Actually, I am an outwardly normal (except for my aversion to watching sports) father of three (husband of one). I have some beliefs that are outside the societal norm, but nothing that is obvious to the casual observer. I have never used any drugs outside of one or two incidents (in my life) with pot.
I just don't think we should mandate nationally that everyone live like me.
I wasn't angry. I certainly was antagonistic, but it was in response to baseless antagonism (not yours, the gp's).
My points were not easily extended to his points. His points were about restricting behavior that harms other people. My points, I think quite obviously, were about restricting behavior that doesn't harm other people.
And remember, when I wrote that post I had no idea it would be modded, so I didn't enumerate everything in mind-numbing detail.
In fact, though, you are often better off saying something controversial and then refining it. How many people would have read that post if it were five pages long listing all of the do's & don't's of my personal political beliefs? But if you say something punchy, you get people's attention and have the opportunity to refine it.
I don't think any government bigger than a community government should restrict anything that doesn't harm anyone (or have potential for very significant harm... building a nuke in your garage doesn't harm anyone, but the potential's pretty significant). I don't think any government, period, should restrict anything that happens inside your home, with the same caveat as above.
I do think that a community gov't should be able to have dress codes, marriage codes, etc. Having those things on a state or national level is just mindless conformity, though.
His points (with the exception of the one on radiation) are clearly in a different category than mine. I didn't think I needed to spell out exactly what I meant, given the examples, but obviously I did.
What an idiotic response. I listed a bunch of things that harm no one, that are clearly just the government restricting your behavior to make everyone the same.
You write a strawman left-field list of harmful activities that the government restricts as a rebuttal.
The US as far as I know has never been a free country. Certainly it hasn't in the last 70 years.
Why can the government tell me who or how many people I can marry? Why can the government tell me what plants I can grow? Why can the government tell me what substances I can own? Why can the government tell me how (or if) I should dress? Why can the government tell two consenting adults what they can do together, or whether they can charge one another for it? Why can the government tell me what countries I can visit?
I don't know of anywhere that I would really call free, and I am thankful for the freedoms I have. I am also watchful of the freedoms that are guaranteed to me but seem to be slipping. But I would love to see someplace that was really free.
Another 'offtopic' moderation coming my way, I'm sure...
I notice that in all of this ad hominem, you never ever once give an example of someone reporting US successes in Iraq that the US media skipped, nor do you give even one example of what Nancy Pilosi is doing to destroy America.
Also, I can't imagine how you could believe that you are killed at critical thinking and also believe that "Flaming liberals are clearly trying to destroy our country".
I can see how you could be a critical thinker and believe that "flaming liberals *are* destroying our country" (I disagree, but I can see it). Trying requires intent, and I can't see how anyone rational could think Nancy Pilosi and Dennis Kucinich seek to destroy the country.
In short, your posts don't provide any supporting evidence and are not well thought out.
I don't think there's a more dispicable trait in this world than to claim someone else's work as your own. Dude, I'm not a fan of plagiarism, but let's get a sense of scale. People have perched others to slowly die clutching a greased pole with spears sticking up their ass, locked them live into iron pots with fires underneath, and raped children so they could sell the video.
There are MANY more despicable traits in the world. The world's a big place, and some people are pretty damned despicable.
I agree with you that the attorney firings rank fairly low on the "stupid, immoral or illegal things Bush did" list, but they definitely were a problem beyond the lying.
Presidents regularly fire attorneys when they start their term. I guess that's OK... For a prez to fire attorneys for political reasons in the middle of the terms clearly produces chilling effects. Now all attorneys had better do what the prez says all the time, or he'll just fire them. If the firings for political reasons only occur at the beginnings of the terms, ya never know who's going to win, so as an attorney you might as well stick to your convictions.
Even if you had to duplicate quantum information to copy a human mind, it wouldn't prevent upload. We already do quantum teleportation (moving the quantum state of one system to another remote system).
