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Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space
neutralino writes "The Associated Press reports that astrophysicist Stephen Hawking wants humans to establish colonies in space in order to ensure the survival of the human race. At a news conference in Hong Kong, Hawking said that 'It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.'"
Do we have to go into space right now? Do I have time to go home and change?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
We'd just start creating things that can wipe out the galaxy.
I say we all go back to Kobol, and meet up with the other 12 colonies. :)
It looks like they already have some really cool stuff.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
...otherwise, space exploration is a boondoggle.
We're running out of it here.
Although seriously, everyone still living on earth makes for a giant single point of failure. But my ping time is going to suck if I start gaming from the moon.
Talk about avoiding the problem.
Instead of fixing our problems and looking for solutions, lets go into space to get away from it all.
some how this seems like a bad idea, or atleast a bad reason. Why not go into space for some positive reason? like to learn or solve a problem like over population...
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
He later elaborated on the specific humans who should go into space, including several people he went to school with, that one snooty teller at his bank, his obnoxious neighbors with their noisy children, and that little bastard who egged his house last Halloween.
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We have to leave this rock.
Even if we don't destroy ourselves, the Earth is doomed. It will not last forever. Mars and moon will not be the answer either. At some point, we will have to leave the solar system if we want to survive.
But where are we going to go? How many generations will it take to get there?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Any one who's seen a Gundam series knows what'll happen when we make space colonies: melodramatic war between the colonies and earth.
Of course we'll first need massive armored suits and lazer swords, not to mention genetically engineered kids to fight our battles.
Hell, we can barely get a craft into orbit let alone colonize an uninhabitable planetary body... How about we figure out how not to blow up the Earth?
Over sufficiently long timeframes, and sufficiently large impactors, the same applies to continents.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1602361. stm
Same story, only BBC broke this in 2001.
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Why do we have to start with humans in space, isn't it a much better idea to start making colonies with animals?
Those can provide us with a LOT of experience at a lesser risk. If animals die in space (or maybe even bacteria) people will probably make a small fuzz but forget it quickly. If humans die in space it could mean the end of the space project.
Once we establish a solid base, and knowledge about building a new colonie we can send humans...??
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Is Hawking hinting at something here?
One old worry is that someone would develop a way to trigger a fusion bomb without a fission bomb. Serious work went into that problem in the 1950s and 1960s, and the designer of the neutron bomb has been quoted as saying that certain lines of research should be discouraged because they might lead to a solution.
If we dont move to space hey will never have a chance to grow up in an orweillian human society.... sacre bleu!
I'm not anti-human or anything (in fact, I'm good friends with a number of them!). But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Unfortunately, a few minutes thought shows that it's far easier to kill off a planet than it is just to kill off the people you don't like on a planet. For the race to be secure you'd have to do more than just colonize Mars -- you'd have to have people on ships moving away in all directions as fast as possible.
We really need to work out our problems here.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Sounds like his solution isn't necessarily based on developing habitats in the solar system (though he did say moon and Mars were the first steps). This seems like an ultra-long term scenario for which the technology doesn't even exist yet. It's almost like he's saying the Earth is screwed, so let's get off this hunk of rock. I think, considering we could be here for a very very long time, the better solution is to develop technology or philosophies dedicated to helping us live where we are. Can't just give up on Earth...we have no other options no matter how many sci-fi shows we watch.
Send robots first. Don't start sending people until you get a space elevator and/or have the robots set up an environment the long term stay. Otherwise we'll spend way too much on resources.
How are we going to take cows into space? We need cows for steaks and dairy (milk, cheese and ice cream).
They have spacesuits for man. Could they make a spacesuit for a cow? A cowsuit?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
What about that hot nurse of his? Is she coming too?
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Shotgun Uranus! I call King (its mine now, I called it!)
--Valthan
Would colonizing space really solve the basic problems that could cause mankind to die out on Earth? The disasters listed above seem to originate with man, and most of these because of man's relentless pursuit for power or profit. If our lives are so fragile now, on the planet we are ideally suited to live on, how much more fragile will the human race be on an inhospitable planet somewhere else in the solar system, not to mention the universe. There is a great gulf to cross through space and it seems that we should solve the root causes of our problems at home before we bring them with us to a more delicate and dangerous place.
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This has been my personal belief for years. I thought I was the only one who thought this way.
Oh, you're still down there?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
humanity has a dark self-destructive side
and as weapons become more and more powerful, it will take smaller and smaller groups of people to do more and more damage
until the truly scary it is achieved: it is not inconceivable that at some future date, just one committed nihilistic person could unleash something which could wipe out most of humanity, and at the very least destroy civilization
this could be via genetics or nanotechnology or something weirder and not yet discovered
so indeed, the best way to safeguard from such people is to live in far flung locations, such that a disaster, manmade or not, in one location can lead to recolonization by the other location
hawking is 100% right, it really is in mankind's best interest to take out a survival insurance policy and get our asses into space in a self-sustainable manner
i would give us a century or two to achieve this goal, and with serendity and luck, we will get into space before the statistical inevitability of that one demonic person appearing making their vile mark on the world by killing most of us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Always mount a scratch planet.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
What about venturing out in space and meeting up with a powerful angry alien who just found out we killed his son's daughter's husband's mother by terraforming another planet? What do we do then?
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
"May the Circle be unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by.
There's a better home a waiting, In teh Sky Lord, in the Sky".
-A.P. Carter
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
For all we know he's an idiot.
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
As much respect as I have for Professor Hawking, I have to say that this is rather obvious. Even if we don't kill ourselves or get killed by some sort of natural disaster, eventually, the sun will go super nova and destroy us anyway.
So yeah, if the human race is to live to the end of the universe, we have to colonize space. You don't have to be Hawking to know that!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
We may be good at making things go boom, but galaxies are very big things, and it'll be a very long time before we can make anything that'd have any sort of significant effect on them.
TFA: "Hawking said that 'It is important for the human race to spread out into space....'"
mmm, I'll bet that long after Steven Hawking is gone, his chair will be still be giving lectures, advice, and making scientific discoveries...
I think it would be better to remain on the Earth to let the Universe survive!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I'm with Stephen all the way, just as long as we stay away from the Beta Quadrant. Those pesky Klingons are the last thing we need to mess with our space programs right now.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Well, I can't find anything to support this idea in my bible...
I don't think we're really going to space - in any big way.
Mod me as either funny OR insightfull
Or maybe a BCP. So humans can continue their "business" of destroying planets
I've always thought it was kind of goofy to be talking about space colonization at this point in the space age. We're nowhere near capable of sustaining ourselves independent of earth or even proving we can live healthy and sustainable lives away from earth. Hell, we can't even reliable GET humans into space. One step at a time.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
He's thinking of giant space goats. Oddly enough, the first people he wants to go into space aren't scientists, engineers and great artists, but politicians, marketing types, and telephone handset sanitizers.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Stephen Hawkings is an intelligent guy, but isn't this a bit out of his field? He works in astrophysics at the highly theoretical level. Whilst the sentiment is nice, it's not exactly founded from a realistic perspective from working in the industry. It's not like he works at NASA and has a good grip on the realities - and limitations - of space travel. I could say curing cancer is vital to humankind's progression, but it doesn't exactly mean it's a realistic goal.
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling.
I agree.. It's one thing to say "The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe," buts its another to give a viable solution as to how. Basically all he stated was the obvious. Mr. Hawking is a very inteligent person so I'd except him to, after his speech, say "and this is how" followed by charts and graphs and mathmatics far beyond my understanding. But I guess thats just wishfull thinking. As it stads now I don't think the human race will be able to get off this rock untill the planet is united as one and can move ahead as one.
Eating the brains of your enemies does not make you smarter. But it's still fun.
...just as we need to accept personal death.
The Noah's Ark story has great appeal, but events capable of destroying the Earth might well destroy nearby colonies in the solar system.
Or perhaps I should say, if we hypothesize that humankind does not have the wisdom to maintain a stable existence on Earth, the same factors that lead to it destroying the Earth and/or human life thereon might well lead to the same outcome in our planetary colonies.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I know we all like to sit around and pretend that there's a solution for everything out there, somewhere, waiting to be found, but humanity is a seriously broken creature. We could have infinite food, power and resources, but people would still kill, rape, maim and hurt one another endlessly.
I view the challenges involved in colonizing mars as far easier than teaching humans to not fight amongst themselves. At least we have a vague notion as to how to solve the former.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
He wants to send _people_ to do it. And when you use people, you end up with the same problems we have here on Earth. Which is exactly why we have the problems we do here on Earth.
I think what he means is we should be more dispersed through-out the universe. I whole-heartedly agree...and I'm compiling a list of who should be sent first :)
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
People can have different views.
For me, the primary concern is the survival of the species.
Everything else is secondary. Everything.
Why?
Because, in _my_ view, the meaning of life is ensuring the survival of the species.
See, these all depends on the views of the person.
Different people, different views. There is nothing wrong in yours or mine.
P.S -> Actually, if we were to be really magnanimous, our concern should be survival of life - in some form at least, even more than the survival of our species alone.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Dr. Hawking further elaborated on his suggestion that the space colonies include 10 women for every man:
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature."
You know, I used to read a lot of sci-fi, I watched Trek, Firefly, and I have huge respect for Hawking's intellect, yadda yadda, but I'm starting to find these calls to colonize the stars "or else" to be off the mark. The fact of the matter is this, gang: we are fragile critters, sacks of water more or less, and we can only survive in an environment that exists only in very small portions of the universe - so small it's comparitively non-existent. This notion that we're going to piss around in city-sized spaceships, or "terraform" all these supposed M-class planets, just like in Aliens(kewl!), and spread all over the universe like a pock-marked trailer park, is just, well, it's just fantasy. *Fun* fantasy, make no mistake, but we're talking real life here. That means long term effects of living in weightlessness(physically and psychologically, we can't). Exceeding the speed of light(we can't). Terraforming(we're so far away from anything even theoretically possible that it's fantasy).
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't explore. We will, it's in our nature. However, saying we need to get into space real soon cuz' we're on the cusp of nuclear/biological/environmental/terrorist related extinction is like telling a prehistoric cave dweller that they better start working on the theory of flying because that volcano is about to erupt.
DT
Let's see... Instead of leaving the earth (since some replies suggest that it isn't a very good idea and we would just ruin the Galaxy instead of Earth), lets find some other options...
/.ers will all congregate to an Island and let everyone else perish, and we can then create a utopia led by CowboyNeal. Don't Forget that we'll still die from Natural Disasters or something we havn't thought of yet anyways!
Being wiped out by natural disaster
Immediate Risk: Moderate Low
Long Term Risk: High (Global Warming? Sun failure?)
Mitigation Plan: Sorry, Everyone dies (but hey, who cares right? This wont happen in our time! We should all have jobs in Washington D.C.!)
Nuclear War / Engineered Virus
Immediate Risk: Moderate High
Long Term Risk: Moderate High
Mitigation Plan: World Peace? pffttt. Hopefully us
Other dangers we have not yet thought of
Immediate Risk: Unknown
Long Term Risk: Moderate High?
Mitigation Plan: Can't really have one of these for something we havn't thought of yet.
So we are going to eventually die anyways - the bottom line is we either take steps now to ensure the continual survival of our Great^1000 Grandchildren, or we become even more selfish than we already are, steal the last bit of life from this planet, and then just wither away and perish. Of course, if thats the case why wait? Let's engineer that virus or start that Nuclear war now.
Its Deluxe, son. Deluxe!
There are good reasons, other than colonisation, for expansion into space: some of them potentially helping with the survival of earth. If we can move dirty manuafacturing, mining activities and some food production into space, the pressure on our own ecology will become much less severe.
Ok, not really. But how come Slashdot didn't report it when I said the same thing? ;)
Humans say Hawkings must walk first.
Space? Lets cure cancer, Aids, Psoriasis, Diabetes, Poverty....
Then we space...
You know I got a shitlist of people that I love to see shot off into the vacuum of space.
Oh colonization RTFA first I guess.
ACK
If the earth becomes uninhabitable, it will likely resemble a foreign planet anyways. If we really can survive on an inhospitable planet far away, then we can certainly survive once ours becomes inhospitable. If we leave, it has to be either because our planet is going to be destroyed, or because we've discovered some planet almost exactly like earth. We know that planet will have to be far away, so it seems that we'll either need near-lightspeed travel or the construction of a giant Noah's-ark-like ship. Both of these being far off in the distance, and the effects of spaceflight on man being fairly well-explored, I don't see why we can't do all the research needed either on earth or with unmanned craft.
Previous human migrations were driven by less, ahh, altruistic motivations. Survival, distaste for the status quo, better living, things like that.
And what part of wanting your offspring (or theirs, etc) to actually live and carry on your culture is "altruistic?" For most of us, that's exactly the opposite. It's completely, rationally seflish. We want what we build to last and improve. And you don't build large systems without redundancy, that's all. And the thirst for some adventure and a challenge is hardly "altruism." You want altruism? That would be killing yourself to free up some resources for somebody else so they don't have to work as hard. Except, a fat lot of good that does if a giant meteor smacks into your resources.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Who do you think you're kidding? The vast majority of the things that you do are geared towards advancing the species in some way. Your job, your wife, your kids, your hobbies - they're all about having a good environment for humans and then putting humans into that environment. Or have you unlocked the secret to inner peace and overturned instincts millions of years old?
The achievements of man will lose all meaning if we die out and nobody is left to hear the tree fall.
Not to be a wet blanket on the whole "Survival of the human race" thing, but are we worth it? It seems that just about every other creature on this planet lives in harmony with each other and nature in general. Humans overpopulate, pave over, and drain natural resources. We're not in the cycle of nature, it seems, and given that, how can we expect to survive long term, unless we either drastically change our way of living and our approach towards nature, or just keep spreading out, like Mr. Smith's analogy of a virus.
Just seems that humans aren't playing by the rules - we grow in population out of proportion to what the environment can withstand. Great for our survival over other species in the short term, but bad for our survival in the long term, as nothing can sustain us for very long.
Go into space? I guess...but to what end? Whose end?
We have almost used up earth. So we should quickly find a new place where we can drive our SUVs and be undisturbed by little children begging for food.
While I think that exploring and colonizing space are cool, here are a couple reasons I don't really agree with Hawking:
I'm always sceptical of the idea of superpathogens. I mean, are we claiming suddenly that we can engineer more successful bacteria than millions of years of evolution? I haven't seen any evidence of that. Sure, there will be dangerous pathogens created, by us and by natural selection, over the next millennium. But it's highly unlikely that any of them would wipe out the human race. Rather, they'd decimate us and we would adapt. Not a pretty picture, but not the end of humanity. Besides, I don't see how getting off the planet helps this: we'll bring pathogens with us and who knows how they'll mutate in their new environment.
Moving to space is hard. No, really: we haven't even mastered the technology to live underwater on our own planet for indefinite periods of time. Or to live in a self sustaining way in other harsh environments indefinitely. Like the dessert, tundra, or the top of Mt. Everest. And these are many many orders of magnatude easier than living in space or on another planet. We are so tied to our environment we could almost qualify as parasites. Yet we fancy oursleves as these standalone creatures. But any steps we've taken away from our environment involve some type of major life support tethering us back to our host. Of course with enough time and resources this could be overcome, but I think this would be far more difficult than just addressing the problems Hawking is worried about directly. Escaping the planet is a nice dream, but it's not a practical backup plan.
The stuff he's talking about is all stuff we can adapt to more easily than we could escape from, or in the case of pathogens, can't escape from at all. So while I think humanity should keep it's eyes on the stars, it's not a bad idea to make sure the homestead is running well first.
Cheers.
I don't know much about space and colonization, but I do know that Hawking's nurse is hot.
