http://www.heartattackproof.com/ "A groundbreaking program backed by the irrefutable results from Dr. Esselstyn's 20-year study proving changes in diet and nutrition can actually cure heart disease... The proof is in the results. The patients in Dr. Esselstyn's initial study came to him with advanced coronary artery disease. Despite the aggressive treatment they received, among them bypasses and angioplasties, 5 of the original group were told by their cardiologists they had less than a year to live. Within months on Dr. Esselstynâ(TM)s program, their cholesterol levels, angina symptoms, and blood flow improved dramatically. Twelve years later 17 compliant patients had no further cardiac events. Adherent patients survived beyond twenty years free of symptoms."
And: http://www.heartattackproof.com/huffpost.htm "Beginning in 1985 I initiated a study of seriously ill coronary artery disease patients. Their nutrition became plant based without oil. Their cholesterol levels plummeted. Their angina disappeared. Their weight dropped. I have reported this study at 5 years, 12 years, and 16 years, in the peer reviewed scientific literature and again beyond 20 years in my book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. In some of the patients we had follow up angiograms (x-rays) of previously blocked arteries demonstrating striking disease reversal, which is a testament to my often quoted statement âoeThe truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist and if it does exist It need never progress.""
So, it's actually those who won't pay attention who are "killing people" in the sense you mentioned. Those people who don't want to look at the evidence, or don't want to work to gather more.
But, it is indeed very profitable to kill people via misleading them that heart surgery will help much (as two of my family members suffered through and then died shortly afterwards for a personal anecdote). As Dr. Fuhrman points out, cardiac interventions are a major hospital profit center. Doctors made $100K or more (in insurance) from my family, but did not have to attend the funerals caused by their bad advice, and neither did they have to experience first-hand the physical or mental suffering their interventions caused.
Note that Fuhrman's, Orish's, Esselstyn's and McDougal's approaches are all better than the "Mediterranean diet" as much as that does indeed help: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/103/13/1823.full "Diet is a cornerstone of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and treatment efforts. Step I and Step II diets are widely recommended as the first line of CVD intervention.1 At the core of this dietary guidance are the recommendations to decrease saturated fat and cholesterol and to consume more fruits, vegetables, and whole grain products. Information from an extensive database, especially regarding saturated fat, indicates that these diets significantly lower blood cholesterol levels, a major risk factor for CVD. Consequently, it is beyond debate that these diets reduce CVD risk...."
But what these MDs I mention go beyond is showing how you can not just prevent but *reverse* clogged arteries in the heart with diet.
So, if you had heart disease right now (which you probably do if you are like most older US Americans an eat a Standard American Diet), which would you rather have: * a painful operation, months of recovery, and then six years of generally crappy quality of life eating the same old junk doing various restricted activities, or: * making a major change to what you eat, which in six weeks tastes as good overall as what you ate before, and then, quite possibly, living twenty years in great health doing lots of physical activity?
Great points. Because we can always make solar panels and windmills, I'm not too worried about space expansion being impossible from running out of fossil fuels from Peak Oil or whatever. And I agree that with enough energy, pretty much all resource issues become easy to solve.
On energy in general, as Amory Lovins an others have said, if fossil fuels and older nuclear had to pay their true costs up front (including health costs, environmental damage, centralization risks), renewables (like solar thermal) would have been cheaper since the 1970s. It's only because of tax preferences and unpaid externalities (e.g. politics) that fossil fuels have remained in widespread use. What is happening now is that wind and solar are becoming even cheaper than subsidized polluting risky fossil fuels etc..
In a capitalist society, prisons and war can be profitable, so we get lobbying for laws and politics such that they increase. Of course, in other societies, prisons and war can be sources of political power, so that growth is not unique to capitalism. In the theory of social decline, those cancers will grow until the society collapses because it can't afford them. And then the whole thing would start over, The difference this time is we have nukes and bioengineered plagues and soon autonomous killer robots, so its not clear humans will survive if our global society collapses in some likely ways. But, perhaps some isolated habitats might survive (ocean, subterranean, antarctic, space). http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
So, in that one sense, perhaps people like William Catton are right that the Earth has surpassed its "carrying capacity" -- but only in the narrow sense of carrying capacity including the ability to absorb humanities follies from greed and war. Otherwise we could probably support trillions of people on Earth with advanced technologies using lots of nuclear energy as you outline. A related story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside
Not that we'd probably want to do that compared to living in space and making the Earth into a nature park and religious shrine?
I've certainly read enough dystopian sci-fi (the Beserker series to begin with) that I understand where you are coming from. Having said that, humans deal in self-replicating technologies all the time (dogs, cat, horses, cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, trees, and so on) that I don't think self-replicating space habitats greening the universe is necessarily an unmanageable issue. For example we manage the fertility of dogs and cats by spaying or neutering them to deal with overpopulation issues (although there is still a lot of sadness and troubles there, to be sure). Another poster pointed out the "greenfly" which I have not read about, which supposedly ends up harming humanity instead of helping it. Certainly there are always risks to anything we do -- and one of the biggest is just having all our eggs in one basket with all of humanity on just one planet that could get hit by an asteroid or plague or such.
What is more of a risk is, in general, AI getting out of hand (especially military AI), but that does is a risk whether AI is embodied in space habitats or embodied in spacecraft or robots or nanobots or whatever.
