That sounds all well and good, and I'll agree that those other domains are certainly legitimate domains of knowledge which can be very interesting in their own right. However, if people who are genuinely stupid are getting MBA degrees, something's wrong. Just like you should be able to earn a degree in theoretical physics if you're a moron, you shouldn't be able to get a Master's degree in anything, at least from an accredited school. University degrees are supposed to show not only that you showed up for class, but that you understand material that is at least somewhat difficult to grasp (or else why would you need to go to a University to learn it, instead of just picking up a pamphlet?). If this many morons are getting these degrees, it shows there's something wrong with the places handing them out, and it makes the degree look worthless for everyone.
Not only that, but people might be more likely to do risky things if they're hundreds of years old (or more) and feel like they've lived a full life. They might volunteer for deep-space missions, for instance; these obviously would be inherently dangerous, but if you're already 300 years old and feel like you've seen everything, why wouldn't you want to try that out, and see what's out there, even though there's a chance something will go wrong and a malfunction in your ship will kill the crew, you'll hit a stray asteroid, etc.?
You don't usually need to teach people that having babies isn't a good thing: history has shown over and over than when living conditions are better and contraception is easily available, people voluntarily limit their reproduction. People in 1st-world industrialized countries aren't limiting their baby-making because they were taught to, they're doing it because they want to spend their time doing something besides changing diapers all the time, so they have 0, 1, or 2 kids and they've had enough. There's always a few freaks like the Duggars, but they're a rare exception. Of course, in China they had to make it a government policy, but that's because people there aren't so affluent. The richer ones probably don't care about the policy these days because they wouldn't want that many kids anyway, it's the poor ones that want more.
"silly. even the very most hospitable regions of mars are like airless, pretty-close to vacuum hells compared to the most inhospitable regions of earth." better?
No, not better, because you're implying that vacuums are more inhospitable than the most inhospitable regions on Earth, and that simply isn't true. Now, it's debatable whether Antarctica or Mars is more inhospitable, but it's absolutely not debatable about whether Mars or the sea floor is more inhospitable. It's much easier to build an artificial habitat that can keep 1atm of pressure contained inside, than to build an artificial habitat that can keep hundreds or thousands of atmospheres of pressure out. Even Mars vs. Antarctica is pretty debatable: the two things Antarctica has in its favor are proximity (only need a (water) ship to get there, not a spaceship), and air (you can get breathable air from outside, though you'll need to heat it up). On Antarctica, at least during the colder months, you'll have to use lots of energy to keep your habitat warm, and cooling from convection is a huge problem. Sure, you can go outside, but you'll need highly specialized clothing (a lot more than just a jacket) or you'll freeze very quickly. On Mars, there's not much air, so convective cooling isn't much of a problem, so you don't need so much energy to keep your habitat warm, just like it wasn't that hard for the Apollo Astronauts to stay warm when they spent a week in a tin can traveling to and from the Moon. And you can go outside, but again you'll need highly specialized clothing (a pressure suit) and your own oxygen, or you'll die from oxygen deprivation. But divers and extreme mountain climbers are quite familiar with this too, so it's not something foreign to living on Earth.
In short, I don't see living on Mars to be all that difficult, given enough resources are used to build a proper airtight habitat. It'd be a whole lot easier to build such a place on the Moon, however, since it's so much closer, and I really don't know why everyone wants to skip over the Moon and rush to Mars, when we can be doing this stuff on the Moon and gaining valuable experience. There's even theories that there's "lava tubes" or similar on the Moon, which would make it very easy to construct underground habitats there.
the point of any mission is to capture data. analysis occurs back home, because that's where the resources to perform the analysis live. whether the data is acquired by a robot or otherwise.
