FWIW, the Vietnam protests did eventually lead to the US withdrawal, though admittedly there were a lot of other elements also. But this was partially because the news was willing to cover the protests, and enough voters finally turned against the war.
OTOH, these days protests are not well covred. Media is segmented, so those who don't want to notice protests, don't see them. Etc. They probably don't have much effect currently. And the government has become quite adept at ignoring legal protests, as have other organizations. Boycotts require MASSIVE support to show any effect at all.
All that said, I'm not convinced that DDOS is a legitimate protest. It's clear that some effective form of protest is needed, but it needs to require significant personal effort of those protesting. And it also needs to be something that's difficult to ignore. Otherwise those with severe grievances will have no recourse but to ignore the laws...and frequently the laws are so unjust that that seems a reasonable action. But illegal actions have a tendency to escalate.
It's a valid problem, but I don't think the proposed solution is a valid solution. However, I don't have a better alternative to propose.
While I "sort of" agree with you conclusions, I totally disagree with your certainty.
1) You can't prove the universe is logically consistent. That's an assumption. 2) You can't prove that the universe wasn't created one nano-second ago, with all evidence in situ. 3) You can't prove that this isn't a computer simulation. 4)...this list has gone on as long as I have patience, but it can be extended ad lib.
Note that no valid estimate of the probability of any of the above is even possible. Where they are consistent is that it is plausible to act AS IF the universe were durable and logically consistent, and that the "facts" that you remember as having been learned are accurate. But this is exactly what a young earth creationist is doing. I may believe that his beliefs aren't useful, and that many of the "facts" that he learned are wrong, but there is no evidence. In fact, IIRC, Bayesian theory predicts that in such cases there is no possible evidence that will convert him to your point of view. You *might* be convinced of his point of view by a personal appearance from some god or other, but you'd be likely to talk yourself into beleiving that it had been a hallucination. I.e., it's also doubtful that any evidence would convert you to his point of view.
I never experiences a drive corruption problem....but then I mainly used development tools and word processors. I agree about the crashing programs, but on a single tasking system that's more a nuisance than a real problem.
It's clearly not comparable to today's systems, but 10 years ago it was about as good as any (again, bar things like Solaris which I didn't have access to).
Paradigm shifts are a global phenomenon...but scaling factors are significant. Large paradigm shifts are extremely rare. Small scale ones happen all the time. Basically it's just evolution happening in a different milleau than biology. A large paradigm shift is analogous to speciation. A small paradigm shift is analogous to a change in allele frequency. And things happen at every scale in between.
Consider, when psychologists stopped considering the mind a black box, that was a paradigm shift. So was when they started considering it one. In every field you can think of there are continual small paradigm shifts. But the large ones are *extremely* rare. You're unlikely to encounger one major paradigm shift in a century...depending on what you mean by major.
An interesting claim, but Mac's OS 7.2 was a perfectly decent single-tasking OS (on a Mac II). I can't really comment about OS 9, as I never used it.
FWIW, I preferred OS 7.2 to any other OS I had access to. So much so that I was able to hang onto it for years after the company officially decided to go with MSWind95. Within a year of the time I gave it up, I had Red Hat 4.x (or perhaps 5.x) installed in a partition, and was using it whenever I could. I did *not* like MSWind, even after using it for a year. But I didn't think that that version of Linux was as good as Mac OS 7.2. Still, it was already perfectly capable at most single-threaded server tasks (i.e., it didn't support SMP well, but nobody else did either). It just didn't have many applications. No word processor except Lyx, e.g. (I ended up using Mozilla [or perhaps Netscape] as a word processor.)
OTOH, I can't compare with Solaris, so I may be being unfair to them.
P.S.: Linux is *still* shy on end-user applications in specialty areas. E.g., the music notation editors have finally gotten good enough that I've been able to switch my wife over to them, but *I* need to do the final editing, because I need to adjust the note sizes and layout. This is easy in, e.g., Finale (MSWind & Mac), but on Linux it means using Frescobaldi, which is basically a fancy text editor. It does the job, but it's not friendly to musicians...unless they are also programmers.
People are complex. One of their features is selfishness. Environmental factors can either encourage or discourage this.
