No, I'm saying candidates interested in representing their electorate rarely get the financing necessary to run a credible campaign, and so instead everyone votes for the perceived lesser evil of the major party candidates,who clearly *don't* represent their interests except on a few hot-button topics of no interest to their corporate backers, and which they tend to remain in eternal gridlock with their opponents over - to the benefit of everyone directly involved.
And sadly, voting for the lesser evil is in fact the rational choice in this situation - it is a known weakness of first-past-the-post voting systems, and one that politicians have learned how to game extremely effectively.
It's a fine idea. And perhaps one day it will be common to find politicians who actually wish to represent the people electing them, rather than the donors willing to offer the biggest bribes.
I don't understand why anyone would even mention it in the same sentence as Out-of-Africa theory, or even the same book (unless that book was "The complete history of life from planetary genesis to modern day nation-states"), and I certainly wouldn't consider it a "top theory" without any shred of evidence (not that I'd expect to find any even if it were true)
But as for not being sane, why ever not? Natural life-seeding is generally accepted as at least theoretically possible, especially within a solar system (for example we almost certainly exchange impact ejecta with Mars, Venus, etc. on a fairly regular basis), and an intelligence that wanted to do so intentionally could do so far more effectively. Launch a tiny probe with a teaspoon of freeze-dried "terraforming microbes" with enough genetic instability to evolve rapidly as they transformed their world, and just enough smarts to hit a target planet without sterilizing the payload. We're almost at the point of being able to do that already, and plenty of people right here at home find the idea of bringing life to a desert appealing. Especially if biogenesis were in fact very rare even on hospitable worlds.
Imagine if, 8 billion years or so ago a species like modern humans ventured out to the stars and discovered *nothing*. A galaxy full of lifeless rocks, many of which could have harbored life, but never did. Heck, a few million years worth of sub-light undergrad projects could have seeded the entire galaxy. In a few centuries we may well be capable of doing the job ourselves with a few decades of "Green the galaxy" sentiment - just send great gobs of cheap drones streaking out into the void, with enough shielding to protect their payload for a billion years.
You've made a few large assumptions: > lacking FTL means it requires millenia to cross between stars
- only to an outside observer: if you've got the energy to burn you can use relativistic time dilation to make the journey arbitrarily short.
> FTL would necessarily be extremely advanced technology
- in fact it could be something well with our own technological grasp, which we've overlooked because our concepts of the universe, and with it our physics theories are based on a fundamentally different set of assumptions. (After all, if FTL is possible, it probably means there's major flaws in our understanding of physics).
- or they might be able to use one of the techniques we've already postulated, simply because they were lucky enough to find a large deposit of the sort of exotic matter that would make it possible within their solar system
- or, they may have gained the technology from some other much more advanced space-faring species. After all, if anyone is jetting around the galaxy, sooner or later someone else will get their hands on the technology. And Earth *is* probably several billion years late to the galactic life game.
>Studying alien life would get boring - Biologists have been studying life on Earth for centuries and are still finding interesting things. Completely alien life is liable to be no less interesting, no matter how many worlds your ancestors have explored. The span of potential life is nearly infinite - we need only look at out own geo-history to see how incredibly uncommon life resembling the modern forms is.
That said, I've got to agree there's very little reason to assume conquest or colonization. Pretty much all the resources available here are more easily available... pretty much anywhere else. Meanwhile alien life is as likely as not to be severely incompatible to the point that terraforming a dead world is probably easier than a living alien one. And If you have to live in self-contained habitats to avoid being poisoned by the local ecology, conquest seems... ill-advised.
On the other hand I can think of two things Earth offers that might not be common or easily made - a rocky world with a strong magnetosphere (important if you want a stable atmosphere), and a pre-oxidized planet capable of sustaining an oxygen atmosphere. After all, it took oceans teeming with algae billions of years to saturate the oceans with oxygen, and to then oxidize mineral formations on land enough that significant amounts of oxygen could start building up in the atmosphere. Tailored terraforming microbes could probably do the job in a small fraction of the time, but waiting thousands if not millions of years might be less appealing than simply transforming a living world conveniently free of intelligent life.