Which is why geologists and paleontologists never go into the field, and just let others do that work while they sit at home and analyze everything on their computer, right? Sorry, I don't buy it. Non-experts, nor robots, know what to look for or can make decisions quickly based on new evidence, and the communications turnaround time between here and Mars is pathetically slow. There's a big difference between walking around with a shovel and looking at rocks in real-time, deciding whether to walk this way or that way, or go look at this other feature that previously looked insignificant but now looks more useful, and getting results from a robot after 30 minutes of comm lag, and having to deal with that lag for every single little tiny thing you order that robot to do in your place. Plus, robots these days just don't have the fine motor capabilities that humans do; ones that do are too specialized for a very specific task (having to do with small-scale manufacturing, not examining rocks), and ones that are more general-purpose have pretty poor motor skills.
I'm sorry, I don't consider driving 2-ton vehicles around in traffic with incompetent drivers and living in subdivisions to be a "high quality of life". Better than Mexico perhaps, but not the ideal. You're making the mistake of equating the amount of resources consumed to be directly proportional to "quality of life", and that's crap. So if someone trades in their gas-guzzling 1970s jalopy for a new Nissan Leaf (or a used Honda Insight), and then quit their job that's 60 minutes away for a new one that's 5 minutes away, suddenly their quality of life has fallen because they're not consuming so much energy any more? People could live far more efficiently, and far better, than they do today with better technology (like PersonalRapid Transit) and habitats), but it would take investment, discipline, and a change in society and values to get there.
A lot of this discussion seems pretty silly to me, such as your answer here. If we ever developed the technology to extend lifespans indefinitely, it should be considered a given that we'd also have cures for most degenerative diseases like your eye condition. It shouldn't even be an issue in considering such a hypothetical, sci-fi question. It's a lot like talking about establishing human colonies in giant space stations or on the Moon or other planets, or even terraforming other planets, and then someone asking "where are we going to get petroleum to run all the SUVs in those space stations or on a terraformed Venus?"
What are you talking about? Did you ever watch The Tudors? That was pretty accurate to history, at least well enough for this issue: it really was perilous to have much to do with the King. If he got annoyed with you over something petty, you'd somehow be branded a "traitor" by your political enemies and have your head chopped off. It happened all the time. Having that much power in one person is very perilous to those around him. If I found myself magically transported back to Henry VIII's time, I'd do everything I could to keep a low profile and live out in the country or woods somewhere; I sure as hell wouldn't want to be part of his Court.
I don't know where you live, but here in America, it's the younger generations that are voting against gay rights and evolution, and attending evangelical megachurches.
Oh please. What I'm seeing here in America is that it's the younger generations that are more conservative, and the older ones that are more progressive. Go into any fundamentalist evangelical megachurch; it's absolutely full of younger people (20-30 somethings and their hordes of kids). Then go into the liberal, progressive Protestant churches where they have women preachers, gay preachers, and are constantly preaching tolerance towards those who are different; those churches are full of people who look like they're about to fall over dead from old age, and very few younger people. In my experience, it's usually the young people who are most intolerant of everything. How many elderly muslim Jihadists do you see? None, they're all young men, in their teens and 20s. When people survive to older ages, they realize that life is short and it's stupid to waste your life getting mad about what other people do with their lives. Sure, there's exceptions in both groups (plenty of liberal college students, and Fred Phelps (the WBC asshole, not the swimmer's father) certainly isn't young), but that's the trend I see today. Kids learn their ideology from their parents; when I was in middle/high school, everyone was a Republican, because that's what all their parents were, and they all parroted the same ideology (which, to be fair, wasn't that bad back in those days of the late 80s and early 90s like it is now). It wasn't until they went away to college and hung around with different people that they learned new ideologies from others, not being around their parents any more to have their influence.
Tolerance and progressivism aren't determined by age, they're determined by culture, which changes over time so it's generational. Just look at the Arab uprisings; the young people got tired of their crappy leaders, so they revolted, and installed new leaders. Are these new leaders progressive and tolerant? Hell no, they're all Islamists. Because that's what the young people in those countries are.
