There were a whole bunch of problems with the Biosphere 2 project... including some information that I hope does get remembered in the future with construction techniques on Lunar and Martian buildings.
The largest failure really wasn't the ants, but rather the concrete that they used for the foundation of the buildings. It turns out that the concrete (more or less what you have in your house) is a reducing substance that extracted O2 and added CO2 into the atmosphere over time. You don't notice it in your house because your home isn't necessarily sealed to the same degree. It was for this reason that additional "oxygen" had to be brought into the structure.
There were other problems, including some subtle chemical imbalances that weren't discovered until after the project was well underway. Other engineering failures also happened that simply weren't anticipated. And yes, ants did provide outside interference in terms of transferring small quantities of materials from the "outside" to the "inside"... however that won't be too much of a problem on Mars or the Moon. Lunar ants would, I believe, adapt quickly at learning to avoid vacuum environments.
If a "Biosphere 3" project is ever attempted again, some long, hard looks are going to need to be done in terms of evaluating building materials, chemical absorption properties of those materials, and a deeper understanding of trace elements in biological systems.
Why even have humans build the exploration devices when SkyNet will build them anyway in a couple of decades?
I welcome our new overlord!
Seriously, we need people on Mars, as humans, to be able to relate to us, as humans, what is there. This is part of who we are as species... unless you would rather that mankind never existed in the first place?
Skylab had nearly as much room, in terms of m^3 of usable volume, as the ISS had until very recently with only the latest module additions. It would be hard to say just where we would be right now if some rather lousy decisions weren't made at NASA in terms of spending money wisely, but in hindsight there has been considerable waste.
I'm just glad that finally some people are serious about getting back into space in a serious manner, and willing to end some of the more wasteful approaches. The problem to think about now is what to do with the ISS now that we have it.
What Gygax did was blend the concept of a role playing game to miniature combat situations. In fact, the "sandbox" miniature combat concepts even survived through most of the early rules of D&D, where missile and spell ranges were measured in inches (the " mark as is a fireball range of 6").
He also introduced the concept of using role playing games for leisure activities rather than behavior modification (something frequently done in a psychological or educational setting) or sociological studies (such as what the RAND corporation was doing).
This fusion of military simulation concepts with role playing also produced the incredibly dense and detailed rule books that built up the commercial role playing game industry. Most of the "role playing games" that the RAND corporation made were so simply that all of the rules could fit on a single piece of paper, at least in terms of participant to participant interaction.
The nuclear war simulations were something more like "you are the President of the USA" or "the chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR". An uprising took place in Poland, killing 500 Soviet soldiers. What do you do now? Yeah, that is role playing, but Gygax took it to a whole different level and popularized it for mere mortals to participate. The RAND corporation role playing games were not intended to be something for commercial production, but rather to help government planners decide on how to organize the military and prepare the government for worst case situations.
When I'm dealing with an IRC meeting that involves people from a great many timezones... the standard that I've used in the past is UTC. Timezones otherwise simply don't exist.
So there you have it.... use the tool that is necessary for the job.
What I object to here is forcing people to abandon an older standard and removing the concept of a timezone for those whom such an idea still is useful. It still has value, and really the only reason you have to keep track of daylight saving time, on an official and legal basis, has to do with your interactions with government agencies, and knowing when our favorite entertainment might be on the local broadcast channels (assuming you don't use Tivo).
All I'm pointing out here is that the standard has already been established, and once done it is often difficult to "remake" a standard, such as a calendar, keyboard layout, or measurement system. Hence the continued use of miles in the USA for distance measurement.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync. Having multiple timezones confuses that, using dst to manipulate those timezones even further just makes the problem even worse.
You forget how timezones were created here. Before the concept of a time zone, current time was regulated by determining the local mean solar time for you particular location... meaning your exact longitude. Defining what "now" was could be different even on opposite sides of a college campus, much less between different cities. At least with the concept of a time zone, all the arithmetic you have to perform is to add or subtract a few hours, unless you are dealing with truly global enterprises or projects.
On a historical note, the concept of a time zone was introduced by the railroad companies, who found that it was incredibly difficult for them to make train schedules where each individual town on the route would have its own definition of time. Imagine the locomotive engineer who had to have something like a complex GPS receiver that would give the local "time" as they moved across Kansas heading for the Rocky Mountains built out of 19th Century technology. It just didn't work, so instead the idea of a time zone that would only have to be occasionally adjusted for genuinely long distance travel was created.
This also had the advantage that it was at most about a 1/2 hour off from the "local time" used in the previous definition of "now". In other words, it wasn't too difficult to move people off of the previous "standard" onto the newer "standard" of time zones. With your proposal of elimination of time zones (which is pretty much the case anyway in terms of synchronizing computers and other scientific experiments needing that level of organization), getting ordinary people to adjust to a global clock is going to cause many other problems. Such as why should Paris/London be selected as the "ideal" time zone, as opposed to Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, or New York/Washington DC? GMT/UTC is an adopted standard only because that is what mariners for the UK Royal Navy used during a period of global colonial dominance, not that the French didn't mind using the same standard either for the most part as Paris and London are nearly the same longitude, at least for time considerations.
One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office". Having a bill collector call you at 6 A.M. is not only annoying... it can even be illegal, especially if they ignore the concept of a timezone when they call you. And yes, that has happened to me.
So wow! China is going to duplicate the Ranger series of spacecraft!
I am underwhelmed at this huge revelation. Especially for a major national government that prides itself as a superpower which is a peer to Russia and America.
This is exactly what I thought was more legitimate in terms of something that China might try to pull off. It wouldn't surprise me if John Carmack might team up with Elon Musk and try something like that as a demonstration flight either, and produce something that could stick around on the Moon for a longer period of time as well.
I'm not saying that I don't find it interesting that China is getting to the space business, and I do wish them quite a bit of luck and success. But I don't see how China landing an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon is going to be anything worth bragging about other than the fact that they are demonstrating ballistic missile technology... proving that China is equivalent to what America had in the 1960's. Something of concern as China is a nuclear weapon political power, but otherwise not remarkable. Certainly not something for an American president to even mention in a press release, much less enact major legislation to get America to compete against China.
The issues of living somewhere other than on the Earth are, for the most part, also political. I have heard it said that why live on Mars when people haven't figured out how to live on Antarctica. The reason people in large numbers aren't living on Antarctica has to do with politics... particularly environmental politics that is concerned about oil and mining companies heading into that continent and establishing mineral extraction enterprises... and what will be done to keep the damage to the environment to a minimum if that happens. Even more politically explosive is to determine exactly what government jurisdiction has control over that continent and anything obtained there. I've heard it said that Antarctica may have more oil than the Middle East... think about how many countries might be interested in that!
