Following on from the thoughts on the digital afterlife the concept of immortality raises many questions from a scientific standpoint.

The aspect of immortality that we are concerned with is the adjective from the Oxford English dictionary - “living forever”. Outside of spiritual beliefs the idea of ‘forever’ is difficult to fathom; indeed science has a great deal of difficulty with infinity. That which has no end point cannot be quantified or easily explained. The very concept of infinity dictates that it has no solution and since it has no solution it cannot be proved.

In a real sense infinity can be described as a concept of our impression of reality. In our reality it is always possible to take one more step in a journey out into the Universe, it is inconceivable, to us, that at some point we would reach the ‘edge’ and be unable to go any further because that would be a boundary after which nothing, not even reality itself, could exist.

The prospect of living forever is therefore only limited by the boundaries of our reality but even then that is only in turn a limitation of current knowledge; a billion years from now it may well be possible to create our own alternate realities. A universe where everything is exactly the way you want it.

This is not a challenge to the existence of a creator but a celebration of the advancement of life, a life that has moved forward from its creation on a never ending road to achieve bigger and better things.

Now that we know the principle of immortality is theoretically possible we can think about the multitude of obstacles on the road to achieving it; I’ll introduce these problems in part 2.

It’s been a burning question ever since man first looked up and realised what it actually was they were looking at. According to recent research by University of East Anglia in Norwich the answer is yes, we are most probably alone as intelligent life forms go; this struck me as surprisingly odd, how could we know?

It turns out that the research centred around a computer model of four known factors of the evolution of life here on Earth, which were the emergence of single-celled bacteria, complex cells, specialized cells, and intelligent life. The model makes the assumption from these time lines that intelligent life does not appear until late on in the lifespan of a habitable planet arguing that we only have a billion years left here on Earth.

Now, I have a few problems with all of this; firstly a computer model based on four major assumptions from a sample of one is not what I’d call particularly reliable and that sort of pseudo science is best left to the health scare industry. Secondly, even if by pure chance this is remotely accurate why does the fact that the Earth can only sustain us for another billion years preclude our continued evolution?

The actual figure is much less than a billion because no higher species has ever lasted anything like that long surviving a multitude of extinction events, but that still doesn’t preclude our continued evolution. We don’t need a billion more years or even a million more; a thousand years would be stretching it, because in less than a hundred years we will have manned colonies on other planets and in the same time again we will be reaching out for the stars. If we can do it then so can any other intelligent species that has evolved elsewhere in the universe; once a species leaves the cradle of its mother planet it no longer matters what the habitable lifespan of their former home is.

The fact is that intelligent life could have formed up to perhaps 10 billion years ago and with 100 million stars in each of 100 million Galaxies it would be nothing short of a miracle if it didn’t and if only a tiny fraction of advanced lifeforms lasted long enough to venture out into space then there will be literally millions of them all over the universe.

It appears to me that the naysayers ignore these mathematical mountains in favour of the traditional shortcomings of mankind; it wasn’t so long ago that science told us the Earth was the centre of the Universe. We just seem to love our own self importance in the scheme of things.

So why haven’t they all contacted us yet?

This is another question that reeks of self importance; firstly it presumes they are looking for us, secondly it presumes they just happened to have been passing our way during the past 10 thousand years or so and thirdly it presumes they haven’t advanced technology any further than we have and thus rely on radio waves for communication.

Well let’s turn the scenario around, let’s say that in a thousand years time Earthlings have the technology to somehow control the warping of space time and hop to different points at will and that our politicians of the day decide the space program is suddenly worth more than is spent on chewing gum. So off we go to find as much other life as we can completely disregarding the fact that history has shown us that ’strangers’ kill each other and start wars when they meet. How many spacecraft will we send out into the universe?

10? 50? 100? 1000?

Well let’s say we send 1000 and each one ‘hops’ over to another star to explore what’s going on in that region of space, how long are they going to stay there looking for life on other planets we find?

A year? five years? ten years?

Well let’s say they rush round and search all the star systems and planets for signs of past or present life in just a year. That would mean 1000 spacecraft and millions of people both on the craft and back down on Earth would only be able to explore 1000 star systems per year and that in turn would mean it would take a million years just to explore the stars in our galaxy; all well and good but, and it’s a pretty big but, there’s another 100 million galaxies to go after that!

Now let’s say this search continues for a billion years and we are happily patting ourselves on the back for having explored 1000 galaxies leaving only 99 999 000 to go; there is one huge problem - the planets we explored a billion years ago will now have changed and evolved beyond recognition.