There's is little point in escapint to space. After all space and time will collapse within 3,000 Zillion years(aprox.) anyway. You're just delaying innevitability. What we really need to plan is an escape from this doomed dimention!
This will sound quite negative of me, but in a sense, you're right. Spreading humanity's seed across the solar system/galaxy is only a priority if you have decided that human existence is instrinsically valuable enough to justify such an upheaval. Objectively viewed, there's nothing particular to recommend humanity as opposed to any other hypothetical sentient life, barring some species-specific traits or subjective societal constructs.
:-)
In simpler terms, it's not poorly thought of to be cognizant of your own mortality. Therefore, isn't it also worthwhile to be willing to accept the mortality of your own species? Do people feel the need to identify so strongly with their species that they'd be unwilling to allow its passing?
Not that I'm philosophically opposed to space travel.
Season 1, Episode 4: Infection http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/0 04.html
Reporter: "After all that you've just gone through, I have to ask you the same question a lot of people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home?"
Sinclair: "No. We have to stay here, and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics - and you'll get ten different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us, it'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes - all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars."
It's fairly apparent he's just saying things to get noticed at this point. The more sane approach would be to focus on improving humanity. Genetically enhancing intelligence and space adaptations (or harsh environment) are infinitely more plausible and more constructive than throwing around the idea that world governments are competent enough to make stable colonies, without a fundamental shift in human evolution.
Simplified, work on making smart people first. Worry about expansion AFTER that.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Check out the MSNBC.com version of the story. He and his nurse remind me of the old Benny Hill show. I guess if you're stuck in a wheelchair, you may as well enjoy yourself.
Milton Friedman endorsed this form of taxation as the least distorting. The reason is that it is a tax on economic rent, which is to say, the portion of profit that is unnecessary for bringing a particular asset into its current use.
What happens when you start taxing economic rent instead of economic activity is that marginal assets are brought into production -- the most marginal of assets being at the frontier.
Seastead this.
Give or take a billion... before the sun exhausts its supply of hydrogen and becomes a Red Giant, bringing Earth's temperature to Fahrenheit 2,000 and perhaps even engulfing us. Earth either evaporates, or at best turns into a hot version of Mercury. I'd like to be on Titan or Neptune by that time, thanks.
Given that we've only evolved from bacteria to humans in as much time, I'd say we better start working on the problem, as it's unlikely we'll evolve our way to other planets.
Because it originated in the west, i.e. Europe. When America was colonized Western culture went there too. At that time the "far East" was largely unaware of Western culture and it lived on very different principles. Most westerners, for example, cannot begin to comprehend why a Japanese samurai would be willing to commit seppuku at the word of his superior. However, Alan Watts deals with bringing Eastern philosophies and religions and explaining them to the "west". These include Hinduism and Buddhism and their principles. Again, if you're curious about what they are, I recommend checking out that link I had in my original post to the first two chapters of one of this books. Read the first chapter, it's not very long, and tell me what you think. :-)
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By (repeatedly) suppressing humans' ability to travel in space for the past ~20 years, this has promoted a deep desire to disperse into the cosmos, thus guaranteeing the survival of the race. It was all part of the Golden Path, and now we will enter the Scattering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller-Ulam_design
The solution has been around for 50 years.
But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Because a hardwired, nihilistic, self-destructive (self, including species as self) outlook wouldn't have allowed us to get this far, genetically. The very traits that allow us to nurture offspring that take years to develop simply require us to look at the big picture, and to cherish the future. And to make that more workable, we develop cultures that are built around generational continuity and hope. Anything less than that is a sort of cultural insanity and requires a truly loony willing suspension of disbelief (see 70-virgins-if-I-blow-myself-up-in-a-Zbarro, childish "rapture" fantasies, and related examples).
We're generally wired to get a warm and fuzzy feeling from passing along our culture and protecting our little broods. Remove that, and you're not going to have people, as a whole, living out a "good" life.
Reaching out to or making other livable environments (as in, off-world) is just as rational as clearing the bear out of the cave you need to shelter your tribe. Just as rational as using that bear's hide to keep your little naked ape-like offspring warm through the ice age. It's silly to ask if we "deserve" to survive... survival is deserved by rationally taking advantage of the fact that we exist at all. There is no meaning in anything, otherwise. Since we make the meaning in our lives, we decide if we're worth surving or not. The universe doesn't give a crap one way or the other.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
With all do respect I believe that the universe has enough room for billions of sentient species to expand.
what?
Who let the Freeper in here?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Yes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The problem with sending animals is that you have to send a functioning biosphere along with whatever creature you send into space. That's a big technical challenge, and for people it's a tradeoff between discomfort and the smartness of the machines against the smartness of the people. For animals, assume that they can't really contribute anything to the (meta) running of the biosphere. If you give them grass they can crap on it and all, but they won't be picking up a wrench to fix a broken water recycling plant or irrigation system. Also, for any significant duration your're talking about an environment where the significant input is energy. No "food enough for three days" but a system that'll continue to provide as long as it receives energy.
I'm guessing that it's more complex to set up an animal-supporting artificial biosphere in space than one to support humans.
Hawking must have just watched Al Gore's movie!
Umm, you accept it all you want. The rest of us would like to carry on as far as we can, thanks.
Seriously, once we as a species accept that, then we all may as well just commit mass suicide and be done with it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
nothing to see here, move along...
They (westerners) haven't the slightest hint of how to be happy. They're always unsatisfied. They need more and more, and they live for the future.
Good. It's called "drive." It fuels things like space exploration. Unlike our navel-contemplating planet co-squatters in the East, our "God" is outside us, above us, and we're forever (hopefully forever) building towers and spaceships to meet Him. Works for me, just fine.
It's the itchy, unsatisfied sacroliliac of some impotent balding outside-looking 40ish engineer today that will -- again, hopefully -- lead to my daughter finding herself working on Mars thirty years from now.
"Woot!" to Professor Hawking, sez I.
"Woot!" to his nurse, too...
With all due respect, life has been on this planet for millions of years. I can't see that changing any time soon. Have there been deadly viral outbreaks? Yup. Life survived. Have there been dramatic climactic shifts? Yup. The north pole used to be a tropical paradise. But Life survived. Humans aren't as biologically adaptable as other creatures, but I think that given our current state of technology we can survive pretty well even if some big disaster does happen.
And even if we don't - so what? The universe doesn't care if we're here or not and we won't be around to complain about it anyways.
Love sees no species.
So what you're saying is I should watch more TV?
Of course a few hundred years ago, I would have been born, lived and died within a 100 mile radius. Probably not have been able to read or even be exposed to an idea that wasn't promoted by the Church or my Lord. Unless I was lucky enough to get an apprenticeship with a local artisan, I would likely have no other option but to do whatever my father and his father before him did. Subsistance agriculture. I would then marry a woman who also was trapped in the same little bubble as I was and breed up some more workers for the farm.
I'd be too damn busy and tired to notice that I was miserable, or even wonder if there was any other way to be.
I'll take my slot in the rat race, thank-you-very-much.
He and his daugther are writing a children's book.
The real choice is liberty versus control. -- Bruce Schneier
I don't think that preservation of the human species requires colonization of the Moon or Mars. The disasters mentioned (global warming, nuclear war, disease) wouldn't actually destroy the Earth, just the surface ecosystem. It takes a lot more than that to destroy this 13,000 km rock, like a collision with a Moon-sized body or the death of the Sun (about 4 billion years from now).
If you want to preserve a few humans, it would be far easier to make a self-sustained colony at the bottom of the ocean or in mines deep below the surface. Power could be provided by a nuclear reactor or geothermal source. A large cavern within the Earth would likely be more hospitable than a glass dome on the surface of Mars, especially considering the dangers of solar radiation.
How would we decide who to save as the nucleus of mankind? It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years. [1]
Now if your talking about settling an Earth-like planet in another solar system, that's another story. But it'll take a long time to get there, probably too long to happen in my lifetime. Personally, I'd rather spend my years in a well-stocked mine shaft than a cramped spaceship.
AlpineR
People keep saying that the human race is fundamentally evil, is doomed to annihilate itself, all those lovely things, and yet the human race has thrived and advanced so far in such a short amount of time (even just one hundred years ago, things like cathode ray tubes, plastics, and any number of modern-day polymers were unthinkable). The very fact that people are aware of the problems we as a species have created means that humanity, at its very core, is not entirely as bad as some of its members make it out to be. It's inevitable, however, that something will happen someday that will threaten the existence of mankind - It happened with the dinosaurs, unless you're one of those people who believe the Earth is 4,000 years old.
Maybe it isn't feasible to go to space now, but if we, as a species, come together to pool our resources to create interstellar travel or indeed any kind of feasible, long-term space flight, we could just pull it off in a few generations. Things like cancer research, AIDS research, and research into creating more efficient and environmentally-friendly ways of life would all continue on while the project is underway; The world wouldn't stand still for a few centuries while such a project is put in motion. In fact, it could be considered as top priority in the research required for such a thing, since in order for a colony to be sustainable, it must have a higher standard of health than we've ever known, and it must be composed almost entirely of renewable resources. It would require a renewable source of food, a renewable power source, renewable water sources, a renewable source of oxygen, a renewable crew (both robotic and human), military/policing forces, skilled workers, a large surplus of parts and materials to fashion new parts, sufficient fuel to reach its projected destination (preferably with excess), medical services, entertainment services, and so on. It would have to be, in and of itself, capable of functioning as a country on Earth might, with the added disadvantage of the inability to perform trade (and so requiring a mass surplus of supplies).
I think Hawking is one of the greatest people of our time, and I also think that he's dead-on about this particular issue. However, I also think that wider-scale marine colonization would probably be a better place to start this venture than the Moon or Mars. If we can successfully live day-to-day life in an underwater environment for extended periods of time, with high degrees of external pressure, then it's entirely possible to live in space, where the opposite is true. The preparations for such space travel are right here on Earth; We just need to use it, and I'm sure the extra habitable space wouldn't go unused.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Albert Einstein: "God does not gamble"
Stephen Hawking: "Humans must colonize space or be wiped out"
May the ignorant hordes interpret them as they wish.
Because you never know when you're going to have to flag down a ship and hitch yourself a ride when the Vogons come in to make way for that new galactic bypass.
e.g.: A guy who can't get out of a wheelchair telling everyone the we need to go into space.
- - - - -
I'm only kidding. I think Hawking is one of the greatest minds of our time. If he says we need to take valiant steps to colonize then we need to do it.
I don't suppose anyone has read this book?
It's fairly hefty on the physics details, but it does go into some interesting details about not only how humans, or at least sentient spacecraft capable of reproducing themselves need to be sent out by the human race pronto, if we want to have any chance of becomming immortal. I haven't read the book in a long time now, so I'm a little light on details but I can see how Hawking could be on the same wavelength (branching out to preserve the human race)
Will program for karma.
...the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through our star system, and our planet is one of those scheduled for demolition! All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in the local planning department on Alpha Centauri for nearly fifty years! For heaven's sake, it's only four light years away you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout.
I'm grabbing my towel and sticking out my thumb.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
Finally, westerners are incredibly lonely. They feel as if they are isolated egos inside of a bag of skin.
Someone's projecting again.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Sounds to me he is realy talking about the human civilisation and not so much the human race. Unless there is an accident that destroys the complete earth, some people will survive.
If it is a virus, the people on 'colonies' will also be infected and die, because there will be some interaction between us. If not, then over time there will be two species, humans and colonians.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
While the things you describe (consumerism, living for the future, etc) may happen to some in Western cultures, it's by no means universal. Neither I nor most of my friends live this kind of life, and while there are certainly a lot of Americans living the unexamined life, there are certainly plenty who do not.
In any event, most of your vaunted cultures pursuing "Eastern philosophy" have succumbed to the lure of the chance to escape living short lives in dirty hovels with unclean drinking water and no hope of leisure time. Whatever else you may say about Western civ, the technological progress it has enabled has pushed the standard of living higher in much of the world, and stands poised to help out the rest of the world too. Neither technology nor economics is a zero-sum game.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
While I am far from being an astro-bio-physiologist, I'm surprised nobody with an inkling of sci-fi knowledge has mentioned terraforming. I'm certain that biologists have seem more than a few times when a plant has been put somewhere it wasn't and reformed the area chemically, physically, etc. (Consider customs laws) The point being, yes, we should colonate other planets, no, humans probably shouldn't be the first thing to do so, the animal(s) selected would be given their best chances via plantlife and the many effects that they can provide: Oxygen and food are the primaries. The residual effects of breathable Oxygen in the atmosphere lead to a living environment similar to our own, possibly changing the global temperature and bringing out other necessities (Got water?). In other news, there's a company right now using those Bucky molecules we all know and love to try creating the first space elevator. Recently, they achieved a 1500 ft vertical shaft "weighted" up by a balloon.
Bravo. I'm just happy that I don't have to worry about the invading horde comming over the hills to rape our women, kill our men and steal our food because the crops are in season. Hurray for modern life!
...welcome our new theoretical physicist overlord.
Man that sounds like all that frontier struggle for surival old western crap, no thanks. i gotta order a pizza now.
Stereotyping is so much easier than thinking, isn't it?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Engineering species changes and evolution, or even starting from scratch (building intelligent machines) is far less time consuming that waiting for random/natural evolution.
All that is left Steve is for you to tell us how
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
"Western society bears a remarkable resemblance to cancer"? Sorry pal - but you lost me on that first sentence!
That sounds like a remarkably nihlistic line of thought to me. Cancer cells lack any real intelligence, capability for rational thought, or even ability to display "common sense". Is that what you really believe defines Western civilization?
Most of the truly unhappy people I run across are uninspired/unmotivated. They take a "Who cares? We're all going to die eventually anyway!" type of attitude, and they regularly engage in self-destructive behaviors - if they do much of anything at all with their free time. That's a problem, but thankfully - many of us don't follow that "Live only for today." path.
Living "for the future" is a great thing! So is capitalism and the desire to have better and more for yourself! I'd say that practically none of the great inventions would have ever been created if it weren't for individuals who were motivated to put in some hard work and lots of trial and error with the hopes of bettering things for themselves and others. Do you think we'd have electric lighting if Thomas Edison wasn't stubbornly motivated to succeed - trying out thousands of different materials to finally find one that lit up with electric current flowing through it, instead of just burning up? What about the Wright Brothers and their motivation to fly, despite most people around them thinking they were foolishly wasting their time? (They could have just been content to fix people's bicycles instead, since that was their "real job".)
Well said, friend.
Fly over urban metropolises and you'll see pus and grime coming out of them, a haze of brown tinges their atmosphere.
But from my SUV the sun is dimmed to a pleasant orange color.
People shuttle to and fro in their daily lives, consuming as much as their salaries will allow. They justify this as acceptable in the "spirit of capitalism". It's "acceptable" to spend all that money on crap you don't need, because everybody else has it, or "it's cool".
But aren't you free to reject these ideas. People would gravitate to better alternatives. It is hard to beat Nascar on my plasma HD and a six pack of beer
Then most of these blobs will be told they need to hurry up there too, so that they can meet that quota, and then by the time you're 40, bald, and more or less impotent, you say: "My God! I've arrived!" And you look around and realize that not much changed, and you feel a big let down, you feel deceived, as if there was some hoax played on you.
This is a victim's thinking. Are you having a midlife crisis? Try buying a red sports car.
If you're interested about what I said here, please know that it was basically all taken from the words of Alan Watts [wikipedia.org], the 20th century's best and little known-about philosopher and interpreter of Eastern religions.
Sounds kinda creepy to me, like Heaven's Gate. If you haven't noticed a lot of people from the far east are highly motivated by US style consumerism. You can only meditate so much I guess.
an ill wind that blows no good
(end of post)
The cast noticed he was chuckling when he was walked past the "warp core". When asked why, he said...