Yes, I've read the Antarctic treaty... I've also read the Outer Space Treaty and other similar kinds of documents related to international law governing what happens in territory not currently a part of any particular nation state. It is very ugly right now on a political scope, and it will take a few very brave people to try and start challenging the current political order of things. This also applies to how the law is going to apply to what is going to happen to other worlds besides the Earth.
I personally don't take the Lunar Embassy seriously, nor any other similar effort to claim property rights. It will take somebody physically getting there, and holding up a gun to defend their turf denying others the ability to use it.
As to who is going to pay for trips into space... I think you might be surprised. As the costs of going into space drop, new markets are opening up for space-related businesses, and there are reasonable and compelling reasons to go up. It is far more than just rich tourists and communications satellites. But it will take building an infrastructure in terms of transportation systems that are affordable to make it happen. If Musk succeeds here with his approach, the cost of going into space for the average American or European (throw in the Japanese for good measure) is very comparable to what it cost the average European to travel to America in the 17th Century. A huge investment, no doubt, but at the cusp of something that can be done. The problem now is that a destination needs to be provided... which was also a major problem in the 17th Century for Europeans as well.
BTW, as for nuclear rocketry, I don't know of anybody who is legitimately talking about using nuclear rockets for launching somebody from the ground into Earth orbit using that sort of technology. This is something that is intended for inter-planetary missions... and I dare you to show me the environmental hazards that would come from the use of nuclear rockets on a genuine spaceship that travels through interplanetary space between the Earth and Mars. There aren't any, unless you are standing directly under the exhaust plume... which I wouldn't want to do under conventional chemical rockets either.
Actually, the only problem is that we haven't had too much innovation in terms of discovering new radioscopicly stable isotope of elements that can be extracted in large enough quantities for a fuel source, and simultaneously cheap enough to use as a fuel source as well.
There are only so many ways to combine basic elements in order to provide a chemical energy source, and the combination of hydrogen+oxygen is a tough reaction to beat in terms of rapid exothermic reactions, or its availability in large quantities on the Earth. Perhaps other exotic chemical reactions can be made, but it needs the new element Unobtainium.
There has been continued progress in terms of developing other fuels sources, although it should be noted that the fueling of the vehicle... except for the fact that it needs fuel of some sort... is generally a very secondary consideration in spacecraft design. The cost of the vehicle materials, the engine design, and other considerations that drive up the cost are so significant that the fuel costs are statistically irrelevant.
As for anti-gravity... yeah, you may be right. If it can possibly move from being considered a psuedo-science topic to something more serious. Or even prove theoretically that it is even possible. I'd place more bets on finding a material with the tensile strength necessary for a space elevator first.
As for finding the food to feed everybody in the world... I consider that to be a solved problem as a scientific problem. The issue has more to do with politics and logistics... and the majority of that is political as well. With companies like ConAgra trying to figure out how to burn food up as a vehicle fuel source, the issue of generating sufficient food for 10x the current population of the world is hardly a concern.
I'm not saying that people don't go to bed hungry in many parts of the world for a lack of available food sources, but that happens because the leaders of their country have a wish for them to starve... or don't want to give up the political power they have in order to get the available food to those people who need the food. The food is there and available in quantities so large that the food is literally rotting away unused in most cases that could feed these "starving millions". The transportation infrastructure into these places is also mostly so poor that the food can't be brought to them from outside of the immediate neighborhood/communities where they live.
So tell me, when was the last famine that hit Los Angeles? It was in the early 19th Century, when the transportation infrastructure was so poor that the whole community died out to the last person. Yet there is a city of several million people living there now. Why aren't they still starving to death with 10000x the population that starved previously from a lack of food?
I'm a fairly big fan of SpaceX myself, so I won't rehash most of what you've said here... which is pretty good.
Bush('43) at least set the vision that Mars should be a long-term goal of NASA, and set in motion a series of actions that IMHO will make this irreversible in terms of future presidents. Nixon first suggested Mars as an eventual goal for manned spaceflight, but then did nothing at all to make it happen. At least Bush has specific programs being worked upon at NASA that are specific for an eventual mission to Mars. All Clinton did was push the ISS... which was really a Reagan-era program but rehashed for political purposes.
Keep in mind that the ISS was really a technology transfer vehicle from the Russian experiences in building MIR to bring that expertise to the USA. Time will tell if that is a bargain or not, but the ISS certainly is a step ahead of MIR in terms of capabilities and performance. Your comment here about Robert Bigelow gaining expertise off of the ISS is also very valid, and indirectly is a bonus from the MIR/Salyut experience as well.
Making SpaceX profitable is an amazing accomplishment on the part of Musk, and speaks volumes in terms of his approach to building that company up. The awesome part of the Dragon capsule is that it will be the first manned spacecraft that you can purchase without a specific congressional authorization by an American. There were previous attempts to purchase a privately owned space shuttle, but for various reasons these never happened... including some huge political roadblocks that kept it from happening.
I think the Falcon 1 is going to be heavily used, and due to its cost is going to bring about a whole new market that otherwise wouldn't have considered spaceflight before. Musk certainly seems to be hoping that a successful Falcon 1 launch is going to bring a large number of customers.
Musk certainly seems to be on the road to having a pretty good year for 2008, with the success of his other company, Tesla Motors. The Roadster has finally entered production and serial number 1 has been delivered. The only thing I haven't heard about is his solar energy company, which was going to mass-market solar-electric panels for home electricity generation at cheap prices. Obvious tie-ins for Tesla and SpaceX should be quite apparent as well if this other company makes any huge moves.
While I'm not completely dissing China here, this seems to be rather ambitious for China to make it to the Moon sometime next year... or even by the end of the next decade (2020). Ambitious to the point that if they make it to the Moon, that you might see some "Chinese Astronauts" die as a result of the activities.
If the Chinese are conducting aggressive LEO operations, this might be quite a bit more believable. Doing docking rendezvous or other orbital actions that would demonstrate equipment capable of being used for lunar operations. This is hard-won experience to be able to accomplish this sort of task, and something that even NASA is lacking right now, with all of their Apollo-era astronauts who knew these skills being retired and soon will die due to age.
This isn't suggesting that China couldn't get to the Moon quickly, but I don't see them making it soon. I should note that Shenzhou 7, the "next" manned Chinese spaceflight, is supposed to be the first Chinese EVA attempt. Something worth watching, and one of the baby steps necessary for getting to the Moon.
The Chinese have shown themselves to be very cautious in terms of spaceflight of any sort, and generally don't "push the envelope" very much, at least in terms of racing to achieve some sort of technological objective like landing on the Moon.