If aliens did come here, especially without FTL, it seems the likely reasons are - biology, archaeology (in which case stealth might well be assumed, to avoid interfering with the primitive cultures they're studying), proselytizing (we've usually used it as a tool for conquest, but the missionaries themselves often have "nobler" goals), or broader cultural exchange. Or genocide. Can't rule out that the mere existence of other (intelligent?) life might be intolerable to some - either because of the threat we might eventually pose, or simply because they feel they must defend their position as the only intelligent life in the galaxy.
You could say that of a great many social policies as well. Currency for example. Pollution control. The reduction of violence and murder. The list goes on an on - the stick is very often the preferred form of motivation for most types of governments. Probably because it's often cheaper and requires less understanding of the varied motives of the population to offer an effective carrot.
Did you intend to imply that eugenics is inherently fascist? Seems like a rather extreme claim. Certainly a fascist regime would have a relatively easy time implementing such a thing, but that can be said for a great many social policies.
Eugenics could be implemented in a great many ways, as easily with the carrot as the stick.
Sure, why not. They're in every measurable respect an identical twin that bifurcated decades later than usual, but hey, I suppose God only hands out an extra soul if the bifurcation occurs in the womb while he's still paying attention, right?
What makes you say that? I haven't heard of any functionality the brain supplies to the growth process. Just remove everything but the brainstem from the clone fetus, and the body should probably grow okay. The pituitary glad may be important - leaving it intact is probably the most challenging part, might need to resort to chemical manipulation or DNA editing to prevent the cortex from growing instead.
Of course the morality of such a thing is a whole different question.
Basically, as far as implementation is concerned. As used, far more similar to a combination of subways, buses, and other forms of mass-transit I suspect. And there's very little "just" about a fully automated highway - automation removes the vast majority of problems with highways, allowing them to potentially outperform even well-run railway systems, with lower initial infrastructure costs (not counting the not strictly necessary tunnels), and far more scalable capacity (as adding additional cars is far simpler and less expensive than adding another train)
It remains to be seen how actual costs would compare to subways, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
Repairing roads when needed is obviously a good investment at present. Unfortunately, the road system is already pushing the limits of most people's ability to drive. If we stopped treating driving as an entitlement and had a rigorous driver's education system such as Germany we could safely boost the speed limit some, not to anything like 120 though, not on crowded freeways. And *definitely* not on ground-level through-town roads where kids, animals, etc. might wander into traffic. But even doing that would pretty much require banning distracted parents driving minivans full of kids (Admittedly a benefit for pretty much everyone else on the road anyway...) Current limits have to be based on the least-capable drivers allowed on the road.
For how long? It will generally take years, possibly decades, for traffic patterns to adapt to re-clog to available corridors. The difference between looking at immediate gains, and long-term trends. Both have their place.
If you were allowing humans on the road, then probably yes. But his plan is for roads dedicated entirely to automated vehicles, which can be made almost impervious to traffic jams. The solutions are actually quite simple - ants use them all the time, but humans are *really* bad about prioritizing their own progress above the smooth flow of traffic, with the result that everyone slows down, themselves included.
Rule 1: Every individual strives to remain equidistant between those in front of and behind them at all times Rule 2: don't worry about it until you've hit several times the throughput than human drivers could hope to maintain
The proposed underground Loop system doesn't use an evacuated tube, that's the basically unrelated Hyperloop system - which was originally proposed for above ground use, but could admittedly benefit dramatically from the straight-line potential of tunnels.
Loop proposes what is basically an underground highway populated by fully automated "flatbed" vehicles designed to ferry normal cars, as well as passenger and cargo pods, between stations. Given a dedicated highway without any human, animal, or other unexpected natural obstacles to worry about, it could deliver many of the "sci-fi" automated car promises that don't work well when sharing the road with humans. High speeds (120+ mph), high efficiency on-the-fly "trains" made from bumper-to-bumper convoys, the ability to almost completely avoid traffic jams even when the road is filled to capacity (and mitigate even those caused by now much-less-common accidents, etc), etc.
Think subway functionality, with far more flexibility since individual cars can join and leave trains at full speed, so you never have to slow down or stop unless someone is getting on or off your specific car. So, maybe more like a coordinated fleet of high-speed shuttle-buses with dedicated roads so that there's never any traffic jams. Except that you also have the option of bringing your car if you're willing to pay for it.
