Oh, for the love of christ, get over yourself. People are sheep because they don't want to spend time and energy maintaining their gadgets, they just want to use them?
YOU are the sheep because you think that defective gadgets - ones where you need to spend time and energy on maintenance that a PROPERLY designed gadget wouldn't require - somehow makes you a better person. Rather than holding the people who design and sell those faulty gadgets responsible for releasing a shitty product, you instead seem to think it is a *virtue* that you're willing to put up with a crappy device that requires you to spend tons of time on tasks unrelated to what you want to do just so you can use their devices. You actually think it's a *good* thing that you have to do this!
Talk about being a brainwashed sheep!
I want tools that DO WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO with a minimal amount of hassle and that don't require me to spend tons of time making sure they're in good shape before I use them. When I want to use a web enabled device, I want to just surf the goddamn web. I don't want to spend 30 minutes checking for the latest viruses and exploits, scanning my system, and dealing with all that bullshit - I just want to surf the web and do whatever it is I'm going to do there. When I want to install an application on my computer I don't want to have to dick around with making sure permissions are right or that all dependencies are met or any of that - I just want to click as few buttons as possible and then use the application.
Please, though, feel free to continue to imagine that you're somehow better than everyone else because your time is worth so little to you that you're more than happy to spend your time making up for the failures of the people who provide you with gadgets and software to do their jobs better. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be getting actual work done or having fun with our gadgets. If not wasting my time doing bunches of routine maintenance tasks with my electronics makes me a sheep, then baa baa baa, guilty as charged.
Excuse me, but where, exactly, was I speculating wildly? Where did I say anything other than "things may be different elsewhere due to different conditions"? Is it really considered to be "wild" speculation to say "we only have 1 instance of life that we know anything about, maybe life is different elsewhere, we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this is the only way it can be"?
In fact, I think it's the people, like you, who are so damn certain that these rules MUST apply elsewhere, that are actually speculating wildly - you're trying to apply what you've seen in exactly 1 case of life to *every* other possible life form in the universe, with *zero* evidence to support that notion.
And, actually, I chose my quote *exactly* because Newton used it. See, with physics, we actually have observations of other places in the universe where we can see that physics works essentially the same everywhere. With life, not so much. Unless there's been some fundamental discovery that we can now go from basic physics to a complete model of all possible life forms? I mean, I'd like to think I'd have heard about that.
Anyway, let's address your specific examples:
1) "Life will expand to the limit of resources" - you say that this *MUST* happen because a lifeform that does this will be more numerous than one that does not. Are you then saying that more numerous = more successful? Because, within the context of this whole greater discussion (ET coming here and getting rowdy), quantity isn't relevant, but quality sure is. Silverfish massively outnumber human beings on Earth; are you suggesting that they are thus the most likely creatures on the planet to go out into space and contact another civilization?
2) Please explain how evolution is a necessary byproduct of mathematics. Because I'd say that'd be pretty damn revolutionary if you could demonstrate that biological evolution comes from mathematical axioms. An essentially geometric proof of evolution would certainly be useful in quite a few areas.
3) With regards to first world countries - you still haven't demonstrated why it is that some members of those populations are NOT expanding to the limit of their resources; you've simply waved your hand and said "but they consume more resources per individual." If people actually *did* "ALWAYS" (and remember, that was my criterion) expand to the limit of their resources, wealthy people with more money than they could possibly spend, would be having vast numbers of children - yet, interestingly, they are not. Why not? Could it be because there is not ALWAYS a drive to expand to resource exhaustion, and at some point or in some situations, expanding to the point of resource exhaustion actually ISN'T the best strategy?
4) Tragedy of the commons - the problem here is that "expansion" does not equal "success." Let me give you a counter example: I have 100 different people who share a certain patch of ground. By and large, these people are pretty specialized - so each provides something useful for the health and well being of the other 99. Not NECESSARY, but simply "useful." Let's say that 1 person says "screw it, I'll expand, and use more than my 1% of this shared resource." Well, in this situation, the other 99 people, who had been working together happily before, say "Oh, well, then you can't have any of the things we provide." Rather quickly the expanding member realizes that it's a better situation to stay with that 1% rather than have 2% (and everyone else winds up with about.99% percent - barely being hurt - because they are willing to reallocate resources so that no member gets particularly harmed by the expansive jerk. In this situation you wind up with the cooperative 99% not really feeling much of a pinch at all, yet that expansive 1 person, even though he now has twice as many resources as he did before, is absolutely screwed. Lo, you have a situation wherein expansion is bad, cooperation is good., and it would require a very large portion of the population to suddenly embr
You and the other people in this thread who are saying that how it is on Earth is how it must be elsewhere with regards to "basic" or "fundamental" laws of "life" or "evolution" are arguing that, from a sample size of exactly 1, that you think you know what the fundamental rules are elsewhere. Basically, you and them are arguing that we know - based on our sample of 1 environment where life came to be - some of the axioms of life.
I am saying that these axioms may not be nearly as axiomatic as you think, and may, in fact, only seem to be axiomatic due to the accidents and circumstances of the Earth and environment, and that other environments may be so radically different, that other pseudo-axioms for the dynamics of life could be different there.
Considering that even experts in the field of biology can't necessarily agree what "life" even is, what is a living creature and isn't; considering that until as recently as 1977 we thought there were only 2 main types of life and yet there has been found a 3rd; considering that until fairly recently it was believed that there was no possible way that things could live in certain extremely hot, cold, or toxic environs; considering that there are recent findings in genetics that indicate that evolution may work by radically different mechanisms and have different dynamics than we know (horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics and other recent areas of study), I think it's the height of hubris, and is completely unscientific to even try to claim, with any certainty that we *know* things must be the same elsewhere.
Here's my question - why are you so certain it should be the same elsewhere as here? Give me the scientific argument for why these things *must* be the same everywhere else. I'm arguing that there could be myriad systems of dynamics because other systems may be fundamentally different, while you seem to be arguing that our system of dynamics MUST be the same elsewhere, despite us never seeing another example of life.
In physics there's the idea that the laws of physics are the same everywhere - and this is born out, more or less, by observations of physical phenomena elsewhere in the universe that seem to obey the same physics we have locally. So where's the observation of life that arose in radically different environments and how that life interacts? The answer is that we haven't seen it, there have been no observations, and anyone claiming that they know anything for a fact about life elsewhere is essentially just spouting dogma and not approaching it even remotely as a scientist would. About the only thing I'd be willing to say for sure would be that life elsewhere in this universe, whatever form it takes, will have behavior that ultimately results from the fundamental physical laws of the universe.
And unless I've missed a huge revolution in science, we don't actually know all of those fundamental laws. Oh, wait, make that 2 revolutions in science - the jump from physics to chemistry (wait, 3!) then from chemistry to biology (make that 4!) from biology to universal biological understanding of all possible bases for life. Now, I'm not the most up-to-date person in the world by any means, but I'd like to think that I'd have heard of things that epochal.