I have (and have had) you on my friends list, so don't take this as arbitrary argument, but you have totally *chosen* to read what he wrote in a way that you could argue with it.
He said we give an immense importance to human life, and very little on the life of others. Emphasizing that dichotomy is a far, far cry from saying we should put equal importance on both. It is simply saying that we should re-think the degree of difference.
Maybe a car analogy would help: if I say "You think a Cadillac SUV can crash right through depleted uranium armor, but a Prius would be stopped by toilet paper", I'm not saying that you should think both have the same penetrating power. I'm saying your scale is off.
In fact, it seems pretty astounding to me that you would even defend your position once 'hey!' pointed it out to you. Your mistake seems blazingly obvious...
Excellent point; I actually thought about the paradox of quantum vacuum fluctuations in a universe with no matter, when it appears that matter causes space-time.
OK, random, space cadet, used-to-be-in-physics mode starts here... I really think that we have to back up & take an even broader view. I subscribe to the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM, which assumes the quantum wave is the 'first class' object and everything else is just a partial view of the universe that we get as a result of the nature of what we are. This in turn implies that the universe is really deterministic, so you can (and probably should) consider it as one unchanging field.
I think that only when we get a view of the universe that can accomodate the notion that electrons aren't really electrons, they're an infinitesmal slice of information about some field that has always behaved deterministically, will we begin to be able to make useful comments about the beginning of time.
I didn't RTFM, but I'm sure he was seriously suggesting that the universe came from nothing. There has been semi-serious argument for some time that the universe is a 'vacuum bubble'.
Per quantum mechanics, things can appear from nothing as long as they vanish within a maximum time dictated by the total energy content (including mass) of the thing. (E*T = h, where E is the energy and T is the time the thing hangs around, and h is Planck's constant).
There has been argument that the negative gravitational energy of a thing exactly counters the mass energy of the thing, so the total energy content of the universe is 0. If so, the entire universe could appear from nothing and vanish at any time.
I have no idea if this is exactly what he's arguing, but I've heard it argued seriously before.
IANAP BIHABSIP I am not a physicist but I have a BS in physics.
The interesting thing to me is the way Hawking is augmented. When you talk to him, it's not entirely him that you're talking to - he has tools to easily call up arguments he's used in the past, and updated as he saw holes, so Hawking + the chair is really smarter than plain old Hawking. When these tools are cheapn & easy enough for everyone to use, I think most everyone will.
Wow, those are some very helpful and well-thought-out suggestions.
I have one suggestion for you, though. It looks as if you expect most companies who would be interested in you to offer you a reasonably good salary. I think you should reverse that notion - most companies can't or won't afford what you're worth.
I am primarily a contractor. If I go out looking for a new contract and I get too many bites at $75/hr, I crank the rate up and start looking again. You are worth more than the market average (well, at least I am). Don't expect that most companies will make a reasonable offer. You're looking for that unusual job that will pay you what you're worth.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. Either everyone honestly believed there were WMD, or you heard the WMD deniers loud and clear. Not both.
And, while I am the last person to defend Saddam Hussein's human rights record, it is worth pointing out that the US govt carefully studied the effects of destroying Iraq's water treatment plants (thousands dead, mostly children, from polluted water sources), then went in and destroyed them in the Gulf War. (http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0401c.asp) That is responsible in large part for the dead children - the direct, premeditated actions of the government you're defending.
I do want to backpedal firmly from one thing I said... something to the effect of "we'll be able to do anything we can imagine".
I do not in the least mean to say we can break physical law... I don't believe it is possible send information or matter faster than light, break the laws of thermodynamics, or violate conservation of charge, quantum color, strangeness, momentum, etc.
What I really mean to say is that it seems likely that a civilization 1000 years more advanced than us can configure matter to its liking, and in essence if not in fact convert matter to energy at will. And I think the only cost limitation on that is essentially the cost of the matter & energy involved.
