Future shock: We're 'pwned' by our Apple iPhones

Bricking up the windows would be less hassle, but we shouldn’t be giving Apple any ideas. They have plenty of their own already, according to recent reports fawning over their new device in major news outlets. It would be wildly paranoid to assume these media and tech conglomerates are deep in each other’s pockets, spinning a dark, tangled web of digital enslavement around us. So we shall assume the 16th version of a phone – yes, 16th - is worthy of such blanket coverage. And yes, I do get the irony of this article.

Apple are unperturbed by such cynicism anyway. Our voices are as significant as a single grain of salt hurled into space. Everything seems small when you’re sitting on top of an $800 billion war chest of ready cash. Perhaps this is the cost of flying chief executive Tim Cook to Heaven to download the mind of God into the iCloud. Don’t be surprised if this happens, they’re certainly saving up for something.

It’s safe to assume global tech companies, in particular Apple and Samsung, are amazed by their luck in convincing hundreds of millions of us to fork out nearly a grand for a device which sucks on our souls like a dementor from Harry Potter, laying us bare as the day we were born to companies who genuinely want to know the colour of your pants, where you bought them and how often you wear them.

To get this information, your smartphone learns to know you better than your own mother. Where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, why you were there, what you bought, how far you walked, where your car was parked and what socio-economic class you belong to in accordance with all this information. How fast did you drive? Did you text behind the wheel? Your phone knows and judges your personality accordingly before sending on all this juicy goss back its maker for analysis. Your apps are always listening too - Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram…all the phantom twins you never knew you had. These apps are ‘free’ for a reason.

And sex? Your phone knows all about it. It understands sex better than Barry White. Whether it’s something as innocent as an ovulation app or curious exploration of the more salacious corners of the interwebs, your phone knows what you like, when you like it and where you liked it. And how long it took you to like it.

Despite this barefaced pimping out of all that was once private and personal, some members of our species continue to queue for weeks in all weathers, hoping to be among the first to feel the new sacrament’s overcooked battery warm their freezing hands.

Some post videos on Youtube of the packaging being opened with such awed quasi-religious reverence you’d think the actual apple Eve bit into was inside. Others adorn their machines with wee fake diamonds and plastic moulds with low resolution pictures of their children on the side. All because we think we own these devices – when, indeed, they own us.

It’s not just because of privacy invasion that we should try and resist the hype surrounding the new offering from Apple. Fundamentally, nothing much has changed since 2010’s truly game-changing iPhone4. Super HD 4K screens? Great tech achievement, but the human eye’s limitations render it useless on phones. Full-length ‘infinity’ screens? Just more room for bottom feeder advertisements - with those Xs you click to make them go away so small that an ant’s toe can’t press them without the full video ad opening up. It’s all feeling very familiar - small incremental upgrades to already highly refined tech.

They’ll say the new phone is faster – and it will be – but were you really so encumbered by your previous model? But it’s so slow now, you’ll say. That’s because continual ‘updates’ work to weigh down the device, making it more or less unusable after a few years.

Not only that, older phones aren’t supported by the latest software updates – effectively rendering your state-of-the-art shiny shiny from just a few years ago redundant – an aberration left gasping for its mother’s teat, let to die without her nourishment.

Unable to update firmware or apps, continual crashing, battery failing – eventually we need a replacement. And it just so happens there’s a brand new one every year, rendering all other models obsolete. How long will we be fooled? Perhaps we can discuss it in the queue together.

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VAN BEETHOVEN OR VAN ALLEN?

I DON’T know a single person who can keep a secret to themselves. It’s likely you don’t either. So expecting the 400,000 engineers, scientists and technicians who made it possible for our species to land on the moon to keep collectively schtum about it being faked does stretch the boundaries of believability.

Who you can’t keep quiet though are conspiracy theorists, forever citing radiation levels in the atmosphere as an impermeable barrier to space travel. What is true is that one of NASA’s main concerns for the early Gemini and Apollo astronauts was their exposure to what are known as Van Allen belts.

