Future shock: Science and tech writer Bill Bain on eternal life with dead relatives and Margaret Thatcher

This may take the form of deceased relatives wandering around your living room or, if you’re so inclined, waking up to a perfectly-bouffanted Margaret Thatcher lying naked beside you. A deeply unpalatable scenario, you’ll agree.

However, there is context beyond cheap Tory-baiting – the inevitability that curious deviants will be soon able to bear witness and live out such unholy scenes. Looking at some of the True Blue oddities of nature lurking around Manchester last week, this is one simulation that will not lack popularity.

Such depravity is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential of life-like holograms. The only limits will be the depths of your own degeneracy. A dystopian world of isolationist hedonism awaits us all.

The dead could even be enhanced in this ghost-like form, becoming new and improved versions of those we loved so dearly. What better Mother’s Day gift than your resurrected dad sitting on his favourite chair again – only without his disinterested grunts or flicked snotballs. You could give him George Clooney’s twinkly eyes too. Mum would like that. Or even Clooney’s entire head, loaded with dad’s memory. It’s what he would
have wanted.

So how far away is this seismic, paradigm-shaping technology? Mapping, digitising and downloading the contents of human brains may still be few decades off, but life-like holograms themselves are not far away at all. In many ways, they’re already here – simply requiring refinement for commercial use.

Apple – with its ridiculous war chest of $800 billion – has splashed out on patents for a device which projects realistic holograms that can be manipulated by human hands, responding to swipes and squeezes.

In Korea, a research team at the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has developed holograms of such high resolution that they make the famous Tupac projection look like the 1970s video game Pong. Swedish pop legends Abba are certainly taking their cue from the revived rapper, with all four members giving their permission for a forthcoming holographic world tour. It’s likely Prince will play the Hydro with Bowie and Hendrix soon.

There are, of course, more sober applications of the tech currently being applied. In this year’s French elections, presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon appeared as a hologram to speak simultaneously at seven rallies.

So, how do they work? Toronto-based tech company Rose and Thistle call the process Holographic Paramotion. It uses a box filled with the latest optical tech to beam holograms using countless individual lasers to animate each sinew of movement. These are not the green-tinged, static, flickering phantoms of dubious quality you might be familiar with. The latest holograms are increasingly indistinguishable from reality and unsettling in their motion and solidity.

The danger is we become non-existent ourselves – retreating from reality to live out our physical lives as desensitised, passive prisoners haunting our own fantasy worlds. Our physical deaths may be just a blip in an our everlasting presence on Earth.

Ghosts and zombies may prove to be real after all – manifested in ways far more disturbing than anyone could have envisioned. And I don’t just mean the potential resurrection of The Iron Lady as a personal sex-o-gram.

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LUCA BE A LADY
HUE and Cry never stopped looking for Linda, just as astro-biologists never stopped looking for Luca – the last universal common ancestor and the single source of all life on Earth.

The irony is that Luca was always hiding in plain sight – from the birds in the sky to the fungus in the fields and the fish in the sea. Everything that has ever existed originates from this single microbe which arrived on a young Earth around four billion years ago.

I use the term “arrived” with trepidation as there are many competing theories on Luca’s origins – some marvellous, some mad – but it’s the rather beautiful vision of comets riddled with bacteria seeding the universe through planetary impact that has gained most traction in recent years, illustrated above.

So Luca, Earth’s true Eve, was quite possibly an alien, albeit a very tiny one. Now, a surprisingly specific genetic portrait of this great granny of all things has been generated by evolutionary biologists at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Decades of intensive gene research on microbes has now shed considerable light on the mystery of how life first emerged on the planet.

It seems Luca thrived in intensely hot deep sea vents on the magma-drenched, celestial baby Earth. This organism was unlike anything we’ve ever seen, basically a conglomeration of tiny cells that spent hundreds of millions of years freely exchanging genetic material through some early form of osmosis.

It had no gender and, most interestingly, was seemingly immortal. It was life but certainly not as we know it. Death itself did not exist until Luca effectively committed suicide after a billion years of celibacy and invented sex.
Why this eternal organism’s genetics changed so suddenly to pave the way for gender and procreation as a way of exchanging genetic information is still a mystery.

Philosophers might suggest Luca sacrificed immortality to evolve a consciousness so it could understand itself. In short, create us. Perhaps Luca is actually still the one true existence on this planet, more alive than ever before, now looking through the eyes of everything it birthed.

And if that’s true, someone tell Pat Kane to call off the search for Linda. Je suis Linda. You are Linda. Pat himself is Linda. We are all Linda. But her real name is Luca.