Mind you, I am inclined to think that there are some fundamental dynamics that will be more or less the same for life everywhere. But the difference between me and the others in this thread is that I don't claim to KNOW this for a fact. Trying to state that we know things for certain when there is NO evidence for it strikes me as just dumb - there is no benefit to claiming certainty, while the benefit of keeping an open mind is that it allows new information that we obtain to be examined with a little less bias.
But hey, if you guys want to treat your science like a religion, that's totally up to you; let me know how it works out for you.
I know you were probably going for "funny" but it's still an Earth based example that is laden with billions of years of Earth history and evolutionary legacy.
And I'd hardly call the Soviet system "cooperative" unless you mean "do as the beloved leader says or you'll die, and even if you do, you'll still likely die" when you say "cooperative."
Computers do not help you "think" faster really, they simply help you acquire data faster so that you can then think about them.
Computers magnify one or two aspects out of (tens? hundreds? thousands?) of human intelligence (and these aspects they do magnify are essentially the low hanging fruit of human intelligence), and you're right - even with just doing those extremely simple things, they have MASSIVELY expanded the capacity of one human or a group of humans who leverage that new capability.
So there's a pretty good example of human beings seeing ways to be smarter I didn't even think of it, to be honest, because it is SO omnipresent that I was pretty much blind to it being just one of the many ways that humans have *aggressively* seized on any way they can to improve their capabilities. Anything that has made it possible for a human to compete more effectively against other humans has, by and large, been adopted and improved. And it isn't just using technology as an external tool - people have adopted ways to make themselves function better, whether it be simply getting better nutrition and exercising to more extreme treatments like steroids or supposed IQ boosting drugs. I remember a few years back reading about professional athletes - pitchers in one example - having elective surgery on their pitching arms that would let them add a little more speed to their fastball. Pro golfers routinely get lasik when they can see just fine because it will make their vision better than average. These things may be done mostly by the elite now, but as the technology improves and it becomes easier and easier to enhance some aspect of our lives, people *will* embrace it because, by and large, history shows that they always have.
So am I unreasonable, as that one guy says, for positing that humans will continue to behave, by and large, as they always have? Or is he unreasonable for positing that - for no reason at all - human beings will simply stop behaving as they pretty much always have?
I say that it is EXTREMELY unlikely that humans would suddenly stop taking advantage of devices or treatments that would continue to improve their abilities in whatever way they could, and that definitely includes expanding our intellectual capacities as we learn how to do it.
But why will life "always" expand to the limit of resources? How do you know this to be "always" true of life EVERYWHERE in the universe? What fundamental law of physics (that we assume to be true everywhere as one of the axioms of physics) does this inevitably arise from?
I can see many situations on Earth where people choose to limit the number of offspring they have to replacement (or lower) levels. Look at First World countries - birthrates are declining despite the fact that, person per person, they use FAR more resources than people in Second and Third World countries. These First World nations are still successful (present economic woes aside) and still have a significant impact on the destiny of the human species, and certainly could live on SUBSTANTIALLY lower levels of resource utilization...
So, if life "always" expanded to the point of resource exhaustion, then why are we seeing cases where some fairly sizeable chunks are not doing this? Isn't it possible to imagine a population comprised entirely of creatures that seek equilibrium rather than expansion?
Please don't say "I can't imagine a situation in which..." because that's an incredibly bad argument. Lord Kelvin, pretty much THE preeminent scientist of his age, couldn't imagine a universe in which physics hadn't been "solved" and the rest wasn't just the tedious filling in of more decimal places, and then he got knocked on his ass when some troublemaker had this rock that seemed to be giving off energy... You can't imagine it because there's been no reason to imagine it - every single case of "alien life" that you have been exposed to has either been Terrestrial in origin (just a different eco system) or invented by human beings who were telling stories, and as such entirely grounded in Earth, our history on Earth, our minds which evolved on Earth, etc. You don't think this could give us a pretty huge blind-spot when it comes to thinking about how things might be elsewhere? A huge bias that is so omnipresent that we don't even know it's there?
At least wait to see if the "fundamental" laws of life (whatever life even is) has been replicated somewhere else in the universe before boldly planting your flag in the ground and saying, "On Earth as it must be in Heaven!"
1: "There is only one way that life can be, only one way that evolution can operate, and that's how it is here on Earth, which is only 1 kind of environment and history out of essentially infinite possibilities, but hey, all life we currently know of behaves like this so it MUST be true!"
and
2: "We have one example of life - Earth. On Earth pretty much all living things that we've found so far follows some rules, and we think they're probably pretty basic. However, we're open to the possibility that life evolving elsewhere in the universe - possibly under radically different conditions (maybe not even on a planet) - might behave differently. Once we find some life elsewhere, if it also follows some of the things we think of as fundamental, maybe then we can say those things are actually fundamental, but until then it's probably not a bad idea to keep an open mind."
Which one seems more like a dogmatic response, and which seems like a scientific one?
We can't even get everyone who studies the question to agree what life *is* and yet you have people in this thread arguing that it is a solved question in every way, and confidently predicting - no, INSISTING - that life everywhere else will behave just as it does on Earth. I'm not saying that it *won't* behave in many ways similarly, but I think it's wrong to INSIST that it does until we actually have more than 1 size to sample.
Remember when a few years back people insisted that life couldn't *possibly* exist in certain extreme conditions (cold, heat, chemical environments, etc.)? And yet, lo, life has been found to be quite happily chugging away in those conditions. Forgive me if I'm a little leery of people who want to say that things MUST be one way or another in a field that isn't, in fact, completely 100% solved, and where surprising discoveries happen on a frequent basis.
I think largely the possibility of humans being the hostile ones would be about the elimination of competition instead of the scarcity of resources. Frankly, if we have FTL and the attendant technology, we'd be much better off just ripping up stars where there's nobody around to try and stop us from gathering resources.
By the time we'd run out of stars to use, I'm reasonably sure that "humanity" would have changed to something that we can't even imagine now.
We may be war mongering assholes, but I think we're economic minded warmongering assholes, and so the question would become: "If I can go fly off to another star system and rip it apart and get all the resources I could possibly need for my lifetime and the lifetimes of 15 generations of my offspring, without conflict, is it better to do that, or should I go be a warmongering asshole and fight a battle I might lose with some other warmongering asshole over pretty much those exact same resources?"
Or, if we really do have easy FTL, it might be "Whelp, I need to eradicate everyone with a belief system that differs even a tiny bit from my own because they'll kill me if I don't kill them" and then we all die.
So since the choices are "we all die in massive genocidal conflicts" or "we realize we can satisfy our greed for the farthest we can reasonably imagine, safely and without needing to risk death" I'll go with the one that gives us a future:)
Though I do want Galactica, so maybe warmongering assholes aren't all bad.
True fact: I used the word "asshole" more than 3 times in 2 posts on/. today, and in entirely different stories, and not once was it directed at another person.