..."I've only just realised I never needed that chair"
I don't even have enough frequent flier miles to travel overseas.
Both humans and animals are completely too specialized for life on earth. Because of that, it's highly unlikely we'll ever see our universe populated by humans. Our short life spans makes any trip outside the solar system completely unlikely. Even if we do make it to another solar system after a 500 year trip, we require a very specific environment to truely thrive. We need an earth-like environment. We need a good variety of both plants and animals. We need a good variety of bacteria. Hell, to successfully move, we need a noah's ark to take us there.
If we really want to see human progeny or intelligent life expand out into the universe, then we need to get AI working, stuff that into self-sufficient, self-replicating robots, and throw them out into the universe. They will be able to easily travel between stars by simply shutting down for a limited time. Robots can survive in almost every place in the universe that humans cannot, so they're almost guaranteed to thrive regardless of whether their destination has an earth-like planet or not.
What are you talking about?
atleast I won't miss anything cool while I'm dead. What you don't want to happen is for you to the only one who dies. You know you are missing some fun shit for sure.
Buddhism and Zen came from the east, yes... But so did Shinto and gunpowder.
Life in ancient China was pretty shitty for everybody who wasn't the Emperor, and Buddha himself had a pretty fucking miserable life, which drove and informed most of his teachings about humility and acceptance.
I, on the other hand, am very happy and content, living in my suburban house on a French land-lot style yard in a straight row with many other houses. My air and water are clean, my food is delicious, my TV set is huge, and life is wonderful.
Sometimes you gotta stop re-watching "Koyaanisoatsi" and just go outside and fire up the BBQ grill, especially on a nice day like today. Happiness has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with your state of mind.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
That's Druish, not Jewish!
Actually might not be as bizarre as you think. If a large asteroid split up into several smaller lumps, the lumps would orbit around the center of gravity/mass of the original rock, and thus would seem like a flock of smaller asteroids, all following each other. Eventually they'd probably be drawn off in different directions by the influences of other bodies, but if one split up on its way into the solar system, it might still be a big ball of fragments by the time it passed by Earth.
It's certainly not totally implausible.
Also, I suppose a really big asteroid might have enough of a gravitational field to attract other objects, or maybe you could even have some semi-stable situation where two asteroids of relatively equal mass orbited around each other, and then their center of mass collectively orbited the Sun (like a binary star system). Again I don't think it would be stable for very long because of all the interfering forces, but it could probably exist for a short while.
Going off on a tangent here for a second: I think the odds of us recognizing the thing that's going to kill us all before it happens is pretty slim. It's not exactly a short list: anything from climate change to asteroids to a virus to some sort of germline genetic engineering gone awry could wipe us out -- and that's only the things we know about or have the capacity to conceive of. There are probably lots of threats out there that we're as ill-equipped to think about as the dinosaurs were of wondering about an asteroid from space. Even if you could put up some type of asteroid shield and control climate change and elimiate industrial pollution and reduce the risk of genetic manipulation, that doesn't mean that we're not living, as a species, in an incredibly precarious situation, all packed together on one planet.
So regardless of what you do to "improve" things here on Earth, Hawking's (and many other people's) point still stands: spreading us out some is an inherent Good Thing from a long-term survival perspective.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
he already has his exoskeleton built.
Maybe if we start looking up and ask "what's out there" we'd be a hell of a lot better off than looking at each other and asking "what can I find objectionable about this person" today.
Maybe what humanity needs is a serious after-school project of space travel. The same way you give a troubled kid a good after-school project to give them focus.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Pssh, Stephen Hawking just wants NASA to build him a home in space because he is scared Chuck Norris will kick his ass again. How do you think he got put in a wheel chair in the first place.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
The human body isn't adapted for such an environment. Solar radiations is already a very big problem for space travel. We need a very specific athmosphere, temperature, pression...It looks like our body is more a burden that an efficient tool. Medicines and/or genetic engineering should evolve drastically before being able to consider that our specy may flourish in the galaxy.
Olivier
Why do you call it 'Chinese' food when you've bought those spring rolls from a restaurant in Ohio? Oh my God!
I'd imagine that if you're smart enough to use such phrases as 'asinine dualities' then you'd be able to comprehend the concept of a borrowed culture. Western culture is regarded as money-driven, fast-paced and obsessed with image, whether this is exactly true or not and whether such a culture exists elsewhere in the world or not. The new wave of Chinese nightclubs springing up and the hipster kids going to them is seen as an import of western culture, for example.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
All of the recent topics on Slashdot have been tagged as stupid.
Happiness has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with your state of mind.
I agree it has everything to do with your state of mind, but you'll be a fool to think your culture doesn't affect it.
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Um, sorry to break your self-hatred and self pity, but living in the modern western world is pretty damn great. Most people have plenty of food, comfortable homes, good health... we have exposure to food, music, movies, and culture from all around the world. Nearly everyone I know is pretty damn happy, and the few I know who are unhappy it is usually family problems or personal mistakes and has nothing to do with "oppressive western society".
I mean, you do know what life is like in the third world, and in the pre-industrial area, right? Perhaps you need to travel more, or read more history. Life is in the west is pretty much the best human living ever in the history of the species.
For all the invader zim fans: "Do we have to go right now? I want to watch the scary monkey show"
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." - Isaac Asimov
One interesting thought about establishing human colonies in space and on other planets is the fact that those are radically different environments. Perhaps science will find an answer, but it would be difficult to replicate Earth's gravity, diurnal and seasonal cycles, and atmosphere.
This all makes me wonder, how many generations before our "space children" would start to diverge from the rest of the human race? How many generations before speciation would occur?
Throws an interesting kink into the idea of saving "humanity" as we know it.
Ask me about my sig!
I think you meant they live for the moment. Living for the future would be something to be proud of... it would indicate insight and planning.
No, thinking about the future distracts you from living in the moment, where everything is "real". These Eloi believe that planning for the future is gauche. Unfortunately, they also believe that the Electricity Fairy and the Food Fairy will provide for them in their idyllic future while all the poor, planning Morlocks are in the grave, having lived unfulfilled, frustrated lives.
If only all advertising were so thoughtful. I feel obligated to point out, though, that a reasonable number of westerners do know how to be happy, though they likely still spend all their money. :)
You completely misinterpreted what I said. I never claimed that the progress achieved by western culture was a negative thing, in fact I'm a great supporter of it. It's the mindset that's lacking and it's what has lead to the destruction of this planet. Perhaps you don't "believe" in global warming or pollution and its consequences? These have been brought on by western culture's flawed mindset and estrangement from its environment.
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Which unquestioned beliefs are we going to reevaluate before we decide we can leave? If we wait until we're perfect before we leave we'll never get anywhere.
Hawking has only been saying this for a couple of decades now.
It's strange to me that people revere Hawking as a god and take whatever he says as canonical gospel. Ok, he's a great physicist. But he sucks as a philosopher, and I have no reason to believe he knows, for example, how to run a country or fix a car or make good tea or. . .
'Course, he's probably right about this one.
Why should the perpetuation of the human species be our formost goal anyway? No, seriously, think about it. I want to drive clean vehicles and such because I want my children to be happy and healthy, and their children, and so on. I don't want people to suffer. Fair enough. But why should I care if 200 years from now humanity is wiped out in a blink of an eye?
Thanks!
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Only to the extent that you let it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Well thank you Mr. obvious. How about coming up with an original thought? Sheesh!
Slashdot: the only place on the internet where Stephen Hawking could get the stupid tag.
Not to my knowledge, and he's certainly not a supporter of it. He breaks down the mythology of Hinduism and picks the philosophical ideas that he likes.
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The universe isn't out to get us, but did you read the summary?
We are out to get ourselves. The chance of all those things are growing. In fact, global warming may be well beyond stopping.
I didn't say what we "should" do. That sounds like an unquestioned belief to me.
No matter what we should do, we're not waiting. Therefore, expect space to hold the same species deathtrap, on a grander scale.
--
make install -not war
Isn't the universe going to end eventually anyway? I mean, even if we assume the universe's expansion is slowing, and will eventually lead to another big bang rather than heat-death... How will we survive *that*? Rather than building up false hope, let's all just drink more rum.
The whole Lunar Revolution, bombardment of Earth, and economic plan was masterminded by a computer network that achieved sentience somehow. So now you know what a beowulf cluster of those would look like.
But more seriously, human nature being what it is, and given that individual people keep gaining the ability to control more destructive power all the time, there is an interesting dilemmna.
Establish independent colonies on other planets/moons/asteroids and
1> You have ensured that the species will not die out from some single plaentary catastrophe (natural or man made).
2> You will greatly increase the probablility that some lunatic or small group of them will find a way to hit Earth with a big rock or bioweapon.
Those unclear on the concept of risk management will assume this means that we should not go into space. They will be wrong.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Your views of life correlate to those of some culture, and again, living in the west does not mean that they necessarily correlate with that one. I have a feeling you'd be surprised with how much you'd agree with what Watts says.
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Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.
:). Ok, I suppose there are disasters that could wipe out all life on earth, but it would have to be something like Mars crashing into earth. Even that might not destoy all life. It's hard to imagine something the size of Mars crashing into Earth. I also suppose that if the temperatures rose to 400 degrees like on Venus that _might_ wipe out all life. I don't think we've found life that can survive at 400+ degrees. As far as genetically engineered viruses, they are lifeforms themselves. A more accurate statement might be: Human life on earth is at the ever.....
The interesting thing is that probably none of these things would threaten life on earth. It would only threaten human life (that may or may not be important to you
The real solution is to let Moon colonies form when they are economically feasible. It's not going to work otherwise. If we do build a space elavator and space travel gets cheaper, the silicon that's found on the Moon will undoubtably become an attractive resource.
No Sigs!
I would be quite interested in seeing what differences would occur over time in humans living off-planet. One of the more obvious things would be the reaction/development of a human body to a greater gravity than that of earth. If humans were able to live and grow under heavier gravities, the assumption would be that they'd grow to be relatively stronger. A weak geek on a high-grav planet could very well be of comparable strengh to an earthbound body-builder. By the same token, somebody growing up on a lower-grav planet might be expected to be relatively weaker in earth-gravity, but also grow to be taller, etc (given the same nutrients etc).
Other factors might include atmospheric conditions (radiation, although I'm assuming early cities would be 'domed' to trap air etc) and such things as the length of a day, etc. All these could have a longterm effect on human physiology, and we could end up having several specialized and distinct branches of our own species over a few centuries.
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"It seems that even Hawking believes that any attempt to change Western culture is in vain. Western society bears a remarkable resemblance to cancer. Fly over urban metropolises and you'll see pus and grime coming out of them, a haze of brown tinges their atmosphere. People shuttle to and fro in their daily lives, consuming as much as their salaries will allow. They justify this as acceptable in the "spirit of capitalism". It's "acceptable" to spend all that money on crap you don't need, because everybody else has it, or "it's cool"."
This applies to non western cultures as well. China spring to mind. Yes there 'communists' but the is a very healthy and growing market places where people try to earn money for themselves.
Look at the coal mines in china, look what China does to the enviroment. The is NOT a western problem, it is a human problem.
"They haven't the slightest hint of how to be happy. They're always unsatisfied. They need more and more, and they live for the future."
I am happy, my family is happy. Do we wna tmore? of course everyone does. Everyone everywhere wants more of something, even you.
Alan Watts? your kidding right? oh your not, you just stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nope. :-)
2 &cid=15526969
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188342 &cid=15526860
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18834
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... We must first go down the stairs so that we can be protected from the Terrible Secret of Space.
We will be protected
at the bottom of the stairs.
I believe some form of robot may be in order.
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/
No matter what happens to earth, it will still be more hospitable to life than any other planet we know of. Even if a "planet killer" comet strikes us while we're already in the middle of a nuclear winter, we'll still have an easier time surviving than we would elsewhere. It's much easier to build a shelter on earth in a cave to withstand just about anything we can think of for a couple hundred years than it is to build a shelter on another planet which will survive for any period of time. On Earth we've got an atomosphere and water which can be cleaned to a usable state if polluted. We can build a nuclear power station to provide energy for any scenario when the sky is blocked much more easily than we could build solar power collectors on another planet. The only real exception is in the very long term, when our sun starts to dim, but we've got some time to figure that one out.
I'm all for space exploration just to expand human knowledge, but we shouldn't lie to ourselves by saying it's a part of our survival strategy as a species.
Shit. First I get left out of the White Man's conspiracy (no dark rooms, cigars or manipulation for me) and now I find out I got screwed out of the raping and pilaging. I mean just last week, another barge of free Iraqi oil, war spoils and virgins came into port and I didn't get any. Oh wait, that never happened, did it.
America's got problems, but if you believe that shit, your problems are worse.
You don't have to go so far as to blow the galaxy up. You can merely make it unliveable by having too many fast food joints, shitty cable tv, idiot politicians, Wal-Mart as the only remaining employer, and $1000 for a drugfu of gasoline.
They always laugh at those crazy few who think they can fly, or go to the moon, or cure 'uncurable' diseases. For the first and only time in all the millenia we humans have been around, we have instant communication at any place on the planet, have the ability to transport ourselves from one end to the other in a matter of hours, have the ability to transmit incalculable information to any point on the planet...the list is endless. Just as there is reason to believe that the human race will self-destruct, there is equal or greater chance that we will continue to flourish.
Funny, I'm actually quite happy with my life.
/DOOOOOOOM/ pervading my cancerous western upbringing must have somehow skipped me.
The
Stephen, I always thought your music was more compelling than your science.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
You might also check out Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series.
There is also a 2 book series by Greg Bear, "The Forge of God" and "Anvil of Stars".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Unlike our navel-contemplating planet co-squatters in the East, our "God" is outside us, above us, and we're forever (hopefully forever) building towers and spaceships to meet Him. Works for me, just fine.
Priests and ministers and born-agains often rush in to give God the credit, but really feats of engineering and procreation occur because the process of creation is *fun*, not out of a specific desire to Glorify Him, Praise Him, Meet Him, or Otherwise Interact with God in Ways that Demand Use of Capitialization.
Cause we all know easterners dont have that problem at all.........
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
manned made
Mars and moon are already in a state that is probably much worse for life than what humans can cause to earth.
The environment there already is post-apocalyptic for species that need the conditions found on earth. So why go there?
Why even start an effort to do this? This would cost an huge amount of ressources and thus would probably result in more damage to the eco-systems on earth.
It's much more rational to change our behaviour on this planet.
This post is remarkably informative - it may seem like a bunch of desperately cliched generalisations ("Westerners are lonely", "20th century's best philosopher", "people shuttle to and fro") but in fact it is completely accurate. Cancer is a set of cells that do not understand how to self destruct when they are damaged. The author's perception of reality appears to be damaged. He does not understand how to self destruct, and writes blog entries instead (writing a blog about how awful western civilisation is is like shitting in the street to protest about people's manners).
There are direct parallels between the authors experience of alienation (lack of understanding of other's motivation, lack of pleasure in everyday things, reducing everything to negatives, projecting feelings onto others) and delusional psychosis. Of course, I would say that, because I'm one of "them".
Life and matter are like cancer, if you view them in such a warped and reductionist way (they grow, they are coloured, they reproduce, they rush about, you don't understand them when you're down in the dumps).
On topic - I am ashamed that Hawking is embarassing his field like this. It's very unusual for great physicists to be great economists or great leaders, and once again he has shown that being able to understand one scientific field not give any great insight into other fields, but sadly gives the scientist the self confidence to pronounce on them. Hawking, FYI: the chance of a virus killing it's host species is zero. Virii that are successful need hosts (even scary GM ones). Sudden global warming is a hypothesis unsupported by any evidence, and human beings have shown remarkable ability to live in a range of climes (e.g. iceland, egypt). You say the current human culture is in some way special and must survive. It's not, and it might. If a biologist said the world was going to be swallowed by a black hole, would they receive this sort of airtime on Slashdot?