Also, people are not uniform. Different people will react differently (mainly in degree of change, but not entirely) to the same stimulus. And the reaction is non-linear WRT the stimulus. (There are complex feedback and feedforwards loops.)
You can be sure that any simple model is wrong. But people won't understand any model that isn't simple. And many people won't trust any model that they don't understand. Others are differently selective about which models they don't trust.
P.S.: The only simple model political system that's ever even been tried (that I know of) is despotism. But people pretend that they are using some simple economic or political system, because it make other people (and often themselves) feel good.
I really doubt that "we", i.e., the stay-at-homes, will ever do it. The only way to have a project last for 700 years is to inspire true commitment. A colony ship might work, but but the time they got there, they wouldn't be interested in living on a planet, and this would need to be planned for. (And by planned for, I don't mean rig things to coerce them.)
The other possibility that I see is that an AI could be designed that WOULD maintain focus for that long and longer.
OTOH, if we don't choose to remain confined to Earth, the people will eventually be spending their lives in self-contained colony worlds. Given sufficient energy sources (independent of the sun) eventually some of them will choose to leave the area. Either political or religious disagreements would work as a reason. Speed of travel will be less important than safety, but speed of becoming "lost" might be vitally important, depending on the reason for leaving. I'm not sure they would be particularly interested in other suns, but they'd be interested in the matter that circles them...still, brown dwarfs might be just as good, or wandering planetoids. (Planets will be less desireable, because they are more difficult to extract resources from.) Note that while wandering, a high speed will be very undesireable. You want to be moving fast enough to reach new resources but not so fast that you pass them faster than you can take what you want from them. Still, suns will be areas dense in usable resources.
This concept has been called "MacroLife". When the wandering colony encounters a rich resource, it builds a new colony or so and splits, reproducing. It probably requires controlled fusion to make it work, but it might work in a limited way with only fission power.
For the engine they probably store it as a liquid. Significantly below the transition point. On Earth that's not much of a problem, and in space not much of one either...unless you get near the sun. 165K seems to be cool enough. Quote from Wikipedia:
Xenon is the preferred propellant for ion propulsion of spacecraft because of its low ionization potential per atomic weight, and its ability to be stored as a liquid at near room temperature (under high pressure) yet be easily converted back into a gas to
Note, however, that ion engines can theoretically work with any atom. Personally, I think they should be designed to use some common heavy element, like iron, and to accelerate the ions maximally. This, however, is an eventual design goal, not something to aim for in the next decade or so.
Nope. It would have had unbounded string as the basic string type, and it would have included a garbage collector.
FWIW, I think the other problems with the language have been solved, but those two features would have changed the design drastically, and in an improved way...except for embedded real-time systems.
How to do it is a good question. But not currently knowing how doesn't prove it can never be done.
For that matter, what do you mean "the unconscious"? Do you even have a good definition of the term? Much of what has frequently been called "the unconscious" is common to all humans. Most of it is common to all mammals. Part of it is common to all chordates. The part that is individual is rather small...though just how small we don't know.
Another thing we don't know is how much of it is devoted to managing the biological substrate. But we do know that it's a major chunk.
The above I can say without a good definition of "the unconscious". Lacking a good definition, I used that of C.G.Jung.
Personally I think that the concept is rather useless for this purpose. What is more useful is are the concepts of "Common Features of Humans that aren't devoted to maintaining the working of biological systems" and "Unique elements of individuals". (There are other purposes for which those aren't the appropriate categories.) OTOH, I'm no expert, and I don't play one on TV.
Your opinion that it is fantasy, however, needs justification before it should be taken seriously. (Also, please define "simulacrum" and "perpetuation". You could be correct in the sentence in which you use those terms, but it all depends on what you mean by those terms.)
It's not that simple. For example, if entropy is a property caused by the expansion of space, then if the universe begin contracting entropy will reverse. That's one of the theories that yield an infinite universe, via repeated collapse/expansion cycles. And there are reasonable arguments (i.e., arguments that haven't been shown to be invalid) that in a collapsing universe, entropy would, on the average, decrease. Most of these arguments (that I've seen) are old, i.e. they predate both dark matter and dark energy, but I don't recall seeing that they've been invalidated...except by this one argument that claims to show that the universe isn't eternal. (N.B.: This argument doesn't claim to show that we are in the first cycle, merely that eventually one will come to a first cycle.)
