What would it be like to have a mind that could assimilate every piece of recorded information known to mankind on a given subject? A mind that could not only retain the vast amounts of knowledge and recall it at lightening speed, but could also extrapolate and complete mind boggling computations in a known field of study like mathematics almost instantaneously?
The most modern computers are already capable of such extraordinary feats and much more. The ever expanding abilities of super computers in the 21st century are not limited to just one subject, but can digest, cross reference and cipher available data on any subject imaginable.
The incredible amount of information obtainable by the average citizen is but a small fraction of what is kept from the public domain. A search of the communal internet causes one to be in awe of the power that might be weld by one who is privy to the most sacred of withheld secrets
In Daniel 12:4 the prophet was told by God's messenger, "...seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase."
Bible students understand that Daniel's prophesied developments of expanded travel abilities of men and the increase of knowledge are major keys for recognizing that we are living at the time of the end when Daniel's prophecies would be fully comprehended.
As for mankind traveling to and fro, not much needs to be said about this prophecy except that in 2004, man has vehicles driving about on the surface of Mars not only taking pictures, but even analyzing and sending back data that now supports water was once found on the planet.
As for knowledge increasing in 2004, it is a fact that human embryos are being cloned in South Korea ("S. Koreans report cloning advance," Denver Post, 2-21-04). In the last month of 2003, two Denver Post articles read, "Light brought to standstill for first time..." and "Chimps' genome largely mapped." Knowledge is increasing at an unfathomable rate. Any doubts that we are living at Daniel's prophesied time of increased knowledge can reasonably be dispelled with a Feb. 22, 2004 Knight Ridder article which headlined, "Flood of information overloads society."
We quote, "Feel overwhelmed by the deluge of information flooding the world?
It's no surprise. Researchers say the amount of new words, sounds, pictures and numbers produced and stored on paper, film, or computer disks has almost doubled in three years.
The supply of new material saved in a single year, 2002, would fill half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress - the world's largest collection of books and papers - if it were converted to print, according to a study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, political scientists at the University of California at Berkeley...The recent explosion of recorded data, after centuries of steady but much slower growth, can be traced, in large part, to two factors: [1] The computer revolution, which has made it possible to capture and save vast quantities of information in ones and zeroes, the binary alphabet of the digital age. [2] The growth of "Big Science" in astronomy, nuclear physics and biology, such as the Human Genome Project. Experts figure that in recent decades the number of scientific papers published has been doubling every three years.
In just one field, global climate data, the volume of recorded information is expected to zoom from 2 billion gigabytes in 2000 to 15 billion gigabytes in 2010.
A gigabyte is a billion bytes, the equivalent of a billion English letters...The volume of printed information grew by 36 percent from 1999 to 2002, the last year of the study, but electronic records ballooned by 80 percent...The majority of this mind-numbing flood of information never reaches most citizens. Immense quantities come from secret electronic intercepts by the National Security Agency, the nation's eavesdropping intelligence agency; scientific laboratories; orbiting satellites and the like.
The material is reworked and distilled before any of it is made public, if it ever is."
The article specifically mentioned how the "majority" of information never reaches most citizens and how the material is "reworked and distilled before any of it is made pubic, if it ever is."
Consider our original thought about a man having access to a mind that contained all such information and never forgets.
The Prophet Daniel told us in Dan. 8:23-26 that a sinister, cunning king will arise in the last days. He is to be so impressed with himself that he will magnify himself in his heart and dare to rise up against the Prince of princes, Jesus Christ.
In Revelation 13 the Apostle John tells us that this beastly king will be empowered by Satan himself and that a false prophet, portraying himself as a lamb, will be in league with him.
In verses 14 -15 John prophesies that this miracle-working false prophet will be able to give breath (that is an actual breathing kind of life) to an image made of this Anti-Christ King. Quoting verse 15 we read, "he [the false prophet] was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast [that is, the image of the Anti-Christ], that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed."
During the past decade we shared how scientists were working on what was called, "4th generation computers." These are computers that are envisioned will be able to incorporate within their hardware the life force and abilities of living cells. Such abilities as information transmission, storage, and self replication are just a few of the anticipated benefits.
Keeping in mind that such a bio-computer would literally require breath to live and that computers can generate, and are in fact a kind of image, John's prophecy invokes intriguing possibilities.
As we review the following news item keep in mind that this research has in actuality been going on for decades and as we read earlier, "the majority of information never reaches most citizens or is reworked and distilled before any of it is made public, if it ever is." Odds are we are sharing only a fraction of how far this technology has and will actually be pursued.