So what you're saying is we'll all be happy if we embrace cultures which practice ritualistic suicide.
Yeeeahhh....
Or we could all just become quakers. The old ways were so much more enlightened and fulfilling, right?
You have no idea just how foolish these nostalagic dreams truly are. Cultures evolve. We can no more go back to that way of life than we could grow back our tails return to wandering around the African plains.
I will start taking arguments like Hawking's seriously when someone can describe to me a plausible scenario that would leave the entire Earth less hospitable to human life than the next most desirable real estate in the solar system.
Until then, such arguments strike me as nothing more than pitifully transparent rationalization for sci-fi fantasies.
Martin
I know exactly what you're talking about. The yellow robots are easy because they don't shoot back. The red robots are a little harder as they DO shoot back but their energy weapon moves so slowly that it's not hard to move out of the way. If the heat gets too intense you can always leave the room anyway.
But....
Should the bouncy smiley face appear...well my friend, the smart money's on the bouncy smiley face.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Great Post.
I'm sick to death of people romanticizing the past. Far from being an idyllic life full of good health and hearty laughs, it was, for the average person, a grim and miserable existence by modern standards. Poor health and toothaches were the norm, mixed with a variety of concerns about how this season's dry weather was going to allow the family to survive the winter.
We have it pretty good. Our concerns and stresses about getting ahead in the rat race are a damned sight more tolerable than last century's stresses about simply staying alive.
Let's get this straight. You may not agree with something Stephen Hawking says, but applying a 'Stupid' tag to the article is pointless and, well, poorly informed.
For some time now, I've been watching the evolution of the Stupid tag itself. Why do people use it? Apparently, it's always one of a few reasons: because they disagree with the article, they think the contents of the article describe something stupid, or they're confusing it with 'evil', 'wft', or any number of more expressive, less inflamatory terms.
While I can agree with tagging an article 'stupid' if it expresses a patently absurd notion, none of the other excuses qualify as anything other than flamebait.
Knock it off, whoever you are - you're making yourself look really ... well, stupid.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Step 1: Identify habitable planets
If any exist, we should start finding them in the next 10-20 years.
Step 2: Build interstellar craft
This is the tough part. Whether FTL remains a pipe dream or new physics turn out to allow it, we'll either need space elevators or a massive new source of energy (cheap fusion, maybe) to get the huge amounts of mass into orbit. (Fusion power would be used to create the massive amounts of fuel, not power craft directly).
Step 3: Seed planet with bioengineered life
We would probably send a very smart AI probe to do this, armed with bioengineered terraforming microbes. The trip would be very very long, but I think it could conceivably leave by 2056.
Step 4: Move in!
Hopefully the AI will also build us some nice beachfront condos to enjoy the purple sunsets and double moons. Either the colonists would be frozen for the trip, or spend the duration awake and wandering around the ship, fornicating and filling themselves with flavored fizzy fermented fruit juices. Arrival would be timed for opening of beachfront condos.
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of." so.. according to the "genius" we can't have a nuclear war or a genetically engineered virus in space?
...but YANAPTMCI (you are not a physicist, though my cousin is) - he works at Brookhaven, and takes occasional duty on the "big red button", as in, "crap! there's something wrong! push the big red button to shut it down!"
You're afraid of something hundreds of thousands of times less dangerous to your health than a dozen risks you blithely take every day, such as walking down the street, drinking tap water, eating cooked meat, flying on a commercial jet, etc.
Your comment reminded me of my grandmother, who became alarmed when she heard there was an "electron gun" in her television. I mean really, should we listen to you? You can't even spell "dissipate."
...if we're talking about just the mere survival of mankind, a tiny fraction to keep our race in existance, I'll take my chances on a deep subterranean nuke-proof bunker with lots of decontamination chambers, perhaps even a self-sustained eco-system.
Space travel as we know it today is incredibly fragile, and is completely dependent on high-tech from earth. Any disaster of cosmic enough proportions (sorry, mankind would survive global warming, nuclear holocaust and geneticly engineered viruses, if not much of it) like our sun going beserk is quite likely to wipe out any space colony or planetary base. If not, the 250,000 parts of the space shuttle will break down and replacements run out.
The only thing I can concievably think of that would wipe out earth, yet not qipe out any space base (unless we can go interstellar which takes 73000 years with our fastest spacecraft), would be a massive asteriod hitting earth and cracking it like a giant walnut. However, hundreds of millions of years of evidence say that's incredibly unlikely. It killed the dinosaurs, but us mammals survived. So would mankind today.
Not you and me, mind you. "Important" people that would be evacuated to said bunkers. But then again, you and me should worry more about being hit by a car...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I do identify so strongly with my species that I am willing to work to prevent its passing.
I do not advocate careful exploration. We should search for life before we change places. But that concern doesn't stop us from mining the asteroid belt for material to create O'Neill-style space habitat. Use the good real estate first (e.g. L4, L5), while we're still learning how to make them self-sufficient (or, actually, needing only solar input).
The world has moved on? Really? I'd have to strongly disagree there.
Skimming over the replies to my post seems to indicate otherwise.
I'm not sure if you're actually being intelligent here or not. I know that I am "that", but perhaps we mean different things. What I don't approve of is a certain mindset.
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I liked your comment but /. is an impossible audience for that kind of thinking. You're mainly talking to American technologists who believe that a techno-fix exists for all problems. They will be the last people in the world to see that this isn't true and will always dump on the messenger for it.
Personally I was brought up on sci-fi stories and used to think that we would colonise the stars someday. I no longer think this is possible. Even a moonbase I regard as highly unlikely and the idea of living on Mars for me belongs to 1950's style sci-fi. To me, sadly, the future of mankind looks more like NOLA post-Katrina than Star Trek. But every culture and civilisation has it's fantasies and dreams and these are ours.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
"Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
What, and there aren't any dangers in space??? C'mon man, have you never watched the Sci Fi channel?!
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I didn't know that anyone still reads Saberhagen. In my opinion his writings are kind of dry, no offense. I think the berserkers are similar in concept to the flood in the Xbox Halo game. The flood requires bio-mass to replicate and tries to wipe out all intelligent non-flood life by reusing its bio-material. The flood was stopped only by a galaxy-wide mega-suicide self destruct that only affected intelligent biological material and left lifeless or unintelligent material like bacteria, plants, planets and stars unaffected.
If it might be actually possible to wipe out all intelligent biological life in the galaxy by constructing one of those halo things, then I say we should not go into space to prevent halos from being constructed by ourselves. Or at least stay out of space so we do not learn about Halos that do exist. That way we can peacefully exist until the galaxy is destroyed and not even have to worry about saving it.
On the other hand, I think that "space laser" needs more funding in case alien invaders do show up. That way we would have something to at least try to shoot'em with as they glide slowly side-to-side towards earth, dropping their poo that also happens to be biological weapons of mass destruction. Where will you be then? I bet you would have wished you colonized moon and mars earlier!
This is somewhat similar to statements that he made to The Telegraph in October of 2001:
e ws/2001/10/16/nhawk16.xml
"The human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before the Millennium is out, unless we set up colonies in space, Prof Stephen Hawking warns today."
See the article at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Hypothetical? Yeah, if I'm allowed to think of perfect, selfless hypothetical life then we wouldn't stack up. I doubt that's how it works in reality. Obviously we are the only species on Earth capable of space travel, technologically, but I would also argue we are the most capable morally. Out of the billions of species to exist on Earth, we get along with other species like nothing ever has. Maybe intelligence does this, but maybe not. Theres no real reason to care for other species beyond maintaining food.
I am not a human you insensitive clod!
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Find new space-age delicacies ... like popplers!
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
What part of my use of the phrase "self-destructive" were you not following?
The fact is, the universe does "care", in that it has created for us the perfect set of conditions by which we thrive.
Utter nonsense. The universe, and the fluctuating conditions in which we evolved, simply are. We (as a species, and as a wider ecosystem) have adapted to the conditions already present or to new conditions (since those have changed very, very radically many times in the past). Literally millions of species have failed to adapt and are long gone. Most of them long before we were ever even close to appearing. That wasn't our doing, and I'm sure that those dying species didn't find the conditions to be perfect for thriving (um... since they were busy dying off in a world that was too hostile for them).
My point, which apparently I need to spell out in simpler terms, is that there is no judgemental, ledger-sheet-wielding universal "personality" out there deciding if it's appropriate or not for us to survive, or taking some sort of pleasure or finding some sort of cosmic justice in one outcome or the other. That's entirely up to us. Whether we're smart enough to not piss in the drinking water outside the bear cave we take over (apparently, enough of our ancestors were), or whether we're smart enough to avoid other forms of damage that will either hurt us or simply reduce some of what's simply very enjoyable around us... depends on a lot of cultural things, and on science being put to work. It also depends enormously on things that are completely outside of our control. Just like it did for millions of extinct species that came and went before us, through periods of wild climactic shift, through big rocks falling out of the sky, and probably many rounds of fantastically viral pathogens.
The universe doesn't "care," either literally or figuratively. There's simply cause and effect, including some of our own efforts, and many things we're helpless to shape. I do know, though, that people who ignore the reality of multi-year hurricane cycles so they can score political points while endeavoring to "fix" the environment by crippling the only economies that are actually in a position to develop and deploy the technologies that might make a tiny difference in the weather they're so scared of... well, that craven bunch are beyond reach, philosophically. Yes, I like and wish to preserve polar bears. And yes, I'd like to see China and India just as thoughtful about it (and just as beholden to efficient technological pressures) as their more western, hand-wringing counterparts are.
But you could take every SUV in the US off the road and not put a dent in the carbon that's released by things like overseas refinery gas flaring. Why? Because those locales aren't, and wouldn't be, tied to the same political "solutions" that the west would be. Why? Because their cultures aren't up to it, and the west feels so guilty for being ahead of the game that they'd rather wreck their own ability (through economic largesse brough by enormous productivity and high standards of living) to deploy more efficient modes of economic horsepower than hold the rest of the world to the same standards.
That goes for virtually every form of bio-diversity conservation. We sure wouldn't want to actually say to African governments that they need to get their acts together so they can establish rule of law, encourage investment, run efficient agro-businesses, and thus reduce deforestation and the slaughter of endless tons of "bush meat" just to feed people. Because if we come right out and say that "your local religious/tribal spats and power plays are directly responsible for the decimation of habitat and species," well, that wouldn't be politically correct. Instead, we just ship cash and support, perpetuating the problems at the root of the environmental degredation (to say nothing of the human misery). It's true in Africa, South America, and throughout much of Asia.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wars and plagues will not obliterate humanity. Not even an asteroid hit now that we have taken certain steps to prepare. Civilization could be destroyed and populations devastated, certainly, but our race will live on and eventually rebuild new cultures and civilizations. This cycle could continue on endlessly except for the second law of thermodynamics!
The Earth's ecosystem is not a closed system. We continually get energy input from the sun. One day the sun will run out of hydrogen to fuse and it will go nova. The sun will continue to grow and nova until it destroys itself in a supernova. The Earth will be burnt, boiled, pulverized, swallowed, and/or blown out of orbit. These we cannot survive.
So yes, we have time, but we do need to get off the planet and into space. Not because of what we do to ourselves, but because of what the universe will do to us!
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
Will the space elevator be wheelchair accessible?
I've thought of this before but again, Hawkings beat me to the press.
I've thought about the establishment of colonies in space myself. And we can do it now, it's currently possible to build on the moon. However stays in space for extended periods is dangerous to your health. Cosmic rays will bombard a person with radiation much more than would be healthy over an extended period outside of the ionosphere. The earth's ionosphere protects life from most cosmic radiation. Outside the ionosphere however there isn't any protection, and we don't currently have the capability to build a shield strong enough to stop most cosmic rays. Two or three months back I read an article in a science mag, perhaps Sciam, that reported a study done by a group of scientists at NASA that said there was a good possibility that if a group of people made the trip to Mars right now that one in four of them would get cancer by the tyme they reached Mars. Or some such, I don't know where the magazine is right now.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Professor to Fry: " I am beginning to fear there will be no forced mating at all."
Offtopic... yeah, right. A discussion about the potential dangers to civilization, and historical and fictional discussions of such, is off-topic on a discussion about some guy saying we need to get off of Earth to increase our survivability in the case of various dangers to civilization.
Stephen Hawking: Great. The entire universe was destroyed.
Fry: Destroyed? Then where are we now?
Al Gore: I don't know. But I can darn well tell you where we're not: The universe.
Nichelle Nichols: (groans) Eternity with nerds. It's the Pasadena Star Trek convention all over again.
Just like humans, blaming everything but themselves for their own failings.
"It's religion's fault people are bad!"
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
I'm a Westerner and I'm happy.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Don't look at Scifi, look at history.
He also began beating the crap out of his right arm which refused to cooperate in general and had a propensity to give the hitler salute at the worst possible moments.
No "days of yore", sorry, and you can go ahead and drive your car. I'm just talking about a different mindset, that's all. I should have mentioned that I'm a big supporter of technology in my post, perhaps it would have trimmed down the confusion.
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I find it hard to believe that I would find a lot of common ground with anything posted on zenhell.com, but I'll at least take a look, based on your recommendation...
Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy religions of the East...
So, the concept of a soul is bullshit, partly because Western science can't measure it, but mostly because the Hindu faith says so. Okay, I'm pretty much done with this guy.
I tend to subscribe to the theory that Hindu was a religion invented by foreign conquerers in order to keep their new subjects both preoccupied and malnourished. To this day, people starve in the streets as yummy cows stroll by. They get to call my faith in the human soul mere "hallucination" after, and only after, they find a less insane way to live.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Bad religion is one of the ways people are bad. Who's blaming anyone else?
--
make install -not war
Too many people seem to be completely misinterpreting what I have said. Please understand that when I say "Western Society" and "Western Culture", I'm not referring to a geographical location, or an ethnic group, but rather a cultural mindset that anybody on any part of the globe can have (including those living in the East). I'm a big supporter of technology (programmer by profession), and so support many of the advances in technology that many of you enjoy as well. I'm simply critiquing a certain mindset, and had I been more careful in my word choice I think there would have been less of an uproar over that post. Unfortunately I don't plan on writing another essay on the subject, so if you're confused and interested in understanding what it was exactly that I said, please check out the links to Alan Watts in my original post, he's a much better writer and speaker than I am.
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A "spacesuit" is, by definition, a suit to wear in space. It follows from that, then, that a "cowsuit" would be a suit to wear in a cow.
Simply preposterous.
If, however, you are proposing a spacesuit that looks like a cow then I say you may have something there; the simple addition of large, irregularly-shaped black spots to existing space suits would achieve much of that effect (and by adding a long tail...well, let's just hope we all live to see such a day.)
I, for one, welcome our spacegoing bovine overlords.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Look, the Federation may have been a military dicatorship, but it worked for some people...
All I'm saying is that if humans need to spread out into the galaxy to ensure the survival of the species, Will Shatner and I are ready to go out and sleep with all the alien babes it'll take to make that happen. We'll take one for the team - that's just the sort of guys we are.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Well, that's too fucking bad 'cause no one is asking you.
:)
When Dr. Stephen Hawking speaks, the world fucking listens. And if he says we have to use some of "your" "stolen" tax dollars(like how I put quotes around the word 'your?' 'cause it isn't really "your" money! XD), hell, if he thinks the government needs to "steal" some more tax money from your parsimonious bitch ass, guess who's opinion we won't be asking?