OTOH, this is an area where specialists in the field disagree even about basics. So I, and an outside observer, can't claim to have an informed opinion. Except that certain arguments seem to be generally agreed to be consistent with known evidence. I may not understand why there is this agreement, but I can notice that the agreement seems to be there.
You have things a bit backwards. Belize is the country that was charging him with a crime. They're expelling him as an undesireable person. Extradition would only come into it if he were in the US and Belize wanted him handed over.
I don't find any of them particularly convincing. Sorry, but this is a question we don't have a reasonably convincing answer to. Branes colliding and resetting an eternally existing universe (one of a number existing in some higher dimensional space) is among the more plausible. But it doesn't have much in the way of plausibility. What it has is consistency with what we know. Well that, and I find it inconceivable that the first entity in the universe would be intelligent and powerful.
To tell the truth, I find myself attracted to the universe as a multi-player simulation, but that postulates another universe to contain not only the machine that runs this one, but the players, creators, etc. Still, such a universe isn't that implausible, because we live in such a one, even though our video games aren't nearly as complex. However, this just shoves the problem back one step, and makes it much more difficult, since then THAT is the universe that needs explaining. And of that universe we have no direct knowledge. In that case, though, the question is "Are you an NPC? Or have your memories just been hidden while you're playing the game?" Highly unsatisfactory.
Once you hypothesize a container outside the universe, nearly anything goes. But even in that case I find the idea of an isolated, disembodied, powerful, intelligent entity too much to swallow.
Quantum theory has virtual particles that could, *extremely rarely* yield a universe, as one example. I don't find it particularly plausible, but given an infinite amount of time it could happen. So it's consistent, but not very likely. (Yes, there are problems with that theory...but the actual universe model of quantum theory also has problems, and it's reasonable to argue that solving one set of problems would solve the other.) Note that this approach has time and standard quantum theory as pre-existing conditions. This is tricky, because space isn't a pre-existing condition, as least as I understand the theory (not much).
Then there's Brane theory, which has eternal universes existing in a higher dimensional space that occasionally collide, resetting everything into an approximation of the big bang. This is not detectably different from what we observe, so it's consistent. (Unless the recent argument that the universe can't be eternal is shown to be sound.)
There are others, and there's no way to choose between them. None of them are complete. None of them are particularly convincing. But all of them (the ones that I'm considering) are consistent. Even the quantum theory virtual particle (which *I* consider one of the less likely), however, is more plausible than the existence of an extermely powerful, self-willed, and intelligent pre-existing entity existing in isolation.
I don't believe that the "heat death" of the universe is considered likely anymore. Currently the question seems to be how strong dark energy is likely to make the expansion. If it gets strong enough, then each atom will end up being alone in it's own light cone. Not much better than the "heat death", but not the same thing, either.
For that matter, this could be the explanation of the big bang. Perhaps this isn't the first time this has happened, and when the observable universe consists of only one atom, the dark energy keeps getting stronger until even atoms aren't stable, and there's an explosion. I don't know if this is consistent with the laws of physics, as known, but perhaps in that state sub-atomic particles reconfigure themselves into resonances that are approximately similar to what we currently observe. The time scale could shift radically, and there would be no way to know. Or maybe the atoms explode normally, and dark energy keeps increasing until protons explode...or quarks.
This isn't a serious proposal. I haven't even tried to find out whether it could make mathematical sense. But it's not totally implausible. There are other answers...like black holes swallowing everything until dark energy make them explode. Etc. But those don't look like they could create an plausible "big bang". But I could be wrong. The real question is are sub-atomic particles anything other than resonant states that happen to be particularly stable under the current conditions. There seem (to me) to be indications that that's all they are. In which case different conditions could yield a very different set of approximately stable resonances. But the real problem is the speed of light. But if space itself is expanding, this may not be a problem.
FWIW, serious physicists have proposed answers that don't seem any stranger to me than this. But the "heat death" seems to be inconsistent with what we believe we know.
Excuse me, but I don't believe that you have justified the existence of ANY creator god, much less any particular one.
