Small Town Wren

I’m probably going to regret posting about this when some of my friends start hacking off their limbs, but! This month’s National Geographic has a fantastic article on bionics. We are officially living in the future. We might not have flying cars, but my god, we have cyborgs. Legit cyborgs.

This is completely awesome. I’m having trouble expressing just how much glee this brings to my life. The Editor’s Note of the issue, I think, states it well:

But the bionics of modern medical engineering has little to do with enabling someone to run 60 miles an hour or use an eye like a zoom lens. It is more about the quiet miracle of holding a fork or seeing the silhouette of a tree. [...] “It made me feel I was just Ray again”

I know what it means to lose part of yourself. Perhaps not in the physical, corporeal sense, but in no way less painful and traumatizing. It’s really difficult to regain that footing, that sense of “this is me.” The fact that these new technologies are giving some of that back to people is simply beautiful.

In some ways it is a touch creepy. Reading about the rewiring of nerve-ends gives my skin the crawlies. I couldn’t read the section on how bionic eyes work. The details are gross, but the big picture is amazing. And I hope that this doesn’t become corrupted in too quick a fashion. I know some of my cyberpunk fanboys are drooling over the idea of that arm with a weapon attached. In the technological dream, such fantasies are cool and fun. I just hope they never enter reality.

Photo courtesy of Mark Thiesson via National Geographic.

This comes courtesy of my wonderful friend John. He listens to this so often that I cannot think about Carl Sagan without thinking about him.