at perfect efficiency to get nearly 0.5 kg of bromine. This too, can be done cost-effectively, and the sea is a major supplier of the world’s bromine.

The third halogen of chlorine is iodine. This is a rarer element than bromine and chlorine throughout this planet, and it is present in the ocean to less than a thousandth of a quantity of bromine. The total amount of 86 billion tons sounds very impressive, but translated, this is only 0.45 kg of bromine in 7,570,000 liters of sea water.   

This is too little for it to be extracted cost-effectively by direct means.  However, fortunately there is another method to do this for us – the natural way.  Depending on the species, seaweed and brown algae have a very high concentration of iodine. The iodine can be extracted by burning to ash to produce iodide. This can then be oxidised to iodine and recovered by solvent extraction and evaporation.

The most expensive element in seawater is gold.  There is at least one to two grams of gold for every 100 million metric tons of ocean water in the Atlantic and north Pacific. There is also undissolved gold on the seafloor. The ocean is deep, and gold deposits are at least 1.5 km to 3.0 km underwater.

In order to extract gold from sea water, 104 to 125 cubic km, or 104,204,550,000,000 to 125,045,460,000,000 litres of ocean waters will have to be searched and processed in order to yield just 0.45 kg of gold. The cost of doing this is far more expensive than the cost of the gold itself. We might as well give up and leave the gold to rest quietly and in peace the ocean.

What about silver, the next most costly element. The concentration of silver in seawater is between 2 – 100 parts per trillion, averaging at 50 parts per trillion. The total volume of seawater in the world’s oceans is approximately 1370×10⁶ km3 or 1.4522 × 10¹⁷ litres.

The density of seawater is 1.025 kg/L. Hence the mass of ocean water is 1.49 x 10 ¹⁷ kg. Out of every trillion kg of ocean water there is 50 kg of silver. Hence the amount of silver in the ocean is about 7,450,000 kg of silver.   

Many people have tried to extract gold and silver from sea water, but I think the cost of doing so is prohibitive, and hence in my opinion they are not worth the effort.

There is 420 mg of calcium per litre of seawater. Translated, this means there is 6 x 10 ¹³ kg (60 trillion kg) of calcium in the ocean water. One of the main reasons for the abundance of calcium in water is its natural occurrence in the earth's crust, and acidic rain constantly wash calcium off the land into the ocean. Calcium is also a constituent of coral. 

However, nobody attempts to extract calcium from the ocean, as calcium is so cheap and abundant in land such as in limestone hills.

But the cheapest of all is to mine salt from the ocean where hardly any effort needs to be done. The watercourse cuts deep into the land, forming narrow bays and lagoons, and rock mass movements and subsidence cause the seabed to drop steadily. Under these conditions, about 13.6 million years ago, salt deposits were formed automatically for us to reap in abundance. In other words, part of the sea has been cut off by the land depositing the salt on dry land as salt mines.

Fortunately sodium as salt or sodium chloride, not gold or silver or other element except calcium and magnesium, is one of the most important elements required by our body for its physiological functions such as for the absorbance and transport of nutrients, maintenance of  blood pressure, the right balance of fluid and electrolytes, transmission of nerve signals such as in the heart, and the contraction and relaxation of the muscles, and is given almost free for us from the oceans.

It is the salt of life from the ocean where all life first originated, and for this:

We thank God for this gift.

(1,830 words in 7 pages)

Why is the Ocean Waters Salty? Is it getting Saltier?

 

Over the last few days in late August 2023, I have been receiving at least over a dozen alarming videos and claims from WhatsApp groups of Japanese seafoods being contaminated by radioactivity following the earthquake and tsunamis resulting in radioactive wastes being discharged from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck 128 km off the Northeast Coast of Japan triggered a series of tsunamis that struck nearby shorelines with only a few minutes’ warning. The disaster left dozens of villages along nearly 322 km of coast heavily damaged or completely destroyed.

The waves, some of which measured more than 12 metres, also struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant 241 km north of Tokyo, disabling the plant’s emergency systems and causing emergency crews to use seawater to cool the damaged reactors.

Since everybody is alarmed by the waste water from the Fukushima laced with radioactivity being discharged into the sea around Japan. They now claim the presence of radioactivity in seafood from Japan. 

Let me explain.

The waste water Japan is discharging into the Pacific Ocean contains mainly tritium. 

