215 Essays on Infinite Lifespans   Manfred Clynes and more. If we create conscious machines, (which are what we tend to think we are today), but of different structures than those we know, then there is a real possibility of dissolv- ing the ties to time that we are accustomed to experience. CHOOSING YOUR OWN TIMECONSCIOUSNESS When  creating  conscious  machines,  we  would  have  the freedom to design ourselves to have different timeconscious- ness rates, and also variable timeconsciousness rates to suit our needs. What will our needs be? In terms of travel, we can envisage much: for space travel, slow down our time con- sciousness, say by a factor of 10,000. What’s 10,000 years if they pass like one year or even one month? And if you com- bine this with relativistic Einsteinian time slowing, you have some favorable space travel conditions. If you have millions of years to live, timeconsiousness contraction does not matter; there will be plenty of experience left. It will also be useful to have contact with other forms of life, at least in our galaxy and adjust your time-consciousness to other beings. More likely, often, for other than space travel, we would use the opposite, an expanding time consciousness, a speed- ing-up adjustment using nanotechnology, or picotechnology; thinking could be say 10,000 times faster than we are used to. What would happen then? A year would last 10,000 years. The seasons would not change for 2,500 years. The factor of 10,000 is perhaps a somewhat extreme example here; you could adjust your time consciousness rate as you wish, maybe sometimes only double it or triple it, depending on the situa- tion you are in. Aging will be eliminated as we know it. Aging would turn into a rather serious problem of memory accumulation how- ever. All the matter in the universe is insufficient memory