Speaking as someone who has studied (to the point of having useful ability with) multiple languages, I can certainly attest to the benefits in the general case. When you're talking specifically about technical material, though... you need to have realistic expecations.
Since it seems that you have never before studied a foreign language (at least, not to any significant extent) you may not appreciate how very difficult it for many people to acquire this skill after the age of 11 or so. Even if you find that you do have a knack for languages, there is an enormous (and I mean ENORMOUS) difference between the amount of effort required to obtain basic reading skills and true fluency. Depending on the language, it may be easier to learn to speak it than to read it. I think you should very carefully consider just how much time you think you would be spending in this effort. With that in mind, I offer a (very) brief guide to language complexity:
Spanish : Doesn't get much easier than this. Has case and gender, but it's still a romance language using the latin alphabet. Grammar is easily relatable to English, and vocabulary can be acquired rapidly. It's also fairly regular in terms of both grammar and spelling. Not of much use as a technical language.
French : Somewhat harder. Like Spanish, has case and gender; add to that an unbelievable butt-load of tenses (13, I think) of which you'll only ever really need four or five. Like Spanish, it is a romance language, so grammar and vocabulary are easy for an English speaker to acquire; also fairly regular (although not so much as Spanish), more useful as a technical language.
German : Somewhat harder yet, I think, but not everyone agrees. Has gender, and is very heavy on case. Spelling can be highly irregular, although not nearly so much as in English. Case issues complicate grammar and can boggle an English-speaker's mind. Historically regarded as a language for technical documents.
Russian: I'm married to a Russian speaker, and I can tell you that you are leaving the safe harbor of the romance languages behind. Russian has case, gender and (God help you) declension. Grammar rules are very complex, but fairly regular;. The alphabet is Cyrillic, of course, but it's not much harder than the english alphabet to learn, and the spelling rules are much more regular then those of English. There's lots of technical material in Russian that might be of interest to an Engineer, but the amount of study required will be significantly more than for the preceding languages.
Japanese : we're starting to drift into the realm of masochism here. Japanese grammar is simple and highly regular, but counter-intuitive to a speaker of English. You will have to learn approximately 2,000 individual pictograms, just to acheive basic literacy, plus another 2,000 to 5,000 pictograms (Kanji) pertaining to your technical specialty. It's not too difficult to learn to speak Japanese; learning to read it is a bitch. Could be worse, could be Chinese...
Chinese (Mandarin) : If you go this route, you are both maximizing your value and (probably) guaranteeing your rapid collapse into insanity. I can't speak too much to this language; unlike the others, I've never actually given it any formal study. It's grammar is supposed to be fairly regular, but it's poly-tonal (same phoneme has different meanings, depending pitch), which is hell on anybody who wasn't raised with it; lots of sounds that are very difficult for foreign speakers to distinguish. On the reading end of things, you will have to master about 5,000 pictograms for literacy, plus another 3,000 to 5,000 for technical literacy within your (technical) specialty. You don't even want to know what's required if your specialty is in the liberal arts.
I hope this is of some help. As a general note, an English speaker with a moderate disposition towards acquiring new languages can gain useful skills in any of the romance languages via self-study. For any of the others on this list, the self-study approach is suicidal.
I'm sure that the folks at Otis have their opinions, and that those opinions are born out of their extensive experience in the field. The question, then, is to what extent is that experience relevant to building a space elevator?
I'm sure I don't know, but the folks at LiftPort Group have a FAQ which they provide their answers to many, if not all, of the points you make.
Granted, they are in the business of selling the Space Elevator concept, but they can do math too.
Actually the assertion that !(x-x) is always false is in and of itself false in languages that allow operator overloading. Obviously, you assumed the intrisic operation, and the compiler would certainly know the difference, but from a human standpoint, no such assumption could be made.
I spent two years studying Japanese in a University setting (The University of Texas at Austin, if it matters) and the only electronic/computer gadget that was ever worth diddly was the Canon WordTank(TM) http://store.aikotradingstore.com/cawog50.html.
This is a genuinely useful study aid and you could do worse than giving one to every student. Beyond that, there's just no substitute for immersion or, failing that, plain old elbow grease.
That's a common fear, and I certainly understand that train of logic, but It assumes that a lot of current constants remain so.
Consider: what incentive is there to have power over people that can't do anything for you? If you have control over the immortality infrastructure, and if machines are doing most of the physical labor, then the majority of the population is a just a drain on "your" resources. Turn 'em into fertilizer!
The only thing worse than being under control of a despot is being under the control of a despot that doesn't need you.