An unmanned lander going to the Moon built by the Chinese may be more practical... but then again, look at the Google Space Prize at a whole bunch of people trying to do that same thing in the USA (and elsewhere!) as well... this time without support by NASA. That won't have nearly the same sort of reaction as you are suggesting here, unless you think another spacecraft like Clementine should be built and launched to the Moon.
I should point out that there have been some of the design team of the Saturn rockets (both Saturn I and Saturn V) that considered themselves to be "lucky" that they didn't have any failures, rather than 100% success.
Had the Saturn rockets gone on to fly the equivalent of the number of flights that the Shuttle program has gone through, you would have seen perhaps a similar level of rocketry failure. It may not have been as catastrophic in terms of loss of human life (the Shuttle is particularly awful on that point) due to emergency provisions like the Launch Escape Tower (a launch problem like what hit the Challenger might have been survived by the astronauts on a Saturn V), but you would still have seen a failure rate.
This is also clearly ignoring the early history of NASA, when they were using Redstone rockets, the Atlas, and other rockets in the early days of the Mercury program.... some of which were even televised "live" on network television and had them blow up spectacularly before the American public. Those televised launches were especially interesting, as they weren't really supposed to be "prototypes" of the typical sort, but rather preliminary launches to demonstrate capsule performance... and still failed. It got so bad that comedians of the time were making jokes asking if NASA could even potentially send an astronaut into space at all, and congressmen wondering why Russia could "do it" but not NASA.
SpaceX has made some mistakes, but they are sitting in a much better position than NASA was in the early 1960's. I'll also have to admit that the reason SpaceX is in the position they are in is due to the knowledge gained by NASA and the U.S. military back in the 1950's and 1960's as well (not to mention other rocket developers), but I wouldn't condemn them for not trying. At least they have tried to put hardware up, rather than spend billions on worthless "studies" that never get launched in the first place, which seems to be NASA current design approach.
It should be mentioned that sometimes small errors creeping into measurements can also announce a more profound scientific theory that hasn't been fully explored.
Just as an example, calculations on the orbit of Mercury produced a series of errors that seemed to fall outside of the margin of calculation error in terms of predicting position... especially when observing transit events across the disc of the Sun.
It turns out that because of the proximity of Mercury to the Sun, you need to take into account the gravity well of the Sun and introduce modifications based upon the time dilation described by Einstein's relativity equations. These have a measurable impact and significantly was one of the first vindications of relativity in terms of a previously unsolved scientific problem that finally had a theoretical explanation.
In fact, this is something that the physics community is hoping here to discover... if something beyond relativity is playing into celestial mechanics. It seems dubious that it would be, but people thought that of Einstein's equations as well, considering how Einstein modified Newton's equations of celestial mechanics. This is also why this story has "legs" within the Physics community, as the person who comes up with an explanation... either that a calculation was overlooked or a new theory of mechanics can be developed from this discrepency.
My money would be placed on something overlooked... and that once it is shown to everybody looking at this, that this discrepancy will be dismissed. But at the same time, these probes are at the frontier of human experience, returning data that until now couldn't have ever been gathered, so it could be something completely new that we have never known about before. Whoever solves this issue is going to get some huge recognition, and perhaps a Nobel Prize in Physics depending on what the solution turns out to be.
One thing you must remember is that this is being published in scientific journals, not just some back page of your local newspaper. If there is one thing scientists do like to perform, is showing that somebody else missed a basic calculation on their raw data like you are suggesting. This is called "peer review", and very common in scientific journals... even if it is more informal than an organized panel. That is in fact why results like this are published in journals like this, so these kind of mistakes can be vetted.
Or more to the point, if you want to make a name for yourself, look through the raw data, perform the calculations yourself, and show what mistake somebody with a PhD did with this sort of data. Many graduate students have indeed gained notice when they have performed exactly these sort of calculations.
Also, terrorists blowing up a big city isn't the end of the world. It's only one city. Humanity will survive:)
The problem of this line of thinking is that the world isn't always so forgiving when you kill off a million citizens through nuclear warfare. Depending on who you are talking about, there have been a few U.S. presidents who have been willing to bet the whole farm on a full-scale total nuclear war. Kennedy was one of them (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Nixon was another during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Check out what really ended that war and try to and figure out what stopped the Israeli Army from conquering Cairo and the whole of Egypt in 1973, and you get a better grasp of global politics and real concerns about nuclear proliferation. Hint, Israeli engineers were building military bridges to cross the Suez Canal, and there was nothing between the Suez Canal and Cairo in terms of military personnel worth consideration.
Remember, World War I was started because some relatively insignificant nobleman of a 3rd rate country was assassinated at the wrong place and the wrong time. This was a terrorist's dream, so far as being able to make a small action and have it cascade into something huge. A well-placed nuclear bomb at the right moment in time can also have the same effect today.
No this isn't virtual memory.... it is a virtual machine. Memory and CPU registers are supposed to be separated and each process is supposed to be divided so they can't directly access each other but rather need to route through the operating system in order to send information to each other. Only in practice this doesn't always happen.
And this is a problem with VMWare as much any other sort of processor division. The main problems was that once the virtual machines were set up for each process in Windows, all sorts of holes were punched into the environment for message passing and other issues that allowed for inter-process communications. And *THAT* is where the security holes came into play.
All VMWare and other similar software provides is another level of abstraction... and some initial security that Windows supposedly provided originally but then ignored with a drive to provide inter-process actions. The same thing can happen with Virtual Machines... and between networked computers. Just that it is another level of abstraction moving up the food chain.
The real worry, at least in terms of a legal profession, is that an informed electorate with access to these precedents could start to question the legal profession from the outside with hard and specific examples. Changes in the legal profession wouldn't happen immediately or be revolutionary, but there would be an impact when you have lawyers dealing with clients who know more about the case law in a narrow scope of the law than they do themselves.
For myself, anything that can help to provide for a better informed electorate is a good thing, at least from a basic democratic principle that includes freedom to know what our government is doing at all levels. Not everybody is interested in everything the government is doing, but if you open up the process like this there is likelihood that somebody somewhere is going to care about even the obscure stuff, and raise a stink if something doesn't seem right.
If this doesn't have "new wiki project" written all over it, I don't know what else could.
While 1.8 million records does seem like quite a bit, Wikipedia (at least the English edition) has close to that many articles.
The real question would be this: What kind of person would be interested in digging into case histories and provide the meta linking information in order to make this sort of information useful?
Next question: What sort of skills would be necessary to make this happen? I know you don't necessarily need a J.D. in order to understand case law, but this seems to be a bit higher level of knowledge than the typical internet user, or even Wikipedia contributor.