As for how the universe could come into existence. there are several consistent answers, and we can't yet choose between them. Your "God" isn't one of them. It could, in principle, be made consistent by severely modifying it, but it could not be made probable. Nothing requiring self-aware intelligence could be made probable in isolation. (Now if you were to consider the universe to be a virtual reality, then some God could be plausible as either the owner of the computer that runs the simulation, or as the programmer. But such a God would be embedded in a larger context in which she/he/it wasn't anything special...except perhaps wealthy or powerful enough to play around with toys that other approximately equivalent entities didn't have access to...and even that kind of specialness isn't implied by the scenario. Maybe they all play that kind of game. Maybe most people are NPCs, and it's a multi-player game. Maybe... Note that this isn't getting especially likely as an answer, just consistent.)
But also note that there is no plausible evidence of any god, in that sense, existing. And you haven't offered any, except saying "I can't believe...", which may be a true statement about your beliefs, but doesn't say much about the external universe.
That sort of depends. If you consider the universe to be a virtual reality, then God could be the guy that owns the machine. Perhaps calling the root user "God" is an accurate analogy.
OTOH, if the universe *is* a virtual reality engine, then much of what we know (or rather think we know) is quite suspect. It's far easier to run a small simulation, and simply fake details that aren't what you're interested in simulating. Perhaps *you* are a disembodied intelligence in an active simulation. (Well, in fact that's certain. The universe that you hallucinate clearly isn't the real universe. The question is how deep does this simulation go. Are you the only entity in the game, or is it a multi-entity simulation. How well is consistency maintained, etc.)
Note that everyone in the West who has thought seriously about this since deCartes has come to the same realization. And it's the standard religious position in both Hinduism and Buddhism. (I'm not sure about Taoism. Confucism doesn't seem to even consider the point.)
During the industrial revolution it was also true that a lot of people didn't survive the transition. We don't seem to ever hear their side of the story. People talk about "Luddites" and don't understand that they were fighting for their lives. People barely remember the enclosure acts, and totally forget how terribly accurate "The cows are eating the people!" was.
This time may, or may not, be worse. It depends on social policy decisions made now, and over the next decade. And most people don't understand the problem.
It may be a self-correcting system, but it's the kind of self-correcting system that can get a lot of people dead, and a lot more maimed, during the correction process.
Read "The Midas Plague" and "The Man Who Ate the World", both by Frederick Pohl. If there are no material limits, then the problem is social beliefs. (And there *will* be material limits. Even with a throughgoing nanotechnology.)
Why do you believe that? A robot composer has alread been mistaken for.... I can't remember whether it was Brahms or Beetoven... by a jury of music critics. This was a double-blind test. There were actually three composers, but I can't remember who the other was.
So. Computers can play elegant chess at the world championship level, computers can compose music at the world class level. Computers can solve mathematics at the world class level. Computers can play Jephrody at the world class level. Computers can probably paint pictures at the world class level (albeit they seem to currently have a limited range). My hesitation over this last category is that I don't know of any specific rating that has been done.
So what do you mean by this creative thing that computers can't do? Wait a couple of years and they'll be doing it.
Ummmmm.... We reached that point a decade or so ago. Jobs have been destroyed faster than they were created ever since the computer started replacing clerks rather then replacing calculating mathematicians. The rate has been increasing.
For that matter, equating a job at McDonalds with a job at a local greasy spoon is not a fair competition. The local greasy spoon is a much better job, and also pays better and gives you better long term job security.
FWIW, my projections indicate that in another 50 years there won't be ANY jobs for people that can't be done cheaper and better by an automated system. Whether that a good endpoint or a bad one depends entirely on the social policy decisions that we make during the intermediate period. So not only are not enough new jobs being created, but the quality of the jobs that are being created is severely decreasing. They pay less, they have fewer benefit, and they have less job security.
Now it's true that this pattern is only detectable over the last 50-60 years, and it started off quite slowly, but it's been increasing....I think monotonically increasing, and definitely increasing at an increasing rate. So my suspicion is that it's a permanent feature. And note that I'm not one of the ones who has been adversely affected by this yet.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the term is boosterspice, one word.
FWIW, the Vietnam protests did eventually lead to the US withdrawal, though admittedly there were a lot of other elements also. But this was partially because the news was willing to cover the protests, and enough voters finally turned against the war.