What is possible within those limitations, taken with a good imagination, is staggering.
On the other, you're saying that said competition is built into every life form in such a way that, even though intelligent, they cannot modify or abdicate the drive.
All of the scenarios you're giving are promoting survival of the group at the expense of survival of the individual. I do believe that any successful life will take up a large fraction of any resource it can use.
It only takes one that does take advantage of those resources to make irrelevant all of the others. This has happened over & over throughout the history of life on earth, so there's an amazing precedent to believe that life will occupy virtually all available resources.
I think the higher you go, the harder you'll fall.
And I think that's crazy. If current society fell altogether, all over the planet, leaving only pockets of 100 or so people living in isolated communities, we would still have billions of books spread all over. Even if we had to rebuild the whole of civilization, we would do so much faster than if we were starting from scratch.
The difference between civilization falling now & the times it has fallen in the past is essentially the fact that the printing press exists now. There are so many copies of so many books running around that we would be hard put to lose the information.
In a society that built smart matter, either through advanced biological methods or other means of doing molecular manufacturing, an individual could build millions of seeds that could each produce a high level of technology with nothing more than carbon dioxide, water, & sunlight or temperature gradient. You would have lots of places where civilization was founded, giving high redundancy. You would notice if a whole planet stopped sending messages to the rest of the universe & check up on them.
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to so believe, not the least of which is science doesn't support such an idea.
It is already demonstrated that matter can be taken apart and put back together with atomic, or at least molecular, accuracy to be 'smart matter' that achieves a purpose. All life on earth does this, all the time. The only speculation I'm giving is that you could use technology to control this process to a large degree, and that it can be done with a large variety of stock material, not just Carbon Hydrogen Oxygen Nitrogen. The first part is a very small leap; the second is a much larger one, but if we figure out how to control nuclear processes, it can be bypassed.
If you can control matter at the atomic level, you should be able to cause fusion in any element combination that is lighter than iron, yielding energy & allowing you to transmute one element to another.
I am definitely speculating, but I stand by my assertion that it is much more naive to speculate that technology can't do these basic things (moving atoms from one place to another with near-atomic accuracy, cheaply, and converting matter to energy with a lot of freedom as to the method).
I think I've made my point about 'smart matter'. Regarding matter to energy, the options that I can see right away are: * build a black hole and capture photons radiated as ionized matter falls into it * essentially 'cold fusion'; force atoms together using macroscopic forces * find some way to encourage decay in heavy atoms (bombard with some subatomic particle, etc) * just surround the sun with solar panels and drop light elements into it
Obviously this is hand-waving. I'm not saying I could go build a matter-to-energy converter and reshape the planet to my whim at an atomic level;-) I'm saying that there are so many possible different ways to do this, and nature has been so susceptible to even the primitive tools we've brought to bear on it so far, that it is far more 'out-there' to speculate that technology can't/won't solve these problems than the opposit
Life that spreads beats out life that doesn't spread. So all life that survives has a drive to spread.
Presuming that a really technologically advanced race couldn't take a solar system apart & put it back together however they like is naive.
Presuming that a race that has had advanced technology for 1000 years would be recognizable, and could fall back into some prehistoric state, is naive.
Most humans in 200 years will probably not be recognizable as humans, and may well not be recognizable as discrete beings. Matter converts to energy at a pretty incredible rate, and there's no reason to believe we won't be able to convert all mass we come across into smart mass that supports our purposes.
That is ignoring the obvious fact that a race that survives 1000 years of advanced technology won't just be able to do anything we can imagine; they will have discovered so many new principles about how the universe works that most of what they'll do we can't even fathom.
I definitely see your point, but I believe we will make it through as a race if not as individuals.
I'm not sure you have age on me - I'm not old but I'm not a pup. (36 yrs). I also have some very bright friends who I have a decade on who have much the same outlook as you.