Perhaps if I have a "distorted view of science" it is because I know professional scientists, have attended scientific workshops and forums, and have even participated in "pure" scientific research.
Real science is something that often isn't pretty, and there are huge egos and reputations on the line by people with often powerful political connections that make things happen.
You have also missed something critical here. I have not said that science is a religion. I said that science, to some individuals, may be for all intents and purposes a religion unto itself. And I suggested that *some* atheists (certainly not all of them) who genuinely reject the idea of a supreme being may be "adherents" to this "religion of science".
As for the Oxford Dictionary definition... I question the validity of that definition. That may be a more or less reasonable definition in many cases, but in terms of practical applications of a moral philosophy that guides your life, this definition is very limiting. I am asserting here that religion can be defined much more broadly, and that your application of explicitly excluding atheism from the definition of a religion is a deliberate attempt to segregate atheism from other religious philosophies... and for a political purpose as well. Of course my (and others who feel the same way I do) attempt to challenge this definition used in this manner is also a political action. That is why this has touched such a raw nerve.
Perhaps I'm being a bit of a gadfly on this issue. The problem here is mainly differences of a point of view, and allowing some individuals to define terms in such a way that they can be somehow "superior" to others of a different point of view.
And again, somehow a few of those responding have been assuming that they speak "for all atheists" when I hardly doubt that at all. Oh I appreciate their sincerity, but because the definitions of the words being used by "believers" and "non-believers" (to use some other "charged" words here) are used in significantly different manners and in reality have very different definitions.
Still, none of this is dealing with the main issue that started this whole thread.... what is the worth of a soul in relationship to the development of artificial intelligence? What is there about some sort of consciousness that can be described in mathematical terms? Can a study of religious views about this topic allow some greater insight above and beyond pure computer science related research?
Instead, brazen defense of atheism has prevailed here without even a reference to Artificial Intelligence... which was the whole point of the article in the first place, or so I thought.
Even with the stricter definition that you seem to be applying to religion, it is possible to be an adherent to multiple religious philosophies.
As far as your speaking on the behalf of "most people"... you are treading on some very thin ice by making such a statement. Please don't take offense in what I'm saying, but instead use it as an opportunity to examine just what you are claiming to call a religion.
I'll admit that many individuals to tend to compartmentalize their lives in terms of "work", "school", "home", and "religion", and even have time that they spend at each of these in a nearly exclusive manner. The problem with this is that you aren't being honest with yourself if you practice a religion in this fashion without considering that the religion is a greater part of your being and who you are. Genuine adherents to a religious philosophy will let it "consume" their whole lives and make it a part of their daily lives in all areas. Those who profess a "faith" in a regimented manner, I believe, are simply doing it for some sort of social face saving move and really don't adhere to the doctrines of that religion. I am also asserting here that they aren't being honest in what their true religious compass is trying to tell themselves.
Religion doesn't necessarily require a great religious leader such as Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, as apparently you are trying to assert here.
I think this has touched a major nerve here, simply due to the number of replies I'm getting here.
The one aspect of atheism as a religion that is significant is that it does take the place of other religious thought within the mind views of those who profess such such a belief or lack thereof.
I also reject out of hand the definition here that religion necessarily has to require a belief in a higher being. There is nothing specific about environmental conservation that is necessarily religious in nature, but there certainly are fanatical individuals devoted to environmental causes that have turned it into a religion after a fashion. I'm not accusing all atheists of being an extreme environmentalists, but I am suggesting that this is a form of atheism after a fashion because God or a higher being doesn't play a part in this "belief". And those on this extreme fringe can be so fanatically devoted that they don't mind dying as a martyr for their cause, and these extremists to have a sacred cannon and other similar trappings of religion.
BTW, where did you get the mistaken notion that being an adherent to a specific religious philosophy necessarily requires exclusivity? Some (many) religions, especially organized "churches" (which can be distinguished from the religion) do demand exclusivity as a major tenant and aspect of their religion, but there are many individuals who don't depend on the viewpoints of a particular leader for their belief. Especially anybody with half a brain that is being honest about their beliefs. And not all religions require exclusivity either... even with formal membership and initiation rituals.
I'll be open here, I profess a general belief in the divine nature of Jesus Christ, and have a firm conviction that his teaching... if anybody actually paid attention to them for more than a passing thought... could do more good in this world by ending warfare and opening your mind to compassionate service to others. At the same time, I have also studied the philosophies of Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, Isaiah and others. And frankly, from my own viewpoint, I belief that God in one form or another has touched the lives of all of these religious leaders. But that is my own belief here, and I'm adamant that others should be allowed to follow their own path to enlightenment or even morality in general how they see fit. Even if that means an out right rejection of religious thought altogether.
What is amazing me on this series of postings is a viewpoint that there is "one true atheism". Without a central leader pushing for exclusive control, how could there be with atheism? I'm not trying to define what you... as an atheist, believe or don't believe, but I am suggesting that even those who claim to be hard-core atheists to have religion... perhaps with a broader definition than they are comfortable at using.
And getting back to the business of talking about Artificial Life/Intelligence, the role of a soul is certainly something interesting to discuss in the context of religious philosophies... including a philosophy of a non-existence of deity of any kind. In that context, atheism is a religion in spite of claims to the contrary.
You seriously believe that all atheists are communists and accept the teachings of Mao?
I think you are mistaken about something here that I was trying to say. I said nothing of a universal faith that can be called atheism here, but rather was describing a whole spectrum in various dimensions of atheistic belief.
There isn't "one true atheism"... such as it is. It isn't nearly so neatly organized, and for those slashdot readers who are seemingly offended here about my spouting heresies about atheism should really go back and think about this some more before getting offended here. Obviously I've touched on a nerve on this issue.
I'm not going to continue this thread any more, as it is starting to go back and forth in a series of "yes I am" "no you aren't" type of cycles, but I do think there is some massive misunderstanding here of what I'm saying. I started out by suggesting there were many forms of atheism and named off several fairly common branches of atheistic thought... all of which seemed to bring offense to those claiming to be atheists.
This has been a fun thread, but it also missed the point completely about the existence or non-existence of a soul and if that may be critical somehow to the field of artificial intelligence. The one thing that seems to be a common thread among those who do profess a faith in a higher being is that there is something eternal and infinite in the existence of a "soul" that continues on after your physical death. I was trying to argue here that such a definition of a soul can also be described in strictly mathematical terms that doesn't necessarily even require the existence of a "God", even though many would find it comforting to find a "proof of the soul" through AI research.
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There were a whole bunch of problems with the Biosphere 2 project... including some information that I hope does get remembered in the future with construction techniques on Lunar and Martian buildings.
