I see this as an opportunity. Slip North Korea a couple faulty nuclear triggers and some time next week both county's nuclear programs should be lazily drifting downwind from a large blue glass ashtray. Whoops! Go straight from tickling the dragons tail to kissing its ass... can you say critical mass!
The best part is we can all just shake our heads and say "Hey, ya need a little technical assistance? We've done this before, be glad to help you bandage that owwy... 2,000 lbs of yellow cake? $10.5 million dollars. A uranium enrichment plant? $526 million dollars. An unplanned nuclear detonation in your nuclear bomb works? Priceless!
In fact, lets just get rid of "School" all together and come up with a completely new paradigm called "Learning for Life." Have children exposed to beautiful and moving information from their first ability to understand language. Expose them to the things that make us human. Let them hear language and speak to children from all over the world. Give them access to all the knowledge they can hold and show them how to learn. Show them how to take what they learn and apply it to the puzzles of being alive. Show them how to take what we know and tease out new truths and understandings from the world. Call that "Learning for Life". Tickle their fancy, inflame their curiosity, empower their search to know and understand. Give them the methods, the tools, the gross concepts, the vital paradigms. Let them fill those contexts with content.
Of course, you'll need to have a race of intelligent, informed adults, who don't mind that their children will be unruly and ready to point out their fallacies and superstitions. That or you can do what we in the U.S. do, we raise sheep. I don't see how a three month summer impacts that one way or another.
We are children decrying the silliness of being a child. We are at our social infancy, barely toddling out of own gravity well, and still dumping in our ecological diapers. This is not deep. We have all the complication of an 18 month old and our species has barely distinguished itself from others that still walk on their knuckles. If we haven't seen extraterrestrial life, its because they don't want to shatter our cultural evolution.
Among galactic civilizations (and they almost certainly exist), we rank a zero, we haven't even mastered the planet, let alone the star, wormholes and femtotechnology or large singularities. We are just this moment worth talking to... at least the bright among us. You can criticize the race, it would be silly, I mean infants soil themselves, drool, snot, fill their diapers. Its what they do. I'm certain there's a brilliant being watching us going "Oh, aren't they just precious. So cute and pink. You just wanna run up and pinch one on the cheek. And those religions... aren't they just the silliest little beings... boogie, boogie, boogie.
Ask these questions again in about half a million years. When we've grown up a little, bet we have some interesting things to say by then.
The falling of the other shoe sounds a little like, we question for no reason. That is, we are survival engines, interacting with our environment, who at some point found survival value in being curious. Since that time, we have arrived at the place where it is an innate process for us to ask why. It is literally a developmental phase of our growing up. Often the questions themselves have more value than the answer (we are after all utilitarian by nature as well), and its important to remember that the striving to comprehend is an end in its own right.
This is a distinction from superstition. An attempt to explain that which we do not understand using made up explanations that bear no relationship to reality. There are in fact aspects of reality that cover so much time and so much space, that they exceed our capacity to grasp. Spirituality, is a viable means by which to hold these infinities. We simply need to be very careful, to weed our faith of superstitions and meaningless dogmas. The good news is that our body of comprehension grows exponentially. The bad news is that infinities remain infinities.
Has anyone here flown or know anything about the Mountain Goat? Stall speed 26 mph, top cruising speed over 175 mph, and able to take off on flat ground in less distance than the length of a 747. That and able to carry over half a ton in cargo safely. I just want to know this isn't too good to be true. I saw a film of this thing flying over cow pastures on the Monterey Coast at about 20 feet, then floating at about 2,500 ft. as it hovered over a hilltop in a 30 mph headwind. Weirdest thing I've ever seen a plane do. Any time you can jump out of a moving plane with better than even odds of surviving, the plane is going really slow.
Actually planes and helis will get you VIP seating just about anywhere. A good friend of mine has a buddy who trades in helicopters and planes. He in fact built the helicopter for the movie "Blue Thunder" (a film from the 80s starring Roy Scheider if anyone cares.) Anyway we were working in Torrance at the time working for Epson America and he gave the entire crew a bunch of touch and goes around the PV peninsula from a pad just outside what was the 94th Aero-Squadron Cafe next to the Torrance Airport (a tiny muni strip.)
A couple weeks before they were delivering a heli to a new owner in San Diego, and he took it down on the sand to get lunch at Jack in the Box (man that would have made some kind of commercial.) They were surrounded by a crowd and let a few girls in bikinis take a couple short rides. Dave later got to drive a Lamborghini on the Autobahn at over 200 mph for nearly 2 hours. He said flying the copter with his friend was more fun, and usually ended up getting him a date for the weekend.
