I'll second GospelHead821's opinion. I find Sawyer almost to be the hard SF Piers Anthony. He'll take an idea or two that's good for a novelette and pad it out into a novel. The result feels drawn out with little life.
For more recent SF writers, I quite like Vernor Vinge, John Varley, and Wil McCarthy. Currently, I think they would be my personal candidates for future grandmasters, although other people would probably argue in favour of Kim Stanley Robinson.
David R. Palmer has finally (after a 25 year hiatus) written the sequel to Emergence - Tracking is first coming out in serialized version in Analog. Unlike the somewhat disappointing (and unrelated) Threshold from 1985, so far Tracking's mostly up to the level of Emergence. This week, my wife has been chortling her way through my pb copy of Emergence when she saw how enthused I was to see DRP's name on the July/August Analog cover. I hope I'll see more coming from DRP after this novel.
I quite enjoyed Kathleen Goonan's musical cities series but not everyone does. I think the closest description I can think of for her writing style is Impressionistic with a hint of Surrealism, and it's not for everyone but I really like it. I haven't checked out her In War Times yet. I love Kingbury's stuff but he doesn't write anywhere near enough, though he is keeping ahead of DRP so far.
I think an interesting thing is that, for most of the above authors, writing is a sideline and not the day job, so they'll never have the output of Heinlein, Clarke, or any of the other great SF writers from the 40s-60s.
Actually, I quite recommend subscribing to Analog. Or if you prefer your SF a little more mushy, IASFM. It's a good way to evaluate a number of different (and new) writers, although some of them are short story specialists who don't write novels. It's also quite nice, in a busy schedule, to have standalone stories you can read completely in an hour or less. You sometimes can get a good discount on three-year subscriptions at their booths during Worldcons.
My point was that Einstein's genius didn't need post-graduate work, and I suspect (though I obviously can't prove) that post-graduate work for Albert would mean we wouldn't know the name "Einstein" today. And my point is that the field has changed a lot in 100 years. There probably wasn't a lot of people getting graduate degrees in molecular biology or electrical engineering back then either.
What was necessary to advance the field back then and what is necessary now isn't the same. That doesn't mean that Einstein, if he had been born in the 1930's (like Richard Feynman) or even now, wouldn't have been capable of advancing the field if he had had to get a graduate degree. Sure, he almost certainly wouldn't have been able to make as many diverse contributions to it from quantum mechanics to relativity, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have been able to make contributions to science.
Maybe he would be making it in protein folding or molecular nanotechnology instead of basic physics. Who knows?
Brain development is extremely dependent on good nutrition in the first few years of life. Malnutrition is common in many parts of Africa with periodic famines in such areas as the horn.
On the other hand, in a continent where there is (relatively) little motorized transportation and walking is a primary mode of transportation. travelling on foot is a basic survival tool and the body naturally directs its energies to that purpose because it gets significant use. It therefore shouldn't be surprising to find a strong aptitude to the athletic competitions that you mention, The core skills for those sports are developed by everyday activities common there.
So sub-Saharan Africa is an environment which strengthens one set of aptitudes (for your "counterexample") and weakens another. And man is an animal which adapts to its environment.
He didn't. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from ETH Zurich. But so what if he didn't have a graduate degree?
It was 1900, and most of what was known then about about physics (and much that wasn't known then) is now taught in the first three years of bachelor's in physics. The field has advanced substantially since, so that you now need to learn more than what's in an undergraduate curriculum before you reach the bounds of knowledge and can add to it. Such was not the case in 1900.
Maybe Hawking's concern is that the world could be missing out on the skills of another Srinivasa Ramanujan. That said, from the Wikipedia article, it appears that Ramanujan was Brahmin caste and thus had educational opportunities not available to most people in India.
Also, mathematical ability at that level seems to be the combination of a rare gift of aptitude with a certain intensity to cultivate and develop it. It's possible that we in the first world have - for the most part - become too rich, contented, and easily distracted to dedicate ourselves to that pursuit.