The largest failure really wasn't the ants, but rather the concrete that they used for the foundation of the buildings. It turns out that the concrete (more or less what you have in your house) is a reducing substance that extracted O2 and added CO2 into the atmosphere over time. You don't notice it in your house because your home isn't necessarily sealed to the same degree. It was for this reason that additional "oxygen" had to be brought into the structure.
There were other problems, including some subtle chemical imbalances that weren't discovered until after the project was well underway. Other engineering failures also happened that simply weren't anticipated. And yes, ants did provide outside interference in terms of transferring small quantities of materials from the "outside" to the "inside"... however that won't be too much of a problem on Mars or the Moon. Lunar ants would, I believe, adapt quickly at learning to avoid vacuum environments.
If a "Biosphere 3" project is ever attempted again, some long, hard looks are going to need to be done in terms of evaluating building materials, chemical absorption properties of those materials, and a deeper understanding of trace elements in biological systems.
Why even have humans build the exploration devices when SkyNet will build them anyway in a couple of decades?
I welcome our new overlord!
Seriously, we need people on Mars, as humans, to be able to relate to us, as humans, what is there. This is part of who we are as species... unless you would rather that mankind never existed in the first place?
Something more to think about:
Skylab had nearly as much room, in terms of m^3 of usable volume, as the ISS had until very recently with only the latest module additions. It would be hard to say just where we would be right now if some rather lousy decisions weren't made at NASA in terms of spending money wisely, but in hindsight there has been considerable waste.
I'm just glad that finally some people are serious about getting back into space in a serious manner, and willing to end some of the more wasteful approaches. The problem to think about now is what to do with the ISS now that we have it.
An old girlfriend of mine is now a grandmother, so yeah, I'd have to agree with you that the /. population is aging.
:)
/. can still attract the young and inexperienced. I hope this doesn't turn into an old fart's forum.
Don't let kids like this get to you that are essentially clueless.
And I got six kids myself... with the oldest entering their teenage years. Ah the joy
Thank goodness though that
I take it you have never played mixed-gender D&D campaigns. I know more than a few people who lost their virginity to such groups :)
What Gygax did was blend the concept of a role playing game to miniature combat situations. In fact, the "sandbox" miniature combat concepts even survived through most of the early rules of D&D, where missile and spell ranges were measured in inches (the " mark as is a fireball range of 6").
He also introduced the concept of using role playing games for leisure activities rather than behavior modification (something frequently done in a psychological or educational setting) or sociological studies (such as what the RAND corporation was doing).
This fusion of military simulation concepts with role playing also produced the incredibly dense and detailed rule books that built up the commercial role playing game industry. Most of the "role playing games" that the RAND corporation made were so simply that all of the rules could fit on a single piece of paper, at least in terms of participant to participant interaction.
The nuclear war simulations were something more like "you are the President of the USA" or "the chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR". An uprising took place in Poland, killing 500 Soviet soldiers. What do you do now? Yeah, that is role playing, but Gygax took it to a whole different level and popularized it for mere mortals to participate. The RAND corporation role playing games were not intended to be something for commercial production, but rather to help government planners decide on how to organize the military and prepare the government for worst case situations.
When I'm dealing with an IRC meeting that involves people from a great many timezones... the standard that I've used in the past is UTC. Timezones otherwise simply don't exist.
So there you have it.... use the tool that is necessary for the job.
What I object to here is forcing people to abandon an older standard and removing the concept of a timezone for those whom such an idea still is useful. It still has value, and really the only reason you have to keep track of daylight saving time, on an official and legal basis, has to do with your interactions with government agencies, and knowing when our favorite entertainment might be on the local broadcast channels (assuming you don't use Tivo).
All I'm pointing out here is that the standard has already been established, and once done it is often difficult to "remake" a standard, such as a calendar, keyboard layout, or measurement system. Hence the continued use of miles in the USA for distance measurement.
You forget how timezones were created here. Before the concept of a time zone, current time was regulated by determining the local mean solar time for you particular location... meaning your exact longitude. Defining what "now" was could be different even on opposite sides of a college campus, much less between different cities. At least with the concept of a time zone, all the arithmetic you have to perform is to add or subtract a few hours, unless you are dealing with truly global enterprises or projects.
On a historical note, the concept of a time zone was introduced by the railroad companies, who found that it was incredibly difficult for them to make train schedules where each individual town on the route would have its own definition of time. Imagine the locomotive engineer who had to have something like a complex GPS receiver that would give the local "time" as they moved across Kansas heading for the Rocky Mountains built out of 19th Century technology. It just didn't work, so instead the idea of a time zone that would only have to be occasionally adjusted for genuinely long distance travel was created.
This also had the advantage that it was at most about a 1/2 hour off from the "local time" used in the previous definition of "now". In other words, it wasn't too difficult to move people off of the previous "standard" onto the newer "standard" of time zones. With your proposal of elimination of time zones (which is pretty much the case anyway in terms of synchronizing computers and other scientific experiments needing that level of organization), getting ordinary people to adjust to a global clock is going to cause many other problems. Such as why should Paris/London be selected as the "ideal" time zone, as opposed to Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, or New York/Washington DC? GMT/UTC is an adopted standard only because that is what mariners for the UK Royal Navy used during a period of global colonial dominance, not that the French didn't mind using the same standard either for the most part as Paris and London are nearly the same longitude, at least for time considerations.
One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office". Having a bill collector call you at 6 A.M. is not only annoying... it can even be illegal, especially if they ignore the concept of a timezone when they call you. And yes, that has happened to me.
So wow! China is going to duplicate the Ranger series of spacecraft!
I am underwhelmed at this huge revelation. Especially for a major national government that prides itself as a superpower which is a peer to Russia and America.
This is exactly what I thought was more legitimate in terms of something that China might try to pull off. It wouldn't surprise me if John Carmack might team up with Elon Musk and try something like that as a demonstration flight either, and produce something that could stick around on the Moon for a longer period of time as well.
I'm not saying that I don't find it interesting that China is getting to the space business, and I do wish them quite a bit of luck and success. But I don't see how China landing an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon is going to be anything worth bragging about other than the fact that they are demonstrating ballistic missile technology... proving that China is equivalent to what America had in the 1960's. Something of concern as China is a nuclear weapon political power, but otherwise not remarkable. Certainly not something for an American president to even mention in a press release, much less enact major legislation to get America to compete against China.
