bordarretazos

Escribe Arthur C. Clarke: «Even if we cannot abolish sleep altogether, it would be an immense gain if we could concentrate it into a very few hours of really deep unconsciousness, chosen when convenient.

Perhaps we shall always need the ‘balm of tired minds’, but we will not have to spend a third of our lives applying it. On-the other hand, there are occasions when protracted unconsciousness would be very valuable; it would be welcomed, for example, by convalescents recuperating after operations – and, above all, by space-travellers on lengthy missions. It is in this connection that serious thought is now being given to the possibility of suspended animation, which we will need if we are ever to reach the stars, or travel more than a very few light-years from the neighbourhood of the Sun.

«We assume that our familiar senses give us a complete picture of our environment, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are stone-deaf and colour blind in a universe of impressions beyond the range of our senses. The world of a dog is a world of scent; that of a dolphin, a symphony of ultrasonic pulses as meaningful as sight. To the bee, on a cloudy day, the diffuse sunlight carries a direction-sign utterly beyond our powers of discrimination, for it can detect the plane vibration of the light-waves. The rattlesnake strikes in total darkness towards the infra-red glow of its living prey – as our guided missiles have learned to do, only in the last few years. There are blind fish in muddy rivers who probe their opaque universe with electric fields, the natural prototype of radar; and all fish have a curious organ, the lateral line, running along their bodies to detect vibrations and pressure changes in the water around them.