Sincerely,
-society
XD
Listen p*ssy. I'm sure your the same homo that posted earlier about alf's boner and you just want to remain anonymous fo
You're not being very open minded are you? Watts certainly did not starve himself as "cows strolled by". He was not advocating all aspects of Hinduism, and in fact he preferred Buddhism. Watts was a scholar and interpreter of Eastern philosophy. He picked out the philosophical ideas that made the most sense to him and explain them to westerners. The man taught at Harvard for crying out loud! Thanks for attempting to read it, but you won't get very far if you refuse to hear him out. At the very least you have to admit that you can't critique that which you refuse to attempt to understand.
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I didn't read the references, but I think I've heard the song:
"This is not my beautiful house! And this is not my beautiful wife! And you say to yourself, 'My god, how did I get here?'. And the days go by..."
The Sun will not go nova. It does not have enough mass to create the gravitional force required for carbon fusion. Though, it will become a red giant with a radius of about 1 AU in about 5 billion years. It will then shed its outer layers and become a white dwarf. A supernova requires a star of about 8 times the mass of our Sun. After the supernova explosion (fusion of elements heavier than iron), if the core is still about 3 or more times the mass of out Sun, it will become a black hole, otherwise a neutron star.
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." - Calvin
Ah, thanks for that post. You are right, my post could have definitely stood to be clearer and therefore I made this clarification.
:-)
To answer your question: No, Watts does not say that you should disown technology and live among the untouchables. The man was born in the west and taught at Harvard. He was a very intelligent person and so you should at the very least try and hear him out. I'm a programmer and am agnostic, although I also believe in certain eastern ideas that you may consider "mystical", however, if you really study up on it, you will see that they are not, and in fact have a very strong backing in Quantum Physics (the Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami, Ph.D comes to mind).
Furthermore, it is possible to induce "mystical experiences" without practicing meditation for years (it's called LSD, DMT, etc). Either way, I sincerely appreciate your post, and I hope you give this guy a chance, I'm sure that if you do you'll see that he's not some wacko "mystic" but one of the most intelligent human beings to have ever lived.
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Oh right, securing freedom by spying, intimidation, and indefinite imprisonment without trial. Go back to the Dark Ages.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
If we ever get there, a few specimens such as these would be indispensable.
Yes, well, I hope you recognize that for most people on this earth, nothing has changed. Lucky us.
// This is not a sig.
How are to ensure we have enough biodiversity in space? We simply can't just take 2 of each species and hope for the best.
What we should be doing is ensuring the survival while on Earth. We can't control external elements such as asteroids and comets slamming into us. Seems the odds are stacked against those events happening when compared odds that we sucumb to the damage we are causing to ourselves now.
Live forever, or die trying.
Personally I was brought up on sci-fi stories and used to think that we would colonise the stars someday. I no longer think this is possible. Even a moonbase I regard as highly unlikely and the idea of living on Mars for me belongs to 1950's style sci-fi. To me, sadly, the future of mankind looks more like NOLA post-Katrina than Star Trek.
You're a half-full kind of guy, aren't you?
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
"very strong backing in Quantum Physics"
Why do I suspect that this boils down to "mystical things are mysterious and so is Quantum physics, therefore the two are related"?
Q physics gets related to everything that people don't understand. It's often a substitute for the unknowable divine for people who find the concepts of God and the supernatural distasteful but yet want to believe in something beyond the ordinary.
Are you sure that isn't the case for you?
The problem is, what they're really saying is "humanity sucks, except for me".
Maybe a lot of people are, but not everyone.
I think most of humanity sucks. But I think I suck too. Doesn't mean I think either myself or humanity deserves to be destroyed just now. We've all got our good points along with our bad. The question is whether the good outweighs the bad, and that is a question left for history to decide.
If I'm really such a horrible person I'll wind up suffering the consequences of that sooner or later. If I'm bad enough I might end up dead because of it. I know at the least that I'm not perfect and will die eventually. But considering just within normal human limits, if there are no bad consequences of my behavior and everything turns out OK, then I'm either not as horrible as I thought I was, or I am but it's tolerable levels of badness, only possible by virtue of the good of others around me mitigating those consequences.
Same deal with humanity. If we blow ourselves up - either Earth, the galaxy, or whatever - well then in hindsight, we deserved it. Maybe not each of us as individuals, but as a society or species, yeah. Doesn't mean we *ought* to blow ourselves up now. We ought to try to be as good and successful a society/species as we possibly can in order to avoid such a fate. Maybe we'll fail to do so. Maybe we *would* fail to do so if not for some benevolent alien race out there who will save our asses from our own dysfunction. Who knows. History will tell. All we can do is try.
When I was younger I used to have a saying, one that I wish I could bring myself to apply in my life today:
"Plan for the worst. Strive for the best. Expect nothing."
.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
In addition to the scientific reasons, the command to "be fruitful and multiply" dictates that we colonize space if the result is to be anything other than misery.
Nah, I think he's been listening to Pink Floyd:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Because you don't understand.
Fairly sure. I really didn't say much in my post other than the fact that certain eastern ideas have very strong backing in QM. Now, how is it that from that statement you're able to extract any sort of conclusion on what I mean by it? You can't, you can only assume you know, obviously.
So my advice to you, is to not jump to these assumptions, because for all you know I could hold a Ph.D. Quantum Mechanics (Actually I don't, but Amit Goswami does). A better question you could have asked would be: "Oh really? And just what are those correlations?"
One more thing: you're right that nobody in western science truly understands QM. Could this be because the actual explanation flies directly in the face of their metaphysical assumptions about life and so they refuse to even consider it as a possibility?
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That's interesting. Sounds a lot like christianity - the modern concept of Christianity was more or less invented by the Roman Empire. And of course the Catholic church actively suppressed education to make it easier to control their sheeple.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hawking is an alien, and he's trying to get rid of us to make way for the rest of his species to settle our planet. Fortunately for us, they're all confined to wheelchairs and will be easy to defeat, especialy if we refuse to build special hyperspace ramps for the handicapped.
"Fairly sure. I really didn't say much in my post other than the fact that certain eastern ideas have very strong backing in QM. Now, how is it that from that statement you're able to extract any sort of conclusion on what I mean by it? You can't, you can only assume you know, obviously. :-) "
I can relate your claim to personal experience.
I am a neuroscientist, and people who "know" quantum mechanics have come through my field, claiming that QM is the secret of consciousness.
It is poppycock in my field, and I surmise therefore that it may be in yours as well.
BTW, Alan Watts does not talk much about QM, however he uses more obvious scientific observations to dispel the notion of an isolated ego in a bag of skin (do you subscribe to this viewpoint btw?). Amit Goswami is a physicist who believes in what you're talking about. Slightly off-topic, but do you know why we're self-aware as opposed to other animals? (and don't just say our brain is more advanced, that's like saying a car works because it has fuel inside of it; obvious). Finally, what do you think is the "secret" of consciousness? (this probably will overlap with the previous question)
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All living creatures are self-replicating machines. What would make these "berserkers" less living than the life formes it could replace?
In other words, I don't think they can wipe out life since they are life.
Dr. Hawking further elaborated on his suggestion that the space colonies include 10 women for every man:
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature."
The Sun probably does not have enough mass to supernova. The most likely scenario for the Sun is conversion into a red giant. The Sun will most likely slough off its outer layers creating a planetary nebula. After a long, long cooling period, the Sun may eventually compress into a white dwarf.
One might wonder why we wish the survival of a species that has destroyed its own habitat. Are there greener pastures to destroy in outer space?
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program" -- Larry Niven
We're at the bottom of a hole.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Why should I care about the human race? In 100 years nobody I care about will be alive anyway. If something wipes out the Earth I don't see it as a big loss to the rest of the universe. There is probably some other race out there more deserving of survival beyond their world.
At 1 AU, which by definition is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, the Sun would then swallow the Earth.
Sure, the sun probably won't supernova by creating the heavy elements, but I don't understand how it avoids going nova. When the hydrogen runs out, the sun will collapse under its own gravity. A shockwave has to occur, and that is a nova.
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
There are degrees of self-awareness. We have alot, monkeys have some, ants have none. If I started picking your brain apart one neuron at a time, you wouldn't ever notice a specific point at which self-awareness ceased, you would gradually get less and less aware until you were just a brainstem controlling your heart, lungs and digestive system.
:)
The "secret" of consciousness is that there is no secret. Just because people are fascinated by a problem doesn't make it profound. I myself enjoy picking my nose too, and likely will for the remainder of my days, but that doesn't mean my nose is deeply mysterious.
I suggest you begin with the assumption that the world is a mundane and boring place, rather than that there are deep mysteries that need solving. It's not as depressing as it sounds
Ah. Very illuminating. I guess if you have a discussion without facts, there's no way that you might have to re-evaluate your position. A straw man without the straw or man, quite efficient.
I've never quite understood the obsession with "continuing" the human race. While I am certainly concerned with the long-term impacts of what humans do,thus a concern for environmental impacts, population control, and the conditions under which my fellow people exist under, I one could care less if humanity survived for a million more years or not. I'm not going to be there, and I have little concern about whether or not our "civilization" still exists. It's this ridiculous sentimental attachment to a non-existant overarching concept, in whatever forms it takes (racial prejudice, nationalism, religious fervor) that leads to the stupid wars and completely preventable human created disasters. As far the ones outside of our control, well, sitting around worrying about a meteorite striking seems like a lot of paranoia.
Any offworld presence we could establish would be so infinitescimally small (did I spell that right), that we might as well just jar a bunch of our DNA with some instructions, secure them well in a five foot thick lead time capsule, with a "reconstitute when your alien technology allows."
(Okay, okay, my ex-wife has me in a bit of a cynical mood today, I'll admit.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
So... you first say it's not a secret, then you admit it's a problem. Then you equate picking your nose to consciousness.
I'm aware that animals display varying degrees of consciousness, but unlike you, I think it's fascinating, not boring. According to your own beliefs, there should be no reason that we are conscious at all, it would be just as likely that life continued in the way it has, television and all, without our being aware of it.
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Sounds like you're not a fan of humanity then. I'm only trying to help it. Your "way" is to destroy yourself, now that's a bleak outlook.
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Something can be a complex problem worth studying without being a deep and mysterious secret. You know what the difference is, stop playing semantics.
And on another day I might have posted something very similar to what you have just wrote.
Please mod this post offtopic.
3 20027 ) where you said:
I wanted to point out to you..
this post ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185590&cid=15
Although I understand what you say and I agree with some of it, I don't believe this is a gold bubble that will dissappear over night. [...] I'm guessing that we'll see $1000/oz by the end of the year - I bought at $550 so have put my money where my mouth is. We shall see.....
And then, this: Gold closes less than $600 an oz, down $170 from Mid May (previous post was from May 12).
I'd go ahead and sell.
sig?
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So this means that if I do mess in my house, I don't clean the floor, wash things and don;t fix what is broken the solution is to leave it as it is and buy a new one? I agree with space exploration an living in other planets but is that the ultimate solution to it all? I think scientists should reconsider this idea about science as a saver. Smells like the bad side of religion.
http://www.quasarcr.com/
You are correct, the Sun will swallow the Earth when it becomes a Red Giant. The hydrogen won't completely run out. There will still exist a hydrogen/helium shell surrounding a carbon/oxygen core. The carbon/oxygen core of the Sun will be much more compressable then say the iron core of a star going nova. Instead of a complete gravitational collapse (and subsequent shockwave), the compressed core will increase in temperature and ignite the hydrogen/helium shell which will cause it to slowly expand and cool. The electron degenerency pressure of the core will prevent its collapse and transfer energy from gravitional compression back to the surrounding shell as heat. The Sun will lose its outer layers, but very slowly. The core will be all that is left (a white dwarf).
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." - Calvin
Kinda like the planet Krypton. Meanwhile while the top scientists are trying to get people off the planet, the elected elders will just simply say "The planet is just shifting it's orbit. Do not leave or you will be jailed."
So since by that time, space travel will be privatized, there will be space kids ejected in homemade space ships out to other planets because of the bureaucracy .
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
All of these regard consciousness as a "secret" in that they say that classical physics and biological science are incapable of explaining it.
I would say that these more basic disciplines may yet be able to explain it, but we don't yet know enough about the structure of the brain to do so, yet. It is an empirical error on your part to retreat to a form of explanation that cannot fit within the simpler theoretical framework until observed data force you to do so.
Well, literally it does care. "We" are the universe, or at least part of it. We are how the universe has currently arranged itself here. In that sense, any caring we do is caring that the universe does, in part.
Even further than that, the universe had within it the preconditions, as you call it "cause and effect" that biased it to arrange itself into choice-making entities which benefit from "caring", creating cultures that develop meaning, etc. We have not simply adapted to conditions new or old, we have arisen and formed from those very conditions.
I suggest you seriously consider reading the first chapter from that link so that we can stop all these misunderstandings.
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Yeah but what's interesting about this is that what is "selfish" depends upon what you consider to be within your "self". Are individual genes acting for their own interest (Dawkins), are we acting for ourselves as organisms, or as you imply for our family and culture? What seems to be happening is that as we become more obviously interconnected through technology we are expanding the sphere of our self-interest, at this point including "humanity" or "the planet". There certainly is a lot of selfishness at the cultural level at this point in history, which seems to be in conflict with the more global view of selfishness.
Well, it seems like the only hope for this cancer is to be able to escape the host that it has destroyed then? It seems to me like you'd better start investing in NASA then, because according to the vast majority of scientists, we don't have much time if we continue this cancerous behavior.
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well, guess what, I sold and took profits and am waiting on the sidelines waiting to jump back in. PMs (or any stock don't go straight up y'know). I still believe in $1000 gold for the end of the year. I'm guessing we'll find support at $525-550, only time will tell. The fundamentals haven't changed any and it should be understood that the gold market can be terribly manipulated by the dumping of paper contracts. This I suspect has been happening today. The traders make money which ever way - short or long. The USD index is up quite a bit (meaning that the dollar has found strength from somewhere) but I feel it can't be sustained. When the USD and oilprice move (downward and upward respectively) we'll see the PoG pick up again. It's a buying opportunity when we hit the bottom of the move.
We'll see, but I still made some money.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
"As for biology, its purpose does not involve answering that question"
Absolutely incorrect. I can tell you for a fact that explaining consciousness is a priority of biological science.
Go to Pubmed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi
and search for the term consciousness.
"That's because classical physics is flawed"
Not flawed, incomplete. Just because a theoretical framework cannot explain everything does not make it wrong, it's just too simplistic to accomodate all of the data. It may still be a valuable framework for explaining how things work. A computer programmer, for example, does not need to understand QM to write some code. His non-QM (and therefore "flawed") understanding of how the world works is sufficient for him to understand how a computer works.
Is consciousness outside the realm of classical physics? Noone knows, and it is an error on your part to state outright that biology cannot address this question.
We will know the answer at some point, but our understanding of the brain is far too primitive to make assertions of this sort.
In the meantime, Occam's razor tells me to side with the simpler alternative: that everything related to personality and self awareness occurs in the physical substrate of the brain using neurochemical processes that we are studying.
Awwww, possibly ;-)
I call it 'realism' though.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
The US waged a war of conquest and genocide against the indigenous peoples of this continent. It enslaved hundreds of thousands of Africans, and left them to fend for themselves after they were freed. It has undermined or destroyed the indepedence movements of dozens of colonial possessions, both our own and those we "liberated" from other powers, and has supported rutheless dictators throughout the world because we prefer their methods to the philosphies of their opposition.
Now, tell me, at what point did we learn better? Exactly when in history did we become the good guys? You haven't refuted that commenter, only illustrated the American supremacy in self-deception.
No, it isn't. The Federation is run by the Vulcan shadow government.
Think about the situation at the time the Vulcans first contacted Earth. They've had their schism with the Romulans and have fought wars with them, and had the worse of it; and now there are Klingons prowling the dark places of the galaxy. Now the Vulcans contact a planet that's just developed warp technology. A planet full of creatures with a horrific record of murder and mayhem, who are capable of justifying the same to themselves in terms of 'pro patria mori' and similar bullshit, who could easily be a terror on the galaxy to make even the Klingons fear... but who are at a very impressionable stage...