We have exactly 1 instance to go on when talking about how evolution works: Life on Earth. ANYTHING we think is a fundamental truth about life, and this includes evolution, is based on the entire history of Earth and all the accidents that entails, and maynot be fundamental at all and a result of circumstances.
Note my use of the word "may" in there? Note the fact that I'm not saying one way or another that I know something to be true, fundamental and RIGHT? My entire point is that making assumptions based on what we think are "fundamental rules" about life - a massively complex and crazily difficult phenomenon that we aren't even sure what it actually *means* for something to be alive - may just be circumstantial variables.
Let me throw something out there as a bit of a digression:
One of us has room for modification in her stance, the other of us does not. What will you do if we do in fact find some other life form in the universe that violates one of the things you think are so fundamental? You'd have to change the *entire* framework for your system because it cannot admit to the possibility that there may be other rulesets that can work for evolution; the fundamentals will have to change. In my case, if we find multiple instances of life out there and they all seem to hew to these supposed fundamentals, THEN I'd be more willing to put some credit to the notion that those concepts may be fundamental, but even then, it isn't like my whole system has been uprooted.
For what it's worth, I do, actually, suspect that it's highly likely that some of the things we consider pretty fundamental about life are true. But I think it's foolish to actually plant my flag in it and say it's got to be that way - there's *absolutely* no advantage to me in being "certain" while there's TONS of benefit to me to being able to be open minded about it.
Intelligence may not be well enough understood *now* to do much meaningful work in the field, but you know, there's that whole concept of "progress." Science is rife with things that were previously completely misunderstood/overly complex to do meaningful work on, but now are reasonably well understood and certainly have lead to meaningful work.
As for evidence that a sizeable minority would be interested in self-improvement in the form of some kind of modification, are you kidding me? The fact that parents in the middle class and up are trying to crush, kill or maim to get their kids into elite institutions, force-feed average kids AP everything, and will medicate their precious snowflakes into a stupor in order to help boost their concentration doesn't make you think that there'd be a push for this?
Or the fact that amongst people who favor a more "creative" kind of intelligence, substance use has been an ongoing thing because some feel it helps them get in touch with their creative center?
Or the massive self-help industry where people spend tons of money trying to find ways to be more productive, more efficient, more effective in general?
As to the issue of "what is intelligence" and people pushing their own definition in research, you do know that there are likely quite a few different people/groups working on this, in one way or another? Each person/group approaching it from a different standpoint?
As to the question of that minority basically coming to redefine humanity, it's pretty easy to see, actually - individuals who have received treatments to enhance their capabilities could likely find it easier to manipulate the mechanisms that allow an individual to accrue personal power in our current system. Smart doesn't always equal powerful, but I will submit that there are very few truly powerful people who are not extremely intelligent, by one definition or another. When it comes to talking about the destiny of the species, it's the movers and shakers that ultimately matter. Joe Six-Pack may be a helluva guy, salt o' th' Earth, but his impact on humanity is negligible - he is, strictly speaking not all that relevant. Cold but true.
And to get at a couple of specific things you said:
More memory - meh, that's overrated. I have google, so as long as I know how to look things up, I'm in like Flynn.
Faster thinking, however - THAT is a biggie. If I can think twice as fast as you can, and if I train myself to think critically, all other things being equal, I'll usually be several steps ahead of you in thinking things through.
But why limit it to those kinds of things? Why not throw in "thinking different" as an option? What if there were a treatment that would allow one to "hear" their sub-conscious thoughts, where it seems that quite a bit of processing goes on? What about a treatment that (however it does this) allows one to more directly tap into intuition? Or hell, even one that allows a person to moderate their emotional responses to things (emotion has been shown to hinder judgment) so that they can simply focus deeply on a given task, with their full attention?
The point being, I think your quick dismissal of the advantages of more "intelligence" (whatever it is, and I think it's likely tons of different things) indicates a failure of imagination mixed with a pretty naive view of humanity.
First, let me clarify, I am ONLY talking about humans, and everything I said is based on my experience as a member of that species and a student of history of that species.
Second, your comments:
"Sure, YOU might like to be smarter. I might like to be smarter too. But that doesn't translate to the species having any real use for more intelligence. We'd be much better served by providing First World educations to everyone in the Third World than we'd be if we developed a way to make you (or me) smarter."
Yes, I'd like it. And many other people would. And many people who are frighteningly ambitious certainly would. Now, not everyone is driven to be competitive like that, but a LARGE number of people are, and my point was that, if we figure out how to do it (and you can bet people will work on that) you can be damn sure that there will be humans who happily take advantage of becoming smarter, and you can bet that there will then be competition amongst those humans to make themselves smarter still to remain competitive. Amongst human beings, the chance of that kind of dynamic NOT happening are vanishingly small.
"People have been taking drugs to make themselves smarter for a very long time. Why do you think so many people like coffee? There's relatively little evidence that any of these new drugs actually raise your intelligence in ways that a double-espresso doesn't."
So, because those current drugs don't necessarily have the desired effect, you don't think that someday there will be drugs that work? Or you don't think there are people researching better drugs for this right now? You kind of prove my point above - people WANT to be smarter and they actually try to accomplish it, but the tools we've had, to date, haven't necessarily been all that effective. They won't always be as ineffective and you can take as a near certainty that there are people working on more effective tools to boost human intelligence right now.
Some people may not care about it, but if you think it won't have a HUGE impact on the species when we can reliably boost our mental capacities in the ways that right now we can only imagine, you just don't know humans.
You're missing my entire point - you are assuming Earth life based concepts here, and I'm saying that it's possible the fundamental rules could be quite different. A species from such a planet might not really have that concept in their lexicon.
Your entire post makes so many assumptions about things that are near universal on earth so they must be elsewhere; I'm saying this may be true but it very well may not be - we simply cannot know. Our entire experience with life-forms and rules of species interactions has been based on life evolving on Earth. How can we possibly know what MUST be true of life-forms and ecosystems in environments that may not even be planetary?
My feeling is that life elsewhere will likely be both stranger and less strange than we think, and it might be a good idea, since the stakes *could* potentially be the survival of our species, for some thought to go into it to try and absorb the idea that maybe things we assume are completely fundamental characteristics of all life everywhere just might not be.
In another thousand or so years, assuming we're still here, it would be trivial to send out messages using every single technology that we were aware of for transmission. Any effort to get in contact with another species would almost certainly use multiple methods we'd figured out, on the off chance that they had too.
While another species might not think like that, it isn't completely unreasonable to think they might come to some of the same conclusions (i.e. more ways of sending a message makes it more likely that someone will be able to hear it) if they wanted to get in touch with us.
Of course, ET might just be a bit haughty and refuse to talk to anyone who hadn't figured out pulsed gravity wave communication or something like that - maybe the mode of communication could be an IQ test for them.