Natural tritium is produced as a result of the interaction of cosmic radiation with gases in the upper atmosphere. There is about 7.3 kg. of it present in the atmosphere, about 150 to 200 g per year.

The radioactivity in the Fukushima water is almost entirely tritium, a type of hydrogen. For scale, the Pacific Ocean contains 8,400 grams of pure tritium, while Japan will release 0.06 grams of tritium every year out of a total of 3 gm

Scientists in South Korea have used computer simulation to map out how the Fukushima tritium would move with the ocean currents. What they have shown was tritium levels around Korean waters would increase by less than six parts per million.

Nuclear reactors in other countries too realises tritium every year, probably double the amounts Japan will now be releasing, yet together with those already present in the atmosphere, they show no biological or health hazards on life on Earth. 

Not just that alone. Japan intends to take 40 years to slowly release it to add just 0.06 g of tritium into the Pacific Ocean. This is less than 0.001 % being added each year. 

A 2021 study postulated that eating fish for a lifetime caught a few km from the Fukushima wastewater outlet increases the tritium radiation by 0.02 micro-sieverts. This is less than a banana, which contains the equivalent of 0.1 micro-sieverts.

The same study also demonstrated a lifetime exposure to all other isotopes is 5 micro-sieverts, and this is equivalent to a dental x-ray exposure. It is also claimed that a fish can be in the same water for 50 years, but the amount of radiation gathered up is the same as one dental x-rays contact.

A fish caught 20 km from the wastewater discharge diminishes to no radioactivity.  In comparison, the natural background radiation is 1500 to 3500 micro-sieverts per year.

According to one source, the maximum marine dose near the outlet is 7 micro-grays per year. This is more than 10,000 times smaller than the zero-effect benchmark of around 90,000 micro-grays per year.

Collectively, tritium and carbon-14, subscribe to less than 0.08 % of the ocean radioactivity.  The Pacific Ocean itself already naturally stores 18 -20 million gm of carbon-14. The Fukushima waste discharge shall add just one extra gram of carbon-14 into it.

Let me put this in a simpler non-technical way for us to understand.

It has been estimated that there are about 1.335 billion cubic kilometres of oceans on earth. This is 1.335 x 10 ²¹ litres of water (1 cubic km = 10 12 litres) 

The data I got from various sources puts the estimate at 1,362,145,400 cubic kilometres.

There is already 26.8 ± 14 kg of tritium present in the oceans of which 3.8 kg are of natural origin. Let’s put 21 kg (21 000 000 mg) in the ocean waters as a modest figure. This works out to be 1.6 x 10 ¹⁴ (0.0 000 000 000 000 16) mg per litre of naturally occurring trillium in the ocean water.

But there was only a total of 3 gm of tritium in the Fukushima reactor. Dissolve 3 gm (3,000 mg) of tritium inside 1.335 x 10²¹ litres of ocean waters. This works out there would only be 2.2 x 10 ¹⁸ mg or 0.000 000 000 000 000 0022 mg of tritium per litre of ocean waters throughout the oceans discharged from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor.

No analytical instrument available to us can detect this infinitesimal teeny-tiny amount to such an infintestimal level as 0.000 000 000 000 000 0022 mg per litre of tritium or any substance at all.

Maybe those who keep shouting about radioactive food toxicity from Japan can. But I can’t even with the best and the most sensitive instrument we use in analytical chemistry.

Japan shall use the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove radioactive isotopes such as cesium-137, strontium-90, and iodine-129 but ALPS cannot isolate tritium. So this rare radioactive water isotope will be released.

The liquid waste currently stored by Japan is mainly ordinary water with 3 g of tritium in it. It is being stored in tanks that can fill 500 Olympic size swimming pools, and Japan intends to take 40 years to release them bit-by-bit into the Pacific Ocean.

Even that, the natural tritium present in the ocean pales compared to other radioactive substances such as 91 % are from potassium-40, 8.6 % are from rubidium-40, and 0.3 % from uranium which were already present in the ocean since Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Please read my explanation on the Fukushima Disaster: Radioactivity found in the Pacific Ocean?