These are radioactive ‘barriers’ of highly charged particles surrounding the Earth, thought to be solar winds which have been captured by the planet’s magnetic field. If you’re religious, you could perhaps think of them as God’s invisible hands, warning us to stay put, that we are indeed a prison planet for sorry souls.

Fortunately, man slipped through God’s fingers by powering his rockets at a very fast speed indeed. We reached our nearest heavenly body and planted a wee flag, which will remain forever upright as long as the moon exists. Alien tourists millions of years from now will believe it was a symbol that represented our planet’s unity, a species exploring space in harmony together.

It may not be in plentiful supply on Earth at the moment but where harmony does exist – it has been discovered – is within the Van Allen belt itself. Not only that - we can listen to it, with NASA recently releasing the sounds of this eerie cosmic symphony being conducted 620 miles above our heads.

Of course, space is a vacuum and sound is non-existent, but NASA’s state-of-the-art Van Allen Space Probes - twin robotic crafts that orbit the Earth and monitor this plasma of colliding particles - pick up waves of activity in the frequency range humans can detect. These are then formatted to sound waves, allowing our ears to eavesdrop on the inner workings of this mysterious energy field.

Scientists only recently learned that the Van Allen belt acts as a shield to protect the Earth from dangerous high-energy electrons, like Superman’s cape draped over the planet, protecting us all. But don’t expect a stirring John Williams masterpiece from NASA’s recording - for me, the sound is evocative of Mick Jagger’s weird whistle at the start of the Dancing In The Street video.

Line them up back to back, it’s one and the same. Perhaps the conspiracy theorists are right after all and NASA genuinely are the world’s biggest pranksters.

For those who believe that we actually made it to the moon, enjoy the sound of possibility here: soundcloud.com/nasa/plasmawaves-chorus

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X-MEN AMONGST US

READING like the plot of a Marvel film, scientists have recently concluded an intriguing experiment involving the world’s only sibling astronauts – twins Scott and Mark Kelly – to determine if one of them has gained strange new powers in space. Last year, Scott was blasted into orbit for a year-long stay on the International Space Station while Mark stayed on terra firma – all with the aim of accurately measuring the effects of space travel on the human body.

The pair were perfect subjects because they share the same DNA, meaning scientists enjoyed the rare opportunity of directly comparing changes in the same genetic tapestry. Believe it or not, NASA really is searching for its own X-Men – astronauts whose DNA has mutated to develop what they call, unimaginatively, ‘the space gene’ –believed to be our own way of adapting to the pressures of exploring the solar system.

When the twins were reunited in the lab last month, scientists discovered more than 200,000 of Scott’s DNA molecules had mutated. His telomeres - caps at the end of chromosomes believed to be the key to ageing and cancer - became longer than his brother’s while he was in space. The shorter they are – like a bomb fuse – the more vulnerable our bodies are to disease. Strangely, Scott’s telomeres slowly returned to their normal size in the weeks since his return to Earth.

NASA believes the results could provide definitive evidence that the human body adapts remarkably well to zero-gravity conditions – and ongoing studies of Scott and Mark’s genetics will reveal more answers in the months to come. The experiment’s ultimate goal is to investigate whether our biology can actually withstand the pressures of long-term space travel.

The 2030s remain the organisation’s goal for manned missions to Mars, but billionaire engineer Elon Musk’s Space X project is a more nimble operation than NASA’s lumbering administrative beast. Big decisions can be made quickly. There is no political interference. He’s certainly the man who will be paying the closest attention to these results, allowing NASA to burn up cash on research before blasting off himself.

Obsessed with sending humans to our neighbouring planets as a ‘back-up drive’ for civilization, he has the money, support, talent and vision to make it happen. He promises a city on Mars with a million inhabitants within 50 years – and with Scott Kelly’s genetics proving our incredible adaptability in space, it might just happen.