The philanthropy is also just a smart move. If you've acquired a lot of riches and move into an impoverished area, you'll be a big target for any of the less ethical elements of the population. If you've spread enough of your money around in good works in your neighbourhood, then you'll have acquired a good reputation. People will look more favourably on you and will be more likely to provide support if you become a target of criminal elements. It's a lot harder for a criminal to portray himself as Robin Hood when he targets your belongings if you already do good works to help those poorer than you.
Now I'm not trying to belittle you or say that's the sole reason why you would be performing such deeds; I'm sure you're also motivated by altruistic empathy for those in your village. But it doesn't hurt either.
BTW, what is the state of the caste system in your area? Will all population members have equal access? If there is still caste stratification, have you made any efforts to liberalize people's attitudes? I think that's another area where returning expatriates could have a big influence.
They said that one of the primary objections were from soldiers. I think looking unpatriotic/unAmerican/unSupportTheTroops would be very bad for business. Maybe another factor was the realization that a large number of soldiers are coming home from Iraq with PTSD and good weapons handling skills and that it could be bad for more than business.
No, it just requires a pressurized cabin. You would need something that can take a little more pressure than your average airliner but not much. Unlike military aircraft, you shouldn't need to worry too much about someone trying to use a cannon to fire rounds into your cabin, leading to explosive decompression.
You got to know how to hold em, know when to fold em, Know your alpha helix and beta sheets. You never count your units when you're sittin' at the keyboard, There'll be time enough for countin' when the protein's done.
No, these scum are far worse than terrorists; they are a plague, an infectious disease that destroys all it touches. Unrelenting, incurable. Even the courts are at their mercy. Mercenaries are not enough, here. Entire armies are insufficient. Not even the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects), could handle this. No, they must be wiped out from orbit, with nukes. It's the only way to be sure.
Signed, The RIAA: Creators of the Culture, Uh Sir,
I have someone on the line who identifies himself as Absence of Gravitas who would like a word with you.
Fine, instead of thinking you're a stupid gwailo, the chef doesn't respect your friend for being a foreigner. Same difference.
The point is that you're interpreting their reaction through your cultural expectation of "The customer is always right and you should be able to give me what I want, darnit". However that cultural expectation is not necessarily applicable to your friend's situation, no matter how polite or "acclimatized" to Chinese culture you and he may think he is.
Nationalist, racist - when it comes to certain Asian countries, the line for some of their citizens is a little blurry. Millennia of contempt for foreigners haven't been papered over by a century of corrupt colonial domination - rather the opposite.
Actually China's been much more on track to keeping their population under control, in large part due to the one child policy. If you want to see a powerful Asian nation that's having a big problem with population control and resource usage, look further South to the "democratic" nation of India.
That said, the Chinese one-child policy probably has led to infanticides of girls and resulted in a gender imbalance in younger generations. A surplus of men without any marital prospects could lead to more internal strife which the leadership may need to redirect into manpower for an invasion. Or it could just lead to a few generations with extremely competitive males. I'm not quite sure how that's going to work out yet. We'll have to see over the next 20 years.
Or maybe the chef is having a snit because you're a stupid gwailo pretending to tell him how to cook Chinese food. So the wait staff pretend not to understand the stupid gwailo rather than get into an argument about it (the chef has large cleavers and you are unarmed).
Hmm. I don't think a Galactic Civilization would resort to anything as crude as nukes. There would be some species out there that wouldn't mind getting the Earth and would prefer it if they didn't need to clean radioactive isotopes out of everything and could avoid waiting a few thousand years.
If they needed to wipe us out, they would probably just get an AI to reverse engineer some stuff like Ebola, the common cold, chickenpox, and gengineer something with the mortality rate of Ebola and the infection rate of one of the more virulent viruses. Have a second wave with a human-communicated SARS. That would probably wipe out the support systems for our modern industrial infrastructure and any survivors could be cleaned up by conventional automated AI robot troops in a few decades.
But I would expect any such aliens would prefer to save themselves the trouble and just let us wipe ourselves out if we were so set on doing it. Diplomacy by Laissez Faire Darwinism. If we managed to get our baser instincts under control, then they may be willing to take a risk contacting us.