We can create new habits and preferences: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation-- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
Thanks for the mention of "greenfly" which I had not heard of. That lead indirectly to this with many examples on the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft "Also from Alastair Reynolds' books, the "Greenfly" terraforming machines are another form of berserker machines. For unknown reasons, but probably an error in their programming, they destroy planets and turn them into trillions of domes filled with vegetation -- after all, their purpose is to produce a habitable environment for humans, however in doing so they inadvertently decimate the human race. By 10,000, they have wiped out most of the Galaxy."
Yeah, sounds lile a very believable accident. When I started my very first simulation of self-replicating robots (written in ZetaLisp on a Symbolics around 1987), the very first robot duplicated itself, cut away its offspring, and then proceeded to cannibalize its offspring as the nearest source of materials to make another.I needed to add a sense of "smell" and tagging offspring with that "smell" to prevent that. But I learned an important lesson about how easy it is to make such mistakes and unintentionally create, in this case, the world's first simulation of cannibalistic robots.
So, yes, I could readily believe in the "greenfly". In any case, not having read the novels, I guess I don't understand why the humans did not just move to the domes? Or maybe I'm just tto much influenced by "Silent Running" where cute robots maintain the bio-domes?
In any case, we may not have much more time before we are overwhelmed by the unexpected interactions of all our fancy technology in the context of a politics and social culture that is still obsessed with fighting over scarcity -- but now with the power of post-scarcity weapons. Thus my sig. And that is why "Elysium" is a tremendously optimistic movie in a way. People are still alive on Earth over a century in the future, and some are still in control of the robots. A story I created on a similar theme, but more pessimistic than Elysium (but with a somewhat similar ending): "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
As Bucky Fuller said, we (even decades ago) have had all the technology we need to make the Earth a happy place for most everyone as far as basic needs and even many luxuries.That we have not chosen to do so is a deep moral failing of our global culture.
I regret now not trying to work with him in the late 1980s, since he seems one of the best people in the field.
khallow made a good reply on how we can probably make simpler computers that get the job done. But even if we couldn't, by mass, computers probably make up only a tiny fraction of a self-replicating system the size of Elysium (like 0.0001%) given it is mostly metal, dirt, air, wires, motors, rocket engines, space suit fabric, and so on. So, in the worst case, you could think of computing chips as "vitamins" supplied from outside, in which case the system could still be 99.9999% self-replicating by mass, but would need regular shipments of chips as it grew (maybe just from discarded Android phones?). Still a big win for construction costs and speed.
Thanks for the idea about solar power space satellites; I'll update the essay with that. I used to be a Senior Associate at the Space Studies Institute who looked into the feasibility of solar power space satellites in the 1980s. Personally, I think such systems won't fund they development of space habitats like SSI hoped because solar panels are now rapidly falling in price to grid parity. But once we are in space, SPSS may make sense to beam power down to factories, or space launch sites (like for laser launchers or making hydrogen for rocket fuel), or even powering airplanes in flight. But the best place to use space power is just in space to live there, IMHO. So, it is a choice how we are going to use all that aerospace technology -- to leap into the space age or to regress back to the stone age (as Einstein joked about). And the same is true for biotech.
Back when NASA was more ambitious and had better political support: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ "What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press.
What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy."
As I said elsewhere: http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/the-science-behind-elysium/ "The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create transport spacecraft to land on Earth and solar space satellites to power them on the ground for launching back into space with people on board. So, all it takes is crowd-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation."
It may be easier to figure out how humans can live in zero-G by bio-engineering though, compared to spinning big heavy things. http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park --- Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2] To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16 -- 20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments. The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.[5] ----
Although other addictive paths in the brain may work differently than morphine, a limit of that study...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious...."
So, yes, with the trillions spent on the Iraq war, we could have made the US energy independent with solar panels, created household gardening robots, developed both hot fusion and cold fusion devices, and ended most cancer and heart disease in the US by encouraging better nutrition and exercise, and on top of all that built a space habitat. Instead hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands of US soldiers were crippled, sections of Iraq are radioactive wastes from Depleted Uranium, there are many children (both Iraqi and US) born with birth defect from the radiation and other hazards, there are now huge numbers of people in Iraq who hate the USA who did not before now that they have lost a family member and so are more likely to become terrorists, and so on.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/08/02/194243/paper-evolution-favors-cooperation-over-selfishness "Conventional wisdom has suggested selfishness is most beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans, while cooperation is suboptimal. This dovetailed with a political undercurrent dating back more than a century, starting with social Darwinism. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications casts doubt on this school of thought. The paper shows that while selfishness is optimal in the short term, it fails in the long term. Cooperation is seen as the most effective long term human evolutionary strategy."
That said, here is something I wrote a few years ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html ---- Or as I wrote elsewhere in my own words:... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness".:-) So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees.:-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings): http://www.ursulakleguin.com/ or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion,
The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.
Still, it's a tough situation for a police officer to constantly be making difficult decisions in often ambiguous circumstances, knowing there really are some at-the-moment messed up people out there, and also directed by politicians to enforce a lot of problematical laws (e.g. the drug war). In that sense, it's amazing many (most?) do their jobs as well as they do.
Around 1997-1998 the bottom seemed to fall out of the educational software market in general, including with prices falling for boxed software and expectations rising for artwork and embedded video. That was unfortunate for me and my wife as we were just finishing a first version of an educational garden simulator. I first had the initial idea about ten years earlier while a program administrator for the NOFA-NJ organic farm certification program; too bad it took so long to bring it to fruition (including going to graduate school in biology). Guess time-to-market is really important.:-)
Mergers were one issue, I agree, including trying to get MECC interested in distributing our software back then. Perhaps the rise of the web was another. Store shelves were full of fighting and competitive games to get the dollars of kids. A bigger issue was was maybe that parents who bought educational software looked for checklists of how the software would help their child get better grades in school at specific school tasks -- which generally has a tangential-at-best relationship to true education (see John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Alife Kohn, etc.).
