Immortality, Fate of Mankind, and Reaching for the Stars

[Frozen_Feet]

Because the thread about nudity and violence in TV was getting sidetracked.

My opinion on the first two:

Entropy causes all things to fall apart. Live long enough, and all parts of your body have to be changed. Your personality is not static; it changes with experience. You forget some things, learn some new ones, and eventually become a whole new person. Throughout these processes, the natural imperative is for change; situations change; the world changes. To even start reaching immortality, you'd at least have to go through cycles of death and rebirth like a Phoenix to reboot your system once in a while. Even that is likely not enough in - in cosmic scale, the range of different variables that allow for human life are fairly narrow. In the long run, you have to push both your mind and your body well past all conceptions of "humanity" we know hold.

What, exactly, is staying alive there? After thousands and thousands of years, is it really you? Is it really human? Not a single original part, and by extension a single original memory, will be left of what you are now.

Why not just have kids?

Really. Why?

Now, what comes to reaching the stars, let's start with this:

Earth at its worst is much, much better than any other planet in the solar system for human life. Unless we screw up royally bad, keeping it that way is multiple magnitudes easier than terraforming even the Moon.

Shooting people in the space will hardly solve problems down here on earth; the energy and effort required to send significant amounts of people to other celestial bodies is vast. It's approximated that sending 200 people on a two-way trip to Alpha Centauri would require all of the World's nukes for fuel, to give an example. With the current world birthrate, that'd take... 10 minutes or so to replace. It's less than the effect of accidental deaths that happen world-wide within half an hour.

Resources we have here are, however, limited, and everything we shoot into space is out from that pool. While space research has, and may, produce useful insights, as a rule of the thumb, all problems on Earth are best solved on Earth.

The people we shoot elsewhere? Chances are they die. It'd be like sending excess people to Sahara or Antarctica.

Sure, something may come out of. In a few millenias. Hopefully. Even then, all the things that applied to immortality apply here - the people would have to adapt. Sooner or later, they aren't humans, or any kind of earth life, anymore. Considering the distances and timespans involved, their culture will deviate and turn into something with just a passing resemblance to their ancestors. What, exactly, did we preserve?

And while I can, to a point, appreciate the idea of spreading life to other planets that have none, I consider the idea of trying to find other planets capable of supporting life just so we can move on to them ethically dubious. Why is human life oh so precious that we need to trod down all other living beings for our own hides? What more value does a hundred billion humans give to humanity in comparison to seven billion?

There's a point where the primal instinct to reproduce and spread to other systems goes from "survival" to "madness". The energies required for star-faring civilization are immense; If we do have the technology to achieve such ridiculous feats, chances are we can already achieve practical immortality down on earth and fortify it to the point where nothing will threaten our prolonged existence anyway, in which case, see the first part.

Before anyone asks, yes, I do see a point in trying to better our lives, improve science and generally try to achieve a mentally and spiritually enlightened state. However, you don't need infinite population for those - in fact, most would be easier to achieve with a small population, as it'd be easier to achieve higher energy-collection rates per capita. Enough is enough.

[Tengu_temp]

Why not just have kids?

Really. Why?

Because they're not you. It's better to exist in a state that doesn't resemble much what you started with than not to exist at all. Unless you live in constant suffering and want it to end, but that's not something you mentioned.

Besides, the process of your personality and beliefs slowly changing over time is natural. Why fear it?

[Frozen_Feet]

Because they're not you. It's better to exist in a state that doesn't resemble much what you started with than not to exist at all. Unless you live in constant suffering and want it to end, but that's not something you mentioned.

Besides, the process of your personality and beliefs slowly changing over time is natural. Why fear it?

But the whole point is: the immortal creature without a single part or memory of yours is not you either! Not any more than your distant descendants would be. Life and reproduction in itself is a way of immortality.

Your argument only makes sense if you believe there is some ever-lasting part to you that is never wholly replaced, never goes away. But in such case, the other question still remains: what exactly are you preserving? Does it need a body to exist? Is it inherently more worthy than those of your kids would be?

[Arlion]

Yes,but you would be alive

[Lord Raziere]

don't like kids.

immortality sounds cool, hyperspace sound awesome, I hope we find a loophole in physics or something

[Tengu_temp]

But the whole point is: the immortal creature without a single part or memory of yours is not you either! Not any more than your distant descendants would be.

Yes it is. It might be very different from me as I am now, but it still possesses my consciousness, and that's better than not existing. My descendants are completely different beings.

[Lord Raziere]

well a good study in the phoenix immortality thing is The Doctor.

he has regenerated 11 times so far. he seem to be doing fine for the most part.

[Frozen_Feet]

Yes,but you would be alive

Would you?

Assume you try to make an indestructible body of steel for yourself. Even if you can succesfully tranfer your brain in there so that all the information can be copied safely, after a while, the brain will die. So will the original memories, since they are part of the biological structure.

The resulting body doesn't have a single bit of organic tissue in it. You might be aware and sapient, but as a whole, you no longer fulfill definition of biological life. Never mind that the thing is not you anymore than a copy of a CD is the original one.


Yes it is. It might be very different from me as I am now, but it still possesses my consciousness, and that's better than not existing. My descendants are completely different beings.
How is it your consciousness? Where do you draw the line?

[0Megabyte]

Immortality: Your body already replaces every single cell every few years anyway. You are literally not the same person you were five years ago. Why fight to preserve the literally different person of five years from now, if change was such a big problem?

Space:

1.) The earth is great, I'll give you that much. But we cannot stay here longterm, anymore than a baby can stay in the womb.

There are resources out there. Plenty of them. Entire worlds full of them. And most importantly, there's water out there, and lots of it. We can do this, and those we've sent into space came back just fine so far. We can send them out for longer periods. That's the whole point of sending people to Mars, or having a permanent station on the Moon.

I agree that shooting people into space wont' solve Earth's problems. But floating people across the sea didn't solve Europe's problems, either.

From the perspective of a white guy living here, we got a pretty good deal out of it, though. (Granted, the moral implications are vast, but I won't get into that yet.)

The point of doing this isn't, in and of itself, to solve Earth's problems. The point is that it is a completely separate goal worthy in it's own right. Creating a work of art is a worthy goal, even if it doesn't feed a hungry person, isn't it? We don't tell the great artists to shut up because they haven't solved global warming.

Once again, this isn't an either/or situation.

Furthermore, the creation of new cultures is in fact the one of the coolest parts of the whole endeavor. Separated from each other, humanity finds a level of diversity it never reached on Earth.

In fact, this will happen anyway. Do you think the culture of, say, Germany will be the same in a thousand years? The culture of Germany from a thousand years ago would look on today's as alien.

Thus, what's the point of Germans preserving Germany, if it'll just seem like a totally alien place a thousand years ago? What, then, is preserved? You can see then, the argument doesn't' work for Germany on Earth, and so the argument doesn't work for human cultures in space.

I really think you overestimate how onerous this task is. Once we have people out there -enough of them, anyway- in self-sufficient ships, the human race will be guaranteed for much longer.

As for why humanity is worth saving: Even when their culture changes (and I wish I could see what they do with culture! How a thousand space-faring civilizations change, what these people will be like. I want to see them, badly. I want to meet them, and find out what they learned, and find out how they live!) humans will be humans for a long time. Even when humans evolve, those are still our descendants out there. They're still human, just as we're still primates.

So, what's worth protecting? Humanity is. We are little pieces of the universe that have become, more than anything else we have ever encountered, self aware! We are the universe made conscious, able to ask questions about itself.

We are able to create art, and science. We are able to figure out how the universe we are a part of works. We are able to say things of such beauty, of such profundity, that the universe itself, through us, weeps and sings for joy. In us, on this planet, at this time, the universe has evolved to observe itself! And by God if that isn't worth preserving, nothing is, and we should just burn the whole thing down and save the rest of the planet a whole lot of trouble.

And heck, we won't even need planets to support ourselves. Once we have the right ships, all we'll need is resources. Entire generations, entire civilizations, can be born, live, and die without ever touching the ground.

But not all civilizations will do that. Some of us will land on a planet around a dim red star, or a bright blue star, or another nice yellow star, and on one of those planets a human will sit on the beach, bask in the warmth and read Shakespeare underneath the striking violet sky.

If wanting that is madness, then I embrace madness. It's better to be mad with wonders than dead with sense.

[Lord Raziere]

Would you?

Assume you try to make an indestructible body of steel for yourself. Even if you can succesfully tranfer your brain in there so that all the information can be copied safely, after a while, the brain will die. So will the original memories, since they are part of the biological structure.

The resulting body doesn't have a single bit of organic tissue in it. You might be aware and sapient, but as a whole, you no longer fulfill definition of biological life. Never mind that the thing is not you anymore than a copy of a CD is the original one.

or you can just put yourself onto a matrix style internet, or your own server, or an MMORPG and play a virtual world forever while robots maintain the world outside with flawless logic and super-intelligence. :smallbiggrin:

[The_Snark]

But the whole point is: the immortal creature without a single part or memory of yours is not you either! Not any more than your distant descendants would be. Life and reproduction in itself is a way of immortality.

Your argument only makes sense if you believe there is some ever-lasting part to you that is never wholly replaced, never goes away. But in such case, the other question still remains: what exactly are you preserving? Does it need a body to exist? Is it inherently more worthy than those of your kids would be?

I don't believe in an ever-lasting part of me, no. The hypothetical immortal Me who exists a thousand years ago may have long ago replaced every molecule in its body, might act and believe and think in such a way as to be unrecognizable to the present-day Me. It might not share my memories; I've certainly seen science-fiction that posits longevity without perfect memory. If we're looking at transhumanism, it might not even be recognizable as me.

But it would have continuity of experience. There is an unbroken line of consciousness between me and it, and that's important. If I look a thousand years ahead I may not identify with or even like what I see, but the changes happened/will happen gradually; it's not a horrifying sudden change. There is never a single point in time at which I cease to exist, and that, I think, is what people really fear about death.

Descendants really have nothing to do with this, for me. If I ever have children, it will be because I want to raise children, not because I think I'll somehow live on through them.

I don't really support striving for immortality; I doubt that it's actually possible, and if it were, it would create all kinds of logistical problems, and I must admit that on an emotional level that kind of drastic change to the typical human existence would make me uncomfortable. But I can understand the urge. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about dying, but faced with a choice between dying right now and living, I would choose the latter. I do not expect that to change.

[Tengu_temp]

How is it your consciousness? Where do you draw the line?

It's so easy and yet so hard to describe. Let's use a video game analogy: it's all about the character you create. Even if that character changes completely, physically and mentally, it's still the same character. You still are controlling something. Other characters are controlled by other players. They're not me.

[Frozen_Feet]

Immortality: Your body already replaces every single cell every few years anyway. You are literally not the same person you were five years ago. Why fight to preserve the literally different person of five years from now, if change was such a big problem?

You do realize that you're restating my own views back at me? Change is not a problem - but accepting it puts the whole concept of immortality into question, because it means life itself already is a form of immortality.

You are also mistaken on a very imporant point: Brain cells, the ones that make up most of what we consider our "person", are replaced by a much slower rate. Some of them last for the whole biological lifespan of a human invidual. It's their eventual erosion and destruction that puts the hard end on life of any single person.

But why try our damnest to prolong that lifespan, if creation of new ones is equally valuable? Again, why just not have kids?


Space:

1.) The earth is great, I'll give you that much. But we cannot stay here longterm, anymore than a baby can stay in the womb.

There are resources out there. Plenty of them. Entire worlds full of them. And most importantly, there's water out there, and lots of it. We can do this, and those we've sent into space came back just fine so far. We can send them out for longer periods. That's the whole point of sending people to Mars, or having a permanent station on the Moon.

We've send less people to space overall than would comfortably fit in my living room - and even then, it took the might and resources of the greatest nations on Earth to achieve.

I'm afraid you're understating the energy and effort involved in conquering space. It isn't just about the absolute amount of resources, it's also about how fast we can extract them in comparison to how fast we use them. Even within our solar system, it'd require harnessing the whole output of the sun to produce a system-wide culture - and outside that treshold, even at the speed of light, the distances are so vast that the just the time of crossing them make the prospect near-impossible.

And by the time we can even hope to achieve that, we've long ago crossed the treshold of being able to make "humanity" and life on earth virtually indestructible. Why is quantity of such life important?


I agree that shooting people into space wont' solve Earth's problems. But floating people across the sea didn't solve Europe's problems, either.

It did much more for it in regards to energy used than space travel from Earth to other planets would.


The point of doing this isn't, in and of itself, to solve Earth's problems. The point is that it is a completely separate goal worthy in it's own right. Creating a work of art is a worthy goal, even if it doesn't feed a hungry person, isn't it? We don't tell the great artists to shut up because they haven't solved global warming.

Once again, this isn't an either/or situation.

Furthermore, the creation of new cultures is in fact the one of the coolest parts of the whole endeavor. Separated from each other, humanity finds a level of diversity it never reached on Earth.

But the question you've yet to answer: why is insemination of space a worthy goal in itself?

By taking your artist analogy and running with it: there are several things our culture considers trite and uninspired. Several types of art that just aren't held in as high esteem as others. And yes, there are people who cry foul when people waste their time on such things instead of having a "real job". I'm one of them. If you opt to paint a hungry person when you could give them food, you're doing something wrong; if your "art" involves cutting and torturing small animals, I won't consider it worth it.

If insemination of space potentially creates fringe cultures that have to struggle from day to day because the parent culture can't reach them with their innovations for hundreds of years, I call into question what was the point of parenting that culture.

Diversity in suffering. Is it worth it?



In fact, this will happen anyway. Do you think the culture of, say, Germany will be the same in a thousand years? The culture of Germany from a thousand years ago would look on today's as alien.

Thus, what's the point of Germans preserving Germany, if it'll just seem like a totally alien place a thousand years ago? What, then, is preserved? You can see then, the argument doesn't' work for Germany on Earth, and so the argument doesn't work for human cultures in space.




I really think you overestimate how onerous this task is. Once we have people out there -enough of them, anyway- in self-sufficient ships, the human race will be guaranteed for much longer.

As for why humanity is worth saving: Even when their culture changes (and I wish I could see what they do with culture! How a thousand space-faring civilizations change, what these people will be like. I want to see them, badly. I want to meet them, and find out what they learned, and find out how they live!) humans will be humans for a long time. Even when humans evolve, those are still our descendants out there. They're still human, just as we're still primates.

So, what's worth protecting? Humanity is. We are little pieces of the universe that have become, more than anything else we have ever encountered, self aware! We are the universe made conscious, able to ask questions about itself.

We are able to create art, and science. We are able to figure out how the universe we are a part of works. We are able to say things of such beauty, of such profundity, that the universe itself, through us, weeps and sings for joy. In us, on this planet, at this time, the universe has evolved to observe itself! And by God if that isn't worth preserving, nothing is, and we should just burn the whole thing down and save the rest of the planet a whole lot of trouble.

And heck, we won't even need planets to support ourselves. Once we have the right ships, all we'll need is resources. Entire generations, entire civilizations, can be born, live, and die without ever touching the ground.

But not all civilizations will do that. Some of us will land on a planet around a dim red star, or a bright blue star, or another nice yellow star, and on one of those planets a human will sit on the beach, bask in the warmth and read Shakespeare underneath the striking violet sky.

If wanting that is madness, then I embrace madness. It's better to be mad with wonders than dead with sense.

Self-sufficient ships? Self-sufficient to what extent? You are proposing perpetual motion machines. I find it optimistic to think we will ever reach such technology.

And from what we know, universe has hard limits to how long it will last. The energies required to create Earth that will come to see that end are much, much smaller than those required to uplift every planet to such status. Again, what value does quantity add? And what is this mysterious human race you keep referring to? Why would they bear even a passing resemblance to us in either body or spirit? How does that count as human?

And why do you assume that all fronts of knowledge will be worth it? Again, if by creating more life you create more suffering than happiness, is it worth it? Cultural development is not a smooth upward slope, and the speed of light means that eventually, those starfaring people will be unable to keep in touch - passing years mean that they become but a distant myth. Accumulation of information is not a straight slope, either.



But it would have continuity of experience. There is an unbroken line of consciousness between me and it, and that's important. If I look a thousand years ahead I may not identify with or even like what I see, but the changes happened/will happen gradually; it's not a horrifying sudden change. There is never a single point in time at which I cease to exist, and that, I think, is what people really fear about death.


But I could claim there's a similar continuum between me and my children. In fact, that's exactly the view I hold. Ultimately, all things are part of the same whole, including consciousness. I'm not seeing how, say, me teaching my views to children is qualitatively metaphysically different from it being hard-coded on a sheet of metal - in either case, information transferred from one medium to another, and the original, eventually, gets destroyed.

In the end, the continuum is nothing tangible - it's but a concept. What if your "future self" seizes to hold this concept? What if portion of the very discovery of immortality obsoletes it?

[Moff Chumley]

Bro, the idea that a self-sufficient ship is impossible without perpetual motion is one hundred per cent false. :smallannoyed:

Anyhow: give Accelerando by Charles Stross a read. It more or less analyzes all of these issues in the most imaginative and plausible manner I've seen.

[The_Snark]

But I could claim there's a similar continuum between me and my children. In fact, that's exactly the view I hold. Ultimately, all things are part of the same whole, including consciousness. I'm not seeing how, say, me teaching my views to children is qualitatively metaphysically different from it being hard-coded on a sheet of metal - in either case, information transferred from one medium to another, and the original, eventually, gets destroyed.

In the end, the continuum is nothing tangible - it's but a concept. What if your "future self" seizes to hold this concept? What if portion of the very discovery of immortality obsoletes it?

I think the difference here is that you're placing greater emphasis on the continuity of your thoughts and beliefs than of your consciousness. In that case, then you are quite correct to be more concerned about your children and your legacy. For the person who is concerned about their consciousness, it is not about the mark you leave on the rest of the world; it is about the continuing existence of you, the specific part of the world that lies behind your eyes and perceives the rest of it as something separate.

Your children are quite clearly not a part of your consciousness. You cannot see through their eyes or know what they're thinking. They are as separate from you as a rock or a bird or Calvin Coolidge is. Now, you might believe that your consciousness is connected to all things, including your children and birds and rocks and Calvin Coolidge, so perhaps this doesn't worry you—and that's fine! But it does worry a lot of people, and I think that's where the fear of death stems from. It's not an ideological fear about your ideas and your legacies being lost; it's a visceral fear, rooted in emotions and hormones and biology.

But that's not a reason to deny it in and of itself; I think everything we feel can be traced back to that. Don't think of it as a single moment in which you decide, "I want to live forever." Instead ask yourself, "Do I want to die right now?" You'll almost certainly answer no; now imagine asking that question every second of your life. Not obsessing over it, just in the back of your mind. Will you ever answer "yes, I would like to die right now"?

I don't know; I'm not you. I don't think I would—but who knows? Perhaps after living for a thousand years, I would be ready for it. I'm okay with that idea, so long as it's what I want. I like living; I don't want to be forced to stop before I want to. If I never stop wanting to, that means living forever.

Also, I'm afraid I've edited a bit into my earlier post, which you may have missed. :smallredface: Might help to clear up my view on it.

[nyarlathotep]

How is it your consciousness? Where do you draw the line?

That is easy it the first person perspective I am looking through and that I will be looking through till the day I die. I may change how i interpret information fed into that perspective functionally turning me into a different person to those outside of my perspective, but I will still be the one experiencing it. If the me of the future "me", be it a descendant or replacement body or a never aging same body, is pricked and me at my first person perspective feels pain it is me if it looks at a painting and my first person perspective can see it then it is me.

[Frozen_Feet]

It's so easy and yet so hard to describe. Let's use a video game analogy: it's all about the character you create. Even if that character changes completely, physically and mentally, it's still the same character. You still are controlling something. Other characters are controlled by other players. They're not me.

But in your example, the character and the controller are distinct entities that obey different rules. There is some outside entity that also changes, and within a different paradigm.

Your analogy would fit for "soul" or some other concept like detailed above (the notion about eternally persisting part and so on), but I'm not sure that's what you're aiming for.

I don't see a way to apply it to a non-divisive world view.


Bro, the idea that a self-sufficient ship is impossible without perpetual motion is one hundred per cent false. :smallannoyed:

Anyhow: give Accelerando by Charles Stross a read. It more or less analyzes all of these issues in the most imaginative and plausible manner I've seen.

Will take a look at your suggestion. What comes to self-sufficient ships, my point is merely this: you get less energy out of a system than you put into it. Cosmic scale is so vast that to cross the distance between galaxies, a ship would have to be of riduculous scale by itself to have a reactor capable of generating enough energy to both direct itself and sustain its contents for the timespans involved; smaller ships simply run out of fuel and materials to keep themselves going, and turn to dust.

Without something like perpetual motion machine or nearing something equally implausible in function, the realistic reach of humanity actually stops pretty short in the scale of the universe. In the context of this thread, you are allowed to remain optimistic about science, but it's good to remember all stories with interstellar culture break some law of physics. Modern advances in science have actually made many of those ideas less, not more plausible.

[0Megabyte]

You do realize that you're restating my own views back at me? Change is not a problem - but accepting it puts the whole concept of immortality into question, because it means life itself already is a form of immortality.

You are also mistaken on a very imporant point: Brain cells, the ones that make up most of what we consider our "person", are replaced by a much slower rate. Some of them last for the whole biological lifespan of a human invidual. It's their eventual erosion and destruction that puts the hard end on life of any single person.

But why try our damnest to prolong that lifespan, if creation of new ones is equally valuable? Again, why just not have kids?

This isn't a subject that's a major focus for me, but the obvious answer is this: Living is fun. Duh. That's all I've got. I enjoy life. I wouldn't stop enjoying life just because it changed. All those changes the supposedly immortal me goes through that makes me a different person? Sounds like fun. I see nothing wrong with this reason. Dying sucks, I'd rather experience things.

Won't matter, I will die anyway, but if I had the choice I'd go immortality, even if it meant some suffering.


We've send less people to space overall than would comfortably fit in my living room - and even then, it took the might and resources of the greatest nations on Earth to achieve.

You must have a very large living room: 454 people is quite a few. Wow you must have a cool house!

Anyway, space travel is now under the power of private industry, as I mentioned at length in the previous thread. It doesn't even take a government anymore to build a spacecraft.

And, just for reference: The price of the entire Apollo program, over the course of a decade, came to roughly $170 billion in 2009 dollars. We spend more on Social Security any single year than we spent on the Apollo program over a decade.

So yes, that's a huge amount of money. But you are exaggerating the burden an equally large amount. The biggest problem is political will, not resource management.


I'm afraid you're understating the energy and effort involved in conquering space. It isn't just about the absolute amount of resources, it's also about how fast we can extract them in comparison to how fast we use them. Even within our solar system, it'd require harnessing the whole output of the sun to produce a system-wide culture - and outside that treshold, even at the speed of light, the distances are so vast that the just the time of crossing them make the prospect near-impossible.

I don't quite understand. What, exactly, are you imagining? I'm not following your assumptions. Why the requirement to have a system-wide culture? We're bemoaning the loss of individual cultures in the modern day, why on earth (:smallwink:)would we want one mono-culture in space? The distance means humanity can grow more diverse. And that diversity is a good thing.

I'm also suspecting that you're thinking of vastly more elaborate systems of humanity than I am.


And by the time we can even hope to achieve that, we've long ago crossed the threshold of being able to make "humanity" and life on earth virtually indestructible. Why is quantity of such life important?

Not really. It's much simpler to build a small self-contained ship than the terraform an entire planet. Takes a lot less resources, too. You also, I think, overstate the Earth's chances. When the sun turns into a red giant, the Earth will either be flung out into space or thrown into the sun itself. It'd be vastly harder to move the earth or fortify it against the sun, than it is to send a few of us into space.


But the question you've yet to answer: why is insemination of space a worthy goal in itself?

I did answer that. Humanity is worth saving. Our species is worthwhile. We have sentience, and consciousness, and art and love and science. I don't see how that's not worth preserving! This is humanity we're talking about, you and me. Just as it's a tragedy for a culture or a people to be wiped it, it's an even larger tragedy if all of us die.

Of course, if you don't like humanity, I suppose you'd have a different view. But I do. I am one. I'm biased. I like people. And so, since humanity is precious to me, I wish to preserve it. I can't see how humanity wouldn't be precious to you as well.


By taking your artist analogy and running with it: there are several things our culture considers trite and uninspired. Several types of art that just aren't held in as high esteem as others. And yes, there are people who cry foul when people waste their time on such things instead of having a "real job". I'm one of them. If you opt to paint a hungry person when you could give them food, you're doing something wrong; if your "art" involves cutting and torturing small animals, I won't consider it worth it.

Who are we to judge their culture, or their art? Just because our culture looks down on certain things doesn't mean they aren't worthwhile, or that they should be stamped out. Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it's worthless.

And if these people create cultures you don't like, well too bad. That's their right as our descendants, just as it's our right to create a culture our ancestors would object to.

This is humanity we're talking about. On such large scales, what matters isn't what you think of their nonexistent culture, but what they think of it.


If insemination of space potentially creates fringe cultures that have to struggle from day to day because the parent culture can't reach them with their innovations for hundreds of years, I call into question what was the point of parenting that culture.

Diversity in suffering. Is it worth it?

Duh. Of course it's worth it. Was it worth it for the Vikings to try and colonize Greenland? Absolutely. Was the culture that they created worth it, even though they had a harder, more primitive life? Absolutely, and to say otherwise would be to denigrate their lives, their struggles, their hopes and dreams and their success at lasting longer than my own nation has so far.

People suffer. People will suffer. Nothing we can do will make that any less true. If we let that paralyze us from action, we are lost.


Self-sufficient ships? Self-sufficient to what extent? You are proposing perpetual motion machines. I find it optimistic to think we will ever reach such technology.

Point of order about self-sufficient ships: If you had read all my talk about ships gathering resources, the amount of stuff that's in single asteroids, the amount of water in comets, you'd find that by self-sufficient I definitely don't mean a perpetual motion machine. I mean, instead, a system that can actually be made to survive, with the addition of outside resources, yes, but with an actual system.

Sending a bunch of food up there with them won't work. It'll run out. Being able to make more food, with the addition of some more materials from time to time, and you've got a better shot.



And from what we know, universe has hard limits to how long it will last. The energies required to create Earth that will come to see that end are much, much smaller than those required to uplift every planet to such status. Again, what value does quantity add? And what is this mysterious human race you keep referring to? Why would they bear even a passing resemblance to us in either body or spirit? How does that count as human?

Even if we make this world a better place, humanity will change. The humans of today, our hearts and minds and feelings and ideas, would be utterly alien in many respects to our ancestors. So our descendants will be different from us in ways we cannot imagine. So what? We're still human.

And even a billion years from now, our descendants will still be human, in the same way we are still mammals. Would our ancestors of 65 million years ago recognize us? No! But I'm damn grateful they fought to live.

As for the mysterious human race I keep referring to: I mean you and me, and the other people reading this, and every human being on this planet. It's not a hard thing to understand what a human is.

And just because we change, why does that make it less worthwhile? By that logic, we should become as static as China was for a thousand years, or the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan. We should try to throttle change, and do everything we can to stop it, if change makes our descendants worthless to us.

I really don't understand how you can have such a denigrating view of the concept. It's something to be embraced, not used to try to suggest our efforts are meaningless.

As for the value of quantity: as one man said, quantity has a quality all its own. Humans, and human diversity, is a good thing. Some will fail. Some with thrive. But regardless, it's better to have five billion of us spread over the solar system than ten billion of us on one planet. Disasters are less likely to wipe us out.

That's the whole point, after all: Preserve the human race from extinction. Allow it to evolve into whatever new things that exist. I, for one, wish I could be immortal precisely so I could see these changes you denigrate.


And why do you assume that all fronts of knowledge will be worth it? Again, if by creating more life you create more suffering than happiness, is it worth it? Cultural development is not a smooth upward slope, and the speed of light means that eventually, those starfaring people will be unable to keep in touch - passing years mean that they become but a distant myth. Accumulation of information is not a straight slope, either.

Knowledge is worth it for its own sake, even if it serves nothing. But, the funny thing about knowledge is that just when you think it's useless, it turns up something like television, or nuclear power plants, or the internet. You really can't count knowledge out.

Also, as to whether creating more life is worth it if there's more suffering than happiness: Suffering is part of the human condition. If we didn't exist, we wouldn't suffer. While in some cases it may be preferable to not exist than to suffer, suffering is not in and of itself bad.

Without someone to experience it, there's no suffering, and there's no other concepts either. Things still exist, but ideas, feelings, don't. I like ideas. I like feelings. I like concepts. I like abstract thought patterns and the power of the universe to ask itself "why?" These things are worth preserving, even if there's pain.

I'd rather be in pain than dead. And I'd rather humanity have some lot of suffering than be extinct. We suffer already, every one of us. We are not better off dead. And neither will they.

As for the culture thing: The world where they are so different they cannot keep in touch, and mythology overtakes facts. Wouldn't that be awesome?! That sounds so damn cool!

I really fail to see how that's anything but a good thing. Humanity spread out so far that its branches can no longer even communicate with each other. That's awesome, and worth striving for. It means human civilizations will become even more diverse. It means nothing can destroy us except the heat death of the universe. I wish I could live long enough to see this come to pass. It would be amazing to see the changes of society brought by such distance. To look up in the sky and know that even if we cannot meet them now, we are not alone, and we never will be again.


But I could claim there's a similar continuum between me and my children. In fact, that's exactly the view I hold. Ultimately, all things are part of the same whole, including consciousness. I'm not seeing how, say, me teaching my views to children is qualitatively metaphysically different from it being hard-coded on a sheet of metal - in either case, information transferred from one medium to another, and the original, eventually, gets destroyed.

In the end, the continuum is nothing tangible - it's but a concept. What if your "future self" seizes to hold this concept? What if portion of the very discovery of immortality obsoletes it?

Then I'll go read a good book. Or lay out and enjoy the feeling of the sun on my skin. Or have some good old-fashioned sex. I don't need a reason to live forever. I'd just like to get a chance to read that next book, to feel that next meal, to talk to that next person, to laugh at that next joke, to mourn for that next loved one (yes! That is part of living, and that is part of what is to be embraced) or watch the next sunset or look up into the stars one more time and stare intently until my eyes tear up.

Why do I need a reason to do these things?

[Androgeus]

We've send less people to space overall than would comfortably fit in my living room - and even then, it took the might and resources of the greatest nations on Earth to achieve.

You have a large living room (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name). You probably meant people who have stood on extraterrestrial soil, which I'll give is a drastically smaller number.

[Samurai Jill]

Yes it is. It might be very different from me as I am now, but it still possesses my consciousness, and that's better than not existing. My descendants are completely different beings.
What is your consciousness but the sum of your memories and personality with a capacity for introspection? All of these are transient and can be passed to others. Consciousness is a process, not a property, and certainly not a unique object.

But it would have continuity of experience. There is an unbroken line of consciousness between me and it, and that's important. If I look a thousand years ahead I may not identify with or even like what I see, but the changes happened/will happen gradually; it's not a horrifying sudden change. There is never a single point in time at which I cease to exist, and that, I think, is what people really fear about death.
I would suspect that people fear death for the simple reason that organisms which don't leave few descendants, but regardless of the cause, that doesn't make the fear inherently logical. Within the context of finite resources, any society that wants to introduce the new is sooner or later going to have to chuck out the old.

I'm not saying that extending human- or sentient- longevity wouldn't have potential benefits, but so would the ability to trade memories, gestalt consciousness, having power to tailor our own genetic code, or a plethora of other technologies that all undermine the concept of individual selfhood.

This isn't to say that a transhuman future of hyperintelligent robots or supermodel-mensans or whatever wouldn't be vastly preferable to our present civilisation- in terms of internal elegance, refinement, complexity, diversity, or whatever- but the goal of 'human immortality' is as impossible as it is meaningless.

[Frozen_Feet]

0Megabyte: I find it exceedingly funny that you, in the same post, talk about immortality and inter-stellar travel, yet you think we can't reduce human suffering below the level of human happiness?

I also can't ascribe to your concept of cultural relativism. We are by and large talking about our hypothetical descendants (in one form or another), yet you ascribe rights to them that ignore developments of our own culture?

There are habits that are more healthy to us humans, based on our physical and mental make-up, than some other habits are. No matter what form our descendants take, it's possible to derive similar grounds for morality from theirs.

Likewise, running a long-lasting, scientifically enlightened culture requires a certain kind of mindset; indeed, I could say that the viewpoint you are advocating is imposing your will on their as much as I am. There are changes to/from such mindsets that make it all fall flat. Just the idea that no, suffering is not worth it undermines much of what you said, and it's one integral to many real-life philosophies.

Few points about self-sufficient ships and usage of resources: most of space is empty. You always get less energy out of a system that you put in. Even if you grow your own food and recycle your own waste, you are slowly but surely exhausting your resources. Are you familiar with Von Neuman probes? They are effectively what you are describing - miner bots that move from object to object and consume them in order to make others of their kind. Cosmic radiation alone causes each bot to crumble, so the originals eventually seize to work. The copies, however, keep going - unless their energy reserves are not enough to reach the next object to consume.