Well, before I respond to the body of your reply, I want to make certain that I have made one thing clear: I am not now suggesting, nor have I ever intended to suggest, that the human body could be made to "last forever". This is patently absurd; entropy always wins. The term that I elected to use was "Functional Immortality", a term that I admit is open to interpretation. To my mind, it means "live until you get bored with the whole thing and chuck it."
That said, I think your remark falls under the "Star Trek Syndrome" as well; i.e. "tomorrow will be just like today, only with better toys".
While I have to agree that it is easy for the naive observer to dismiss the complexity inherent in a given task, and I freely admit to being a naive observer, "human abilities" are not a constant. We enhance our abilities all the time; with machines, with drugs. There's no reason for us not to get better at it.
As for your argument using the internal combustion engine as an example, I would not consider it insignificant if the performance of my body (measured in terms of, say, years at physiological age 30 or better) were to be improved in the same measure as the internal combustion engine (measured in terms of fuel-efficiency).
I gather that your point is intended to be that, whatever the improvement, it's not much to show for 100 years of work, and it's a trivial problem compared to tinkering with the human organism.
I can't really disagree with that, but I don't see it as being terribly relevant. The internal-combustion engine, viewed as thermodynamic process, has an absolute cap on its efficiency. That cap is further reduced by the particular chemical process (oxidation) involved. The question is not "how much has it improved", but "how close are we to that theoretical maximum efficiency". The answer is: "a lot closer than we were 100 years ago."
To my mind, a more interesting observation would be to note that the greatest improvements in the performance of the internal-combustion engine occurred early in the development process, followed by a protracted period of incremental and increasingly expensive (in terms of cost-of-development) improvements. So, is the human body a highly refined machine that can't be significantly improved upon, or a badly designed machine that can't be significantly modified without running afoul of its myriad interdependencies, or is it a rough cut, crying out to be improved upon?
From worst-case point-of-view on the immortality issue, the real limit is probably the brain. If you have enough resources, you could always just clone yourself a new body and do a brain transplant. How long can a brain go, even assuming that you are continually repairing the individual neurons and support systems, before it ceases to function?
Well, I've got to admit it, the/. crowd has really disappointed me this time. Normally, I can count on seeing some insightful comments on any given topic, but this particular subject has (to date) generated a mighty poor showing.
Even weeding the victims of "Star Trek Syndrome" (the unfortunate tendency to consider technological advances in isolation) out of the mix, I don't see much sign of intelligent life here. There are exceptions: MythoBeast's reply, in particular, shows an awareness of the more fundamental issues.
For the record, the capability to engineer functional immortality in the human species is a question of "when", not "if". Assuming that we can maintain a technological civilization, it seems inevitable within the next two centuries. The real question is: "How are we going to deal with it."
Consider: the technology is going to cost a fortune to develop, but will probably be cheap to reproduce, self-replicating and inheritable. I base these statements on the assumption that the mature form of the technology is a combination of gene-tweaking and nano-or-bio-technology-based house-cleaning agents. Given, this, and the implied capability that goes along with it, the beneficiaries of this technology will not have to worry about being fat, ugly, or old, and the only diseases they're likely to be plagued by are the ones designed in laboratories. All of which implies that the primary causes of death in a society with access to such technology would be reduced to three: accident, violence, and suicide (considering going off your longevity regime as a form of suicide).
What does that really mean? All of our cultural institutions (and it doesn't make any difference whose culture you're talking about; by "our", I mean humanity's), all of our societies are shaped by the knowledge of death. By implication, ALL of these societies will lose their viability in the face of Universal Functional Immortality (UFM). The problem is, we've got nothing to replace them. And its not just UFM; consider all the other technological trends and you potentially have a world in which everyone could be young, health, beautiful, immortal and idle, the latter because all of the forms of purely physical labor have been automated. Ironically, I suspect the development of A.I.s sophisticated enough to create this "utopia" will take much longer than finding a way to put the brakes on the aging process.
It's not just our culture; the structure of our brains is shaped by death as an environmental constant. Much of what we consider "human nature" is likely "hard-wired" as a mess of evolutionary spaghetti-code. Fixing aging is one thing; changing human nature is another. Unfortunately, that nature did not evolve in an environment where really long-term thinking was a survival trait. We run by simple rules: survive, reproduce; monopolize resources; minimize change within our environment. As individuals we exhibit a wide variety of thresholds at which we consider these imperatives to be satisfied, but they drive us all.
What happens when immortals with no physical wants try to satisfy these urges? How do you build a society, starting where we are now, that won't self-destruct or go into stasis? Or is the technological singularity simply inevitable?
Come on, show me that you're part of that "top 25% of the I.Q. curve".