You're being humorous, but that does hint at one of the genuine risks of gene drives - the lines between species are generally far less absolute than we imagine, with outliers between "genetically adjacent" species sometimes able to successfully reproduce, which would allow a gene drive to jump species. Combine that with an infected species having a population that's almost entirely hard-up males, and it seems like the odds would go up even further.
And if you're talking about a less... extinction-oriented gene drive, then you have to recognize that the "infected" species will now be carrying extremely powerful DNA-editing technology in their DNA forever - gene drives can remove anything except themselves. And evolution does so love to find ways to put useful genes to work.
Even in the 16th century, life expectancy at birth was ~40 years. And if you survived your first few years it went way up.
A lot of domestic animals don't have close wild relatives anymore, but we can make rough comparisons - like cows, elk can live to be 20, but their life expectancy is 10-13. Similarly wild boars typically live to about 12 in captivity, or about 6 in the wild. And the trend continues - like 16th century humans, it seems wild animals have a life expectancy of roughly middle-age, about halfway to the point where they'd die of old age.
Meanwhile, farms typically slaughter them at a much younger age, once their youthful growth spurt begins to plateau.
You still up for it? Knowing your "good life" will likely mean living alone in a small, filthy cage with an unending supply of food, and a distracted slaughter that you probably won't be conscious for as puberty begins to slow down?
Even if "when you were dead" involved them probably killing you before age 20? Because that's about the norm for farm animals.
Typical slaughter age --- Natural lifespan --- Animal 1.5y --- 15-20 y --- Cow (beef)
4y --- 15-20 --- Cow (dairy) 1.5y --- up to 8y --- Chicken(laying hens) 3-5y --- 10-12 y --- Pigs (breeding sow)
And of course farm animals have been long bred to be stupid/placid enough to not realize/put up a fight when being led to slaughter, not exactly problem-solving tool users, even if many are more intelligent than they're typically given credit for.
And while some farms may indeed offer the "good life", in the US at least the vast majority of meat comes from farms that offer anything but. And *none* offer a choice in the matter, even if the animals could comprehend what they were choosing.
Look at the end of the paragraph - they CAN test whether the hypothesis is true - if certain events occurred early on they'd leave distinctive evidence. Those events may not have happened, so we may not be able to *disprove* the hypothesis, but it *is* possible to prove it true. Or at least find evidence for it, which is all science ever really does - Truth is the realm of clerics and philosophers. It would likely be useless knowledge since those other universes are now forever out of reach, but it would nonetheless be one more reasonably confirmed fragment of a still deeply speculative cosmology.
Nobody's claiming the theory is true - they've formulated a theory and are exploring its implications for ways in which it might be tested.
As for the nomenclature of Theory - I agree it's being abused in this scenario, far worse than for superstrings, etc, where the theory is at least almost perfectly consistent with existing well-tested predictive but uninformative ones.
And you can do a lot better than MP3 as well - I remember a gaming voice-chat program years ago that was tuned specifically for recording voices with extremely high compression and low CPU overhead, so you could have multi-way chat decently over your 56k modem while playing Quake, etc. online.
As I recall it also integrated volume normalization as well, which combined with the voice filter meant that if you took off your headset mic without silencing it and left the room to talk with your roommates, there was a fair chance that your online buddies could still hear your conversation.
Wish I could remember the details, I'd love to find it again. Pretty sure it was open source.
Personally, I try to avoid commissioning the death of anything that demonstrates sophisticated tool-use and problem-solving skills. Which pretty much rules out most whales and higher primates, elephants, etc.
Same way it fits here - as verbose nonsense. Even with an infinite number of universes having an an infinite range of different physical laws, there's still no room for that gibberish.
Hey, we've given capitalism a fair shake all over the world, and *every time* the same sorts of problems arise, the only variation is in how aggressively anti-capitalistic sentiment fights back.
Contrast with communism, which has never actually been tried at the national scale, and yet gets blackwashed with the abuses of the authoritarians that rose to power fraudulently claiming the banner.
Capitalism at least earned virtually every black mark against it on its own merits.
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No, I'm saying candidates interested in representing their electorate rarely get the financing necessary to run a credible campaign, and so instead everyone votes for the perceived lesser evil of the major party candidates,who clearly *don't* represent their interests except on a few hot-button topics of no interest to their corporate backers, and which they tend to remain in eternal gridlock with their opponents over - to the benefit of everyone directly involved.