Extending your other premise, that wholesale gene-scrubbing might be required, you may be living under a version of Brave New World and have a rigidly self-controlled caste society. Or look at Dune - technology limited by a ruling aristocracy that manage regions rather than nationalistic systems per-se. Look at Imperial China - rulers limited technology for centuries to filter out disruptive developments. I hope it doesn't come to that. I like to think that we could figure out how to use gene therapy techniques to remove those genes that make us susceptible to messianic belief systems and xenophobia without losing our creativity and individualism. But yeah, the kind of corrupt people that gravitate to power for the opportunity to exploit it would probably try to exploit the approaches I outline above towards one of your proposed scenarios. I think Vernor Vinge alludes to something similar in Deepness in the Sky.
However my belief is that said galactic civilization would find BNW and Dune totalitarian scenarios as unacceptable and dangerous as our current paranoid xenophobic tendencies. It doesn't get rid of our aggressive and xenophobic tendencies, it just leaves them at the top of the social pyramid and suppresses them below where they fester. Those societies would probably not be expansionistic (because communication and transportation delays make interplanetary civilizations harder to control than planetary ones) and would get fairly unstable after a few thousand years. Just look at how the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, Aztec, Mayan, and Spanish empires fell apart. Galactics would be patient enough to wait until those types of empires became decadent and easy to destabilize or wipe out.
Well, that depends on how that AI is created. I think self awareness and human intelligence is dependent on a certain amount of self-organizing complexity. So I doubt that any AIs are going to be program code that's written because there just aren't enough AI researchers to tackle writing from scratch the kind of complexity we're talking about.
We initially are probably going to create AIs by modelling the kinds of processes that exist in the human brain, especially the early connection growth/pruning that goes on in the first year+ of cerebral development. It's not clear how emotions factor into those early processes and what role the underlying hormonal feedback loops have to do with human development but they may be necessary in those initial steps of complexity building and self-organization. Perhaps prior to development of the awareness of self is the awareness of the other individuals taking care of us when we are helpless and driven by simple emotions and instinctual feelings of hunger, pain, and the need for the safety and comfort of a parent's arms. Maybe we need to recognize the need for a mother and father's comfort before we can recognize that we are the same type of creature.
I think that the first AIs few are going to be raised, not too differently from the way we raise kids, with a controlled gradual exposure to the world at a pace that matches what supervision we can provide. Once the AI is awake and and stable, then you can let it speed itself up, or clone it and have it observe the results. You might even be able to get them to compare different AI snapshots to see if there are any common patterns and whether you can create a minimum-complexity self-aware AI. Then, you may find that those already mature minimum-complexity AIs don't need the parts that have emotion and that it's just a residual part of the awakening process.
Personally, if I live to see the day and have a choice between dealing with raised AIs that imprinted on human "in loco parentis" and a stripped AI with no ties to humanity, I think I'll be happy to pay for the extra resources needed to model the emotions.
Why do we not see them? Because these Great Filters are such massive events, probably sterilizing entire galaxies, that there is not enough time between them for a species to develop cross-galaxy colonization capabilities. You see the Great Filter as an external factor. You should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that a significant filter may be due to an unavoidable milestone in the development of star-faring civilization based on an evolved species.
It's possible that evolved species have too many aggressive instincts to survive the democratization of extinction capabilities. That would limit star-faring civilizations to artificial intelligences and species that have made genetic self-modifications to decrease those aggressive instincts.
The filter would therefore be implicit in the process of evolution and depend on whether, before it could wipe itself out, a civilization based on our current genetic stock can convert itself or bud off a remote colony that uses a genetic base modified to be individually less aggressive while still sufficiently competitive as a group to continue advancing.
In the unlikely event that we magically come up with an AI smarter than us to accelerate the process, why would we expect it to bother with us after it achieves "enlightenment" It depends on how crappy a job we do of raising it. There are some people willing to take care of their parents when they age and become partially incapacitated because they feel a sense of duty and obligation to those who raised them well. If our AIs have the equivalent of abusive childhoods, then they would have a lot of incentive to wipe us out as a dangerous risk. But if we do a reasonable job of raising them, then they may be grateful enough to provide to those humans who are interested the opportunity to step up to their level.
Actually, while I suspect that there are a number of significant filters to the evolution of a star faring civilization rendering it fairly rare (with the development of sufficient cerebral complexity for self-aware intelligence being a big one), I think we've been playing footsies with another for the last 50 years.