He also had an awesome little amphibious plane, and he and my friend Dave flew it to Catalina for lunch. They'd been working on it all morning, and decide to skip over to the island for lunch. They pulled right into the dock and walking into the restaurant covered in grease. They were moved ahead of everyone else, and and treated like VIPs. Figure anyone with the stones to fly in covered in grease must be important enough to get away with it.
So yes, flying will invariably get you the bonus VIP rating. Oh, if you're in California, and you like cow parts, Harris Ranch has a sweet little strip you can walk into the restaurant from and enjoy some of the best cow in central California. I've enjoyed this little convenience and its a sublime way to blow a few hours.
The laws of thermodynamics speak of observations in a closed systems. We still cannot prove the universe is or isn't a closed system and if in fact there is an infinite multiverse, then all bets are off. A great story along these lines if Asimov's "The Gods Themselves". So a more powerful engine than matter-antimatter might be two closely spaced portals to two universes, a universe about to become a big bang, and a universe on the verge of heat death. You could harness huge flows of energy from both portals and because the effects on our space would be cancelled out by the two opposite universes, our universe would incur no dangerous shift in fundamental physical conditions (read the article to better understand.)
Ask a few network questions. Can you make a subnet? What's the difference between a tree and a forest? AD is important, what UI tool do you use to manage it and you may want to ask a few questions around permissions, and security. As the parent said, you can find them online. Certs are fine, but make certain the candidate actually wen to a real school to get training and not some cert factory. A bit of Cisco education is also useful as a side with your Windows main course. For sure they should have a clue about Linux and BSD (if you get someone who can do Solaris and another *nix flavor or two all the better.) They should have more than a passing understanding of Windows 7, maybe XP (depending on how many XP diehards in your environment.) If they are already playing with Win 8, you have ago getter. Server 2008 for sure. Perhaps Server 2003. You can ask about virtualization, powershell, net tools, command line interface, its all good. A well rounded engineer will know Exchange, SQL Server,.Net, Sharepoint (she said with a pained grimace), and Outlook.
Contact a local IT company that does windows and ask them how they hire their guys.
Oh yeah, we've done so well since Hiroshima! Let's see the Korean War, The Viet Nam War, two Gulf Wars, The War in Afghanistan, a couple dozen outbreaks in Africa and the Mid-East. That's just the U.S, Add the fun and games from all the other countries in the world and there's been about 12 war free days since we nuked Japan. Nukes don't stop war. In fact technology is moving fast in a direction where war is going to performed from remote consoles, and nukes won't impact that process either. There is no reason to have them. We should just dismantle them, remove the possibility of some idiot building a crude nuke or dirty bomb, and get on with life.
How would you collect light over tens of thousands of kilometers and move that energy to earth? You could use satellites with a wide variety of wavelength for collecting the energy, microwave is just easier to manipulate (we don't have the nanotechnology yet to do the fancy things with optical wavelengths that we can with microwave.
As a species, we get together (good luck on that) and relinquish uranium and plutonium for any use on planet, and instead create a thorium based nuclear economy. Take all the uranium and plutonium and use it to build and power cities on the Moon and Mars. The cities on Moon can then beam collected solar energy back to earth in the form of microwave, collected by a network of geosynchronous satellites. Anyone who agrees to using Thorium now get's a share of the solar power coming from the moon so they have abundant Nuclear power now. Abundant Solar power later, and the threat of global thermonuclear war is eliminated (at least until the folks on Mars decide to nuke earth for holding back on the cream puff shipment or whatever.)
The problem is simple. People claim to want clean, unlimited power. They don't. They want bombs. They want to make certain that if you nuke them, they can nuke you back. The solution is to give up the right to nuke anybody, so everyone can live with the threat of having ones home converted into a blue ashtray eliminated. Sadly there is a certain amount of trust required for this to work, and nations with good sources of yellow cake need to trade these for free thorium technology. Its really simple. Society is sick and we can either cure or perish from the illness together.
Of human culture colliding with human technology. As long as we continue to honor our lowest primate drives, then the amplifying effect of technology will generate results with greater and greater negative impact. The good news, is that such circumstances would be unsustainable, precisely because they would be socially unacceptable. At some point human beings will communicate at the speed of thought through imbedded technology. Secrets will become passe even impossible. Humanity will have to evolve into a species that is capable with dealing in absolute truth, and it will not be a society any of us recognize today.