Bingo! The Vulcans, in a paternal, imperialist sort of way, take Earth under their wing. They help humans build better starships, they advise and guide. In time, they join with Earth to form the United Federation of Planets. Coincidentally, the enemies of the Earth are the same as the enemies of the Vulcans... How did something like that happen?
So now the Romulans and the Klingons are kept off the Vulcans' backs by Starfleet. By the mighty space navy of the United Federation of Planets. A fleet of ships built at Mars, crewed almost entirely by humans from Earth, now guards a planet of decadent philosophers who are free to pursue their ideals of pure logic and reason. Humans fight and die in huge numbers for the protection of Vulcan. And every Starfleet ship we've ever seen has a single Vulcan, as a highly-ranked officer but not as captain... remember how Soviet ships used to have a 'political officer' to make sure the captain didn't do anything ideologically unsound? Yeah.
And whenever we see Starfleet command, the concentration of pointy ears is so much higher, don't you notice? Oh yes. It's all humans on the front line, but back at base it's all green-blooded bastards.
The entire Federation is a sham, concocted and perpetuated by the Vulcans for their own cowardly ends. Deal with it.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So when do the Arc ships depart "Earth That Was?" I'm looking to buy a beat up old Firefly and hire a few Companions to keep me company.
-buf
I think your boogeyman needs to be defined more widely. It isn't just 'western culture' it's pretty much 'all of us.' Look close at just about any place on earth and you'll find people ripping and tearing at the earth to scratch out a living. The notion that it's 'western culture' is a delusion. There's no 'sacred path' outside the mainstream that we've horribly wandered off. There are certainly alternatives and there are tendencies that all of humanity exhibit (a short-term point of view that doesn't plan ahead.) What I'm trying to get at is: don't just blame one part of humanity. You can go to where the 'noble savages' that so many who believe these myths venerate, and you'll find them burning down as much forest as they can.
(That's how my RSS reader truncated the title of the story - it made me jump!)
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Alan Watts? your kidding right? oh your not, you just stupid.
Cut the guy some slack. Don't you remember when *you* were a freshman and discovered that everything you'd ever been taught before by your elders was *all* *wrong* ?
Give him a few years to play around with utopias before slapping him down.
The very plain fact is that far more Iraqis have died in this *year to date* in sectarian and insurgent violence than died in the September 11th attacks. That sectarian and insurgent violence was *directly* unleashed by the U.S. invasion that was completely based on the decisions of the Bush administration.
Just because the U.S. didn't benefit doesn't mean it was some kind of admirably selfless act. Actually, it was a giant fuck-up that could have easily been forseen and avoided. That is a BAD THING, get it?
I don't believe the Bush administration deliberately did this to get access to Iraqi oil; I can actually believe GWB justified it to himself by thinking of all the nasty things Saddam Hussein did, although such justification is amazingly selective and based on a complete misunderstanding of Iraq. (E.g. "But he used chemical weapons against his own people!"...no, he gassed Kurds. Saddam Hussein is not a Kurd.) Whatever the justification, the invasion has become an absolute disaster from the point of view of the average Iraqi.
Well, I'll give you that, it's not really a major point anyway. I was just trying to point out that the way biology views it, there's no reason for us to be aware of our surroundings and ourselves. You've yet to give a response to that point.
Believe me, as I have a background in physics I know very well that Newtonian mechanics works very well for explaining everyday, ordinary observations. However, it is indeed flawed when it comes to answer the question of: what is the true reality of the universe? It fails miserably at answering that, in fact it is downright wrong. QM seems to provide the answer to that, however, with the mindset like yours, most scientists simply disregard it. Their disbelief goes so far that it caused Einstein to say: "God does not play dice". Well since then he's been proven wrong. God does play with dice, and there are no hidden variables. Check out the EPR paradox for more details.
You're so stubborn in your classical mindset that you refuse to acknowledge the facts right in front of you and dismiss them as bullshit "mysticism". Sure, no one's arguing that your mind doesn't occur because of your brain, that's not what they're saying. Again, I can repeat myself for you as many times as you like, but it is truly confounding that we are self-aware at all. In the classical mindset, there is no reason whatsoever for us to be self-aware, and classical physics fails horribly at explaining the quantum world, which is really the world we live in.
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One of my co-workers had a wonderful time at a Dude Ranch last summer.
Are we sure he didn't mean myspace?
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Now, now. Let's not start hurling terms like 'freeper' and 'moonbat' around or this will turn into another political blog. We're better than that, honest we are.
It is very *very* western for 'white man' to wander off on a pilgrimage 'to the east' and bring back a passel of ideas and set up a smorgasboard philosophy based on them.
In fact, that form of 'veneration of the East' is patently racist. It's like admiring a comic book mythisized version of the 'American Indian religion' made up by a new age guru. And it's very VERY patronizing to people who live their real lives in said system.
It has great appeal for people with a moderate but not deep world experience, it gives them an 'other' to admire in their shallow way.
But it's based, sadly, in ignorance of the whole truth. Think a little more about the grandparent commenter's query and what he was getting at.
"Well, I'll give you that, it's not really a major point anyway. I was just trying to point out that the way biology views it, there's no reason for us to be aware of our surroundings and ourselves. You've yet to give a response to that point. "
Self awareness has a clear evolutionary advantage in allowing us to evaluate our own actions before we take them, and to evaluate their consequences after we have taken them.
"You're so stubborn....... and classical physics fails horribly at explaining the quantum world, which is really the world we live in."
You misunderstand the utility of a simple theoretical framework if you claim it must explain everything before it can explain anything. We are limited in our ability to understand complex theories because our brains are only the science of a small cantelope. My "stubbornness" is the proper empiricist response to being told I need to use a more complex theoretical framework without sufficient reason.
You have no data to support your assertion that self-awareness is a special quality that can only be explained with QM. What you have are your gut instincts and several millenia of philosophy. That's insufficient background material for the claim you make.
You seem to be claiming that the west is fueling things like space exploration while the (as you call them) "navel-contemplating planet co-squatters in the east" are doing nothing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Asia is where most of the worlds manufacturing occurs now - especially when it comes to high tech goods. More engineers and scientists are educated there, and they are well respected there (moreso than here).
And do you think the US would be looking at going to the moon again if China hadn't started it's own moon program?
It is quite unfortunate that you, as well as many others, have no respect for someone's property. Yes, that money is mine. I earned it with my own two hands. If you don't like it, too fuckin bad. And guess what, nobody is asking you either. Or any of the other hundreds of posters on this story for that matter. :)
guess who's opinion we won't be asking?
Obviously it must be yours.
I'm just talking about modern life. Not specific current American politics. This should have been obvious when I said that I don't have to worry about it. I don't know what you think has happend in history, but throughout human history, there has been a whole lot of raping, pillaging, and plundering...
Why? In purely practical terms, all we need is energy and life. Closed biosystems are complex and difficult, but if we get soem plants and animals up there in a protected environment, we have the sun and some heavey minerals to keep it going. Technically, we have everthing we need to start a colony up there. Or at least, a first colony from which we can learn. Hell, we even have a reason to go, what with the helium-3.
All that's lacking is the will. And some idiot who thinks that going to mars first was a great PR stunt to pull. And that useless ISS which is cool and all but hardly practical.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
So to the point: Are the achievements of man serving no purpose NOW? Is medicine not curing people NOW? Is technology not making this conversation happen NOW? Is art not inspiring humankind NOW?
Perhaps the mere *thought* of extinction scares us simply because it means we are not the gods we imagine ourselves to be.
Sure, it may have an evolutionary advantage, but so would the ability to shoot laser beams out of our eyes. That's hardly a sufficient explanation of why we are self-aware. In the biological and your "empirical" mindset (which I wouldn't call very empirical at all because you refuse to even try and experience any of these higher levels of thought; i.e. meditation, LSD, etc), it would make much more sense for evolution to continue without the introduction of self-awareness. *You* are here. You experience the world from your eyes while you could have been just like some common animal. Why is that so? Can you explain that? Sure it's because our mind is "better", but what makes it better? The fact that there is this ability in this world, to become self-conscious, is incredible. DId you know that most humans don't have a self, meaning they are not self-conscious until they are *taught* how to be aware of themselves (at around the age of 3 btw). It's a fact, ask your local sociologist about it.
Where did I misunderstand its utility?? I told you I know full well the usefulness of Newtonian mechanics. And then you go on to suggest that we might not even be able to understand "it"? Oh yeah, that's real empirical of you.
Here's a simple example: An electron does not have a definite position until someone or something observes it. Here's another: If you repeat a quantum experiment and perfectly duplicate the environment, you will still get different results based on probabilities (i.e. the electron showed up there this time, and there that time). This suggests that the act of conscious observation affects the environment. I'll have to get back to you later with even more examples if you want, I'm still not done reading this book.
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*As soon as my time machine is finished, I'm going to go back to 1936 and write a science fiction epic around that term.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Hawking's suggestion has the virtue that we actually have the technology necessary to pursue it. I think there is an even more interesting strategy for human survival that requires a few fundamental breakthroughs (which may not actually be possible) but the result would be more dramatic. It's been known since the sixties that a ramscoop fusion engine has the potential to provide constant 1g accelerated space travel. That is, the acceleration would be the amount needed to provide the equivalent of Earth's gravitational field. Analyzing this motion with the appropriate special relativity framework we get remarkable, almost unbelievable, consequences. You can find the analysis in Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's big blue bible Gravitation in chapter six. Because of time dilation and lorentz contraction such a ship could travel to any point in the visible universe with the shipboard time elapsed being less than the number of years a person could expect to live including the return trip.
The amount of time that would correspondingly elapse on Earth during such a round trip is an example of the twin paradox on steroids. There is a list of cases at this web address. The provocative extreme cases involve billions of years. So even though evolution and geological events would have moved far past the era of man we could send teams to the future which could have the potential to renew our species no matter what events might occur. So you could leave in the 21st century and you (not some distant descendant) could return to Earth hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years in the future. Damn, that theory of relativity implies some unbelievable possibilities due to the geometry of how the universe is put together.
"Sure, it may have an evolutionary advantage, but so would the ability to shoot laser beams out of our eyes. That's hardly a sufficient explanation of why we are self-aware."
Laser beams were either too complex or too energy inefficient for evolution to develop. Self awareness wasn't.
I could go on but this is but this is pointless because we're each committed to our respective sides. You either don't understand the philosophy of empiricism or your refuse to accept it. Either way, I won't be able to convince you. Suffice to say that the mainstream of scientific discipline, for all its flaws and stubbornness, has lead to the invention of the coffee machine on my desk, and eastern philosophies haven't. So I'll stick with science.
I wish I had mod points. I don't know if I agree with all your points, but that's a very intersting take on the subject.
......about philosopher and interpreter of Eastern religions......
Eastern religions' common thread of survival is the idea of re-incarnation. So what happens if the earth and all life thereon is destroyed? Where or into what then do people get re-incarnated?
The Christian faith hinges on the idea of a physical resurrection into the some kind of transcendent body, such as Jesus. In that scenario, humanity can and will survive the eventual destruction of this planet. Jesus lived in a tangible, physical body, yet one that was not limited to the physical dimensions our mortal bodies are today.
All theory is gray
Neither Alan Watts, nor the Dali Lama, nor myself, would disagree with you when you say "stick to science". Never have I said you should not, in fact I'm a great proponent of it. As I have shown, it is the other way around, "western" scientists are the ones who do not stick to science. They scoff at their own results, and say things like "God does not play dice".
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.....It enslaved hundreds of thousands of Africans.......
Who were rounded up by their OWN chiefs and sold for trinkets and guns to the slave traders.
All theory is gray
Heh, here's a fun quote for you. Niels Bohr, who had the materialistic mindset of yours, was visited by Schrodinger. While Schrodinger explained to him the idea of the quantum jump (the idea that small particles vanish from the material world and instantaneously appear in another location), Bohr protested for days. Finally he gave in and said: "If I had known that one has to accept this damned quantum jump, I'd never have gotten involved with quantum mechanics!" :-D
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....I really didn't say much in my post other than the fact that certain eastern ideas have very strong backing in QM.....
I'd really be interested in how quantum physics touches on eastern ideas in ways that Christianity does not. I've always thought that QM is science, and as such is limited to the physical world, whereas religion goes beyond science.
All theory is gray
I couldn't help it. I had just finished up reading a flame war about Coulter over at Crooks and Liars. :D
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Thanks for taking interest. Check out my replies to Illserve, towards the end I give a few examples. Also, if you're really interested, there's a book on the subject called "The Self-Aware Universe" by Amit Goswami, Ph.D. in physics at the University of Oregon.
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Oh, also, you should first familiarize yourself with what those eastern ideas actually are, and the best way to do that would be to start by reading those first two chapters by Alan Watts that I linked to in my original post.
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Ahem... Aren't you forgetting about terrorists?
read a little john ringo-- alldenta..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
No matter how BAD the earth gets. Even with run away globl warmming and unbreathable air it will still be easier and cheaper to build an enclosed living space on Earth then to build it on, say, the moon. Even if all the air on earth were is disapear and the Earth were to be in hard vacuum it would still be cheaper to live inside a presure tank here then inside a presure tank on the moon because. Even if you share the gaol of moving people off the Earth, now may not be the right time. If you start today it might take 150 years to build a sutainable industry in space, one that can operate without support from Earth. But if we start in 50 years it might take only 110 years to do the same thing. To be free of Earth you need things like a stell and aluminum industral and plants that make basic metals and machine tools. How long until there is a factory of the moon that makes digial camera and childred's toys. Not this century.
Here's a simple example: An electron does not have a definite position until someone or something observes it. Here's another: If you repeat a quantum experiment and perfectly duplicate the environment, you will still get different results based on probabilities (i.e. the electron showed up there this time, and there that time). This suggests that the act of conscious observation affects the environment. I'll have to get back to you later with even more examples if you want, I'm still not done reading this book.
Bzzzzzzzzzzt!! Mysticists (is that a word?) who use QM as the justification for mysticism can be counted on to abuse what physicists mean when they say "observation". First things first, "observation" is not something that is taking place in a human's mind. "Observation" is anything that causes a quantum state to collapse into a more defined state. "Anything" in this case is either photon or some other particle that disturbs the system; there most certainly isn't any real evidence for "chakra energy" or any other such foolishness being the driver of such processes. I'll put it less snidely: The universe goes about it's working regardless of whether humans perceive or it not. This influence can be supplied naturally by the environment or by a physicist's instrument. "Observation" can also take place if a quantum system de-coheres on it's own and energy from it influences another system...say an instrument in a physicist's lab. If the physicist sets up the experiment and goes on vacation for week, his instruments will do all the "observing" while he is away: no consciousness required.
The primary error you are making is conflating "observation" with "perception". If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, the phenomenon of sound waves don't take a vacation because humans aren't around to perceive them as sound. They could do anything from not much of note to starting an avalanche (which needn't have humans in the path of it....). The sound waves starting an avalanche are much closer to what the physicist means by "observation" which in physics is a technical term rather than a psychological or even psychic one.
I do not dispute the existence of quantum effects.
I dispute whether it is valid to argue that consciousness relies on them.
Oh, dear God, I'd forgotten about "TEH TERRORUSTS".
Listen up, and by: "Listen up", I only peripherally mean YOU. I really direct this to the people who use "TEH TERRORUST!" as a way of trying to make it sound like we have some major concern here in our tough, tough, post-9/11 world.
Let me direct you to a simpler time of life, a time when Reagan's and Kennedy's walked the earth.