And that includes tools anyone can use in an interesting way, whether 3D design tools or even just word processors for writing up a story.
Still, from what you say, maybe we are lucky that the rights to our garden simulator software never got entwined with MECC, because then we could not have offered it for free with source for about fifteen years as we have. http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
I worked unrelated jobs during writing that software. And it took years by my wife and me of working for others at unrelated jobs like at IBM Research to pay back what we had borrowed to finish it. It was such a loss of our being tooled up to further improve the software (and a couple related programs built on the same base, PlantStudio and StoryHarp software). Another couple years of being in the groove full-time focusing on that after the software was done, responding to feedback from users, and it all might have turned into something really spectacular. We had triaged out broader cooperative gaming aspects from the first version of Garden Simulator (like the Harvest Moon series succeeded at later), but hoped to add it back in future versions. Instead later I saw the Zynga people become worth billions with FarmVille. Well, I can hope in some indirect way we contributed to current educational and free software successes by example.
Anyway, I hope for a "basic income" for all someday so all people who want to make creative endeavors like free educational software have the time to do so, individually or collectively.
http://javolution.org/ "Javolution real-time goals are simple: To make your application faster and more time predictable! That being accomplished through:
* High performance and time-deterministic (real-time) classes such as fractal-based collections supporting extended views, closure-based iterations, map-reduce paradigm, parallel computations, etc. Performance of fractal structures (e.g. worst case execution time) is comparable to standard structures for small sizes, but significantly improved for larger size (e.g. FastTable random insertion/deletion in O(Log(n))).
* Most parallelizable classes (including collections) are either mutex-free or using extremely short locking time in order not to impact the worst case execution time of high priority threads (works well only if the VM supports priority inheritance).
* Context programming in order to achieve true separation of concerns (logging, performance, etc).
* Straightforward and low-level parallel computing capabilities with ConcurrentContext.
* Struct and Union base classes for direct interfacing with native applications (e.g. C/C++).
World's fastest and first hard real-time XML marshalling/unmarshalling facility.
* Simple yet flexible configuration management of your application.
* Javolution makes it easy to port any Java application to C++ for native compilation (maven based) or to write Java-Like code directly in C++ (see Javolution C++ Overview)."
Javolution is written and maintained by Jean-Marie Dautelle.
So far Javolution has worked fairly well on a big project with soft real-time needs (although used mainly for the struct and union classes, which is what I originally suggested using it for). Perhaps these sorts of classes should become part of the Java standard library somehow?
Examples of situations without the need to spend money by the individual: * Inside the US military (a trillion dollars a year more-or-less of planned economy) -- yes it is a paid job in reality, but especially in warzones or ships it is more of a lifestyle and culture with comprehensive planning to deliver food and shelter and supplies * The Googleplex or SAS-plex where there is "free" food and transport and other services (again, yes you are paid, but there is sort of this air that money is not the main thing and a lot of things are supplied without direct expense) -- maybe ths is arguable, in which case some religious orders like monks or nuns are in this direction * The very poor when hospitalized live in a structured environment that supplies food, shelter, and clothes * Those in prison get food, shelter, clothes, etc. * Middle class childhood in the USA (parents shelter the kids) * Middle class college life (one the meal plan, housing supplied, etc.) -- yes maybe someone pays, but it is not the college kid often * Some few remaining remote tribes who live by subsistence * Those who share GPL software and CC Wikipedia pages as a gift economy
Also, for those over 65, there is social security as a basic income which is not earned, and can be spent as desired.
Perhaps we will see those sorts of zones grow in population while others shrink?
by me five years ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html "These exponential trends in rising capacity and dropping costs illustrate a very different future than the increasingly competitive gloom and doom ones most conventional economists tend to paint for the short term. They even suggest a future where money itself may be less and less important as a control system for day-to-day activities."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ---- Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ----
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html ---- Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet": http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too:-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.:-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology?:-(...
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest): http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html "we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software.:-( ---
See also, for the future both of them together may create, the upcoming movie "Elysium": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) ---- In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on Elysium, a Stanford torus[8][9] high-tech space station governed by President Patel (Faran Tahir), in a utopian setting which includes access to private medical machines that offer instant cures, while everyone else lives below on the overpopulated, ruined, "Third World slum"[7] Ear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ylee/The_Two_Faces_Of_Tomorrow "An artificial intelligence system solves an excavation problem on the moon in a brilliant and novel way, but nearly kills a work crew in the process. Realizing that systems are becoming too sophisticated and complex to predict or manage, a scientific team sets out to teach a sophisticated computer network how to think more humanly. The story documents the rise of self-awareness in the computer system, the humans' loss of control and failed attempts to shut down the experiment as the computer desperately defends itself, and the computer intelligence reaching maturity."
However, the 1950s movies "Invisible Boy" and "Forbidden Planet", both featuring "Robbie the Robot" would also be good. The first is about AI out of control, the second is about augmented humans out of control.
But lots more on these themes. Brave New World and 1984 are classics. Norbert Weiner's (founder of Cybernetics) "The Human Use of Human Beings" is great, as is Vannevar Bush's original "Memex". Reading "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" might show them what they are up against.
But together all more than the time of reading just 200 pages...