And sadly, voting for the lesser evil is in fact the rational choice in this situation - it is a known weakness of first-past-the-post voting systems, and one that politicians have learned how to game extremely effectively.
It's a fine idea. And perhaps one day it will be common to find politicians who actually wish to represent the people electing them, rather than the donors willing to offer the biggest bribes.
I'll start looking right after I catch a unicorn.
I don't understand why anyone would even mention it in the same sentence as Out-of-Africa theory, or even the same book (unless that book was "The complete history of life from planetary genesis to modern day nation-states"), and I certainly wouldn't consider it a "top theory" without any shred of evidence (not that I'd expect to find any even if it were true)
But as for not being sane, why ever not? Natural life-seeding is generally accepted as at least theoretically possible, especially within a solar system (for example we almost certainly exchange impact ejecta with Mars, Venus, etc. on a fairly regular basis), and an intelligence that wanted to do so intentionally could do so far more effectively. Launch a tiny probe with a teaspoon of freeze-dried "terraforming microbes" with enough genetic instability to evolve rapidly as they transformed their world, and just enough smarts to hit a target planet without sterilizing the payload. We're almost at the point of being able to do that already, and plenty of people right here at home find the idea of bringing life to a desert appealing. Especially if biogenesis were in fact very rare even on hospitable worlds.
Imagine if, 8 billion years or so ago a species like modern humans ventured out to the stars and discovered *nothing*. A galaxy full of lifeless rocks, many of which could have harbored life, but never did. Heck, a few million years worth of sub-light undergrad projects could have seeded the entire galaxy. In a few centuries we may well be capable of doing the job ourselves with a few decades of "Green the galaxy" sentiment - just send great gobs of cheap drones streaking out into the void, with enough shielding to protect their payload for a billion years.
Likely? Not especially. But hardly insane.
You've made a few large assumptions:
> lacking FTL means it requires millenia to cross between stars
- only to an outside observer: if you've got the energy to burn you can use relativistic time dilation to make the journey arbitrarily short.
> FTL would necessarily be extremely advanced technology
- in fact it could be something well with our own technological grasp, which we've overlooked because our concepts of the universe, and with it our physics theories are based on a fundamentally different set of assumptions. (After all, if FTL is possible, it probably means there's major flaws in our understanding of physics).
- or they might be able to use one of the techniques we've already postulated, simply because they were lucky enough to find a large deposit of the sort of exotic matter that would make it possible within their solar system
- or, they may have gained the technology from some other much more advanced space-faring species. After all, if anyone is jetting around the galaxy, sooner or later someone else will get their hands on the technology. And Earth *is* probably several billion years late to the galactic life game.
>Studying alien life would get boring
- Biologists have been studying life on Earth for centuries and are still finding interesting things. Completely alien life is liable to be no less interesting, no matter how many worlds your ancestors have explored. The span of potential life is nearly infinite - we need only look at out own geo-history to see how incredibly uncommon life resembling the modern forms is.
That said, I've got to agree there's very little reason to assume conquest or colonization. Pretty much all the resources available here are more easily available... pretty much anywhere else. Meanwhile alien life is as likely as not to be severely incompatible to the point that terraforming a dead world is probably easier than a living alien one. And If you have to live in self-contained habitats to avoid being poisoned by the local ecology, conquest seems... ill-advised.
On the other hand I can think of two things Earth offers that might not be common or easily made - a rocky world with a strong magnetosphere (important if you want a stable atmosphere), and a pre-oxidized planet capable of sustaining an oxygen atmosphere. After all, it took oceans teeming with algae billions of years to saturate the oceans with oxygen, and to then oxidize mineral formations on land enough that significant amounts of oxygen could start building up in the atmosphere. Tailored terraforming microbes could probably do the job in a small fraction of the time, but waiting thousands if not millions of years might be less appealing than simply transforming a living world conveniently free of intelligent life.
If aliens did come here, especially without FTL, it seems the likely reasons are - biology, archaeology (in which case stealth might well be assumed, to avoid interfering with the primitive cultures they're studying), proselytizing (we've usually used it as a tool for conquest, but the missionaries themselves often have "nobler" goals), or broader cultural exchange. Or genocide. Can't rule out that the mere existence of other (intelligent?) life might be intolerable to some - either because of the threat we might eventually pose, or simply because they feel they must defend their position as the only intelligent life in the galaxy.