On Earth, among human societies, open societies tend to make more scientific progress. Why is that? What are the fundamental principles that cause that to be (mostly) true here on Earth, with Humans? If the fundamental principles also apply to different species from different parts of the universe (maybe not even planetarily evolved) that have evolved in entirely different environments, then maybe that would also apply.
There are all kinds of examples of things that are taken for granted as simple inevitable aspects of human nature that turn out to be wildly variable once you expand your scope to look at other societies; we may well find this same thing to be true with extra-terrestrial life forms.
The trivial amount of resources the Earth has vs. the vastly more abundant resources that could be obtained without any kind of headache by simply demolishing uninhabited worlds is probably incentive enough to not wipe us out.
However, if a species was paranoid and wanted to make sure they wouldn't have any competition, then sure - wiping out 99.99% of humanity and then keeping the rest for zoo specimens might make sense.
I can actually see artificial selection taking over at that point. Right now, with our species, we have people attempting to boost their effective intelligence through pharmaceuticals - it's certainly extremely likely that once we really get cooking with genetic modification and the melding of our brains with technology (and assuming we don't wipe ourselves out, I'd say it's extremely unlikely that we WON'T do those things), our intelligence would be in our own hands and there would be motivation to keep getting smarter.
I do agree that evolution, in and of itself, will not necessarily favor more and more intelligence, but once we take our destiny as a species into our own hands, things change fundamentally.
Often, but not always. And it is possible that some of that may be attributable to our genetic legacy and one of the primary drives for evolution on Earth.
But, what if life on another planet started off with a different scenario, and rather than massive competition for resources, cooperation was the overriding measure of fitness? Any species there that attempted to consume another might quickly go extinct, while species that were cooperative might thrive.
I'm not saying aliens couldn't be hostile, just that there may be other paradigms out there than the "red in tooth and claw" one that is *usually* the case with species interactions and evolution on Earth.
Microbes may well have managed to get from Mars to Earth (or vice versa) without even needing spacecraft to do it. By the "we've gotten to another celestial body" metric, microbes are sentient. Before you say "but human beings did it purposely" - yes, to us we did, but other species might not see it that way, especially if they have no way of really examining what we do and sensing the motive.
We do this kind of thing all the time on Earth - either anthropomorphizing animals ("My cat knocked my laptop on the ground because it is jealous that I use it so much") too much, or not enough ("It's okay to beat an animal to train it because they don't feel pain like we do"). It is possible that a species that things in vastly different ways than we do might just see the development of simple tools (and to them our spacecraft might be very simple) as something that lower animals do in order to look for new food sources. Or that technology is simply an instinctive thing we do, much like bees make hives and beavers make dams.
Probably any race that we'd be able to contact - even a one way contact like just listening in on signals they send us - would be enough like us to see us as vastly inferior and sentient, but I'm not totally convinced, and hell, to be honest, I'm not really even sure humanity *is* 100% sentient. We do shit all the time that makes no sense, we're not clear on our motives, our cognitive processes are often completely out of our control - what we think of as the bright spark of self-awareness may not even be a candle to a species that is completely aware of every aspect of their consciousness and able to handle that massive amount of input. Just the way we might look at a dog and think it possesses some extremely limited sentience, and I'd say any species much more advanced than we are could very well look at us in that same way.
But yes, hopefully unappetizing, or, at the least, not worth the shipping cost to get us on the dinner table while still fresh.
"Don't be a loud, obnoxious asshole." Works for phones or any kind of conversation you're having in a public space.
"Don't drive like an asshole." Works for phones, texting, or just generally not paying attention to the multi-ton machine you're controlling while it hurtles down the road.
"Don't pull the asshole move of interrupting someone who is speaking to you by doing something else." Works for people who get a call in the middle of a conversation.
Really, "Don't be an asshole" is about all the etiquette we really need, and it's a lot simpler than trying to remember Emily Post.
Your other comments aside, the magsafe thing isn't popping out all the time, and it is, in fact, quite useful when in places where it isn't just you, a power-cord and your computer. I am in airports a LOT, and one constant is children running around, while another near constant is the inability to get a seat right next to an outlet because, of course, everyone else got there first. Trust me, it's much nicer to have the thing unplug than to have it get dumped on the floor.
No matter how hard I try to make sure that the cord is out of the way, there is ALWAYS a tiny foot that will snag it or an errant bag rolling by that will get caught on it, and it's a good thing.
Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention - the sleep mode is 100x better on the MacBook than on the Thinkpad. I never know what's going to happen when I close the lid on my Thinkpad and open it up again (which is mostly an issue with Windows), but my MacBook handles it much more gracefully.
Basically what it comes down to is that I want my gadgets to work for me, rather than requiring me to adapt my work style to them. I will make some accomodations if the technology just isn't there yet, but it's clear that the tech *is* there, just most manufacturers aren't willing to polish their offerings to the same level Apple has.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and a MacBook Pro on my desk at work, and one of them is a piece of shit while the other one is a fantastic machine. Both cost roughly the same (work for a university, get great pricing) - I think the MacBook was $150 more.
The MacBook has: - Multi-touch trackpad - Built in camera/mic - slot-load superdrive - weighs less - nicer display - way longer battery life - OS X (and other OSs running in virtualization) - Unibody (solid as hell) - MagSafe
The Thinkpad has: - Lots more ports (which I almost never use, but they're there if I need 'em) - Fingerprint scanner (which I stopped using since it takes 5-6 swipes to ever get my print right) - No OS X (but other OSs running in virtualization) - Slightly better processor (which I don't notice), bigger HDD (nice, but if I ever really need more space I'll just bring along an external HDD)
I loan the Thinkpad out to my interns and I get my work done on the MacBook. I don't like Apple stuff because it's pretty (though it is), I like it because generally they get their hardware right. Half of the people in my lab have switched over to using MacBooks (and then putting Windows on them) because they're just much more solidly constructed and convenient for mobile working.
The *functional* design of the MacBook is far superior to the Thinkpad. Find me another provider of laptops that can match Apple for quality of build, features offered, and weight/battery-life and I'll certainly consider them. Until then, I'll stick with the equipment that works best for what I need, and right now that's the MBP.
Tell me your address and I'll send the police over immediately - I know it's terrifying being forced to read these stories at gunpoint, but help is on the way!
Screw talking about some hypothetical gadget - what we should really be discussing is the huge number of people who are being forced to read and comment on articles they don't want to read. Why isn't the government doing something about this?!!
I don't disagree, though some workplaces are different. Where I work, depending on how funding cycles go and depending on whether or not we're launching a project or just in maintenance mode, nobody has a problem with people taking downtime in the form of gaming or whatever else. About 60% of the time, I have enough to do to keep me busy 40+ hours a week. The rest of the time my job is essentially part-time, and I'm encouraged to work on my own projects or just have fun to recharge my batteries for the next big project.
I think that you're reading my view of healthy behavior wrong.