If I had that outlook I think (or maybe I only hope again) I would devote my life to doing my bit to save the human race. (Confucius, Jesus and Martin Luther King did some pretty impressive stuff, and started off as nobodies.)
As it is, I think I do better to just try to raise good children and provide some services (Frimp and MoochMuch) that make the world at least a tiny bit better place.
True, but I think (or maybe I only hope) we will spread out a bit and get some redundancy going before the First Big Nutjob Caper happens.
A nutjob would have to be pretty cutting edge to wipe out humanity, I think, and I also think that a nutjob would have to lose much of his nutjobiness to get to that point.
I agree. I don't know how to involve politics & human foibles too much in extrapolating the future beyond maybe 30 years.
I still think the main thrust of my argument is right. Barring catastrophe, we will get cheaper & cheaper means of doing engineering. Some people at least will opt to change themselves for the better as the technology becomes stable, and other people won't matter much in the grand scheme of things.
Eventually it will be cheap enough to wrap the sun in energy absorbing panels or send a nanoscale factory to another star system that hobby groups will do it if nothing else.
So I think that even if the masses spend all their time in VR living only fantasies, amazing progress is pretty much inevitable.
Heck, if I had the ability I would probably 'tune out' the parts of my mind that make me waste time. If I could choose, I would opt to get more gratification from doing things that provide real progress than from reading, watching movies, etc. If we figure out how to make it possible to tune your preferences, inevitably someone will do it, and they and their offspring will make the rest of us obsolete.
I can't believe how provincial so many of the replies are...
Assumptions: there isn't some way to magically ignore the laws of thermodynamics technology advances at a rate within an order of magnitude of that on earth in the last 100 years civilizations occur often enough for there to have been 1000s that were earth-like in the last billion years
Then... Within the first 1000 years of achieving the equivalent of 20th century tech, sapients achieve superhuman intelligence, either through migrating to nanocomputers or through a combination of nanotech + biological manipulation. They have immense computing power and advanced tools to automatically design anything they can imagine that fits within physical law. They have control over matter to the atomic if not the subatomic level, bounded only by the available energy and physical law.
So... they either convert their star to some other form that generates energy in a more efficient or controllable way, or they surround the star with panels to gather all free energy. In either case, all that should radiate from their star system is low energy infrared (unavoidable losses due to the 2nd law of thermo) and highly compressed communication packets (to the point of looking like static).
Someone, whether the equivalent of a kid doing a science project or a nation spreading their power, sends nanoprobes at near light speed (using laser propelled solar sails or, more likely, some much more advanced technology) to nearby star systems where factory systems self replicate using local raw materials. Eventually (likely in less than a year, assuming exponential growth rates with a tiny seed), enough infrastructure is there to grow or build sapients at the new star system. The process repeats itself.
The aliens should spread at near light speed in an ever-expanding volume.
Of course, there is all of that dark matter out there... it seems likely to me that there is are universe-wide alien civilizations, and that they leave some portion of the universe alone as starter cultures to get new races with new perspective on the universe.
These replies that assume big bulky aliens weighing 10s of pounds, made out of meat, and trolling around in 1970s era sci-fi space ships with blasters are missing the obvious. Only 600 years after the spread of movable type printing presses, we are on the verge of understanding human biology, building software that can do almost any engineering task a human can do, and controlling matter at the atomic level. If you were transported 200 years into the future, most activity will be happening in ways that you can't even sense, much less comprehend.
That is, assuming we don't somehow kill ourselves off altogether or destroy the infrastructure that makes technological civilization possible.
Moreover, what the hell is up with these kinds of posts I've seen lately?
"You should just expect companies to do anything at all to make more money. It was your fault for expecting ethical behavior, not their fault for [lying/stealing/polluting/killing foreigners]."
Yes, it sure as hell IS someone's fault if they behave unethically. Sometimes it is ALSO your fault for believing in them when you had good reason not to. Both can be true at the same time.