There you go. That's the attitude that will let you chase immortality on a road made of the corpses of your siblings.
You could say that of a great many social policies as well. Currency for example. Pollution control. The reduction of violence and murder. The list goes on an on - the stick is very often the preferred form of motivation for most types of governments. Probably because it's often cheaper and requires less understanding of the varied motives of the population to offer an effective carrot.
Did you intend to imply that eugenics is inherently fascist? Seems like a rather extreme claim. Certainly a fascist regime would have a relatively easy time implementing such a thing, but that can be said for a great many social policies.
Eugenics could be implemented in a great many ways, as easily with the carrot as the stick.
Sure, why not. They're in every measurable respect an identical twin that bifurcated decades later than usual, but hey, I suppose God only hands out an extra soul if the bifurcation occurs in the womb while he's still paying attention, right?
What makes you say that? I haven't heard of any functionality the brain supplies to the growth process. Just remove everything but the brainstem from the clone fetus, and the body should probably grow okay. The pituitary glad may be important - leaving it intact is probably the most challenging part, might need to resort to chemical manipulation or DNA editing to prevent the cortex from growing instead.
Of course the morality of such a thing is a whole different question.
Basically, as far as implementation is concerned. As used, far more similar to a combination of subways, buses, and other forms of mass-transit I suspect. And there's very little "just" about a fully automated highway - automation removes the vast majority of problems with highways, allowing them to potentially outperform even well-run railway systems, with lower initial infrastructure costs (not counting the not strictly necessary tunnels), and far more scalable capacity (as adding additional cars is far simpler and less expensive than adding another train)
It remains to be seen how actual costs would compare to subways, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
Repairing roads when needed is obviously a good investment at present. Unfortunately, the road system is already pushing the limits of most people's ability to drive. If we stopped treating driving as an entitlement and had a rigorous driver's education system such as Germany we could safely boost the speed limit some, not to anything like 120 though, not on crowded freeways. And *definitely* not on ground-level through-town roads where kids, animals, etc. might wander into traffic. But even doing that would pretty much require banning distracted parents driving minivans full of kids (Admittedly a benefit for pretty much everyone else on the road anyway...) Current limits have to be based on the least-capable drivers allowed on the road.
For how long? It will generally take years, possibly decades, for traffic patterns to adapt to re-clog to available corridors. The difference between looking at immediate gains, and long-term trends. Both have their place.
If you were allowing humans on the road, then probably yes. But his plan is for roads dedicated entirely to automated vehicles, which can be made almost impervious to traffic jams. The solutions are actually quite simple - ants use them all the time, but humans are *really* bad about prioritizing their own progress above the smooth flow of traffic, with the result that everyone slows down, themselves included.
Rule 1: Every individual strives to remain equidistant between those in front of and behind them at all times
Rule 2: don't worry about it until you've hit several times the throughput than human drivers could hope to maintain
The proposed underground Loop system doesn't use an evacuated tube, that's the basically unrelated Hyperloop system - which was originally proposed for above ground use, but could admittedly benefit dramatically from the straight-line potential of tunnels.
Loop proposes what is basically an underground highway populated by fully automated "flatbed" vehicles designed to ferry normal cars, as well as passenger and cargo pods, between stations. Given a dedicated highway without any human, animal, or other unexpected natural obstacles to worry about, it could deliver many of the "sci-fi" automated car promises that don't work well when sharing the road with humans. High speeds (120+ mph), high efficiency on-the-fly "trains" made from bumper-to-bumper convoys, the ability to almost completely avoid traffic jams even when the road is filled to capacity (and mitigate even those caused by now much-less-common accidents, etc), etc.
Think subway functionality, with far more flexibility since individual cars can join and leave trains at full speed, so you never have to slow down or stop unless someone is getting on or off your specific car. So, maybe more like a coordinated fleet of high-speed shuttle-buses with dedicated roads so that there's never any traffic jams. Except that you also have the option of bringing your car if you're willing to pay for it.