Conceptually you are correct. The problem is in the ease and efficacy of handling certain kinds of thoughts. Sudoku is just pattern matching. But until you begin to develop the ability to see perhaps a dozen standard patterns, there are puzzles which are really hard. Until you're burning in the synapses responsible for doing the heavy intellectual lifting, understanding the concept(s) and applying them with grace and velocity are two different things. There's a story of a student posing a question to a Math Professor about a bee flying back and forth between two converging trains given the speed of the bee and the speed and distance of the two trains what is the answer to the questions "How far did the bee fly?" The Professor replied with the answer almost instantly. The Student "Ah, you saw the short cut, just figure out the time it would take the two trains to meet and multiply that times the speed of the bee. The Professor said "No, I did the infinite regression in my head." You don't do infinite regressions in your head without some serious mental muscle. Kids raised on calculators today make entry errors and come out with numbers that are nonsense. Unless you know that multiplying two 3 digit numbers should produce a 6 or 7 digit number, a child weened on calculators might well accept the 4 digit solution with questioning why it looks wrong. Know concepts. But traffic in thinking. Become good at applying ideas as well as passing them through your consciousness.
I have a close girl friend who studied biology at Cal Tech in the 70s. That may not sound like a big deal, but at that time biology was an all guy party and sadly girls weren't welcome. Even though she did brilliantly in school, has an IQ large enough to have its own zip code, and made some very interesting science for her Phd. She was unable to find work or when she did found herself more often than not washing labware. So, she went back to school and in record time got her MD. She is to this day perhaps one of the best diagnosticians I have ever met, she'd just look at something and she's hit it square on the head 95% of the time (even things that weren't clear or obvious at the onset.) Her knowledge was prodigious. I know she had to do some memorizing, but it was clear that her knowledge had much greater depth than simple fact stuffing. I guess that's where the heavy reading and good memory come in eh?
This is where context is oh so important. Form fits function. A metatarsal has its roots in the fin tip of an ancient bony fish, following that metatarsal from ancestral forms and even looking at derivations (for instance the vestigial metatarsals in a whale or other cetacean) begins to give you an idea of the form, the function and process that has had this particular useful adaptation persist. Then you aren't simply learning the name of a bone. You can understand that the architecture of human foot rivals the beauty of the Greek Pillars and is based on many of the same measurements and ratios. You can appreciate the fine grooves and pits in bones are the work of surfaces shaped by muscle and designed to optimize the balances between strength, weight, flexibility and elasticity. You could memorize the components of a modern motor. That would tell you nothing about engines. Its the dance between the elements and there interaction with the world. Its their history and how they came to be. Its their arc along what is possible and how the human mind holds it that is interesting. Some things you need to learn by rote so you have fertile soil to plant the seeds of genius. Just don't forget to plant the seeds after tilling the soil. Your job is only half done.
See almost nobody has an idea of what living forever means. So here you are let's say for giggles 45 years old. Who are you a how are you related to the you that was 2 years old? 7? 13? 20? 35? Can you even vaguely imagine what the being that is 1,000,000 years old would be like. Having survived the coming and going of ages, seen mountains rise and fall, watched the process of evolution on life on the planet, experiences 10,000 lifetimes, and expanded consciousness to hold all that experience. He could no longer be called human. Such a being would be profoundly different. His first hundred years no more than a freckle on the mural of personality that would have emerged over that vast gulf of time.
Such a being would not have survived in a single physical body. Bodies are too prone to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. More than likely, such a being would exist in one or more remote bodies with a distributed consciousness over many locations so that the end of any particular local would not end the consciousness of the whole. Perhaps such a being might also launch occasional pods containing complete images of their mind to distant locations to avoid catastrophe by astronomical events. It would take a great deal of foresight to exist for deep time. Again, this would be no timid act. You might well be the only thing surviving your species. You might carry with you the sum information of life on your world. Even if there was a community, over the millennia personalities would merge and migrate, emerge and transform. It would be hard after tens of thousands of years to speak of individual consciousness in such a collective.
Almost everyone here is speaking about the persistence of personality. That is fundamentally different than immortality. A personality would not, could not survive the limits of deep time. The good news, is that what would survive, what in fact might thrive, might transcend personality, might transcend the limits of an isolated or localized concept of self. Such a being would transcend identity.
I'm sorry but you have on possible way of knowing what is real. Ever read of "Plato's Cave"? Your reality lives in your head, and at best the hundred billion nerve impulses flowing in from the ends of your nervous system are winnowed down to something like a few important facts about your physical reality that may impinge on survivability (however you define that.) Even those few bits of information are shaped and transformed by context, psychological filters, opinions, beliefs and world view. Experiment after experiment demonstrate the huge gulf between boundless reality and that small thing called human perception. So tell me how you would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you aren't in the matrix right now plugged into a generated reality?