Theodore Sturgeon's short sci-fi story from the 1950s called "The Skills of Xanadu" is something maybe better than all of these on how computers could affect society, because it provides hope, and it sparked Ted Nelson's Xanadu work on Hypertext that contributed to the Web. It is online here and short: http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
... and have no government benefits for any child who is not breastfed for 2+ years, given adequate vitamin D, and given a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, all of which are shown to improve overall immune system functioning... Any kid who is fed junk food, including refined sugar, which has been shown to suppress immune functioning should also be denied benefits. Further, since school is a breeding ground for disease transmission, anyone who does not homeschool should also be denied any government assistance. After all, vaccines only prevent (at best) some specific diseases. What I list above would prevent the incidence of most diseases -- including ones there are no vaccines for, which is most of them including future ones that emerge.
While we are at it, let's also deny benefits (including tax deductions) to those adults who do not eat right and so run a greater risk of being a burden on society. Same for smokers, or those who drive badly, or are promiscuous and so at risk of STDs. Same for those who do not exercise enough.
Other discussion: http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/#Meas_Mort_UK_USA "The main advances in combating disease over 200 years have been better food and clean drinking water. Improved sanitation, less overcrowded and better living conditions also contribute. This is also borne out in published peer reviewed research:
"The questionable contribution of medical measures to the decline of mortality in the United States in the twentieth century". McKinlay JB, McKinlay SM, Milbank Mem Fund Q Health Soc. 1977 Summer; 55(3): 405-28.
"Symposium: Accomplishments in Child Nutrition during the 20th Century. Infant Mortality in the 20th Century, Dramatic but Uneven Progress" Myron E. Wegman School of Public Health, University of Michigan: J. Nutr. 131: 401S--408S, 2001. . . . The majority of third world child deaths still occur despite vaccination. These children need proper food, clean water to drink and wash in and sanitation. We give them vaccines instead."
Although comments there disagree. Note that the first article (I linked to a comment) disagrees with the second. So, read both and all the comments and make up your own mind. One issue is looking at mortality vs. incidence. But which should we really care about more? What seems clear is that, at best, the measles vaccine is preventing on the order of 100 deaths per year in the USA, compared to tens of thousands of deaths per year a century in the past most of which were eliminated before the vaccine was introduced (via quarantine, nutrition, better care, and possibly even the disease itself evolving to be less deadly).
A lot of modern medicine, it seems, is to kick the healing can down the road a little farther and keep people working and going to school, instead of taking some time off to rest at home (including while fasting which can cure many diseases by boosting the immune system and providing time and circumstances for the body to heal itself).
Didn't make the front page, but a story I submitted a while back on the emergence of tools to track anyone questioning any aspect of vaccines: "New surveillance tool to track posts about vaccines" http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=47163539
In that mess of possibilities, some small quantity of mercury, aluminum, and other toxins from vaccines is possibly just one more drop in the bucket. Ideally, the bucket is constantly getting emptied by the body (including through the immune system and other cleaning systems) so it does not overflow and lead to things like mitochondrial dysfunction.
But some stuff, like vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and the first few years, is structural about how the brain is wired.
Many people have reported success making thing somewhat better with the above approaches to addressing autism (beyond behavioral approaches as well, like training to read facial expressions better). The oft-vilified on Slashdot Jenny McCarthy's "Generation Rescue" website has some success stories of improvements via better diet and other interventions: http://www.generationrescue.org/recovery/stories-of-recovery/
Whatever one thinks of the vaccine connection, eating better generally is unlikely to hurt. Although I'd look to someone like Dr. Fuhrman or Dr. Hyman for better general dietary advice than just "gluten/casein free', even as food allergies may be a piece of the puzzle for some kids labelled autistic.
I agree though that parents and guardians of autism spectrum children may often feel desperate, and that is, as you say, a risk for getting preyed on in some way (whether by alternatives or the mainstream).
Good luck with your grandson! Hopefully he can learn to make the most of his unique strengths and connections as "Positive psychology".
Today's schools have become so different from those of a generation ago, making all this even harder. Watch out for "the war on kids", especially the push in many schools to drug boys for wanting to be outside in the sunshine running around playing: http://www.thewaronkids.com/
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.heartattackproof.com/ ... The proof is in the results. The patients in Dr. Esselstyn's initial study came to him with advanced coronary artery disease. Despite the aggressive treatment they received, among them bypasses and angioplasties, 5 of the original group were told by their cardiologists they had less than a year to live. Within months on Dr. Esselstynâ(TM)s program, their cholesterol levels, angina symptoms, and blood flow improved dramatically. Twelve years later 17 compliant patients had no further cardiac events. Adherent patients survived beyond twenty years free of symptoms."
"A groundbreaking program backed by the irrefutable results from Dr. Esselstyn's 20-year study proving changes in diet and nutrition can actually cure heart disease
And:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/huffpost.htm
"Beginning in 1985 I initiated a study of seriously ill coronary artery disease patients. Their nutrition became plant based without oil. Their cholesterol levels plummeted. Their angina disappeared. Their weight dropped. I have reported this study at 5 years, 12 years, and 16 years, in the peer reviewed scientific literature and again beyond 20 years in my book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. In some of the patients we had follow up angiograms (x-rays) of previously blocked arteries demonstrating striking disease reversal, which is a testament to my often quoted statement âoeThe truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist and if it does exist It need never progress.""
So, it's actually those who won't pay attention who are "killing people" in the sense you mentioned. Those people who don't want to look at the evidence, or don't want to work to gather more.