There's no reason the Earth can't support 10 billion, or even much more. The key is, it can't support that many using shitty present-day technology, with everyone driving a big gas-guzzling SUV. Instead of taking the average middle-class American lifestyle as the benchmark, imagine instead large, densely-populated cities with advanced, autonomous transport systems; done that way, it's certainly doable, and the Earth could probably support tens of billions easily, plus others could live on giant space stations, the Moon, etc. The problem, of course, is human nature: greed, shortsightedness, etc. Instead of working to create new technologies and habitats like this, we say "it's impossible" and keep driving our gas guzzlers, and we constantly fight wars with each other over resources and ideology. Read up on "arcologies" to see how people could live without such an individual impact on the environment.
Go watch Star Trek: The Next Generation; that shows a society that could sustain tens of billions on Earth alone. The problem is that the people in that show aren't actually human; they're too intelligent, too thoughtful, too unselfish, too far-sighted, WAY too competent at their jobs, and there's no sociopaths there. Even the screw-ups have very understandable motivations for their actions, and even the Ferengi have better ethics than the people running our corporations and governments.
No one's talking about spending a few millenia with the body of a 95-year-old, this all assumes that we've stopped aging at adulthood. Even if you did stop aging at 95, your body isn't going to continue like that for very long, so the very idea doesn't make sense; the whole scenario only makes sense if you presupposed some kind of technology that allows you to keep your body rejuvenated indefinitely, something it was never designed to do, and would most likely require some sort of artificial intervention.
Life doesn't have to get uninteresting. Sure, if you just sit around on your ass and watch Jerry Springer it will, but there's always new stuff to do and see and create. With indefinite lifespans, it'd make more sense to send generation ships of people to other star systems to see what's out there. Even if there's nothing but lifeless rocks, you can come back home and do something different, even though it'll be hundreds of years later, but since you don't age, that's not such a big deal any more.
Eliminating aging won't eliminate dying. People are always going to be getting killed one way or another, whether it's some crazy shooter or serial killer, or forgetting to look before you cross the street in front of a speeding bus.
Well, not really "false", since 2 states is enough to qualify as "some", but thanks for pointing that out, I didn't realize is was only 2, I thought it was somewhat more than that. Thanks for the links.
And basically, if you're in a non-swing state, your vote doesn't matter either, not just CA and TX. And then people keep trying to tell us that "your vote matters!" BS. This also explains why the popular vote is so close to the electoral vote, and why it rarely differs enough to matter: lots of people don't bother to vote because their vote really doesn't matter, leaving only those whose preferences align with the majorities in their state to bother going to the polls, so that reinforces the result that the popular vote closely matches the electoral vote.
They might be a problem with dust, sure, but not for coldness like others keep saying, where they compare it to Antarctica. Instead, being on Mars is probably a lot more like dealing with the environment in the Middle East, with all its dust, only probably worse, but at least without the heat problem. But that's not an insurmountable problem; obviously, we've figured out how to protect equipment from blowing dust in the desert, and can even operate jet engines there despite the dust. Dust on Mars should be easier to deal with in some ways, since we don't need the atmosphere to run engines (and couldn't anyway, there's no oxygen in it), so it's just a matter of sealing. We already have rovers that can operate in that environment for years, so I don't see what the big deal is. We'll need to design a good pressure suit for humans to operate outside their bases though, which can withstand the dust.
I'm not a UK citizen nor a European, but I've heard people on both sides say that the UK isn't really part of Europe, that UK citizens aren't really Europeans, etc.
It's more complicated than that actually. Yes, in some states, the winner of the popular election gets all the electoral votes for that state. In other states, the electoral votes are divided proportionately based on the results of the popular vote. Every state is different (which is the case for many other political issues too). I'd say the failure of the Founders to devise a proportional election system is probably their biggest failure.
I'm not sure that would help. I see breathtakingly stupid posts by low-UID users all the time. It's not just younger/newer people who are stupid, it's the older people too; I think it's like a disease that's infecting Americans and turning them stupid (stupider than they already were), regardless of their age.