But regardless of anything else, it is absolutely that politician, CEO, stockbroker, etc.'s fault when they behave like an ass. Work on the problem from both ends by recognizing that they will sometimes act like the crooks they are, while at the same time holding their feet over the coals for their specific malfeasances.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I am an outwardly normal (except for my aversion to watching sports) father of three (husband of one). I have some beliefs that are outside the societal norm, but nothing that is obvious to the casual observer. I have never used any drugs outside of one or two incidents (in my life) with pot.
I just don't think we should mandate nationally that everyone live like me.
I wasn't angry. I certainly was antagonistic, but it was in response to baseless antagonism (not yours, the gp's).
My points were not easily extended to his points. His points were about restricting behavior that harms other people. My points, I think quite obviously, were about restricting behavior that doesn't harm other people.
And remember, when I wrote that post I had no idea it would be modded, so I didn't enumerate everything in mind-numbing detail.
In fact, though, you are often better off saying something controversial and then refining it. How many people would have read that post if it were five pages long listing all of the do's & don't's of my personal political beliefs? But if you say something punchy, you get people's attention and have the opportunity to refine it.
Man, why you gotta dis my lifestyle?
OK, let me spell it out:
I don't think any government bigger than a community government should restrict anything that doesn't harm anyone (or have potential for very significant harm... building a nuke in your garage doesn't harm anyone, but the potential's pretty significant). I don't think any government, period, should restrict anything that happens inside your home, with the same caveat as above.
I do think that a community gov't should be able to have dress codes, marriage codes, etc. Having those things on a state or national level is just mindless conformity, though.
His points (with the exception of the one on radiation) are clearly in a different category than mine. I didn't think I needed to spell out exactly what I meant, given the examples, but obviously I did.
What an idiotic response. I listed a bunch of things that harm no one, that are clearly just the government restricting your behavior to make everyone the same.
You write a strawman left-field list of harmful activities that the government restricts as a rebuttal.
One has nothing to do with the other.
The US as far as I know has never been a free country. Certainly it hasn't in the last 70 years.
Why can the government tell me who or how many people I can marry?
Why can the government tell me what plants I can grow?
Why can the government tell me what substances I can own?
Why can the government tell me how (or if) I should dress?
Why can the government tell two consenting adults what they can do together, or whether they can charge one another for it?
Why can the government tell me what countries I can visit?
I don't know of anywhere that I would really call free, and I am thankful for the freedoms I have. I am also watchful of the freedoms that are guaranteed to me but seem to be slipping. But I would love to see someplace that was really free.
Another 'offtopic' moderation coming my way, I'm sure...
I notice that in all of this ad hominem, you never ever once give an example of someone reporting US successes in Iraq that the US media skipped, nor do you give even one example of what Nancy Pilosi is doing to destroy America.
Also, I can't imagine how you could believe that you are killed at critical thinking and also believe that "Flaming liberals are clearly trying to destroy our country".
I can see how you could be a critical thinker and believe that "flaming liberals *are* destroying our country" (I disagree, but I can see it). Trying requires intent, and I can't see how anyone rational could think Nancy Pilosi and Dennis Kucinich seek to destroy the country.
In short, your posts don't provide any supporting evidence and are not well thought out.
There are MANY more despicable traits in the world. The world's a big place, and some people are pretty damned despicable.
I agree with you that the attorney firings rank fairly low on the "stupid, immoral or illegal things Bush did" list, but they definitely were a problem beyond the lying.
Presidents regularly fire attorneys when they start their term. I guess that's OK... For a prez to fire attorneys for political reasons in the middle of the terms clearly produces chilling effects. Now all attorneys had better do what the prez says all the time, or he'll just fire them. If the firings for political reasons only occur at the beginnings of the terms, ya never know who's going to win, so as an attorney you might as well stick to your convictions.
Even if you had to duplicate quantum information to copy a human mind, it wouldn't prevent upload. We already do quantum teleportation (moving the quantum state of one system to another remote system).