But, it is indeed very profitable to kill people via misleading them that heart surgery will help much (as two of my family members suffered through and then died shortly afterwards for a personal anecdote). As Dr. Fuhrman points out, cardiac interventions are a major hospital profit center. Doctors made $100K or more (in insurance) from my family, but did not have to attend the funerals caused by their bad advice, and neither did they have to experience first-hand the physical or mental suffering their interventions caused.
Note that Fuhrman's, Orish's, Esselstyn's and McDougal's approaches are all better than the "Mediterranean diet" as much as that does indeed help: ..."
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/103/13/1823.full
"Diet is a cornerstone of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and treatment efforts. Step I and Step II diets are widely recommended as the first line of CVD intervention.1 At the core of this dietary guidance are the recommendations to decrease saturated fat and cholesterol and to consume more fruits, vegetables, and whole grain products. Information from an extensive database, especially regarding saturated fat, indicates that these diets significantly lower blood cholesterol levels, a major risk factor for CVD. Consequently, it is beyond debate that these diets reduce CVD risk.
But what these MDs I mention go beyond is showing how you can not just prevent but *reverse* clogged arteries in the heart with diet.
So, if you had heart disease right now (which you probably do if you are like most older US Americans an eat a Standard American Diet), which would you rather have:
* a painful operation, months of recovery, and then six years of generally crappy quality of life eating the same old junk doing various restricted activities, or:
* making a major change to what you eat, which in six weeks tastes as good overall as what you ate before, and then, quite possibly, living twenty years in great health doing lots of physical activity?
See also:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!"
...so this research is misguided in that sense. See: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Great points. Because we can always make solar panels and windmills, I'm not too worried about space expansion being impossible from running out of fossil fuels from Peak Oil or whatever. And I agree that with enough energy, pretty much all resource issues become easy to solve.
On making it into space, see my comments here on self-replicating space habitats:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4080869&cid=44543237
On energy in general, as Amory Lovins an others have said, if fossil fuels and older nuclear had to pay their true costs up front (including health costs, environmental damage, centralization risks), renewables (like solar thermal) would have been cheaper since the 1970s. It's only because of tax preferences and unpaid externalities (e.g. politics) that fossil fuels have remained in widespread use. What is happening now is that wind and solar are becoming even cheaper than subsidized polluting risky fossil fuels etc..
In a capitalist society, prisons and war can be profitable, so we get lobbying for laws and politics such that they increase. Of course, in other societies, prisons and war can be sources of political power, so that growth is not unique to capitalism. In the theory of social decline, those cancers will grow until the society collapses because it can't afford them. And then the whole thing would start over, The difference this time is we have nukes and bioengineered plagues and soon autonomous killer robots, so its not clear humans will survive if our global society collapses in some likely ways. But, perhaps some isolated habitats might survive (ocean, subterranean, antarctic, space).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
So, in that one sense, perhaps people like William Catton are right that the Earth has surpassed its "carrying capacity" -- but only in the narrow sense of carrying capacity including the ability to absorb humanities follies from greed and war. Otherwise we could probably support trillions of people on Earth with advanced technologies using lots of nuclear energy as you outline. A related story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside
Not that we'd probably want to do that compared to living in space and making the Earth into a nature park and religious shrine?
I've certainly read enough dystopian sci-fi (the Beserker series to begin with) that I understand where you are coming from. Having said that, humans deal in self-replicating technologies all the time (dogs, cat, horses, cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, trees, and so on) that I don't think self-replicating space habitats greening the universe is necessarily an unmanageable issue. For example we manage the fertility of dogs and cats by spaying or neutering them to deal with overpopulation issues (although there is still a lot of sadness and troubles there, to be sure). Another poster pointed out the "greenfly" which I have not read about, which supposedly ends up harming humanity instead of helping it. Certainly there are always risks to anything we do -- and one of the biggest is just having all our eggs in one basket with all of humanity on just one planet that could get hit by an asteroid or plague or such.
What is more of a risk is, in general, AI getting out of hand (especially military AI), but that does is a risk whether AI is embodied in space habitats or embodied in spacecraft or robots or nanobots or whatever.
See also my other comments on this article. And also, from the 1980s, my own (dashed) hopes: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
The solar power space satellites idea doesn't make economic sense anymore with the falling prices of solar panels, even if it might have in the 1970s.
Space habitats are still doable though via crowd-sourcing a design that could be launched like a seed factory to the Moon or asteroids. Steps by me in that general area:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
And other people have related ideas like TMP2 and OpenLuna.
We can create new habits and preferences: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation-- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
My own collection of health advice and ideas for goign further:
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
But it was a cool idea to make a book about health just for programmers.
Thanks for the mention of "greenfly" which I had not heard of. That lead indirectly to this with many examples on the page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
"Also from Alastair Reynolds' books, the "Greenfly" terraforming machines are another form of berserker machines. For unknown reasons, but probably an error in their programming, they destroy planets and turn them into trillions of domes filled with vegetation -- after all, their purpose is to produce a habitable environment for humans, however in doing so they inadvertently decimate the human race. By 10,000, they have wiped out most of the Galaxy."
Yeah, sounds lile a very believable accident. When I started my very first simulation of self-replicating robots (written in ZetaLisp on a Symbolics around 1987), the very first robot duplicated itself, cut away its offspring, and then proceeded to cannibalize its offspring as the nearest source of materials to make another.I needed to add a sense of "smell" and tagging offspring with that "smell" to prevent that. But I learned an important lesson about how easy it is to make such mistakes and unintentionally create, in this case, the world's first simulation of cannibalistic robots.
So, yes, I could readily believe in the "greenfly". In any case, not having read the novels, I guess I don't understand why the humans did not just move to the domes? Or maybe I'm just tto much influenced by "Silent Running" where cute robots maintain the bio-domes?