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That sounds all well and good, and I'll agree that those other domains are certainly legitimate domains of knowledge which can be very interesting in their own right. However, if people who are genuinely stupid are getting MBA degrees, something's wrong. Just like you should be able to earn a degree in theoretical physics if you're a moron, you shouldn't be able to get a Master's degree in anything, at least from an accredited school. University degrees are supposed to show not only that you showed up for class, but that you understand material that is at least somewhat difficult to grasp (or else why would you need to go to a University to learn it, instead of just picking up a pamphlet?). If this many morons are getting these degrees, it shows there's something wrong with the places handing them out, and it makes the degree look worthless for everyone.
We had to destroy the village to save it.
Here's a shredder you can use.
Not only that, but people might be more likely to do risky things if they're hundreds of years old (or more) and feel like they've lived a full life. They might volunteer for deep-space missions, for instance; these obviously would be inherently dangerous, but if you're already 300 years old and feel like you've seen everything, why wouldn't you want to try that out, and see what's out there, even though there's a chance something will go wrong and a malfunction in your ship will kill the crew, you'll hit a stray asteroid, etc.?
You don't usually need to teach people that having babies isn't a good thing: history has shown over and over than when living conditions are better and contraception is easily available, people voluntarily limit their reproduction. People in 1st-world industrialized countries aren't limiting their baby-making because they were taught to, they're doing it because they want to spend their time doing something besides changing diapers all the time, so they have 0, 1, or 2 kids and they've had enough. There's always a few freaks like the Duggars, but they're a rare exception. Of course, in China they had to make it a government policy, but that's because people there aren't so affluent. The richer ones probably don't care about the policy these days because they wouldn't want that many kids anyway, it's the poor ones that want more.
"silly. even the very most hospitable regions of mars are like airless, pretty-close to vacuum hells compared to the most inhospitable regions of earth."
better?
No, not better, because you're implying that vacuums are more inhospitable than the most inhospitable regions on Earth, and that simply isn't true. Now, it's debatable whether Antarctica or Mars is more inhospitable, but it's absolutely not debatable about whether Mars or the sea floor is more inhospitable. It's much easier to build an artificial habitat that can keep 1atm of pressure contained inside, than to build an artificial habitat that can keep hundreds or thousands of atmospheres of pressure out. Even Mars vs. Antarctica is pretty debatable: the two things Antarctica has in its favor are proximity (only need a (water) ship to get there, not a spaceship), and air (you can get breathable air from outside, though you'll need to heat it up). On Antarctica, at least during the colder months, you'll have to use lots of energy to keep your habitat warm, and cooling from convection is a huge problem. Sure, you can go outside, but you'll need highly specialized clothing (a lot more than just a jacket) or you'll freeze very quickly. On Mars, there's not much air, so convective cooling isn't much of a problem, so you don't need so much energy to keep your habitat warm, just like it wasn't that hard for the Apollo Astronauts to stay warm when they spent a week in a tin can traveling to and from the Moon. And you can go outside, but again you'll need highly specialized clothing (a pressure suit) and your own oxygen, or you'll die from oxygen deprivation. But divers and extreme mountain climbers are quite familiar with this too, so it's not something foreign to living on Earth.
In short, I don't see living on Mars to be all that difficult, given enough resources are used to build a proper airtight habitat. It'd be a whole lot easier to build such a place on the Moon, however, since it's so much closer, and I really don't know why everyone wants to skip over the Moon and rush to Mars, when we can be doing this stuff on the Moon and gaining valuable experience. There's even theories that there's "lava tubes" or similar on the Moon, which would make it very easy to construct underground habitats there.
the point of any mission is to capture data. analysis occurs back home, because that's where the resources to perform the analysis live. whether the data is acquired by a robot or otherwise.
Which is why geologists and paleontologists never go into the field, and just let others do that work while they sit at home and analyze everything on their computer, right? Sorry, I don't buy it. Non-experts, nor robots, know what to look for or can make decisions quickly based on new evidence, and the communications turnaround time between here and Mars is pathetically slow. There's a big difference between walking around with a shovel and looking at rocks in real-time, deciding whether to walk this way or that way, or go look at this other feature that previously looked insignificant but now looks more useful, and getting results from a robot after 30 minutes of comm lag, and having to deal with that lag for every single little tiny thing you order that robot to do in your place. Plus, robots these days just don't have the fine motor capabilities that humans do; ones that do are too specialized for a very specific task (having to do with small-scale manufacturing, not examining rocks), and ones that are more general-purpose have pretty poor motor skills.
