BACK TO WHAT IF?

As a seasonal reminder of where the world is heading into the momentous 2025 and the changes that will bring, the biggest challenges will be the introduction of a returned President who, as a businessman, is proactive rather than just reactive. Politicians are reactive, just responding to events, while in business, you plan several responses to varying arising alternatives. But it will be a bumpy ride.

We now have a new agenda fronted by Trump's varying genius alongside a Musk who is a brilliant realist. In this, we have Trump as in his Christmas message on a religious mantra aiming to get Christianity and God on his side to "Make America Great Again", while you have what looks like his 2IC, laced in logic and not about to leave the future to any one God.

And if people have not yet got the memo, I'm shy to quote Karl Marx's and his "Religion is the opiate of the people" where I put it as the drug humans consume to douse their greatest fear, that of dying - and what if anything comes after. The terror this question brings for which no one can provide an answer it is convenient to have smart people invent their Gods whether the good ones during daylight or the bad devils coming in darkness. These thousands of Gods had to offer solace to a wonderful heaven one went to if they did what they were told, fought and died fighting the boss's wars, and, of course, as even Jesus said, you paid your taxes. Of course, religion had to have its variations, where a cunning add-on was death for apostasy, but what real benefit those poor, overworked virgins could offer would need to be left to the imagination.

So, all our wars seem intertwined with links to undefinable/unprovable gods and what they want to justify our existence. The nearest link comes from the desire to have progeny so that even if one dies and ceases to exist, there remains a rationale for being. In this, we see historically how whole generations of losers in Chinese wars would be eliminated as a fate worse than individual death.

Hence back to WHAT IF? What if this uncertainty in "death" could be explained and a form of remaining consciousness shown to be retain under The law of conservation of energy which states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant and in the case of a closed system the total amount of energy within the system can only be changed through entering or leaving the system? So in fact energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Good theory but until now little practical use for humans in their search for eternity.

Except that Elon Musk with his now proven functional Neuro-Link attached to Noland Arbaugh has demonstrated, AI can achieve connection to all known information in the universe. This remains an incredible step forward and is still developing, where the next big question comes on whether such a neuro link would be sustainable without the human brain interface, or how to keep it active even after a person's physical death. Even along the way, the first step would be the possibility of extending life to facilitate a connection since the body would not need to be active - going into a Methuselah 900-year age group before working out how not to even need the human body. Remember here how this was starting as an experiment with Noland totally immobile so with not much choice, but would need to be extended to physically fit humans. Just as AI cars talk to each other, just imagine a platoon of soldiers with all brains connected just as drones can now be linked.

During such a transition into a next progression, if everyone is then able to connect to reality and be shown the full history of religion, with the possibility of extended "life", would there still need to be wars because my God was better than your God, or killings to make that point? Would governments still hold their citizens to ransom? Perhaps why we haven't seen little green men floating around or visual earlier civilisations is because they are already on this AI level and really all around us?

All of the above appears to be a logically achievable progression of AI, but each step still raises many unanswered questions. These frightening unpalatable issues raised by both Elon Musk and Yuval Harari in his defined "useless people", suggest that at a time of neuro-links, why would you need to have everyone, even the poor in undeveloped countries connected - and if there is no function for them, do you allow them to die off under a number of alternatives, or to go to war amongst each other? Gone would be the Christian ethos of love thuy neighbour and offer the other cheek. In our rapid stride into the future, hopefully proactive rather than just reactive approaches can be adopted...