Clearly for a phone sized device, a pinch is the simplest method of single handed zooming, followed perhaps by a couple taps and a zoom slider. With larger virtual displays, full gestures (as seen in "Minority Report") might include hand framing and hands separating to indicate a zoom. As an aside, as goofy as it is today with people walking around talking to themselves, its going to get real funny when people are walking around waving their arms at things only they can see. You won't be able to distinguish the mentally ill from the business folk. Should be a huge Darwinian selection factor as these guys stroll right into bus traffic. Perhaps this has all been a sly plot to remove the lawyers, bankers and board members from the gene pool. Bravo!
So I'm guessing "Don't Be Evil" has somehow morphed into "Do no obvious fiscal impropriety that might result in punitive damages or government sanctions... or at least don't get caught?"
Actually, this is not a half bad idea if you scrape the "Assholy" off it. If you could get your hands on some LOX, and a wee bit of kerosene to get things started, this could be a very exciting barbeque! Analogous to the "Does is blend" series you could do "Does it vaporize!". That would have to be good for a couple million Youtube hits and an all expenses paid vacation to the Mediterranean.
Okay let be really clear, my mind is wide open and that's precisely the problem because the Fundamentalist Mind is nailed shut, saying "Don't confuse me with fact, my eyes are closed, BLAH-BLAH-BLAH I can't hear you." I'm not here to put anybody straight. It ain't my job, and I wouldn't take it if it offered. I'm just calling it the way I see, if you wanna call me ump, I can live with that. Ignorant is having a lack of knowledge, stupid is reveling in and being committed to your ignorance. Believing the earth is 6,000 years old when we have writing by people living in communities going back 8,000 years is stupid. Believing that the entire world flooded is stupid (where did the water come from, where did it go?) Believing people and dinosaurs lived together is stupid. Not understanding, appreciating or accepting the certainty of evolution is absolutely stupid and replacing it with intelligent design is not only stupid but ridiculous on its founding premise. I'm not the one making things clear. There is at this point in the game Egyptian Science, Greek Science, Roman Science, The Renaissance, The16th, 17th, 18th, 19, and 20th century discoveries on top of the industrial revolution and ALL OF IT INFORMS US. 4,000 years of human knowledge, put a machine on the surface of Mars and its driving up there right now and sending back picture. Your genome is so close to a chimpanzee that you can receive organ transplants from one. You ever hear of RH + or - regarding blood factors? That stands for Rhesus... like the monkey. Look it up. Your Magical Thinking holds no water. The only rule I'll put down anyone's throat is that they can't shove theirs down mine. I grant you your freedom up to the point that it infringes on mine, and then you have start counting fingers and toes. As for when human life starts. Please, oh please get a clue. Every cell in your body contains the blue prints for another you. That's more clones than all the people who have ever lived. Every time a 13 year old boy plays with himself, he's just launched the genetic material capable of repopulating a state of 20,000,000 into a sock. Every month like clockwork every woman drops another egg or three into the toilet. Oh, and even when sperm and egg get together, most don't implant and still end up toilet bound. You think God is crying about the potential trillions of people never conceived? Or about the seven billion already here today and now. Even for those few that do find the endometrium and do implant there are so many things that can happen, but let's say this one is going to be a baby. Great, when is it a human being? Before or after it resembles a polyp? How about before or after it resembles a worm? A fish? A reptile? When it has a heart that beats but no brain? When it loses its gills? When it develops a spine but no arms and legs yet? When it has arms and legs but the brain of say a frog? How about this. There is an already fully formed operational adult human being and the possibility of a human being in her womb, why don't we let the person who has to carry the dang thing for 9 months call it. It shouldn't even be any of your business what another person does with their meaty bits. So I'm not going to say when its a person, but I know for a fact the Mother already is, and I say leave it up to her thanks.
Finally, I didn't said anything about all ideas being equal, they're not. Believing is a flat earth is stupid. Believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny is stupid. Believing in a big man in the clouds who is keeping tally of your silly shit is stupid. Taking the Bible or any other religious text verbatim, in the face of clear and obvious fact to the contrary is not only stupid, its escapist and socially irresponsible. The Bible is a very good book. I like it a lot. There are a ton of big questions that man as humankind will never even begin to answer and for that, A God and a meaningful relationship with the eternal is a valuable and empowering thing. Just remember its your relationship, you made up the rules and you're dancing with your God. You have no say in how or what others should believe, save that they shouldn't be doing it all over the hired help. Other than that, please have a lovely chat with your maker, then be on your way and sin no more.
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I see this as an opportunity. Slip North Korea a couple faulty nuclear triggers and some time next week both county's nuclear programs should be lazily drifting downwind from a large blue glass ashtray. Whoops! Go straight from tickling the dragons tail to kissing its ass... can you say critical mass!
