清华大学刘静： （ 三）盲文学的先锋科学思想探索与先锋科技间存在的极限思维共性

清华/中科院刘静（发明神经连接技术/精确有效治疗肿瘤/液态金属心脏）： （英文版）盲文学的先锋科学思想探索与先锋科技间存在的极限思维共性【三】

The Commonness of Extreme Thinking between Wenmang Literature’s Explorations of Pioneer Scientific Thought and Pioneer Science and Technology

——Reread Wenmang's series of works "The End of Mankind is Coming"

                                                                                        Jing Liu

The revelation of the basic effects of liquid metal series shows that this kind of soft robot is evolving towards a more complex mode, which will significantly speed up the development process of intelligent robot. In recent years, with the continuous relay research and development of laboratories around the world in this direction, liquid metal transformable machines have made various gratifying progress, from macro to micro. It is not difficult to imagine that in the future, if one can give full play to the great potential shown in the field of liquid metal and combine relevant technologies, it will trigger various machine innovations beyond the traditional. In the future, through more cooperation between academia and industry, it is expected to continuously overcome the technical bottle neck in various applications until finally the liquid metal transformable robot is developed and applied to practice.

Interestingly, our purely laboratory research findings were immediately noticed with great attention by Wenmang and written into his book. Surprisingly, many of his descriptions and imagination are quite self-consistent in logic. For example, Wenmang wrote that the perfect combination of self-driving liquid metal and life is the reality of mankind in the future. If it is developed into a self-driving and self-transforming liquid robot, it will be more agile than human action. Wenmang has always admired the pioneer scientists who turned the real pioneer scientific thought into reality. He thinks it will benefit mankind and make mankind upgrade continuously. Some of his comments moved me very much. From a long-term perspective, the discovery of self-fueled liquid metal machine may lay a theoretical and technical foundation for the development of liquid metal genes, liquid metal cells, liquid metal human organs and liquid metal human (an upgraded version of human flesh) that can prevent viruses, bacteria and cancer from invading and make people live indefinitely. At present, liquid metal mollusks only eat aluminum. In the near future, it may adapt to eating more other "food", just like humans gain physical strength through eating.

Wenmang feels that if liquid metal is connected with human brain, human beings can be continuously upgraded. In the future, this intelligent liquid metal unit can even automatically assemble an imitation with special modeling and programmable ability or a software intelligent robot that is more flexible than human beings, and can also be used to develop intelligent soft aircraft, intelligent soft high-rise buildings and intelligent soft spacecraft that can automatically transform. Because it does not need oxygen, it can self-transform and repair all the wounds caused by the outside world. Therefore, it can go to places that human beings cannot reach and conduct extreme tasks for human beings.

Wenmang believes that self-fueled liquid metal is very smart. If it is developed, it will be a perfect supplement to human shortcomings. It not only has its own unique metal life, and this life is as equal as human beings, but also can change the limitations of human life and even prolong human life. If it can obey human instructions, it can completely repair the human body and renovate it more perfectly, replace the aging and scrapped human organs at any time, prolong human life and comprehensively upgrade human civilization. Liquid metal can not only create human organs, but also create liquid metal human body, so that the human body can be upgraded to version 2.0. Nerve connection technology can drive the body movement of dead animals, and then promote immortality. If liquid metal robots are designed, they can travel through high temperatures to perform tasks, or they can enter black holes without obstacles to explore. In reading, it is not difficult for readers to feel that the play of Wenmang’s works reflects the consistent pioneer, but deeply relies on and surpasses the breakthrough of pioneer technology. I don't think his conjectures are unreasonable, because some of them have already been specifically studied in my laboratory. Obviously, similar to the new avant-garde literature (Mang-Literature) created by Wenmang, avant-garde scientific exploration is a process in which the limit of human thinking is constantly broken. Emerging fields are often no man's land at the beginning. Due to the uncertainty and challenge of research, explorers need to have a certain courage, vision and concentration. Any discovery and efforts on this road are worth cheering, just like human self-help actions in Wenmang’s works.