It would prevent backups or duplicates, though.
I have (and have had) you on my friends list, so don't take this as arbitrary argument, but you have totally *chosen* to read what he wrote in a way that you could argue with it.
He said we give an immense importance to human life, and very little on the life of others. Emphasizing that dichotomy is a far, far cry from saying we should put equal importance on both. It is simply saying that we should re-think the degree of difference.
Maybe a car analogy would help: if I say "You think a Cadillac SUV can crash right through depleted uranium armor, but a Prius would be stopped by toilet paper", I'm not saying that you should think both have the same penetrating power. I'm saying your scale is off.
In fact, it seems pretty astounding to me that you would even defend your position once 'hey!' pointed it out to you. Your mistake seems blazingly obvious...
What is "this" country?
Excellent point; I actually thought about the paradox of quantum vacuum fluctuations in a universe with no matter, when it appears that matter causes space-time.
OK, random, space cadet, used-to-be-in-physics mode starts here...
I really think that we have to back up & take an even broader view. I subscribe to the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM, which assumes the quantum wave is the 'first class' object and everything else is just a partial view of the universe that we get as a result of the nature of what we are. This in turn implies that the universe is really deterministic, so you can (and probably should) consider it as one unchanging field.
I think that only when we get a view of the universe that can accomodate the notion that electrons aren't really electrons, they're an infinitesmal slice of information about some field that has always behaved deterministically, will we begin to be able to make useful comments about the beginning of time.
I didn't RTFM, but I'm sure he was seriously suggesting that the universe came from nothing. There has been semi-serious argument for some time that the universe is a 'vacuum bubble'.
Per quantum mechanics, things can appear from nothing as long as they vanish within a maximum time dictated by the total energy content (including mass) of the thing. (E*T = h, where E is the energy and T is the time the thing hangs around, and h is Planck's constant).
There has been argument that the negative gravitational energy of a thing exactly counters the mass energy of the thing, so the total energy content of the universe is 0. If so, the entire universe could appear from nothing and vanish at any time.
I have no idea if this is exactly what he's arguing, but I've heard it argued seriously before.
IANAP BIHABSIP
I am not a physicist but I have a BS in physics.
The interesting thing to me is the way Hawking is augmented. When you talk to him, it's not entirely him that you're talking to - he has tools to easily call up arguments he's used in the past, and updated as he saw holes, so Hawking + the chair is really smarter than plain old Hawking. When these tools are cheapn & easy enough for everyone to use, I think most everyone will.
Is Stephen Hawking the first post-human?
Wow, those are some very helpful and well-thought-out suggestions.
I have one suggestion for you, though. It looks as if you expect most companies who would be interested in you to offer you a reasonably good salary. I think you should reverse that notion - most companies can't or won't afford what you're worth.
I am primarily a contractor. If I go out looking for a new contract and I get too many bites at $75/hr, I crank the rate up and start looking again. You are worth more than the market average (well, at least I am). Don't expect that most companies will make a reasonable offer. You're looking for that unusual job that will pay you what you're worth.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. Either everyone honestly believed there were WMD, or you heard the WMD deniers loud and clear. Not both.
And, while I am the last person to defend Saddam Hussein's human rights record, it is worth pointing out that the US govt carefully studied the effects of destroying Iraq's water treatment plants (thousands dead, mostly children, from polluted water sources), then went in and destroyed them in the Gulf War. (http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0401c.asp) That is responsible in large part for the dead children - the direct, premeditated actions of the government you're defending.
I do want to backpedal firmly from one thing I said... something to the effect of "we'll be able to do anything we can imagine".
I do not in the least mean to say we can break physical law... I don't believe it is possible send information or matter faster than light, break the laws of thermodynamics, or violate conservation of charge, quantum color, strangeness, momentum, etc.
What I really mean to say is that it seems likely that a civilization 1000 years more advanced than us can configure matter to its liking, and in essence if not in fact convert matter to energy at will. And I think the only cost limitation on that is essentially the cost of the matter & energy involved.