I look at healthy behavior as "behavior that doesn't cut you off from options you want to do or interfere with your life in a way that causes problems" - more or less. In the case of someone who is cutting themselves off from personal relationships, losing a job, dropping out of school, or becoming physically sick from playing too much - yes, that's unhealthy. It is the same kind of unhealthy as any kind of addiction - drugs, alcohol, sex, food, work, whatever.
Some people can play games or use drugs or drink or have sex or enjoy food or work hard to succeed, or whatever else and it doesn't impair their ability to function in other areas - to me, that's healthy. It's when someone's activities start to really impact them negatively that it becomes unhealthy.
As to the issue of grinding in real life - it's only a grind if you don't enjoy the process. I love taking classes and learning new things, not just the degree that comes at the end of it. I love developing research protocols and not just the publication credits that come after. I'd damn well better, considering that being awarded a degree or getting a publication credit is a very brief thing, while the process stuff is a huge part of my life! Toiling away at something that you don't like doing in order to get a brief moment of reward - that seems very sad to me, and I'm fortunate not to be in that position.
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Oh, for the love of christ, get over yourself. People are sheep because they don't want to spend time and energy maintaining their gadgets, they just want to use them?
YOU are the sheep because you think that defective gadgets - ones where you need to spend time and energy on maintenance that a PROPERLY designed gadget wouldn't require - somehow makes you a better person. Rather than holding the people who design and sell those faulty gadgets responsible for releasing a shitty product, you instead seem to think it is a *virtue* that you're willing to put up with a crappy device that requires you to spend tons of time on tasks unrelated to what you want to do just so you can use their devices. You actually think it's a *good* thing that you have to do this!
Talk about being a brainwashed sheep!
I want tools that DO WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO with a minimal amount of hassle and that don't require me to spend tons of time making sure they're in good shape before I use them. When I want to use a web enabled device, I want to just surf the goddamn web. I don't want to spend 30 minutes checking for the latest viruses and exploits, scanning my system, and dealing with all that bullshit - I just want to surf the web and do whatever it is I'm going to do there. When I want to install an application on my computer I don't want to have to dick around with making sure permissions are right or that all dependencies are met or any of that - I just want to click as few buttons as possible and then use the application.
Please, though, feel free to continue to imagine that you're somehow better than everyone else because your time is worth so little to you that you're more than happy to spend your time making up for the failures of the people who provide you with gadgets and software to do their jobs better. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be getting actual work done or having fun with our gadgets. If not wasting my time doing bunches of routine maintenance tasks with my electronics makes me a sheep, then baa baa baa, guilty as charged.
Excuse me, but where, exactly, was I speculating wildly? Where did I say anything other than "things may be different elsewhere due to different conditions"? Is it really considered to be "wild" speculation to say "we only have 1 instance of life that we know anything about, maybe life is different elsewhere, we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this is the only way it can be"?
In fact, I think it's the people, like you, who are so damn certain that these rules MUST apply elsewhere, that are actually speculating wildly - you're trying to apply what you've seen in exactly 1 case of life to *every* other possible life form in the universe, with *zero* evidence to support that notion.
And, actually, I chose my quote *exactly* because Newton used it. See, with physics, we actually have observations of other places in the universe where we can see that physics works essentially the same everywhere. With life, not so much. Unless there's been some fundamental discovery that we can now go from basic physics to a complete model of all possible life forms? I mean, I'd like to think I'd have heard about that.
Anyway, let's address your specific examples:
1) "Life will expand to the limit of resources" - you say that this *MUST* happen because a lifeform that does this will be more numerous than one that does not. Are you then saying that more numerous = more successful? Because, within the context of this whole greater discussion (ET coming here and getting rowdy), quantity isn't relevant, but quality sure is. Silverfish massively outnumber human beings on Earth; are you suggesting that they are thus the most likely creatures on the planet to go out into space and contact another civilization?
2) Please explain how evolution is a necessary byproduct of mathematics. Because I'd say that'd be pretty damn revolutionary if you could demonstrate that biological evolution comes from mathematical axioms. An essentially geometric proof of evolution would certainly be useful in quite a few areas.
3) With regards to first world countries - you still haven't demonstrated why it is that some members of those populations are NOT expanding to the limit of their resources; you've simply waved your hand and said "but they consume more resources per individual." If people actually *did* "ALWAYS" (and remember, that was my criterion) expand to the limit of their resources, wealthy people with more money than they could possibly spend, would be having vast numbers of children - yet, interestingly, they are not. Why not? Could it be because there is not ALWAYS a drive to expand to resource exhaustion, and at some point or in some situations, expanding to the point of resource exhaustion actually ISN'T the best strategy?
4) Tragedy of the commons - the problem here is that "expansion" does not equal "success." Let me give you a counter example: I have 100 different people who share a certain patch of ground. By and large, these people are pretty specialized - so each provides something useful for the health and well being of the other 99. Not NECESSARY, but simply "useful." Let's say that 1 person says "screw it, I'll expand, and use more than my 1% of this shared resource." Well, in this situation, the other 99 people, who had been working together happily before, say "Oh, well, then you can't have any of the things we provide." Rather quickly the expanding member realizes that it's a better situation to stay with that 1% rather than have 2% (and everyone else winds up with about .99% percent - barely being hurt - because they are willing to reallocate resources so that no member gets particularly harmed by the expansive jerk. In this situation you wind up with the cooperative 99% not really feeling much of a pinch at all, yet that expansive 1 person, even though he now has twice as many resources as he did before, is absolutely screwed. Lo, you have a situation wherein expansion is bad, cooperation is good., and it would require a very large portion of the population to suddenly embr
Okay, let me say this for the last time:
You and the other people in this thread who are saying that how it is on Earth is how it must be elsewhere with regards to "basic" or "fundamental" laws of "life" or "evolution" are arguing that, from a sample size of exactly 1, that you think you know what the fundamental rules are elsewhere. Basically, you and them are arguing that we know - based on our sample of 1 environment where life came to be - some of the axioms of life.
I am saying that these axioms may not be nearly as axiomatic as you think, and may, in fact, only seem to be axiomatic due to the accidents and circumstances of the Earth and environment, and that other environments may be so radically different, that other pseudo-axioms for the dynamics of life could be different there.
Considering that even experts in the field of biology can't necessarily agree what "life" even is, what is a living creature and isn't; considering that until as recently as 1977 we thought there were only 2 main types of life and yet there has been found a 3rd; considering that until fairly recently it was believed that there was no possible way that things could live in certain extremely hot, cold, or toxic environs; considering that there are recent findings in genetics that indicate that evolution may work by radically different mechanisms and have different dynamics than we know (horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics and other recent areas of study), I think it's the height of hubris, and is completely unscientific to even try to claim, with any certainty that we *know* things must be the same elsewhere.
Here's my question - why are you so certain it should be the same elsewhere as here? Give me the scientific argument for why these things *must* be the same everywhere else. I'm arguing that there could be myriad systems of dynamics because other systems may be fundamentally different, while you seem to be arguing that our system of dynamics MUST be the same elsewhere, despite us never seeing another example of life.