Wenmang is a person outside science. He believes that science is only one or N assumptions, but his Wenmang-exploration is beyond all assumptions; Scientists explore by hypothesis, while Wenmang explores by transcending hypothesis. Scientists and Wenmang are not the same people. I agree and appreciate the view that scientists are within the hypothesis and Wenmang is above the hypothesis. Perhaps the creation of new things does not always happen in the scientific community. Sometimes breakthroughs depend on contributions beyond knowledge. I was also touched by the huge gap in the level of civilization mentioned by Wenmang. I was frustrated and confused that today's medical technology is still far from enough to meet the actual needs, and pointed out that if compared with human beings thousands of years later, the current medical technology may appear pretty simple and primitive. In fact, in a sense, it also reminds me that I should strive to break the thinking limit to develop the pioneer medical technology in the future. As long as you think about the complex dimensions of the world, you will find that the secrets solved by mankind are nothing to the whole universe, which reminds how much space there is for pioneer scientific exploration. The human body strengthened and upgraded by liquid metal may be able to withstand many natural disasters, including COVID-19, which poses a great threat to mankind. In terms of intelligent systems, we have proposed the development of liquid metal intelligence, including the construction of transformable computers based on non von Neumann principle and liquid metal quantum computing system. Once such technology makes a breakthrough, it may surpass the current carbon based life in intelligence due to its natural liquid environment or perfect integration with biological objects.

During the course of many years of research, I have always admired that liquid metal is really the spirit like material scattered on the earth in the universe. It is a precious gift given by nature to the mankind. The Phoenix Satellite TV program in Hong Kong, China once discussed the significance of the "life" of liquid metal we found, pointing out that in the past, many scientists once thought that life was created by God, but they gradually changed their views and turned to believe that life can be created by way of physical and chemical means. Senior commentators point out that the discovery of liquid metal mollusks serves as a strong evidence for this theory. The new field of liquid metal robot was born due to the accidental discovery in my lab, and has since become the mainstream direction of the academic community. Our initial intention of research was to find a basic way to innovate the current situation of traditional robot research, but we didn't expect to bring enlightenment far beyond the original. In the past, although the academic community has developed various mollusc robots, most of them still belong to the mechanism composed of multiple rigid units. There is still a considerable distance from the ability of advanced machines such as soft and universal deformation and even integration, which is more different from the soft appearance and seamless and smooth connection of human or animals in nature. The discovery of liquid metal transformable machine effect provides key theoretical and technical enlightenment for the development of new conceptual soft machines. From this, transformable machines can be gradually constructed and evolved. The development in recent years shows that this undoubtedly opens an unprecedented exploration space. Liquid metal robot has been recognized as one of the most promising major directions in the robot field, and there are many corresponding R & D opportunities, such as the invention of various liquid metal functional materials, and the construction of supernormal conformation conversion, deformation and motion mechanism, adjustment and control methods and even the principle of Intelligent Liquid Integrated Functional Entity (I‐LIFE); At the same time, the integration of liquid metal with biology, robotics, electronics and intelligent science is expected to further promote the innovation of the theory and application technology system of liquid metal transformable robot, and also provide rich research space for the forefront of relevant disciplines.

One of the most important intentions of Wenmang works is to save mankind in the face of disaster. He believes that in case of disaster, it is the ancestors of mankind who survive, the origin of human society and the restart of mankind. This assumption is not too far from reality. In fact, the problem of birth, aging and death faced by mankind itself needs to be explored by extreme science. In this regard, the realization of immortality has long been proposed, but the existing medical technology can not create an immortal body, which shows the value of pioneer scientific and technological exploration. In many exchanges and discussions with me, Wenmang has paid great enthusiasm and attention to the liquid metal biomaterials, which we proposed and gradually established systematically a few years ago.

To a large extent, liquid metals, a big class of materials, have shown remarkable potential and are changing the limits of life. To mention a few examples, we can realize that nerve regeneration is an extremely slow process in life science and clinical medicine. Once the nerve is broken or damaged, its repair is rather difficult. Sometimes it even takes several years to restore the interconnection of severed nerve endings. Therefore, nerve repair has always been a major unsolved challenge in the global medical community. In order to break through the bottleneck faced by the existing technology, we proposed the liquid metal nerve connection and repair technology that subverts the traditional concept, so as to quickly establish the signal pathway and growth space between the severed nerves, and to improve the efficiency of nerve regeneration and reduce the risk of muscle function loss. This has caused a great sensation in the international community and is attributed as a "most amazing medical breakthrough". In many countries around the world, there are hundreds of special reports on science news, TV programs or professional websites in multiple languages. Our team demonstrated the feasibility of using liquid metal as a highly conductive neural signal pathway through various animal experiments in vitro and in vivo. With the help of neural regulation, experiments have also proven that liquid metal electrons can make dead animals (bullfrogs) move like living bodies - that is, such liquid metal nerve connection and repair technology can drive (manipulate) the movement of dead animals. These attempts show the development prospect of new technology and are urging the emergence of cybertronics, a fully soft and even liquid brain computer interface technology with a wide range of applications in the near future.