I'm sorry, I don't consider driving 2-ton vehicles around in traffic with incompetent drivers and living in subdivisions to be a "high quality of life". Better than Mexico perhaps, but not the ideal. You're making the mistake of equating the amount of resources consumed to be directly proportional to "quality of life", and that's crap. So if someone trades in their gas-guzzling 1970s jalopy for a new Nissan Leaf (or a used Honda Insight), and then quit their job that's 60 minutes away for a new one that's 5 minutes away, suddenly their quality of life has fallen because they're not consuming so much energy any more? People could live far more efficiently, and far better, than they do today with better technology (like Personal Rapid Transit) and habitats), but it would take investment, discipline, and a change in society and values to get there.
A lot of this discussion seems pretty silly to me, such as your answer here. If we ever developed the technology to extend lifespans indefinitely, it should be considered a given that we'd also have cures for most degenerative diseases like your eye condition. It shouldn't even be an issue in considering such a hypothetical, sci-fi question. It's a lot like talking about establishing human colonies in giant space stations or on the Moon or other planets, or even terraforming other planets, and then someone asking "where are we going to get petroleum to run all the SUVs in those space stations or on a terraformed Venus?"
What are you talking about? Did you ever watch The Tudors? That was pretty accurate to history, at least well enough for this issue: it really was perilous to have much to do with the King. If he got annoyed with you over something petty, you'd somehow be branded a "traitor" by your political enemies and have your head chopped off. It happened all the time. Having that much power in one person is very perilous to those around him. If I found myself magically transported back to Henry VIII's time, I'd do everything I could to keep a low profile and live out in the country or woods somewhere; I sure as hell wouldn't want to be part of his Court.
I don't know where you live, but here in America, it's the younger generations that are voting against gay rights and evolution, and attending evangelical megachurches.
Oh please. What I'm seeing here in America is that it's the younger generations that are more conservative, and the older ones that are more progressive. Go into any fundamentalist evangelical megachurch; it's absolutely full of younger people (20-30 somethings and their hordes of kids). Then go into the liberal, progressive Protestant churches where they have women preachers, gay preachers, and are constantly preaching tolerance towards those who are different; those churches are full of people who look like they're about to fall over dead from old age, and very few younger people. In my experience, it's usually the young people who are most intolerant of everything. How many elderly muslim Jihadists do you see? None, they're all young men, in their teens and 20s. When people survive to older ages, they realize that life is short and it's stupid to waste your life getting mad about what other people do with their lives. Sure, there's exceptions in both groups (plenty of liberal college students, and Fred Phelps (the WBC asshole, not the swimmer's father) certainly isn't young), but that's the trend I see today. Kids learn their ideology from their parents; when I was in middle/high school, everyone was a Republican, because that's what all their parents were, and they all parroted the same ideology (which, to be fair, wasn't that bad back in those days of the late 80s and early 90s like it is now). It wasn't until they went away to college and hung around with different people that they learned new ideologies from others, not being around their parents any more to have their influence.
Tolerance and progressivism aren't determined by age, they're determined by culture, which changes over time so it's generational. Just look at the Arab uprisings; the young people got tired of their crappy leaders, so they revolted, and installed new leaders. Are these new leaders progressive and tolerant? Hell no, they're all Islamists. Because that's what the young people in those countries are.
Hell yes. I was bored all the time as a kid or young teenager. Now I wish I had 4x as much time to do all the things I want to do.