That's the thing about Extraction Vs. Consumption rate - just because the requisite materials and energy exist somewhere, doesn't mean we can utilize them. At this moment, sun shines down so much energy that it could power all of civilization many times over - but utilizing that energy requires specialized panels, and said specialized panels require specialized materials - of which there are not necessarily enough to ever utilize all of that energy.

Also, money spent =/= resources used. There are resources that are much, much rarer and harder to come by than their price would indicate. For example, there are many rare earth metals used in electronics that we are really starting to exhaust our supply of - but you haven't seen that in the price yet. Worth of money is not tied to any single thing - it's fluid. It's based on how people value things, and that does not always go hand in hand with actual material costs.

Finally, I'm still left wondering about this strange "humanity" you talk about. Like you and me? As in, organic (carbon-based) life-forms with typically four limbs, two eyes (etc.), DNA, basic psychology and physical development correspondent to H. Sapiens, having their memory and personality affixed on neural cells, possessing of sight, scent, hearing, touch, taste (etc.)?

There's no imperative for our descendants, whether they be our biological children or our immortal copy-selves, to be anything of the sort. They can be as far from us than we are from reptiles, or even further. By ignoring all the things that make up a human and insisting on using that word of any roughly sapient being, you could as well start calling Dolphins and Gorillas humans too; they are as close or closer to us than our hypothetical descendants have imperative to be.

By all means, use "human" as a general descriptor for thinking beings. Personally, I disagree, as it's missing several fundamental points of what it actually means to be "like you and me".

[Lord Raziere]

guys y'all forgetting.

matrix-world, except the robots are friendly servants who keep the outside world running so that we can enjoy a virtual world paradise forever that we can change to look like however we want.

now that is immortality: downloading yourself into paradise while the robots take care of the outside world, you are immortal in a world you can change to fit yourself for all eternity. you want to swim? a pool materializes before you. want to eat? food appears in your hand.

takes care of all your problems, and is harder sci-fi to boot.

[Samurai Jill]

...Even within our solar system, it'd require harnessing the whole output of the sun to produce a system-wide culture...
I'm curious about the math involved here. I seem to recall estimates that a nuke-propelled Orion engine would cut down transit times within the solar system to something on the order of weeks, and fusion propulsion or antimatter synthesis would presumably improve efficiency and/or speed by another order of magnitude or two.

And by the time we can even hope to achieve that, we've long ago crossed the treshold of being able to make "humanity" and life on earth virtually indestructible. Why is quantity of such life important?
Again, I'm curious about where you're getting this estimate from. The technology required to work around the eventual death of the sun is presumably far, far, far in advance of that required to settle around another star.

If insemination of space potentially creates fringe cultures that have to struggle from day to day because the parent culture can't reach them with their innovations for hundreds of years, I call into question what was the point of parenting that culture.
Well, given that information can be transmitted at the speed of light, I doubt that extrasolar colonies would be that far behind the technology curve, if one assumes they can maintain the infrastructure needed to support the tech in question (which is not certain.) Sure, the speed of light means that you'll eventually see significant inefficiency in information propagation between very distant colonies, but over the timescales and areas where that becomes significant, any given colony is likely going to have plenty of well-developed neighbours who can contribute as much to their intellectual life as Earth could.

Now, I largely agree that terrestrial problems are not going to solved by colonising other worlds in any direct, material sense, and obviously initial colonists are going to have a rough time of it. But I doubt there's a planet in existence that can't be colonised by life of some kind- if only in the form of self-replicating machines- and you can imagine a strain of transhuman that's arbitrarily close to any such form of life. Green Mars had human colonists growing gills to swim in the seas of Europa.

And I would contend that- regardless of whether the inhabitants of other worlds resemble us particularly closely- there is an inherent value in seeding the universe with life of some kind- and in fact, the less it resembles us over time, the better. More diversity. We can always pick uninhabited worlds, if you're worried about displacing native life.

I think the best thing we could do with Mars, for example, is send out a thermos flask of the toughest, leanest, meanest, most fecund microbes we can find on Earth and just let it crash-land on the Martian surface along with a picnic basket. Never mind about people, we can just come back in a few million years and see what grew in the big red petri dish.

Self-sufficient ships? Self-sufficient to what extent? You are proposing perpetual motion machines. I find it optimistic to think we will ever reach such technology.
Again, I don't think that's entirely fair. Clean-breeder-reactor technologies can already stretch out existing fission energy sources to last for several centuries, and you don't need a huge amount of uranium to power a fair-sized ship. Fuel for propulsion is another matter, of course, but there are possibilities in things like solar sails.

[PirateMonk]

What is your consciousness but the sum of your memories and personality with a capacity for introspection? All of these are transient and can be passed to others. Consciousness is a process, not a property, and certainly not a unique object.

They can be passed on to some extent, but there is a great deal of information lost in the process. If you ever conveyed your full consciousness to someone else, they should be able to construct a fully conscious model of you, which, for as long as it was maintained, seemingly would be functionally identical to most other forms of immortality.

[Pie Guy]

Relevant tvtropes link. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanticismVersusEnlightenment)

[Frozen_Feet]

I'm curious about the math involved here. I seem to recall estimates that a nuke-propelled Orion engine would cut down transit times within the solar system to something on the order of weeks, and fusion propulsion or antimatter synthesis would presumably improve efficiency and/or speed by another order of magnitude or two.

We are talking about entirely different things here, I'd guess. I refer to the levels of energy created by the sun, but obviously that is not all the energy in the solar system, nor is sun the only way to generate such energies.

It is most realistic, though. Sun is one big fusion reactor and it's already there; it's also not going to run out anytime soon. So for a system-wide civilization, it's the logical choice.

I will not say anything more about the math before I know more of this Orion-engine. I'd hazard a guess it runs to the same problem all other nuke-based engines, though: there's only so much readily available fissile material. While I could see such methods being used to kick-start colonization, a system-wide civilization would have to replace it with some other form of energy, or utilize said energy to create more fissile material.


Again, I'm curious about where you're getting this estimate from. The technology required to work around the eventual death of the sun is presumably far, far, far in advance of that required to settle around another star.

This is the argument that needs more clarifying: I specifically referred to terraforming a planet. If we get to the point where we can artificially induce earth-like climate in a place like, say, Mars, we're already at the point where we can control planet-wide climate at our whim. Earth at it's worst is better than all other planets in the solar system, containing in abundance the resources required for life; keeping Earth at a livable state would thus be easier than keeping any other planet as such.

Assuming total control over the ecosystem of earth allows humans on earth to divert their attention to other problems - though personally, death of the sun, or any sun, is not real problem - if current theories about dark energy are correct, the expansion of the universe will stop time long before that becomes a timely issue, and no amount of moving around will save you from that.

(Granted, it's a far out theory. Haven't seen it discussed in a while.)

Just sending out a tiny fraction of humanity to other planets and hope for the best is easier, yes. But even with terraforming technology, travel through the void and risks associated there of make it less likely to succeed.


Well, given that information can be transmitted at the speed of light, I doubt that extrasolar colonies would be that far behind the technology curve, if one assumes they can maintain the infrastructure needed to support the tech in question (which is not certain.) Sure, the speed of light means that you'll eventually see significant inefficiency in information propagation between very distant colonies, but over the timescales and areas where that becomes significant, any given colony is likely going to have plenty of well-developed neighbours who can contribute as much to their intellectual life as Earth could.
There's more to it than that. In the context of old stories, have you heard of the idea that our old television broadcasts and the like should continue in the void practically forever, and be potentially picked up by other life forms?

Well, that theory got cold water on its neck fairly recently. Recent studies suggest that radio signals dissolve to the level of background noise before they even leave the solar system. The transmitters and receivers that'd be required to reliably send data between solar systems would need to be huge.

And in the cosmic scale, light-speed is not very fast. Even the closest stars are years away - further from them, the distances can stretch to hundreds, even thousands of years. Think of all the significant geopolitical changes that have happened in last five years. It becomes a game of broken phone pretty quickly, even if we establish a reliable interstellar network.


Again, I don't think that's entirely fair. Clean-breeder-reactor technologies can already stretch out existing fission energy sources to last for several centuries, and you don't need a huge amount of uranium to power a fair-sized ship. Fuel for propulsion is another matter, of course, but there are possibilities in things like solar sails.

If I recall right, solar sails start to fail fairly soon beyond the edges of a solar system - I think I saw an estimate you can accelerate a ship to 1/4 C within ours, but auxiliary propulsion systems are required to keep it on course.

Of course, much depends on your definition of fair-sized. I've seen estimates that we could, already, build a nuke-and-solar-sail powered starship and send it to a two-way trip to Alpha Centauri. Amount of people on-board would be 200, and the trip would take one or two centuries.

But even that'd require global-scale co-operation; any "fair-sized ship" would be huge, would require huge amounts of non-renewable resources to build, and movement would be... cumbersome, to put it slightly. We could not, as a whole, build more than a handful of such ships, and we'd be unlikely to get any returns out of it (which is why no-one is doing it).

And there are still problems about corrosion and corruption of equipment and passengers that are yet to be adressed outside of science fiction - and I'm not talking about hard "this is how we could do it" sci-fi.

"Several centuries" both is, and is not, a long time. It's a long time for any complex engineering product to stay functioning - it's a short time once you take into account how darn long the distances between stars are. Again, even moving near speed of light, closests systems are years or decades away.

[Flickerdart]

Kids aren't a replacement for immortality, because then you have to deal with raising kids.

The robot body thing works. It's not you anymore once you've transferred consciousness, and you'll still die - but the robot isn't gonna die (barring irreparable component failure). You gave immortality to something else, but it's still immortality.

[Frozen_Feet]

Relevant tvtropes link. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanticismVersusEnlightenment)

Another relevant link. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale)

The funny thing is that I'm generally more on the enlightened side, space travel just tends to bring out worst of me. :smalltongue:

[0Megabyte]

0Megabyte: I find it exceedingly funny that you, in the same post, talk about immortality and inter-stellar travel, yet you think we can't reduce human suffering below the level of human happiness?

The immortality thing is hypothetical, and not something important to my point. In fact, it's an unrelated thing. We may be able to create some sort of personal immortality. Maybe not. I'm not an expert on the technology.

But one that stays a constant, at least until we wildly change it, is human nature. If you want to talk about altering humans into some drastically different species, be my guest: That's a completely different conversation then sending humans into space. People suffer. It's part of what we do.


I also can't ascribe to your concept of cultural relativism. We are by and large talking about our hypothetical descendants (in one form or another), yet you ascribe rights to them that ignore developments of our own culture?

I ascribe them the same rights we have. I reject the culture of slavery which was common in my own country until a hundred and fifty years ago. They have the same right to reject what they find wrong with my culture. Just because I don't see it doesn't mean they'll be wrong. And it would be ludicrous to assume they would have the same values.

I'm seeing the values of my own society change in front of my very eyes. I'm watching as previous generations struggle against my own, which disapproves of their views on homosexuality. What's there to make me assume that fifty years ago I won't be in their position on some other issue? Polygamy, for example?

Also, ignoring it is something else entirely, which I never, ever said.


There are habits that are more healthy to us humans, based on our physical and mental make-up, than some other habits are. No matter what form our descendants take, it's possible to derive similar grounds for morality from theirs.

As long as they are physiologically modern humans, there will be similarities. But look at the variety of cultures and cultural views that exist here and now. Even within my own country. Look at the differences between the culture of the United States a hundred and fifty years ago and today. Of course our descendants from a thousand years from now will have a different culture, and will value different things.

Different cultures value different things already. To assume things will stay the same, when I see them changing in front of my eyes is kind of silly. I doubt, for example, that they'll be for murder and random violence. But will they consider the fact that my country executes criminals as murder? Will they decide that sacrificing the old and infirm for the safety of the whole is not murder, even though I would call it such? Human beings have similarities, but our cultures and values run a wide gamut. It's honestly bizarre that you ignore that, and assume I meant something weird.


Likewise, running a long-lasting, scientifically enlightened culture requires a certain kind of mindset; indeed, I could say that the viewpoint you are advocating is imposing your will on their as much as I am. There are changes to/from such mindsets that make it all fall flat. Just the idea that no, suffering is not worth it undermines much of what you said, and it's one integral to many real-life philosophies.

How is it imposing my will to give people the option to leave the planet? How is it imposing my will to accept that they'll have different values than me, and being curious what those values are?

How is it imposing my will to want the human race to not go extinct?! And if that's imposing my will, then we're already doomed. If people want to just die, then I can't stop them, and we don't deserve to live.

Further, what do you know about running a long-lasting scientifically enlightened culture? We've barely had a few hundred years of it. I don't think you can very easily predict how it'll develop in a thousand, or ten thousand years.

If people would rather go extinct than suffer, then any effort I make is futile and I should just die now. What's the point if they'll throw it all away?


Few points about self-sufficient ships and usage of resources: most of space is empty. You always get less energy out of a system that you put in. Even if you grow your own food and recycle your own waste, you are slowly but surely exhausting your resources. Are you familiar with Von Neuman probes? They are effectively what you are describing - miner bots that move from object to object and consume them in order to make others of their kind. Cosmic radiation alone causes each bot to crumble, so the originals eventually seize to work. The copies, however, keep going - unless their energy reserves are not enough to reach the next object to consume.

That's the thing about Extraction Vs. Consumption rate - just because the requisite materials and energy exist somewhere, doesn't mean we can utilize them. At this moment, sun shines down so much energy that it could power all of civilization many times over - but utilizing that energy requires specialized panels, and said specialized panels require specialized materials - of which there are not necessarily enough to ever utilize all of that energy.

So what, we should just give up? How defeatist. Look: If we send ships out there, they can go to other places and find resources as they need them. Find sources of energy as they need them. You're too caught up on the word self-sufficient, and ignoring what I'm saying. You understand the concept of a submarine, right? You are aware they can go months without getting more supplies, right?

Well, the difference between that, and the ships I'm talking about, resource-wise, is merely one of scale. Ships could go from asteroid to asteroid, comet to comet, and get minerals and necessary things. It's not wholly different from what we do already on Earth. The concept isn't hard to understand. And I'm not saying we'll do it with current technology, either.


Also, money spent =/= resources used. There are resources that are much, much rarer and harder to come by than their price would indicate. For example, there are many rare earth metals used in electronics that we are really starting to exhaust our supply of - but you haven't seen that in the price yet. Worth of money is not tied to any single thing - it's fluid. It's based on how people value things, and that does not always go hand in hand with actual material costs.

The point was that you were vastly overestimating the price of what we've already done in space, and what we're doing right now. Go ahead and ignore that, though.


Finally, I'm still left wondering about this strange "humanity" you talk about. Like you and me? As in, organic (carbon-based) life-forms with typically four limbs, two eyes (etc.), DNA, basic psychology and physical development correspondent to H. Sapiens, having their memory and personality affixed on neural cells, possessing of sight, scent, hearing, touch, taste (etc.)?

There's no imperative for our descendants, whether they be our biological children or our immortal copy-selves, to be anything of the sort. They can be as far from us than we are from reptiles, or even further. By ignoring all the things that make up a human and insisting on using that word of any roughly sapient being, you could as well start calling Dolphins and Gorillas humans too; they are as close or closer to us than our hypothetical descendants have imperative to be.

By all means, use "human" as a general descriptor for thinking beings. Personally, I disagree, as it's missing several fundamental points of what it actually means to be "like you and me".

...what are you talking about? When did I say anything like that?!

You keep vastly misinterpreting me! You act like there's no differences in culture on this planet, and changes in culture aren't possible. (chiding me that there would be moral similarities, for example. How do you make that mistake?) You say that I am using the word human to mean any roughly sapient being, when I never said anything remotely like that.

Humans are humans. Our descendants will still be human. Are you not aware of evolution? A human is still a subset of the group from which the most recent common ancestor between humans and chimps came from. Any descendants of humans will still be a subset of humans. That's simply how the definitions work. A lion and a housecat are still felines, they still come from a single common ancestor, and from that ancestor's perspective, they're both its children. That's just reality.

I don't automatically assume, though, that the descendants of humans will wildly change themselves through genetic engineering or whatever. They might, they might not. I can't predict that. What I can say is that that will be their choice, and we cannot act to spite them on the off chance that they change into something unrecognizable.

The point isn't human evolution anyway: The point is to allow humanity to survive, even if the world dies. They'll change. And change isn't bad. Why on Earth would we desire to just reject them just because their alleles and phenotypes have changed due to genetic drift and selection pressure? Should my mother reject me because I have two differently colored eyes, should that be a mutation?

Does that make me less human, because one of my genes changed?

Now, if I met these people, and they'd changed enough that a regular human like you and me cannot reproduce with them, they'd no longer be homo sapiens sapiens. They'd have a new name, as a new species, such as homo sapiens 0megabytus or something, should I be the one who discovered them. But they'd still be as human as neanderthals were. And they were a human species, just as we are.

Anyway, you're the only one who finds humanity strange. I find it perfectly normal, myself. Then again, I am one.

[warty goblin]

My thoughts:

On Immortality: Survival is a human imperative, so is reproduction, our selfish genetics see to that. Due to finite resources, having both is simply not possible for everybody, and it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that handing out immortality or the right to have children unequally could easily end up very, very messy. On the whole I'd rather live in a world with children than with a bunch of selfish ancient people refusing to die. The first might be inconvenient, noisy and messy, but its much less boring. Also, let's face it here, old people aren't generally full of new ideas, they're full of the same old ideas. The day new people stop being born is the day the species stagnates genetically and mentally. Do the species a favor: have enough babies to replace you and your (first) spouse, raise them well, then have some dignity and die when you get old.

On traveling to the stars. Sure it's possible, it's also desperately inconvenient, and there's little to no reason for anybody to put up the disgusting amount of material resources it requires. Sending people to nearby solar systems is quite literally an investment on which you will never see a return, there's simply too much space and time in the way. I find it extremely unlikely that humanity will ever get past Pluto. If we ever develop intelligent machines capable of self replication they might well pull it off, but I'm much less concerned with that.

In terms of colonizing celestial bodies within the solar system, I'd imagine it will happen eventually, probably because some nation wants to boast about something, or a corporation sees a way to make some money. I'd also guess it will be extremely limited, appeal to very few people (let's fly millions of miles to live in a tin can breathing recycled farts and drinking filtered urine all while developing exciting new stochastic radiation side-effects!), and probably not large enough to maintain a self-replacing population. If nothing else, I can't imagine very many people wanting to raise children in a space colony. Kids need space, and a space habitat is likely to be ironically typified by a lack thereof.


In terms of the sun blowing up: It's not due to happen for a very long time yet, so I'm really not worried about that. Odds are we'll annihilate ourselves long before our star gets all uppity - getting away from the before explosively collapsing is somewhere near the final question humanity ever need concern itself with*. Getting hit by large pieces of space debris is a larger worry, but one that's actually practically solvable with pretty close to modern technology if it isn't already. Definitely something worth spending some money on though.


*Penny for the ultimate question.

[0Megabyte]

Note about the whole "immortality" thing:

Simply put, how many people do you imagine will be able to afford it? Even if we get it, I doubt it'll be cheap for a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if there wouldn't be enough immortals to be statistically significant, really.

[warty goblin]

Note about the whole "immortality" thing:

Simply put, how many people do you imagine will be able to afford it? Even if we get it, I doubt it'll be cheap for a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if there wouldn't be enough immortals to be statistically significant, really.

Which is another reason it's a terrible idea. Every replacement part going to giving Mr. Rich III his eighth liver or third pancreas is a replacement part not going to giving a new organ to somebody younger and still inside their natural lifespan. I know I'd be pissed off as hell if my kid (or really any family member) were dying for want of a cloned organ, but couldn't get one because "I'm sorry Sir, but organ regrowth is only covered in our Premium Plans."

I'm going to indulge in a bit of speculation and say I would be far from the only one. In fact I suspect that given such a scenario, there would be enough pissed off people that you'd be looking at serious turmoil, instability and more than likely violence. How long before this becomes an enormous issue, and the protests start? How long until the protests turn into riots? How long do you think it'll take before some guy who drew the genetic short straw can't afford organ replacement finds out they can still afford bullets?

I'm guessing that it's quite likely such technology would end up getting a lot of people killed.

[0Megabyte]

To be fair, technology tends to kill a whole ton of people, and it's quite reasonable to imagine the social implications of immortality would do the same.

I have had the same speculation about immortality that you had, btw.

[Eldan]

A few technical issues I've seen above, and I'd like to address first:

1) Self-sustaining population: a genetically stable population for a colony would not, actually, be need to be very large. Studies seem to suggest that as few as 150 people could be enough to counter inbreeding by mutation. Even drift wouldn't be much of a problem. Interestingly, it's also a size many tribal population and villages arrive at naturally. Of course, with radiation, which is a huge problem, populations would probably need to be larger, to counter the risk of people becoming sterile in space.

2) Self-sustaining colonies: here we run into a problem. It's a common one, and probably a subset of No Sense of Scale: people don't understand ecology. Ever heard of Project Biosphere II? We tried to make enclosed ecosystems in the 90s. The result of experiment one was that we had to abandon the project when oxygen levels started gradually falling inside the greenhouse, from 21 to 14 percent, in the end. Over 16 months. That was with 8 people, in a huge structure that still had energy from the sun, and didn't need to actually, you know, fly. The crew lost weight, and they only made 80% of their own food. Almost all the insects taken in died, as did almost all vertebrate species. The ecosystem became dominated by ants which killed almost everything else.
Now, Biosphere came under a lot of criticism for being unscientific (which is in itself a problematic word), and I won't go into it.
But it shows a lot of the problems. If you want to make a system self sufficient, you can't just pack a few humans and some algae for hydroponics. You need decomposers, fungi or bacteria. Then you need other species to keep those in check. You probably need bacteria to synthesize all the nutrients you need. Then you need other species to balance out the species you have. And god help you if you have a bacteriophage on board killing a single one of all your vital stuff. If you want plants? Good luck finding all the pollinators you need, the species to control all your pollinators, and the superpredators to control your predators.
Carbon dioxide doesn't just vanish from your atmosphere either. No, plants don't just "use it up", they breathe just like humans do, which produces CO2 again.. On earth, we need tectonic and volcanic processes and bacteria to get rid of it.
Then you need energy for photosynthesis, which has to come from somewhere. Any idea how much power sunlight lamps need? Short version: a lot.

So tl;dr: Self-sufficiency is a complicated business.


Now, let's go on, but first let me say that I'm a convinced and outspoken Transhumanist. I even love the idea of a space project and colonies. But we're not there yet, nor will be we any time soon and people underestimate just how complicated this will be.

Finally, on the issue of immortality and continuity of consciousness: Let me be provocative here.
Yes, the "You" in 1000 years will be different from the you now. However, so is the you in 40 years from now. So, let's assume you are 25, and you've had your 2.3 kids. What do you do now? Raise your kids to adulthood, then kill yourself, since you've done your part to keep the human population at it's current state? After all, your personality changes every second of your life, with every stimulus you take in and every chemical you consume. You aren't the same person you were born as, you were ten years ago or you were when you stood up this morning. You change, and yet, you go on.
The entire concept of natural lifespan is utterly silly. With some statistical trickery, we soon find out that a primate our size would rarely live past his mid-forties. After that? Hygiene and modern medicine. So, where do you draw your line? Is blood transfusion unnatural? Donated organs? Spray-on replacement skin, which we are currently testing?

[Frozen_Feet]

But one that stays a constant, at least until we wildly change it, is human nature. If you want to talk about altering humans into some drastically different species, be my guest: That's a completely different conversation then sending humans into space. People suffer. It's part of what we do.
We don't need to purposefully alter humans, environment itself does it. And it's very much relevant to space travel: in zero G, selective pressures are vastly different than on planets. Evolution does not go at a fixed rate, sudden and drastic changes in environment can slow it down or speed it up.

Now, the point about human suffering was this: we're talking about hypothetical levels of energy that'd allow to give everyone currently alive a comfortable life. I simply find it funny that you talk about one sort of fantastic utopia while denying another which is not any more unrealistic.


I ascribe them the same rights we have. I reject the culture of slavery which was common in my own country until a hundred and fifty years ago. They have the same right to reject what they find wrong with my culture. Just because I don't see it doesn't mean they'll be wrong. And it would be ludicrous to assume they would have the same values.

I'm seeing the values of my own society change in front of my very eyes. I'm watching as previous generations struggle against my own, which disapproves of their views on homosexuality. What's there to make me assume that fifty years ago I won't be in their position on some other issue? Polygamy, for example?

Also, ignoring it is something else entirely, which I never, ever said.

As long as they are physiologically modern humans, there will be similarities. But look at the variety of cultures and cultural views that exist here and now. Even within my own country. Look at the differences between the culture of the United States a hundred and fifty years ago and today. Of course our descendants from a thousand years from now will have a different culture, and will value different things.

Different cultures value different things already. To assume things will stay the same, when I see them changing in front of my eyes is kind of silly. I doubt, for example, that they'll be for murder and random violence. But will they consider the fact that my country executes criminals as murder? Will they decide that sacrificing the old and infirm for the safety of the whole is not murder, even though I would call it such? Human beings have similarities, but our cultures and values run a wide gamut. It's honestly bizarre that you ignore that, and assume I meant something weird.

I find it odd you've come to think I assume the exact opposite view I've stated to hold. I said it already: change is not a problem. I know it happens.

However, much of your points are founded on "change is good", in a misguided attempt to prove "change is bad" you think I hold.

It's not so. My point is that change is neutral. It can go both ways. Your argument hinges on the idea that all paths are worth walking, when there are good arguments to be made that no, they are not.

When I brought up how qualities of human body and psyche can be used as basis of morality, I did not mean that the views of our descendants would stay the same; considering I'm the one proposing much more drastic changes to human nature, how did you ever get that idea? My point was this: at any given moment, for any type of being, you can derive things that are more healthy or "worth it" for it to do than some others, just based on its basic make-up.

One lesson you learn from history is that our precursors were, in a lot of things, very much mistaken, and generally what we should learn of mistakes is not to repeat them. Eventually, this loops back to the question, is diversity in suffering worth it? Is there a point where letting a baby burn its hand on a stove to learn its hot ceases to be wise?

You argue that human suffering will never go away, but we can still do much to alleviate it. You obviously ascribe to some concepts of right and wrong, but what's your admitted margin of error? You admit you can be wrong, but what are the things you think you are right about? (Based on the discussion had, sancitity of life and inherent worth of existing at least, since without those tenets, most of what you say wouldn't make sense.)


How is it imposing my will to give people the option to leave the planet? How is it imposing my will to accept that they'll have different values than me, and being curious what those values are?

How is it imposing my will to want the human race to not go extinct?! And if that's imposing my will, then we're already doomed. If people want to just die, then I can't stop them, and we don't deserve to live.

Let's assume a multi-generational ship to Alpha Centauri again. The original crew were likely volunteers, but their children? They are born to itty-bitty living space in the hostile vastness of space without a say in their fate. To them, being out of earth is not an option; it's something their parents, and the instigators of the whole project, imposed on them. Their happiness or suffering is thys the responsibility of those people.

To give a more down to earth example, I might be curious of how values of a human group develop if I throw them on Antarctica for gits and shiggles. Does fulfilling my curiosity justify people freezing to death?

I'm not saying imposing your will on other people is a bad thing. Make no such mistake. Learning and teaching, basics of science, require it.

The phenomenom hardly dooms us in some grand way. Like change, it's a neutral thing - it can swing both ways. I'm merely remarking that by seeking reinforcement for your own ideals and using them as a basis of your action, you are imposing your will on the hypothetical future generations as much as I am. Morality of such action is whole another ball game.


Further, what do you know about running a long-lasting scientifically enlightened culture? We've barely had a few hundred years of it. I don't think you can very easily predict how it'll develop in a thousand, or ten thousand years.

If people would rather go extinct than suffer, then any effort I make is futile and I should just die now. What's the point if they'll throw it all away?

I don't know much about it - that's why I'm calling to question many views and concepts associated with such utopias. I'm here to ask questions, not give answers.

To the latter paragraph - why would it be futile? By our own logic, would just giving people the chance to throw it all away be a worthwile goal unto its own?

You are also forgetting something about my views: I stated long ago that I do perceive point in preserving life - to an extent. If we can create practically eternal, small community of happy people down on Earth, does it add value to that if we spend myriad times more effort and resources to create practically eternal, very large community of people universally? Hypothetical people are phantasms - how much weight should we give to chasing ghosts?

You give it much more weight than I do, that's for sure - somewhat ironic, since I'm a strong proponent of ecological diversity in general. My view is simply that once a type of being has secured its existence, it should stop and think of other things than itself. "Humanity" is not, to me, inherently more valuable than other things, and as you should see I also consider that very state highly transient - clinging to it is not fruitful in my eyes.


So what, we should just give up? How defeatist. Look: If we send ships out there, they can go to other places and find resources as they need them. Find sources of energy as they need them. You're too caught up on the word self-sufficient, and ignoring what I'm saying. You understand the concept of a submarine, right? You are aware they can go months without getting more supplies, right?

Well, the difference between that, and the ships I'm talking about, resource-wise, is merely one of scale. Ships could go from asteroid to asteroid, comet to comet, and get minerals and necessary things. It's not wholly different from what we do already on Earth. The concept isn't hard to understand. And I'm not saying we'll do it with current technology, either.

I'm not advocating a defeatist view. I'm merely brining into attention very real obstacles and limitations imposed by natural laws. In the end of the day, it's not guaranteed any level of technological advancement will give mankind enough reach to always get to the next checkpoint before running out of fuel.

Taking your example of submarines, they don't need more supplies because they're carrying what they need with them; but those supplies can, and will run out eventually. If the submarine doesn't reach a resupply depot, it sinks. It's only "self-sufficient" for a time. Only a true perpetual motion machine can ascend this problem, but that would require a way to bendd laws of thermodynamics.


The point was that you were vastly overestimating the price of what we've already done in space, and what we're doing right now. Go ahead and ignore that, though.

And my point throughout this thread has been that what we've done in space is miniscule in scale and yet still required massive effort and resources; that you're underestimating the price required to do significantly more. I'm not ignoring your point - I'm just still disagreeing with it.


...what are you talking about? When did I say anything like that?!

You keep vastly misinterpreting me! You act like there's no differences in culture on this planet, and changes in culture aren't possible. (chiding me that there would be moral similarities, for example. How do you make that mistake?) You say that I am using the word human to mean any roughly sapient being, when I never said anything remotely like that.

I apologize for being unclear. It seems that poor wording made you again interprete my argument to have nearly the opposite meaning I meant it to.

At no point have I thought that changes in culture aren't possible. The point I was going for was that time and evolution will, eventually, make our descendants so distanced from ourselves that their relation to us would be as much or less than that of other life. I find it stretches the definition of human to the point where you could just call any living, thinking being human.

You said that our descendants would be still human, like humans are still mammals. I dispute that reasoning - by analogy, evolution could make us reptiles, or arthropods, or any number of creatures that would no longer qualify as mammals. We evolved from bacteria, but are hardly such ourselves; in the same manner, calling our distant descendants "human" is a misnomer, or nothing more than a historical notation.


Humans are humans. Our descendants will still be human. Are you not aware of evolution? A human is still a subset of the group from which the most recent common ancestor between humans and chimps came from. Any descendants of humans will still be a subset of humans. That's simply how the definitions work. A lion and a housecat are still felines, they still come from a single common ancestor, and from that ancestor's perspective, they're both its children. That's just reality.

I'm well aware of evolution - by this point, you should've realized the sole reason I argue our descendants would ceases to be human is, in fact, evolutionary.

Housecats and lions are both felines, yes. But go far enough in the past, and you'll find that they share a common precursor with canines - go further, and you will see the precursors slowly lose all things in common with what is currently considered a "feline". Calling such alien precursors "felines" is a misnomer, plain and simple.

Just because they're our descendants, doesn't make them human, if they've lost all qualities typical to humans. Thus, I find holding them valuable because they are "human" highly mistaken.


I don't automatically assume, though, that the descendants of humans will wildly change themselves through genetic engineering or whatever. They might, they might not. I can't predict that. What I can say is that that will be their choice, and we cannot act to spite them on the off chance that they change into something unrecognizable.

The point isn't human evolution anyway: The point is to allow humanity to survive, even if the world dies. They'll change. And change isn't bad. Why on Earth would we desire to just reject them just because their alleles and phenotypes have changed due to genetic drift and selection pressure? Should my mother reject me because I have two differently colored eyes, should that be a mutation?

I'm not assuming they will wildly change themselves on purpose either. However, like I said in my first post, natural imperative is for change. Environmental pressures change, and to adapt, humans need to change. And thus, they'll become something utterly alien to us.

I'm not saying we should reject them because of that, or that they're worthless. I'm saying insisting on their "humanity" is fallacious and ignorant of potential profoundness of the change.


Does that make me less human, because one of my genes changed?

One gene is within variation typical to H. Sapiens. Growing six functional wings and ability to see in infrared would not be. Would such make you less human? Maybe. Personally, I prefer term inhuman.

Change is neutral. It doesn't necessarily make our descendants better or worse. But it does make them different.