A simpler time when people lived with the idea the upwards of 50% of the USA, USSR, and chunks of Europe's populations could be dead in under an hour's time. Yeah, right. Ooooh, scary terrorists.
Hell, I'll take terrorists any day of the week over continuing to live with that. Hell, I'll take terrorists over living with the fear that my village was going to be raided and a member of my family killed. I think my odds are STILL better with the terrorists.*
*Note: Offer not valid in Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Most of the Middle East, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Indonesia, Iraq, Chechnya, Sudan, Iraq, and Tennessee.
.....If I started picking your brain apart one neuron at a time, you wouldn't ever notice a specific point at which self-awareness ceased, you would gradually get less and less aware......
That is based on the assumption (faith) that consciousness is part of or caused by the material nature of the brain. It is like saying that the physical hardware of a computer gives rise to the software which controls and runs it and gives the computer its "personality". We can load all sorts of software into the same hardware and this software makes the same hardware do radically different things. If there is a sharp distinction in a computer between the hardware and the software, could this not also be true of us are humans? Just as the software was put into the computer by an external intelligence, so too was our mind and spirit put into the hardware of our bodies by an external intelligence. Even our "hardware", our bodies are constructed and controlled by the software stored in the DNA. We are talking about information and in the case of humans we usually talk about God in this context.
All theory is gray
No shit? I don't disagree with a single thing you said. Oh, and I made no "error".
You're a far way from understanding what I mean, and your presumptuous attitude makes me less inclined to help you.
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So you finally concede this world is not purely a material one? Then your arguments against consciousness slowly disintegrate as you provide no other explanation for it....
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Closed biosystems to sustain human life have not succeeded so far. Biosphere 2 began to run low on oxygen and so wasn't really self-sustaining.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
The cost of putting something like that on the moon would be extraordinary. How much weight, how many journeys? How would it be assembled - there's manyears of work there? It would have too be fairly big to produce a sustainable crop of food or produce oxygen. There's a long list of things like radiation, low gravity, temp extremes that make small things very difficult and expensive to solve. And it's going to have to be paid for by taxation. Politically near enough impossible I would think. The He3 story could make it a commercial venture but I'm not sure a large firm would spend billions to get small risky energy returns. The first steps would be seen as commercial suicide due to the expense.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
To hell with mankind.
Have you seen how this species treats one another?
If he can barely survive on a *planet*, how long can he survive on the fragile, technology controlled capsule?
Seriously, if he can't get along with his fellow man on a country or continental size land mass, where the environment nurtures him with free, unlimited oxygen, easy water and food, how can he survive space?
In outer space, I give him 3 generations, max, before being swallowed forever by the hostile, unforgiving eternal void.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
You must be careful how you use that term 'God'. If used in the Christian sense, that there was this grampa-like figure that created man, then you should be aware that this is not the sense in which it is used by Alan Watts or Buddhism. Again, I strongly recommend you read those two chapters.
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By the way, you might be surprised to know that the Dali Lama is a big fan of yours; he really likes neuroscientists.
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For those of you that haven't seen it, the quote is from Dr. Strangelove.
Which COMPLETELY coincidentally, is the movie I just finished watching for the first time not even an hour ago. Wacky.
Karma: NaN
Very simple. Matter behaves according to certain laws. It cannot travel faster than the speed of light for example. Matter, in the classical sense, also obeys locality. QM shows that matter is really not particles, but wavicles, with both the properties of waves and particles. So, with the example I gave, of an electron, when nothing observes it, it is a wave that is spread over a certain region. This wave represents the probability of being found at any one of those points. Therefore one can think of it as being in multiple places at the same time. When you observe it, you "collapse the wave" and you see it as a particle. Afterwards it goes back into its wave-like state. Oh, another thing you should read that will make this clear to you is the Double Slit Experiment. So, continuing, small particles like electrons also make what is called "quantum jumps". This means they instantaneously go from one position to another. It is impossible to know exactly when this will happen and where they will arrive, you can only know the probabilities. Finally, perhaps the best example of the world not being a material one, is the so-called Spooky action at a distance". In this, two or more particles are in an entangled state. A change on one brings about an instantaneous change in the other, no matter how far they are separated.
Well again you are wrong. QM has proved you wrong, and this is because the universe, on a quantum scale, is undeterministic. This means that things do not follow an exact sequential order. In other words, a change in an electron, like firing it at another, will not give you the same result each time the experiment is perfectly duplicated. This is not the case in computers; they follow an algorithm--a direct sequence of events. Furthermore, the brain and computers and fundamentally different in their design. The brain is massively parallel; you can cut off half of it and it will still work. Things happen simultaneously in different locations. This is not the case in CPUs, and no amount of multi-threading will save you. Perhaps if you had a computer whose CPU consisted of several billions of cores, and they all had the ability to physically change their orientations, then *maybe* you could have an AI.
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I've misunderstood very little. Remember this?
This suggests that the act of conscious observation affects the environment.
I suspect "suggests" means that what you meant can be cast into any suitable terms. I've spent quite a bit of time around New Agers who speak using the exact type of language and ideas you were expressing. When I pinned them down with what science and physics actually meant, they too insisted that I "had it all wrong".
What other reasonable way can I take where you are coming from? In some of your other posts, you are scornful of "materialistic mindsets"? QM is one way of putting a scientific imprimateur on classical "God Of The Gaps" arguments but QM does not by itself explain consciousness or human perception even if someday of those naughty empirical materialists shows that it figures into on some level or another. At any rate, nothing more than speculation along those lines has happened thus far so consciousness is apropos of nothing when discussing QM. Incidentally, the track record of the materialist empiricists is pretty damn good; they've explained in verifiable detail one hell of a lot more than the mystical philosphers. I also suspect that while QM may figure in consciousness I severely doubt that the reverse is true....although good evidence could change my mind.
Neither Alan Watts, nor the Dali Lama, nor myself, would disagree with you when you say "stick to science". Never have I said you should not, in fact I'm a great proponent of it. As I have shown, it is the other way around, "western" scientists are the ones who do not stick to science. They scoff at their own results, and say things like "God does not play dice".
It's a fool's errand but I guess I can't resist replying to this and your whole shtick.No one who matters in this context cares what Alan Watts or the Dali Lama has to say on the subject. Despite the disengenuous claims to the contrary quantum mechanics was developed entirely in places like Copenhagen, Berlin, Cambridge and other locations noted for their scarcity of ashrams. It was conceived and developed by people with extensive training in and knowledge of advanced classical mechanics (Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanics and so forth, not the high school level stuff that is often bandied about). If we were waiting for Buddhists to reach a useful level of creativity to discover QM we would still be waiting (probably forever). In fact the subject in question has not been a static edifice. It continues to be developed and improved, QM -> QED -> QCD -> quantum gravity (that last arrow is a direction, not a completed step). Notably absent from this progress is a useful contributions from any temples or ashrams.
I know a statement like that comes off as insulting toward those institutions which I really don't intend except in regard to bullshit claims made on their behalf and possibly without their agreement with the claims. I had the opportunity to attend some of the lecures of Feynamn and I was even a classmate of Polchinski. These are people who were responsible for improving our understanding of QM and I didn't detect even a hint of oriental philosphy informing either one of them and yet they have done OK. I imagine Joseph might bring matters to higher levels yet.
My point is that QM is a Western game. There have been plenty of contributers from most areas of the world including, for instance, Tomonaga who contributed to the formulation of QED. My point is that his contribution was in no way Eastern except as an incidental geographical matter. I'm only aware of popularizers like Fritjof Capra who make claims such as yours. Not actual working physicists who have made contributions to the advancement of QM. I'm sure there have been many, because of their voracious intellectual interests, who have been curious about Eastern philosophies as well as being actual contributors. Oppenheimer is an example who studied Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gits. But I don't think anyone claims this was part of the intellectual framework that informed his research thinking. Gelman's Eight-Fold Way illustrated his familiarity with Buddhist philosophy but it has immeasurably more to do with the group SU(3) than any discourse delivered by the Buddha.
Perhaps their track record is so good because the effects of QM on the visible world are negligible? Thus obviously they have a good track record at explaining where a ball will go. But both "mystical" philosophers and real QM physicists realize that they're not dealing with just the visible world, but rather the true reality of how everything works. And as I have shown in other posts, it's very interesting to see how well certain eastern ideas fit in with QM. Materialism simply does not work on the quantum scale, meaning reality is not made of the "matter" that we once thought it was.
It's easy to try and dismiss me as a "New Ager" isn't it? Too bad this time you're talking to someone who actually knows something about QM. Now, the part that you misinterpreted was not in the "suggests", but rather in the word "conscious", for the outlook that I'm proposing is that, in the words of Amit Goswami, the world is made of consciousness. Now, before you flip out upon reading that, please realize that if anything is true, the world is *not* made out of "material" or "particles". QM shows that discrete, independent particles do not exist, instead we have "wavicles", who only exhibit particle-like behavior when they are observed. It would be difficult for me to explain to you what exactly is meant by consciousness, and I've yet to finish reading Goswami's book, but needless to say I think it makes a whole lot of sense, especially after reading Watts' stuff. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to word this better, until then all I can offer you is the fact that we do not live in a material world.
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I won't bother to debunk the rest, but you get what I'm saying. The fact the parent is modded +5 insightful shows just how powerful false analogy can be.
Sony ha
n/t.
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There certainly is a lot of selfishness at the cultural level at this point in history, which seems to be in conflict with the more global view of selfishness.
Well, it all comes down to education. And some cultures have such disdain for education (about reality) on some subjects that it will be a long time before that all gets evened out. A long time. Especially when we've got so many backwards-leaning medieval-minded thugocracies still sitting (or trying to) on the energy reserves that we're still depending on.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
However. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but eastern ideas played a great role in the development of Quantum Mechanics. Take, for example, one of QM's greatest contributors, Erwin Schrödinger:
This was taken from the wiki on the Vedanta. And with regards to modern contributions, the author that I have cited, Amit Goswami, is a Ph.D. and though I think he recently retired, he worked for the Institute for Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon. He published the book I'm currently reading (The Self-Aware Universe), and is the author of numerous scientific papers and two physics texts.
:-)
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I have no idea how you could get from the one statement to the other.
Well, literally it does care. "We" are the universe, or at least part of it. We are how the universe has currently arranged itself here. In that sense, any caring we do is caring that the universe does, in part.
You're right, of course. I tend to refer to the universe as not being some anthropomorphized entity in these conversations because some people are so anxious to mentally create the image of some "other" party that will or won't approve of how we carry on. We, indeed, are that other party, as you say... and we're certainly part of the universe!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Well then you'd do well to read my reply to him.
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.....You must be careful how you use that term 'God'. If used in the Christian sense, that there was this grampa-like figure ......
There are of course many different ideas "God" that have their various adherents. In the context of the article, concerning the survival of the human race, when the earth is destroyed, the Christian concept of a transcendent Creator and the resurrection from the dead, in a transcendent, immortal physical body fits quite well. Eastern ideas of re-incarnation fail when the all life on this planet is wiped out if or when the sun goes nova or swallows the earth. The Christian God, outside of our time-space dimension demonstrated this survival by physically resurrecting Jesus from the dead. The founders of eastern and other religions are dead. None of them even makes the claim to conquering the greatest enemy -- death. The Bible speaks about the immortal, immaterial parts of man, the spirit, soul, consciousness, mind, intelligence or whatever other terms are applied to the non-physical part of man, becoming resident in a new kind of physical body. This new transcendent body can operate in ADDITIONAL dimensions to the time-space we are now a part of and flesh and blood limit us to.
Just as we load software and data into computer hardware, which determines and expresses the complete functionality thereof, so too our Creator is able to and will do with us.
According to the Bible, all humans will exist eternally, apart from the continuance of this present time-space cosmos. Those who believe, trust and obey the words and work of Jesus will have this continuance in the presence of their Creator. Those who disbelieve and disobey will be in an existence forever shut out from this closeness to the holy and absolutely perfect God.
All theory is gray
dude. going to space is bad for health!!! I dont wanna go there..
You've got it exactly backwards. The Catholic Church was the only place you could get a liberal education back around 1300. If it weren't for those monks in Ireland (and a precious few other places) fanatically preserving classical knowledge (including the texts which they themselves considered somewhat afoul of their belief system), the Renaissance flat-out never would have happened, in spite of the sudden influx of arabic science and wisdom after the fall of Constantinople.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nothing you've said about him makes him sound particularly unique or compelling. In fact, the more you try to tell me what a brilliant mind he is, the more he sounds like Yet Another Would-Be Joseph Campbell.
Thanks, but I don't need some Harvard prof to tell me how to live a happy life. I figured it out with nothing but an undergrad degree from a small State University in the midwest. If you are miserable and his book helps you, well than good for you. I'm glad you found something that makes you happy. You can stop assuming everybody else needs his thoughts and insights as badly as you do any time now.
Cheers!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
One day soon, someone will dump your lifeless corpse in a hole.
You will be terrified when your time comes to die.
Is it just me or do I detect a hint of bitterness in that response? I never said you needed a Harvard professor (heh), nor did I suggest that you in particular were unhappy, rather instead those people that adhered to a certain mindset. As to me? I read his stuff not because it makes me happy, but because I find it incredibly insightful and informative. Forgive me for trying to recommend it to you, I hope you weren't too offended. :-)
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......that everything related to personality and self awareness occurs in the physical substrate of the brain using neurochemical processes that we are studying.........
That is an assumption (faith) that a collection of atoms gives rise to consciousness, intelligence, mind, thought, emotion etc.
Is it possible, by examining the physical hardware of a computer to determine its function or the origin of its programming? All the hardware of a computer does is to allow the software to express the intent of the mind that created the software. All software ultimately is the product of a mind, a human mind in the case of a computer. No software arises apart from the activity of mind. Unlike hardware, there is no known mathematics that can give a reasonable assurance that the software is bug free.
Is it possible by minutely examining the brain, to determine the origin of its software? Does the software executed by the brain NOT also come from a mind, intelligence of a program designer? Does this software, just as in a computer reflect the intents and purposes of the programmer?
We know a lot more about computers than the brain, but even so, the most detailed examination of the hardware chips and circuits tells is very little about the functioning of the software and NOTHING whatsoever about the software origin until the computer is actually powered up. Even then that is only the case if the programmer decided to tell us about the working of the program and who he/she is. Since the brain is much more complex than a computer and we know very little about it, learning about the software is not very likely by examining its biology.
All theory is gray
To merely describe and explain normative social values does not respond to the question "why should an individual care?"
I do like your proof by induction, on the other hand.
You will soon die, at your own hands or otherwise.
Spot on. Yes, you couldn't have said that any better.
" Trying to understand the intricacies of federation politics from watching Star Trek episodes would be like an alien trying to understand the US government by watching "JAG". "
Or, its like trying to understand the intricacies of the US police force by watching Scooby Doo.
I've been saying EXACTLY THAT for over 20 years. When you consider the positive and negative effects of ZPE and MNT, there is no doubt that things are going to get scary and we should all hedge our bets by having someone out in the distance somewhere "safe". Particularly with enough genetic material to sustain a distant ecosystem.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Great post!
And we are all part of this evolved grey goo, which have eyes evolved to discern the subtle differences in colour of this grey-goo. Therefore making it look beautifully coloured. I'm sure if you look at all the life on earth including ourselves at some other frequencies, we may look a monotonously boring grey.