I have posted it 7 years ago on Friday, November 25, 2016 showing there was hardly any health risk here: 

Scientific Logic: November 2016

In my opinion there is hardly any health risk consuming any fish or any seafood caught anywhere around Japan or elsewhere as there is hardly any trace of radioactivity in them due to the huge diluation by ocean waters mixed into the wastewater  

The recent videos and warnings sent to me by others lead me to write this article on something similar, namely, if the salt content in the oceans is getting more and more concentrated below this line.

…………………………………………

When I was in school, I read a story about why the sea became salty, not realizing there were many similar stories from Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Germany and even from the Philippines. Here are some of them you may read for yourself.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0565.html

But today let us give a more scientific explanation whether or not our oceans are getting saltier?

Let’s have a brief look.

We have a lot of salty water on our planet. Oceans envelop about 70 percent of the Earth's surface and about 97 percent of all water on and in the Earth is saline.  By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be isolated and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 166 metres (500 feet) thick, about the height of a 40-story office building. But where did all this salt come from? Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land, and from sea storms to the land and back into the oceans through rivers.

Rains on the land contain some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid. The rain physically erodes the rock, and the acids chemically break down the rocks and carry salts and minerals along in a dissolved state as ions.

The ions in the overflow are carried to the streams and rivers and then to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Other dissolved minerals are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time.

Sodium and chloride combined as salt are the two most common ions in seawater. They constitute over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater. The concentration of salt in seawater (its salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand.  

About 3.5% of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts. In a cubic mile of seawater, the weight of the salt (as sodium chloride) would be about 120 million tons. A cubic mile of seawater can also contain up to 11.3 kg (25 pounds) of gold and up to 20.4 kg (45 pounds) of silver.

1 cubic mile (4.16818 cubic km) of sea water contains 1,101,117,147,000 gallons  (4168181823818 litres) of water. This is 10 ^12 litres of water per cubic km of water. (The density of seawater on the surface ranges from about 1020 to 1029 kg/m³, depending on the temperature and salinity. At a temperature of 25 °C, the salinity of 35 g/kg and 1 atmospheric pressure, the density of seawater is 1023.6 kg/m³).

Scientific theories behind the origins of sea salt started with Sir Edmond Halley (the discoverer of Halley’s Comet) in 1715, who suggested that salt and other minerals were carried into the sea by rivers, having been leached out of the ground by rainfall runoff. Upon reaching the ocean, these salts would be retained and concentrated as the process of evaporation (hydrologic cycle) removed the water.

Halley noted that of the small number of lakes in the world without ocean outlets such as the Dead Sea and the Caspian Sea have the highest salt content. Halley termed this process "continental weathering".

Halley's theory seemed plausible. Sodium may have been leached out of the ocean floor when the oceans were first formed. The presence of the other dominant ion of salt, namely chloride, was from "outgassing" of hydrochloric acid as chloride together with other gases from Earth's interior via volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. The sodium and chloride ions subsequently became the most abundant constituents of sea salt.

Ocean salinity has been stable for millions of years, most likely as a consequence of a chemical / tectonic system which recycles the salt. We shall discuss this later.

Since the ocean's creation, sodium content has stabilized. It is no longer leached out of the ocean floor, but instead is captured in sedimentary layers covering the bed of the ocean. One theory is that plate tectonics result in salt being forced under the continental land masses, where it is again slowly leached to the surface.

The water on Earth exists in cycles. Called the hydrologic cycle, it involves the continuous circulation of water in the Earth-Atmosphere system. At its core, the water cycle is the motion of the water from the ground to the atmosphere and back again. Of the many processes involved in the hydrologic cycle, the most important are evaporation and transpiration.

About 1.25045 x 10 ¹⁴ cubic meters or 30,000 cubic miles of water evaporate from the ocean each year. This falls as rain or snow to be returned to the oceans in cycles.

However, these cycles of evaporation and rain are not balanced. Over the oceans only water evaporates and falls as rain which is almost pure water. The rain pours over the land. It then dribbles through the soil to pick up soluble chemicals, running them into rivers into the ocean.

River water actually contains about 1/ 100 of 1 percent salt but not salty enough to taste. But does it have an implication to make the ocean saltier, or does it?

We would think then the ocean is constantly gaining traces of salt and other chemicals dissolved from the land but loses none that it evaporates. If this is true then the oceans should be growing saltier and saltier very slowly, and over the millions of years of rainfalls, the salt should mess up greatly.

River water also carries its salt into some inland lakes. This water is not discharged into the ocean. In these lakes the dissolved material accumulates as it does in the oceans.