In any case, we may not have much more time before we are overwhelmed by the unexpected interactions of all our fancy technology in the context of a politics and social culture that is still obsessed with fighting over scarcity -- but now with the power of post-scarcity weapons. Thus my sig. And that is why "Elysium" is a tremendously optimistic movie in a way. People are still alive on Earth over a century in the future, and some are still in control of the robots. A story I created on a similar theme, but more pessimistic than Elysium (but with a somewhat similar ending):
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
As Bucky Fuller said, we (even decades ago) have had all the technology we need to make the Earth a happy place for most everyone as far as basic needs and even many luxuries.That we have not chosen to do so is a deep moral failing of our global culture.
Thanks for the link. That indirectly lead me to this also by Freitas:
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm
I regret now not trying to work with him in the late 1980s, since he seems one of the best people in the field.
khallow made a good reply on how we can probably make simpler computers that get the job done. But even if we couldn't, by mass, computers probably make up only a tiny fraction of a self-replicating system the size of Elysium (like 0.0001%) given it is mostly metal, dirt, air, wires, motors, rocket engines, space suit fabric, and so on. So, in the worst case, you could think of computing chips as "vitamins" supplied from outside, in which case the system could still be 99.9999% self-replicating by mass, but would need regular shipments of chips as it grew (maybe just from discarded Android phones?). Still a big win for construction costs and speed.
Thanks for the idea about solar power space satellites; I'll update the essay with that. I used to be a Senior Associate at the Space Studies Institute who looked into the feasibility of solar power space satellites in the 1980s. Personally, I think such systems won't fund they development of space habitats like SSI hoped because solar panels are now rapidly falling in price to grid parity. But once we are in space, SPSS may make sense to beam power down to factories, or space launch sites (like for laser launchers or making hydrogen for rocket fuel), or even powering airplanes in flight. But the best place to use space power is just in space to live there, IMHO. So, it is a choice how we are going to use all that aerospace technology -- to leap into the space age or to regress back to the stone age (as Einstein joked about). And the same is true for biotech.
Back when NASA was more ambitious and had better political support: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"What follows is a portion of the final report of
a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press.
What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy."
As I said elsewhere:
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/the-science-behind-elysium/
"The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create transport spacecraft to land on Earth and solar space satellites to power them on the ground for launching back into space with people on board. So, all it takes is crowd-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation."
Related projects I've participated in:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://openvirgle.net/
It may be easier to figure out how humans can live in zero-G by bio-engineering though, compared to spinning big heavy things.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
I also suggest living in liquid with probably "liquid breathing" as an option to prevent muscle wasting and bone loss (since whales do OK by resistance from water):
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
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Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16 -- 20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.[5]
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Although other addictive paths in the brain may work differently than morphine, a limit of that study...
Other ideas about addiction as a "pleasure trap" relating to "supernormal stimuli":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
And the challenge of addiction may only get worse:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Unless we rethink our daily physical, nutritional, and social interactions:
http://www.bluezones.com/
Glad you found a way to get on an upward spiral of improving health.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ..."
"... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious.
creating artificial scarcity with the tools of abundance http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
So, yes, with the trillions spent on the Iraq war, we could have made the US energy independent with solar panels, created household gardening robots, developed both hot fusion and cold fusion devices, and ended most cancer and heart disease in the US by encouraging better nutrition and exercise, and on top of all that built a space habitat. Instead hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands of US soldiers were crippled, sections of Iraq are radioactive wastes from Depleted Uranium, there are many children (both Iraqi and US) born with birth defect from the radiation and other hazards, there are now huge numbers of people in Iraq who hate the USA who did not before now that they have lost a family member and so are more likely to become terrorists, and so on.
Of course, a few people are richer or more politically powerful for all that suffering. As Major General Smedley Butler said "War is Racket":
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
So, yes, AC, as you say: "War on Earth seems to be holding us here." Or more generally, competition. See Alfie Kohn for alternatives.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/08/02/194243/paper-evolution-favors-cooperation-over-selfishness
"Conventional wisdom has suggested selfishness is most beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans, while cooperation is suboptimal. This dovetailed with a political undercurrent dating back more than a century, starting with social Darwinism. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications casts doubt on this school of thought. The paper shows that while selfishness is optimal in the short term, it fails in the long term. Cooperation is seen as the most effective long term human evolutionary strategy."
That said, here is something I wrote a few years ago: ... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness". :-) :-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
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Or as I wrote elsewhere in my own words:
So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees.
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/
or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion,
My: "Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988" http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Some of my inspirations:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.
You left out the bit about someone planting evidence in each scenario; example: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/07/30/plant-it-and-it-will-grow/
This book has a chapter on how even the best of police officers can go bad through cognitive dissonance and progressive desensitization (although bad training can speed that): http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909
Still, it's a tough situation for a police officer to constantly be making difficult decisions in often ambiguous circumstances, knowing there really are some at-the-moment messed up people out there, and also directed by politicians to enforce a lot of problematical laws (e.g. the drug war). In that sense, it's amazing many (most?) do their jobs as well as they do.