The best part is we can all just shake our heads and say "Hey, ya need a little technical assistance? We've done this before, be glad to help you bandage that owwy... 2,000 lbs of yellow cake? $10.5 million dollars. A uranium enrichment plant? $526 million dollars. An unplanned nuclear detonation in your nuclear bomb works? Priceless!
In fact, lets just get rid of "School" all together and come up with a completely new paradigm called "Learning for Life." Have children exposed to beautiful and moving information from their first ability to understand language. Expose them to the things that make us human. Let them hear language and speak to children from all over the world. Give them access to all the knowledge they can hold and show them how to learn. Show them how to take what they learn and apply it to the puzzles of being alive. Show them how to take what we know and tease out new truths and understandings from the world. Call that "Learning for Life". Tickle their fancy, inflame their curiosity, empower their search to know and understand. Give them the methods, the tools, the gross concepts, the vital paradigms. Let them fill those contexts with content.
Of course, you'll need to have a race of intelligent, informed adults, who don't mind that their children will be unruly and ready to point out their fallacies and superstitions. That or you can do what we in the U.S. do, we raise sheep. I don't see how a three month summer impacts that one way or another.
We are children decrying the silliness of being a child. We are at our social infancy, barely toddling out of own gravity well, and still dumping in our ecological diapers. This is not deep. We have all the complication of an 18 month old and our species has barely distinguished itself from others that still walk on their knuckles. If we haven't seen extraterrestrial life, its because they don't want to shatter our cultural evolution.
Among galactic civilizations (and they almost certainly exist), we rank a zero, we haven't even mastered the planet, let alone the star, wormholes and femtotechnology or large singularities. We are just this moment worth talking to... at least the bright among us. You can criticize the race, it would be silly, I mean infants soil themselves, drool, snot, fill their diapers. Its what they do. I'm certain there's a brilliant being watching us going "Oh, aren't they just precious. So cute and pink. You just wanna run up and pinch one on the cheek. And those religions... aren't they just the silliest little beings... boogie, boogie, boogie.
Ask these questions again in about half a million years. When we've grown up a little, bet we have some interesting things to say by then.
The falling of the other shoe sounds a little like, we question for no reason. That is, we are survival engines, interacting with our environment, who at some point found survival value in being curious. Since that time, we have arrived at the place where it is an innate process for us to ask why. It is literally a developmental phase of our growing up. Often the questions themselves have more value than the answer (we are after all utilitarian by nature as well), and its important to remember that the striving to comprehend is an end in its own right.
This is a distinction from superstition. An attempt to explain that which we do not understand using made up explanations that bear no relationship to reality. There are in fact aspects of reality that cover so much time and so much space, that they exceed our capacity to grasp. Spirituality, is a viable means by which to hold these infinities. We simply need to be very careful, to weed our faith of superstitions and meaningless dogmas. The good news is that our body of comprehension grows exponentially. The bad news is that infinities remain infinities.
Has anyone here flown or know anything about the Mountain Goat? Stall speed 26 mph, top cruising speed over 175 mph, and able to take off on flat ground in less distance than the length of a 747. That and able to carry over half a ton in cargo safely. I just want to know this isn't too good to be true. I saw a film of this thing flying over cow pastures on the Monterey Coast at about 20 feet, then floating at about 2,500 ft. as it hovered over a hilltop in a 30 mph headwind. Weirdest thing I've ever seen a plane do. Any time you can jump out of a moving plane with better than even odds of surviving, the plane is going really slow.
Actually planes and helis will get you VIP seating just about anywhere. A good friend of mine has a buddy who trades in helicopters and planes. He in fact built the helicopter for the movie "Blue Thunder" (a film from the 80s starring Roy Scheider if anyone cares.) Anyway we were working in Torrance at the time working for Epson America and he gave the entire crew a bunch of touch and goes around the PV peninsula from a pad just outside what was the 94th Aero-Squadron Cafe next to the Torrance Airport (a tiny muni strip.)
A couple weeks before they were delivering a heli to a new owner in San Diego, and he took it down on the sand to get lunch at Jack in the Box (man that would have made some kind of commercial.) They were surrounded by a crowd and let a few girls in bikinis take a couple short rides. Dave later got to drive a Lamborghini on the Autobahn at over 200 mph for nearly 2 hours. He said flying the copter with his friend was more fun, and usually ended up getting him a date for the weekend.