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who has studied (to the point of having useful ability with) multiple languages, I can certainly attest to the benefits in the general case. When you're talking specifically about technical material, though... you need to have realistic expecations. Since it seems that you have never before studied a foreign language (at least, not to any significant extent) you may not appreciate how very difficult it for many people to acquire this skill after the age of 11 or so. Even if you find that you do have a knack for languages, there is an enormous (and I mean ENORMOUS) difference between the amount of effort required to obtain basic reading skills and true fluency. Depending on the language, it may be easier to learn to speak it than to read it. I think you should very carefully consider just how much time you think you would be spending in this effort. With that in mind, I offer a (very) brief guide to language complexity: Spanish : Doesn't get much easier than this. Has case and gender, but it's still a romance language using the latin alphabet. Grammar is easily relatable to English, and vocabulary can be acquired rapidly. It's also fairly regular in terms of both grammar and spelling. Not of much use as a technical language. French : Somewhat harder. Like Spanish, has case and gender; add to that an unbelievable butt-load of tenses (13, I think) of which you'll only ever really need four or five. Like Spanish, it is a romance language, so grammar and vocabulary are easy for an English speaker to acquire; also fairly regular (although not so much as Spanish), more useful as a technical language. German : Somewhat harder yet, I think, but not everyone agrees. Has gender, and is very heavy on case. Spelling can be highly irregular, although not nearly so much as in English. Case issues complicate grammar and can boggle an English-speaker's mind. Historically regarded as a language for technical documents. Russian: I'm married to a Russian speaker, and I can tell you that you are leaving the safe harbor of the romance languages behind. Russian has case, gender and (God help you) declension. Grammar rules are very complex, but fairly regular;. The alphabet is Cyrillic, of course, but it's not much harder than the english alphabet to learn, and the spelling rules are much more regular then those of English. There's lots of technical material in Russian that might be of interest to an Engineer, but the amount of study required will be significantly more than for the preceding languages. Japanese : we're starting to drift into the realm of masochism here. Japanese grammar is simple and highly regular, but counter-intuitive to a speaker of English. You will have to learn approximately 2,000 individual pictograms, just to acheive basic literacy, plus another 2,000 to 5,000 pictograms (Kanji) pertaining to your technical specialty. It's not too difficult to learn to speak Japanese; learning to read it is a bitch. Could be worse, could be Chinese... Chinese (Mandarin) : If you go this route, you are both maximizing your value and (probably) guaranteeing your rapid collapse into insanity. I can't speak too much to this language; unlike the others, I've never actually given it any formal study. It's grammar is supposed to be fairly regular, but it's poly-tonal (same phoneme has different meanings, depending pitch), which is hell on anybody who wasn't raised with it; lots of sounds that are very difficult for foreign speakers to distinguish. On the reading end of things, you will have to master about 5,000 pictograms for literacy, plus another 3,000 to 5,000 for technical literacy within your (technical) specialty. You don't even want to know what's required if your specialty is in the liberal arts. I hope this is of some help. As a general note, an English speaker with a moderate disposition towards acquiring new languages can gain useful skills in any of the romance languages via self-study. For any of the others on this list, the self-study approach is suicidal.
Sorry 'bout that. It's: http://www.liftport.com/faq.php
I'm sure I don't know, but the folks at LiftPort Group have a FAQ which they provide their answers to many, if not all, of the points you make.
Granted, they are in the business of selling the Space Elevator concept, but they can do math too.
That all there is to it. It's just that far to many programmers omit the "Profile your code" step.
A good point, but code for embedded devices, or any code that has to interface with real-time physical processes, is really a different ball game.
Actually the assertion that !(x-x) is always false is in and of itself false in languages that allow operator overloading. Obviously, you assumed the intrisic operation, and the compiler would certainly know the difference, but from a human standpoint, no such assumption could be made.
I spent two years studying Japanese in a University setting (The University of Texas at Austin, if it matters) and the only electronic/computer gadget that was ever worth diddly was the Canon WordTank(TM) http://store.aikotradingstore.com/cawog50.html. This is a genuinely useful study aid and you could do worse than giving one to every student. Beyond that, there's just no substitute for immersion or, failing that, plain old elbow grease.
That's a common fear, and I certainly understand that train of logic, but It assumes that a lot of current constants remain so. Consider: what incentive is there to have power over people that can't do anything for you? If you have control over the immortality infrastructure, and if machines are doing most of the physical labor, then the majority of the population is a just a drain on "your" resources. Turn 'em into fertilizer! The only thing worse than being under control of a despot is being under the control of a despot that doesn't need you.