If the lake is located in a hot region of the land, its average rate of evaporation is greater than that of the oceans. Hence, the dissolved material accumulates more rapidly and can become far saltier than the ocean. For instance, the Dead Sea bordering Israel and Jordan has 25 percent dissolved matter. It is so salty that nothing can thrive in it. It is so dense that we can float on the water.  

The salinity in other parts of the world varies with temperature, evaporation, and precipitation. Salinity is generally low at the equator and at the poles, and high at mid-latitudes. The average salinity is about 35 parts per thousand.

If the oceans continue to gather salts and other dissolved minerals like the Dead Sea, would the oceans be dead too eventually? Theoretically it would if not for other events which tend to reduce the salt content.

Storms at sea for instance blow sprays far inland, and dissolved salts are carried with the sprays far into the interior to deposit and to distribute dissolved salts over the land.

What is more important is, certain combinations of dissolved substances, when present in sufficient concentration, combine to form insoluble compounds that sink to the bottom of the ocean.

 Other chemical compounds, though not insoluble in themselves, can combine with other materials on the ocean floor. Other substances washed into the ocean are absorbed into the cells of ocean organisms.

The outcome is that the ocean is far less rich in dissolved matter or even saltier than it ought to be if we compute all other materials that must have been brought into it by the rivers over the past few billion years.

 

 Contrastingly, the ocean floor is quite rich in substances that must have come from land. Large quantities of metals and pollutants lie in lumps distributed over the ocean floor.

Furthermore, in the course of time shallow arms of the ocean may be cut off by emerging bits of land. These bits of the once ocean gradually evaporate, leaving behind large quantities of the dissolved material in the ocean which has then returned to land.

Salt mines are an example. We can obtain vast quantities of salt and lesser quantities of other substances, are the leftover remnants of such dried-up bits of the ocean. 

But then if 8 billion people living on this world consume 6 g of salt each day, then 4.8 x 10 ¹⁰ gm (48,000 metric tons) of salt will return into the ocean everyday through the urine of 8 billion people even if dried up lands reclaimed the salt from the ocean. It looks like salts in the oceans into land and back to the ocean again are like cycles of rains and evaporation. 

Well, then, what would the overall results be? Is the ocean getting a tiny bit saltier over a long time, or is it getting less salty? Does it sometimes swerve in one direction, sometimes in the other, keeping a balance on an average? I don’t think geologists or other scientists really know. 

Is it Possible to Send Our Thoughts by Telepathy?

 

Thank you, Tan Sri, for your article on transcendental meditation and its benefits. 

Thank you for sharing, and also for your question to me on any possibility on long distance communication using thoughts? Hmm! 

I shall try to answer this question. Bear with me.

 

Ever since humans evolved some 315,000 years ago, they have been communicating.

The earliest civilizations between 4000 and 3000 B.C.E., during the rise of agriculture and trade to allow people to have surplus food and economic stability they need to communicate. In earlier years humans communicated using cave paintings, smoke signals, symbols, carrier pigeons, and telegraph.

Our modern methods are more convenient and efficient. We communicate from far using postal services by writing letters, later by telephones, television, Internet, e-mails, later mobile and smartphones, social media, text messaging and through WhatsApp.

Communications has now reached a stage that has become easier and easier, and faster and faster too and knowledge using computers and the Internet has increased tremendously.  

 

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased

(Daniel 12:4)

 

However, since I was an innocent boy in school I have heard of the word “telepathy” that we can send our thoughts by long distance to a friend, but I had no clue how this can be achieved.

 Today, I have often thought if it was possible.  Can we really communicate by just thinking and the other person at the other end just receives the brain waves of our thoughts, just like we hear voices and music through a radio where radio waves from a transmitter are transmitted long distances and the signals are converted and amplified into sounds?

Let’s have a look at this possibility by using brain waves we call telepathy.

In 1924 an Austrian psychiatrist by the name Hans Berger placed electrodes on the human scalp and was able to detect wavering electrical spikes and waves using a very sensitive galvanometer. He was frightened by this finding.  

He dared not publish it until 1929. Ever since this discovery, techniques in recording brain waves have been refined for them to be recorded on paper. 

Today, we call this electroencephalography from the Greek word to mean “electric writing from the brain.” We abbreviated this as EEG.

