Artificial Life, Computers, and Time Travel

Nothing stirs the imagination more than a story that ponders on what may be impossible with current technology. No mathematical manipulation can create life or shift time backwards and forwards with the flip of a switch. All ventures into artificial life and time travel are intellectual exercises. To begin, the laws of physics are brutally inflexible; none can be broken, even with the permutations of quantum weirdness. The issue with sentient computers is closer to fruition but still totally a matter of solving the problems of consciousness and sentient thought. Even with these well-known and acknowledged sobering limits, artificial life, sentient computers, and time travel exist as possibilities in the minds of science fiction aficionados and futurists. Artificial life by definition means life generated without the use of preexisting living matter. That life may be completely organic as androids, inorganic as robots, or composite as cybernetic combinations of both. When that life is created the big question is can it achieve consciousness and sentience. The stories in this book explore the possibilities for the reader to decide whether life is a function of the materials from which it is made or something else or both. Computers are so all-invasive in current society it is hard to believe civilization was possible without them. Many consider computers as mechanical brains in total parallel with living organic brains. The truth is no computer has yet to come close to the inherent power of the ordinary human brain. The stories here take a leap of imagination where computers have advanced to the point where they equal and go beyond the abilities of mortal brains. There is real food for thought here. Alas, going backward and forward in time is a complex mathematical dream. Calculations of black holes and worm holes are the fodder of visionary dreams, of instantaneous travel through time and space. Although possible on paper, no physical proof has yet come forth to prove anything practical. Even so, stories of time travel fuel the imagination and satisfy the passion for adventure in distant places in the past and future. Read on and be transported where only the reader can go.