OTOH, these days protests are not well covred. Media is segmented, so those who don't want to notice protests, don't see them. Etc. They probably don't have much effect currently. And the government has become quite adept at ignoring legal protests, as have other organizations. Boycotts require MASSIVE support to show any effect at all.
All that said, I'm not convinced that DDOS is a legitimate protest. It's clear that some effective form of protest is needed, but it needs to require significant personal effort of those protesting. And it also needs to be something that's difficult to ignore. Otherwise those with severe grievances will have no recourse but to ignore the laws...and frequently the laws are so unjust that that seems a reasonable action. But illegal actions have a tendency to escalate.
It's a valid problem, but I don't think the proposed solution is a valid solution. However, I don't have a better alternative to propose.
While I "sort of" agree with you conclusions, I totally disagree with your certainty.
1) You can't prove the universe is logically consistent. That's an assumption. ...this list has gone on as long as I have patience, but it can be extended ad lib.
2) You can't prove that the universe wasn't created one nano-second ago, with all evidence in situ.
3) You can't prove that this isn't a computer simulation.
4)
Note that no valid estimate of the probability of any of the above is even possible. Where they are consistent is that it is plausible to act AS IF the universe were durable and logically consistent, and that the "facts" that you remember as having been learned are accurate. But this is exactly what a young earth creationist is doing. I may believe that his beliefs aren't useful, and that many of the "facts" that he learned are wrong, but there is no evidence. In fact, IIRC, Bayesian theory predicts that in such cases there is no possible evidence that will convert him to your point of view. You *might* be convinced of his point of view by a personal appearance from some god or other, but you'd be likely to talk yourself into beleiving that it had been a hallucination. I.e., it's also doubtful that any evidence would convert you to his point of view.
I never experiences a drive corruption problem....but then I mainly used development tools and word processors. I agree about the crashing programs, but on a single tasking system that's more a nuisance than a real problem.
It's clearly not comparable to today's systems, but 10 years ago it was about as good as any (again, bar things like Solaris which I didn't have access to).
Paradigm shifts are a global phenomenon...but scaling factors are significant. Large paradigm shifts are extremely rare. Small scale ones happen all the time. Basically it's just evolution happening in a different milleau than biology. A large paradigm shift is analogous to speciation. A small paradigm shift is analogous to a change in allele frequency. And things happen at every scale in between.
Consider, when psychologists stopped considering the mind a black box, that was a paradigm shift. So was when they started considering it one. In every field you can think of there are continual small paradigm shifts. But the large ones are *extremely* rare. You're unlikely to encounger one major paradigm shift in a century...depending on what you mean by major.
An interesting claim, but Mac's OS 7.2 was a perfectly decent single-tasking OS (on a Mac II). I can't really comment about OS 9, as I never used it.
FWIW, I preferred OS 7.2 to any other OS I had access to. So much so that I was able to hang onto it for years after the company officially decided to go with MSWind95. Within a year of the time I gave it up, I had Red Hat 4.x (or perhaps 5.x) installed in a partition, and was using it whenever I could. I did *not* like MSWind, even after using it for a year. But I didn't think that that version of Linux was as good as Mac OS 7.2. Still, it was already perfectly capable at most single-threaded server tasks (i.e., it didn't support SMP well, but nobody else did either). It just didn't have many applications. No word processor except Lyx, e.g. (I ended up using Mozilla [or perhaps Netscape] as a word processor.)
OTOH, I can't compare with Solaris, so I may be being unfair to them.
P.S.: Linux is *still* shy on end-user applications in specialty areas. E.g., the music notation editors have finally gotten good enough that I've been able to switch my wife over to them, but *I* need to do the final editing, because I need to adjust the note sizes and layout. This is easy in, e.g., Finale (MSWind & Mac), but on Linux it means using Frescobaldi, which is basically a fancy text editor. It does the job, but it's not friendly to musicians...unless they are also programmers.
People are complex. One of their features is selfishness. Environmental factors can either encourage or discourage this.
Also, people are not uniform. Different people will react differently (mainly in degree of change, but not entirely) to the same stimulus. And the reaction is non-linear WRT the stimulus. (There are complex feedback and feedforwards loops.)