Now, if I met these people, and they'd changed enough that a regular human like you and me cannot reproduce with them, they'd no longer be homo sapiens sapiens. They'd have a new name, as a new species, such as homo sapiens 0megabytus or something, should I be the one who discovered them. But they'd still be as human as neanderthals were. And they were a human species, just as we are.
But there's no imperative for them to stay that close to use. Indeed, for a spacefaring or immortal race, there'd be a whole lot of ways and reasons to be vastly more distanced. In the context of this thread, we're talking about dropping the "homo" part, but it could as well be "sapiens" that's first to go.


Anyway, you're the only one who finds humanity strange. I find it perfectly normal, myself. Then again, I am one.

Quite on the contrary. I find humanity pleasantly familiar. But there are myriad potential off-shoots of humanity that I'd consider alien enough to warrant their own names and descriptors.

Anyways, one important details. Above be many question marks (again). They're not there for rhetoric. Can't answer them? Very well, neither can I. But don't mix curiosity for offense. :smallwink:




Finally, on the issue of immortality and continuity of consciousness: Let me be provocative here.
Yes, the "You" in 1000 years will be different from the you now. However, so is the you in 40 years from now. So, let's assume you are 25, and you've had your 2.3 kids. What do you do now? Raise your kids to adulthood, then kill yourself, since you've done your part to keep the human population at it's current state? After all, your personality changes every second of your life, with every stimulus you take in and every chemical you consume. You aren't the same person you were born as, you were ten years ago or you were when you stood up this morning. You change, and yet, you go on.
The entire concept of natural lifespan is utterly silly. With some statistical trickery, we soon find out that a primate our size would rarely live past his mid-forties. After that? Hygiene and modern medicine. So, where do you draw your line? Is blood transfusion unnatural? Donated organs? Spray-on replacement skin, which we are currently testing?
The idea that just raising kids to adulthood amounts to having "done your part to keep the human population at it's current state" is fallacious, as any state of civilization involves more than just the number of people. There could still be other duties to full fill before letting entropy run its course.

To me, it's never been about what's "natural", simply about the resources and phenomena involved. Personally, I draw the line to death of last original brain cells - after that, I consider the original gone. That's not something you can really stop from happening - sure, you can keep this weird copy-me alive, but I still don't grasp what's better in it than just reproducing in the old-fashioned way.

[Eldan]

What's better about it?

Plain and simple: selfishness. In one or the other form the one and true original driver of all human endeavors.

I don't want to die. Even if I change, I don't assume that there will ever be a point where I sit down and say "Now I've had enough, let's end all this" and choose Oblivion over continued existence.

Of course, I'm fully aware that this is made from the viewpoint of "current me", which may well change again. :smallbiggrin:

And if there are other duties involved in doing your part on society, why do you think you can no longer meaningfully perform them when your last brain cell is dead? Why wouldn't you let a once-human machine contribute to society?

[Samurai Jill]

We are talking about entirely different things here, I'd guess. I refer to the levels of energy created by the sun...
Your precise words were 'harness the whole output of the sun', which implies something equivalent to a Dyson sphere, and seems to be a gross exaggeration. But never mind.

If you're curious about the Orion engine, a quick google search should sate your curiosity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion). Limits on the availability of nuclear fuel are a problem, of course, but I don't think the development of reliable fusion power within a few generations is outside the realm of possibility.

It is most realistic, though. Sun is one big fusion reactor and it's already there; it's also not going to run out anytime soon. So for a system-wide civilization, it's the logical choice.
As you have already outlined, the mere existence of a given resource does not imply it can be economically harvested for a given purpose, and that applies to energy as well as matter. You can't run an interplanetary spacecraft on solar power- at least not if you intend to get places within a human lifetime.

A possible alternative would be to collect solar power using a large, static receiver dish and 'beam it' to a moving spacecraft as microwave energy. Tricky to coordinate, though...

This is the argument that needs more clarifying: I specifically referred to terraforming a planet. If we get to the point where we can artificially induce earth-like climate in a place like, say, Mars, we're already at the point where we can control planet-wide climate at our whim.
Again, I don't think this is accurate. One of the big differences between terraforming Mars and a place like, say, the Moon, is that Mars has all the basic ingredients needed to sustain a viable ecosystem- it's just that they're trapped in a different equilibrium state from that of Earth (or, for that matter, Venus.) The thing that has to be borne in mind is that one of the major regulating factors that makes life possible is the presence of life itself- atmospheric oxygen and the ozone layer would not exist if it weren't for the emergence of eukaryotic microbes just before the cambrian explosion. This means that terraforming Mars might be far less difficult than is supposed, because the introduction of life could start to shift the planet toward a different equilibrium state, with minimal intervention on our own part.

This is also why terraforming Mars might be easier than dictating our own planet's climate or weather pattern- because Earth is already in a near-optimal equilibrium state, and isn't going to get 'better' (or worse) without extreme, and wholly artificial, effort. (Of course, that extreme and wholly artificial effort for the worse is what's probably causing global warming, which I entirely agree is not going to be solved, in any direct material sense, by spacefaring programs.)

...if current theories about dark energy are correct, the expansion of the universe will stop time long before that becomes a timely issue...

(Granted, it's a far out theory. Haven't seen it discussed in a while.)
Okay, whoa, time out. What?

And again, I don't think that terraforming is a necessary element for colonisation of other worlds (though it might be helpful.) As I've pointed out, it's far easier to adapt the colonist to fit the environment than it is to adapt the environment to fit the colonist, and with sufficient 'adaptation', you can probably live just about anywhere shy of the Oort cloud.


Well, that theory got cold water on its neck fairly recently. Recent studies suggest that radio signals dissolve to the level of background noise before they even leave the solar system. The transmitters and receivers that'd be required to reliably send data between solar systems would need to be huge.
Given that you'd need to invest substantial resources in any craft intended to make the trip, tacking on a satellite dish doesn't seem an extravagant frill (particularly if you already have a solar sail attached.) Transmitters on Earth can be as big as you like. And again, I'd like to see the math on this.

And in the cosmic scale, light-speed is not very fast. Even the closest stars are years away - further from them, the distances can stretch to hundreds, even thousands of years. Think of all the significant geopolitical changes that have happened in last five years...
Again, as I stressed before, if we ever get to the point where we've colonised stars that are thousands of light-years apart, I call that a win scenario. At that point, plenty of other worlds within broadcast distance of fledgling colonies will be just as culturally productive as Earth. And why is it neccesary for all the colonies to remain a single political entity? What's wrong with systems of local self-government and just the free exchange of information between worlds allowing a gradual cultural osmosis? Why does humanity have to remain a single monolithic cultural bloc? What's wrong with diversification?

Of course, much depends on your definition of fair-sized. I've seen estimates that we could, already, build a nuke-and-solar-sail powered starship and send it to a two-way trip to Alpha Centauri. Amount of people on-board would be 200, and the trip would take one or two centuries.
Again, I totally agree that present technology does not make a compelling case for extrasolar colonisation as a way to relieve terrestrial pressure, but the gist I get from your arguments is that you are basically opposed to/skeptical of any attempt at doing so regardless of tech level. Which strikes me as faintly silly.

If nothing else, we'll eventually crack Hard AI, and then you'll have an intelligence that can reasonably self-repair, requires no food, air, or water, consumes virtually no energy during hibernation, and can take as long as it bloody likes to get between the stars. Never mind sending Poole and Bowman- if you ever want to explore Alpha Centauri, just send Hal 9000.

[Samurai Jill]

They can be passed on to some extent, but there is a great deal of information lost in the process. If you ever conveyed your full consciousness to someone else, they should be able to construct a fully conscious model of you, which, for as long as it was maintained, seemingly would be functionally identical to most other forms of immortality.
Oh, I certainly agree that there are benefits to be reaped from improving the efficiency of information transmission along those lines, it's just that every technology which does so makes the concept of individual self less and less meaningful. The same technology that lets you clone replacement organs lets you clone entire people. The same technology that lets you download skills and memories makes it possible to erase them. None of this is inherently a bad thing. It may well be a fantastic thing. But the concept of individual continuity, or 'immortality', simply ceases to have relevance.

[Tengu_temp]

But in your example, the character and the controller are distinct entities that obey different rules. There is some outside entity that also changes, and within a different paradigm.

Your analogy would fit for "soul" or some other concept like detailed above (the notion about eternally persisting part and so on), but I'm not sure that's what you're aiming for.

I don't see a way to apply it to a non-divisive world view.

No, the controller is not a separate entity. If the the player character is the body and mind, then the controller is the soul.

I realized that this is a discussion about terms. And I hate discussing terms, because most of the time it's sophism that leads nowhere. I'll just say this: immortality, in no matter what form, is better than non-existing. Because non-existing is one of the few things in this world that really scare me. Schoppenhauer said "no matter what awaits us after death, even if it's nothing, we will approach it peacefully because then it will be the natural state of being for us". I understand what he's saying, and I still don't buy it. Non-existing sucks. I wanna live forever.

[Mauve Shirt]

Relevant. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html)

[Frozen_Feet]

As you have already outlined, the mere existence of a given resource does not imply it can be economically harvested for a given purpose, and that applies to energy as well as matter. You can't run an interplanetary spacecraft on solar power- at least not if you intend to get places within a human lifetime.

A possible alternative would be to collect solar power using a large, static receiver dish and 'beam it' to a moving spacecraft as microwave energy. Tricky to coordinate, though...

Um, didn't we just talk about solar sails? Those should be fairly hand for movement within a solar system.

In any case, the sun creates vast amounts of energy and we don't have to worry about "wasting" it. Using the power of the sun in large scale to power up processes to create fuel and other resources (such as hydrogen or water) is fairly simple and logical step to take on the way to star-faring culture.

You are right though that by my own reasoning there's no imperative for it to happen. But it's marginally less "out there" than hypothetical matter-antimatter engines or even fusion.



This is also why terraforming Mars might be easier than dictating our own planet's climate or weather pattern- because Earth is already in a near-optimal equilibrium state, and isn't going to get 'better' (or worse) without extreme, and wholly artificial, effort. (Of course, that extreme and wholly artificial effort for the worse is what's probably causing global warming, which I entirely agree is not going to be solved, in any direct material sense, by spacefaring programs.)

My argument is simply that because Earth is so close to near-optimal state, keeping it that way requires less resources and less effort than artificially inducing a similar state elsewhere (not that we are doing such a good job at it currently). So any application of terraforming technology would likely have equal or greater application down here in regards to ensuring "survival of mankind".


Okay, whoa, time out. What?

It's based on the cosmological model of accelerating universe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe) Some force is pushing the universe apart. Few years back, I saw a calculation claiming that claimed if the apparent force keeps growing at the same rate, it will reach a point in a billion years where it will rip apart galaxies and freeze up time (due to some gravitational effect; I did not understand that part very well). The crux is that this would happen far before the sun even becomes a red giant.

My main point is bringing into attention that life cycle of the sun is hardly the earliest or most severe "end of the world scenario". Under several theories, it's entirely feasible for mankind to hide in our comfy home system and planet till the universe itself is destroyed.


And again, I don't think that terraforming is a necessary element for colonisation of other worlds (though it might be helpful.) As I've pointed out, it's far easier to adapt the colonist to fit the environment than it is to adapt the environment to fit the colonist, and with sufficient 'adaptation', you can probably live just about anywhere shy of the Oort cloud.
You are likely correct. My main concerns are that it'd suck royally for the colonists, and I doubt whether it'd really be necessary for extended "survival of mankind". There are a variety of reasons to do it or appreciate it anyway, but I still feel there's a point where it'd be more reasonable to just pack your stuff and go back home.

An analogy would be trying to inhabit the Antarctic, the bottom of the sea etc. There's plenty of more convenient places for people to live in - spending vast effort to create life that is "sub-standard" to get your jollies is only makes sense if you insist on it.


Given that you'd need to invest substantial resources in any craft intended to make the trip, tacking on a satellite dish doesn't seem an extravagant frill (particularly if you already have a solar sail attached.) Transmitters on Earth can be as big as you like. And again, I'd like to see the math on this.

To my annoyance, the article eludes me. It was about debunking the myth that our first radio transmission would eventually be heard by someone, but I can't formulate a search phrase to find it. I'll have to visit the library again to dig it out.

Main problem in regards to ships would be that the receivers, too, have to be pretty darn huge to pick up such signals. The idea of making solars sails double as them is pretty intriguing, actually; I've not heard of it before. It might work.


Again, as I stressed before, if we ever get to the point where we've colonised stars that are thousands of light-years apart, I call that a win scenario. At that point, plenty of other worlds within broadcast distance of fledgling colonies will be just as culturally productive as Earth. And why is it neccesary for all the colonies to remain a single political entity? What's wrong with systems of local self-government and just the free exchange of information between worlds allowing a gradual cultural osmosis? Why does humanity have to remain a single monolithic cultural bloc? What's wrong with diversification?

There's nothing wrong with cultural diversification itself - it's just that change, once again, isn't always for the better. We've struggled a lot to reach a point where daily survival is not an immediate concern to many of us; many people still languish under such burden. It's a pretty stable concept that such single-minded focus on survival is not good for creativity or care-free life.

All planets are not equal, and all colonies won't be equal; fledgling colonies will have to begin many things from scratch. An analogy would, again, be sending people to Antarctic and telling "make the best of it, see you later!" Once we've reached a sustainable, enlightened culture that can produce for all its people, is it really called for to go around creating cultures that have all the toil ahead of them that we just managed to get done with?

As noted, I don't see much point with that. Of course, there's the possibility that a space-faring civilization comes before a sustainable, harmonious one, but in my opinion accumulated scientific observations point to the opposite.


Again, I totally agree that present technology does not make a compelling case for extrasolar colonisation as a way to relieve terrestrial pressure, but the gist I get from your arguments is that you are basically opposed to/skeptical of any attempt at doing so regardless of tech level. Which strikes me as faintly silly.

If nothing else, we'll eventually crack Hard AI, and then you'll have an intelligence that can reasonably self-repair, requires no food, air, or water, consumes virtually no energy during hibernation, and can take as long as it bloody likes to get between the stars. Never mind sending Poole and Bowman- if you ever want to explore Alpha Centauri, just send Hal 9000.

Not regardless of tech level; the levels of technology that'd make it feasible are just so far in the realm of science fantasy that I usually don't pay them much attention when discussing matters like this. Again, this is based on my observation that many recent trends in astro-physics point to space travel being less, not more feasible. Science Fiction has underestimated technological advancements on several fronts, but in the case of space travel it has almost invariably been overoptimistic.

Part of my skepticism/opposition of course stems from the the elements of panspermia I find ethically dubious or philosophically futile. There isn't much more I have to say about the issue in general anymore; we'd probably have to pick some specific model to discuss to get further.

[warty goblin]

No, the controller is not a separate entity. If the the player character is the body and mind, then the controller is the soul.

I realized that this is a discussion about terms. And I hate discussing terms, because most of the time it's sophism that leads nowhere. I'll just say this: immortality, in no matter what form, is better than non-existing. Because non-existing is one of the few things in this world that really scare me. Schoppenhauer said "no matter what awaits us after death, even if it's nothing, we will approach it peacefully because then it will be the natural state of being for us". I understand what he's saying, and I still don't buy it. Non-existing sucks. I wanna live forever.

See, I understand my eventual non-existence as one of the greatest gifts in the universe. There is literally no version of eternal life that does not look like absolute hell to me.

The fact that my life is finite, measurable, encompassable, gives it a meaning and beauty of which the infinite can only dream - the ability to look forwards with purpose, to look back, place my accomplishments within the frame of my likely lifespan and view with pride those that are worthy of occupying that slight space. My death allows what I have done well to have purpose and absolves the wrongs, the mistakes, the petty banality.

I'm not in any hurry to die, but the fact that I will is immensely comforting.

[Tengu_temp]

Relevant. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html)

I've read this before. It's bull. All of those should be easily avoided, are just speculations, or worth it. I counter with this (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LivingForeverIsAwesome).
Though, to be fair, my perfect vision of immortality still has some kind of self-destruct switch just in case your life becomes unbearable.


The fact that my life is finite, measurable, encompassable, gives it a meaning and beauty of which the infinite can only dream - the ability to look forwards with purpose, to look back, place my accomplishments within the frame of my likely lifespan and view with pride those that are worthy of occupying that slight space. My death allows what I have done well to have purpose and absolves the wrongs, the mistakes, the petty banality.

And how does that make the accomplishments of immortals any less worthwhile, exactly? Or are you saying that your accomplishments become truly great only after your death? Because hoo boy, do I disagree with that.

[hamishspence]

My death allows what I have done well to have purpose and absolves the wrongs, the mistakes, the petty banality.

If anything, living longer might give one more opportunity to make up for mistakes made when one is young.

More time to learn- more time to take a new path rather than remain on the old one.

[Frozen_Feet]

And if there are other duties involved in doing your part on society, why do you think you can no longer meaningfully perform them when your last brain cell is dead? Why wouldn't you let a once-human machine contribute to society?

Missed this priorly. Shortly: I can't meaningfully perform anything, because I'm dead. :smalltongue: If there is some weird copy-me around, it sure can keep on existing, but that's not of my concern. Your argument about selfishness still rings empty me, as it still hinges on the premise that the "unbroken continuum of experience" (like someone called it) is meaningful, or that there even is one. It could as well be my kids, or a clone, or a separately-made robot doing those things.

I wouldn't have anything special against once-human machines contributing to society, anymore than I would oppose children of other people contributing to society. Can't say anything more outside a more specific scenario.

[Eldan]

Perhaps your kids would be as similar to the Now-You than Future-You would be, or they wouldn't. At least Future-You would share most of Now-You's genes.

And it isn't even really about continuity of experience, that part doesn't even really matter to me. But the thing is, even if every second of my life is a a different me, none of those mes would want to die. Why, then, should any of them? To Now-Me, Future-Me has just as much a right to life as Now-Me does.

Also, I'm creating new terminology (or at least new to Now-Me :smalltongue: ) and I love it.

[Frozen_Feet]

Didn't we already go through robotic body replacements? XD There is still no imperative for my descendants, whatever their nature will be, to even remain as biological life.

Not that my genes are particularly important to being me - as much hinges on outside stimuli recorded on the organical media that is my brain. You could make an exact clone of my DNA and put it somewhere else, and it'd be a wholly different person.

Answering your question is however impossible, as I can't now what my future-me is going to do - which would be a large factor for now-me's decision of whether to put it out of its misery or not.

[Coidzor]

Yes,but you would be alive

Well, someone else who was once someone else who was once someone else who was once someone else on down through the millennia until it gets back to the original "you."

What the base "You" would get would be a vastly increased life-span before the centuries basically result in self-inflicted mindrape. And probably some other-inflicted mindrape for good measure, one doesn't know what the millennia might bring, after all.

[thorgrim29]

Disregarding the moral arguments, because I don't feel like getting into them right now, I'd like to argue against the inequity of clinical immortality.

1: As a technology ages, it gets better and cheaper, that's pretty constant of any product that isn't deliberately maintained as a luxury. So, while it may be true that for the first 20 years or so, 30 at the most, only the wealthy would be able to afford the treatments, eventually everyone would, or close enough to everyone (in developed countries that is, but it would be futile to wait for the whole world to be equal before advancing). Best example, the DVD player. It was prohibitively expansive not 10 years ago, and now it's dirt cheap.

2: Even if more rich people then poor people are immortal, society as a whole benefits, because rich people tend to be the engine of technological advancement (if only because of founding), plus they pay more taxes. Those taxes would then presumably go in part towards financing the immortality treatments for the masses.

[Eldan]

Of course you don't know what future you will decide. And that's the entire point:

You can't make decisions for future you. Future you has the right to live, even if he is different from you. Ending your life now ends so many possibilities your future yous could have.

[Mystic Muse]

See, I understand my eventual non-existence as one of the greatest gifts in the universe. There is literally no version of eternal life that does not look like absolute hell to me.

Thank you for phrasing this for me much better than I could have.

[Frozen_Feet]

Of course you don't know what future you will decide. And that's the entire point:

You can't make decisions for future you. Future you has the right to live, even if he is different from you. Ending your life now ends so many possibilities your future yous could have.

But you can't avoid making decisions for your future self either.

Just for contrast, replace each instance of "future you" with "your children". It's the potential parent's responsibility to weigh whether getting children in given situation will be good for either them or the child. All possibilities are not worth seeing through - if the probable futures ends in tears, I might as well call it a day.

There's such things as "foreseeable future", after all, and I hazard the guess that advances in science will only broaden that concept. There are cases where, frankly, the hypothetical rights of hypothetical beings seize to matter at the face of actual reality of events.

[DomaDoma]

Could we... could we not follow up on FF's comment right there? Thanks.

[PirateMonk]

Relevant. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html)

Not really. #5 and #4 really only apply if you're the only immortal, which is a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. The next two are somewhat speculative, and can probably be solved. #1 may or may not be problematic, depending on the precise form of the immortality.


Missed this priorly. Shortly: I can't meaningfully perform anything, because I'm dead. :smalltongue: If there is some weird copy-me around, it sure can keep on existing, but that's not of my concern. Your argument about selfishness still rings empty me, as it still hinges on the premise that the "unbroken continuum of experience" (like someone called it) is meaningful, or that there even is one. It could as well be my kids, or a clone, or a separately-made robot doing those things.

Do you also believe that you won't be able to meaningfully do anything in five years? If the transfer is done right, there should be a vastly greater gap across that timespan than from shifting your consciousness to a different physical form.


It's based on the cosmological model of accelerating universe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe) Some force is pushing the universe apart. Few years back, I saw a calculation claiming that claimed if the apparent force keeps growing at the same rate, it will reach a point in a billion years where it will rip apart galaxies and freeze up time (due to some gravitational effect; I did not understand that part very well). The crux is that this would happen far before the sun even becomes a red giant.

This seems to currently be considered unlikely (http://www.universetoday.com/36929/big-rip/). Still an interesting idea, though.

[Frozen_Feet]

^ The brain cells that store my personality will still largely be the same after five years. Yes, I will have changed as a person, but there's still enough "original parts" left to qualify as the same creature. I can do meaningful things, because I'm still alive... maybe.

I also fail to see how copying my memory to a wholly different construct is a lesser change than gradual erosion of my body.

[Mystic Muse]

I also fail to see how copying my memory to a wholly different construct is a lesser change than gradual erosion of my body.

Even if it was a lesser change, it's debatable whether that would truly still be you or just your memories and such.

[PirateMonk]

^ The brain cells that store my personality will still largely be the same after five years. Yes, I will have changed as a person, but there's still enough "original parts" left to qualify as the same creature. I can do meaningful things, because I'm still alive... maybe.

I also fail to see how copying my memory to a wholly different construct is a lesser change than gradual erosion of my body.

As Samurai Jill noted, consciousness is a process, not an object or a property of an object. Your brain cells are not you; they are simply running you. Consciousness transfer is less of a change because nothing is changing except the hardware.

[warty goblin]

And how does that make the accomplishments of immortals any less worthwhile, exactly? Or are you saying that your accomplishments become truly great only after your death? Because hoo boy, do I disagree with that.
Neither of those, I'm saying my death makes my accomplishments meaningful to me.

Put differently the fact that I dedicated some significant effort and time from a finite supply of both to accomplish something makes that thing important. To speak metaphorically, if I've only got $10, and I spend $1 on something, it's probably something I absolutely want or need. If I have a billion dollars why would I even notice?

Besides which, I cannot be afraid of non-being, there's literally nothing to be afraid of. I am afraid of pain, of sorrow, but not of no longer existing. The world will roll on without me, in a hundred years ago in all likelihood nobody will even remember I lived, and that seems to me to be the fitting end to life. Dying does not sound pleasant, and I'd rather my end be as painless as possible if given the choice, but while I exercise sensible caution I refuse to let myself be ruled by fear of that which I have no reason to dread.

[Eldan]

I am afraid the entire meaning of what you say just goes over me head. I can simply not understand why anyone would say that.

There is sorrow, and hate, and despair in life, yes. But then, there is joy, and beauty, and love. And nothing, to me, is scarier than the prospect of never being able to see the sun rise again or never to fall in love, to learn a new and interesting fact or to marvel at the beauty of nature, to never again cook and eat my favourite food, even. And all that, to me, is what death means. It's the end. The worst possible state, for there can never be anything good ever again after it.

[Mystic Muse]

The worst possible state, for there can never be anything good ever again after it.

There are many, MANY people, including me, who would disagree with you on that.

Naturally, I can't go into this because of board rules, but anybody who believes that they have any chance of getting into some sort of heaven would disagree that there can never be anything good ever again after.

And, despite how alien it may sound to some on here, I could die ten seconds after this post, and other than the people I leave behind being horribly sad that it happened, it wouldn't matter to me, even if there was no afterlife.

[Lord Seth]

And, despite how alien it may sound to some on here, I could die ten seconds after this post, and other than the people I leave behind being horribly sad that it happened, it wouldn't matter to me, even if there was no afterlife.Well of course it wouldn't matter to you. You'd be dead.

[Mystic Muse]

Well of course it wouldn't matter to you. You'd be dead.

What I mean is, there's nothing in particular I feel I need to stay alive for. Yes, I want to live to travel to different countries, possibly raise a kid one day, and do a multitude of other things, but if I found out I was going to die within the next couple of days, it wouldn't matter to me while I was still alive, other than the aforementioned people being really sad. That would tear me up.

[Eldan]

I can't understand that. How can anyone look at the world and not be constantly, eternally, perpetually amazed by it? Just look at things. Really look at them. There is an overwhelming multitude glorious, fantastic, amazing, awesome, beautiful things out there. You can never see them all, touch them all, smell them all, feel them all. But how could anyone, anyone, voluntarily give up their chance to experience as much of it as they can? Why would you even consider anything over the feeling of just existing?
Here I am, sitting at my computer, and I feel the cold air on my face, and the keyboard under my skin, the way my fingers move rapidly as I type, I see the light reflected off the frame of the screen in front of me and the blue sky outside, a lonely bush in the middle of the street growing the first pink flowers of spring, the windows opposite reflecting the warm sunlight back at me and outside, I hear people talking, and laughing, and I hear the sound of cars and trams in the distance. Why would I ever not experience all that?

[Mystic Muse]

I can't understand that. How can anyone look at the world and not be constantly, eternally, perpetually amazed by it? Just look at things. Really look at them. There is an overwhelming multitude glorious, fantastic, amazing, awesome, beautiful things out there. You can never see them all, touch them all, smell them all, feel them all. But how could anyone, anyone, voluntarily give up their chance to experience as much of it as they can? Why would you even consider anything over the feeling of just existing?
Here I am, sitting at my computer, and I feel the cold air on my face, and the keyboard under my skin, the way my fingers move rapidly as I type, I see the light reflected off the frame of the screen in front of me and the blue sky outside, a lonely bush in the middle of the street growing the first pink flowers of spring, the windows opposite reflecting the warm sunlight back at me and outside, I hear people talking, and laughing, and I hear the sound of cars and trams in the distance. Why would I ever not experience all that?

I'll attempt to explain tomorrow since the forum backup is coming up in a minute.

[J.Gellert]

I can't understand that. How can anyone look at the world and not be constantly, eternally, perpetually amazed by it? Just look at things. Really look at them. There is an overwhelming multitude glorious, fantastic, amazing, awesome, beautiful things out there. You can never see them all, touch them all, smell them all, feel them all. But how could anyone, anyone, voluntarily give up their chance to experience as much of it as they can? Why would you even consider anything over the feeling of just existing?
Here I am, sitting at my computer, and I feel the cold air on my face, and the keyboard under my skin, the way my fingers move rapidly as I type, I see the light reflected off the frame of the screen in front of me and the blue sky outside, a lonely bush in the middle of the street growing the first pink flowers of spring, the windows opposite reflecting the warm sunlight back at me and outside, I hear people talking, and laughing, and I hear the sound of cars and trams in the distance. Why would I ever not experience all that?

Besides all that (well said), consider what happened in the past 10.000 years. Many things. Awesome things.

How could anyone get bored or tired of it?

Seriously, whoever tells me he wouldn't want immortal life... I'll call him a liar, simple as that. Either he hasn't given it any though, or he's just plain lying to convince himself to not feel bad for not having... the impossible.

Death is not a natural state of things. Old age is just a disease.

[Ragitsu]

To crib a Stargate Atlantis line about fixing supposedly impossible problems,

Cancer, a few seconds.

Death...a few minutes.

[Mystic Muse]

Seriously, whoever tells me he wouldn't want immortal life... I'll call him a liar, simple as that. Either he hasn't given it any though, or he's just plain lying to convince himself to not feel bad for not having... the impossible.


Yes, I want to outlive everybody I've ever cared about. :smallannoyed:

Even if that's not the case, as I've mentioned before, there are many, many people who believe that there is something better after death, so they have no reason to get eternal life.

There is nothing about eternal life that appeals to me, because there is nothing about life in general that appeals to me. Yes, I like nature, and I definitely want it to continue to exist.

You really want to know what makes me not care about continuing to live? Humanity. I'm tired of hearing every other day about some horrible new thing happening. I'm tired of hearing of stupid parents who decided that not feeding their kids was a good idea, or hearing about the latest celebrity gossip like we have a right to know what goes on in somebody's private life. I'm tired of watching the news and hearing about fifteen minutes of humans being horrible people, followed by one good thing humans did that happened 100 or so years ago. I'm tired of my cousins using derogatory terms for people with alternate religions or sexualities, and I'm tired of people in general.

Remove most of humanity from the equation, and I'll care about living longer. Otherwise, while I might care about living longer, I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future.

[Ragitsu]

You really want to know what makes me not care about continuing to live? Humanity. I'm tired of hearing every other day about some horrible new thing happening. I'm tired of hearing of stupid parents who decided that not feeding their kids was a good idea, or hearing about the latest celebrity gossip like we have a right to know what goes on in somebody's private life. I'm tired of watching the news and hearing about fifteen minutes of humans being horrible people, followed by one good thing humans did that happened 100 or so years ago. I'm tired of my cousins using derogatory terms for people with alternate religions or sexualities, and I'm tired of people in general.

Remove most of humanity from the equation, and I'll care about living longer. Otherwise, while I might care about living longer, I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future.

If it helps: in relation to the media, bad stuff is the stuff that gets ratings (and sells well). There's also much good in the world, but who wants to talk about it when it's not profitable?

[J.Gellert]

Yes, I want to outlive everybody I've ever cared about. :smallannoyed:

People outlive their loved ones every day. There is no way around it, well, unless all your loved ones are immortal, too, or, you do something radical first...


If it helps: in relation to the media, bad stuff is the stuff that gets ratings (and sells well). There's also much good in the world, but who wants to talk about it when it's not profitable?

True enough, most journalism seems to exist on people's fears. Just watch the trends throughout the year; Spring: Car accidents! Summer: Drownings! Autumn: The flu! Winter: Death by Christmas lights! All year long: War! Famine! Death!

You have to care less about this, or it's going to drive you crazy. Every so often I see my parents get sad because someone died on the other side of the world, and all I can do is be angry at the TV people. That is not news. That is Drama Daily.

So it's a thing you have to deal with whether you are mortal or immortal. And if Vampire is right about the Humanity deal, then great, you will become desensitized by your many years of existence! Awesome!

[Mystic Muse]

People outlive their loved ones every day. There is no way around it

I don't think I can address this anymore without going into board forbidden topics.


As for caring about what happens to humans less? Not going to happen any time soon either. Also, I find the idea of being desensitized to it abhorrent, not awesome.

[Eldan]

In all likelihood, everyone has a few relatives die before them. Grandparents, uncles, parents. It is a fact, and one you have to deal with in some fashion. Dying yourself so it doesn't happen again does not, to me, seem like a constructive solution to the problem.
And think of it like this, then: immortality would, if achieved by science, not be reserved for you alone. It would be, at first, a precious commodity, sure, but eventually become cheaper. Cell phones used to be rare, now everyone has them. If you were to become immortal, or long-lived through science, so would your family and your loved ones, giving you that much more time with them, and opportunities to get to know them even better, as well as many other wonderful people you would never have met otherwise.

[Ragitsu]

As for caring about what happens to humans less? Not going to happen any time soon either. Also, I find the idea of being desensitized to it abhorrent, not awesome.

It's not so much being desensitized as handling what you can. Considering all the worlds ills, or even half of them, would crush any one person.

[Mystic Muse]

I'm tired of explaining why I don't find death to be a bad thing, so I'm done with this thread.

[Eldan]

I don't think you really have, or at least not in a way that was clear to me. What you did say was that you wouldn't care if your life ended soon. That much I got. But I don't really see a reason why you are so tired of life.

[Mystic Muse]

I don't think you really have, or at least not in a way that was clear to me. What you did say was that you wouldn't care if your life ended soon. That much I got. But I don't really see a reason why you are so tired of life.

Eh one more.

I'm just tired of continuously having humanity as a whole continuously disappointing me with barely anything popping up that makes me feel good about humanity. I'm not trying to explain that I'm tired of life, I'm trying to explain why death isn't as big a deal as you guys. as I've said, I believe that there is an afterlife, so death doesn't seem to me like the big deal you guys consider it.