The issues of living somewhere other than on the Earth are, for the most part, also political. I have heard it said that why live on Mars when people haven't figured out how to live on Antarctica. The reason people in large numbers aren't living on Antarctica has to do with politics... particularly environmental politics that is concerned about oil and mining companies heading into that continent and establishing mineral extraction enterprises... and what will be done to keep the damage to the environment to a minimum if that happens. Even more politically explosive is to determine exactly what government jurisdiction has control over that continent and anything obtained there. I've heard it said that Antarctica may have more oil than the Middle East... think about how many countries might be interested in that!
Yes, I've read the Antarctic treaty... I've also read the Outer Space Treaty and other similar kinds of documents related to international law governing what happens in territory not currently a part of any particular nation state. It is very ugly right now on a political scope, and it will take a few very brave people to try and start challenging the current political order of things. This also applies to how the law is going to apply to what is going to happen to other worlds besides the Earth.
I personally don't take the Lunar Embassy seriously, nor any other similar effort to claim property rights. It will take somebody physically getting there, and holding up a gun to defend their turf denying others the ability to use it.
As to who is going to pay for trips into space... I think you might be surprised. As the costs of going into space drop, new markets are opening up for space-related businesses, and there are reasonable and compelling reasons to go up. It is far more than just rich tourists and communications satellites. But it will take building an infrastructure in terms of transportation systems that are affordable to make it happen. If Musk succeeds here with his approach, the cost of going into space for the average American or European (throw in the Japanese for good measure) is very comparable to what it cost the average European to travel to America in the 17th Century. A huge investment, no doubt, but at the cusp of something that can be done. The problem now is that a destination needs to be provided... which was also a major problem in the 17th Century for Europeans as well.
BTW, as for nuclear rocketry, I don't know of anybody who is legitimately talking about using nuclear rockets for launching somebody from the ground into Earth orbit using that sort of technology. This is something that is intended for inter-planetary missions... and I dare you to show me the environmental hazards that would come from the use of nuclear rockets on a genuine spaceship that travels through interplanetary space between the Earth and Mars. There aren't any, unless you are standing directly under the exhaust plume... which I wouldn't want to do under conventional chemical rockets either.
Actually, the only problem is that we haven't had too much innovation in terms of discovering new radioscopicly stable isotope of elements that can be extracted in large enough quantities for a fuel source, and simultaneously cheap enough to use as a fuel source as well.
There are only so many ways to combine basic elements in order to provide a chemical energy source, and the combination of hydrogen+oxygen is a tough reaction to beat in terms of rapid exothermic reactions, or its availability in large quantities on the Earth. Perhaps other exotic chemical reactions can be made, but it needs the new element Unobtainium.
There has been continued progress in terms of developing other fuels sources, although it should be noted that the fueling of the vehicle... except for the fact that it needs fuel of some sort... is generally a very secondary consideration in spacecraft design. The cost of the vehicle materials, the engine design, and other considerations that drive up the cost are so significant that the fuel costs are statistically irrelevant.
As for anti-gravity... yeah, you may be right. If it can possibly move from being considered a psuedo-science topic to something more serious. Or even prove theoretically that it is even possible. I'd place more bets on finding a material with the tensile strength necessary for a space elevator first.
As for finding the food to feed everybody in the world... I consider that to be a solved problem as a scientific problem. The issue has more to do with politics and logistics... and the majority of that is political as well. With companies like ConAgra trying to figure out how to burn food up as a vehicle fuel source, the issue of generating sufficient food for 10x the current population of the world is hardly a concern.
I'm not saying that people don't go to bed hungry in many parts of the world for a lack of available food sources, but that happens because the leaders of their country have a wish for them to starve... or don't want to give up the political power they have in order to get the available food to those people who need the food. The food is there and available in quantities so large that the food is literally rotting away unused in most cases that could feed these "starving millions". The transportation infrastructure into these places is also mostly so poor that the food can't be brought to them from outside of the immediate neighborhood/communities where they live.
So tell me, when was the last famine that hit Los Angeles? It was in the early 19th Century, when the transportation infrastructure was so poor that the whole community died out to the last person. Yet there is a city of several million people living there now. Why aren't they still starving to death with 10000x the population that starved previously from a lack of food?
I'm a fairly big fan of SpaceX myself, so I won't rehash most of what you've said here... which is pretty good.
Bush('43) at least set the vision that Mars should be a long-term goal of NASA, and set in motion a series of actions that IMHO will make this irreversible in terms of future presidents. Nixon first suggested Mars as an eventual goal for manned spaceflight, but then did nothing at all to make it happen. At least Bush has specific programs being worked upon at NASA that are specific for an eventual mission to Mars. All Clinton did was push the ISS... which was really a Reagan-era program but rehashed for political purposes.
Keep in mind that the ISS was really a technology transfer vehicle from the Russian experiences in building MIR to bring that expertise to the USA. Time will tell if that is a bargain or not, but the ISS certainly is a step ahead of MIR in terms of capabilities and performance. Your comment here about Robert Bigelow gaining expertise off of the ISS is also very valid, and indirectly is a bonus from the MIR/Salyut experience as well.
Making SpaceX profitable is an amazing accomplishment on the part of Musk, and speaks volumes in terms of his approach to building that company up. The awesome part of the Dragon capsule is that it will be the first manned spacecraft that you can purchase without a specific congressional authorization by an American. There were previous attempts to purchase a privately owned space shuttle, but for various reasons these never happened... including some huge political roadblocks that kept it from happening.
I think the Falcon 1 is going to be heavily used, and due to its cost is going to bring about a whole new market that otherwise wouldn't have considered spaceflight before. Musk certainly seems to be hoping that a successful Falcon 1 launch is going to bring a large number of customers.
Musk certainly seems to be on the road to having a pretty good year for 2008, with the success of his other company, Tesla Motors. The Roadster has finally entered production and serial number 1 has been delivered. The only thing I haven't heard about is his solar energy company, which was going to mass-market solar-electric panels for home electricity generation at cheap prices. Obvious tie-ins for Tesla and SpaceX should be quite apparent as well if this other company makes any huge moves.
While I'm not completely dissing China here, this seems to be rather ambitious for China to make it to the Moon sometime next year... or even by the end of the next decade (2020). Ambitious to the point that if they make it to the Moon, that you might see some "Chinese Astronauts" die as a result of the activities.
If the Chinese are conducting aggressive LEO operations, this might be quite a bit more believable. Doing docking rendezvous or other orbital actions that would demonstrate equipment capable of being used for lunar operations. This is hard-won experience to be able to accomplish this sort of task, and something that even NASA is lacking right now, with all of their Apollo-era astronauts who knew these skills being retired and soon will die due to age.
This isn't suggesting that China couldn't get to the Moon quickly, but I don't see them making it soon. I should note that Shenzhou 7, the "next" manned Chinese spaceflight, is supposed to be the first Chinese EVA attempt. Something worth watching, and one of the baby steps necessary for getting to the Moon.