Similarly, in terms of breaking the bottleneck of medical technology, the liquid metal angiography that can realize high-resolution vascular imaging invented by us also enables the extremely fine capillaries that could not be seen by X-ray photography or CT scanning to be displayed in the image in a high-resolution manner. Such research also further gave birth to the technology of liquid metal vascular embolization for tumor treatment. With the excellent compliance and filling of liquid metal, an integrated technology of tumor diagnosis and treatment that can effectively block vascular nutrient transport and induce lesion apoptosis can be established. The whole process is carried out via a simple way of vascular micro puncture under the guidance of image equipment. This new medical approach aimed at cutting off the nutritional supply and starving the target tumor to death works just like fighting a battle for tumor treatment without gunsmoke.

It has to be said that the war between human beings and tumors is a tragic history of human evolution and development. Tumors have not succeeded in trying to eliminate human beings, and human beings also didn’t succeed in trying to eliminate tumors. For a long time, the cruel war between mankind and tumor has been so entangled and tugged at. Due to air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, crop pollution, food pollution and food processing pollution caused by natural and man-made disasters, there appeared more and more new tumors. Now, it has led to an increase of tens of millions of cancer patients worldwide every year, and the situation still becomes ever serious. The despair, pain and loss of wealth of cancer patients are sighing and worrying. Saving the lives of cancer patients has been one of the important missions of my laboratory for many years, which is also the driving force for me to spare no effort to develop and build cutting-edge tumor minimally invasive treatment equipment in the past many years.

When I started to write this comment, Wenmang suddenly told me late at night that there was a mentor in Europe he deeply respected. The 85 year old man in his family suddenly fell ill and is now in the advanced stage of cancer. His children often drive to the hospital 300 kilometers away to take care of the elderly and then after that return home to take care of his 84 year old mother every day. This reminds me of the KangBo knife tumor minimally invasive treatment equipment, which was successfully developed many years ago by my team and has been widely used in more than 100 hospitals in China. While informing Wenmang, I am also very moved that if the elderly can come to Beijing, they may get reasonable treatment. In terms of indications, this treatment technology should be able to deal with such tumors. The device has successfully treated thousands of patients, including lung cancer (advanced stage), liver cancer (advanced stage), breast cancer (without breast resection), prostate cancer, bone cancer, adrenal cancer, neck lymph node cancer, etc. after one year of operation, the survival rate of the patients is 97%. The maximum age of patients who had received treatment was 103 years old. To some extent, this technology is a kind of extreme technology. The principle of local tumor ablation based on the combined freezing and heating (the lowest temperature is - 196 ℃, and the high temperature is more than 80 ℃) was first proposed by myself in 1999. After years of research and development of equipment and continuous improvement, it was put into clinical use. The operation is not affected by human pacemaker implantation. It can be used for the treatment of tumors at high risk locations, such as heart and large vessels. Its ultra-fine probe has significantly better therapeutic performance than previous single cryotherapy or high temperature ablation. In recent years, it has been specially introduced into the treatment of pancreatic cancer, known as "King of Cancer" in the medical field, which has produced an exciting therapeutic effect and has brought hope for a large number of patients. In the communication and discussion with Wenmang, we all have great hope for extreme medical technology.

Death is undoubtedly a cruel reality that human beings are extremely afraid of, but they must face. No one wants to die, no matter how old they are. The desire to survive when death comes is extremely strong. Immortality is the eternal theme of human dreams. In fact, the current mainstream medicine does not dare or unintentionally touch this demand, because it does involve too many extreme thinking, including the constraints of technical, ethical and even policy factors. Partly due to the continuous encouragement of Wenmang, my laboratory has been exploring the realization of liquid metal heart, and has made some progress. In Wenmang’s words, the heart is the engine. As long as the engine is not broken, it's easy to say anything. Wenmang says that if the "perpetual motion machine" such as liquid metal heart can be developed, human beings may really live forever or at least live much longer. Since liquid metal can remain in liquid phase from room temperature to about 2400 °C, and can flexibly realize solid-liquid conversion according to the application scenario, if various liquid metal super human organs can be successfully developed, they are not perishable, consume few energy, and can not be invaded by viruses, bacteria and cancer, Wenmang believes that human life can be very long in theory. From the perspective of extreme science in the future, viva, which mankind once hoped for, is neither feudal superstition nor groundless. It has a certain realistic scientific basis. At present, we are still promoting the research and development of bionic organs such as liquid metal heart. We hope to make progress if it continues, which may help to partially alleviate human fear of disease, pain and death.

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