In physics there's the idea that the laws of physics are the same everywhere - and this is born out, more or less, by observations of physical phenomena elsewhere in the universe that seem to obey the same physics we have locally. So where's the observation of life that arose in radically different environments and how that life interacts? The answer is that we haven't seen it, there have been no observations, and anyone claiming that they know anything for a fact about life elsewhere is essentially just spouting dogma and not approaching it even remotely as a scientist would. About the only thing I'd be willing to say for sure would be that life elsewhere in this universe, whatever form it takes, will have behavior that ultimately results from the fundamental physical laws of the universe.
And unless I've missed a huge revolution in science, we don't actually know all of those fundamental laws. Oh, wait, make that 2 revolutions in science - the jump from physics to chemistry (wait, 3!) then from chemistry to biology (make that 4!) from biology to universal biological understanding of all possible bases for life. Now, I'm not the most up-to-date person in the world by any means, but I'd like to think that I'd have heard of things that epochal.
Mind you, I am inclined to think that there are some fundamental dynamics that will be more or less the same for life everywhere. But the difference between me and the others in this thread is that I don't claim to KNOW this for a fact. Trying to state that we know things for certain when there is NO evidence for it strikes me as just dumb - there is no benefit to claiming certainty, while the benefit of keeping an open mind is that it allows new information that we obtain to be examined with a little less bias.
But hey, if you guys want to treat your science like a religion, that's totally up to you; let me know how it works out for you.
I know you were probably going for "funny" but it's still an Earth based example that is laden with billions of years of Earth history and evolutionary legacy.
And I'd hardly call the Soviet system "cooperative" unless you mean "do as the beloved leader says or you'll die, and even if you do, you'll still likely die" when you say "cooperative."
Computers do not help you "think" faster really, they simply help you acquire data faster so that you can then think about them.
Computers magnify one or two aspects out of (tens? hundreds? thousands?) of human intelligence (and these aspects they do magnify are essentially the low hanging fruit of human intelligence), and you're right - even with just doing those extremely simple things, they have MASSIVELY expanded the capacity of one human or a group of humans who leverage that new capability.
So there's a pretty good example of human beings seeing ways to be smarter I didn't even think of it, to be honest, because it is SO omnipresent that I was pretty much blind to it being just one of the many ways that humans have *aggressively* seized on any way they can to improve their capabilities. Anything that has made it possible for a human to compete more effectively against other humans has, by and large, been adopted and improved. And it isn't just using technology as an external tool - people have adopted ways to make themselves function better, whether it be simply getting better nutrition and exercising to more extreme treatments like steroids or supposed IQ boosting drugs. I remember a few years back reading about professional athletes - pitchers in one example - having elective surgery on their pitching arms that would let them add a little more speed to their fastball. Pro golfers routinely get lasik when they can see just fine because it will make their vision better than average. These things may be done mostly by the elite now, but as the technology improves and it becomes easier and easier to enhance some aspect of our lives, people *will* embrace it because, by and large, history shows that they always have.
So am I unreasonable, as that one guy says, for positing that humans will continue to behave, by and large, as they always have? Or is he unreasonable for positing that - for no reason at all - human beings will simply stop behaving as they pretty much always have?
I say that it is EXTREMELY unlikely that humans would suddenly stop taking advantage of devices or treatments that would continue to improve their abilities in whatever way they could, and that definitely includes expanding our intellectual capacities as we learn how to do it.
But why will life "always" expand to the limit of resources? How do you know this to be "always" true of life EVERYWHERE in the universe? What fundamental law of physics (that we assume to be true everywhere as one of the axioms of physics) does this inevitably arise from?
I can see many situations on Earth where people choose to limit the number of offspring they have to replacement (or lower) levels. Look at First World countries - birthrates are declining despite the fact that, person per person, they use FAR more resources than people in Second and Third World countries. These First World nations are still successful (present economic woes aside) and still have a significant impact on the destiny of the human species, and certainly could live on SUBSTANTIALLY lower levels of resource utilization...
So, if life "always" expanded to the point of resource exhaustion, then why are we seeing cases where some fairly sizeable chunks are not doing this? Isn't it possible to imagine a population comprised entirely of creatures that seek equilibrium rather than expansion?
Please don't say "I can't imagine a situation in which..." because that's an incredibly bad argument. Lord Kelvin, pretty much THE preeminent scientist of his age, couldn't imagine a universe in which physics hadn't been "solved" and the rest wasn't just the tedious filling in of more decimal places, and then he got knocked on his ass when some troublemaker had this rock that seemed to be giving off energy... You can't imagine it because there's been no reason to imagine it - every single case of "alien life" that you have been exposed to has either been Terrestrial in origin (just a different eco system) or invented by human beings who were telling stories, and as such entirely grounded in Earth, our history on Earth, our minds which evolved on Earth, etc. You don't think this could give us a pretty huge blind-spot when it comes to thinking about how things might be elsewhere? A huge bias that is so omnipresent that we don't even know it's there?
At least wait to see if the "fundamental" laws of life (whatever life even is) has been replicated somewhere else in the universe before boldly planting your flag in the ground and saying, "On Earth as it must be in Heaven!"
Why?
There are 2 arguments in this sub-thread:
1: "There is only one way that life can be, only one way that evolution can operate, and that's how it is here on Earth, which is only 1 kind of environment and history out of essentially infinite possibilities, but hey, all life we currently know of behaves like this so it MUST be true!"
and
2: "We have one example of life - Earth. On Earth pretty much all living things that we've found so far follows some rules, and we think they're probably pretty basic. However, we're open to the possibility that life evolving elsewhere in the universe - possibly under radically different conditions (maybe not even on a planet) - might behave differently. Once we find some life elsewhere, if it also follows some of the things we think of as fundamental, maybe then we can say those things are actually fundamental, but until then it's probably not a bad idea to keep an open mind."
Which one seems more like a dogmatic response, and which seems like a scientific one?
We can't even get everyone who studies the question to agree what life *is* and yet you have people in this thread arguing that it is a solved question in every way, and confidently predicting - no, INSISTING - that life everywhere else will behave just as it does on Earth. I'm not saying that it *won't* behave in many ways similarly, but I think it's wrong to INSIST that it does until we actually have more than 1 size to sample.
Remember when a few years back people insisted that life couldn't *possibly* exist in certain extreme conditions (cold, heat, chemical environments, etc.)? And yet, lo, life has been found to be quite happily chugging away in those conditions. Forgive me if I'm a little leery of people who want to say that things MUST be one way or another in a field that isn't, in fact, completely 100% solved, and where surprising discoveries happen on a frequent basis.
I think largely the possibility of humans being the hostile ones would be about the elimination of competition instead of the scarcity of resources. Frankly, if we have FTL and the attendant technology, we'd be much better off just ripping up stars where there's nobody around to try and stop us from gathering resources.