He also had an awesome little amphibious plane, and he and my friend Dave flew it to Catalina for lunch. They'd been working on it all morning, and decide to skip over to the island for lunch. They pulled right into the dock and walking into the restaurant covered in grease. They were moved ahead of everyone else, and and treated like VIPs. Figure anyone with the stones to fly in covered in grease must be important enough to get away with it.
So yes, flying will invariably get you the bonus VIP rating. Oh, if you're in California, and you like cow parts, Harris Ranch has a sweet little strip you can walk into the restaurant from and enjoy some of the best cow in central California. I've enjoyed this little convenience and its a sublime way to blow a few hours.
The laws of thermodynamics speak of observations in a closed systems. We still cannot prove the universe is or isn't a closed system and if in fact there is an infinite multiverse, then all bets are off. A great story along these lines if Asimov's "The Gods Themselves". So a more powerful engine than matter-antimatter might be two closely spaced portals to two universes, a universe about to become a big bang, and a universe on the verge of heat death. You could harness huge flows of energy from both portals and because the effects on our space would be cancelled out by the two opposite universes, our universe would incur no dangerous shift in fundamental physical conditions (read the article to better understand.)
Ask a few network questions. Can you make a subnet? What's the difference between a tree and a forest? AD is important, what UI tool do you use to manage it and you may want to ask a few questions around permissions, and security. As the parent said, you can find them online. Certs are fine, but make certain the candidate actually wen to a real school to get training and not some cert factory. A bit of Cisco education is also useful as a side with your Windows main course. For sure they should have a clue about Linux and BSD (if you get someone who can do Solaris and another *nix flavor or two all the better.) They should have more than a passing understanding of Windows 7, maybe XP (depending on how many XP diehards in your environment.) If they are already playing with Win 8, you have ago getter. Server 2008 for sure. Perhaps Server 2003. You can ask about virtualization, powershell, net tools, command line interface, its all good. A well rounded engineer will know Exchange, SQL Server, .Net, Sharepoint (she said with a pained grimace), and Outlook.
Contact a local IT company that does windows and ask them how they hire their guys.
Oh yeah, we've done so well since Hiroshima! Let's see the Korean War, The Viet Nam War, two Gulf Wars, The War in Afghanistan, a couple dozen outbreaks in Africa and the Mid-East. That's just the U.S, Add the fun and games from all the other countries in the world and there's been about 12 war free days since we nuked Japan. Nukes don't stop war. In fact technology is moving fast in a direction where war is going to performed from remote consoles, and nukes won't impact that process either. There is no reason to have them. We should just dismantle them, remove the possibility of some idiot building a crude nuke or dirty bomb, and get on with life.
How would you collect light over tens of thousands of kilometers and move that energy to earth? You could use satellites with a wide variety of wavelength for collecting the energy, microwave is just easier to manipulate (we don't have the nanotechnology yet to do the fancy things with optical wavelengths that we can with microwave.
As a species, we get together (good luck on that) and relinquish uranium and plutonium for any use on planet, and instead create a thorium based nuclear economy. Take all the uranium and plutonium and use it to build and power cities on the Moon and Mars. The cities on Moon can then beam collected solar energy back to earth in the form of microwave, collected by a network of geosynchronous satellites. Anyone who agrees to using Thorium now get's a share of the solar power coming from the moon so they have abundant Nuclear power now. Abundant Solar power later, and the threat of global thermonuclear war is eliminated (at least until the folks on Mars decide to nuke earth for holding back on the cream puff shipment or whatever.)
The problem is simple. People claim to want clean, unlimited power. They don't. They want bombs. They want to make certain that if you nuke them, they can nuke you back. The solution is to give up the right to nuke anybody, so everyone can live with the threat of having ones home converted into a blue ashtray eliminated. Sadly there is a certain amount of trust required for this to work, and nations with good sources of yellow cake need to trade these for free thorium technology. Its really simple. Society is sick and we can either cure or perish from the illness together.
Of human culture colliding with human technology. As long as we continue to honor our lowest primate drives, then the amplifying effect of technology will generate results with greater and greater negative impact. The good news, is that such circumstances would be unsustainable, precisely because they would be socially unacceptable. At some point human beings will communicate at the speed of thought through imbedded technology. Secrets will become passe even impossible. Humanity will have to evolve into a species that is capable with dealing in absolute truth, and it will not be a society any of us recognize today.
Heck with the kitchen, I know a city chock full of baboons, its a little district near Maryland.