I may pop back in to try and clarify, but I'm fairly bad at it sometimes, and I really shouldn't say anymore about my beliefs or I'll probably break the board rules.

[Eldan]

Hmm. Now, I will hopefully stray not too far into religion with this, but:

Your theoretical afterlife, wouldn't it also be eternal? And would it not, by most definitions also contain other humans? How, then, would it be better?

[Mystic Muse]

Hmm. Now, I will hopefully stray not too far into religion with this, but:

Your theoretical afterlife, wouldn't it also be eternal? And would it not, by most definitions also contain other humans? How, then, would it be better?

Think Earth except absolutely no bad things happening ever, and me getting to hang out with people in my family who have died, or possibly ask questions of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln.

[Yora]

To late. At university we would have classified the first post in this thread as a religious discourse. :smallbiggrin:
But if you don't claim any relationship to any major religious group, this thread should be safe. Which is kind of sad, since these are question people have thought about for thousands of year and come to many interesting conclusions, but talking about them is verboten!

[Eldan]

Think Earth except absolutely no bad things happening ever, and me getting to hang out with people in my family who have died, or possibly ask questions of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln.

Now, without going into the deeper religious implications (my, aren't I careful today), why would, in such a state, this even still be humanity? Aren't humans, at least in part, defined by the struggles they overcome? If life was an endless moment of perfect or at least positive moments, would it not, in it's entirety become meaningless?

Someone, and excuse my laziness for not looking up who it was, stated further up in the thread that they only consider life worthwhile because they use their limited time to overcome problems, making it meaningful because they spend a limited resource, lifespan, on it.
If then, there was neither such a limited resource, caused by this new life being endless and unchanging, nor any suffering or struggles, be they however small in their nature to overcome, as the afterlife designed by you is, as you have defined it, free of such burdens, how would you give meaning to such a life when, by it's very nature, there is nothing to accomplish and, in fact, no drive for humans to achieve anything anymore in their now perfected state?

Edit: we could always open up a chat room, IRC channel or similar environment conductive to discussions of such a nature.

[Mystic Muse]

Now, without going into the deeper religious implications (my, aren't I careful today), why would, in such a state, this even still be humanity? Aren't humans, at least in part, defined by the struggles they overcome? If life was an endless moment of perfect or at least positive moments, would it not, in it's entirety become meaningless?

Someone, and excuse my laziness for not looking up who it was, stated further up in the thread that they only consider life worthwhile because they use their limited time to overcome problems, making it meaningful because they spend a limited resource, lifespan, on it.
If then, there was neither such a limited resource, caused by this new life being endless and unchanging, nor any suffering or struggles, be they however small in their nature to overcome, as the afterlife designed by you is, as you have defined it, free of such burdens, how would you give meaning to such a life when, by it's very nature, there is nothing to accomplish and, in fact, no drive for humans to achieve anything anymore in their now perfected state?

Edit: we could always open up a chat room, IRC channel or similar environment conductive to discussions of such a nature.

I think we should probably just end the discussion. For one, it's late/early so I wouldn't be able to argue very well anyway, and I'm not very good at arguing about things like this anyway.

[Ragitsu]

The definition of humanity could change in time.

One day humans may all be genetically engineered/enhanced.

One day humans may all be partially or mostly machines.

One day humans may have all ascended to another plane of existence.

[Eldan]

Aww. That is, frankly, a bit disappointing. Don't just leave.

Just when the discussion really started to go along and become interesting enough to actually write up long-winded and badly formulated arguments from my side. Please consider participating once more in the future, perhaps tomorrow, if your schedule permits it, as I find it most stimulating to find out about other people's opinions.

[Mystic Muse]

Aww. That is, frankly, a bit disappointing. Don't just leave.

Just when the discussion really started to go along and become interesting enough to actually write up long-winded and badly formulated arguments from my side. Please consider participating once more in the future, perhaps tomorrow, if your schedule permits it, as I find it most stimulating to find out about other people's opinions.

I might take up that offer tomorrow if I'm not still tired. when I start confusing words with other words, I think that's a good indication my brain is not in a state conducive to debates.

EDIT: tonight though, I'd like to get some sleep.

[deuterio12]

And think of it like this, then: immortality would, if achieved by science, not be reserved for you alone. It would be, at first, a precious commodity, sure, but eventually become cheaper. Cell phones used to be rare, now everyone has them.

-Having your personal battleship used to be rare. It still is.
-Having your own country used to be rare. It still is.
-Gaining a nobel used to be rare. It still is.
-Having available the best medical treatment possible used to be rare. It still is.

Just because somethings became cheaper, doesn't mean everything becomes cheaper.



If you were to become immortal, or long-lived through science, so would your family and your loved ones, giving you that much more time with them, and opportunities to get to know them even better, as well as many other wonderful people you would never have met otherwise.

That's way too utopic. If immortality was to be unlocked, it wouldn't be perfect immortality (wich plain breaks the laws of thermodynamics).

Resources are limited. Keeping someone alive eternally consumes an eternal amount of resources. Many people would have to settle down with lesser forms of immortality. There would be fierce competition for the best immortality doctors.

So instead of meeting other wonderfull people, you may as well end up geting glares of hate from someone whose brother died because he couldn't beat your bid for that latest immortality upgrade.

Actually, immortality would probably signifcantly increase crime rate, because if you suffer an "acident", hey, the dude next in line gets the new immortality package! What do they have to lose? Either you step out of the way, or their immortality expires.

And that's not mentioning not-wonderfull immortal people. A significant amount of criminals never get caught. Make them immortal, and you have eternal nightmares.

[Eldan]

You have a point there. However, one could just as well say that crime rates could go down because people are risking more. If you have another 10 years to live, on average, you are more ready to turn to a risky life of crime than if you have another 30 years in relative comfort. That is, I'd assume, a factor in the link between poverty and violent crime rates (besides the obvious reason taht rich people don't really need the money in your wallet).

After all, going by the same logic and applying some game theory: however small the risk, by risking your eternal life, you are pursuing an infinitely unfavourable stategy.

[Winterwind]

I can't understand that. How can anyone look at the world and not be constantly, eternally, perpetually amazed by it? Just look at things. Really look at them. There is an overwhelming multitude glorious, fantastic, amazing, awesome, beautiful things out there. You can never see them all, touch them all, smell them all, feel them all. But how could anyone, anyone, voluntarily give up their chance to experience as much of it as they can? Why would you even consider anything over the feeling of just existing?
Here I am, sitting at my computer, and I feel the cold air on my face, and the keyboard under my skin, the way my fingers move rapidly as I type, I see the light reflected off the frame of the screen in front of me and the blue sky outside, a lonely bush in the middle of the street growing the first pink flowers of spring, the windows opposite reflecting the warm sunlight back at me and outside, I hear people talking, and laughing, and I hear the sound of cars and trams in the distance. Why would I ever not experience all that?If it wasn't waaay too long, I'd totally sig this. One of the wisest, best composed things I've ever read on this forum. :smallsmile:

So, yeah, I'd gladly live for - well, maybe not eternity, but certainly some centuries or even millennia. So many things I'd like to see... maybe then I would have the time to. Of course, new ones keep cropping up all the time...

That's me in a non-depressed phase, anyway. Ask me again when depressed, and I'd probably say I didn't want to live on for even just a few further years, nevermind millennia, but I consider my non-depressed state to be my natural one. :smallwink:

[Eldan]

Thanks.

To be fair, I have my depressing phases as well. My current research assignment (over in two weeks, Woohoo!) sucks and is boring. I'm just in an inexplicably good mood today. Perhaps because it's the first sunny day of the year.

[Frozen_Feet]

As Samurai Jill noted, consciousness is a process, not an object or a property of an object. Your brain cells are not you; they are simply running you. Consciousness transfer is less of a change because nothing is changing except the hardware.

But we might as well transfer my "consciousness" to another body while I'm still alive, with the original me still running about; would you argue that the copy-me is the same as me?

To me, the physical state creating and storing me consciousness is also very much part of me, and the erosion and eventual destruction of that state puts and end to what is called me. A consciousness might continue to exist, but the original creature is still gone. Never mind that in living creatures, changes in hardware often cause direct changes in software; this loops back to my very first post. The process itself changes, and eventually seizes to have even a passing resemblance to the original.

Your argument is basically like saying each copy of Windows is the same copy, even after some have been retrofitted to the point there isn't a single bit of the original coding left. It might have been Windows once, but ain't anymore, pal.




Death is not a natural state of things. Old age is just a disease.

But entropy very much is a natural state of things. Things are continuously falling apart on their own; even that which you call life is based on some things decaying so others can progress.

Current theories on the subject strongly suggest that universe, itself, will eventually cease to be. Once that state is reached, life and thought in all forms also become impossible.

How do you propose to get around that? If natural imperative is for all things to end, how is death not natural?

Do you want to live to see the end of the world? Okay then. It just loops back to the original question: after a point, what exactly is living?

[Eldan]

That is all true, of course. However, I still fail to see in what way having children would in any way be better or more advantageous than preserving whatever "you" will finally result after all that modification.

To be cold and economical for a while:
Preserving "you" over having children is an advantage. The you, even if it doesn't share your personality, will still have much of your knowledge and skills and can therefore work and produce benefit for society, while your children first need to be educated and therefore consume resources.

[The Big Dice]

So, yeah, I'd gladly live for - well, maybe not eternity, but certainly some centuries or even millennia. So many things I'd like to see... maybe then I would have the time to. Of course, new ones keep cropping up all the time...
Can you imagine how bored you'd get?

I mean, people get jaded after four or five years when it comes to most things. Now stretch that out to centuries. And worse, assuming immortality comes to us all, centuries of all the people you know.

Just imagine how annoying someone you dislike might be after five centuries. And you've only known that person for the couple of years you've been at your job.

People keep talking about being able to spend immense amounts of time withtheir families. But after a century of things never changing, families would tear each other apart. You think it's bad spending the weekend with your cousins? Imagine a situation where you live so long that not just the day and weeks are blurring as they zoom past. It's the years and decades.

There are reasons immortality is a curse in many classic stories.

And if everyone, or even a reasonable number of rich and powerful people became immortal, we just stopped progress. Most development comes about as a new generation of thinkers and builders comes along and wants to make their mark on things. Gradually, the older generation passes away, making way for the new one. Who then go on to become the establishment, and eventually a new generation grows up and brings fresh solutions to the table.

But of the older generation is there for the forseeable future, and that future is measured in centuries, then nothing will ever change.

Death is the price we pay for progress.

[DomaDoma]

People... tend to stick in their ways, more often than not. And our brains don't have infinite capacity.

[Eldan]

I don't buy the immortality as a curse thing.

To me, the blurring effect of aging, and the jadedness that comes with it, is balanced out by progress. Of course you get bored of many of the things around you. But every day, more new and awesome things are invented, and more than you can hope to see in your short lifespan.

Consider my favourite fictional character, Hob Gadling the immortal. He has lived for maybe five, six hundred years now, and he doesn't get bored of it. He went from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the industrial Revolution and the entire modern age. He has seen things he could not have dreamed off as a child. He was a book printer, a writer, a slave trader, an explorer. Why should you get bored of that?

[Frozen_Feet]

Preserving "you" over having children is an advantage. The you, even if it doesn't share your personality, will still have much of your knowledge and skills and can therefore work and produce benefit for society, while your children first need to be educated and therefore consume resources.

^true, if the forms of immortality outperform having kids and teaching them. However, we know how to have kids and teach them already, while immortality is just a distant dream.

Would all the energy and effort aimed at achieving immortality have better returns than spending it all on making our kids faster learners etc.? Of course, this is not a question that can be answered outside a specific scenario, but the concept of "diminishing returns" rears its ugly head in many of them. If each invidual lives for a thousand years but having kids and teaching them only takes 1, that one year is pretty insignificant compared to resources needed to sustain the invidual for the rest of its life.

EDIT: for the record, I don't think immortality is a curse or blessing - it can go both ways. I am, however, firmly on the opinion that modern human psyche could not handle lifespans vastly exceeding those of our current maximums, not without periodically forgetting a lot of things to retain a sense of novelty.

Then again, there's no imperative for an immortal to remember everything, nor is there any imperative for them to remain human. XD

[deuterio12]

You have a point there. However, one could just as well say that crime rates could go down because people are risking more. If you have another 10 years to live, on average, you are more ready to turn to a risky life of crime than if you have another 30 years in relative comfort. That is, I'd assume, a factor in the link between poverty and violent crime rates (besides the obvious reason taht rich people don't really need the money in your wallet).

Oh, they do. Most of the time, that's how they got rich on the first place, and how they stay rich. Stealing small amounts from thousands of people over a long period of time is much more effecient than stealing a big chunk from a single person. Specially because the poor people have less ways of stoping you from taking their stuff.



After all, going by the same logic and applying some game theory: however small the risk, by risking your eternal life, you are pursuing an infinitely unfavourable stategy.

Except that you risk losing your eternal life. Resources are limited, thus only the top dogs can get the immortality packages.


That is all true, of course. However, I still fail to see in what way having children would in any way be better or more advantageous than preserving whatever "you" will finally result after all that modification.

To be cold and economical for a while:
Preserving "you" over having children is an advantage. The you, even if it doesn't share your personality, will still have much of your knowledge and skills and can therefore work and produce benefit for society, while your children first need to be educated and therefore consume resources.

Because human brains don't work that way.

You know what's really wonderfull about children? Their empty brains absorb information that much faster that most adults with a developed mind could hope for (exceptions exist, but they're just that, exceptions)

You need to spend that much resources to teach an adult a new thing than to teach a grown up, because the adult brain is already patterned and filled. Old habits and beliefs get in the way of new ones, will you want it or not.

Kinda of the "you need to empty a cup before you can fill it". Children already have the empty cup, making it much easier to fill.

[Eldan]

So we need to expand the cup.

In all seriousness, we are talking about concepts so far in the future, they are pretty much pure speculation. Who says we can't modify our brains to absorb knowledge better?

In any case, I wasn't talking about learning, mostly. Yes, children learn fast. However, that is not really an advantage over an immortal who already has the relevant skills.


Where children shine, and that, I admit, I forgot to include in my above model, is where learning new skills is concerned where older skills became obsolete. After all, what use would an immortal roman legionary's awesome skills at ditch-digging and javelin throwing be today?

[Winterwind]

Can you imagine how bored you'd get?I don't think I would. Too many continuously new things to explore.


I mean, people get jaded after four or five years when it comes to most things. Now stretch that out to centuries. And worse, assuming immortality comes to us all, centuries of all the people you know.I don't get jaded particularly quickly, and again, that's assuming one stays in one place and doesn't go out to experience new things. And, if I knew I had basically unlimited time, I'd do things I wouldn't ever consider doing within my limited lifespan, because I could afford to do so, whereas now I don't have these years to spare. For example, living in a Tibetan monastery, in some nomadic tribe in North Africa or for a few years? I wouldn't do it now, but I totally would if I knew I had centuries ahead of me.


Just imagine how annoying someone you dislike might be after five centuries. And you've only known that person for the couple of years you've been at your job.I can't think of any person I found annoying that I had to put up with for longer than just a few years. I don't see why this should change if I would live for longer.

Your arguments would make sense if I lived my life in some village and never moved more than two miles away from it. As it happens, it's not the medieval ages anymore. I've been moving about once every five years in the past, and will most likely be moving elsewhere in a year or two again, most likely.


People keep talking about being able to spend immense amounts of time withtheir families. But after a century of things never changing, families would tear each other apart. You think it's bad spending the weekend with your cousins? Imagine a situation where you live so long that not just the day and weeks are blurring as they zoom past. It's the years and decades.Sorry, but I don't see your point here. Firstly, I don't see my parents and my grandparents, who have known each other for half a century now tearing each other apart, and I don't see why this would change in the future. Secondly, even if this was the case, so what? All this means is, at some point, when one was ready for that step, one would leave the old environment and get into a new one, fall in love with new people, create new friendships. I don't see what's bad about it.

Same as above - you are assuming some ridiculous degree of stasis, people staying in the same place forever, with the same people forever. I'm not immortal now and I'm not staying in the same place all the time, if I was immortal I'd just be moving even more. It's not the medieval times. People don't spend all their life in one place anymore.


There are reasons immortality is a curse in many classic stories.Most often in stories where immortality doesn't equal eternal youth though. And the rest of the stories is allegorical and doesn't take the full complexity and options available to a human being into account.


And if everyone, or even a reasonable number of rich and powerful people became immortal, we just stopped progress. Most development comes about as a new generation of thinkers and builders comes along and wants to make their mark on things. Gradually, the older generation passes away, making way for the new one. Who then go on to become the establishment, and eventually a new generation grows up and brings fresh solutions to the table.

But of the older generation is there for the forseeable future, and that future is measured in centuries, then nothing will ever change.

Death is the price we pay for progress.This, on the other hand, I agree with. I am indeed rather doubtful immortality would be a good thing for mankind as a whole (albeit not certain it wouldn't work out after all, either; the knowledge that one always had new chances ahead, could master all sorts of skills and could engage in really long-term goals might well create an entirely new attitude amongst humans that would keep the old generation creating progress, maybe even at a faster pace than ever before); my comment was just on whether [I]I would like immortality, without looking at the greater context.


EDIT: I just implicitly assumed the same technology that created immortality and eternal youth also extended brain and memory capacities all along.

[hamishspence]

That's way too utopic. If immortality was to be unlocked, it wouldn't be perfect immortality (wich plain breaks the laws of thermodynamics).

Resources are limited. Keeping someone alive eternally consumes an eternal amount of resources. Many people would have to settle down with lesser forms of immortality. There would be fierce competition for the best immortality doctors.

Aren't some micro-organisms functionally immortal already?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

If the "resource" used to keep one immortal is food- then the immortal may not end up consuming significantly more resources per year than the average person.

[deuterio12]

So we need to expand the cup.

In all seriousness, we are talking about concepts so far in the future, they are pretty much pure speculation. Who says we can't modify our brains to absorb knowledge better?

Because whoever does that first will keep doing so at an exponential rate, and doesn't really have any reason to share it with anyone else, and we end up with a few godlike beings on top while the rest of mankind becomes their slaves.



In any case, I wasn't talking about learning, mostly. Yes, children learn fast. However, that is not really an advantage over an immortal who already has the relevant skills.


Oh, it is. The stundent surpassing the master is a common trope for a good reason. It's much easier to spot the errors of others and correct them yourself than to spot and correct your own errors.

That's how progress works. The older generation did something, and then when we learned it, improved on it, and ended with something better.

Like Newton said, you can see more far away than a giant when you climb on top of their shoulders.

hamishspence:That's actualy a hot-debated topic, but regardless, those are very simple organisms.

Our bodies are much more complex, and thus much more prone to decay and acumulation of errors.

[hamishspence]

Because whoever does that first will keep doing so at an exponential rate, and doesn't really have any reason to share it with anyone else

There's one reason- the possibility that with multiple people working together, more can be achieved- with a greater personal benefit, than via working alone.

There are selfish reasons to share, after all.


Our bodies are much more complex, and thus much more prone to decay and acumulation of errors.

True- but if our own "error-correcting mechanisms" can be improved, this might be one way into significantly increasing lifespan.

The point being that "biological immortality" is not thermodynamically impossible.

[Eldan]

And so, in fifty years, we all become Conjoiners.

I, for one, am looking forward to the quasi-immortal hivemind.

[deuterio12]

There's one reason- the possibility that with multiple people working together, more can be achieved- with a greater personal benefit, than via working alone.

There are selfish reasons to share, after all.

That's only because our brains have limited potential. If one can extend the potential of a single brain whitout limits, it's much more effecient than geting single minor brains togheter.

[hamishspence]

Isn't a big part of computing, parallel processing?

Computers can only improve so fast- but multiple ones working together can be better at certain things.

The same may apply to humans- working together may be more "cost-effective" than working alone.

[Eldan]

Not necessarily. The different perspective of a mind that is built differently from your own is still a resource to be considered. After all, why start out with only one mind, if you could start out with two and expand them both?

There would be limits to such a growth, among them technological limitations. If your hypothetical immortal can increase his own knowledge and intelligence and then, using his expanded mind, research technology to further increase it, there is still the point that two or more minds, working together, could research faster and therefore gain an advantage, which, theoretically, could not be compensated for if this was just a straightforward exponential growth.

[hamishspence]

Yup- and you might want to cater to a particular strength.

A master of mathematics who is poor socially, and a master of social skills who lacks a head for figures- might boost their own abilities and team up, which may be easier than trying to shore up their own skill weaknesses.

And lead to greater benefit for them overall.

[J.Gellert]

^true, if the forms of immortality outperform having kids and teaching them. However, we know how to have kids and teach them already, while immortality is just a distant dream.

Would all the energy and effort aimed at achieving immortality have better returns than spending it all on making our kids faster learners etc.? Of course, this is not a question that can be answered outside a specific scenario, but the concept of "diminishing returns" rears its ugly head in many of them. If each invidual lives for a thousand years but having kids and teaching them only takes 1, that one year is pretty insignificant compared to resources needed to sustain the invidual for the rest of its life.

EDIT: for the record, I don't think immortality is a curse or blessing - it can go both ways. I am, however, firmly on the opinion that modern human psyche could not handle lifespans vastly exceeding those of our current maximums, not without periodically forgetting a lot of things to retain a sense of novelty.

Then again, there's no imperative for an immortal to remember everything, nor is there any imperative for them to remain human. XD

That's alright, but that wasn't my quote :smallbiggrin:

[Frozen_Feet]

That's alright, but that wasn't my quote :smallbiggrin:

How on earth did that even happen? o.O

Anyways, because I did happen to put this topic in media discussions:

There are stories that consider immortality a curse, and those that consider it a blessing. However, the attitude often also hinges on what kind of immortality in question.

In greek myth, there was this fellow who was granted immortality... but not eternal youth. So while he wouldn't die, he'd become increasingly more fragile and unable to enjoy life. It's easy to see how this'd be a curse.

On the other hand we have the Phoenix, which perpetuates the cycle of life all on its own, destroying its old body in flames to be reborn as new, younger creature. Its renewal removes the burden of years from its shoulders - it's hard to conceive anything bad about such immortality. Every time age makes you crippled and cynical, you can regress to a younger, healthy self and keep on going.

[Lost Demiurge]

Hello, FrozenFeet. Our views on space travel and colonization are opposed, and as such I regard you as a potential hinderance to it. So long as you do not actively seek to choose my destiny and that of my children's children's children, then I have no real quarrel with you, though.

Here are my reasons as to why we as a species need to start spreading out into the galaxy:

1. We need a frontier. Many people are born with the urge to explore and settle, many are forced to sublimate it via games and simulations because right now we do NOT have a viable frontier. The Earth's been mapped countless times. It's in the nature of certain people to be pioneers... Why not help them to fulfill that nature?

2. There are quite a lot of resources out there that can benefit this world.

3. We have a chance of finding other intelligent life out there. What will it be like? I want to know. Failing that, I have a feeling that by the time finding other intelligent life is possible, others will want to know. Why deny them a chance to answer that question?

4. If we don't set up other strongholds off of this planet, then we run the risk that we will be wiped out as a species. I do not want that. Sooner or later we'll have weapons capable of cracking planets or an asteroid will get lucky. Let's have a fallback plan that lets our species keep going in the event of serious doomage.

5. It's a goal. It's a bright, shining goal to rally people around that will require cooperation and a lot of time and patience to achieve. It's going to occupy generations, and keep them busy for quite a long time, and it'll never quite be done.

Don't you see? It's a goal that doesn't involve us killing each other, or establishing dominance of a religion, or destroying things. It doesn't require perfection, or other such myths. It's a GOOD goal. It is a PURPOSE. It is something I can look at with pride, and set my children upon that path with a light heart, knowing that someday, one of them might touch the stars...

Versus the goal of... What, exactly? Making things perfect on Earth? Never gonna happen. 100% perfection is a myth.

Let's go for the stars. Or if you don't want to, at least stand out of my way.

[warty goblin]

Hello, FrozenFeet. Our views on space travel and colonization are opposed, and as such I regard you as a potential hinderance to it. So long as you do not actively seek to choose my destiny and that of my children's children's children, then I have no real quarrel with you, though.

Here are my reasons as to why we as a species need to start spreading out into the galaxy:

1. We need a frontier. Many people are born with the urge to explore and settle, many are forced to sublimate it via games and simulations because right now we do NOT have a viable frontier. The Earth's been mapped countless times. It's in the nature of certain people to be pioneers... Why not help them to fulfill that nature?

I have an urge to live in a replica fourteenth century castle that I sublimate through books, games and having a backbone and basic sense of responsibility. Doesn't mean society should cough up a few million dollars to make it come true.


2. There are quite a lot of resources out there that can benefit this world.

And until somebody gives me a very rigorous argument for why we need them, I'd rather we keep the huge quantity of resources it would take to get there right here, where they can definitely be put to productive use.


3. We have a chance of finding other intelligent life out there. What will it be like? I want to know. Failing that, I have a feeling that by the time finding other intelligent life is possible, others will want to know. Why deny them a chance to answer that question?
Because there are better, more productive things to do with the money? Not every question is worth the expense of answering it.


4. If we don't set up other strongholds off of this planet, then we run the risk that we will be wiped out as a species. I do not want that. Sooner or later we'll have weapons capable of cracking planets or an asteroid will get lucky. Let's have a fallback plan that lets our species keep going in the event of serious doomage.
Nukes are more than sufficient to wipe out humanity. As I said before, the best answer to this is to not use and get rid of them. Asteroids are a risk that should be addressed, but can be thwarted with a much smaller investment than setting up permanent space colonies.


5. It's a goal. It's a bright, shining goal to rally people around that will require cooperation and a lot of time and patience to achieve. It's going to occupy generations, and keep them busy for quite a long time, and it'll never quite be done.

Don't you see? It's a goal that doesn't involve us killing each other, or establishing dominance of a religion, or destroying things. It doesn't require perfection, or other such myths. It's a GOOD goal. It is a PURPOSE. It is something I can look at with pride, and set my children upon that path with a light heart, knowing that someday, one of them might touch the stars...

Versus the goal of... What, exactly? Making things perfect on Earth? Never gonna happen. 100% perfection is a myth.

Let's go for the stars. Or if you don't want to, at least stand out of my way.
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. On the one hand the goal of space travel is never 100% complete, so that's a good thing. But perfecting the Earth is unobtainable, so it's a bad goal? Does anybody else see the problem here?

More generally, of course perfection is unobtainable. Arguably it doesn't even exist, like the limit of a non-convergent series. Just because the world will never get there does not mean that progress cannot be made. There is, I think a very good reason why the Preamble of the United States Constitution says 'a more perfect union.' It's going to be flawed of course, but all that matters is that it is better than what came before. A more perfect world is, to me, about the highest goal a person can work towards.

[Frozen_Feet]

Don't you see? It's a goal that doesn't involve us killing each other, or establishing dominance of a religion, or destroying things. It doesn't require perfection, or other such myths. It's a GOOD goal. It is a PURPOSE. It is something I can look at with pride, and set my children upon that path with a light heart, knowing that someday, one of them might touch the stars...
I'm going to call out your view that the goal will not involve such things, and whether those things are even bad.

To build a space-ship, you need resources; you need to mine those resources from somewhere. Destruction is required for construction. Those spacecraft will not be perfect, and require testing; some people will be killed in our quest to solve those problems. Furthermore, unless you want to coerce people into doing things they don't want, you will have to convince them to share your ideals; this is as much establishing dominance of a perspective than any religion is.

Finally, space travel itself has spawned many myths, and popular imagination regarding is filled to the brim by equally unrealistic concepts as "perfectly harmonious society". Even the idea that there will be other intelligent life out there worth contacting is but speculation for the moment.


Versus the goal of... What, exactly? Making things perfect on Earth? Never gonna happen. 100% perfection is a myth.


"Perfection" is not needed; there is "good enough", which I see as wholly attainable. The goal I prefer is "creating a happy and sustainable population" - it's not mutually exclusive with space travel, but in general is easier to achieve with a smaller population in contrast to larger one. Less people means we have more nergy to use for each invidual. As noted before, ever-expanding population or civilization might not be required to fulfill that goal.

[hamishspence]

R. A. Heinlein pointed out that the space program managed to pay for itself many times over in technological spin-offs.

Maybe the same will apply to a modern program based on developing the Solar System- mining the belt, the comets, and the moon, setting up space stations, and so forth?

Even if the idea of colonizing other planets is pushed up to the far future, that doesn't mean there is nothing to be gained from a space program that has that as an end goal.

Heavy industry moved into space might, in fact, make for a more environmentally friendly civilization on Earth- help the forests and oceans to recover.

[Lost Demiurge]

I have an urge to live in a replica fourteenth century castle that I sublimate through books, games and having a backbone and basic sense of responsibility. Doesn't mean society should cough up a few million dollars to make it come true.

Nor should society stand in the way of your dream, if you gather the resources to make it come true. Can you not extend the basic courtesy to folks who dare to dream of a new frontier?



And until somebody gives me a very rigorous argument for why we need them, I'd rather we keep the huge quantity of resources it would take to get there right here, where they can definitely be put to productive use.

Many of the resources we need to do this can be recycled from junked material, or repurposed military hardware. Most of the other resources are going to be dug up and put to non-productive use. How many SUV's that get 10 miles per gallon do we REALLY need in a year?



Because there are better, more productive things to do with the money? Not every question is worth the expense of answering it.
[QUOTE]

Even if the answer is "Yes, and this changes everything?"

[QUOTE=warty goblin;10331474]
Nukes are more than sufficient to wipe out humanity. As I said before, the best answer to this is to not use and get rid of them. Asteroids are a risk that should be addressed, but can be thwarted with a much smaller investment than setting up permanent space colonies.


The math is simple. The more planets we have, the less vulnerable we are to having one of them get messed up by means we didn't anticipate or couldn't prepare for. You really think we're gonna get through the next few centuries without nukes being deployed at some point?



This seems like a false dichotomy to me. On the one hand the goal of space travel is never 100% complete, so that's a good thing. But perfecting the Earth is unobtainable, so it's a bad goal? Does anybody else see the problem here?


All right, let me elaborate. As long as we are stuck on this planet with finite resources and a population that is NOT going to shrink so long as most countries maintain their basic principles of freedom of reproduction then ignoring the stars and focusing only on improving the planet is a BAD goal. It's a bad goal because we are going to simply need more space sooner or later, and space down here is LIMITED. If we prepare for that before it becomes a problem by laying the foundations for space exploration and colonization, then we will be a thousand times better off than if we have to do it in a hurry when it becomes a crisis.



More generally, of course perfection is unobtainable. Arguably it doesn't even exist, like the limit of a non-convergent series. Just because the world will never get there does not mean that progress cannot be made. There is, I think a very good reason why the Preamble of the United States Constitution says 'a more perfect union.' It's going to be flawed of course, but all that matters is that it is better than what came before. A more perfect world is, to me, about the highest goal a person can work towards.

And I happen to think that the time's almost here that we can work on perfecting the world we've got AND expanding into space.

One of the big advantages we have over animals, compadre. We can multi-task. And advancing technology is only going to reduce the resources we need to accomplish both goals...

Do what you like with this world. Don't stop me from reaching toward my stars.

[Lost Demiurge]

I'm going to call out your view that the goal will not involve such things, and whether those things are even bad.

To build a space-ship, you need resources; you need to mine those resources from somewhere. Destruction is required for construction. Those spacecraft will not be perfect, and require testing; some people will be killed in our quest to solve those problems. Furthermore, unless you want to coerce people into doing things they don't want, you will have to convince them to share your ideals; this is as much establishing dominance of a perspective than any religion is.

Finally, space travel itself has spawned many myths, and popular imagination regarding is filled to the brim by equally unrealistic concepts as "perfectly harmonious society". Even the idea that there will be other intelligent life out there worth contacting is but speculation for the moment.


Oh, the goal of space exploration might indeed involve such things. But honestly, humans are gonna be humans any way you slice it... We'd find something to fight over in any situation.

And as far as resources go... Much of what we need can be salvaged from existing, junked technology or repurposed military machinery. Not counting things that don't exist yet... God knows where they will come from. You don't. Could be they're easily obtainable, or profitable to make.

::Shrugs:: What's wrong with mining, anyway? As long as you're not levelling mountains, you might as well put resources to work for you. Provides jobs, helps us get the materials we need for other things, and lets us explore under the earth.

And I'll go on record. There IS other intelligent life out there somewhere. Just a question of where.



"Perfection" is not needed; there is "good enough", which I see as wholly attainable. The goal I prefer is "creating a happy and sustainable population" - it's not mutually exclusive with space travel, but in general is easier to achieve with a smaller population in contrast to larger one. Less people means we have more nergy to use for each invidual. As noted before, ever-expanding population or civilization might not be required to fulfill that goal.

Less people? Heh, you talked about implementing a religion and establishing dominance... You'd pretty much need that to enforce our species to stop or even slow down breeding. I don't know about you, but I like basic human rights of freedom of choice.

Simple fact is that our population is going to keep expanding. Space exploration and colonization is a means of keeping that from being a problem, if we get started on it soon enough...