Around 1997-1998 the bottom seemed to fall out of the educational software market in general, including with prices falling for boxed software and expectations rising for artwork and embedded video. That was unfortunate for me and my wife as we were just finishing a first version of an educational garden simulator. I first had the initial idea about ten years earlier while a program administrator for the NOFA-NJ organic farm certification program; too bad it took so long to bring it to fruition (including going to graduate school in biology). Guess time-to-market is really important. :-)
Mergers were one issue, I agree, including trying to get MECC interested in distributing our software back then. Perhaps the rise of the web was another. Store shelves were full of fighting and competitive games to get the dollars of kids. A bigger issue was was maybe that parents who bought educational software looked for checklists of how the software would help their child get better grades in school at specific school tasks -- which generally has a tangential-at-best relationship to true education (see John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Alife Kohn, etc.).
Still, there is a lot of great educational software out there now, between apps, the web, PCs, and so on. Examples (including Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft):
"8 Videogames to Get Your Kid Into Engineering"
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/12/videogames-engineering-kids/?pid=3191&viewall=true
And that includes tools anyone can use in an interesting way, whether 3D design tools or even just word processors for writing up a story.
Still, from what you say, maybe we are lucky that the rights to our garden simulator software never got entwined with MECC, because then we could not have offered it for free with source for about fifteen years as we have.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
I worked unrelated jobs during writing that software. And it took years by my wife and me of working for others at unrelated jobs like at IBM Research to pay back what we had borrowed to finish it. It was such a loss of our being tooled up to further improve the software (and a couple related programs built on the same base, PlantStudio and StoryHarp software). Another couple years of being in the groove full-time focusing on that after the software was done, responding to feedback from users, and it all might have turned into something really spectacular. We had triaged out broader cooperative gaming aspects from the first version of Garden Simulator (like the Harvest Moon series succeeded at later), but hoped to add it back in future versions. Instead later I saw the Zynga people become worth billions with FarmVille. Well, I can hope in some indirect way we contributed to current educational and free software successes by example.
Anyway, I hope for a "basic income" for all someday so all people who want to make creative endeavors like free educational software have the time to do so, individually or collectively.
http://javolution.org/
"Javolution real-time goals are simple: To make your application faster and more time predictable!
That being accomplished through:
* High performance and time-deterministic (real-time) classes such as fractal-based collections supporting extended views, closure-based iterations, map-reduce paradigm, parallel computations, etc. Performance of fractal structures (e.g. worst case execution time) is comparable to standard structures for small sizes, but significantly improved for larger size (e.g. FastTable random insertion/deletion in O(Log(n))).
* Most parallelizable classes (including collections) are either mutex-free or using extremely short locking time in order not to impact the worst case execution time of high priority threads (works well only if the VM supports priority inheritance).
* Context programming in order to achieve true separation of concerns (logging, performance, etc).
* Straightforward and low-level parallel computing capabilities with ConcurrentContext.
* Struct and Union base classes for direct interfacing with native applications (e.g. C/C++).
World's fastest and first hard real-time XML marshalling/unmarshalling facility.
* Simple yet flexible configuration management of your application.
* Javolution makes it easy to port any Java application to C++ for native compilation (maven based) or to write Java-Like code directly in C++ (see Javolution C++ Overview)."
Javolution is written and maintained by Jean-Marie Dautelle.
So far Javolution has worked fairly well on a big project with soft real-time needs (although used mainly for the struct and union classes, which is what I originally suggested using it for). Perhaps these sorts of classes should become part of the Java standard library somehow?
Examples of situations without the need to spend money by the individual:
* Inside the US military (a trillion dollars a year more-or-less of planned economy) -- yes it is a paid job in reality, but especially in warzones or ships it is more of a lifestyle and culture with comprehensive planning to deliver food and shelter and supplies
* The Googleplex or SAS-plex where there is "free" food and transport and other services (again, yes you are paid, but there is sort of this air that money is not the main thing and a lot of things are supplied without direct expense) -- maybe ths is arguable, in which case some religious orders like monks or nuns are in this direction
* The very poor when hospitalized live in a structured environment that supplies food, shelter, and clothes
* Those in prison get food, shelter, clothes, etc.
* Middle class childhood in the USA (parents shelter the kids)
* Middle class college life (one the meal plan, housing supplied, etc.) -- yes maybe someone pays, but it is not the college kid often
* Some few remaining remote tribes who live by subsistence
* Those who share GPL software and CC Wikipedia pages as a gift economy
Also, for those over 65, there is social security as a basic income which is not earned, and can be spent as desired.
Perhaps we will see those sorts of zones grow in population while others shrink?
by me five years ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"These exponential trends in rising capacity and dropping costs illustrate a very different future than the increasingly competitive gloom and doom ones most conventional economists tend to paint for the short term. They even suggest a future where money itself may be less and less important as a control system for day-to-day activities."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
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Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
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http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ... :-(
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Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest):
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
"we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software.
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See also, for the future both of them together may create, the upcoming movie "Elysium":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
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In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on Elysium, a Stanford torus[8][9] high-tech space station governed by President Patel (Faran Tahir), in a utopian setting which includes access to private medical machines that offer instant cures, while everyone else lives below on the overpopulated, ruined, "Third World slum"[7] Ear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ylee/The_Two_Faces_Of_Tomorrow
"An artificial intelligence system solves an excavation problem on the moon in a brilliant and novel way, but nearly kills a work crew in the process. Realizing that systems are becoming too sophisticated and complex to predict or manage, a scientific team sets out to teach a sophisticated computer network how to think more humanly. The story documents the rise of self-awareness in the computer system, the humans' loss of control and failed attempts to shut down the experiment as the computer desperately defends itself, and the computer intelligence reaching maturity."
However, the 1950s movies "Invisible Boy" and "Forbidden Planet", both featuring "Robbie the Robot" would also be good. The first is about AI out of control, the second is about augmented humans out of control.