The Chinese have shown themselves to be very cautious in terms of spaceflight of any sort, and generally don't "push the envelope" very much, at least in terms of racing to achieve some sort of technological objective like landing on the Moon.
An unmanned lander going to the Moon built by the Chinese may be more practical... but then again, look at the Google Space Prize at a whole bunch of people trying to do that same thing in the USA (and elsewhere!) as well... this time without support by NASA. That won't have nearly the same sort of reaction as you are suggesting here, unless you think another spacecraft like Clementine should be built and launched to the Moon.
I should point out that there have been some of the design team of the Saturn rockets (both Saturn I and Saturn V) that considered themselves to be "lucky" that they didn't have any failures, rather than 100% success.
Had the Saturn rockets gone on to fly the equivalent of the number of flights that the Shuttle program has gone through, you would have seen perhaps a similar level of rocketry failure. It may not have been as catastrophic in terms of loss of human life (the Shuttle is particularly awful on that point) due to emergency provisions like the Launch Escape Tower (a launch problem like what hit the Challenger might have been survived by the astronauts on a Saturn V), but you would still have seen a failure rate.
This is also clearly ignoring the early history of NASA, when they were using Redstone rockets, the Atlas, and other rockets in the early days of the Mercury program.... some of which were even televised "live" on network television and had them blow up spectacularly before the American public. Those televised launches were especially interesting, as they weren't really supposed to be "prototypes" of the typical sort, but rather preliminary launches to demonstrate capsule performance... and still failed. It got so bad that comedians of the time were making jokes asking if NASA could even potentially send an astronaut into space at all, and congressmen wondering why Russia could "do it" but not NASA.
SpaceX has made some mistakes, but they are sitting in a much better position than NASA was in the early 1960's. I'll also have to admit that the reason SpaceX is in the position they are in is due to the knowledge gained by NASA and the U.S. military back in the 1950's and 1960's as well (not to mention other rocket developers), but I wouldn't condemn them for not trying. At least they have tried to put hardware up, rather than spend billions on worthless "studies" that never get launched in the first place, which seems to be NASA current design approach.
It should be mentioned that sometimes small errors creeping into measurements can also announce a more profound scientific theory that hasn't been fully explored.
Just as an example, calculations on the orbit of Mercury produced a series of errors that seemed to fall outside of the margin of calculation error in terms of predicting position... especially when observing transit events across the disc of the Sun.
It turns out that because of the proximity of Mercury to the Sun, you need to take into account the gravity well of the Sun and introduce modifications based upon the time dilation described by Einstein's relativity equations. These have a measurable impact and significantly was one of the first vindications of relativity in terms of a previously unsolved scientific problem that finally had a theoretical explanation.
In fact, this is something that the physics community is hoping here to discover... if something beyond relativity is playing into celestial mechanics. It seems dubious that it would be, but people thought that of Einstein's equations as well, considering how Einstein modified Newton's equations of celestial mechanics. This is also why this story has "legs" within the Physics community, as the person who comes up with an explanation... either that a calculation was overlooked or a new theory of mechanics can be developed from this discrepency.
My money would be placed on something overlooked... and that once it is shown to everybody looking at this, that this discrepancy will be dismissed. But at the same time, these probes are at the frontier of human experience, returning data that until now couldn't have ever been gathered, so it could be something completely new that we have never known about before. Whoever solves this issue is going to get some huge recognition, and perhaps a Nobel Prize in Physics depending on what the solution turns out to be.
One thing you must remember is that this is being published in scientific journals, not just some back page of your local newspaper. If there is one thing scientists do like to perform, is showing that somebody else missed a basic calculation on their raw data like you are suggesting. This is called "peer review", and very common in scientific journals... even if it is more informal than an organized panel. That is in fact why results like this are published in journals like this, so these kind of mistakes can be vetted.
Or more to the point, if you want to make a name for yourself, look through the raw data, perform the calculations yourself, and show what mistake somebody with a PhD did with this sort of data. Many graduate students have indeed gained notice when they have performed exactly these sort of calculations.
Have fun! Seriously, I mean it!
The problem of this line of thinking is that the world isn't always so forgiving when you kill off a million citizens through nuclear warfare. Depending on who you are talking about, there have been a few U.S. presidents who have been willing to bet the whole farm on a full-scale total nuclear war. Kennedy was one of them (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Nixon was another during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Check out what really ended that war and try to and figure out what stopped the Israeli Army from conquering Cairo and the whole of Egypt in 1973, and you get a better grasp of global politics and real concerns about nuclear proliferation. Hint, Israeli engineers were building military bridges to cross the Suez Canal, and there was nothing between the Suez Canal and Cairo in terms of military personnel worth consideration.
Remember, World War I was started because some relatively insignificant nobleman of a 3rd rate country was assassinated at the wrong place and the wrong time. This was a terrorist's dream, so far as being able to make a small action and have it cascade into something huge. A well-placed nuclear bomb at the right moment in time can also have the same effect today.
No this isn't virtual memory.... it is a virtual machine. Memory and CPU registers are supposed to be separated and each process is supposed to be divided so they can't directly access each other but rather need to route through the operating system in order to send information to each other. Only in practice this doesn't always happen.
And this is a problem with VMWare as much any other sort of processor division. The main problems was that once the virtual machines were set up for each process in Windows, all sorts of holes were punched into the environment for message passing and other issues that allowed for inter-process communications. And *THAT* is where the security holes came into play.
All VMWare and other similar software provides is another level of abstraction... and some initial security that Windows supposedly provided originally but then ignored with a drive to provide inter-process actions. The same thing can happen with Virtual Machines... and between networked computers. Just that it is another level of abstraction moving up the food chain.
The real worry, at least in terms of a legal profession, is that an informed electorate with access to these precedents could start to question the legal profession from the outside with hard and specific examples. Changes in the legal profession wouldn't happen immediately or be revolutionary, but there would be an impact when you have lawyers dealing with clients who know more about the case law in a narrow scope of the law than they do themselves.
For myself, anything that can help to provide for a better informed electorate is a good thing, at least from a basic democratic principle that includes freedom to know what our government is doing at all levels. Not everybody is interested in everything the government is doing, but if you open up the process like this there is likelihood that somebody somewhere is going to care about even the obscure stuff, and raise a stink if something doesn't seem right.
If this doesn't have "new wiki project" written all over it, I don't know what else could.
While 1.8 million records does seem like quite a bit, Wikipedia (at least the English edition) has close to that many articles.
The real question would be this: What kind of person would be interested in digging into case histories and provide the meta linking information in order to make this sort of information useful?