[Frozen_Feet]

R. A. Heinlein pointed out that the space program managed to pay for itself many times over in technological spin-offs.

Maybe the same will apply to a modern program based on developing the Solar System- mining the belt, the comets, and the moon, setting up space stations, and so forth?

Even if the idea of colonizing other planets is pushed up to the far future, that doesn't mean there is nothing to be gained from a space program that has that as an end goal.

This is true. However, eventually question of diminishing returns crop up - would we benefit more from focused research than reapplication of accidental spinoffs?

Space travel is not the only thing that imposes limits to engineering that requires imagination to overcome - several things on Earth, such as deepsea exploration, are arguably as challenging. Granted, isn't an either/or question; it's possible to research many thing at once, and reseach has a tendency to pay itself back eventually.




Heavy industry moved into space might, in fact, make for a more environmentally friendly civilization on Earth- help the forests and oceans to recover.
This makes the rather dubious assumption that moving products from orbit to Earth can be made environmentally more friendly than respective structures on Earth.

A space elevator between Earth and Moon is the most realistic proposal I've seen; most others would be made infeasible by rapidly accumulating space debris.

But what such industry would be for? Our growing need for heavy industry is dictated by growing population, but if we can reduce and stabilize it, much of the need to achieve the feat would be mitigated or removed.


Oh, the goal of space exploration might indeed involve such things. But honestly, humans are gonna be humans any way you slice it... We'd find something to fight over in any situation.

And as far as resources go... Much of what we need can be salvaged from existing, junked technology or repurposed military machinery. Not counting things that don't exist yet... God knows where they will come from. You don't. Could be they're easily obtainable, or profitable to make.

::Shrugs:: What's wrong with mining, anyway? As long as you're not levelling mountains, you might as well put resources to work for you. Provides jobs, helps us get the materials we need for other things, and lets us explore under the earth.

And I'll go on record. There IS other intelligent life out there somewhere. Just a question of where.

I'm not saying there's anything bad about - on the contrary. It, too, is neutral, unless some other circumstances push it to immoral.

My main point is the same I said to 0Megabyte: I find it funny how you espouse highly idealistic view while dismissing outright another that is no less realistic. We'll find way to fight over any situation? Why not down here on Earth too? In could even say this hypothetical space-faring utopia where all men are equal and no-one's rights are trampled down is merely an expansion of the view I hold. :smallwink:


Less people? Heh, you talked about implementing a religion and establishing dominance... You'd pretty much need that to enforce our species to stop or even slow down breeding. I don't know about you, but I like basic human rights of freedom of choice.
Rights come with responsibilities. Freedom of choice does not make all choices equal. Imposing our will on future people is not inherently wrong, and it's also not something we can avoid. If we want our descendants to benefit from the knowledge we've amassed, we need to enforce it on them somehow. Sometimes, that very same knowledge calls into question wisdom or feasibility of certain acts. There is no such thing as limitless freedom, and not all freedoms are rights.

Furthermore, there'd be several measurable benefits to reducing human population to a more manageable level and keeping it there, such as easiness of producing less inviduals a higher standard of living. And while some freedoms would have to be restricted, some others would become more abundant.


Simple fact is that our population is going to keep expanding. Space exploration and colonization is a means of keeping that from being a problem, if we get started on it soon enough...
How is it a simple fact? There are several things that could easily reduce or even wipe out human population even without our own effort.

I'm also highly skeptical of the notion that space travel can solve overpopulation, on Earth or anywhere. Going by quick estimates based on few rapid searches, a baby is born every three seconds; a person dies every eight.

So, 28 800 people are born daily, and 10 800 die, for a net total of 18 000 people. You'd have to get that many people out of the planet daily for the population to remain stable. Before you retort with "but more people move around on earth without trouble!", I highly encourage you to take a look at the actual distances and energies involved. I'd also like to bring to your attention that we're running out of several easily utilized resources that allow for such motion in the first place.

My conclusion? For space travel to have a notable impact on human population on Earth, we'd already require a way to reduce or stabilize our population. In which case, shooting people to space is wholly tangential to the problem; there might be other reasons for it, but controlling population is not one.

EDIT: Guh... darn forum, eating at my text.

[druid91]

This is true. However, eventually question of diminishing returns crop up - would we benefit more from focused research than reapplication of accidental spinoffs?

Space travel is not the only thing that imposes limits to engineering that requires imagination to overcome - several things on Earth, such as deepsea exploration, are arguably as challenging. Granted, isn't an either/or question; it's possible to research many thing at once, and reseach has a tendency to pay itself back eventually.


This makes the rather dubious assumption that moving products from orbit to Earth can be made environmentally more friendly than respective structures on Earth.

A space elevator between Earth and Moon is the most realistic proposal I've seen; most others would be made infeasible by rapidly accumulating space debris.

But what such industry would be for? Our growing need for heavy industry is dictated by growing population, but if we can reduce and stabilize it, much of the need to achieve the feat would be mitigated or removed.

Frozen feet... Unless we take my younger self's advice (note: I have changed a lot since then, this does not reflect on me currently... So please don't yell at me.) And simply wipe out a good chunk of the earths population...

We aren't going to reduce or stabilize the population. Even that would be a temporary measure. Oh? You can only have so many children? How are you going to stop them? You can punish all you want but without an insane level of oppression and violation of privacy you can't. It just doesn't work, especially with my generation high on Reproduction.


Because the thread about nudity and violence in TV was getting sidetracked.

My opinion on the first two:

Entropy causes all things to fall apart. Live long enough, and all parts of your body have to be changed. Your personality is not static; it changes with experience. You forget some things, learn some new ones, and eventually become a whole new person. Throughout these processes, the natural imperative is for change; situations change; the world changes. To even start reaching immortality, you'd at least have to go through cycles of death and rebirth like a Phoenix to reboot your system once in a while. Even that is likely not enough in - in cosmic scale, the range of different variables that allow for human life are fairly narrow. In the long run, you have to push both your mind and your body well past all conceptions of "humanity" we know hold.

What, exactly, is staying alive there? After thousands and thousands of years, is it really you? Is it really human? Not a single original part, and by extension a single original memory, will be left of what you are now.

Why not just have kids?

Really. Why?

Well because at worst, I have a child who is just like me mentally. Who happens to be made of metal and can kick any "good old fashioned" biological child's rear at near anything you can think of. I will have a child who is simply better than he would have been had I not chosen that path.

At best I get to wake up one day residing in a new body of pure, clean, durable metal instead of this rotting bag of meat I currently reside in.

[Eldan]

I resent the "rotten" epithet or the implication that metal is in any way cleaner or better than biological bodies. Our bodies are marvellous displays of the power of evolutionary construction. It will be a long while until metal and technology can remotely match that degree of complexity, at which point it will likely be nearly indistinguishable.

[Frozen_Feet]

Carbon-based lifeforms are pretty durable, anyhow. And there's vast room of improvement within organic chemistry - I'd argue it'd have much better returns much sooner if we focused on organic robotics in place of inorganic. We have a huge collection of ready-made blueprints to look at and tinker with already, after all.

[druid91]

I resent the "rotten" epithet or the implication that metal is in any way cleaner or better than biological bodies. Our bodies are marvellous displays of the power of evolutionary construction. It will be a long while until metal and technology can remotely match that degree of complexity, at which point it will likely be nearly indistinguishable.

I find it infinitely humorous that you say this and have a warhammer 40k imperium avatar at the same time.

Eh sorry about the epithet, even if I consider it to be true, But to me metal is cleaner, and inherently better. Biology is full of messes. Metal is just cleaner. How often does your calculator barf, or defecate?

And that very complexity is one reason why I dislike them, the littlest thing goes wrong and you die. I'd very much prefer it if, data storage aside, My mechanical body of the futureTM remained mostly similar to todays robotics, perhaps an upgrade in strength or materials here or there. But nowhere near the insane complexity of the human body.


Carbon-based lifeforms are pretty durable, anyhow. And there's vast room of improvement within organic chemistry - I'd argue it'd have much better returns much sooner if we focused on organic robotics in place of inorganic. We have a huge collection of ready-made blueprints to look at and tinker with already, after all.

To me that's trading time for quality. Sure it'd take longer to become the machine (We are actually pretty close, We have already linked the human nervous system up to a computer at least once.) But once it happened, there goes food. We would no longer need the vast amounts of farm-land we use now. We wouldn't need breathable air.

[Eldan]

How often does your math teacher need new batteries?

Can you tell your calculator something and he can remember it? Can your robot train his muscles?

And on the tiniest thing going wrong... is that a joke? Biologicals are self-healing. Robots aren't. BIologicals can overcome diseases. Sand kills robots. Biologicals spit it out. If you cut a nerve in your skin, it heals. If you cut a cable in a robot? It's gone.

Metal isn't flexible, it can't heal, it can't grow, and it can't produce complex chemicals, all in the same parts that also cause movement, have in-built self-cleaning and are able to evolve.

[druid91]

How often does your math teacher need new batteries?

Can you tell your calculator something and he can remember it? Can your robot train his muscles?

And on the tiniest thing going wrong... is that a joke? Biologicals are self-healing. Robots aren't. BIologicals can overcome diseases. Sand kills robots. Biologicals spit it out. If you cut a nerve in your skin, it heals. If you cut a cable in a robot? It's gone.

Metal isn't flexible, it can't heal, it can't grow, and it can't produce complex chemicals, all in the same parts that also cause movement, have in-built self-cleaning and are able to evolve.

Never, solar power cells.:smallbiggrin::smalltongue:

This same self-healing property can go nuts and kill the biological...

Sand? How would sand kill a mechanical? Hey look sand in the joints, start up the fan. OR simply not have openings through which the sand can open, rubber at the joints would do wonders.

Oh a cable is cut? I go home take apart my arm covering and I strip out the defective part and put in a new one. The old is melted down to make a new part. A nerve is wounded? You lie on the ground screaming in pain.

Metal is inflexible, therefore you build joints.

You do not need to grow if you are already the appropriate size.

For healing there is repair if something is so broken that it would require help to repair it would likely need help in a biological as well along with more chance of the biologicals own healing factor causing damage.

Why would a machine need complex chemicals? That it could not manufacture elsewhere?

Self cleaning...
I assume that is a joke?:smallamused::smalltongue:Just messing with you, but personally I see nothing about the human body that is clean.

Evolution would accelerate like never before. Because you don't have to wait for the genes to pass around and strengthen, the new body type, or environmental modifications would come out, you plug in and that's that.
Be sure to read the white text.

[Lost Demiurge]

This makes the rather dubious assumption that moving products from orbit to Earth can be made environmentally more friendly than respective structures on Earth.

A space elevator between Earth and Moon is the most realistic proposal I've seen; most others would be made infeasible by rapidly accumulating space debris.

But what such industry would be for? Our growing need for heavy industry is dictated by growing population, but if we can reduce and stabilize it, much of the need to achieve the feat would be mitigated or removed.


There are new technologies which can only be manufactured in zero-gravity, or are otherwise much more feasible to make in an orbital environment. There are theoretical technologies whose research will go a LOT quicker if researchers have access to orbital facilities.



I'm not saying there's anything bad about - on the contrary. It, too, is neutral, unless some other circumstances push it to immoral.

My main point is the same I said to 0Megabyte: I find it funny how you espouse highly idealistic view while dismissing outright another that is no less realistic. We'll find way to fight over any situation? Why not down here on Earth too? In could even say this hypothetical space-faring utopia where all men are equal and no-one's rights are trampled down is merely an expansion of the view I hold. :smallwink:


And yet you began this, by dismissing space as a viable goal for humanity. I can't let something as shortsighted as that pass by without challenge!

And since when did I say space-faring would lead us to Utopia? You put those words up there, not I. No, space-faring plus human nature would inevitably result in conflicts among the stars, interplanetary warfare, and new problems on new worlds. Just because I see it as a bright and shining goal doesn't mean everyone will. And that's the beauty of it... It doesn't REQUIRE you to buy into it. It just requires that you stay out of the way of the people who DO buy into it.



Rights come with responsibilities. Freedom of choice does not make all choices equal. Imposing our will on future people is not inherently wrong, and it's also not something we can avoid. If we want our descendants to benefit from the knowledge we've amassed, we need to enforce it on them somehow. Sometimes, that very same knowledge calls into question wisdom or feasibility of certain acts. There is no such thing as limitless freedom, and not all freedoms are rights.

Furthermore, there'd be several measurable benefits to reducing human population to a more manageable level and keeping it there, such as easiness of producing less inviduals a higher standard of living. And while some freedoms would have to be restricted, some others would become more abundant.


So who dies?

Who chooses who dies?

How ya gonna do it?

Unless you can answer those three questions, then you're just turnin' air into CO2. All the ivory tower philosophy in the world ain't gonna answer those three questions. You want humanity to go through a
"beneficial" dieback event, you're going to have to answer them yourself, find a way to make it happen, then deal with the fact that you're going to be executed for crimes against humanity. Don't waste my time with padding around the issue. You want less people, then people gotta die. Then you're going to die, for making that choice.

And you're going to have to make that choice because they're sure as hell not going to stop making babies.



How is it a simple fact? There are several things that could easily reduce or even wipe out human population even without our own effort.

I'm also highly skeptical of the notion that space travel can solve overpopulation, on Earth or anywhere. Going by quick estimates based on few rapid searches, a baby is born every three seconds; a person dies every eight.

So, 28 800 people are born daily, and 10 800 die, for a net total of 18 000 people. You'd have to get that many people out of the planet daily for the population to remain stable. Before you retort with "but more people move around on earth without trouble!", I highly encourage you to take a look at the actual distances and energies involved. I'd also like to bring to your attention that we're running out of several easily utilized resources that allow for such motion in the first place.

My conclusion? For space travel to have a notable impact on human population on Earth, we'd already require a way to reduce or stabilize our population. In which case, shooting people to space is wholly tangential to the problem; there might be other reasons for it, but controlling population is not one.

EDIT: Guh... darn forum, eating at my text.

Now you're being obstinate. It is a simple fact that people are going to make babies. Even with a dieback, unless it's a BIG one that wipes out the entire species, we'll recover.

It's a primal urge to reproduce. If it weren't, the porn industry wouldn't rake in the billions it does every year. We got religions that REVOLVE around having as many kids as possible. We got nations and cultures that glorify family!

EVEN IF YOU WIPE US DOWN TO A MERE MILLION OR SO, IN A FEW GENERATIONS WE'LL GET RIGHT BACK UP THERE AGAIN! IT IS IN OUR NATURE!

Also, you mention that we're running out of easily utilized resources that allow for freedom of motion around the world? Then let's develop substitutes, which we can easily get from outer space, once we develop the technology a little more...

::Sighs:: Also, your math is based on the current constant. Just because that's humanity's current rate, doesn't mean it'll remain the same. I fully expect that we'll have some nasty wars, shortages, and other things that will up the kill rate before we get to the point where space expansion can help alleviate pressure. I know this and I accept it.

[Frozen_Feet]

I'll go ahead and note that many of the biggest advancements in the field of inorganic robotics have been inspired by or achieved through imitation of organic life. Heck, the very idea of solar power is practically trying to imitate plants!

In addition, organic elements are more common than inorganic ones. In the long run, I'd say using them as basis makes more sense resource-wise.

Of course, if you go that route, it'd be best to find a way to make life based on hydrogen and helium. Of course, since those don't form compounds easily, such a lifeform would be better off relying on physical phenomena rather than chemical. Its metabolism could be based on fusion...

... okay, I'll save you from some theoretical rambling and say that the end result would be something akin to a sentient sun. Who knows, maybe suns are sentient already. Is there a sciece fiction story based on the idea out there somewhere, or should I write it myself before someone beats me to it? :smalltongue:

[hamishspence]

Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud wasn't so much "sentient sun" as "sentient nebula"- but sounds a little like what's being described.

Warhammer 40K has the C'tan- which in it's normal form, is a solar parasite that moves from star to star draining them of energy.

[druid91]

I'll go ahead and note that many of the biggest advancements in the field of inorganic robotics have been inspired by or achieved through imitation of organic life. Heck, the very idea of solar power is practically trying to imitate plants!

In addition, organic elements are more common than inorganic ones. In the long run, I'd say using them as basis makes more sense resource-wise.

Of course, if you go that route, it'd be best to find a way to make life based on hydrogen and helium. Of course, since those don't form compounds easily, such a lifeform would be better off relying on physical phenomena rather than chemical. Its metabolism could be based on fusion...

... okay, I'll save you from some theoretical rambling and say that the end result would be something akin to a sentient sun. Who knows, maybe suns are sentient already. Is there a sciece fiction story based on the idea out there somewhere, or should I write it myself before someone beats me to it? :smalltongue:

Imitation of the result, not imitation of the method. If you shoot someone in the head with a crossbow instead of a rifle does it make them any less dead?:smallwink:

[Frozen_Feet]

There are new technologies which can only be manufactured in zero-gravity, or are otherwise much more feasible to make in an orbital environment. There are theoretical technologies whose research will go a LOT quicker if researchers have access to orbital facilities.
I've not heard of such technologies. Any specific article in your mind? As for research, that doesn't equate to heavy industry, and won't necessarily require even one-way material traffic with Earth.

Also, if something can only be manufactured in 0 G, can it be used on Earth?


And yet you began this, by dismissing space as a viable goal for humanity. I can't let something as shortsighted as that pass by without challenge!

And since when did I say space-faring would lead us to Utopia? You put those words up there, not I. No, space-faring plus human nature would inevitably result in conflicts among the stars, interplanetary warfare, and new problems on new worlds. Just because I see it as a bright and shining goal doesn't mean everyone will. And that's the beauty of it... It doesn't REQUIRE you to buy into it. It just requires that you stay out of the way of the people who DO buy into it.

Ahem:


Don't you see? It's a goal that doesn't involve us killing each other, or establishing dominance of a religion, or destroying things. It doesn't require perfection, or other such myths. It's a GOOD goal. It is a PURPOSE. It is something I can look at with pride, and set my children upon that path with a light heart, knowing that someday, one of them might touch the stars

If that isn't an utopic take on the subject at hand, I don't know what is.

1) So who dies?

2) Who chooses who dies?

3) How ya gonna do it?

1) A population of one billion would be around my estimated ideal, so we'd have to reduce humanity by six billion; of course, since I'm in favor of doing it in a relatively peaceful and gradual manner, a lot more people would actually die before reaching that. Besides that, it'd be hard to say who exactly, since the whole population might have been replaced by that point. Everyone dies at some point. By extension, all current cultures would be "dead", or just notations in a history book, anyway.

2) Take a good, long look at this thread. Notice that people have come up who'd rather not live forever. Note that there are also people who don't actually see much point in having offspring of their own. By making such attitudes more widepread and providing conditions where people will feel comfortable regardless, we can make the people themselves choose to die without forcing anyone to anything.

3) By reducing birthrate on the level of deathrate, and letting nature run its course. Do note that this actually allows each couple to still have kids, just not more than two. To achieve this, we'd of course need a large-scale political upheaving, a massive increase in living conditions all across the world, and some major education to get everyone on the ball.

Of course, the task becomes much easier if a massive-scale war, pandemic or natural disaster wipes out a whole lot of people in the interim, but that'd just be a bonus. :smalltongue:

Unless you can answer those three questions, then you're just turnin' air into CO2. All the ivory tower philosophy in the world ain't gonna answer those three questions. You want humanity to go through a "beneficial" dieback event, you're going to have to answer them yourself, find a way to make it happen, then deal with the fact that you're going to be executed for crimes against humanity. Don't waste my time with padding around the issue. You want less people, then people gotta die. Then you're going to die, for making that choice.

And I take it you have blueprints for commercial fusion, self-repairing spacecraft and working solar sails? :smalltongue: I find it exceedingly funny you at the same time claim mankind will survive to develop massive-scale interplanetary travel, yet you see changes in politics and basic human attitudes impossible.

Do note you're talking to the fellow who sees no imperative for our descendants to remain human in either body or mind.

You also sound like you assume I'd just go around and murder people. As noted, that's not the case. People don't need advances in science or politics to die; what they need is for them to create incentive to stop reproducing. Unlike you, I see that as wholly attainable goal.

In other words: I consider your statement that humanity will inevitably snap back from any population loss to be laughably fallacious. "Basic nature of humanity" isn't any more an immutable constant than people having two arms is.


And you're going to have to make that choice because they're sure as hell not going to stop making babies.

Unlike interplanetary travel, sterilization is a well known and proven technology. So are condoms.


Imitation of the result, not imitation of the method. If you shoot someone in the head with a crossbow instead of a rifle does it make them any less dead?:smallwink:
I dunno. Does it matter if the crossbow is made of wood instead of polymeres? :smalltongue: Your analogue fails because they indeed do imitate the method to an extent.

[druid91]

Ahem:



If that isn't an utopic take on the subject at hand, I don't know what is.


Unlike interplanetary travel, sterilization is a well known and proven technology. So are condoms.

I believe he meant that the primary goal was not to kill, dominate, or destroy one another, not that it wouldn't happen.

Now convince people to take those options...


I dunno. Does it matter if the crossbow is made of wood instead of polymeres? :smalltongue: Your analogue fails because they indeed do imitate the method to an extent.

Yes, the wood will rot.

Oh. So animals move through motors which take electrical power to turn and then move the limb? I was under the impression that animals moved by shocks causing muscles to contract thus pulling the limb in the direction it was sent by the brain?

[Frozen_Feet]

His views of the worth and feasibility of space travel are still fairly idealistic and optimistic, which is amusing as it creates sharp contrast with his pessimism about human nature.

[druid91]

His views of the worth and feasibility of space travel are still fairly idealistic and optimistic, which is amusing as it creates sharp contrast with his pessimism about human nature.

Well, you can always count on science to be awesome. Humanity on the other hand...

[Frozen_Feet]

Science is a product of humanity, and can and has changed attitudes of humanity throughout the times. Your point is...? :smalltongue:

[druid91]

Science is a product of humanity, and can and has changed attitudes of humanity throughout the times. Your point is...? :smalltongue:

Yes, but a greater percent of science is awesome, being made by awesome people, compared to the percent of humans who are awesome.:smallwink:

I can't believe I'm saying science like an object.

[Frozen_Feet]

That depends. Does Sturgeon's Law apply to science? Is 90% of research needless repetition, stating the obvious, just wrong, going around in circles or useless crud that got thrown together at last moment to make someone's ends meet?

[Lost Demiurge]

I've not heard of such technologies. Any specific article in your mind? As for research, that doesn't equate to heavy industry, and won't necessarily require even one-way material traffic with Earth.

Also, if something can only be manufactured in 0 G, can it be used on Earth?


As you wish:

http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/manufacturing.html

Next?




If that isn't an utopic take on the subject at hand, I don't know what is.



You're being obtuse. My goal is good, but it will not change human nature. Nothing will.




To achieve this, we'd of course need a large-scale political upheaving, a massive increase in living conditions all across the world, and some major education to get everyone on the ball.


You'll need much, much more than this. You'll need a way to ensure that this ideal lives on beyond your death/fall from power/execution for crimes against humanity. Even if you manage to pull off your mass genocide sterilization breeding program, without a way to ensure your will lasts beyond your eclipse, then in the long-term it'll be like nothing really changed.



Of course, the task becomes much easier if a massive-scale war, pandemic or natural disaster wipes out a whole lot of people in the interim, but that'd just be a bonus. :smalltongue:


The fact that you can say that thing proves to me that you're either foolishly naive or a monster. I think that after I finish this post I'm done with this thread.



And I take it you have blueprints for commercial fusion, self-repairing spacecraft and working solar sails? :smalltongue: I find it exceedingly funny you at the same time claim mankind will survive to develop massive-scale interplanetary travel, yet you see changes in politics and basic human attitudes impossible.


It is in mankind's nature to survive. It is in mankind's nature to develop technology. It is against mankind's nature to form utopias. It is against mankind's nature to stop having babies.

There may be exceptions here and there, but as a species we tend to obey our natures.



Do note you're talking to the fellow who sees no imperative for our descendants to remain human in either body or mind.


I'm entirely cool with transhumanism, so long as its an option rather than an inevitablity.



You also sound like you assume I'd just go around and murder people. As noted, that's not the case. People don't need advances in science or politics to die; what they need is for them to create incentive to stop reproducing. Unlike you, I see that as wholly attainable goal.


It's been tried. It has always failed in the long run. Without abolishing basic human freedoms, you will not succeed. Once you've done that, why not a few murders? Oh, you might not think that way now, but clawing your way towards the power you need to do this would probably make you a lot more... Mentally flexible...



In other words: I consider your statement that humanity will inevitably snap back from any population loss to be laughably fallacious. "Basic nature of humanity" isn't any more an immutable constant than people having two arms is.


It's worked for us for thousands of years, I'll bet on it for the future. Go on and bet against me, I could use a laugh.



Unlike interplanetary travel, sterilization is a well known and proven technology. So are condoms.


You cannot force a majority of the world's populace to endure sterilization. You cannot force people to use condoms, or other prophylactics. They must choose to do so.

Babies are gonna HAPPEN.


In summary, I'm not going to bring you around to my way of thinking, and I reckon I've made my points for anyone who cares to read them. Arguing with you further just drags me farther down into the mud.

I'll keep my dream, thank you. You've said nothing that dissuades me from it. I'd wish you luck, but I sincerely hope that you never gain any significant power or influence over humanity as a whole, and so instead wish you a pleasant and uneventful life of mediocrity.

And tonight I think I'll stay up a little late and watch the stars come out. Supposed to be cold and clear, and they always cheer me up when I get a look at them...

[Eldan]

He is, however, right in a point: in the richest countries on earth, birth rates are below death rates, especially in the richest population groups. So if we increase the worldwide living standard, we decrease birth rates. It's a well-known and studied correlation.

And yes, human population is big at the moment. We already have problems with overpopulation, and they will only increase. If we want to offer current or better standards of living for anyone, we need to either lower world population or drastically increase in technology.

[Ragitsu]

He is, however, right in a point: in the richest countries on earth, birth rates are below death rates, especially in the richest population groups. So if we increase the worldwide living standard, we decrease birth rates. It's a well-known and studied correlation.

And yes, human population is big at the moment. We already have problems with overpopulation, and they will only increase. If we want to offer current or better standards of living for anyone, we need to either lower world population or drastically increase in technology.

Or learn to build floating/submerged ocean cities.

[Lord Seth]

It's worked for us for thousands of years, I'll bet on it for the future. Go on and bet against me, I could use a laugh.Things seemed to work fine for the dinosaurs for millions of years. Then they all died. I don't think saying that since something has worked for thousands of years, that means it'll always work. (of course, it doesn't mean it won't always work either...just that a few thousand years isn't enough to extrapolate from for this)

To be honest though, I think there are so many hypotheticals and just plain unknowns in this entire discussion that it's more fruitful to argue whether Kirk or Picard was the better captain--there's far more data in that subject to base an argument on.

[hamishspence]

He is, however, right in a point: in the richest countries on earth, birth rates are below death rates, especially in the richest population groups. So if we increase the worldwide living standard, we decrease birth rates. It's a well-known and studied correlation.

Thing is- just suppose (thanks to some economic wizardry and massive investment by the richer nations) all the poor nations in the world suddenly got a whole lot richer (and had all the infrastructure added to keep them richer)....

....would the people in those nations, immediately start having smaller families? Or is there a cultural preference for large families in some places, that would be very hard to remove?

[Frozen_Feet]

Lost_Demiurge: On space islands: interesting, but those sort of orbital technologies are some that have come to look increasingly infeasible as amount of space debris has grown. I'll stay on the lookout on how the project advances, though I don't have high hopes on its impact on Earth.

On other things: just gotta love how you make me sound like a murdering monster. "Crimes against humanity" would not be required for balancing birth and deathrates.

In many well-faring countries, it has actually happened on its own as prophylactics, sex-ed and several other things have become readily available. I've even seen a study claiming the porn industry is partly to blame, as in Japan it has been linked to growing disillusionment towards sex and thus making babies.

And I find it funny how you claim it's against mankind's nature to try and form utopias, yet charismatic people crop up every once in a while to do just that. There are many utopias, and a lot of people trust, or get into science exactly because they see the hope of founding one sort of utopia or another through its discoveries.

I'll be looking at the stars too. I'll admire their beauty for a while before resuming my attempts to better the life of my fellow beings.

[Eldan]

Or learn to build floating/submerged ocean cities.

That's not the problem. We don't need more space to build cities. As an example, we plain and simple don't have enough food. As a rule of thumb, every kilo of beef requires ten kilos of grain. Which requires ten litres of clean water per kilo of grain, or more. Meat is currently responsible for 18% of our greenhouse gas production. The energy input to output ratio for meat is around 1:50 at the worst, I think.

2002, Europeans ate over 70kg of meat per year. North Americans over 120. China? 52. I don't have numbers for really poor countries handy at the moment, but it's probably substantially less. If everyone ate as much as the richest countries do? Good luck sustaining that. We are already causing massive environmental impacts.

[Ragitsu]

That's not the problem. We don't need more space to build cities. As an example, we plain and simple don't have enough food. As a rule of thumb, every kilo of beef requires ten kilos of grain. Which requires ten litres of clean water per kilo of grain, or more. Meat is currently responsible for 18% of our greenhouse gas production. The energy input to output ratio for meat is around 1:50 at the worst, I think.

2002, Europeans ate over 70kg of meat per year. North Americans over 120. China? 52. I don't have numbers for really poor countries handy at the moment, but it's probably substantially less. If everyone ate as much as the richest countries do? Good luck sustaining that. We are already causing massive environmental impacts.

As cliched as this seems, it appears that soy is going to be a huge part of our future.

[hamishspence]

Fish might be a big help- but many species have already been overfished.

[Ragitsu]

I wonder if cloning/growth tanks will ALSO be a part of our future.

[Frozen_Feet]

Fresh water is another big problem. However, it isn't just the amounts of food that are problematic. Currently, we do produce food for approx. 15 billion people... but due to poor distribution, we still have one billion people suffering from famine.

To keep conditions livable for ever-growing population, we'd need to seriously reorganize global logistics. This problem is just heightened because we're running out of fuel for the systems that facilitate our current logistics. For example, viable alternate for kerosene is nowhere in sight, which means we'd have to reconsider using aerial travel at all.

Overall, through aero- and hydrophonic farming as well as better utilizing solar, tidal and geothermal energies we could achieve a pretty "green" society. But it'd still be vastly easier if we could reduce our population considerably and focus it around the northern hemisphere, which retains better conditions at the face of climate change than many currently densely-populated areas, like China and India.

[Eldan]

Fish might be a big help- but many species have already been overfished.

"Many" is an understatement. We're driving most edible species of fish to extinction, currently, and near-permanently devastating ecosystems at the same time.

[hamishspence]

Overall, through aero- and hydrophonic farming as well as better utilizing solar, tidal and geothermal energies we could achieve a pretty "green" society. But it'd still be vastly easier if we could reduce our population considerably and focus it around the northern hemisphere, which retains better conditions at the face of climate change than many currently densely-populated areas, like China and India.

Problem is- people generally would not want to move, without considerable incentives.


"Many" is an understatement. We're driving most edible species of fish to extinction, currently, and near-permanently devastating ecosystems at the same time.

Fish farms? Ones better than the current ones, which wouldn't involve huge quantities of fish being harvested to feed the farmed fish?

[Ragitsu]

Speaking of fuel ->

http://metalgear.wikia.com/wiki/OILIX

"The concept of OILIX is starting to become a reality. As of 2008, Craig Venter is leading the development of a bacteria that consumes high-concentrations of CO2 and converts it into oil. "

[Frozen_Feet]

Uh huh. You haven't been following the news, haven't you? "Climate fugitive" is a real-world concept that's becoming increasingly common.

Your native land turning too hot to live and previously arable land turning into inhospitable desert? That is enough incentive, and people are acting on it already!

[Eldan]

Ah, yes. Venter. I've been to two presentations by the guy. He's a PR and fundraising genius, no doubt. He did do some interesting stuff, however. The artificial bacterium was by him, so he could actually be on to something.

Edit: we should probably also stay clear of discussing fugitives... that's a relatively hot political topics in some areas.

[Ragitsu]

There is another problem beyond merely meeting the food/water/fuel demands of a growing world.

Autonomy and redundancy.

If people do not man power and gas stations, these services will fail VERY quickly.

Along similar lines, if one particular stretch of land does not produce enough rice, then other people will experience skyrocketing prices/famine.

As the population grows, so will dependency on other infrastructures around the world.

---

In short, we need a system of multiple backups, and perhaps simple AI so that vital systems aren't cut off so easily.

[hamishspence]

Your native land turning too hot to live and previously arable land turning into inhospitable desert? That is enough incentive, and people are acting on it already!

But it's not necessarily going to result in most of the populations of India and China relocating northwards:


But it'd still be vastly easier if we could reduce our population considerably and focus it around the northern hemisphere, which retains better conditions at the face of climate change than many currently densely-populated areas, like China and India.

And the people already living there, may object.

[Eldan]

They already do, actually.

But as I said, politics. Stay away from that subject, please. This thread is too interesting to lock.