What is possible within those limitations, taken with a good imagination, is staggering.
All of the scenarios you're giving are promoting survival of the group at the expense of survival of the individual. I do believe that any successful life will take up a large fraction of any resource it can use.
It only takes one that does take advantage of those resources to make irrelevant all of the others. This has happened over & over throughout the history of life on earth, so there's an amazing precedent to believe that life will occupy virtually all available resources.
And I think that's crazy. If current society fell altogether, all over the planet, leaving only pockets of 100 or so people living in isolated communities, we would still have billions of books spread all over. Even if we had to rebuild the whole of civilization, we would do so much faster than if we were starting from scratch.
The difference between civilization falling now & the times it has fallen in the past is essentially the fact that the printing press exists now. There are so many copies of so many books running around that we would be hard put to lose the information.
In a society that built smart matter, either through advanced biological methods or other means of doing molecular manufacturing, an individual could build millions of seeds that could each produce a high level of technology with nothing more than carbon dioxide, water, & sunlight or temperature gradient. You would have lots of places where civilization was founded, giving high redundancy. You would notice if a whole planet stopped sending messages to the rest of the universe & check up on them.
It is already demonstrated that matter can be taken apart and put back together with atomic, or at least molecular, accuracy to be 'smart matter' that achieves a purpose. All life on earth does this, all the time. The only speculation I'm giving is that you could use technology to control this process to a large degree, and that it can be done with a large variety of stock material, not just Carbon Hydrogen Oxygen Nitrogen. The first part is a very small leap; the second is a much larger one, but if we figure out how to control nuclear processes, it can be bypassed.
;-) I'm saying that there are so many possible different ways to do this, and nature has been so susceptible to even the primitive tools we've brought to bear on it so far, that it is far more 'out-there' to speculate that technology can't/won't solve these problems than the opposit
If you can control matter at the atomic level, you should be able to cause fusion in any element combination that is lighter than iron, yielding energy & allowing you to transmute one element to another.
I am definitely speculating, but I stand by my assertion that it is much more naive to speculate that technology can't do these basic things (moving atoms from one place to another with near-atomic accuracy, cheaply, and converting matter to energy with a lot of freedom as to the method).
I think I've made my point about 'smart matter'. Regarding matter to energy, the options that I can see right away are:
* build a black hole and capture photons radiated as ionized matter falls into it
* essentially 'cold fusion'; force atoms together using macroscopic forces
* find some way to encourage decay in heavy atoms (bombard with some subatomic particle, etc)
* just surround the sun with solar panels and drop light elements into it
Obviously this is hand-waving. I'm not saying I could go build a matter-to-energy converter and reshape the planet to my whim at an atomic level
Life that spreads beats out life that doesn't spread. So all life that survives has a drive to spread.
Presuming that a really technologically advanced race couldn't take a solar system apart & put it back together however they like is naive.
Presuming that a race that has had advanced technology for 1000 years would be recognizable, and could fall back into some prehistoric state, is naive.
Most humans in 200 years will probably not be recognizable as humans, and may well not be recognizable as discrete beings. Matter converts to energy at a pretty incredible rate, and there's no reason to believe we won't be able to convert all mass we come across into smart mass that supports our purposes.
That is ignoring the obvious fact that a race that survives 1000 years of advanced technology won't just be able to do anything we can imagine; they will have discovered so many new principles about how the universe works that most of what they'll do we can't even fathom.
I'm not sure you have age on me - I'm not old but I'm not a pup. (36 yrs). I also have some very bright friends who I have a decade on who have much the same outlook as you.
If I had that outlook I think (or maybe I only hope again) I would devote my life to doing my bit to save the human race. (Confucius, Jesus and Martin Luther King did some pretty impressive stuff, and started off as nobodies.)
As it is, I think I do better to just try to raise good children and provide some services (Frimp and MoochMuch) that make the world at least a tiny bit better place.