You're being humorous, but that does hint at one of the genuine risks of gene drives - the lines between species are generally far less absolute than we imagine, with outliers between "genetically adjacent" species sometimes able to successfully reproduce, which would allow a gene drive to jump species. Combine that with an infected species having a population that's almost entirely hard-up males, and it seems like the odds would go up even further.
And if you're talking about a less... extinction-oriented gene drive, then you have to recognize that the "infected" species will now be carrying extremely powerful DNA-editing technology in their DNA forever - gene drives can remove anything except themselves. And evolution does so love to find ways to put useful genes to work.
Even in the 16th century, life expectancy at birth was ~40 years. And if you survived your first few years it went way up.
A lot of domestic animals don't have close wild relatives anymore, but we can make rough comparisons - like cows, elk can live to be 20, but their life expectancy is 10-13. Similarly wild boars typically live to about 12 in captivity, or about 6 in the wild. And the trend continues - like 16th century humans, it seems wild animals have a life expectancy of roughly middle-age, about halfway to the point where they'd die of old age.
Meanwhile, farms typically slaughter them at a much younger age, once their youthful growth spurt begins to plateau.
You still up for it? Knowing your "good life" will likely mean living alone in a small, filthy cage with an unending supply of food, and a distracted slaughter that you probably won't be conscious for as puberty begins to slow down?
Even if "when you were dead" involved them probably killing you before age 20? Because that's about the norm for farm animals.
Typical slaughter age --- Natural lifespan --- Animal
1.5y --- 15-20 y --- Cow (beef)
4y --- 15-20 --- Cow (dairy)
1.5y --- up to 8y --- Chicken(laying hens)
3-5y --- 10-12 y --- Pigs (breeding sow)
And of course farm animals have been long bred to be stupid/placid enough to not realize/put up a fight when being led to slaughter, not exactly problem-solving tool users, even if many are more intelligent than they're typically given credit for.
And while some farms may indeed offer the "good life", in the US at least the vast majority of meat comes from farms that offer anything but. And *none* offer a choice in the matter, even if the animals could comprehend what they were choosing.
Black holes are spherical in space, not in space-time.
Look at the end of the paragraph - they CAN test whether the hypothesis is true - if certain events occurred early on they'd leave distinctive evidence. Those events may not have happened, so we may not be able to *disprove* the hypothesis, but it *is* possible to prove it true. Or at least find evidence for it, which is all science ever really does - Truth is the realm of clerics and philosophers. It would likely be useless knowledge since those other universes are now forever out of reach, but it would nonetheless be one more reasonably confirmed fragment of a still deeply speculative cosmology.
Nobody's claiming the theory is true - they've formulated a theory and are exploring its implications for ways in which it might be tested.
As for the nomenclature of Theory - I agree it's being abused in this scenario, far worse than for superstrings, etc, where the theory is at least almost perfectly consistent with existing well-tested predictive but uninformative ones.
And you can do a lot better than MP3 as well - I remember a gaming voice-chat program years ago that was tuned specifically for recording voices with extremely high compression and low CPU overhead, so you could have multi-way chat decently over your 56k modem while playing Quake, etc. online.
As I recall it also integrated volume normalization as well, which combined with the voice filter meant that if you took off your headset mic without silencing it and left the room to talk with your roommates, there was a fair chance that your online buddies could still hear your conversation.
Wish I could remember the details, I'd love to find it again. Pretty sure it was open source.
Frack the password - why was a fracking *keyboard app* storing personal information on a remote server in the first place!?!?!
Self-awareness perhaps?
Personally, I try to avoid commissioning the death of anything that demonstrates sophisticated tool-use and problem-solving skills. Which pretty much rules out most whales and higher primates, elephants, etc.
How about chimpanzees? Or is eating intelligent beings with complex social lives only distasteful when they're relatively closely related?
I don't know - seems to work really well for the people in power...
Same way it fits here - as verbose nonsense. Even with an infinite number of universes having an an infinite range of different physical laws, there's still no room for that gibberish.
Hey, we've given capitalism a fair shake all over the world, and *every time* the same sorts of problems arise, the only variation is in how aggressively anti-capitalistic sentiment fights back.
Contrast with communism, which has never actually been tried at the national scale, and yet gets blackwashed with the abuses of the authoritarians that rose to power fraudulently claiming the banner.
Capitalism at least earned virtually every black mark against it on its own merits.