Well, before I respond to the body of your reply, I want to make certain that I have made one thing clear: I am not now suggesting, nor have I ever intended to suggest, that the human body could be made to "last forever". This is patently absurd; entropy always wins. The term that I elected to use was "Functional Immortality", a term that I admit is open to interpretation. To my mind, it means "live until you get bored with the whole thing and chuck it."
That said, I think your remark falls under the "Star Trek Syndrome" as well; i.e. "tomorrow will be just like today, only with better toys".
While I have to agree that it is easy for the naive observer to dismiss the complexity inherent in a given task, and I freely admit to being a naive observer, "human abilities" are not a constant. We enhance our abilities all the time; with machines, with drugs. There's no reason for us not to get better at it.
As for your argument using the internal combustion engine as an example, I would not consider it insignificant if the performance of my body (measured in terms of, say, years at physiological age 30 or better) were to be improved in the same measure as the internal combustion engine (measured in terms of fuel-efficiency).
I gather that your point is intended to be that, whatever the improvement, it's not much to show for 100 years of work, and it's a trivial problem compared to tinkering with the human organism.
I can't really disagree with that, but I don't see it as being terribly relevant. The internal-combustion engine, viewed as thermodynamic process, has an absolute cap on its efficiency. That cap is further reduced by the particular chemical process (oxidation) involved. The question is not "how much has it improved", but "how close are we to that theoretical maximum efficiency". The answer is: "a lot closer than we were 100 years ago."
To my mind, a more interesting observation would be to note that the greatest improvements in the performance of the internal-combustion engine occurred early in the development process, followed by a protracted period of incremental and increasingly expensive (in terms of cost-of-development) improvements. So, is the human body a highly refined machine that can't be significantly improved upon, or a badly designed machine that can't be significantly modified without running afoul of its myriad interdependencies, or is it a rough cut, crying out to be improved upon?
From worst-case point-of-view on the immortality issue, the real limit is probably the brain. If you have enough resources, you could always just clone yourself a new body and do a brain transplant. How long can a brain go, even assuming that you are continually repairing the individual neurons and support systems, before it ceases to function?
Well, I've got to admit it, the /. crowd has really disappointed me this time. Normally, I can count on seeing some insightful comments on any given topic, but this particular subject has (to date) generated a mighty poor showing.
Even weeding the victims of "Star Trek Syndrome" (the unfortunate tendency to consider technological advances in isolation) out of the mix, I don't see much sign of intelligent life here. There are exceptions: MythoBeast's reply, in particular, shows an awareness of the more fundamental issues.
For the record, the capability to engineer functional immortality in the human species is a question of "when", not "if". Assuming that we can maintain a technological civilization, it seems inevitable within the next two centuries. The real question is: "How are we going to deal with it."
Consider: the technology is going to cost a fortune to develop, but will probably be cheap to reproduce, self-replicating and inheritable. I base these statements on the assumption that the mature form of the technology is a combination of gene-tweaking and nano-or-bio-technology-based house-cleaning agents. Given, this, and the implied capability that goes along with it, the beneficiaries of this technology will not have to worry about being fat, ugly, or old, and the only diseases they're likely to be plagued by are the ones designed in laboratories. All of which implies that the primary causes of death in a society with access to such technology would be reduced to three: accident, violence, and suicide (considering going off your longevity regime as a form of suicide).
What does that really mean? All of our cultural institutions (and it doesn't make any difference whose culture you're talking about; by "our", I mean humanity's), all of our societies are shaped by the knowledge of death. By implication, ALL of these societies will lose their viability in the face of Universal Functional Immortality (UFM). The problem is, we've got nothing to replace them. And its not just UFM; consider all the other technological trends and you potentially have a world in which everyone could be young, health, beautiful, immortal and idle, the latter because all of the forms of purely physical labor have been automated. Ironically, I suspect the development of A.I.s sophisticated enough to create this "utopia" will take much longer than finding a way to put the brakes on the aging process.
It's not just our culture; the structure of our brains is shaped by death as an environmental constant. Much of what we consider "human nature" is likely "hard-wired" as a mess of evolutionary spaghetti-code. Fixing aging is one thing; changing human nature is another. Unfortunately, that nature did not evolve in an environment where really long-term thinking was a survival trait. We run by simple rules: survive, reproduce; monopolize resources; minimize change within our environment. As individuals we exhibit a wide variety of thresholds at which we consider these imperatives to be satisfied, but they drive us all.
What happens when immortals with no physical wants try to satisfy these urges? How do you build a society, starting where we are now, that won't self-destruct or go into stasis? Or is the technological singularity simply inevitable?
Come on, show me that you're part of that "top 25% of the I.Q. curve".