Next question: What sort of skills would be necessary to make this happen? I know you don't necessarily need a J.D. in order to understand case law, but this seems to be a bit higher level of knowledge than the typical internet user, or even Wikipedia contributor.
Perhaps if I have a "distorted view of science" it is because I know professional scientists, have attended scientific workshops and forums, and have even participated in "pure" scientific research.
Real science is something that often isn't pretty, and there are huge egos and reputations on the line by people with often powerful political connections that make things happen.
You have also missed something critical here. I have not said that science is a religion. I said that science, to some individuals, may be for all intents and purposes a religion unto itself. And I suggested that *some* atheists (certainly not all of them) who genuinely reject the idea of a supreme being may be "adherents" to this "religion of science".
As for the Oxford Dictionary definition... I question the validity of that definition. That may be a more or less reasonable definition in many cases, but in terms of practical applications of a moral philosophy that guides your life, this definition is very limiting. I am asserting here that religion can be defined much more broadly, and that your application of explicitly excluding atheism from the definition of a religion is a deliberate attempt to segregate atheism from other religious philosophies... and for a political purpose as well. Of course my (and others who feel the same way I do) attempt to challenge this definition used in this manner is also a political action. That is why this has touched such a raw nerve.
Perhaps I'm being a bit of a gadfly on this issue. The problem here is mainly differences of a point of view, and allowing some individuals to define terms in such a way that they can be somehow "superior" to others of a different point of view.
And again, somehow a few of those responding have been assuming that they speak "for all atheists" when I hardly doubt that at all. Oh I appreciate their sincerity, but because the definitions of the words being used by "believers" and "non-believers" (to use some other "charged" words here) are used in significantly different manners and in reality have very different definitions.
Still, none of this is dealing with the main issue that started this whole thread.... what is the worth of a soul in relationship to the development of artificial intelligence? What is there about some sort of consciousness that can be described in mathematical terms? Can a study of religious views about this topic allow some greater insight above and beyond pure computer science related research?
Instead, brazen defense of atheism has prevailed here without even a reference to Artificial Intelligence... which was the whole point of the article in the first place, or so I thought.
Even with the stricter definition that you seem to be applying to religion, it is possible to be an adherent to multiple religious philosophies.
As far as your speaking on the behalf of "most people"... you are treading on some very thin ice by making such a statement. Please don't take offense in what I'm saying, but instead use it as an opportunity to examine just what you are claiming to call a religion.
I'll admit that many individuals to tend to compartmentalize their lives in terms of "work", "school", "home", and "religion", and even have time that they spend at each of these in a nearly exclusive manner. The problem with this is that you aren't being honest with yourself if you practice a religion in this fashion without considering that the religion is a greater part of your being and who you are. Genuine adherents to a religious philosophy will let it "consume" their whole lives and make it a part of their daily lives in all areas. Those who profess a "faith" in a regimented manner, I believe, are simply doing it for some sort of social face saving move and really don't adhere to the doctrines of that religion. I am also asserting here that they aren't being honest in what their true religious compass is trying to tell themselves.
Religion doesn't necessarily require a great religious leader such as Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, as apparently you are trying to assert here.
I think this has touched a major nerve here, simply due to the number of replies I'm getting here.
The one aspect of atheism as a religion that is significant is that it does take the place of other religious thought within the mind views of those who profess such such a belief or lack thereof.
I also reject out of hand the definition here that religion necessarily has to require a belief in a higher being. There is nothing specific about environmental conservation that is necessarily religious in nature, but there certainly are fanatical individuals devoted to environmental causes that have turned it into a religion after a fashion. I'm not accusing all atheists of being an extreme environmentalists, but I am suggesting that this is a form of atheism after a fashion because God or a higher being doesn't play a part in this "belief". And those on this extreme fringe can be so fanatically devoted that they don't mind dying as a martyr for their cause, and these extremists to have a sacred cannon and other similar trappings of religion.
BTW, where did you get the mistaken notion that being an adherent to a specific religious philosophy necessarily requires exclusivity? Some (many) religions, especially organized "churches" (which can be distinguished from the religion) do demand exclusivity as a major tenant and aspect of their religion, but there are many individuals who don't depend on the viewpoints of a particular leader for their belief. Especially anybody with half a brain that is being honest about their beliefs. And not all religions require exclusivity either... even with formal membership and initiation rituals.
I'll be open here, I profess a general belief in the divine nature of Jesus Christ, and have a firm conviction that his teaching... if anybody actually paid attention to them for more than a passing thought... could do more good in this world by ending warfare and opening your mind to compassionate service to others. At the same time, I have also studied the philosophies of Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, Isaiah and others. And frankly, from my own viewpoint, I belief that God in one form or another has touched the lives of all of these religious leaders. But that is my own belief here, and I'm adamant that others should be allowed to follow their own path to enlightenment or even morality in general how they see fit. Even if that means an out right rejection of religious thought altogether.
What is amazing me on this series of postings is a viewpoint that there is "one true atheism". Without a central leader pushing for exclusive control, how could there be with atheism? I'm not trying to define what you... as an atheist, believe or don't believe, but I am suggesting that even those who claim to be hard-core atheists to have religion... perhaps with a broader definition than they are comfortable at using.
And getting back to the business of talking about Artificial Life/Intelligence, the role of a soul is certainly something interesting to discuss in the context of religious philosophies... including a philosophy of a non-existence of deity of any kind. In that context, atheism is a religion in spite of claims to the contrary.
I think you are mistaken about something here that I was trying to say. I said nothing of a universal faith that can be called atheism here, but rather was describing a whole spectrum in various dimensions of atheistic belief.
There isn't "one true atheism"... such as it is. It isn't nearly so neatly organized, and for those slashdot readers who are seemingly offended here about my spouting heresies about atheism should really go back and think about this some more before getting offended here. Obviously I've touched on a nerve on this issue.
I'm not going to continue this thread any more, as it is starting to go back and forth in a series of "yes I am" "no you aren't" type of cycles, but I do think there is some massive misunderstanding here of what I'm saying. I started out by suggesting there were many forms of atheism and named off several fairly common branches of atheistic thought... all of which seemed to bring offense to those claiming to be atheists.
This has been a fun thread, but it also missed the point completely about the existence or non-existence of a soul and if that may be critical somehow to the field of artificial intelligence. The one thing that seems to be a common thread among those who do profess a faith in a higher being is that there is something eternal and infinite in the existence of a "soul" that continues on after your physical death. I was trying to argue here that such a definition of a soul can also be described in strictly mathematical terms that doesn't necessarily even require the existence of a "God", even though many would find it comforting to find a "proof of the soul" through AI research.