Conceptually you are correct. The problem is in the ease and efficacy of handling certain kinds of thoughts. Sudoku is just pattern matching. But until you begin to develop the ability to see perhaps a dozen standard patterns, there are puzzles which are really hard. Until you're burning in the synapses responsible for doing the heavy intellectual lifting, understanding the concept(s) and applying them with grace and velocity are two different things. There's a story of a student posing a question to a Math Professor about a bee flying back and forth between two converging trains given the speed of the bee and the speed and distance of the two trains what is the answer to the questions "How far did the bee fly?" The Professor replied with the answer almost instantly. The Student "Ah, you saw the short cut, just figure out the time it would take the two trains to meet and multiply that times the speed of the bee. The Professor said "No, I did the infinite regression in my head." You don't do infinite regressions in your head without some serious mental muscle. Kids raised on calculators today make entry errors and come out with numbers that are nonsense. Unless you know that multiplying two 3 digit numbers should produce a 6 or 7 digit number, a child weened on calculators might well accept the 4 digit solution with questioning why it looks wrong. Know concepts. But traffic in thinking. Become good at applying ideas as well as passing them through your consciousness.
I have a close girl friend who studied biology at Cal Tech in the 70s. That may not sound like a big deal, but at that time biology was an all guy party and sadly girls weren't welcome. Even though she did brilliantly in school, has an IQ large enough to have its own zip code, and made some very interesting science for her Phd. She was unable to find work or when she did found herself more often than not washing labware. So, she went back to school and in record time got her MD. She is to this day perhaps one of the best diagnosticians I have ever met, she'd just look at something and she's hit it square on the head 95% of the time (even things that weren't clear or obvious at the onset.) Her knowledge was prodigious. I know she had to do some memorizing, but it was clear that her knowledge had much greater depth than simple fact stuffing. I guess that's where the heavy reading and good memory come in eh?
This is where context is oh so important. Form fits function. A metatarsal has its roots in the fin tip of an ancient bony fish, following that metatarsal from ancestral forms and even looking at derivations (for instance the vestigial metatarsals in a whale or other cetacean) begins to give you an idea of the form, the function and process that has had this particular useful adaptation persist. Then you aren't simply learning the name of a bone. You can understand that the architecture of human foot rivals the beauty of the Greek Pillars and is based on many of the same measurements and ratios. You can appreciate the fine grooves and pits in bones are the work of surfaces shaped by muscle and designed to optimize the balances between strength, weight, flexibility and elasticity. You could memorize the components of a modern motor. That would tell you nothing about engines. Its the dance between the elements and there interaction with the world. Its their history and how they came to be. Its their arc along what is possible and how the human mind holds it that is interesting. Some things you need to learn by rote so you have fertile soil to plant the seeds of genius. Just don't forget to plant the seeds after tilling the soil. Your job is only half done.
See almost nobody has an idea of what living forever means. So here you are let's say for giggles 45 years old. Who are you a how are you related to the you that was 2 years old? 7? 13? 20? 35? Can you even vaguely imagine what the being that is 1,000,000 years old would be like. Having survived the coming and going of ages, seen mountains rise and fall, watched the process of evolution on life on the planet, experiences 10,000 lifetimes, and expanded consciousness to hold all that experience. He could no longer be called human. Such a being would be profoundly different. His first hundred years no more than a freckle on the mural of personality that would have emerged over that vast gulf of time.
Such a being would not have survived in a single physical body. Bodies are too prone to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. More than likely, such a being would exist in one or more remote bodies with a distributed consciousness over many locations so that the end of any particular local would not end the consciousness of the whole. Perhaps such a being might also launch occasional pods containing complete images of their mind to distant locations to avoid catastrophe by astronomical events. It would take a great deal of foresight to exist for deep time. Again, this would be no timid act. You might well be the only thing surviving your species. You might carry with you the sum information of life on your world. Even if there was a community, over the millennia personalities would merge and migrate, emerge and transform. It would be hard after tens of thousands of years to speak of individual consciousness in such a collective.
Almost everyone here is speaking about the persistence of personality. That is fundamentally different than immortality. A personality would not, could not survive the limits of deep time. The good news, is that what would survive, what in fact might thrive, might transcend personality, might transcend the limits of an isolated or localized concept of self. Such a being would transcend identity.
I'm sorry but you have on possible way of knowing what is real. Ever read of "Plato's Cave"? Your reality lives in your head, and at best the hundred billion nerve impulses flowing in from the ends of your nervous system are winnowed down to something like a few important facts about your physical reality that may impinge on survivability (however you define that.) Even those few bits of information are shaped and transformed by context, psychological filters, opinions, beliefs and world view. Experiment after experiment demonstrate the huge gulf between boundless reality and that small thing called human perception. So tell me how you would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you aren't in the matrix right now plugged into a generated reality?