By the time we'd run out of stars to use, I'm reasonably sure that "humanity" would have changed to something that we can't even imagine now.
We may be war mongering assholes, but I think we're economic minded warmongering assholes, and so the question would become: "If I can go fly off to another star system and rip it apart and get all the resources I could possibly need for my lifetime and the lifetimes of 15 generations of my offspring, without conflict, is it better to do that, or should I go be a warmongering asshole and fight a battle I might lose with some other warmongering asshole over pretty much those exact same resources?"
Or, if we really do have easy FTL, it might be "Whelp, I need to eradicate everyone with a belief system that differs even a tiny bit from my own because they'll kill me if I don't kill them" and then we all die.
So since the choices are "we all die in massive genocidal conflicts" or "we realize we can satisfy our greed for the farthest we can reasonably imagine, safely and without needing to risk death" I'll go with the one that gives us a future :)
Though I do want Galactica, so maybe warmongering assholes aren't all bad.
True fact: I used the word "asshole" more than 3 times in 2 posts on /. today, and in entirely different stories, and not once was it directed at another person.
We have exactly 1 instance to go on when talking about how evolution works: Life on Earth. ANYTHING we think is a fundamental truth about life, and this includes evolution, is based on the entire history of Earth and all the accidents that entails, and maynot be fundamental at all and a result of circumstances.
Note my use of the word "may" in there? Note the fact that I'm not saying one way or another that I know something to be true, fundamental and RIGHT? My entire point is that making assumptions based on what we think are "fundamental rules" about life - a massively complex and crazily difficult phenomenon that we aren't even sure what it actually *means* for something to be alive - may just be circumstantial variables.
Let me throw something out there as a bit of a digression:
One of us has room for modification in her stance, the other of us does not. What will you do if we do in fact find some other life form in the universe that violates one of the things you think are so fundamental? You'd have to change the *entire* framework for your system because it cannot admit to the possibility that there may be other rulesets that can work for evolution; the fundamentals will have to change. In my case, if we find multiple instances of life out there and they all seem to hew to these supposed fundamentals, THEN I'd be more willing to put some credit to the notion that those concepts may be fundamental, but even then, it isn't like my whole system has been uprooted.
For what it's worth, I do, actually, suspect that it's highly likely that some of the things we consider pretty fundamental about life are true. But I think it's foolish to actually plant my flag in it and say it's got to be that way - there's *absolutely* no advantage to me in being "certain" while there's TONS of benefit to me to being able to be open minded about it.
Intelligence may not be well enough understood *now* to do much meaningful work in the field, but you know, there's that whole concept of "progress." Science is rife with things that were previously completely misunderstood/overly complex to do meaningful work on, but now are reasonably well understood and certainly have lead to meaningful work.
As for evidence that a sizeable minority would be interested in self-improvement in the form of some kind of modification, are you kidding me? The fact that parents in the middle class and up are trying to crush, kill or maim to get their kids into elite institutions, force-feed average kids AP everything, and will medicate their precious snowflakes into a stupor in order to help boost their concentration doesn't make you think that there'd be a push for this?
Or the fact that amongst people who favor a more "creative" kind of intelligence, substance use has been an ongoing thing because some feel it helps them get in touch with their creative center?
Or the massive self-help industry where people spend tons of money trying to find ways to be more productive, more efficient, more effective in general?
As to the issue of "what is intelligence" and people pushing their own definition in research, you do know that there are likely quite a few different people/groups working on this, in one way or another? Each person/group approaching it from a different standpoint?
As to the question of that minority basically coming to redefine humanity, it's pretty easy to see, actually - individuals who have received treatments to enhance their capabilities could likely find it easier to manipulate the mechanisms that allow an individual to accrue personal power in our current system. Smart doesn't always equal powerful, but I will submit that there are very few truly powerful people who are not extremely intelligent, by one definition or another. When it comes to talking about the destiny of the species, it's the movers and shakers that ultimately matter. Joe Six-Pack may be a helluva guy, salt o' th' Earth, but his impact on humanity is negligible - he is, strictly speaking not all that relevant. Cold but true.
And to get at a couple of specific things you said:
More memory - meh, that's overrated. I have google, so as long as I know how to look things up, I'm in like Flynn.
Faster thinking, however - THAT is a biggie. If I can think twice as fast as you can, and if I train myself to think critically, all other things being equal, I'll usually be several steps ahead of you in thinking things through.
But why limit it to those kinds of things? Why not throw in "thinking different" as an option? What if there were a treatment that would allow one to "hear" their sub-conscious thoughts, where it seems that quite a bit of processing goes on? What about a treatment that (however it does this) allows one to more directly tap into intuition? Or hell, even one that allows a person to moderate their emotional responses to things (emotion has been shown to hinder judgment) so that they can simply focus deeply on a given task, with their full attention?
The point being, I think your quick dismissal of the advantages of more "intelligence" (whatever it is, and I think it's likely tons of different things) indicates a failure of imagination mixed with a pretty naive view of humanity.
First, let me clarify, I am ONLY talking about humans, and everything I said is based on my experience as a member of that species and a student of history of that species.
Second, your comments:
"Sure, YOU might like to be smarter. I might like to be smarter too. But that doesn't translate to the species having any real use for more intelligence. We'd be much better served by providing First World educations to everyone in the Third World than we'd be if we developed a way to make you (or me) smarter."
Yes, I'd like it. And many other people would. And many people who are frighteningly ambitious certainly would. Now, not everyone is driven to be competitive like that, but a LARGE number of people are, and my point was that, if we figure out how to do it (and you can bet people will work on that) you can be damn sure that there will be humans who happily take advantage of becoming smarter, and you can bet that there will then be competition amongst those humans to make themselves smarter still to remain competitive. Amongst human beings, the chance of that kind of dynamic NOT happening are vanishingly small.
"People have been taking drugs to make themselves smarter for a very long time. Why do you think so many people like coffee? There's relatively little evidence that any of these new drugs actually raise your intelligence in ways that a double-espresso doesn't."
So, because those current drugs don't necessarily have the desired effect, you don't think that someday there will be drugs that work? Or you don't think there are people researching better drugs for this right now? You kind of prove my point above - people WANT to be smarter and they actually try to accomplish it, but the tools we've had, to date, haven't necessarily been all that effective. They won't always be as ineffective and you can take as a near certainty that there are people working on more effective tools to boost human intelligence right now.
Some people may not care about it, but if you think it won't have a HUGE impact on the species when we can reliably boost our mental capacities in the ways that right now we can only imagine, you just don't know humans.
You're missing my entire point - you are assuming Earth life based concepts here, and I'm saying that it's possible the fundamental rules could be quite different. A species from such a planet might not really have that concept in their lexicon.
Your entire post makes so many assumptions about things that are near universal on earth so they must be elsewhere; I'm saying this may be true but it very well may not be - we simply cannot know. Our entire experience with life-forms and rules of species interactions has been based on life evolving on Earth. How can we possibly know what MUST be true of life-forms and ecosystems in environments that may not even be planetary?