Once you get to the technological development where we are now, the destructive capability available to an individual increases exponentially. There comes a point where a few individuals obtain the power to destroy all life on Earth (i.e. the US President's football). Eventually more and more individuals obtain that power through biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc. At some point in the next few hundred years, that capability will probably be about as common or as easy to obtain as an automatic pistol is now. If a civilization gets to that point and hasn't figured out how to deal with excessive economic inequalities, tribal or national rivalries, mental illness, even bullying, then the result of a Columbine-style freak-out (let alone the stuff going on in Africa and the Middle-East) can be the end of the human race.
Now if you're a galactic civilization, the last thing you're going to do is be stupid enough to get yourself mixed up in that kind of a mess. All intelligent species would evolve with very strong competitive instincts. Humans wouldn't be very happy with an external civilization imposing their values on us and tinkering with our genes and institutions to "help" us through this transition. Right now, there would almost certainly be groups with libertarian leanings that would lead a strong xenophobic backlash (I mean, just look at how we're dealing with the implications of Climate Change). A few unsuccessful attempts that led to massive death tolls among galactics and required the genocide of species that lashed out in xenophobic paranoia would provide a strong warning against further meddling and ample motivation to avoid detection.
It's probably going to take us some close calls and brushes with extinction before we get enough motivation to develop protocols and institutions to help identify high risk individuals and dangerous memetic systems. Note that a dictatorial police state would not be a stable long term solution to this problem; my gut feel is there's a good chance it will require genetic tinkering.
So in my mind, the filter we have to go through is a race between the democratization of the power of extinction with the development of non-tyrannical institutions to prevent that. In that sense, the humbling of the USA "superpower" in its attempt to establish imperialist control of oil resources in Iraq is a useful lesson that takes us part of the way down that path. But it's one that will probably need to be reiterated quite a few more times over the next centuries before it sticks. Until it does, any galactic civilisations will be wise to extensively record the results for any young races that might be stupid enough to think intervention is possible. They'll bring out the popcorn, sit it out, and just watch until we can show we've matured as a species to the point where ALL of us are safe enough to contact (either as self-controlled individuals or as self-inflicted piles of bones).
Based on that logic, do the tides cause volcanic eruptions? Yeah, they can under the right circumstances, like on Io.
Rather, it's more likely that the moon causes any associated volcanic activity, because it is a shitton more mass than anything else, and it sure isn't ripping the planet apart. Duh! What do you think causes tidal action? The gravitational attraction of the moon's mass and it's variance over the surface of the Earth due to gravitational force having an inverse square relationship to distance.
The energy conversion through tidal action has come from the moon's angular momentum and angular rotation around the Earth as well as from the Earth's rotation itself. Over billions of years, the moon has become tidally locked and its orbit continues to slowly decay.
Earth's rotation is also slowly decreasing. If I live long enough, the Earth's diurnal cycle might slow down enough to match my 25-26 hour natural circadian rhythm. I've probably got way better odds of winning on of the really big, long-shot lotteries though.
From what I've heard, it's a combination of a number of factors. Increasing fuel prices is one. Another is drought in a number of Asian rice-exporting countries that has seriously impacted supply. Substitution due to the re-targeting of corn crops to ethanol production is another. An increase in the price of (often petroleum-derived) fertilizers is yet another (without the fertilizers, yields are lower causing a shift in the supply curve).
How much of the price increase is attributable to each factor is unclear, although the price increase as a result of gas prices affecting transportation costs is probably the easiest to determine. Food is a good with a fairly inelastic demand curve and thus price can be significantly affected by shifts in the supply curve. So it's likely supply-related causes dominate the recent price increases in staple commodities like rice.
I think you're ignoring factors like improvements in health care, in particular vaccinations and antibiotics, that have caused a huge drop in infant mortality, as well as lowered maternal deaths from delivery. Better fed babies do have stronger immune systems as well, which also would improve infant mortality rates, but I'm pretty sure that worldwide availability of medical improvements had a more significant role in increasing that rate of population increase than greater food availability did.
In many third world nations, people still have kids at close to the same rate as they did when infant mortality rates were around 50%. Now the mortality rates are a small fraction of that, but couples still attempt to have close to the same number of births without the same level of attrition.