[Frozen_Feet]

But it's not necessarily going to result in most of the populations of India and China relocating northwards:

Actually, since most landmass and remaining arable land is North from them...

And the people already living there, may object.

True. But like Eldan reminded us, we can't talk about that much. (^^;;)

[hamishspence]

on the issue of power- wouldn't solar satellites be a viable option? Or would they be horribly expensive as a city power source?

[Ragitsu]

on the issue of power- wouldn't solar satellites be a viable option? Or would they be horribly expensive as a city power source?

It would be a good way to augment power demands, that's for sure.

[Eldan]

Pretty much moving anything to space is horribly expensive.

[hamishspence]

At first, yes. Later on though, it might become more cost-effective. Hence the idea of space technology being invested in- so it pays off in things like solar satellites, asteroid mining, and so forth.

Even outside of interstellar flight- there may be much to be gained from on Earth- if space is made use of.

Ben Bova's Grand Tour of the Solar System series of novels focussed heavily on this.

[Frozen_Feet]

Just utilizing all sunlight that falls on land here on Earth could conceivably produce many times more energy than all of civilization uses as of now. The problem is, of course, how to do it. One proposal I've seen was gradually covering all of Sahara in solar panels, and using the energy to extract hydrogen from seawater. Hydrogen could then be distributed though pipelines to other parts of the world, and used as fuel for various things.

Of course, there are unresolved engineering problems in that just like there are in space-based solar panels. Biggest problems are, unfortunately, geopolitical.

However, better than satellites on Earth's orbit would be solar bases on dark side of the Moon... if we could just create a damn space elevator or create some other reasonable method of sending the energy back here. Reason is, again, problems with accumulating space debris. Orbital satellites would be too vulnerable to destruction.

[Eldan]

Hmm. Those seawater pumps could conceivably be powered by capillary effects and evaporation... though that would have interesting effects on the climate...

I'll be off scribbling.

[hamishspence]

However, better than satellites on Earth's orbit would be solar bases on dark side of the Moon... if we could just create a damn space elevator or create some other reasonable method of sending the energy back here. Reason is, again, problems with accumulating space debris. Orbital satellites would be too vulnerable to destruction.

The "dark side" of the Moon is exactly as exposed to sunlight as the near side- half a month of day, half a month of night. At the poles, some peaks may be exposed more, though.

Is the space debris mostly a problem in lower orbit- wouldn't high orbits be out of range of most of it?

I think microwaves was one of the suggested ideas for transmitting the power back to Earth.

[Frozen_Feet]

Space debris eventually becomes a problem at any orbit you put stuff in, though it is worse in the lower ones. Space debris is a bitch to get rid of, as anything that could do so would need launching more stuff up there... which is likely to create more debris. (That, or wait and wait and wait) It's estimated debris will eventually form a loose, whirling cloud around Earth that will make any traffic to either direction extremely difficult.

High enough, and debris isn't problem to the satellite itself, but maintaining it becomes very hard. It'd be better to use Moon as a base, as it can hold more infrastructure for keeping the solar panels working, and has resources of its own nearby.

[Eldan]

And it's gravity is probably strong enough to keep most of the debris down.

[Pie Guy]

You know, when I think biological immortality, I think of death by old age stopping. There would still be people dieing of disease, being hit by a bus, etc.

[0Megabyte]

So, a lot was said while I went off and did other things. There's a lot to address, and maybe it's better to reiterate a few things than to go point by point. That way lies madness!

First thing: I don't think it makes any sense to talk about the specifics in too much detail. Space travel takes a lot of technology, and I'm not the expert.

The guys who made this are the experts. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/nanosaild.html

They made a solar sail. (Called the Nano-Sail D.) And it's in space right now as we speak.

Any-who, the point is that technology is moving quickly, and it's hard to talk about tomorrow's tech, when last year I would have thought of a working solar sail as science fiction. But the point about talking about the tech is this: It's plausible. And we can do it. We don't even need to bring a lot of Earth's resources.

As I posted in the previous thread before we jumped over, a single asteroid contains more iron than the entire planet mines in a year. And that's one substance. There's so much stuff out there, that we can build any true space-fairing ship out in space itself. This means we don't even need to worry about sending the potentially millions of tons of stuff into space.

We already have a space station. It's not much of a stretch to build something in orbit a little bit bigger, with technology to both mine, and construct things. Yes, it'd probably be an order of magnitude larger than the ISS, but private enterprise is certainly the solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

SpaceX is a private company that already has contracts with NASA and others to send satellites into orbit. They have the technology, and they've tested it, launching private rockets into space successfully. Their first commercial launch is this year.

It's a great job-making opportunity, and it's certainly a better source of jobs than building tanks or those crappy stuffed Pokemon knock-offs you see at the county fair.

The point is, when it comes to building the ships, we don't even need to ship most of the resources into space, and private industry can handle it in any case. The onus isn't on Earth's limited (albeit vast) resources. Incidentally, the talk about rare-earth minerals is a good one. But we can handle it. Building things that don't use them.

Am I sounding optimistic? What reason do I have to not be optimistic about space-based technology? We live in an age of private rocket companies and solar sails. We live in an age of telescopes which are finding planets around other stars, and are even finding earth-like planet candidates. We live in an age where technology is rapidly advancing in these fields. So perhaps I am optimistic. In this field.

The talk about changing human nature, however, is irrelevant to the entire discussion, and I'm confused why Frozen Feet brought it up. Humans will change in a million years whether we go to space or not. It doesn't really matter to the point of saving the human race.

So, when it comes to the method, I'm not the expert so I can't say every single detail of the plan. But the plans exist. NASA has plans for permanent lunar bases. We will eventually send people to Mars. And this will continue, until the ultimate goal of having humans living permanently in space is achieved. This is gonna happen, unless we're all wiped out.

And we could all very easily be wiped out.

But, and this is solely my personal opinion, humanity is worth saving. Space travel is never going to be a way to fix Earth's problems (except, say, energy. It's probably the ultimate solution for energy, actually.) and it's not going to be a way to deal with overpopulation. It has benefits, and the amount we learn from such things will certainly help us learn better how to manage our own planet more efficiently. Most importantly, it will allow the human race to exist even without our planet. And that's the point of the whole exercise.

Also, the thing is: It's a person's choice whether to leave the Earth. If they wish to, what they make of it is their responsibility. If they fail, that's on luck and them, not on me for arguing that the technology should be pursued. If nobody wants to go, they certainly shouldn't be forced.

I dunno what else there is to say on the matter. We're in the process of getting the means. The resources are available on-site in space. There's no need to force people to go; some of us will leave on our own, for their own reasons. The goal is worthy. The same sorts of technology will help us on Earth with new energy sources, among other unknown things. The price isn't something that will bankrupt nations, at least not if we don't collapse beforehand. Private companies are already here, already working, and if anyone can find a source of profit in this, they can.

And, ultimately, it's really cool. It's space, after all! There's nothing more interesting. The price is worth it, because humanity is worth it.

And, most importantly: Going to space and working to improve our society are not mutually exclusive. There's no either/or thing going on. We can do them both.

[Ragitsu]

And, most importantly: Going to space and working to improve our society are not mutually exclusive. There's no either/or thing going on. We can do them both.

Doubtful. It's hard enough to keep track of progress on a global scale. When humans are across a solar system...even a galaxy? Yikes.

[Frozen_Feet]

First thing: I don't think it makes any sense to talk about the specifics in too much detail. Space travel takes a lot of technology, and I'm not the expert.

I, on the other hand, like discussing real-life trends and discoveries even in the context of speculation and fiction, as it gives the discussion a direction and more ground to build on.


The talk about changing human nature, however, is irrelevant to the entire discussion, and I'm confused why Frozen Feet brought it up. Humans will change in a million years whether we go to space or not. It doesn't really matter to the point of saving the human race.

I brought it up for three reasons:

1) This whole thread was spawned by people derailing a topic about nudity and violence in television. It started with immortality and continued to space travel.

2) As I've been trying to point out, the two are not wholly separate, as we've been talking about both in the context of "saving human race". If having children is a form of immortality, having children in space falls under it too.

3) I do think it matters. Politics, instinct to reproduce, desire to avert death, are based on basic human intuitions. The change of these intuitions is possible, and that change can be directed. Space travel requires a lot from both the mind and psyche of a living being, so altering them to an extent would be beneficial, or even required for large scale space travel.

[druid91]

I, on the other hand, like discussing real-life trends and discoveries even in the context of speculation and fiction, as it gives the discussion a direction and more ground to build on.



I brought it up for three reasons:

1) This whole thread was spawned by people derailing a topic about nudity and violence in television. It started with immortality and continued to space travel.

2) As I've been trying to point out, the two are not wholly separate, as we've been talking about both in the context of "saving human race". If having children is a form of immortality, having children in space falls under it too.

3) I do think it matters. Politics, instinct to reproduce, desire to avert death, are based on basic human intuitions. The change of these intuitions is possible, and that change can be directed. Space travel requires a lot from both the mind and psyche of a living being, so altering them to an extent would be beneficial, or even required for large scale space travel.

Yes but using that as a basis to say that it will never happen is kinda unoptomistic.

1. is pointless.

2. children are not a form of immortality. They are descendants. Nothing more. I find it ironic that you complain about us being romantic about space travel and immortality.... yet you are the same with children. they are children you love them but they are not you.

3. And in the end trying to kill people off is wrong. Death is the enemy.

[Frozen_Feet]

Yes but using that as a basis to say that it will never happen is kinda unoptomistic.
Uh, my reasons for claiming space travel is infeasible are not the same as the reasons I made this thread, and why the title reads as it does.

1. is pointless.

*Ahem* You were the person who started derailing the other thread with this stuff. There was very much point in separating this discussion to a thread of its own, it's just doesn't have much to do with philosophical content of this thread. :smalltongue: That the discussion so smoothly transited from immortality to space travel suggests there's a link, at least in your mind.


2. children are not a form of immortality. They are descendants. Nothing more. I find it ironic that you complain about us being romantic about space travel and immortality.... yet you are the same with children. they are children you love them but they are not you.

Way to go missing the whole argument why I consider children are a form of immortality.

Let's put it this way: many people here are advocating space travel because it will allow for "extended survival of mankind". The difference of this to "extended survival of invidual", what immortality is about, is of scale, not of nature.

And as far of it being ironic... you did notice I've been hanging a lampshade on it for half the thread already, didn't you? :smalltongue:


3. And in the end trying to kill people off is wrong. Death is the enemy.

That is tangential to the point. You'll need to change basic human nature as much or more if you want to make them immortal, and large-scale political changes are required to fuel the research and construction required to facilitate space travel.

Besides, death stems from entropy. Based on current evidence, I'm inclined to think entropy is inevitability as much as it is an obstacle. Assigning it as something as negative as "the enemy" is fruitless. You don't need to try to kill people off, people die on their own. Death =/= murder.

[druid91]

Uh, my reasons for claiming space travel is infeasible are not the same as the reasons I made this thread, and why the title reads as it does.


*Ahem* You were the person who started derailing the other thread with this stuff. There was very much point in separating this discussion to a thread of its own, it's just doesn't have much to do with philosophical content of this thread. :smalltongue: That the discussion so smoothly transited from immortality to space travel suggests there's a link, at least in your mind.



Way to go missing the whole argument why I consider children are a form of immortality.

Let's put it this way: many people here are advocating space travel because it will allow for "extended survival of mankind". The difference of this to "extended survival of invidual", what immortality is about, is of scale, not of nature.

And as far of it being ironic... you did notice I've been hanging a lampshade on it for half the thread already, didn't you? :smalltongue:



That is tangential to the point. You'll need to change basic human nature as much or more if you want to make them immortal, and large-scale political changes are required to fuel the research and construction required to facilitate space travel.

Besides, death stems from entropy. Based on current evidence, I'm inclined to think entropy is inevitability as much as it is an obstacle. Assigning it as something as negative as "the enemy" is fruitless. You don't need to try to kill people off, people die on their own. Death =/= murder.

You know what I mean, or I hope you do. saying you started this to stop a derail doesnt add anything to the discussion.

Because they carry on your beliefs and genes to the future. Which is not gauranteed. I have a vastly different set of beliefs from my mother and my father.

Im advocating space travel because we need to expand. and it's the only way to go.

Yes. but the change is for the better being proactive about the situation. As opposed to merely living out our days in comfort.

A differencein viewpoints then. Im hoping for a future in which the universe is propped open. and the heat death is forestalled by some technology that piles the energy back up.

[Frozen_Feet]

Saying you started this to stop a derail doesnt add anything to the discussion.

It does, however, answer the question why I started this thread and brought these things up, which should make several priorly discussed points easier to relate.

[0Megabyte]

I, on the other hand, like discussing real-life trends and discoveries even in the context of speculation and fiction, as it gives the discussion a direction and more ground to build on.

I brought it up for three reasons:

1) This whole thread was spawned by people derailing a topic about nudity and violence in television. It started with immortality and continued to space travel.

2) As I've been trying to point out, the two are not wholly separate, as we've been talking about both in the context of "saving human race". If having children is a form of immortality, having children in space falls under it too.

3) I do think it matters. Politics, instinct to reproduce, desire to avert death, are based on basic human intuitions. The change of these intuitions is possible, and that change can be directed. Space travel requires a lot from both the mind and psyche of a living being, so altering them to an extent would be beneficial, or even required for large scale space travel.

0.) Oh, it's fun and all, and I'm not stopping you. It's just there comes a time when endless speculation about things we cannot know get boring. I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy doing it endlessly, and even my interest in science fiction can be bored by a long debate about matters we know nothing about.

Actually, though, I have been bringing up factual things, since my first post on the subject in the previous thread. I haven't always repeated those facts, but they were useful. And I did so again in my last post. I just honestly find space travel less difficult than changing the entirety of the human race.

1.) How is that relevant to the space portion? I don't really want to talk about immortality because it's not something I know about, can talk about in terms other than wish-fulfillment, etc. You can go ahead and talk about it with everyone else, I don't want to stop the conversation!

Let me refocus: By the entire discussion, I mean the entire discussion about space travel, not immortality. My wording could have used some rephrasing, I suppose. I'm not going to stop that conversation, though. I just don't want to talk about it as it's too much time for not enough gain.

2.) Having kids isn't a form of immortality. It might be for our genes, which are using us as vehicles for their propagation, but a gene doesn't equal a human, even if they make us up.

Creating new people doesn't make you live any longer.

3.) It might be useful to alter us for space travel, or for many things. But there are currently seven billion people. It's hard to alter everyone. It's definitely not feasible to go into every village and spend the vast amount of money to genetically engineer every baby that every third world mother has, or even the accidental pregnancies that aren't planned in a huge number of mothers in the first world.

The logistics of doing this for everyone is simply astonishingly vast. It probably isn't as simple as a vaccine, after all, where you just inject someone with a little substance.

Because that's how you fundamentally change human nature. It doesn't change, otherwise.

[Frozen_Feet]

^ To give an analogue, solding and welding are different things, but both can be done with largely the same equipment, and both require heat. Your question of "how does changing human nature relate to space travel?" is, to me, like asking what does heat have to do with solding.

We've been talking talking about both in the context of extended human survival, and in regards to that, space travel and immortality actually have a fair bit of overlap.

As for the logistics of changing human nature: yes, the required effort would be immense. However, unlike you, I don't consider logistics of such to be more fantastic than those of space travel - in some cases, I consider them less so. Psychology, political engineering and genetics are also within the realm of science and technology.

Oh, it will take time, obviously, but if there's some resource that is abundant it's that. Granted that we don't screw ourselves up in the interim, of course, but that's an obstacle all changes in culture face.

[pendell]

*Wanders in*

In answer as to *why* to explore space, I can only point you to this youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT2Tg5njPa0).

*Wanders out*

*Wanders back in for a second*

I'm a human being. That means I want to climb every mountain, swim every sea, reach every star, and run my hands through the sand on alien beaches.

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

If you understand what I'm talking about, no words are needed. If you don't -- I don't know how to make you understand.

*I* and my family will go as far, and as high, as we can. You can come with us or stay behind on earth. I cannot understand that second choice, but I won't take it from you. :)

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[druid91]

^ To give an analogue, solding and welding are different things, but both can be done with largely the same equipment, and both require heat. Your question of "how does changing human nature relate to space travel?" is, to me, like asking what does heat have to do with solding.

We've been talking talking about both in the context of extended human survival, and in regards to that, space travel and immortality actually have a fair bit of overlap.

As for the logistics of changing human nature: yes, the required effort would be immense. However, unlike you, I don't consider logistics of such to be more fantastic than those of space travel - in some cases, I consider them less so. Psychology, political engineering and genetics are also within the realm of science and technology.

Oh, it will take time, obviously, but if there's some resource that is abundant it's that. Granted that we don't screw ourselves up in the interim, of course, but that's an obstacle all changes in culture face.

But why take the time to... effectively do nothing. Why try to die? Why not try to live forever, or at the very least hope.

Without that... I don't know... Without knowing in every fiber of me that one day either I or someone else will stand at the center of the universe and laugh, having stalled the death of the universe. In whatever form it takes.... Or that we will have died trying.

To do anything else is really nothing more than elaborate and drawn out suicide.

[0Megabyte]

Technically there is no center to the universe, actually. At least, no more than there is a center to the earth's surface. But I am just being contrary! :smallbiggrin:

However, may I recommend to you and pendett the song 'row row fight the power' from gurren lagann?

[Frozen_Feet]

But why take the time to... effectively do nothing.
I do not consider creating and maintaining a harmonious society down on Earth "doing nothing". Harmony =/= stagnation.

Why try to die? Why not try to live forever, or at the very least hope.

Again, you don't need to try to die - you do so anyway. Trying to live forever becomes a moot point if you don't actually consider it's you who's going to live in the first place. There are many views under which living forever is not specially desireable fate - long enough suffices, and quality of life matters more than its quantity.



To do anything else is really nothing more than elaborate and drawn out suicide.
You have a very weird notion of suicide.

[druid91]

I do not consider creating and maintaining a harmonious society down on Earth "doing nothing". Harmony =/= stagnation.


Again, you don't need to try to die - you do so anyway. Trying to live forever becomes a moot point if you don't actually consider it's you who's going to live in the first place. There are many views under which living forever is not specially desireable fate - long enough suffices, and quality of life matters more than its quantity.


You have a very weird notion of suicide.

No. harmony does not equal stagnation. harmony on earth and nothing more does.

And with that quantity comes quality. Imagine if you will. We leave the planet and you make your paradise on earth. and one day the earth is wiped out and your descendants escape into space. Where we, the original us (copy us if you prefer) not some descendant, greet them with open arms. and and then your descendant learns that we have it just as good as you did. Only we have it for longer.

Suicide: to kill oneself. I include failing to take action to save yourself under this.

[Frozen_Feet]

No. harmony does not equal stagnation. harmony on earth and nothing more does.

I can't agree, plain and simple.


Suicide: to kill oneself. I include failing to take action to save yourself under this.

By that definition, just living your life becomes suicide. I don't consider it an useful definition.

[druid91]

I can't agree, plain and simple.



By that definition, just living your life becomes suicide. I don't consider it an useful definition.

Would two paradise worlds not be better than one?

No. Because every day we feed the machine of industry and invention. Every day we contribute in some small way to the eventual development of the technolgy that will save us.

It only becomes unpleasant if you give up on that.

[Frozen_Feet]

Would two paradise worlds not be better than one?
Only if they are fundamental to keep each other running. You don't need to make more than one paradise, especially not if it requires kicking people out of the first one first.


No. Because every day we feed the machine of industry and invention. Every day we contribute in some small way to the eventual development of the technolgy that will save us.

It only becomes unpleasant if you give up on that.

People go around daily, exposing themselves to things that might very well destroy themselves without sparing a conscious thought on them. Sometimes, those things blindside them and people end up dead - these are what we call accidents. By your definition, the universe sucker-punching you from a completely unexpected angle counts as "suicide", which I find is a gross misapplication of the word.

[druid91]

Only if they are fundamental to keep each other running. You don't need to make more than one paradise, especially not if it requires kicking people out of the first one first.



People go around daily, exposing themselves to things that might very well destroy themselves without sparing a conscious thought on them. Sometimes, those things blindside them and people end up dead - these are what we call accidents. By your definition, the universe sucker-punching you from a completely unexpected angle counts as "suicide", which I find is a gross misapplication of the word.

So you would rather willingly kill the rest?

perhaps I should rephrase that.

I include failure to take action to save yourself from a known threat.

[Frozen_Feet]

So you would rather willingly kill the rest?
I do not understand where you're coming from. Who are these "rest", and why should I kill them?

perhaps I should rephrase that.

I include failure to take action to save yourself from a known threat.

That's slightly better, but there are still a variety of occasions where such inaction would be warranted. I still don't see any use in your redefinition - it only serves to give negative connotations to things that don't need them.

[druid91]

I do not understand where you're coming from. Who are these "rest", and why should I kill them?


That's slightly better, but there are still a variety of occasions where such inaction would be warranted. I still don't see any use in your redefinition - it only serves to give negative connotations to things that don't need them.

The rest. For your plan to work a significant portion of the population must disappear.


What, precisely, is covered under that definition would give negative connotations to something that doesn't deserve it?

[Frozen_Feet]

The rest. For your plan to work a significant portion of the population must disappear.
Yes? Still doesn't mean I need to kill them, or otherwise make them miserable for it.

Your aversion seems to be based on wholly unreasonable concept of ever-lasting expansion; regardless of whether we chase the stars or not, Earth's population can't be arbitrarily large. Regardless of what utopic goal we pursue, the whole population of Earth will have been replaced many times over by the time we're done.

I've already explained this several times. What in the concept is so hard to grasp?


What, precisely, is covered under that definition would give negative connotations to something that doesn't deserve it?

Sacrificing your life for others - sacrificing yourself for ideals. Several lose-lose scenarios where, frankly, you couldn't take the requisite actions even if you wanted to.

There are times and places where "giving up" is an acceptable solution - or where failure to give up has more serious repercussions than doing so. I will not spend my whole evening listing all possible scenarios - if you can't fathom any, it's your loss.

[druid91]

Yes? Still doesn't mean I need to kill them, or otherwise make them miserable for it.

Your aversion seems to be based on wholly unreasonable concept of ever-lasting expansion; regardless of whether we chase the stars or not, Earth's population can't be arbitrarily large. Regardless of what utopic goal we pursue, the whole population of Earth will have been replaced many times over by the time we're done.

I've already explained this several times. What in the concept is so hard to grasp?



Sacrificing your life for others - sacrificing yourself for ideals. Several lose-lose scenarios where, frankly, you couldn't take the requisite actions even if you wanted to.

There are times and places where "giving up" is an acceptable solution - or where failure to give up has more serious repercussions than doing so. I will not spend my whole evening listing all possible scenarios - if you can't fathom any, it's your loss.

Given the possibility of unlimited lifespan. They will not be replaced. If you continue to add eventually the population will reach an arbitrary sum.

In what way is coming prepared so as not to sacrifice yourself not better?

Giving up is acceptable, giving up your wll to live isnt.

[pendell]

I do not consider creating and maintaining a harmonious society down on Earth "doing nothing". Harmony =/= stagnation.



Can I butt in for a moment?

I am interested in the survival of the human race. Plain and simple.

I believe that, in five thousand years of recorded history and who knows how much pre-history, humanity has never had a harmonious society. Never. Even the "primitive people living in harmony" falls apart as a western conceit when you actually look at them up close. Sabretooth tigers and woolly mammoths were exterminated by humans long before civilization existed in North America. The Mayan civilizations killed themselves off before Columbus set foot on these shores. Go to the middle east and you can find huge mounds -- they call them "tels" -- where city after city was built, only to fall apart and disappear in the sands of history, leaving nothing but rubble behind.

I believe expansion into space -- even if there are no habitable worlds -- is infinitely more plausible than a harmonious society on earth. The first is a technical challenge. The second requires directly opposing human nature, the drive to reproduce, fundamental human nature.

Here is a graph of human population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_%28lin-log_scale%29.png).

Which do you think is more likely? That we will successfully re-invent human beings? Or that we will find a way to expand?

Which has the better probability of success?

While you're pondering that, I would like you to point out that there have been a number of sociological experiments to re-invent human nature such as the New Soviet Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_soviet_man). How well did that work out?

I am going to put this as plainly and simply as I can: If the human race does not expand, it will die.

There are a couple alternatives:

One alternative is the Chinese solution. Currently China is #1 in the world in population and #156 in terms of population growth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_population). HOWEVER, there are a couple of points even to this solution.

First, note the graph. Note that is has not stopped or reversed population growth, only slowed it. If the disease is overpopulation, then the Chinese cure is an aspirin. It can prolong the illness, but it cannot stop it or cure it.

Other arguments about this solution are political and will not be touched on here.

The other major alternative, of course, is that we kill each other off in a competition for resources. Then do it again in a few hundred years.

The human race has the capacity for infinite expansion. The earth has finite resources. The universe is not infinite, but pretty close to it. Successfully expanding into space will prolong the lifetime of the species by millenia at least.

It also guards against environmental catastrophe or asteroid impact. If nothing else, the earth's sun is predicted to go Red Giant and consume the planet in 5 billion years or so. If humans are still around then, those of us who survive will be those who left Mother behind.

Another assumption you make which I find questionable is the assumption requires humans to displace other species. That the universe is full of innocent N'avi with big disney eyes whom the evil humans will ruthlessly exploit.

First of all, we don't know that there *are* any other species out there, sapient or otherwise. In the second place, it is NOT necessary for humans to live on planets at all to survive in space. You need a source of power (sun, or fusion power), a source of water (cometary ice, rings of saturn), topsoil (from earth initially, but can later be reproduced in space). I suspect it will be far easier to construct orbital or space habitats in the solar system then it would be to terraform a planet, or find a new one in interstellar space.

It won't be like life on earth. But it will be LIFE, and if done properly those people and their descendents will survive when this earth hits population critical levels and smashes itself back to the invention of the brick in a series of nuclear wars that make Hiroshima look like a child's firecracker. Then we can re-colonize earth, if it ever becomes habitable again.

Space colonization of the sort I describe -- space or orbital habitats in the solar system -- is plausible in the multiple century term and requires a technological solution. A "harmonious society" requires a complete re-invention of human nature from a creature with a fundamental drive to propagate its genes to something else. The most likely result of such an experiment, even if successful, would be for the "new humans" to be out-reproduced and assimilated by the normals.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Frozen_Feet]

Given the possibility of unlimited lifespan. They will not be replaced. If you continue to add eventually the population will reach an arbitrary sum.

You are assuming possibility of unlimited lifespan before reducing population becomes necessary. You are also assuming that once it's possible, birthrate still exceeds deathrate, or that reproduction is even needed.

After a point, the only reason for population to reach an arbitrary sum is our own choice. From simple resource management viewpoint, we have little incentive to make that choice.


In what way is coming prepared so as not to sacrifice yourself not better?

You are making the easily disputed assumption that being prepared is always possible.



I believe that, in five thousand years of recorded history and who knows how much pre-history, humanity has never had a harmonious society.

In all of recorded history, no-one has set foot on Mars either. However, your idealism requires it to be possible eventually. Most of the things you brought up are already part of my knowledge and I've already adressed priorly.

Your argument hinges mainly on the thoughts that reinventing society is harder and won't be necessary before settling into space. Current developments and discoveries have, however, lead me to believe that reinventing society and tampering with human nature will be necessary before space travel, and in addition solve most problems you posit space travel will solve anyhow.

The thing about resources is that the more there are people to sustain, the greater amounts you must extract per unit of time to make it feasible. This goes double for space travel. Each and every colony, each and every ship encounters limits imposed to its population based on how much resources it can spare for them. Space travel is equally unnatural state for humanity as harmonious existence is, just in different ways.

[Ragitsu]

I believe expansion into space -- even if there are no habitable worlds -- is infinitely more plausible than a harmonious society on earth. The first is a technical challenge. The second requires directly opposing human nature, the drive to reproduce, fundamental human nature.

It may not be entirely impossible, given science (genetic engineering).

[druid91]

You are assuming possibility of unlimited lifespan before reducing population becomes necessary. You are also assuming that once it's possible, birthrate still exceeds deathrate, or that reproduction is even needed.

After a point, the only reason for population to reach an arbitrary sum is our own choice. From simple resource management viewpoint, we have little incentive to make that choice.


You are making the easily disputed assumption that being prepared is always possible.

OF course we would make that choice. Having more people on your side is always an advantage.

We have already hooked the human nervous system to a computer. It's only a matter of time before the data in the mind is unlocked.

Then it's a simple leap to downloading that data in a format that makes it able to control a mechanical body.

You can always be prepared to try and save someone without dying yourself. Being adequately prepared is another thing entirely. So long as you try it isn't suicide.


It may not be entirely impossible, given science (genetic engineering).

But how would you convince anyone to take it?

[Frozen_Feet]

OF course we would make that choice. Having more people on your side is always an advantage.

No, it is not. When you only have food for five people yet there are six in the boat, it'll end badly for someone. If you have enough fuel to get your boat to the next island when the cargo is five people, picking up two more will leave you stranded in the ocean.

It's a proven thing that human brain works best with small communities; in large cities, people lose the ability to relate to all stranges they meet, leading to several detrimental side-effects such as heightened bystander effect. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

Again, can't be bothered to spend whole evening spouting examples. If you keep the concept of "resource management" in mind, you should easily be able to come up with thousands yourself. Human psychology and documented problems with large cities are next thing to look at.

Sometimes, small things are beautiful. Sometimes they're better for a stated purpose, too; just look at cellphones if you don't believe me.

[Tyrant]

It may not be entirely impossible, given science (genetic engineering).
You still run into the problem of trrying to convince several billion people to go along with your plan. Unless you plan on forcing people to do that. As pendell said, modern attempts at changing human nature have met with spectacular failure.

I am more or less in line with pendell's thoughts on this matter. I believe our species is worth saving and I recognize that expansion is likely a more viable alternative than changing our fundamental nature. I also believe that space travel/expansion is a more tangible goal. When you start talking about things like world peace or population control, where do you even begin? In what realistic way can you effect change? Not everyone is willing to hear you out or will see the sense in your argument. What then? Hope you have the bigger stick? (and I believe history backs me when I say that it absolutely will come to that at some point) How does that help you with creating harmony when you have to beat people into line? How far do you take it? Those are the problems. You have to get every one else to go along with your view. Space exploration, not so much. You really only need one country, or a small handful, to go along with it to advance quite a bit. Most of what has been accomplished has been because of the efforts of two countries, and that was spawned by tapping into the human drive to expand/explore (and trying to beat an opponent). Channeling man's impulses towards a goal will be more sucessful than fighting those impulses while trying to eradicate them.

[druid91]

No, it is not. When you only have food for five people yet there are six in the boat, it'll end badly for someone. If you have enough fuel to get your boat to the next island when the cargo is five people, picking up two more will leave you stranded in the ocean.

It's a proven thing that human brain works best with small communities; in large cities, people lose the ability to relate to all stranges they meet, leading to several detrimental side-effects such as heightened bystander effect. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

Again, can't be bothered to spend whole evening spouting examples. If you keep the concept of "resource management" in mind, you should easily be able to come up with thousands yourself. Human psychology and documented problems with large cities are next thing to look at.

Sometimes, small things are beautiful. Sometimes they're better for a stated purpose, too; just look at cellphones if you don't believe me.

Yet, finite resources are only a problem if you expand past your means. I do not presume to assume what resources will be found in the void of space. Do you?

Yet which would you rather have a single friend? A tribe of thirty? Or an empire of billions?

Again there is enough out there to hit nearly any arbitrary number youcan think of.

Perhaps but ephemeral things don't last.

[HalfTangible]

If i had to choose between world peace and space cities... my answer would be the same as MovieBob's.

At least in part because humanity is full of bastards and world peace is impossible with threat of global Armageddon. Sad, but true. The space cities would last longer than peace on earth.

[Ragitsu]

But how would you convince anyone to take it?

Oh. Social engineering is a whole other issue.

[Frozen_Feet]

Yet, finite resources are only a problem if you expand past your means. I do not presume to assume what resources will be found in the void of space. Do you?
Nope. However, I do have a pretty good picture of what resources are here on Earth, and how well we are utilizing said resources as of now. That gives pretty good guidelines on what kind of change has to be affected to start moving in the right direction. It's possible to approach Earth as a self-contained problem, and to an extent it works better than trying to solve mankind's problems though hypothetical space technology, as Earth's qualities are relatively well-known.


Yet which would you rather have a single friend? A tribe of thirty? Or an empire of billions?
Human psychology suggests somewhere between one and two hundred would be ideal. In any case, I couldn't be physically in enough places at once to enjoy companies of, say, ten thousand people in a meaningful manner.


Again there is enough out there to hit nearly any arbitrary number youcan think of.

Just because resources exist doesn't mean they can be reached or utilized. After points, space travel requires increasingly fantastic leaps of technology to keep overcoming that obstacle, and after a point those leaps become far more fantastic than convincing few billion people to have less kids would be.

@Tyrant: reducing human population and keeping it in line is very much a tangible goal. Much of what's needed to facilitate it fall to the realm of politics, however, and thus are outside the scope of these boards.