All the grey-goo life on earth is still fighting the competitive evolutionary battle.
i agree because i'm 21 and when i was growing up i was a big sci-fi fan, still am, but i'm getting tired of all the stuff like Earth 2 and Star Trek: Enterprise because I don't think we're close. Zef Cochrane isn't alive in this generation. I see SeaQuest as more realistic. Yes, we could build self-sustaining underwater colonies. It would teach us a lot about what's down there and give many people independence. It would ignite entrepreneurship and the studies of these colonies would help the space program greatly as they already do. There's already an underwater hotel! Personally that makes me nausous but if I didn't have a fear of sea creatures I'd be doing more than watching a TV show about that future. Space is expensive. The ocean is right here. We have precise maps of it. We have many choices. Anything can be done underwater. There's no zero g to worry about. The known risk of decompression is not as big of a problem as the danger of repeating another shuttle mistake that makes the craft explode. It's easier to rescue a submarine than a stranded moon colony. Will underwater residents survive in a nuclear war? No. No one will. Everything will be poison.
because it is possible.
people think our space shuttles are synthetic creations and therefore unnatural but I think the act of humans flying into outerspace is perfectly natural. and infact inevitable. if you look at the earth from a distance. ships continually try to make it out of orbit some succeed and some fail. but one will make it all the way in this way the act is quite similar to the insemenation of a human child. However once the one makes it through many more will follow. The only way to do this is to MAKE It happen, plan on it happening, continuiing missions and creating settlements in places out in space where we are not dependant on Earth. I agree with Hawking 100%.
We need to do this for our species. We need to think of the herd. The fact is that we aren't simply looking out for HUMAN life, but EARTH life and LIFE in general considering we have found no evidence of life elsewhere.
Support space travel and space colonies.
Just like Leto's Golden Path (from God Emperor of Dune, for you heretics) it's a way of not putting all of humanity's eggs in one basket. Obviously we'd still try to preserve Earth.
I'm calling BS on this one. Though I disagree with the grandparent, I also take issue with most of your post:
To stay on topic, I'm strongly in favour of Professor Hawking's suggestion. At least in the very long term, human life on this planet is not sustainable, unless we evolve into some kind of creature which can live in the corona of a red giant.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Maybe by "East" he was referring to mid-east and the like? Japan (for example) is VERY "western" in their lifestyle and society. Seen any scientific breakthroughs coming from Iran, Saudi-Arabia and the like?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I don't doubt that Schroedinger was inspired by aspects of Indian philosophy just as I imagine Murray Gell-Mann found inspiration of a sort in the Buddhist Eight Fold Way as I mentioned before. My point is that you can study that stuff till the cows come home and you get precisely nowhere. What you do need to study and learn is differential equations, Hamiltonian mechanics, group theory and any number of other non-Eastern philosophy subjects or you will get nowhere. Quantum mechanics can never be learned in an ashram or temple but it can be and is learned and extended to new levels at universities and institutes of technology. It is a Western scientific theory and they bang the hell out of it on a daily basis in experiments at labs around the world. And they don't burn incense in any of those labs.
As I mentioned before in reference to Oppenheimer many of these figures are very cosmopolitan and they have an active curiosity about other cultures. But even if you excluded every one of them you will still have physicists and mathematicians like von Neumann who can get all of it done with an advanced understanding of Hilbert spaces. The crucial tool in this context is modern mathematics, not Eastern philosophy. Obviously the stuff you go on about doesn't distract many physicists. What is annoying about it is the insidious attraction it has for people who are not literate about modern physics which is, of course, the vast majority.
I guess one could easily say the if it were not for the eastern ideas that he studied, he would never have come up with that equation!
Niels Bohr had the yin-yang symbol on his coat of arms (he was knighted).
And finally, how appropriate it is that you mention John von Neumann, for coincidentally I have just finished reading that it was in fact he who originally proposed the idea in the 1930s that consciousness collapses quantum waves.
Looks like many of these highly intelligent and respected scientists that you so adore saw something in eastern philosophy that you do not...
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Reduce, reuse, cycle
Oh, please, have you ever read anything by von Neumann about quantum mechanics? For instance his "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics". What it makes very clear is that the activity that is required for creating and understanding quantum mechanics is mathematics. Eastern philosophy isn't even mentioned. In this context it is a waste of time and, I'm afraid, so are these pointless ramblings. I mean no disrespect for Eastern philosophies, but the thesis that it provides some sort of royal road to understanding quantum physics is a bunch of hokum. Newton was arguably the greatest scientist but even he had some odd side interests like alchemy and he also lost a bundle in the great tulip craze. Towering intellects have a whole range of interests and results. It is our task to use judgment in selecting those works which are part of a grand tradition. For you the mumbo jumbo of mysticism seems to be the item of interest. Well, to each his own.
Day to day living tends to distract govenrments and individuals from - - holy crap - - Check out Hawking's Nurse: Yowwwzzaa!
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
...the ransack attack of the human space diaspora fraction gone militaristic, technologically advanced and greedy. At first, I thought: "Well, a virus can traverse to colonies, as people will travel to visit relatives or do business", when it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps it is actually ment to be a "never look back" voyage for space emigrants. Here on Earth, thruout history, the groups of humans, of the same specie, were constantly THE ultimate threat to each other, just because they were separated for a while and hence developed distinct group identities. It IS going to happen on the large scale if we colonize the space across large distances. The space aliens will be us.
Colonies are an expansion into unused resources of water, arable land, animal, plant, and economically recoverable mineral resources. There is no water, no arable land, no animal life, and no plant life on mars. No minerals will ever be economically recoverable from Mars. We know these things. There isn't even air to breath. With all due respect to Mr. Hawkings, his opinion about leaving the Earth to form "colonies" on Mars is just one more indication of the mindless support that narrowly educated and experienced scientists give to the scientific-industrial-complex and the massively expensive programs they propose to foist on the public. Mr. Hawkings is trying to scare mankind into death, misery, and suffering in space for the profit of industry and the expansion of "science" whether he is consciously aware of it or not.
Let me tell you the common sense truth of it: as far as the Universe is concerned, we humans are microbes living in a thin scum on the surface of a pebble rotating around a rather mediocre sun. We are not Masters of the Universe. We never will be Masters of the Universe. We will live our species-life and die when our time comes like every other life form in the Universe.
The struggle of mankind since before Galileo has been to suppress our childish egotism to perceive realities. We have made great progress. We no longer think we are the center of the Universe and the Sun revolves around us. But we apparently still have a way to go to see our true place.
E Proelio Veritas.
Perhaps their track record is so good because the effects of QM on the visible world are negligible?
Not really. QM effects already figure into a vast array of engineering and scientific disciplines. QM is definitely making itself felt in electronics, nanotechnology, instrumentation, cryptography, chemistry, materials science, and many many others. Incidentally, just what sort of people discovered and worked out QM in the first place?
Perhaps someday we will be able to scientifically explain consciousness. We certainly can't now so it is cricket to entertain any ideas about it you care to have. I don't believe in any case that QM is any sort of blank check. The basement ductwork of the universe is baffling, strange, and can only be described in terms of probabilities. Nonetheless, it too operates according to some rules and not others. If you want to label some of those "consciousness" then have at it.
I'm surprised the Moonraker references (look it up on Google/IMDB/wherever) haven't cropped up yet...
- White Knight of the Order of Mihoshi Enthusiasts
The original posting was:
/has/ changed (where societies /have/ advanced), it is due to luck.
"Yes, well, I hope you recognize that for most people on this earth, nothing has changed. Lucky us."
This implies that nothing has changed (with regards to advancement of civilized societies) for most people on this earth, and for those that it
I am questioning the role of luck in the advancement of civilized societies, not the role of luck as to where people are born.
Yes, you may be lucky to be born into a civilized society. It was not luck, however, that lead to the civilized society.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
>No, that's not luck. It's exploitation.
/successful struggle/ of those in the midst of turmoil that causes the advancement. In the case of exploitation, it is not the exploitation that causes advancement, for there are probably many exploited socities that do not or did not advance. Rather, it is the the people struggling under the burden of the exploitation who summon up physical, moral, spiritual or intellectual fortitude to overcome who advance their societies.
Well as we change the subject, I'll thank you for your tacit acknowlegement that in fact, luck is not what gave rise to advancements in civilized societies. Thank you.
So your hypothesis is now, then, that exploitation is what gives rise to advancements in civilization. I would say that that is only part of the story.
In my opinion, societies generally advance as they struggle through turmoil. Sometimes that turmoil is exploitation. Sometimes the turmoil is persecution. Sometimes it is natural disaster. Sometimes it is simply the development of new ways of thinking that displace old ways of thinking. Whatever the catalyst, however, it is not the catalyst that causes the advancement, because no doubt many societies have faced turmoil and failed to overcome it. Rather it is the
In short, hard work, dedication, and talent are some, but certainly not all, of the virtues that cause advancements in civilization in the face of adversities. Societies that lack the necessary virtues won't advance regardless of what adversities they struggle under.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
science is a religion
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
OK, I did expect the 700 Club Inquisition. That makes my post TrollModBait, not flamebait. The ChrisTaliban are the flamers, except where redefined by Constitutional amendment.
--
make install -not war
"Altruism" was the wrong word. How about "fanciful, and laced with typical left-wing boogeymen"?
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
In cased you missed it, he didn't suggest a natural disaster like a meteor smashing into the Earth. Every doomsday scenario suggested had a human-causation. (Except maybe "sudden global warming", whatever that's supposed to be.) The problem of humans being assholes is not something that is fixed by rocketships to new planets.
It's pretty funny, though. Hawking is undoubtably a firm believer in evolution. If the human species bites it, eventually something like us will come along again, given time. So what's the big deal? If you want to do something for the human race, encourage Hawking to get a vasectomy. Poison genes are much more likely to cause harm than a fancied asteroid of doom.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
It is not impossible: an emotional appeal, for instance, might rouse his heart to new feeling.
That's because America isn't the one that gets to enjoy the spoils of the war; Halliburton is.
See here.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Respectfully...
I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! ...
I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? ... You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?
I didn't think so! There's a whole world out there! When I was your age, I didn't watch television! I LIVED! So... move out of your parent's basements! And get your own apartments and GROW THE HELL UP! I mean, it's just a TV show dammit, IT'S JUST A TV SHOW!
[ My apologies to Bill Shatner and SNL. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
How can you say that when I clearly showed the contrary? I'll try again.
We both agree that matter behaves according to certain rules right? Such as, matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Well, quantum collapse, quantum jumps, and spook action at a distance, all happen instantaneously. The "spooky action" between entangled particles is perhaps the best example that the world is not make *purely* of matter. How do you explain it in material terms? You can't! Two entangled electrons, separated by several light years, will affect each other instantaneously. Are you convinced yet?
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Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about the success of classical physics.
Well, I'm having a discussion that touches on this in another branch of this thread. I show there that many of the pioneers of QM, especially Schrödinger, were deeply influenced by eastern philosophy, and that their knowledge of those philosophy's allowed them to depart from the classical view of the world, and in Schrödinger's case, come up with the Schrödinger equation.
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This idea falls in line perfectly with what has been said by virtually every single mystic that has ever lived (except of course they did not refer to 'quantum mechanics' because that name did not exist back then).
Now, to drive the final stake into your already disintegrating arguments: to say as you have said, that it is mathematics that describes the ultimate reality, is simply false. That is to say, unless you consider Statistics to be Mathematics. The examples you have brought up, such as differential equations, etc. do not give you answers for where a quantum object is. They cannot, and never will. You can only give probabilities. And, finally, if you think that saying that "there's a 10% chance that the electron will be in this region" is even remotely an explanation for *why* that is so, well, you see that it is not. Mathematics, and even Statistics, does not explain the reasons for why the quantum world works the way it does. Certain ideas from eastern philosophy, on the other hand, provides an explanation that makes it all make sense. There are no more "paradoxes" when viewed in that manner, meaning, when you take the viewpoint that the fundamental "building blocks" of the universe is consciousness, then everything makes sense.
Oh, and to quote myself from another branch in this thread:
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Is it just me or do I detect a hint of bitterness in that response?
;)
Yes. It's just you.
Well... then again, written text always tends to "sound" a lot more deliberate and serious than speaking. It's how flame-wars get started.
So, no. Maybe it's not just you after all. But no, I'm not bitter either.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Please, don't bring Christianity into this. I'm not a big fan of it. ;-)
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Hah! I now see what the problem is. You simply don't know much about physics, how else can you make such an uninformed statement? :-)
"Spooky action" is indeed amaterial and has nothing in common with the way gravity and electromagnetism work. Did you know, for example, that gravity does not travel faster than the speed of light? If the sun were to disappear right now, our planet would continue orbiting around it for about 8 minutes. Same goes for E&M. E&M fields propagate at the speed of light. Spooky action, quantum collapse, and quantum jumps, on the other hand, happen instantaneously.
Come back when you learn some more physics. ^_^
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No semantic game, I assure you. Matter, material, etc. It must follow certain laws. For example, matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Stephen Hawking lost a bet on that one I think (he thought that matter was destroyed in a black hole). Next, as I have stated previously, matter, i.e. information, cannot travel faster than the speed of light, according to Einstein. This is a very well established law, and it has been tested countless times. So, therefore, if something happens instantaneously, it is obviously happening faster than the speed of light, and therefore it does not fall in the domain of matter. Is that convincing enough to you? Or do you plan on taking this argument up with Einstein?
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Thanks, you're absolutely right. It's just very hard for me to constantly think about the way I'm using certain words and how they may be interpreted in different ways. I've noticed that most of the arguments I get into involve some form of misinterpretation or another. I will keep your words in mind the next time I write or say something "out of the ordinary". Thanks again! :-)
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I was just going to allow this noise to fade away but you really don't have a clue. I just can't leave it that way. You seem to have some quaint idea that physical reality must be essentially the same at every scale. If you can't make sense of an electron as just a very small billiard ball then physical theory is hopeless. Since you indicated you had admiration for Feynman here is a quote from his lectures that doesn't "prove" anything but it does provide his angle on this sort of subject:
"It is therefore not fair to say that from the apparent freedom and indeterminacy of the human mind, we should have realized that classical "deterministic" physics could not ever hope to understand it, and to welcome quantum mechanics as a release from a "completely mechanistic" universe."
Or earlier in the same chapter (38) the possibly more applicable quote:
"Let us consider briefly some philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. As always, there are two aspects of the problem: one is the philosophical implication for physics, and the other is the extrapolation of philosophical matters to other fields. When philosophical ideas associated with science are dragged into another field, they are usually completely distorted."
Again I don't pretend that quoting anyone's opinion can prove anything but it can be instructive depending on the experience of the person being quoted. Concerning your looney idea of human consciousness creates reality the really remarkable result of advances of the last century is that physical theory is much more odd than that. The idea you put forth isn't even wrong. It just doesn't address any of the important experiments and discoveries that have been made in the last fifty years. You seem to be stuck back in the early twentieth century before the invention of quantum electrodynamics extended quantum mechanics to cover electrodynamics and the even more recent extension to cover the weak and strong nuclear forces. The most important thing to take from this is that it still isn't over. For all of the glorious advances quantum theory is still not finished. It isn't time to engage in navel gazing and sloppy anthropomorphic bullshitting.
As long as general relativity and quantum theory are in conflict they are both still broken. It isn't time to shut down the enterprise and start sloppy philosophizing. There is still work to be done. You need to take your goofy ideas (and that isn't really meant as an insult, more like a description and there are much goofier ideas that seem to provide considerable explanatory power such as virtual particles in QED) and do useful work with them like harmonizing Einstein's general relativity with quantum theory. Otherwise your ideas won't have any significance where it matters.
You know what I agree with you 100%. I'm sorry if it sounded to you like I was advocating some interpretation of quantum mechanics and just leaving it at that, no, that's wasn't my intention. I was saying that quantum physicists should borrow a page from Schrödinger and consider using an eastern philosophical approach to understanding it, and thereby perhaps making even more progress in unifying QM and General Relativity.
:-)
Kudos.
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It seems like you are no exception to the countless number of people who have completely misinterpreted what I said.
There is a very large difference between thirst for knowledge and thirst for material satisfaction. See if you can figure out which one I was referring to.
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