 

EEG shows certain electrical activities or rhythms going on in the brain. For instance, when we are asleep the EEG shows a large, slow delta rhythm. 

On waking up, but with eyes closed, the rhythms change into alpha rhythms. But when we open our eyes the rhythms accelerate, but become smaller into beta rhythms with occasional slow, smaller theta rhythms seen.

There are two types of sleep, non-rapid eye-movement (NREM) sleep and rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep. NREM sleep is divided into stages 1, 2, 3, and 4, representing a continuum of relative depth. Each has unique characteristics including variations in brain wave patterns, eye movements, and muscle tone.

 

Normally when one goes to sleep, the low-voltage fast EEG pattern of wakefulness gradually gives way to slower frequencies, as NREM sleep goes from stage N1 (decrease in alpha) to stage N2 (spindles, K-complexes) to stage N3 (increasing amplitude and regularity of delta rhythm). 

When we dream, our brains are filled with noisy electrical activity that looks nearly identical to that of the awake brain.

 

We can hook up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor our brain activity as we progress from wakefulness to deep, slow-wave sleep and on into REM sleep. But EEGs alone will not be able tell whether or not we are awake or dreaming. 

But we can only distinguish REM sleep by recording rapid eye movement (REM) and muscle tone, since our bodies relax in a general paralysis to prevent us from acting out our dreams. But it is not possible to use EEG to read a person's thoughts.

Neuroscientists cannot tell us exactly what these rhythms mean and why the electric potentials change their variations in various stages of wake, sleep and dreams? 

However, we know that every nerve in the brain transmits a tiny bit of electric impulses. But the human brain has something like 100 billion nerve cells, and with each contributing a bit of their own electric impulses.  We can only take an average of the sum of them to show them collectively as EEG patterns. But can we use EEG to listen? In some ways, the answer is yes. 

We get all kinds of mixed and confusing radio signals all the time including a collection of all the electrical signals coming from our brains.

Using the EEG is similar to listening to human activities the world over. All we hear is like trying to listen to millions of radio signals all over the world plus radio signals from outer space. All we hear is a collection of confusing signals. 

The noise would be louder by day in certain spots and softer by night. There would be fainter rhythms showing evening hilarity and cheerfulness, and twice daily rush hour human activities, and stress signals from them at work, and probably only slow delta rhythm on one side of earth when everyone is at sleep.

 

In such a general average, only large and serious disruptions such as war, social and political unrest would make a difference in the EEG patterns of humans all over the world or only in certain locations. In this way we can use the EEG to detect human noise and their activities the world over.

But what about our individual thinking inside our brain? Could someone use EEG to listen to someone’s thoughts?  As I have already explained it is not possible to use EEG to read a person’s thoughts. 

An EEG is not like an electrocardiogram (ECG) that records the electrical activity of the heart. An ECG can help diagnose certain heart conditions, including abnormal heart rhythms and coronary heart disease such as angina, a heart attack or a heart block from some anomaly in the electric transmission through the heart muscles. 

An ECG recording can even be transmitted over long distances to a cardiologist through telemedicine who can interpret the PQRST waves in the ECG for abnormalities. 

So far, we cannot use EEG for long distance transmission to read thoughts, but probably for diagnosis of abnormal brain electric patterns such as an epileptic seizure.

  

That would be very useful for silent communications that could be amplified like a radio transmitter across the entire world. So far, we can use telemedicine to transmit ECG readings to a cardiologist remotely or the provision of remote clinical services, via real-time two-way communication between the patient and the healthcare provider, using electronic audio and visual means. 

We can of course use telemedicine to transmit EEG readings long distance by wire or wirelessly. But still the other person at the other end, even if he is an expert on EEG recordings cannot tell thoughts from these brain waves unless we have develop some means, such as using AI to analyse subdivisions of these recordings which I shall explain shortly.

 

This is a question in telepathy for which I do not have a definitive answer. It is very difficult to understand how we can use such weak electric signals from the brain against a barrage of all kinds of other extraneous electromagnetic noises and signals in the background. 

How would it be possible even if we can identify certain patterns of the EEG as thoughts or certain messages to send and receive them electromagnetically against the general background of brain noises from other humans, let alone the much more powerful radio and electrical noises that overwhelm our single feeble brain signals when the overall electric potential of our single thinking brain is only in less than a millionth of a volt.