Clearly for a phone sized device, a pinch is the simplest method of single handed zooming, followed perhaps by a couple taps and a zoom slider. With larger virtual displays, full gestures (as seen in "Minority Report") might include hand framing and hands separating to indicate a zoom. As an aside, as goofy as it is today with people walking around talking to themselves, its going to get real funny when people are walking around waving their arms at things only they can see. You won't be able to distinguish the mentally ill from the business folk. Should be a huge Darwinian selection factor as these guys stroll right into bus traffic. Perhaps this has all been a sly plot to remove the lawyers, bankers and board members from the gene pool. Bravo!
So I'm guessing "Don't Be Evil" has somehow morphed into "Do no obvious fiscal impropriety that might result in punitive damages or government sanctions... or at least don't get caught?"
Actually, this is not a half bad idea if you scrape the "Assholy" off it. If you could get your hands on some LOX, and a wee bit of kerosene to get things started, this could be a very exciting barbeque! Analogous to the "Does is blend" series you could do "Does it vaporize!". That would have to be good for a couple million Youtube hits and an all expenses paid vacation to the Mediterranean.
Okay let be really clear, my mind is wide open and that's precisely the problem because the Fundamentalist Mind is nailed shut, saying "Don't confuse me with fact, my eyes are closed, BLAH-BLAH-BLAH I can't hear you." I'm not here to put anybody straight. It ain't my job, and I wouldn't take it if it offered. I'm just calling it the way I see, if you wanna call me ump, I can live with that. Ignorant is having a lack of knowledge, stupid is reveling in and being committed to your ignorance. Believing the earth is 6,000 years old when we have writing by people living in communities going back 8,000 years is stupid. Believing that the entire world flooded is stupid (where did the water come from, where did it go?) Believing people and dinosaurs lived together is stupid. Not understanding, appreciating or accepting the certainty of evolution is absolutely stupid and replacing it with intelligent design is not only stupid but ridiculous on its founding premise. I'm not the one making things clear. There is at this point in the game Egyptian Science, Greek Science, Roman Science, The Renaissance, The16th, 17th, 18th, 19, and 20th century discoveries on top of the industrial revolution and ALL OF IT INFORMS US. 4,000 years of human knowledge, put a machine on the surface of Mars and its driving up there right now and sending back picture. Your genome is so close to a chimpanzee that you can receive organ transplants from one. You ever hear of RH + or - regarding blood factors? That stands for Rhesus... like the monkey. Look it up. Your Magical Thinking holds no water. The only rule I'll put down anyone's throat is that they can't shove theirs down mine. I grant you your freedom up to the point that it infringes on mine, and then you have start counting fingers and toes. As for when human life starts. Please, oh please get a clue. Every cell in your body contains the blue prints for another you. That's more clones than all the people who have ever lived. Every time a 13 year old boy plays with himself, he's just launched the genetic material capable of repopulating a state of 20,000,000 into a sock. Every month like clockwork every woman drops another egg or three into the toilet. Oh, and even when sperm and egg get together, most don't implant and still end up toilet bound. You think God is crying about the potential trillions of people never conceived? Or about the seven billion already here today and now. Even for those few that do find the endometrium and do implant there are so many things that can happen, but let's say this one is going to be a baby. Great, when is it a human being? Before or after it resembles a polyp? How about before or after it resembles a worm? A fish? A reptile? When it has a heart that beats but no brain? When it loses its gills? When it develops a spine but no arms and legs yet? When it has arms and legs but the brain of say a frog? How about this. There is an already fully formed operational adult human being and the possibility of a human being in her womb, why don't we let the person who has to carry the dang thing for 9 months call it. It shouldn't even be any of your business what another person does with their meaty bits. So I'm not going to say when its a person, but I know for a fact the Mother already is, and I say leave it up to her thanks.
Finally, I didn't said anything about all ideas being equal, they're not. Believing is a flat earth is stupid. Believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny is stupid. Believing in a big man in the clouds who is keeping tally of your silly shit is stupid. Taking the Bible or any other religious text verbatim, in the face of clear and obvious fact to the contrary is not only stupid, its escapist and socially irresponsible. The Bible is a very good book. I like it a lot. There are a ton of big questions that man as humankind will never even begin to answer and for that, A God and a meaningful relationship with the eternal is a valuable and empowering thing. Just remember its your relationship, you made up the rules and you're dancing with your God. You have no say in how or what others should believe, save that they shouldn't be doing it all over the hired help. Other than that, please have a lovely chat with your maker, then be on your way and sin no more.
Is this the SNL Church Lady???
Out of your bedroom! How about out of your reproductive organs... THAT'S AN INVASION OF PRIVACY, THANKS!/p
Not just a life, but a fully realized human being. And that is what I said, after fertilization. That would still be insane.