There's no reason the Earth can't support 10 billion, or even much more. The key is, it can't support that many using shitty present-day technology, with everyone driving a big gas-guzzling SUV. Instead of taking the average middle-class American lifestyle as the benchmark, imagine instead large, densely-populated cities with advanced, autonomous transport systems; done that way, it's certainly doable, and the Earth could probably support tens of billions easily, plus others could live on giant space stations, the Moon, etc. The problem, of course, is human nature: greed, shortsightedness, etc. Instead of working to create new technologies and habitats like this, we say "it's impossible" and keep driving our gas guzzlers, and we constantly fight wars with each other over resources and ideology. Read up on "arcologies" to see how people could live without such an individual impact on the environment.
Go watch Star Trek: The Next Generation; that shows a society that could sustain tens of billions on Earth alone. The problem is that the people in that show aren't actually human; they're too intelligent, too thoughtful, too unselfish, too far-sighted, WAY too competent at their jobs, and there's no sociopaths there. Even the screw-ups have very understandable motivations for their actions, and even the Ferengi have better ethics than the people running our corporations and governments.
No one's talking about spending a few millenia with the body of a 95-year-old, this all assumes that we've stopped aging at adulthood. Even if you did stop aging at 95, your body isn't going to continue like that for very long, so the very idea doesn't make sense; the whole scenario only makes sense if you presupposed some kind of technology that allows you to keep your body rejuvenated indefinitely, something it was never designed to do, and would most likely require some sort of artificial intervention.
Life doesn't have to get uninteresting. Sure, if you just sit around on your ass and watch Jerry Springer it will, but there's always new stuff to do and see and create. With indefinite lifespans, it'd make more sense to send generation ships of people to other star systems to see what's out there. Even if there's nothing but lifeless rocks, you can come back home and do something different, even though it'll be hundreds of years later, but since you don't age, that's not such a big deal any more.
Eliminating aging won't eliminate dying. People are always going to be getting killed one way or another, whether it's some crazy shooter or serial killer, or forgetting to look before you cross the street in front of a speeding bus.
I disagree: we should blame both, the politicians who started the war, and the degenerates they sent to fight it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maywand_District_murders
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar_massacre
Excellent post with several insightful points. Thank you.
Well, not really "false", since 2 states is enough to qualify as "some", but thanks for pointing that out, I didn't realize is was only 2, I thought it was somewhat more than that. Thanks for the links.
And basically, if you're in a non-swing state, your vote doesn't matter either, not just CA and TX. And then people keep trying to tell us that "your vote matters!" BS. This also explains why the popular vote is so close to the electoral vote, and why it rarely differs enough to matter: lots of people don't bother to vote because their vote really doesn't matter, leaving only those whose preferences align with the majorities in their state to bother going to the polls, so that reinforces the result that the popular vote closely matches the electoral vote.
They might be a problem with dust, sure, but not for coldness like others keep saying, where they compare it to Antarctica. Instead, being on Mars is probably a lot more like dealing with the environment in the Middle East, with all its dust, only probably worse, but at least without the heat problem. But that's not an insurmountable problem; obviously, we've figured out how to protect equipment from blowing dust in the desert, and can even operate jet engines there despite the dust. Dust on Mars should be easier to deal with in some ways, since we don't need the atmosphere to run engines (and couldn't anyway, there's no oxygen in it), so it's just a matter of sealing. We already have rovers that can operate in that environment for years, so I don't see what the big deal is. We'll need to design a good pressure suit for humans to operate outside their bases though, which can withstand the dust.
I'm not a UK citizen nor a European, but I've heard people on both sides say that the UK isn't really part of Europe, that UK citizens aren't really Europeans, etc.
It's more complicated than that actually. Yes, in some states, the winner of the popular election gets all the electoral votes for that state. In other states, the electoral votes are divided proportionately based on the results of the popular vote. Every state is different (which is the case for many other political issues too). I'd say the failure of the Founders to devise a proportional election system is probably their biggest failure.
I love how none of the soldiers who took part in these atrocities were given any kind of punishment.
Thank you for proving my point. You sound like a typical American.
I'm not sure that would help. I see breathtakingly stupid posts by low-UID users all the time. It's not just younger/newer people who are stupid, it's the older people too; I think it's like a disease that's infecting Americans and turning them stupid (stupider than they already were), regardless of their age.