 

Perhaps if our thoughts can be highly isolated coming from a single person, amplified and carried by some radiation, somewhat like a laser light of a particular wavelength and beamed across the world, maybe just to another nearby receiving brain for thought communication. Would this be possible? I don’t know. My brain is not advanced or scientific enough to comprehend this possibility with certainty.

 

But let’s look at this another way.  Perhaps we can use computers and AI to help. It is possible for us to use them to analyze these vague signals of thoughts emitted from our individual brains, differentiate them from all other electrical signals and carry them to a receiving brain. 

In order for this to be possible the EEG readings need to be split by a computer or by AI into many subsidiary rhythms, part of which are our thoughts. See my article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) written just last night hours ago here:

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2023/

If we can do this, that would be a single thought from a single brain. It might be possible for us to amplify these specific subdivisions of brain waves as thoughts to be carried across the oceans like short waves radio signals to a friend to listen or to interpret living on the other side of this world. Such an amplified rhythm might produce a pulsing electromagnetic that can be received electromagnetically and later translated into writing.

Alternatively, the receiver can also use a similar device placed on his scalp to read the thoughts of someone else who sent them. In that case telepathy becomes possible through some electronic devices, but not directly without being aided. Just think of a radio or a television and you can understand my thoughts.

 

However, scientists at this point of my writing are not that advanced. So, they do not use EEG for monitoring human activities, their thinking or for silent communications. Scientists gave their discovery to medical doctors to diagnose brain diseases such as epilepsy, seizure disorders and brain tumors.  

But let us say we have made a scientific breakthrough to be able to use a computer or Artificial Intelligence to decipher the EEG brain patterns by sub dividing them into differential patterns, one of which is thoughts.  In that case there may be a possibility of telepathy coming into reality. 

We can apply them in the same principle as we do for radio by translating voice or music into electrical impulses, which are then decoded into electromagnetic radio waves for long distances for transmission where the reverse is done to change them into voice and music we can hear and understand. That is a possibility.  

 

But there is one problem. Like a radio or a TV broadcast, anyone can receive them using a receiving device like a radio or television set. How then are we going to make this electrical rhythm of thoughts private, meant only for a specific person?

Then we also have another problem: how do we activate the device only for that specific person with whom we wish to communicate telepathically and no want else?  

Yet any question we need to answer. What advantage then would telepathy have over ordinary speech, the telephone, emails, letters by postal services, or even through WhatsApp messages or even what you are reading right now I send in my blog? You too can read my thoughts right now in this article without telepathy.

 

Perhaps the only advantage of telepathy is to break the language barrier. We all think in different languages, and we can express our thoughts in a language someone can understand. 

Hence even if we can translate brain activities into thoughts and try to transmit them in a language only, we can only understand how we would expect the receiver to understand our thought language, unless we can also translate these brain activities into a language the other person can understand.

However, there is one hope. We can transmit images and pictures of our thoughts, but not foreign languages. As the Chinese proverb by Confucius says, “a picture is worth a thousand words". 

We can then imagine a picture and have it sent telepathically, and the entire world with so many races and languages would have understood it at once.

 

I think our only difficulty with telepathy is that we think of all kinds of unsavoury things in our mind all the time, but we keep them to ourselves most of the time not to offend others by not wanting to express them into words. 

But how are we going to prevent ourselves from thinking all kinds of offensive and unsavoury thoughts all the time, which would then be automatically broadcasted to everyone who wishes to receive our hidden secrets. Then telepathy becomes free for all who have a receiver. It would be no different from a radio broadcast.

 

But it would also be a blessing to the Police and crime busters who would be able to read the minds of criminals instantly without needing to have a lie detector.

But on the other hand, such a scientific discovery may be a blessing in disguise so that we can control our minds and transmit only good and kind thoughts to the rest of our fellow citizens. But this may or may not be an advantage to politicians for sure. 

But you can be sure I have good, kind thoughts to all of you, my gentle readers here, not through telepathy, but my thoughts written in words you are reading right now. 

But I cannot tell if you have the same for me. 

 

Thank you for reading my thoughts.

jb lim 

 

 

Can Artificial Intellegence Repalce Us?

 

Robots need not be very intelligent unlike our human brains. But they must be intelligent enough to follow orders instructed by us. If they can follow our orders to repeatedly do the same routine for us such as doing housework, delivering goods, or serving customers we would be content.