But lots more on these themes. Brave New World and 1984 are classics. Norbert Weiner's (founder of Cybernetics) "The Human Use of Human Beings" is great, as is Vannevar Bush's original "Memex". Reading "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" might show them what they are up against.
Vernor Vinge's stuff is great, including about high school in the near future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#Fast_Times_at_Fairmont_High
But together all more than the time of reading just 200 pages...
Theodore Sturgeon's short sci-fi story from the 1950s called "The Skills of Xanadu" is something maybe better than all of these on how computers could affect society, because it provides hope, and it sparked Ted Nelson's Xanadu work on Hypertext that contributed to the Web. It is online here and short:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
... and have no government benefits for any child who is not breastfed for 2+ years, given adequate vitamin D, and given a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, all of which are shown to improve overall immune system functioning... Any kid who is fed junk food, including refined sugar, which has been shown to suppress immune functioning should also be denied benefits. Further, since school is a breeding ground for disease transmission, anyone who does not homeschool should also be denied any government assistance. After all, vaccines only prevent (at best) some specific diseases. What I list above would prevent the incidence of most diseases -- including ones there are no vaccines for, which is most of them including future ones that emerge.
While we are at it, let's also deny benefits (including tax deductions) to those adults who do not eat right and so run a greater risk of being a burden on society. Same for smokers, or those who drive badly, or are promiscuous and so at risk of STDs. Same for those who do not exercise enough.
So, what would be the next step in putting this expanded version of your idea into action? Maybe we could have a big government database to review what people purchase on their credit cards at grocery stores and restaurants and score people's eating habits that way? Not sure how to check the other things... Maybe paid police informants like this one?
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/25/shock-undercover-police-agent-caught-on-tape-seemingly-planting-drugs-on-ny-business-owner/
Or maybe two-way telescreens in every room being mandatory? /sarcasm
mainly: http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/09/02/measles-deaths-pre-vaccine/#comment-37709
Other discussion:
http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/#Meas_Mort_UK_USA
"The main advances in combating disease over 200 years have been better food and clean drinking water. Improved sanitation, less overcrowded and better living conditions also contribute. This is also borne out in published peer reviewed research:
"The questionable contribution of medical measures to the decline of mortality in the United States in the twentieth century". McKinlay JB, McKinlay SM, Milbank Mem Fund Q Health Soc. 1977 Summer; 55(3): 405-28.
"Symposium: Accomplishments in Child Nutrition during the 20th Century. Infant Mortality in the 20th Century, Dramatic but Uneven Progress" Myron E. Wegman School of Public Health, University of Michigan: J. Nutr. 131: 401S--408S, 2001.
. . .
The majority of third world child deaths still occur despite vaccination. These children need proper food, clean water to drink and wash in and sanitation. We give them vaccines instead."
Although comments there disagree. Note that the first article (I linked to a comment) disagrees with the second. So, read both and all the comments and make up your own mind. One issue is looking at mortality vs. incidence. But which should we really care about more? What seems clear is that, at best, the measles vaccine is preventing on the order of 100 deaths per year in the USA, compared to tens of thousands of deaths per year a century in the past most of which were eliminated before the vaccine was introduced (via quarantine, nutrition, better care, and possibly even the disease itself evolving to be less deadly).
A lot of modern medicine, it seems, is to kick the healing can down the road a little farther and keep people working and going to school, instead of taking some time off to rest at home (including while fasting which can cure many diseases by boosting the immune system and providing time and circumstances for the body to heal itself).
Didn't make the front page, but a story I submitted a while back on the emergence of tools to track anyone questioning any aspect of vaccines:
"New surveillance tool to track posts about vaccines"
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=47163539
VItamin D deficiency, lack of phytonutrients, lack of iodine, lack of omega-3s, excessive preformed vitamin A, lack of early breastfeeding, lack of exercise to move lymph around, artificial ingredients in food, food allergies or lactose intolerance, environmental toxins including heavy metals, and so on could all contribute to weakened immune systems and a build up of toxins in the body leading to mental dysfunction (relative to a historic normal). Examples:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/autism/
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/12/09/breakthrough-discovery-on-the-causes-of-autism/
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-dr-fuhrmans-antiadhd-plan.html
In that mess of possibilities, some small quantity of mercury, aluminum, and other toxins from vaccines is possibly just one more drop in the bucket. Ideally, the bucket is constantly getting emptied by the body (including through the immune system and other cleaning systems) so it does not overflow and lead to things like mitochondrial dysfunction.
But some stuff, like vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and the first few years, is structural about how the brain is wired.
Many people have reported success making thing somewhat better with the above approaches to addressing autism (beyond behavioral approaches as well, like training to read facial expressions better). The oft-vilified on Slashdot Jenny McCarthy's "Generation Rescue" website has some success stories of improvements via better diet and other interventions:
http://www.generationrescue.org/recovery/stories-of-recovery/
Whatever one thinks of the vaccine connection, eating better generally is unlikely to hurt. Although I'd look to someone like Dr. Fuhrman or Dr. Hyman for better general dietary advice than just "gluten/casein free', even as food allergies may be a piece of the puzzle for some kids labelled autistic.
I agree though that parents and guardians of autism spectrum children may often feel desperate, and that is, as you say, a risk for getting preyed on in some way (whether by alternatives or the mainstream).
Good luck with your grandson! Hopefully he can learn to make the most of his unique strengths and connections as "Positive psychology".
Today's schools have become so different from those of a generation ago, making all this even harder. Watch out for "the war on kids", especially the push in many schools to drug boys for wanting to be outside in the sunshine running around playing:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/