You can be sure that any simple model is wrong. But people won't understand any model that isn't simple. And many people won't trust any model that they don't understand. Others are differently selective about which models they don't trust.
P.S.: The only simple model political system that's ever even been tried (that I know of) is despotism. But people pretend that they are using some simple economic or political system, because it make other people (and often themselves) feel good.
I really doubt that "we", i.e., the stay-at-homes, will ever do it. The only way to have a project last for 700 years is to inspire true commitment. A colony ship might work, but but the time they got there, they wouldn't be interested in living on a planet, and this would need to be planned for. (And by planned for, I don't mean rig things to coerce them.)
The other possibility that I see is that an AI could be designed that WOULD maintain focus for that long and longer.
OTOH, if we don't choose to remain confined to Earth, the people will eventually be spending their lives in self-contained colony worlds. Given sufficient energy sources (independent of the sun) eventually some of them will choose to leave the area. Either political or religious disagreements would work as a reason. Speed of travel will be less important than safety, but speed of becoming "lost" might be vitally important, depending on the reason for leaving. I'm not sure they would be particularly interested in other suns, but they'd be interested in the matter that circles them...still, brown dwarfs might be just as good, or wandering planetoids. (Planets will be less desireable, because they are more difficult to extract resources from.) Note that while wandering, a high speed will be very undesireable. You want to be moving fast enough to reach new resources but not so fast that you pass them faster than you can take what you want from them. Still, suns will be areas dense in usable resources.
This concept has been called "MacroLife". When the wandering colony encounters a rich resource, it builds a new colony or so and splits, reproducing. It probably requires controlled fusion to make it work, but it might work in a limited way with only fission power.
For the engine they probably store it as a liquid. Significantly below the transition point. On Earth that's not much of a problem, and in space not much of one either...unless you get near the sun. 165K seems to be cool enough.
Quote from Wikipedia:
Xenon is the preferred propellant for ion propulsion of spacecraft because of its low ionization potential per atomic weight, and its ability to be stored as a liquid at near room temperature (under high pressure) yet be easily converted back into a gas to
Note, however, that ion engines can theoretically work with any atom. Personally, I think they should be designed to use some common heavy element, like iron, and to accelerate the ions maximally. This, however, is an eventual design goal, not something to aim for in the next decade or so.
Yes. But it was on a test stand, so that *IF* problems developed, they could shut it down to fix the problem. Think of it as a debugging run.
Nope. It would have had unbounded string as the basic string type, and it would have included a garbage collector.
FWIW, I think the other problems with the language have been solved, but those two features would have changed the design drastically, and in an improved way...except for embedded real-time systems.
How to do it is a good question. But not currently knowing how doesn't prove it can never be done.
For that matter, what do you mean "the unconscious"? Do you even have a good definition of the term? Much of what has frequently been called "the unconscious" is common to all humans. Most of it is common to all mammals. Part of it is common to all chordates. The part that is individual is rather small...though just how small we don't know.
Another thing we don't know is how much of it is devoted to managing the biological substrate. But we do know that it's a major chunk.
The above I can say without a good definition of "the unconscious". Lacking a good definition, I used that of C.G.Jung.
Personally I think that the concept is rather useless for this purpose. What is more useful is are the concepts of "Common Features of Humans that aren't devoted to maintaining the working of biological systems" and "Unique elements of individuals". (There are other purposes for which those aren't the appropriate categories.) OTOH, I'm no expert, and I don't play one on TV.
Your opinion that it is fantasy, however, needs justification before it should be taken seriously. (Also, please define "simulacrum" and "perpetuation". You could be correct in the sentence in which you use those terms, but it all depends on what you mean by those terms.)
It's not that simple. For example, if entropy is a property caused by the expansion of space, then if the universe begin contracting entropy will reverse. That's one of the theories that yield an infinite universe, via repeated collapse/expansion cycles. And there are reasonable arguments (i.e., arguments that haven't been shown to be invalid) that in a collapsing universe, entropy would, on the average, decrease. Most of these arguments (that I've seen) are old, i.e. they predate both dark matter and dark energy, but I don't recall seeing that they've been invalidated...except by this one argument that claims to show that the universe isn't eternal. (N.B.: This argument doesn't claim to show that we are in the first cycle, merely that eventually one will come to a first cycle.)