Quoting from the August 18, ‘03 Denver Post article which headlined, "Researchers think DNA could drive computers" we read, " It almost sounds too fantastic to be true, but a growing amount of research supports the idea that DNA, the basic building block of life, could be the basis of a staggeringly powerful new generation of computers.
If it happens, the revolution someday might be traced to the night a decade ago when University of Southern California computer scientist Leonard Adleman lay in bed reading James Watson's textbook "Molecular Biology of the Gene."
"This is amazing stuff," he said to his wife, and then a foggy notion robbed him of his sleep: Human cells and computers process and store information in much the same way.
Computers store data in strings made up of the numbers 0 and 1.
Living things store information with molecules represented by the letters A, T, C and G.
There were many more intriguing similarities, Adleman realized as he hopped out of bed. He began sketching the basics of DNA computing.
Those late-night scribbles have long since given way to hard science, backed by research grants from NASA, the Pentagon and other federal agencies. Now a handful of researchers around the world are creating tiny biology-based computers, hoping to harness the powers of life itself.
They call their creations "machines" and "devices." Really, they are nothing more than test tubes of DNA-laden water, and yet this liquid has been coaxed to crunch algorithms and spit out data...They're also pursuing the idea that genetic material can self-replicate and grow into processors so powerful that they can handle problems too complex for silicon-based computers to solve.
Eventually, the scientists aim to create self-sustaining computers that can be used, for instance, on deep-space voyages, to monitor and maintain the health of humans on board.
What struck Adleman most that night he jumped out of bed was how a living enzyme "reads" DNA much the same way computer pioneer Alan Turing first contemplated in 1936 how a machine could read data.
"If you look inside the cell you find a bunch of amazing little tools," said Adleman, who made the first DNA-based computation in 1994. "The cell is a treasure chest."
Adleman used his computer to solve the classic "traveling salesman" mathematical problem - how a salesman can visit a given number of cities without passing through any city twice - by exploiting the predictability of how DNA interacts.
Adleman assigned each of seven cities a different strip of DNA, 20 molecules long, then dropped them into a stew of millions of more strips of DNA that naturally bonded with the "cities." That generated thousands of random paths, in much the same way that a computer can sift through random numbers to break a code.
From this hodgepodge of connected DNA, Adleman eventually extracted a satisfactory solution - a strand that led directly from the first city to the last, without retracing any steps. DNA computing was born.
What these researchers are essentially trying to do is control, predict and understand life itself...Biologists are only now grasping the basics of how and why DNA unzips, recombines and sends and receives information. DNA is notoriously fragile and prone to transcription errors - as the world's cancer rates prove...Still, researchers in this field believe they remain on the vanguard of a computational revolution.
After all, a single gram of dried DNA, about the size of a half-inch sugar cube, can hold as much information as a trillion compact discs...Columbia University researcher Milan Strojanovic, using NASA money, is developing a biology-based machine that doesn't need hands-on human help to compute...Ehud Shapiro of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science envisions programming tiny molecules with medical information and injecting them into people."
So as knowledge increases and increases in these last days, while the greatest information is kept hidden, we can't help but think of a cunning king who will one day sit in front of, or might even be hooked into a living computer containing all of the privatized information one believes is enough to rule a world. A servant of Satan with concealed forces of the universe at his command can easily be led to magnify himself in his pride to the extent that he will indeed expect the world to worship him and his living image.
In this day of living computers with robotics and hologram projectors and the possibility of creating someone's clone a reality, a living image is not beyond the reach of men in this 21st century.
The days of terror we were warned of in verse 1 of Daniel Ch. 12, when "..a time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation..." are about to come upon the world.
The glorious moment of the Rapture of the Church to heaven, as is prophesied in I Thessalonians 4:15-18, and the years of prophesied tribulation which will follow this event are not far off. As human knowledge increases, so too does the awareness of the saints that their departure is near at hand.
As for the knowledge unregenerate mankind keeps acquiring in their quest of the answers to the ultimate questions of life, the Apostle Paul wrote of them by God's Spirit in II Timothy 3:7, "always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." That is they will never understand the truth of their existence and destiny because while they produce volumes of information, they have set their hearts against understanding God as their Creator and His only provision of salvation and eternal life through His only begotten Son Jesus Christ.
Today is the day to separate yourself from those who professing to be wise have become fools and come with faith to the only Redeemer Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.
Time is running out.