This idea that we can prevent it, and then everything will be fine. Well there's two big problems with that:
1) What if even though we are the source, we can't stop it? What if it turns out there's just no way now to turn things around, we are too far down the road? What then? Well then the people who have been naysaying global warming to protect their polluting industries will probably be used for entertainment by everyone else in the last few years we have left. And I mean unpleasant forms of entertainment for the subjects; people who have been screwed over in fatal ways can be very unforgiving. There's good reason to believe that in such desperate situations, the rule of law would break down.
While that happens, the US will probably have hundreds of millions coming north across the Mexican border not looking for work but looking for food. They probably won't be checking to see if you're driving an Escalade or a Prius. Think Darfur on a continental scale.
It bothers me that people keep talking about the hypothetical effects of global warming without any real data. CO2 levels have risen by 30%, and surface temperature have not shown enough of a trend that we can really say the temperature is even rising. Um, remember phase changes, heat of liquefaction and heat of vapourization? What is happening to glaciers and arctic ice again? Are the specific heats of water and ice relatively high or low compared to most materials?
If you put some cold water with some ice cubes in a glass, how fast does the temperature of the water change while the ice is melting? How fast does the temperature change after all the ice is melted?
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I'll second GospelHead821's opinion. I find Sawyer almost to be the hard SF Piers Anthony. He'll take an idea or two that's good for a novelette and pad it out into a novel. The result feels drawn out with little life.
For more recent SF writers, I quite like Vernor Vinge, John Varley, and Wil McCarthy. Currently, I think they would be my personal candidates for future grandmasters, although other people would probably argue in favour of Kim Stanley Robinson.
David R. Palmer has finally (after a 25 year hiatus) written the sequel to Emergence - Tracking is first coming out in serialized version in Analog. Unlike the somewhat disappointing (and unrelated) Threshold from 1985, so far Tracking's mostly up to the level of Emergence. This week, my wife has been chortling her way through my pb copy of Emergence when she saw how enthused I was to see DRP's name on the July/August Analog cover. I hope I'll see more coming from DRP after this novel.
I quite enjoyed Kathleen Goonan's musical cities series but not everyone does. I think the closest description I can think of for her writing style is Impressionistic with a hint of Surrealism, and it's not for everyone but I really like it. I haven't checked out her In War Times yet. I love Kingbury's stuff but he doesn't write anywhere near enough, though he is keeping ahead of DRP so far.
I think an interesting thing is that, for most of the above authors, writing is a sideline and not the day job, so they'll never have the output of Heinlein, Clarke, or any of the other great SF writers from the 40s-60s.
Actually, I quite recommend subscribing to Analog. Or if you prefer your SF a little more mushy, IASFM. It's a good way to evaluate a number of different (and new) writers, although some of them are short story specialists who don't write novels. It's also quite nice, in a busy schedule, to have standalone stories you can read completely in an hour or less. You sometimes can get a good discount on three-year subscriptions at their booths during Worldcons.
What was necessary to advance the field back then and what is necessary now isn't the same. That doesn't mean that Einstein, if he had been born in the 1930's (like Richard Feynman) or even now, wouldn't have been capable of advancing the field if he had had to get a graduate degree. Sure, he almost certainly wouldn't have been able to make as many diverse contributions to it from quantum mechanics to relativity, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have been able to make contributions to science.
Maybe he would be making it in protein folding or molecular nanotechnology instead of basic physics. Who knows?
Understood. Thanks for the honest reply.
Brain development is extremely dependent on good nutrition in the first few years of life. Malnutrition is common in many parts of Africa with periodic famines in such areas as the horn.
On the other hand, in a continent where there is (relatively) little motorized transportation and walking is a primary mode of transportation. travelling on foot is a basic survival tool and the body naturally directs its energies to that purpose because it gets significant use. It therefore shouldn't be surprising to find a strong aptitude to the athletic competitions that you mention, The core skills for those sports are developed by everyday activities common there.
So sub-Saharan Africa is an environment which strengthens one set of aptitudes (for your "counterexample") and weakens another. And man is an animal which adapts to its environment.