Because of all this the chances of little green men landing in the Nevada desert and playing a huge synthesiser to the authorities is pretty remote and even if they have been this way before the chances of them just happening to drop by in the last few thousand years is remoter still. Even if they did swing by in the recent past, say 300 million years ago, all they would have seen would have been big scary creatures eating each other, I doubt they would have thought - ‘let’s come back in 300 million years to see if they evolve into something a bit nicer’.

To sum it all up; it’s pretty arrogant and mathematically implausible that we are the only ‘intelligent’ things in the Universe and it’s just as arrogant to ask - “why haven’t they come to see us yet then?”.

The php mail() function is wonderful in its simplicity but as anyone starting out in php soon discovers, that simplicity has a price - you have no ability to use more advanced functions such as SMTP. For anyone who sends out newsletters and gets half of them back from spam filters you’ll know this can be a problem.

This is where an email class such as Pear can help out; so on to the next problem. - What if you are building an application to put on a third party server where Pear mail isn’t installed? All of the tutorials on the Net tell you to go and install it and then re-boot your server; this is all well and good unless the on/off button is 6000 miles away on a shared host that is not particularly keen on turning it off for you.

Fortunately you don’t have to go to those lengths and you can incorporate all the Pear classes you need with a simple call to php ini_set() in your script.

The classes:

Mail:

This is the main mail class and it is needed for all the classes below. It can be downloaded at http://pear.php.net/package/Mail

Once downloaded extract it to temporary folder and rename the main folder to ‘mail’. Upload the folder and all the subfolders in it to the same directory on your server that contains your script for sending emails.

Net_SMTP:

This is the class you will need if you want to send e-mails via smtp, download at http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP

Once downloaded and extracted you will need to change the main folder name to ‘Net’ (make sure you use a capital ‘N’.) Upload it, and put it inside the ../mail/Mail folder as shown in Fig. 1. Once again leaving all sub folders intact.

FIG. 1

Net_Socket:

This class is required to connect to smtp servers, download at; http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket

Once downloaded and extracted you will need to change the main folder name to ‘Net’ (make sure you use a capital ‘N’.) Upload it, and put it inside the ../mail/Mail/Net folder as shown in Fig. 2. Once again leaving all sub folders intact.

FIG. 2.

Now you have the basic classes in place to send smtp emails all you need now is the code to use it.

Create a new php file called ‘mail.inc.php’ and insert the following code;

<?php
ini_set(
“include_path”, (
“public_html/yourdomain.tld/mail/” .
PATH_SEPARATOR .
ini_get(”include_path”)
)
);

require_once ‘mail/Mail.php’;
require_once ‘mail/mime.php’;

$host = “mail.yourdomain.tld“;
$username = “youraddress@yourdomain.tld“;
$password = “yourpassword“;

?>

You will need to change the parts in red to the settings for the email account you wish to use. Save the file and upload it to the root of your server.

Finally, use the following code in your script that sends emails.

//send the email

require_once (’mail.inc.php’);

$message = new Mail_mime();
//Create a plain text part for the email

//Single new line character

$newline = “\n”;

/Double new line characters

$doubleNewline = “\n\n”;

$text = ‘Testing new email class‘.$doubleNewline.
‘This is some text to test the new classes‘.$doubleNewline.
‘Name: Mr Tester‘.$newline.
‘Hello! This is my test email‘.$doubleNewline;

//Create an html version of the email

$html = ‘<html>
<head>
<title>Testing new email class</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><center>Testing new email class</center></h1>
<p>This is some text to test the new classes</p>
<p>Name: Mr Tester</p>
<p>Hello! This is my test email</p>
</body>
</html>’;

$message->setTXTBody($text);
$message->setHTMLBody($html);
$body = $message->get();
$from = “My Script<noreply@mydomain.tld>”;
$to = “Someone <address@someplace.com>”;
$subject = “Test Email“;

$extraheaders = array(’From’ => $from,
‘To’ => $to,
‘Subject’ => $subject);
$headers = $message->headers($extraheaders);

$smtp = Mail::factory(’smtp’,
array (’host’ => $host,
‘auth’ => true,
‘username’ => $username,
‘password’ => $password));

$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $body);

if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {
echo(”<p>” . $mail->getMessage() . “</p>”);
} else {
echo(”<p>Message successfully sent!</p>”);
}

Once again the code in red should be configured to suit your purposes.

And that’s it!