OTOH, this is an area where specialists in the field disagree even about basics. So I, and an outside observer, can't claim to have an informed opinion. Except that certain arguments seem to be generally agreed to be consistent with known evidence. I may not understand why there is this agreement, but I can notice that the agreement seems to be there.
You have things a bit backwards. Belize is the country that was charging him with a crime. They're expelling him as an undesireable person. Extradition would only come into it if he were in the US and Belize wanted him handed over.
I don't find any of them particularly convincing. Sorry, but this is a question we don't have a reasonably convincing answer to. Branes colliding and resetting an eternally existing universe (one of a number existing in some higher dimensional space) is among the more plausible. But it doesn't have much in the way of plausibility. What it has is consistency with what we know. Well that, and I find it inconceivable that the first entity in the universe would be intelligent and powerful.
To tell the truth, I find myself attracted to the universe as a multi-player simulation, but that postulates another universe to contain not only the machine that runs this one, but the players, creators, etc. Still, such a universe isn't that implausible, because we live in such a one, even though our video games aren't nearly as complex. However, this just shoves the problem back one step, and makes it much more difficult, since then THAT is the universe that needs explaining. And of that universe we have no direct knowledge. In that case, though, the question is "Are you an NPC? Or have your memories just been hidden while you're playing the game?" Highly unsatisfactory.
Once you hypothesize a container outside the universe, nearly anything goes. But even in that case I find the idea of an isolated, disembodied, powerful, intelligent entity too much to swallow.
The are.
Quantum theory has virtual particles that could, *extremely rarely* yield a universe, as one example. I don't find it particularly plausible, but given an infinite amount of time it could happen. So it's consistent, but not very likely. (Yes, there are problems with that theory...but the actual universe model of quantum theory also has problems, and it's reasonable to argue that solving one set of problems would solve the other.) Note that this approach has time and standard quantum theory as pre-existing conditions. This is tricky, because space isn't a pre-existing condition, as least as I understand the theory (not much).
Then there's Brane theory, which has eternal universes existing in a higher dimensional space that occasionally collide, resetting everything into an approximation of the big bang. This is not detectably different from what we observe, so it's consistent. (Unless the recent argument that the universe can't be eternal is shown to be sound.)
There are others, and there's no way to choose between them. None of them are complete. None of them are particularly convincing. But all of them (the ones that I'm considering) are consistent. Even the quantum theory virtual particle (which *I* consider one of the less likely), however, is more plausible than the existence of an extermely powerful, self-willed, and intelligent pre-existing entity existing in isolation.
I don't believe that the "heat death" of the universe is considered likely anymore. Currently the question seems to be how strong dark energy is likely to make the expansion. If it gets strong enough, then each atom will end up being alone in it's own light cone. Not much better than the "heat death", but not the same thing, either.
For that matter, this could be the explanation of the big bang. Perhaps this isn't the first time this has happened, and when the observable universe consists of only one atom, the dark energy keeps getting stronger until even atoms aren't stable, and there's an explosion. I don't know if this is consistent with the laws of physics, as known, but perhaps in that state sub-atomic particles reconfigure themselves into resonances that are approximately similar to what we currently observe. The time scale could shift radically, and there would be no way to know. Or maybe the atoms explode normally, and dark energy keeps increasing until protons explode...or quarks.
This isn't a serious proposal. I haven't even tried to find out whether it could make mathematical sense. But it's not totally implausible. There are other answers...like black holes swallowing everything until dark energy make them explode. Etc. But those don't look like they could create an plausible "big bang". But I could be wrong. The real question is are sub-atomic particles anything other than resonant states that happen to be particularly stable under the current conditions. There seem (to me) to be indications that that's all they are. In which case different conditions could yield a very different set of approximately stable resonances. But the real problem is the speed of light. But if space itself is expanding, this may not be a problem.
FWIW, serious physicists have proposed answers that don't seem any stranger to me than this. But the "heat death" seems to be inconsistent with what we believe we know.
Excuse me, but I don't believe that you have justified the existence of ANY creator god, much less any particular one.