He didn't. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from ETH Zurich. But so what if he didn't have a graduate degree?
It was 1900, and most of what was known then about about physics (and much that wasn't known then) is now taught in the first three years of bachelor's in physics. The field has advanced substantially since, so that you now need to learn more than what's in an undergraduate curriculum before you reach the bounds of knowledge and can add to it. Such was not the case in 1900.
Maybe Hawking's concern is that the world could be missing out on the skills of another Srinivasa Ramanujan. That said, from the Wikipedia article, it appears that Ramanujan was Brahmin caste and thus had educational opportunities not available to most people in India.
Also, mathematical ability at that level seems to be the combination of a rare gift of aptitude with a certain intensity to cultivate and develop it. It's possible that we in the first world have - for the most part - become too rich, contented, and easily distracted to dedicate ourselves to that pursuit.
The philanthropy is also just a smart move. If you've acquired a lot of riches and move into an impoverished area, you'll be a big target for any of the less ethical elements of the population. If you've spread enough of your money around in good works in your neighbourhood, then you'll have acquired a good reputation. People will look more favourably on you and will be more likely to provide support if you become a target of criminal elements. It's a lot harder for a criminal to portray himself as Robin Hood when he targets your belongings if you already do good works to help those poorer than you.
Now I'm not trying to belittle you or say that's the sole reason why you would be performing such deeds; I'm sure you're also motivated by altruistic empathy for those in your village. But it doesn't hurt either.
BTW, what is the state of the caste system in your area? Will all population members have equal access? If there is still caste stratification, have you made any efforts to liberalize people's attitudes? I think that's another area where returning expatriates could have a big influence.
Maybe another factor was the realization that a large number of soldiers are coming home from Iraq with PTSD and good weapons handling skills and that it could be bad for more than business.
No, it just requires a pressurized cabin. You would need something that can take a little more pressure than your average airliner but not much. Unlike military aircraft, you shouldn't need to worry too much about someone trying to use a cannon to fire rounds into your cabin, leading to explosive decompression.
You got to know how to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know your alpha helix and beta sheets.
You never count your units when you're sittin' at the keyboard,
There'll be time enough for countin' when the protein's done.
Yeah, somebody already came up with a modest proposal
Signed,
The RIAA:
Creators of the Culture, Uh Sir,
I have someone on the line who identifies himself as Absence of Gravitas who would like a word with you.
That's just DWA.
Fine, instead of thinking you're a stupid gwailo, the chef doesn't respect your friend for being a foreigner. Same difference.
The point is that you're interpreting their reaction through your cultural expectation of "The customer is always right and you should be able to give me what I want, darnit". However that cultural expectation is not necessarily applicable to your friend's situation, no matter how polite or "acclimatized" to Chinese culture you and he may think he is.
Nationalist, racist - when it comes to certain Asian countries, the line for some of their citizens is a little blurry. Millennia of contempt for foreigners haven't been papered over by a century of corrupt colonial domination - rather the opposite.
Actually China's been much more on track to keeping their population under control, in large part due to the one child policy. If you want to see a powerful Asian nation that's having a big problem with population control and resource usage, look further South to the "democratic" nation of India.
That said, the Chinese one-child policy probably has led to infanticides of girls and resulted in a gender imbalance in younger generations. A surplus of men without any marital prospects could lead to more internal strife which the leadership may need to redirect into manpower for an invasion. Or it could just lead to a few generations with extremely competitive males. I'm not quite sure how that's going to work out yet. We'll have to see over the next 20 years.
Or maybe the chef is having a snit because you're a stupid gwailo pretending to tell him how to cook Chinese food. So the wait staff pretend not to understand the stupid gwailo rather than get into an argument about it (the chef has large cleavers and you are unarmed).
If they needed to wipe us out, they would probably just get an AI to reverse engineer some stuff like Ebola, the common cold, chickenpox, and gengineer something with the mortality rate of Ebola and the infection rate of one of the more virulent viruses. Have a second wave with a human-communicated SARS. That would probably wipe out the support systems for our modern industrial infrastructure and any survivors could be cleaned up by conventional automated AI robot troops in a few decades.