Designing and creating a robot to do these chores is tough enough for a human brain. We need to design a compact computer that would fit inside the skull of a robot that would be about the size of our human skull. But why would our intelligent human brain need to do that since the vacuum tubes to transistors to tiny integrated circuits down to silicon chips are getting smaller and smaller by the day. Instead of that, why not make the structure bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger with extremely powerful, yet tiny chips inside its brain.

Being intelligent ourselves we know that a brain that becomes too big and large would finally lose its efficiency because nerve impulses don’t travel quickly.

As scientists we know nerve impulses are extremely slow compared to the speed of electricity, where the electric field can propagate with a speed on the order of 50–99% of the speed of light; however, it is very fast compared to the speed of blood flow, with some myelinated neurons conducting at speeds up to 120 m/s (432 km/h or 275 mph). The fastest nerve impulse travels at 100 metres per second. Translated, this implies a nerve impulse can streak across from one end of the brain to the other in just four-hundred-fortieth of one second, but a brain, let’s say 14.6 km long (if there is one) would require 2.4 minutes to travel across. This would be too slow for our human brain to react. A brain of this size, no matter how intelligent we are would fall apart especially in an emergency simply because it took too long for information to travel and to wait before we could process them in our huge brains.

Thus, we need to use a computer to process and analyze information that uses not nerve impulses, but electrical impulses that travel near the speed of light – at 29,5046,400 meters per second or at 98 % the speed of light to be more precise. (The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second).

We can imagine using our human brains to devise a technology in which we use smaller and smaller but finer and finer, yet faster and faster components to analyse information much, much faster than our human brain could, and yet our robots can be as large and as strong as we wish. Ultimately, the robot or Artificial Intelligence (AI) if you wish to call it, would become faster, much more efficient, and probably far more intelligent than us, hopefully not. But is there a theoretical limit to how intelligent robotics can become? To the best of my knowledge, there may not be one, simply because as we pack in more complexities into a computer and larger and larger, the AI, it not only keeps and stores all the data, but it seems to outdo us. This is a frightening scenario I should imagine. Of course, some may disagree by questioning how AI could produce great works of art, how it could compose great symphonies or make great scientific and medical discoveries? But in my mind, I would reply to them that they can use their human brains to achieve the same as an IA, let alone outdo it.

Of course, a question like this comes from an ordinary non-scientific mind. But there are scientific geniuses who may not agree because they are the ones who can think and design scientific ideas, make discoveries and breakthroughs into technology far better than an ordinary person.

They attain their genius because the tiny atoms and molecules inside their brains are arranged in such a way by an Intelligent Designer, a Maker who is God, almost exactly like those tiny components being arranged inside powerful computers by an intelligent designer who is us.

There is actually nothing inside the brain of a scientific genius except just atoms and molecules, except how they were arranged. If we can arrange the atoms and molecules of a genius scientist, the same as they arrange the teeny-tiny components inside their AI they will (in my thinking) become even more intelligent than us.  If the components in their AI are not as tiny as those atoms and molecules in our brains, we can compensate for this by making our AI structurally larger and more robust.

Then my readers may argue with me that AI and computers can do what they are programmed to do. This is true. But I will answer back to my readers that their brains too are programmed by their genes to do the same. Part of our brain has been programmed by learning what we should do, and this is no different from a computer or AI.  My argument would be that if we can build a computer as intelligent as us, there is no limit to why an AI can be designed to be even more intelligent than us?

As a trained biological evolutionist this is exactly how we observe species getting better and better, more and more adaptable to environmental challenges through evolution for billions of years. It was a randomized arrangement of atoms and molecules of hit and miss into success. So would our brains do the same for AI evolution into more and more artificial intelligence.   

Ha! The next question my readers will challenge me would be the question: would AI become so intelligent they will replace us? I would retort, why couldn’t they be. If we can make them supersede in thinking, we can also program them to be just as kind as they are intelligent to us, not to destroy us even though they lack a soul except a physical body.

Perhaps in my worst night dreams they may keep us as their pets, and models to be refashioned again should we cease to exist in this world to do all the things we do to the other animals that too have the right to exist on this small planet of ours. Perhaps we need to be replaced as soon as possible so that other creatures less endowed with intelligence can live to regain their glory on Earth.

Allow me to conclude with this verse Jesus predicted to all mankind:

 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Mathew 5:5)