But increasing wellfare and making contraceptives better available are good points. Imposing ideology on humans is hardly impossible, and it's possible to utilize mankind's natural instincts towards those goals too. Unlike what you seem to propose, global-scale genetic engineering isn't required for a long while.

If you want to abandon the optimism that runs this thread, then yes, bigger sticks will likely get involved at some point. But pray tell me, why would they not get involved when facilitating space travel? Several resources that power even our current attempts are utilized on the expense of many poor peoples, and it's causing geopolitical strife even now. Past space programs were not as squeaky clean as you imply. Why would larger-scale attempts be more so?

Overall, I'm starting to repeat myself. Your views on the matter are largely the same as 0Megabyte's and Lost_Demiurge's, so instead of keeping on repeating myself, I refer you back to the prior discussion. If you come up with some new article or concept that'd add to the discussion, please share, though.

[warty goblin]

If i had to choose between world peace and space cities... my answer would be the same as MovieBob's.

At least in part because humanity is full of bastards and world peace is impossible with threat of global Armageddon. Sad, but true. The space cities would last longer than peace on earth.

Inevitable question, if humanity is so full of right bastards, how long do you think the space cities would last? Because if overcrowding on Earth, which is big and full of resources is a problem it seems like you'd need even more strict controls in a space station where there's a lot less room, and many resources are a hell of a lot harder to come by.

Oh I'm sure space city Alpha won't destroy itself, few people are stupid enough to blow up the thing they're standing on, but how long before the folks in Alpha start thinking it'd be really nice if they could get a little more living space or a larger food ration or access to that nice big asteroid by conquering space city Beta? If humanity is as rotten as you hypothesize, it's not gonna take very long at all, and a city in space is every bit, if not more, vulnerable than one on Earth.

[Frozen_Feet]

A science fiction story that treats the problems of space colony with moderate realism is Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke. In it, colonies on Moon and Mars are strictly regulated, because even smallest screw ups would endanger most people living there.

Interestingly enough, it also portrays humanity living in relatively harmonious state. So it's a case where the optimism towards progress extends to both space travel and enhancing human nature.

[warty goblin]

A science fiction story that treats the problems of space colony with moderate realism is Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke. In it, colonies on Moon and Mars are strictly regulated, because even smallest screw ups would endanger most people living there.

Interestingly enough, it also portrays humanity living in relatively harmonious state. So it's a case where the optimism towards progress extends to both space travel and enhancing human nature.

Indeed, I think relatively harmonious living both in space and on Earth are plenty possible; I'm not nearly as pessimistic about humanity as a lot of people in this thread. I was merely asking the logical question based on the assumption that nuclear holocaust was inevitable.

[HalfTangible]

Inevitable question, if humanity is so full of right bastards, how long do you think the space cities would last? Because if overcrowding on Earth, which is big and full of resources is a problem it seems like you'd need even more strict controls in a space station where there's a lot less room, and many resources are a hell of a lot harder to come by.

Oh I'm sure space city Alpha won't destroy itself, few people are stupid enough to blow up the thing they're standing on, but how long before the folks in Alpha start thinking it'd be really nice if they could get a little more living space or a larger food ration or access to that nice big asteroid by conquering space city Beta? If humanity is as rotten as you hypothesize, it's not gonna take very long at all, and a city in space is every bit, if not more, vulnerable than one on Earth.

I'm saying that the fact peace hasn't been achieved on earth is a poor reason not to go into space, and should be removed from the table, as it is even more impossible than the space cities.

Furthermore, i think that said space cities will be more concerned with collective survival than you seem to hypothesize. Being the only two specks of your race in a harsh wilderness tends to do that, unless you're suggesting that cities on... let's say Mars would be the population size of a country.

Said cities would last longer than world peace, because they'd be in a harsh enviornment where personal gain would be a secondary concern over day-to-day survival. Consider colonies throughout world history which i can't discuss directly because of forum rules - They were placed alone and lost in a harsh land, often with no resources but the clothes on their backs and what they could find there.

And if the resources are so meager that they'd want to conquer each other for a little bit more they aren't going to waste resources on guns :smalltongue:

[Frozen_Feet]

A viewpoint I haven't yet seen much in this thread: if humans are such bastards, why go through the trouble of preserving them in the first place?

[warty goblin]

A viewpoint I haven't yet seen much in this thread: if humans are such bastards, why go through the trouble of preserving them in the first place?

Misanthropy tends not to impress most people.

Regardless, space cities won't solve any problems on Earth. Since I, everyone I know, and in all likelihood my future descendants to several generations will be living Earth, I'm more concerned about solving problems here than building colonies elsewhere in the solar system. I don't see anything inherently wrong with extra-planetary residences mind, it just seems a great waste of mental and physical resources.

The idea of living forever is genuinely abhorrent to me though. I want to live a reasonably long, reasonably health life until this particular body wears out, and then I want to die with some dignity and grace. If that means dying by my own hand a bit before the last system fails, I find that perfectly acceptable as well. Spending eternity showing up to a job I probably lost interest in a long time ago so I could afford the next round of treatments I'm too much of a coward to refuse is not my idea of a good time.

[druid91]

Oh it'll happen. plenty of times.


It is not that hard to get someone to mars.

Mars has a significantly lower gavity than earth making it an ideal launching point for deeper space missions.

Im not aproaching the problem of earth. I could care less about earth. Im aproaching the problem of humanity. The earth is not sufficient. We will outgrow our environment. therefore the only solution is to widen our environment.

You don't need to know every one of them. Just knowing that you have many people behind you.

The whole point is we would be breaking out the sticks, to defend untold billions right to live. whereas you would be fighting to reduce the population.

[Frozen_Feet]

The whole point is we would be breaking out the sticks, to defend untold billions right to live. whereas you would be fighting to reduce the population.

You are failing to consider my motivations, there. I too would be defending the right of untold billions to live - my descendants on Earth, and a variety of inhuman life that is being trampled down by infeasibly large population. Again, there is actual utility in small size; some of that utility would be immensily beneficial to your dream as well. I find it funny how you fail to see that.

[Tyrant]

@Tyrant: reducing human population and keeping it in line is very much a tangible goal. Much of what's needed to facilitate it fall to the realm of politics, however, and thus are outside the scope of these boards.
Tangible is perhaps not the best word. Relatable may be a better word. If you tell someone that you are going to a different location, they can visualize it and they have an understanding of what you are talking about. If you tell someone you want world peace, they think you are practicing your answers for fluff questions at a beauty pegeant. There are two ways to reduce the human population. The quick way and the slow way. The slow way won't work. I really wish I had taken notes as I watching a show on the Hisstory channel the other day to better describe this, but basically the farther out some supposed problem is the less people will bother to think about it. Population overflow is, to many people, some distant problem that they will never have to worry about. You are asking them to stop doing what every animal on Earth does to solve a problem they don't believe is a problem. Again, good luck with that. Space, on the other hand, has shown actual returns and does not require you to force people to do anything.

But increasing wellfare and making contraceptives better available are good points. Imposing ideology on humans is hardly impossible, and it's possible to utilize mankind's natural instincts towards those goals too. Unlike what you seem to propose, global-scale genetic engineering isn't required for a long while.
It's not always a matter of needing more condoms. People know what they are. People are not logic driven robots. They will do what they want to do unless you force them to do otherwise. You can't turn the natural instinct to reproduce towards the goal of stopping people from reproducing. I don't doubt that you can get some people to go along with it. They will be in a very small minority. I can think of two...organizations who's membership exceeds 1 billion who aren't too hot on the idea of stopping reproduction. Quite the opposite actually. The billion or so who are trying it are setting themselves up for some rather exciting times when that system's effects come to fruition. And they have had to become one of the most oppresive systems around to even try it. No thanks.

If you want to abandon the optimism that runs this thread, then yes, bigger sticks will likely get involved at some point.
I was being optimistic saying it wouldn't begin and end with the big stick, which is how I believe it will have to happen.

But pray tell me, why would they not get involved when facilitating space travel? Several resources that power even our current attempts are utilized on the expense of many poor peoples, and it's causing geopolitical strife even now. Past space programs were not as squeaky clean as you imply. Why would larger-scale attempts be more so?
I didn't say they were squeaky clean. We have more than enough to buy what would be needed. If people are oppressed as some kind of side result (and I would honestly love to know where and how that happens as relates to the space program as opposed to a larger scheme), they are few in number when compared to the entire planet. One is telling everyone "this is the way it will be", the other is saying "we're doing this, you guys can join us or not." Again, I will stick with having a choice and not fighting millenia of evolution.

Overall, I'm starting to repeat myself. Your views on the matter are largely the same as 0Megabyte's and Lost_Demiurge's, so instead of keeping on repeating myself, I refer you back to the prior discussion. If you come up with some new article or concept that'd add to the discussion, please share, though.
The problem is you have abstract concepts with no clear way to achieve them. We are trying to say that it will get very messy at some point, and you are choosing to not believe us. We know we can go to space. It has been done. We have an idea of what the roadblocks might be. We have ideas of how to overcome them, or we have the belief that technology and science will continue to advance and potentially give us the answer. All of this while not fundamentally altering human nature.

To me, you are coming at this from a far more idealistic approach that does not account for the biggest variable, humanity. Just look at the differences in opinion on the immortality part of this discussion. I am in the camp that wants to live forever, or at least a whole lot longer than people normally live now. From what I can tell, you are not. You have some ideas about tranferences and such that seem to be on a more metaphysical level. I want to continue living in a very real way, not through my children, etc. I do not care that the me 100 years from now will be somewhat different. The me 10 years from now, or 10 years ago, is different. The one 10 years ago agrees with the now-me that death sucks.

I have a particular view on humanity. I accept that we have numerous aspects that others view as faults that should be dealt with. Humans are capable of being complete bastards. I have been a complete bastard before and if I had to guess I will do so again in the future. I do not believe the vision of the future presented in Star Trek (in terms of society) will come to pass. (well, maybe DS9). It is far too optimistic in it's appraisal of humanity. We will take all of our "baggage" with us into space. I think Battletech is a lot closer to our potential future (in terms of society). An endless cycle of violence with the occasional peak and valley. I accept that we are a violent species that seems to revel in killing our fellow man to the point of coming up with all kinds of ways to do so. I accept that there extreme depths to which I am capable of sinking. Despite that, I would not change us. That drive has brought us out of the caves and into a position of dominance on this planet. It has given us the desire to try to better ourselves. It has allowed us to leave this planet and begin to hope to understand our place in the universe (if we have one). We are capable of limitless cruelty, but also limitless kindness. We can sink to the lowest depths as we slaughter each other, and poor tremendous effort into helping those less fortunate than us. I accept the good with the bad and have no interest in messing with that.

Through fluke or design we are, so near as we can tell, the only species capable of considering it's own existance. I'm not willing to throw that away because we aren't perfect. One of the costs of our existance is pain. So be it. There are some responses here that make me wonder how we ever got out of the caves.

[druid91]

You are failing to consider my motivations, there. I too would be defending the right of untold billions to live - my descendants on Earth, and a variety of inhuman life that is being trampled down by infeasibly large population. Again, there is actual utility in small size; some of that utility would be immensily beneficial to your dream as well. I find it funny how you fail to see that.

In the beginning perhaps.

But eventually I hope to see countless worlds. Each with billions of peope on them.

Inhuman life? Are you talking about aliens?

Your descendants. But what about those of the people whoe population growth you wish to reverse?

[LCP]

It's possible to approach Earth as a self-contained problem

Lurking/skimming, this is the point that strikes me as wrong.

The greatest motivator for expansion into space (infeasible as it may presently be) is that life on the surface the Earth is not a self-contained problem. If it was, we couldn't exist - the second law of thermodynamics would see to that. We're utterly dependent on the Sun, and the Sun has a finite lifetime. We're vulnerable to asteroids, we're vulnerable to volcanism, we're vulnerable to a whole bunch of things, controlling which is far less technologically feasible than propelling ourselves into space. The probability for any one of these things to happen at any given time is low, but on the timescales we're talking about, it becomes incredibly significant.

The history of life on Earth is a history of regular mass extinctions, caused by natural events. The human race might survive such an event, but human civilisation certainly wouldn't, and with the way that we've already exhausted our most easily accessible resources in coming this far, it seems unlikely that we could get back up from such a knock-down blow.

It doesn't matter whether you want to live forever in a robot body or have an endless procession of descendants on a single population-controlled planet: Earth isn't immortal. The idea of staving off the biosphere's mortality (I think earlier you mentioned "fortifying the Earth" against such events) isn't just technologically infeasible, it goes against the most fundamental underpinnings of our understanding of physics. Entropy is always increasing. Even if you survive every asteroid, every pandemic, every gamma ray burst, the Sun will still burn out, and the Earth will still die.

[Frozen_Feet]

Inhuman life? Are you talking about aliens?
I'm talking about perfectly ordinary life outside humans that has worth to its own and does not deserve to be neglected to the point ever-expanding population requires. Extraterrestrial life doesn't even need to enter to it.

Your descendants. But what about those of the people whoe population growth you wish to reverse?

Lets say that all people have one, and only one child; lets further say none of those children die without having kids of their own, die in accidents etc.; fast-forward in time, and there'll be considerably smaller population who will still be descendants of the whole past population. Sure, some genetic material gets lost in the interim, but that happens in all conceivable scenarios. Realistically, some family lines will get lost due to cataclysm or something else.

Reducing our population does not require "no kids, ever!" policy. It requires balancing birth and deathrates. There's a difference.

@Tyrant: Overpopulation is not some big, unrelatable boogie-man of the distant future. It's a problem of now, and there are relatable ways of approaching and dealing with the problem. Some aspects of space travel are further off and require equally large changes in geopolitics to achieve.

There are more human instincts than just reproduction, and increases in wellfare provenly create situations where birthrate goes below deathrate. Overcoming reproductive instinct is far less of an obstacle you make it out to be.

Our viewpoints are equally idealistic; their idealism is just directed differently. The reasons why I haven't fallen back on cynicism at every other turn of this thread is because it's not the slightest bit fruitful in the context. Cynicism can be equally unrealistic as idealism.


Lurking/skimming, this is the point that strikes me as wrong.

You make a good argument. I've argued for many of the same points in this very thread. I chose "self-contained" as descriptor, because I don't think there's a better word for the concept I'm after.

The toolbox down here is vast. Earth is much less mortal than people here make it to be, the universe more so, and at the same time, expansion into space is less feasible. So to an extent, trying to make do with what's available on Earth goes a much further way towards "extended survival of mankind".

[druid91]

I'm talking about perfectly ordinary life outside humans that has worth to its own and does not deserve to be neglected to the point ever-expanding population requires. Extraterrestrial life doesn't even need to enter to it.


Lets say that all people have one, and only one child; lets further say none of those children die without having kids of their own, die in accidents etc.; fast-forward in time, and there'll be considerably smaller population who will still be descendants of the whole past population. Sure, some genetic material gets lost in the interim, but that happens in all conceivable scenarios. Realistically, some family lines will get lost due to cataclysm or something else.

Reducing our population does not require "no kids, ever!" policy. It requires balancing birth and deathrates. There's a difference.

@Tyrant: Overpopulation is not some big, unrelatable boogie-man of the distant future. It's a problem of now, and there are relatable ways of approaching and dealing with the problem. Some aspects of space travel are further off and require equally large changes in geopolitics to achieve.

There are more human instincts than just reproduction, and increases in wellfare provenly create situations where birthrate goes below deathrate. Overcoming reproductive instinct is far less of an obstacle you make it out to be.

Our viewpoints are equally idealistic; their idealism is just directed differently. The reasons why I haven't fallen back on cynicism at every other turn of this thread is because it's not the slightest bit fruitful in the context. Cynicism can be equally unrealistic as idealism.

Now how do you make them have only one child? Say that they decide to say to heck with you and have 9 children.

How do you stop them?


You make a good argument. I've argued for many of the same points in this very thread. I chose "self-contained" as descriptor, because I don't think there's a better word for the concept I'm after.

The toolbox down here is vast. Earth is much less mortal than people here make it to be, the universe more so, and at the same time, expansion into space is less feasible. So to an extent, trying to make do with what's available on Earth goes a much further way towards "extended survival of mankind".

Why is expansion into space less feasible?

And the "toolbox" on earth is running out.

[Frozen_Feet]

How do you build a self-sufficient colony on Mars, huh? How you'll ensure sustenance of space colonies if civilization on Earth goes down in flames? :smalltongue:

I've already given my answer - by creating conditions which reward following that principle. It's called "law". Sure, people will break it from time to time. Doesn't make law bad or infeasible.

EDIT: The tool box is getting too small because there are too many people trying to share the same tools. There is a difference.

What comes to space travel... we are going around in circles again. If I did not convince you prior, then fine. But you haven't yet convinced me either. Find new ammunition, or wait for me to do so in turn.

[druid91]

How do you build a self-sufficient colony on Mars, huh? How you'll ensure sustenance of space colonies if civilization on Earth goes down in flames? :smalltongue:

I've already given my answer - by creating conditions which reward following that principle. It's called "law". Sure, people will break it from time to time. Doesn't make law bad or infeasible.

But when either a majority of people ignore the law, or you are forced to institute an increasingly invasive and oppressive state in order to enforce it... Do you really call that a win?

How do I build a self sufficient colony on mars?

Well what would we need. We would need oxygen, food, water, and the various minerals and metals right?

Oxygen, large algae growth tanks, or some similar low maintenance high growth plant life.

For food we have had hydroponics for years, and have recently developed something similar without the water.

Water, we bring an adequate supply with us. And I believe there is ice in space, harvest that.

Various minerals and metals, mine them from the martian soil. Bring some to start with

How to ensure the sustenance to the colonies? put farms on them.

In addition, one clever Idea I saw, was the current plan for terraforming mars, relies in part on using the pollution caused by the heavy industry to give it an atmosphere.

[Frozen_Feet]

But when either a majority of people ignore the law, or you are forced to institute an increasingly invasive and oppressive state in order to enforce it... Do you really call that a win?

Would you call Earth's civilization being wiped off in a nuclear war because not enough attention was paid to political problems, with a handful of colonies on Mars and Moon languishing for few decades before dying off, with a few hundred survivors send to a long and unsure trip, a win?

There are many, many ways either of our dreams could go wrong. Falling back to Broody Teen Cynicism is as fruitless as Silly Rabbit Idealism.

Being entirely realistic? I could very well see such opressive state being necessary. But if it's lesser of two evils? Sure, I'll take it. Some hard decisions have to be made - and this too I've said already.

[pendell]

In all of recorded history, no-one has set foot on Mars either. However, your idealism requires it to be possible eventually. Most of the things you brought up are already part of my knowledge and I've already adressed priorly.


Well, I kinda haven't read the whole thread :). Sorry about that, but my time is limited , as I am sure yours is also.

In any case: We have put unmanned probes on Mars. We have walked on the Moon. Travelling to Mars is an engineering challenge, not a scientific challenge. We could accomplish it today if we were willing to spend the time and money (multiple billion dollars, I expect) to do it.

Clinical immortality, by contrast , is plausible but will be a subject of research for quite some time. I estimate several centuries, possibly millenia.

Likewise, social engineering is not at a stage where it is possible to suppress human nature. Utopian experiments, from the Pennsylvania quakers to Israeli Kibbutz, have been attempted for five thousand years and have all failed.

I therefore believe the technology for space exploration offers a higher probability of success in a shorter time, relying to a much greater extent on technology already proven and developed.



Your argument hinges mainly on the thoughts that reinventing society is harder and won't be necessary before settling into space.


We already have the sociology to construct a civilization where resources are limited and tight discipline is required to keep it alive. It is called a Hydraulic Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_empire). This is a proven system that has served human civilizations well, sometimes for periods of thousands of years. It is not freedom, but it does allow survival.



Current developments and discoveries have, however, lead me to believe that reinventing society and tampering with human nature will be necessary before space travel, and in addition solve most problems you posit space travel will solve anyhow.


The only problem that it solves is that it provides more resources and space to expand in. I fully expect humans will fight and quarrel and destroy their cities in space. You solve that the way we solved it on earth ; continued expansion. While some cities will be destroyed, other people will be founding new ones due to economic conditions. Then you expand by geometic progression. For every one city destroyed two or three more or being founded. Just as happened in our world. While wars were fought in Europe, people were pushing out to make new colonies in the Americas and elsewhere. The human race will survive, so long as there are room and resources which allow it to do so.



Space travel is equally unnatural state for humanity as harmonious existence is, just in different ways.

Space travel requires that we solve engineering challenges, such as the need for a self-sustaining biosphere. By contrast, harmonious society requires that humans become something other than what they are. I do not regard that course of action as having a high probability of success.

Further, I remind you that the earth is not immortal; if nothing else happens , the planet is still destined to be consumed by a Red Giant in 5 billion years or so. Clinical immortality and a harmonious society aren't entirely helpful if the planet you're on is turned to a cinder!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[druid91]

Would you call Earth's civilization being wiped off in a nuclear war because not enough attention was paid to political problems, with a handful of colonies on Mars and Moon languishing for few decades before dying off, with a few hundred survivors send to a long and unsure trip, a win?

There are many, many ways either of our dreams could go wrong. Falling back to Broody Teen Cynicism is as fruitless as Silly Rabbit Idealism.

Being entirely realistic? I could very well see such opressive state being necessary. But if it's lesser of two evils? Sure, I'll take it. Some hard decisions have to be made - and this too I've said already.

Maybe it's just me but I like my freedoms.

[warty goblin]

Maybe it's just me but I like my freedoms.

The thing is over the entire human population you don't need to keep everybody from having lots of children; it's sufficient to ensure that the birth rate is not greater than (and for a while preferably under) the death rate. It's a statistical game, if for every family with nine children there's another nine without any, the birth rate is just as low as if nobody had more than one.

In which case you're talking incentive driven policy, not totalitarian absolutes. People could still be free to have umpteen children, it'd just be hellova expensive and probably socially stigmatized.

[Tyrant]

@Tyrant: Overpopulation is not some big, unrelatable boogie-man of the distant future.
Well, for the average person on the street it may as well be. How much coverage does it get on the news? How many movies have that being the downfall of the human race, as opposed to a multitude of natural disasters, massive warfare, or polluting the planet? Tell the average first world individual who is living quite well that overpopulation is a problem. They can't see the problem because it isn't a problem for them. It's a problem for those other folks, whoever they happen to be. If they agree, they likely do so in the abstract. Like people in the past (or now) worrying about pollution. On some level they agree that there is a problem, but if they aren't living in a smog cloud they probably aren't willing to do anything beyond some token gesture (sort out cans and bottles, to be taken away by the fossil fuel driven vehicle). Again, there will obviously be some exceptions, but by and large nothing will change until it absolutely has to (or if it becomes the cheaper option). You have to be able to convince people that there is a problem to put your fix (which I still haven't heard exactly what that is) into place.

That's what I am talking about. If you talk about war and how awful it is, people can relate reasonably well. We have all seen violence. Our entertainment and historical record has provided us with a huge number of examples of what we can do to one another. If you talk about changes in weather patterns, people can envision deserts and commercials showing starving people around the world. Nuclear war? People can picture the effects and they can believe it could happen because they know what we are capable of. Over population just doesn't have that impact on people. They know we have lots of free room left. They don't think of water (for some that's because most of the surface is covered in it). They don't think of how much land is needed for farming to keep everyone fed. The list goes on. It is like trying to get people to prepare now for the eventual death of our sun. It is very hard to make the case that there is a problem when the folks with the power to change things are living good. One fix requires a level of global unity that is, in my opinion, highly unlikely. The other has a real shot at being able to make serious strides without global unity. It might at some point require that, but by that point they will be able to point to success. Being honest with ourselves, lowering the birth rate really means lowering the birth rate in the non first world countries. At some point, that will require the carrot or the stick. My experience with humanity tells me it will be a lot more stick than carrot. At least one group has a vested interest in out populating the folks they perceive to be their enemies and they are very unlikely to change their mind on that matter and they don't exactly see eye to eye with logic and reason.

It's a problem of now, and there are relatable ways of approaching and dealing with the problem. Some aspects of space travel are further off and require equally large changes in geopolitics to achieve.
What exactly is your fix? How are you going to convince people to change their ways? Why do you think expanding a program we already have (the space program) will be anywhere near as dramatic a change as instituting global birth control/population decrease?

There are more human instincts than just reproduction, and increases in wellfare provenly create situations where birthrate goes below deathrate. Overcoming reproductive instinct is far less of an obstacle you make it out to be.
Sure there are other instincts. They tend to center around either protecting yourself or allowing the species to carry on (usually in the form of reproduction or avoiding other people when you are sick). You want to raise everyone's level of living? I am wondering how you do that without lowering the levels elsewhere. If you meet in the middle, how do you avoid increasing birthrates in the formerly first world nations? If you knock us down, you potentially eliminate the need for both parents to work. I believe that increases the likelyhood of large families again. Even with people living in first world conditions, large families haven't completely disappeared. There is also nothing that says the trend won't reverse at some point either.

The thing is over the entire human population you don't need to keep everybody from having lots of children; it's sufficient to ensure that the birth rate is not greater than (and for a while preferably under) the death rate. It's a statistical game, if for every family with nine children there's another nine without any, the birth rate is just as low as if nobody had more than one.

In which case you're talking incentive driven policy, not totalitarian absolutes. People could still be free to have umpteen children, it'd just be hellova expensive and probably socially stigmatized.
How do you hope to achieve that balance? Sure, some people will sign up for that. What if half those families change their mind and have a kid? Of those, one or two have one or two more kids? How do you convince any nation that has no interest in that scheme to go along with it? What happens when you hit your quota but still have people wanting to have kids? who monitors this and what is the penalty? There are very real reasons for first world nations to want to have higher populations. Less fortunate folks have to deal with pretty bad situations where more kids make sense. Certain belief systems either encourage large families or discourage birth control. You're talking about global level reform in an area that most people believe no one else has any business dictating terms. If the various predictions I have read pan out, the one case of the attempted implimentation of an idea like this is going to lead to some pretty bad results in the next few decades for the country in question.

[warty goblin]

How do you hope to achieve that balance? Sure, some people will sign up for that. What if half those families change their mind and have a kid? Of those, one or two have one or two more kids? How do you convince any nation that has no interest in that scheme to go along with it? What happens when you hit your quota but still have people wanting to have kids? who monitors this and what is the penalty? There are very real reasons for first world nations to want to have higher populations. Less fortunate folks have to deal with pretty bad situations where more kids make sense. Certain belief systems either encourage large families or discourage birth control. You're talking about global level reform in an area that most people believe no one else has any business dictating terms. If the various predictions I have read pan out, the one case of the attempted implimentation of an idea like this is going to lead to some pretty bad results in the next few decades for the country in question.

You convince people of this the same way you convince people of most anything else: money and social pressure. Making lots of babies illegal would be difficult to impossible to implement in a way that's not morally repugnant, but what about paying men to get a vasectomy after their first child?

I'm not saying it isn't a very hard problem, but it's a problem that both sides of this debate definitely have a vested interest in solving, since the odds of a space colony capable of feeding, reproducing and expanding itself appearing in the near future does not strike me as being particularly high. If worldwide nuclear war caused by overpopulation is as likely as you claim, you of all people should admit this needs solving, if only so humanity endures long enough to get to space. After the bombs drop, I don't see many of the survivors caring much about moonbases, do you?

[HalfTangible]

A viewpoint I haven't yet seen much in this thread: if humans are such bastards, why go through the trouble of preserving them in the first place?

Because unlike the rest of life, we have the capacity to choose to either be complete bastards or be decent people. Other life reacts. We act.

Moreover, why does everyone think i said all of humanity was complete bastards? :smallconfused: Just because a bucket is full of <censored> doesn't mean there isn't metal.

[LCP]

The toolbox down here is vast. Earth is much less mortal than people here make it to be, the universe more so, and at the same time, expansion into space is less feasible. So to an extent, trying to make do with what's available on Earth goes a much further way towards "extended survival of mankind".

I hope you'll excuse me that I haven't read through the whole thread, so I don't know 'how mortal' people have been depicting the Earth as being... but the Earth is definitely, inescapably mortal.

Yes, we can do tons of stuff with what we have; if we couldn't, we wouldn't be speaking right now. But that doesn't mean we can do everything, and there are many extinction threats that it's far less likely we could ever do anything about than getting ourselves into space. The Sun moving off the Main Sequence is the biggest one, and has a probability of 1.0. You can't stop it, and if you stay down here, you can't escape it.

The same, of course, is true for any star... but some stars are younger than others, and if you can keep moving/spreading out, there's nothing to say you can't live long, long past the first such event as a species. I know there's no truly objective moral value to the long-term survival of the human race, but you seem to agree with everyone else that one way or another, it'd be a good thing.

The thing is, you're then depicting it as an either-or situation... either we fix everything down here, or we go into space at the expense of all that. As you say, we have a big toolbox. Why can't we try to do both? The extinction-level events we need to worry about happen on a timescale long enough that we're not exactly in a rush to get off the planet. Right now, expansion into space on any kind of level that could avoid such an end isn't just infeasible, it's impossible. But so was building a 14 TeV proton-proton collider in 1899 - and now the LHC is whizzing away. Putting a man on the moon didn't take impetus away from the civil rights movement in the USA, and I don't think a long-term policy of expansion into space in any way necessarily stalls social betterment down here.

[pendell]

@LCP: Well said. Let those who want to make a paradise of earth do their best, and let those who want to colonize space do their best, and between us will muddle through somehow. Who knows? Maybe our descendents will be trading partners.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Frozen_Feet]

Well, for the average person on the street it may as well be. How much coverage does it get on the news?

Think for a sec: what are the effects of overpopulation?

They are: War. Famine. Disease. Fugitives. Fuel shortages.

These things? Is there something else in the news today?

You see, once you break the problem of overpopulation to its component parts, it suddenly seizes to be a lot less abstract. At the same moment, seeking solutions to the problems goes from speculation to engineering, since many of these things are tied to systems of everyday life. War? Create political goodwill. Famine? Rearrange logistics, breed better plants. Disease? Create new vaccines. Fuel shortages? Research renewable resources.

You are also misrepresenting one core problem. It's not 1st world inhabitants who are well off we need to convince; many of them are already convinced , and while their rate of resource consumption leaves much to be desired, their birthrate is already below deathrate. The real problems lie in the 3rd world, where the problems are greatest and people need to get kicked out of survival mode so they can sit down and craft a working society.


What exactly is your fix? How are you going to convince people to change their ways? Why do you think expanding a program we already have (the space program) will be anywhere near as dramatic a change as instituting global birth control/population decrease?

What level of space program are we talking about here? Succesfully sending a few people to Mars for a decade or so? Sure, that'd be easier. Creating a colony independent of Earth geopolitics to sustain itself? That wouldn't be. Making humanity into a race of Von Neuman probes that can always reach the next resupply depot? Vastly harder. The chances of the latter two happening before Earth population needs to be stabilized. Minimal.

As for how to make people fix their ways: law. Education. Money. Increased living standards. Seem like abstracts to you? They cease to be once you descent down to the nittygrits. We've succesfully campaigned so that 90% of humanity is literate. We've vaccinated enough people to eliminate polio from most countries. Most of the things required to stabilize the population? Are on a similar level.

Before you start demanding more details, I must once again ask you whether you have blueprints for a working space colony. Neither of us can go to much deeper level of detail, because there are problems associated with both that no-one has solved. Talking about some problems and solutions are even prohibited by the board rules.

But both are being worked on. If neither of us can convince the other, then we just need to shut up and wait till we find new ammunition.


You want to raise everyone's level of living? I am wondering how you do that without lowering the levels elsewhere. If you meet in the middle, how do you avoid increasing birthrates in the formerly first world nations?
The trick is to start raising everyone's standard of living to the necessary treshold early enough, so that it is possible to achieve (and maintain) before the population grows too large for such endeavor. There might be steps required where we have to take away stuff from those most well off, but it doesn't follow we can't keep up the incentive to have reasonable amount of kids. Again: education. Law. There are living conditions below current 1st world levels that are entirely acceptable, and still work towards the stated goal.

You can argue, if you want to, that our population is already way too high for it to be possible to reach necessary standards for all peoples. However, if such is the case, then I'm afraid nature itself will step in and fix the problem like it always does with overlarge animal populations.

However, if you hold such a stance, your cynicism towards directing human civilization in contrast to your optimism towards space travel is even more amazing than I previously thought. Population collapse will likely be equally detrimental to space travel as it is to my goals. A population collapse doesn't mean the problem can't be solved, oh no! It means we must man up, learn from our mistakes and try again so it doesn't repeat itself. Starting again with smaller population could even make reaching the goal easier.


I hope you'll excuse me that I haven't read through the whole thread.../QUOTE]

Shame on you! :smalltongue:

Okay, this happens in all long running threads. You are excused. However, while I might be too stubborn to admit defeat, I can recognize when a discussion goes around in circles. So don't take offense if I seize to reply after this, since I really don't have much more things to say about these subjects anymore. (^^;;)

[QUOTE=LCP;10344746]...so I don't know 'how mortal' people have been depicting the Earth as being... but the Earth is definitely, inescapably mortal.