But I would expect any such aliens would prefer to save themselves the trouble and just let us wipe ourselves out if we were so set on doing it. Diplomacy by Laissez Faire Darwinism. If we managed to get our baser instincts under control, then they may be willing to take a risk contacting us. Extending your other premise, that wholesale gene-scrubbing might be required, you may be living under a version of Brave New World and have a rigidly self-controlled caste society. Or look at Dune - technology limited by a ruling aristocracy that manage regions rather than nationalistic systems per-se. Look at Imperial China - rulers limited technology for centuries to filter out disruptive developments. I hope it doesn't come to that. I like to think that we could figure out how to use gene therapy techniques to remove those genes that make us susceptible to messianic belief systems and xenophobia without losing our creativity and individualism. But yeah, the kind of corrupt people that gravitate to power for the opportunity to exploit it would probably try to exploit the approaches I outline above towards one of your proposed scenarios. I think Vernor Vinge alludes to something similar in Deepness in the Sky.
However my belief is that said galactic civilization would find BNW and Dune totalitarian scenarios as unacceptable and dangerous as our current paranoid xenophobic tendencies. It doesn't get rid of our aggressive and xenophobic tendencies, it just leaves them at the top of the social pyramid and suppresses them below where they fester. Those societies would probably not be expansionistic (because communication and transportation delays make interplanetary civilizations harder to control than planetary ones) and would get fairly unstable after a few thousand years. Just look at how the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, Aztec, Mayan, and Spanish empires fell apart. Galactics would be patient enough to wait until those types of empires became decadent and easy to destabilize or wipe out.
Well, that depends on how that AI is created. I think self awareness and human intelligence is dependent on a certain amount of self-organizing complexity. So I doubt that any AIs are going to be program code that's written because there just aren't enough AI researchers to tackle writing from scratch the kind of complexity we're talking about.
We initially are probably going to create AIs by modelling the kinds of processes that exist in the human brain, especially the early connection growth/pruning that goes on in the first year+ of cerebral development. It's not clear how emotions factor into those early processes and what role the underlying hormonal feedback loops have to do with human development but they may be necessary in those initial steps of complexity building and self-organization. Perhaps prior to development of the awareness of self is the awareness of the other individuals taking care of us when we are helpless and driven by simple emotions and instinctual feelings of hunger, pain, and the need for the safety and comfort of a parent's arms. Maybe we need to recognize the need for a mother and father's comfort before we can recognize that we are the same type of creature.
I think that the first AIs few are going to be raised, not too differently from the way we raise kids, with a controlled gradual exposure to the world at a pace that matches what supervision we can provide. Once the AI is awake and and stable, then you can let it speed itself up, or clone it and have it observe the results. You might even be able to get them to compare different AI snapshots to see if there are any common patterns and whether you can create a minimum-complexity self-aware AI. Then, you may find that those already mature minimum-complexity AIs don't need the parts that have emotion and that it's just a residual part of the awakening process.
Personally, if I live to see the day and have a choice between dealing with raised AIs that imprinted on human "in loco parentis" and a stripped AI with no ties to humanity, I think I'll be happy to pay for the extra resources needed to model the emotions.
It's possible that evolved species have too many aggressive instincts to survive the democratization of extinction capabilities. That would limit star-faring civilizations to artificial intelligences and species that have made genetic self-modifications to decrease those aggressive instincts.
The filter would therefore be implicit in the process of evolution and depend on whether, before it could wipe itself out, a civilization based on our current genetic stock can convert itself or bud off a remote colony that uses a genetic base modified to be individually less aggressive while still sufficiently competitive as a group to continue advancing.
Actually, while I suspect that there are a number of significant filters to the evolution of a star faring civilization rendering it fairly rare (with the development of sufficient cerebral complexity for self-aware intelligence being a big one), I think we've been playing footsies with another for the last 50 years.
Once you get to the technological development where we are now, the destructive capability available to an individual increases exponentially. There comes a point where a few individuals obtain the power to destroy all life on Earth (i.e. the US President's football). Eventually more and more individuals obtain that power through biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc. At some point in the next few hundred years, that capability will probably be about as common or as easy to obtain as an automatic pistol is now. If a civilization gets to that point and hasn't figured out how to deal with excessive economic inequalities, tribal or national rivalries, mental illness, even bullying, then the result of a Columbine-style freak-out (let alone the stuff going on in Africa and the Middle-East) can be the end of the human race.