True, but I think (or maybe I only hope) we will spread out a bit and get some redundancy going before the First Big Nutjob Caper happens.
A nutjob would have to be pretty cutting edge to wipe out humanity, I think, and I also think that a nutjob would have to lose much of his nutjobiness to get to that point.
I agree. I don't know how to involve politics & human foibles too much in extrapolating the future beyond maybe 30 years.
I still think the main thrust of my argument is right. Barring catastrophe, we will get cheaper & cheaper means of doing engineering. Some people at least will opt to change themselves for the better as the technology becomes stable, and other people won't matter much in the grand scheme of things.
Eventually it will be cheap enough to wrap the sun in energy absorbing panels or send a nanoscale factory to another star system that hobby groups will do it if nothing else.
So I think that even if the masses spend all their time in VR living only fantasies, amazing progress is pretty much inevitable.
Heck, if I had the ability I would probably 'tune out' the parts of my mind that make me waste time. If I could choose, I would opt to get more gratification from doing things that provide real progress than from reading, watching movies, etc. If we figure out how to make it possible to tune your preferences, inevitably someone will do it, and they and their offspring will make the rest of us obsolete.
I can't believe how provincial so many of the replies are...
Assumptions:
there isn't some way to magically ignore the laws of thermodynamics
technology advances at a rate within an order of magnitude of that on earth in the last 100 years
civilizations occur often enough for there to have been 1000s that were earth-like in the last billion years
Then...
Within the first 1000 years of achieving the equivalent of 20th century tech, sapients achieve superhuman intelligence, either through migrating to nanocomputers or through a combination of nanotech + biological manipulation. They have immense computing power and advanced tools to automatically design anything they can imagine that fits within physical law. They have control over matter to the atomic if not the subatomic level, bounded only by the available energy and physical law.
So...
they either convert their star to some other form that generates energy in a more efficient or controllable way, or they surround the star with panels to gather all free energy. In either case, all that should radiate from their star system is low energy infrared (unavoidable losses due to the 2nd law of thermo) and highly compressed communication packets (to the point of looking like static).
Someone, whether the equivalent of a kid doing a science project or a nation spreading their power, sends nanoprobes at near light speed (using laser propelled solar sails or, more likely, some much more advanced technology) to nearby star systems where factory systems self replicate using local raw materials. Eventually (likely in less than a year, assuming exponential growth rates with a tiny seed), enough infrastructure is there to grow or build sapients at the new star system. The process repeats itself.
The aliens should spread at near light speed in an ever-expanding volume.
Of course, there is all of that dark matter out there... it seems likely to me that there is are universe-wide alien civilizations, and that they leave some portion of the universe alone as starter cultures to get new races with new perspective on the universe.
These replies that assume big bulky aliens weighing 10s of pounds, made out of meat, and trolling around in 1970s era sci-fi space ships with blasters are missing the obvious. Only 600 years after the spread of movable type printing presses, we are on the verge of understanding human biology, building software that can do almost any engineering task a human can do, and controlling matter at the atomic level. If you were transported 200 years into the future, most activity will be happening in ways that you can't even sense, much less comprehend.
That is, assuming we don't somehow kill ourselves off altogether or destroy the infrastructure that makes technological civilization possible.
Moreover, what the hell is up with these kinds of posts I've seen lately?
"You should just expect companies to do anything at all to make more money. It was your fault for expecting ethical behavior, not their fault for [lying/stealing/polluting/killing foreigners]."
Yes, it sure as hell IS someone's fault if they behave unethically. Sometimes it is ALSO your fault for believing in them when you had good reason not to. Both can be true at the same time.
But regardless of anything else, it is absolutely that politician, CEO, stockbroker, etc.'s fault when they behave like an ass. Work on the problem from both ends by recognizing that they will sometimes act like the crooks they are, while at the same time holding their feet over the coals for their specific malfeasances.