Oh, everything is mortal. However, Earth isn't necessarily more mortal than the universe itself. I've seen a few cosmological models where adapting, conscious beings could stretch the feasible timespan for life on Earth to the point where the rest of the universe becomes equally uninhabitable. At which point, it becomes a matter of priorities - do we live well and die here, or live poorly and die somewhere else? If the answer is "but we can live well here and poorly there!", I must again call into question what more value do suffering people add to the bliss of others.

It becomes a matter of diminishing returns. Would the energies spend to keep space travel going be better spend on something else?

To me, quality of life is more important than quantity. 99 happy people out of hundred is better than 99 happy people out of ten thousand. To some extent, increase in quantity helps increasing quality, but there are pretty clear situations where having more people becomes detrimental to the goal of having more happy people. This extends to temporal dimensions too. It's better to have a creature live 19 happy years out of 20, than it's to have a creature live 19 happy years out few billion.


The thing is, you're then depicting it as an either-or situation... either we fix everything down here, or we go into space at the expense of all that. As you say, we have a big toolbox. Why can't we try to do both?
You are right that in the long run, it isn't necessarily either-or situation. There are several hypothetical technologies that would make me withdraw my argument - they're just so far into the realm of science fantasy that I don't give them much weight in these discussions yet.

However, as has been noted, I view several portions of my vision as necessary stepping stones for space travel as well. So, to me, speculaton of starfaring species is putting the cart before the horse. It isn't "either we fix everything down here, or we go into space at the expense of all that", it's "either fix most things down here, or don't go to space at all." My skepticism towards the value of going to space at all is on top of that, and based on current trends in science which make it seem less, not more feasible.

This might yet turn around - but the arguments made in this topic so far haven't been any more convincing to me as my arguments of re-engineering human culture have been to others.

[AtomicKitKat]

I don't believe wanting immortality is "selfish" or "evil". My belief is that mortality is inherently selfishness-inducing. "Why worry about tomorrow? Let the kids figure out how to solve global warming, like I did the Great War/Great Depression/WW2/Vietnam/September 11th/whatever." It's a lot harder to justify messing up the world if you're going to be around to experience the mess.

[HalfTangible]

I don't believe wanting immortality is "selfish" or "evil". My belief is that mortality is inherently selfishness-inducing. "Why worry about tomorrow? Let the kids figure out how to solve global warming, like I did the Great War/Great Depression/WW2/Vietnam/September 11th/whatever." It's a lot harder to justify messing up the world if you're going to be around to experience the mess.

I believe that immortality is a bad thing. May i direct you to Tuck Everlasting?

And if it's just eternal life - you still age. Which means your body eventually wears itself down, since it was designed to enhance immediate survivability and reproduction.

And to keep that from happening your body has to reboot every now and again. It'd end with you getting killed, and i know that deadly wounds are the least painful but that doesn't mean it ain't gonna hurt. There's one other way to end it under those circumstances, but i'd prefer to stay out of that line of discussion as it strays into morality and politics.

And even if you can avoid all that, overpopulation becomes an even bigger issue because immortals can contribute to birth rates but not death rates. Unless they're mass murderers, of course, but that's more than a little extreme.

And all of those assume your brain remains intact and working all of those years. We are mortal, end of story.

OT: Mortality is selfishness inducing, yes. But true immortality is apathy inducing by it's nature, simply because death and destruction - or rather, fear of it - is what drives most actions humans take. We fear the death or misery of others, so we give, we have children to keep our race from dying out, we fear the dangerous, etc etc

[druid91]

Think for a sec: what are the effects of overpopulation?

They are: War. Famine. Disease. Fugitives. Fuel shortages.

These things? Is there something else in the news today?

You see, once you break the problem of overpopulation to its component parts, it suddenly seizes to be a lot less abstract. At the same moment, seeking solutions to the problems goes from speculation to engineering, since many of these things are tied to systems of everyday life. War? Create political goodwill. Famine? Rearrange logistics, breed better plants. Disease? Create new vaccines. Fuel shortages? Research renewable resources.

You are also misrepresenting one core problem. It's not 1st world inhabitants who are well off we need to convince; many of them are already convinced , and while their rate of resource consumption leaves much to be desired, their birthrate is already below deathrate. The real problems lie in the 3rd world, where the problems are greatest and people need to get kicked out of survival mode so they can sit down and craft a working society.



What level of space program are we talking about here? Succesfully sending a few people to Mars for a decade or so? Sure, that'd be easier. Creating a colony independent of Earth geopolitics to sustain itself? That wouldn't be. Making humanity into a race of Von Neuman probes that can always reach the next resupply depot? Vastly harder. The chances of the latter two happening before Earth population needs to be stabilized. Minimal.

As for how to make people fix their ways: law. Education. Money. Increased living standards. Seem like abstracts to you? They cease to be once you descent down to the nittygrits. We've succesfully campaigned so that 90% of humanity is literate. We've vaccinated enough people to eliminate polio from most countries. Most of the things required to stabilize the population? Are on a similar level.

Before you start demanding more details, I must once again ask you whether you have blueprints for a working space colony. Neither of us can go to much deeper level of detail, because there are problems associated with both that no-one has solved. Talking about some problems and solutions are even prohibited by the board rules.

But both are being worked on. If neither of us can convince the other, then we just need to shut up and wait till we find new ammunition.


The trick is to start raising everyone's standard of living to the necessary treshold early enough, so that it is possible to achieve (and maintain) before the population grows too large for such endeavor. There might be steps required where we have to take away stuff from those most well off, but it doesn't follow we can't keep up the incentive to have reasonable amount of kids. Again: education. Law. There are living conditions below current 1st world levels that are entirely acceptable, and still work towards the stated goal.

You can argue, if you want to, that our population is already way too high for it to be possible to reach necessary standards for all peoples. However, if such is the case, then I'm afraid nature itself will step in and fix the problem like it always does with overlarge animal populations.

However, if you hold such a stance, your cynicism towards directing human civilization in contrast to your optimism towards space travel is even more amazing than I previously thought. Population collapse will likely be equally detrimental to space travel as it is to my goals. A population collapse doesn't mean the problem can't be solved, oh no! It means we must man up, learn from our mistakes and try again so it doesn't repeat itself. Starting again with smaller population could even make reaching the goal easier.


I hope you'll excuse me that I haven't read through the whole thread.../QUOTE]

Shame on you! :smalltongue:

Okay, this happens in all long running threads. You are excused. However, while I might be too stubborn to admit defeat, I can recognize when a discussion goes around in circles. So don't take offense if I seize to reply after this, since I really don't have much more things to say about these subjects anymore. (^^;;)



Oh, everything is mortal. However, Earth isn't necessarily more mortal than the universe itself. I've seen a few cosmological models where adapting, conscious beings could stretch the feasible timespan for life on Earth to the point where the rest of the universe becomes equally uninhabitable. At which point, it becomes a matter of priorities - do we live well and die here, or live poorly and die somewhere else? If the answer is "but we can live well here and poorly there!", I must again call into question what more value do suffering people add to the bliss of others.

It becomes a matter of diminishing returns. Would the energies spend to keep space travel going be better spend on something else?

To me, quality of life is more important than quantity. 99 happy people out of hundred is better than 99 happy people out of ten thousand. To some extent, increase in quantity helps increasing quality, but there are pretty clear situations where having more people becomes detrimental to the goal of having more happy people. This extends to temporal dimensions too. It's better to have a creature live 19 happy years out of 20, than it's to have a creature live 19 happy years out few billion.


You are right that in the long run, it isn't necessarily either-or situation. There are several hypothetical technologies that would make me withdraw my argument - they're just so far into the realm of science fantasy that I don't give them much weight in these discussions yet.

However, as has been noted, I view several portions of my vision as necessary stepping stones for space travel as well. So, to me, speculaton of starfaring species is putting the cart before the horse. It isn't "either we fix everything down here, or we go into space at the expense of all that", it's "either fix most things down here, or don't go to space at all." My skepticism towards the value of going to space at all is on top of that, and based on current trends in science which make it seem less, not more feasible.

This might yet turn around - but the arguments made in this topic so far haven't been any more convincing to me as my arguments of re-engineering human culture have been to others.

First of all while augmenting the human race would be handy for becoming a starfaring race.
It's not necessary.

We are near space now. Really all we'd need is a space elevator and we'd be set now.

And you keep saying that but you never say what these trends are. If space was relly so useless I doubt the mars mission would be continuing.

And I find it ridiculous that the earth will be around long enough to see the end of the universe.


I believe that immortality is a bad thing. May i direct you to Tuck Everlasting?

And if it's just eternal life - you still age. Which means your body eventually wears itself down, since it was designed to enhance immediate survivability and reproduction.

And to keep that from happening your body has to reboot every now and again. It'd end with you getting killed, and i know that deadly wounds are the least painful but that doesn't mean it ain't gonna hurt. There's one other way to end it under those circumstances, but i'd prefer to stay out of that line of discussion as it strays into morality and politics.

And even if you can avoid all that, overpopulation becomes an even bigger issue because immortals can contribute to birth rates but not death rates. Unless they're mass murderers, of course, but that's more than a little extreme.

And all of those assume your brain remains intact and working all of those years. We are mortal, end of story.

OT: Mortality is selfishness inducing, yes. But true immortality is apathy inducing by it's nature, simply because death and destruction - or rather, fear of it - is what drives most actions humans take. We fear the death or misery of others, so we give, we have children to keep our race from dying out, we fear the dangerous, etc etc

Personally, The version of immortality I'm hoping for is mechanical, not organic. Parts wear out I replace them. My brain gets close to wearing out I transfer.

It may induce apathy, but that would be boring. I at least would indeed take a several million year nap. Then I would wake up. And do things.

[HalfTangible]

And you keep saying that but you never say what these trends are. If space was relly so useless I doubt the mars mission would be continuing.

I can think of at least one country where it isn't. :smallannoyed: Cuz <censored - forum rules do not allow me to continue this train of thought. I mean discussion>.


And I find it ridiculous that the earth will be around long enough to see the end of the universe.

It won't have life on it, but earth itself - as in crust, magma etc - has a chance. A very miniscule, almost zero chance, but a chance.

it has absolutely no chance of keeping life on it for it's whol existence though :smallfrown:

Also: you messed up the quoting thing =/ can't tell what's yours and what's the other guy's.

[druid91]

I can think of at least one country where it isn't. :smallannoyed: Cuz <censored - forum rules do not allow me to continue this train of thought. I mean discussion>.



It won't have life on it, but earth itself - as in crust, magma etc - has a chance. A very miniscule, almost zero chance, but a chance.

it has absolutely no chance of keeping life on it for it's whol existence though :smallfrown:

Also: you messed up the quoting thing =/ can't tell what's yours and what's the other guy's.

I fixed the quote thing.

And by earth I mean living earth.:smallwink: Not whatever remains of it's mass after it is destroyed. Though I wonder, If we do become a space faring race... Will there be people selling "genuine" earth rock Some day? Like meteorites now.

[HalfTangible]

I fixed the quote thing.

And by earth I mean living earth.:smallwink: Not whatever remains of it's mass after it is destroyed. Though I wonder, If we do become a space faring race... Will there be people selling "genuine" earth rock Some day? Like meteorites now.

Not before selling earth plants :smalltongue:

"Take a look at this beautiful seqouia mahogany tree! An earth variety ya know! Only 3 miles tall, and the fire it breathes is green, so you know it's genuine Terraborn! only 900 credits. We'll even throw in a space condo to attach to the top, only an extra 150 credits! Act now!"

[druid91]

Not before selling earth plants :smalltongue:

"Take a look at this beautiful seqouia mahogany tree! An earth variety ya know! Only 3 miles tall, and the fire it breathes is green, so you know it's genuine Terraborn! only 900 credits. We'll even throw in a space condo to attach to the top, only an extra 150 credits! Act now!"

And theres more, if you act now we'll throw in a genuine earth-cat! We'll even clip the poisonous fangs for free!

[HalfTangible]

And theres more, if you act now we'll throw in a genuine earth-cat! We'll even clip the poisonous fangs for free!

And we'll even throw in - at no extra charge - a genuine interactive earth history archive, perfectly re-rendered in Holo format!! Here's just one clip of said archive:

"Tempting bats, but no dice. Now the inmates are running the asylum!"

[LCP]

I've seen a few cosmological models where adapting, conscious beings could stretch the feasible timespan for life on Earth to the point where the rest of the universe becomes equally uninhabitable.

I'm skeptical but interested. Could you give me a reference, please? I'm a physicist (4th year undergraduate), so I have access to my university's journal subscriptions through the department - if it's an academic paper I can probably get through to it without any paywall difficulties.

I say skeptical because the lifespan of the Sun is known and certainly a lot shorter than the lifespan of the galaxy. Conservation of energy is conservation of energy... if your 'adapting, conscious beings' are still playing by any of the rules of human biology, I'm not seeing how they can live without a parent star. Meanwhile, we can observe that there are stellar nurseries out there, so unless we're phenomenally unlucky and all that stuff just went 'poof' in the time it took the light to reach us, new stars are being born right now for the Sun to shout "damn kids, get off the lawn" at.

[HalfTangible]

I'm skeptical but interested. Could you give me a reference, please? I'm a physicist (4th year undergraduate), so I have access to my university's journal subscriptions through the department - if it's an academic paper I can probably get through to it without any paywall difficulties.

I say skeptical because the lifespan of the Sun is known and certainly a lot shorter than the lifespan of the galaxy. Conservation of energy is conservation of energy... if your 'adapting, conscious beings' are still playing by any of the rules of human biology, I'm not seeing how they can live without a parent star. Meanwhile, we can observe that there are stellar nurseries out there, so unless we're phenomenally unlucky and all that stuff just went 'poof' in the time it took the light to reach us, new stars are being born right now for the Sun to shout "damn kids, get off the lawn" at.

the sun's not THAT old yet =/

Surviving without a parent star would technically be possible if you could find another way to get solar energy, but it would be ineffective, extremely risky and most likely would be short-term (i'm thinking star-hopping spaceship, basically)

[Frozen_Feet]

One of the theories was based on the Big Rip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip), which itself is based on the model of Accelerating universe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe) An article I saw few years back, dealing with scientific theories of the "end of the universe", dealt with it in addition to Big Crunch you've prolly heard about.

That article posited that the Big Rip would happen in one billion years, which is considerably sooner than older estimates of when sun will leave its main sequence. Don't have the article with me, so can't say more about the math. Current data seems to point against this, though.

[HalfTangible]

One of the theories was based on the Big Rip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip), which itself is based on the model of Accelerating universe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe) An article I saw few years back, dealing with scientific theories of the "end of the universe", dealt with it in addition to Big Crunch you've prolly heard about.

That article posited that the Big Rip would happen in one billion years, which is considerably sooner than older estimates of when sun will leave its main sequence. Don't have the article with me, so can't say more about the math. Current data seems to point against this, though.

I'm no physicist, but that sounds a lot like saying that dividing your distance by one half over and over never quite brings you to zero =/ (meaning, it only works in theory)

[Frozen_Feet]

I'm not following.

[LCP]

the sun's not THAT old yet =/

The Sun's ~5 billion years old. If I remember my astro correctly, its projected main sequence lifetime is ~10 billion years. So it's about halfway there.

Of course, from a human point of view, if you compare how long we've had the benefit of living under the Sun to how long it's got to go, the proportions are much nicer-looking.

@Frozen_Feet: Thanks for the link - I hadn't actually heard of this! However, the paper in question seems a fairly speculative theoretical excursion (just three pages!), and clicking through on the various links, it looks like data is coming in (http://www.universetoday.com/22382/no-big-rip-in-our-future-chandra-provides-insights-into-dark-energy/) to disconfirm it.

EDIT: Plus, even taking such a doomsday scenario into consideration (which is picking something that is pretty improbable as your base assumption), you're still talking about a billion years before it happens. Cataclysmic asteroid impacts, to pick just one civilisation-threatening natural disaster, happen with a much higher frequency than that.

[warty goblin]

I'm no physicist, but that sounds a lot like saying that dividing your distance by one half over and over never quite brings you to zero =/ (meaning, it only works in theory)

That's a limit, you can get as close to zero as you want, but for any finite number of divisions you are not going to be there.

The Big Rip hypothesis however is a bit more subtle than that. If I understand it correctly, it says that if dark energy has sufficient negative pressure, it will simply push stuff apart fast enough that it cannot interact.

The subtle part is that dark energy is thought to be fairly evenly distributed in the universe, so the farther apart two things are, the more dark energy there is between them, and the faster the space between them expands. The rate at which two objects are receding from each other is thus proportional to the distance between them, which means that we're looking at an exponential growth type of problem. The key here is that a positive exponential will exceed any finite number in finite time. Since the spaces between your atoms, and even their electrons and the nucleus are finite, eventually dark energy will pull them apart so that they can no longer interact.

For an easy to visualize thought experiment, suppose you have two dots on a rubber band, and an infinite stream of ants marching from one dot to the next at some fixed rate. The rubber band here is the universe, ants gravity or an electro-magnetic force, their speed that of light, and the stretching of the band is the dark energy.

Now start to stretch the band. If you stretch it at a constant rate that's less than the ants' marching speed, the ants will take increasing amounts of time to reach their destination, but they will always arrive.

But now start to stretch the rubber band really fast - in fact let's make it double in length every minute. Since the ants are moving at a fixed rate, eventually the band will be expanding faster than they can walk, and dot A can no longer interact with dot B. The closer together dots A and B are, the longer this will take, but it will always happen under this model.

That's the Big Rip, more or less.

(I should note that the relevant Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip)page specifies that this is not likely to happen)

[HalfTangible]

That's a limit, you can get as close to zero as you want, but for any finite number of divisions you are not going to be there.

In theory. Which was the whole point. In theory you never hit zero. In a real world scenario, sooner or later you're going to hit whatever object happens to be zero because sooner or later you don't have the senses neccesary to divide by half any more.

And under your model, the rubber band will eventually snap.

[warty goblin]

In theory. Which was the whole point. In theory you never hit zero. In a real world scenario, sooner or later you're going to hit whatever object happens to be zero because sooner or later you don't have the senses neccesary to divide by half any more.

That depends whether we're talking physics or mathematics though. Numerically you will never get to zero, no matter how many steps you take, I can still find closer points*, and you will never get there.

If we're talking physical distances, then no matter the precision of your instruments, eventually the distance will be shorter than the quantum uncertainty in your position, and it's no longer possible to tell whether you're there or not.


*Technically as many closer points as there are numbers.

None of which are at all relevant to the big rip hypothesis, because there the rate of expansion exceeds the speed of light in finite time. It's still not going infinitely fast, but once you beat lightspeed, it actually no longer matters because nothing, including gravity and the strong and weak forces, propagates faster than lightspeed.


And under your model, the rubber band will eventually snap.
It's infinitely stretchy, I got it the same place as my infinite supply of lightspeed ants: Mr. Math's Thought Experiment Prop Emporium. They've got a special on bullets that travel faster than the speed of light right now, very handy for all your causal paradox needs.

[Frozen_Feet]

Actually, in regard to Big Rip, the rubber band snapping might be a pretty good analogy.

[pendell]

The Sun's ~5 billion years old. If I remember my astro correctly, its projected main sequence lifetime is ~10 billion years. So it's about halfway there.

Of course, from a human point of view, if you compare how long we've had the benefit of living under the Sun to how long it's got to go, the proportions are much nicer-looking.

@Frozen_Feet: Thanks for the link - I hadn't actually heard of this! However, the paper in question seems a fairly speculative theoretical excursion (just three pages!), and clicking through on the various links, it looks like data is coming in (http://www.universetoday.com/22382/no-big-rip-in-our-future-chandra-provides-insights-into-dark-energy/) to disconfirm it.

EDIT: Plus, even taking such a doomsday scenario into consideration (which is picking something that is pretty improbable as your base assumption), you're still talking about a billion years before it happens. Cataclysmic asteroid impacts, to pick just one civilisation-threatening natural disaster, happen with a much higher frequency than that.



FYI, I followed up on this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_giant#The_Sun_as_a_red_giant), and it is noted that, while the Sun will not expand to red giant for 5 billion years -- we believe -- the earth will be uninhabitable long before that event.



Before this happens, Earth's biosphere will have long been destroyed by the Sun's steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles and its core contracts, even before the transition to a Red Giant. After just over 1 billion years, the extra solar energy input will cause Earth's oceans to evaporate and the hydrogen from the water to be lost permanently to space, with total loss of water by 3 billion years.[19] Earth's atmosphere and lithosphere will become like that of Venus. Over another billion years, most of the atmosphere will get lost in space as well;[16] ultimately leaving Earth as a desiccated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock.


So: The planet Earth will NOT be the pleasant, green place we know it in 1 billion years. It will be desert in 3 billion years and Venus in 5. The molten ball that eventually falls into the sun will have nothing in common with the planet we live on today.

So it seems to me that space colonization is mandatory, even if the "space" colonized is actually earth itself! If we do not find some means of creating and sustaining a biosphere by artificial means, it will eventually cease to exist naturally.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Talya]

I have wondered if I'm the same "me" as I was yesterday. Am I the same consciousness as the little kindergarten girl I was 30-odd years ago?

The end result is, it doesn't matter. As someone else said, there is an unbroken line of consciousness between that little girl and me. What she experienced is now and always will be part of the programming of my brain.


You are equating physical matter and knowledge with consciousness, and they are not the same thing. If you could clone yourself, as an adult, with identical brains, you would never share a consciousness, even in that instant where your experiences were identical. You'd be different versions of yourself. Consciousness is not what you know, or what you're made of. It's more than that. I'll not touch on religion here, but there's overlap between religion and science where the subject of "What is a person?" is involved, so I apologize in advance if I stray too close to the subject.

I want to preface this by saying I don't believe in a soul, or anything eternal. I have no beliefs in any superstitions or mysticism. But from a purely logical and practical standpoint, my life experience and observation tells me consciousness is not something science can measure, or that can be quantified. Not yet, anyway. A person who suffers inrecoverable amnesia may have lost their past experiences, but those experiences still shape who they are to some degree, because they have contributed to that person's knowledge and skills. They have changed, but they are still the same consciousness, same person.


Lastly, this 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-ton ball of iron that we live on will not last forever, even if we take care of it. Spreading our culture and our species to the stars will help ensure our survival for billions of years longer than we would otherwise last. I truly hope mankind strives for apotheosis, and becomes one with the legends we have created, taking at last our great strides across the cosmos. Nietzsche once wrote, "Companions, the Creator seeks, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the Creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets." (Thus spake Zarathustra) No matter what one believes or doesn't believe, we can take our destiny as a species into our own hands. We can be more than these primitive animals we are now, barely above the species we share this planet with. We can make worlds. Or we can fizzle out and disappear. The choice is ours.

Edit: Sorry, that was long. It's one of my favorite concepts in science fiction -- the apotheosis of man. Babylon 5 will forever remain one of my favorites for that reason, despite its dated effects and mediocre scripts and acting, due to its subject matter, deep characters, and incredible story.

[AtomicKitKat]

I believe that immortality is a bad thing. May i direct you to Tuck Everlasting?

Not too relevant. It's derived from the position that immortality is a bad thing.(tm)


And if it's just eternal life - you still age. Which means your body eventually wears itself down, since it was designed to enhance immediate survivability and reproduction.

And to keep that from happening your body has to reboot every now and again. It'd end with you getting killed, and i know that deadly wounds are the least painful but that doesn't mean it ain't gonna hurt. There's one other way to end it under those circumstances, but i'd prefer to stay out of that line of discussion as it strays into morality and politics.


Obviously, we're talking immortality in the sense of perfect regeneration without telomeric shortening(or at least, some way of lengthening them indefinitely). Exectution/Euthanasia is a possibility, yes. I think most folks would only do that in the case of a crazy person who was either too insane to fix(that is, beyond even replacing their brain cells with new stem cells), or had already done too much damage(or killing).


And even if you can avoid all that, overpopulation becomes an even bigger issue because immortals can contribute to birth rates but not death rates. Unless they're mass murderers, of course, but that's more than a little extreme.

That depends. Even as mortals, some folks don't want kids. Also, the first argument is more applicable to males than females(until/unless there's a way to keep the ovaries "fresh" for life, and even then, there's a limit, set from birth, to the number of ova within).


And all of those assume your brain remains intact and working all of those years. We are mortal, end of story.

See the part above about replacing/repairing damaged brains.


OT: Mortality is selfishness inducing, yes. But true immortality is apathy inducing by it's nature, simply because death and destruction - or rather, fear of it - is what drives most actions humans take. We fear the death or misery of others, so we give, we have children to keep our race from dying out, we fear the dangerous, etc etc

First, you'd need to define "true" immortality. If you mean Biblical/Apocalypse(Marvel) levels of immortality, wherein you cannot be killed, then that is very likely to happen. However, most folks here(I'm surmising) are talking about trans-senescense immortality, wherein one does not "die of old age", and indeed, remains at approximately age 18-40 until/unless extreme injury(presumably, disease would either be eradicated, or my personal preference, cured, in order to provide immunity from future viral uprisings). A TS immortal would still fear death. Just not the "I have no time left!" type(barring some hyper-aggressive and/or life-value-reducing disease).

[HalfTangible]

Not too relevant. It's derived from the position that immortality is a bad thing.(tm)
It explains why immortality would be a bad thing and thus is a good example to point towards. >.>




Obviously, we're talking immortality in the sense of perfect regeneration without telomeric shortening(or at least, some way of lengthening them indefinitely). Exectution/Euthanasia is a possibility, yes. I think most folks would only do that in the case of a crazy person who was either too insane to fix(that is, beyond even replacing their brain cells with new stem cells), or had already done too much damage(or killing).1) I have no idea what telomeric is, 2) no, it isn't obvious, 3) i was giving various possible scenarios for immortality and explaining why they were bad.


That depends. Even as mortals, some folks don't want kids.

I KNOW there are people who don't want kids! I'm one of those people! I said CAN.


Also, the first argument is more applicable to males than females(until/unless there's a way to keep the ovaries "fresh" for life, and even then, there's a limit, set from birth, to the number of ova within).

Considering males can impregnate more than one woman at a time, i think an immortal male would contribute more often anyway, unless he was monogamous with another immortal female.


See the part above about replacing/repairing damaged brains.Doesn't really matter since all of those scenarios assume that that can be done. Which i said.


First, you'd need to define "true" immortality.

Not really, no =/ Immortality is defined as eternal life. Which means you can't be killed and you don't die from old age.

[JonestheSpy]

Seems to me like everyone participating in this thread needs to run out and buy Kim Stanley Robinson's amazing Mars trilogy, if you haven't read it already. A brilliant writer who really knows his science, he really delves into a lot of the things being discussed here, including the effect of extended lifespans on society (not to mention the colonization of first Mars then the rest of the solar system).

[Talya]

Seems to me like everyone participating in this thread needs to run out and buy Kim Stanley Robinson's amazing Mars trilogy, if you haven't read it already. A brilliant writer who really knows his science, he really delves into a lot of the things being discussed here, including the effect of extended lifespans on society (not to mention the colonization of first Mars then the rest of the solar system).

I liked that trilogy, but it deals more with political science than what is being talked about here, per se. If you want a book that might touch a bit on this, perhaps try Starplex, by Robert J. Sawyer.

[Frozen_Feet]

Larry Niven's Ringworld touches on all the subjects as well, though I'm not sure how well it has aged.

[The Big Dice]

Larry Niven's Ringworld touches on all the subjects as well, though I'm not sure how well it has aged.

Ringworld and it's many sequels have aged fairly well. Niven's A Gift From Earth touches on the idea of functional immortality and the price that might be paid for acheiving it through transplant surgery.

[Incompleat]

While I certainly approve of space exploration, I think that it will take a fairly long time yet before stable, self-sustaining extraterrestrial colonies become technologically and economically feasible: I am pretty much guessing, and predicting technological progress is a notoriously tricky matter, but I would be surprised if, for example, "true" colonization of Mars (as in, not just a bunch of scientists/explorers staying there for a few years, but common people living on Mars for their foreseeable future) will begin before the end of the century.

Keep in mind, with our current technology building cities in the Gobi Desert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert) or in the Antarctic would be only barely possible, assuming that one can even find people insane enough to want to live there, and these places are basically the Garden of Eden compared to Mars...

This leads me to another, less glamorous enterprise which, I think, should receive much more attention right now: before thinking about how to colonize the space, we really need to learn how to live and thrive in the less hospitable parts of the Earth.

One of the greatest advantages of human technology is that it allowed our species to live in areas which would otherwise be much too cold for us. I think that this trend needs to continue: what about the deserts, for example? Or the surface of the oceans, or their depths? Or, to mention my pet idea (mostly because I think that it would be awesome - but then, I am a Dvergr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvergr) at heart), what about the underground?

We are not even close to having populated all of Earth: there are lots of less naturally hospitable areas which are completely empty of people, and most of them are much more amenable to exploration and colonization and much richer of easy-to-reach resources than the space or any other planet of the solar system - not to mention that that's something that we can do right now, and which would provide a good test field for the technologies which we will need in order to colonize the Solar System.

So... Strike the Earth!

[The Big Dice]

Keep in mind, with our current technology building cities in the Gobi Desert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert) or in the Antarctic would be only barely possible, assuming that one can even find people insane enough to want to live there, and these places are basically the Garden of Eden compared to Mars...

This leads me to another, less glamorous enterprise which, I think, should receive much more attention right now: before thinking about how to colonize the space, we really need to learn how to live and thrive in the less hospitable parts of the Earth.
The strange thing there is, while it would be hard to find people willing to go live in the Gobi Desert, and Antarctica is neutral land by international treay so settling there would be tricky. (Not to mention buried ancient cities that are inabited by sentient blobs and giant penguins...) I can see people literally lining up in numbers that maker X-Factor and American Idol auditions look like the line at the post office.

Living on another world has an allure, a romantic draw that many people would find impossible to resist.

[Knaight]

Coming back to the core of both arguments in this thread is a single notion. That notion is that humanity has some sort of inherent worth, and that the extinction of humans would be a bad thing. Its a position I disagree with, and as such I submit the following thesis: Humanity has no value. Every individual human does.

From what I've seen, there are several arguments put forth for the value of humanity. Of these there is one primary argument that stays within board rules: the argument of what we accomplished, and how that would be lost if we died out. Its all true, humanity has accomplished very much, science, art, philosophy, and many other human endeavors are worth having.

However, the reason these things are worth having is that they increase the quality of life for individual humans. The sum total of people actually alive get to know more, appreciate their lives more, live in better conditions, and in general have a better life than they would have without those developments. The value of the developments is how they help people, and with no people to help the value is gone.

[pendell]

That notion is that humanity has some sort of inherent worth, and that the extinction of humans would be a bad thing. Its a position I disagree with, and as such I submit the following thesis: Humanity has no value. Every individual human does.


I find your argument hard to follow; If humanity becomes extinct it follows that individual humans will also become extinct. Therefore, if individual humans have worth .. in fact, if only one human out of the entire human race has value -- then it follows that humanity also has value. And therefore the extinction of humanity would be a bad thing.

I do not see how you can have the extinction of humanity -- which you do not believe to be a bad thing -- without also causing the deaths of individual humans, which (I think) you WOULD consider a bad thing.

Can you clarify?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Talya]

One issue with "Immortality," by the way, is that the human race should continue to evolve. If any of us were to live a few hundred thousand years, we might find ourself as primitive as neanderthals compared to the decendants of humans born at the time.

[warty goblin]

I find your argument hard to follow; If humanity becomes extinct it follows that individual humans will also become extinct. Therefore, if individual humans have worth .. in fact, if only one human out of the entire human race has value -- then it follows that humanity also has value. And therefore the extinction of humanity would be a bad thing.

I do not see how you can have the extinction of humanity -- which you do not believe to be a bad thing -- without also causing the deaths of individual humans, which (I think) you WOULD consider a bad thing.

Can you clarify?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The way I see Walking Target's argument is this. He's saying that the value of humanity is that it can improve the lives of individuals. If there are no more individuals, humanity has no value. Therefore the eventual extinction of the species is not a bad thing, since with it goes everything that makes it worthwhile to begin with.

Interestingly enough, I don't think this demands that any individual have value, only that human happiness does.

As a corollary, I think this implies that preserving the species is not the most worthwhile course of action, and that rather the worth of humanity is best increased by bettering people's lives. If it's a trade-off between continuing the species and giving a lot of people better lives, this suggests that the proper course of action is the latter.

[Incompleat]

One issue with "Immortality," by the way, is that the human race should continue to evolve. If any of us were to live a few hundred thousand years, we might find ourself as primitive as neanderthals compared to the decendants of humans born at the time.


Hang spontaneous evolution and Natural Selection.

Their existence was a necessary evil for the development of complex life forms and, eventually, of intelligence, but damned if I am going to let blind, random forces choose the destinies of my remote descendants and murder the ones that they will not find adequate.

Assuming that we eventually manage to achieve biological immortality, I am confident that our technology will also be able to force our evolution to the path that we consider the best one, and also "upgrade" existing humans in order to let them catch up with the younger generations.