Now if you're a galactic civilization, the last thing you're going to do is be stupid enough to get yourself mixed up in that kind of a mess. All intelligent species would evolve with very strong competitive instincts. Humans wouldn't be very happy with an external civilization imposing their values on us and tinkering with our genes and institutions to "help" us through this transition. Right now, there would almost certainly be groups with libertarian leanings that would lead a strong xenophobic backlash (I mean, just look at how we're dealing with the implications of Climate Change). A few unsuccessful attempts that led to massive death tolls among galactics and required the genocide of species that lashed out in xenophobic paranoia would provide a strong warning against further meddling and ample motivation to avoid detection.
It's probably going to take us some close calls and brushes with extinction before we get enough motivation to develop protocols and institutions to help identify high risk individuals and dangerous memetic systems. Note that a dictatorial police state would not be a stable long term solution to this problem; my gut feel is there's a good chance it will require genetic tinkering.
So in my mind, the filter we have to go through is a race between the democratization of the power of extinction with the development of non-tyrannical institutions to prevent that. In that sense, the humbling of the USA "superpower" in its attempt to establish imperialist control of oil resources in Iraq is a useful lesson that takes us part of the way down that path. But it's one that will probably need to be reiterated quite a few more times over the next centuries before it sticks. Until it does, any galactic civilisations will be wise to extensively record the results for any young races that might be stupid enough to think intervention is possible. They'll bring out the popcorn, sit it out, and just watch until we can show we've matured as a species to the point where ALL of us are safe enough to contact (either as self-controlled individuals or as self-inflicted piles of bones).
The energy conversion through tidal action has come from the moon's angular momentum and angular rotation around the Earth as well as from the Earth's rotation itself. Over billions of years, the moon has become tidally locked and its orbit continues to slowly decay.
Earth's rotation is also slowly decreasing. If I live long enough, the Earth's diurnal cycle might slow down enough to match my 25-26 hour natural circadian rhythm. I've probably got way better odds of winning on of the really big, long-shot lotteries though.
From what I've heard, it's a combination of a number of factors. Increasing fuel prices is one. Another is drought in a number of Asian rice-exporting countries that has seriously impacted supply. Substitution due to the re-targeting of corn crops to ethanol production is another. An increase in the price of (often petroleum-derived) fertilizers is yet another (without the fertilizers, yields are lower causing a shift in the supply curve).
How much of the price increase is attributable to each factor is unclear, although the price increase as a result of gas prices affecting transportation costs is probably the easiest to determine. Food is a good with a fairly inelastic demand curve and thus price can be significantly affected by shifts in the supply curve. So it's likely supply-related causes dominate the recent price increases in staple commodities like rice.
I think you're ignoring factors like improvements in health care, in particular vaccinations and antibiotics, that have caused a huge drop in infant mortality, as well as lowered maternal deaths from delivery. Better fed babies do have stronger immune systems as well, which also would improve infant mortality rates, but I'm pretty sure that worldwide availability of medical improvements had a more significant role in increasing that rate of population increase than greater food availability did.
In many third world nations, people still have kids at close to the same rate as they did when infant mortality rates were around 50%. Now the mortality rates are a small fraction of that, but couples still attempt to have close to the same number of births without the same level of attrition.
1) What if even though we are the source, we can't stop it? What if it turns out there's just no way now to turn things around, we are too far down the road? What then? Well then the people who have been naysaying global warming to protect their polluting industries will probably be used for entertainment by everyone else in the last few years we have left. And I mean unpleasant forms of entertainment for the subjects; people who have been screwed over in fatal ways can be very unforgiving. There's good reason to believe that in such desperate situations, the rule of law would break down.
While that happens, the US will probably have hundreds of millions coming north across the Mexican border not looking for work but looking for food. They probably won't be checking to see if you're driving an Escalade or a Prius. Think Darfur on a continental scale.
If you put some cold water with some ice cubes in a glass, how fast does the temperature of the water change while the ice is melting? How fast does the temperature change after all the ice is melted?