As for how the universe could come into existence. there are several consistent answers, and we can't yet choose between them. Your "God" isn't one of them. It could, in principle, be made consistent by severely modifying it, but it could not be made probable. Nothing requiring self-aware intelligence could be made probable in isolation. (Now if you were to consider the universe to be a virtual reality, then some God could be plausible as either the owner of the computer that runs the simulation, or as the programmer. But such a God would be embedded in a larger context in which she/he/it wasn't anything special...except perhaps wealthy or powerful enough to play around with toys that other approximately equivalent entities didn't have access to...and even that kind of specialness isn't implied by the scenario. Maybe they all play that kind of game. Maybe most people are NPCs, and it's a multi-player game. Maybe... Note that this isn't getting especially likely as an answer, just consistent.)
But also note that there is no plausible evidence of any god, in that sense, existing. And you haven't offered any, except saying "I can't believe...", which may be a true statement about your beliefs, but doesn't say much about the external universe.
That sort of depends. If you consider the universe to be a virtual reality, then God could be the guy that owns the machine. Perhaps calling the root user "God" is an accurate analogy.
OTOH, if the universe *is* a virtual reality engine, then much of what we know (or rather think we know) is quite suspect. It's far easier to run a small simulation, and simply fake details that aren't what you're interested in simulating. Perhaps *you* are a disembodied intelligence in an active simulation. (Well, in fact that's certain. The universe that you hallucinate clearly isn't the real universe. The question is how deep does this simulation go. Are you the only entity in the game, or is it a multi-entity simulation. How well is consistency maintained, etc.)
Note that everyone in the West who has thought seriously about this since deCartes has come to the same realization. And it's the standard religious position in both Hinduism and Buddhism. (I'm not sure about Taoism. Confucism doesn't seem to even consider the point.)
During the industrial revolution it was also true that a lot of people didn't survive the transition. We don't seem to ever hear their side of the story. People talk about "Luddites" and don't understand that they were fighting for their lives. People barely remember the enclosure acts, and totally forget how terribly accurate "The cows are eating the people!" was.
This time may, or may not, be worse. It depends on social policy decisions made now, and over the next decade. And most people don't understand the problem.
Even in an infinite world, the speed of light puts limits on the rate of possible expansion and utilization of energy. ...
Now if you could get around THAT...
It may be a self-correcting system, but it's the kind of self-correcting system that can get a lot of people dead, and a lot more maimed, during the correction process.
Read "The Midas Plague" and "The Man Who Ate the World", both by Frederick Pohl. If there are no material limits, then the problem is social beliefs. (And there *will* be material limits. Even with a throughgoing nanotechnology.)
Why do you believe that? A robot composer has alread been mistaken for .... I can't remember whether it was Brahms or Beetoven ... by a jury of music critics. This was a double-blind test. There were actually three composers, but I can't remember who the other was.
So. Computers can play elegant chess at the world championship level, computers can compose music at the world class level. Computers can solve mathematics at the world class level. Computers can play Jephrody at the world class level. Computers can probably paint pictures at the world class level (albeit they seem to currently have a limited range). My hesitation over this last category is that I don't know of any specific rating that has been done.
So what do you mean by this creative thing that computers can't do? Wait a couple of years and they'll be doing it.
Ummmmm....
We reached that point a decade or so ago. Jobs have been destroyed faster than they were created ever since the computer started replacing clerks rather then replacing calculating mathematicians. The rate has been increasing.
For that matter, equating a job at McDonalds with a job at a local greasy spoon is not a fair competition. The local greasy spoon is a much better job, and also pays better and gives you better long term job security.
FWIW, my projections indicate that in another 50 years there won't be ANY jobs for people that can't be done cheaper and better by an automated system. Whether that a good endpoint or a bad one depends entirely on the social policy decisions that we make during the intermediate period.
So not only are not enough new jobs being created, but the quality of the jobs that are being created is severely decreasing. They pay less, they have fewer benefit, and they have less job security.
Now it's true that this pattern is only detectable over the last 50-60 years, and it started off quite slowly, but it's been increasing....I think monotonically increasing, and definitely increasing at an increasing rate. So my suspicion is that it's a permanent feature. And note that I'm not one of the ones who has been adversely affected by this yet.