My feeling is that life elsewhere will likely be both stranger and less strange than we think, and it might be a good idea, since the stakes *could* potentially be the survival of our species, for some thought to go into it to try and absorb the idea that maybe things we assume are completely fundamental characteristics of all life everywhere just might not be.
In another thousand or so years, assuming we're still here, it would be trivial to send out messages using every single technology that we were aware of for transmission. Any effort to get in contact with another species would almost certainly use multiple methods we'd figured out, on the off chance that they had too.
While another species might not think like that, it isn't completely unreasonable to think they might come to some of the same conclusions (i.e. more ways of sending a message makes it more likely that someone will be able to hear it) if they wanted to get in touch with us.
Of course, ET might just be a bit haughty and refuse to talk to anyone who hadn't figured out pulsed gravity wave communication or something like that - maybe the mode of communication could be an IQ test for them.
On Earth, among human societies, open societies tend to make more scientific progress. Why is that? What are the fundamental principles that cause that to be (mostly) true here on Earth, with Humans? If the fundamental principles also apply to different species from different parts of the universe (maybe not even planetarily evolved) that have evolved in entirely different environments, then maybe that would also apply.
There are all kinds of examples of things that are taken for granted as simple inevitable aspects of human nature that turn out to be wildly variable once you expand your scope to look at other societies; we may well find this same thing to be true with extra-terrestrial life forms.
The trivial amount of resources the Earth has vs. the vastly more abundant resources that could be obtained without any kind of headache by simply demolishing uninhabited worlds is probably incentive enough to not wipe us out.
However, if a species was paranoid and wanted to make sure they wouldn't have any competition, then sure - wiping out 99.99% of humanity and then keeping the rest for zoo specimens might make sense.
I can actually see artificial selection taking over at that point. Right now, with our species, we have people attempting to boost their effective intelligence through pharmaceuticals - it's certainly extremely likely that once we really get cooking with genetic modification and the melding of our brains with technology (and assuming we don't wipe ourselves out, I'd say it's extremely unlikely that we WON'T do those things), our intelligence would be in our own hands and there would be motivation to keep getting smarter.
I do agree that evolution, in and of itself, will not necessarily favor more and more intelligence, but once we take our destiny as a species into our own hands, things change fundamentally.
Often, but not always. And it is possible that some of that may be attributable to our genetic legacy and one of the primary drives for evolution on Earth.
But, what if life on another planet started off with a different scenario, and rather than massive competition for resources, cooperation was the overriding measure of fitness? Any species there that attempted to consume another might quickly go extinct, while species that were cooperative might thrive.
I'm not saying aliens couldn't be hostile, just that there may be other paradigms out there than the "red in tooth and claw" one that is *usually* the case with species interactions and evolution on Earth.
Microbes may well have managed to get from Mars to Earth (or vice versa) without even needing spacecraft to do it. By the "we've gotten to another celestial body" metric, microbes are sentient. Before you say "but human beings did it purposely" - yes, to us we did, but other species might not see it that way, especially if they have no way of really examining what we do and sensing the motive.
We do this kind of thing all the time on Earth - either anthropomorphizing animals ("My cat knocked my laptop on the ground because it is jealous that I use it so much") too much, or not enough ("It's okay to beat an animal to train it because they don't feel pain like we do"). It is possible that a species that things in vastly different ways than we do might just see the development of simple tools (and to them our spacecraft might be very simple) as something that lower animals do in order to look for new food sources. Or that technology is simply an instinctive thing we do, much like bees make hives and beavers make dams.
Probably any race that we'd be able to contact - even a one way contact like just listening in on signals they send us - would be enough like us to see us as vastly inferior and sentient, but I'm not totally convinced, and hell, to be honest, I'm not really even sure humanity *is* 100% sentient. We do shit all the time that makes no sense, we're not clear on our motives, our cognitive processes are often completely out of our control - what we think of as the bright spark of self-awareness may not even be a candle to a species that is completely aware of every aspect of their consciousness and able to handle that massive amount of input. Just the way we might look at a dog and think it possesses some extremely limited sentience, and I'd say any species much more advanced than we are could very well look at us in that same way.
But yes, hopefully unappetizing, or, at the least, not worth the shipping cost to get us on the dinner table while still fresh.
"Don't be a loud, obnoxious asshole." Works for phones or any kind of conversation you're having in a public space.
"Don't drive like an asshole." Works for phones, texting, or just generally not paying attention to the multi-ton machine you're controlling while it hurtles down the road.
"Don't pull the asshole move of interrupting someone who is speaking to you by doing something else." Works for people who get a call in the middle of a conversation.
Really, "Don't be an asshole" is about all the etiquette we really need, and it's a lot simpler than trying to remember Emily Post.
Your other comments aside, the magsafe thing isn't popping out all the time, and it is, in fact, quite useful when in places where it isn't just you, a power-cord and your computer. I am in airports a LOT, and one constant is children running around, while another near constant is the inability to get a seat right next to an outlet because, of course, everyone else got there first. Trust me, it's much nicer to have the thing unplug than to have it get dumped on the floor.
No matter how hard I try to make sure that the cord is out of the way, there is ALWAYS a tiny foot that will snag it or an errant bag rolling by that will get caught on it, and it's a good thing.
Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention - the sleep mode is 100x better on the MacBook than on the Thinkpad. I never know what's going to happen when I close the lid on my Thinkpad and open it up again (which is mostly an issue with Windows), but my MacBook handles it much more gracefully.
Basically what it comes down to is that I want my gadgets to work for me, rather than requiring me to adapt my work style to them. I will make some accomodations if the technology just isn't there yet, but it's clear that the tech *is* there, just most manufacturers aren't willing to polish their offerings to the same level Apple has.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and a MacBook Pro on my desk at work, and one of them is a piece of shit while the other one is a fantastic machine. Both cost roughly the same (work for a university, get great pricing) - I think the MacBook was $150 more.
The MacBook has:
- Multi-touch trackpad
- Built in camera/mic
- slot-load superdrive
- weighs less
- nicer display
- way longer battery life
- OS X (and other OSs running in virtualization)
- Unibody (solid as hell)
- MagSafe
The Thinkpad has:
- Lots more ports (which I almost never use, but they're there if I need 'em)
- Fingerprint scanner (which I stopped using since it takes 5-6 swipes to ever get my print right)
- No OS X (but other OSs running in virtualization)
- Slightly better processor (which I don't notice), bigger HDD (nice, but if I ever really need more space I'll just bring along an external HDD)
I loan the Thinkpad out to my interns and I get my work done on the MacBook. I don't like Apple stuff because it's pretty (though it is), I like it because generally they get their hardware right. Half of the people in my lab have switched over to using MacBooks (and then putting Windows on them) because they're just much more solidly constructed and convenient for mobile working.
The *functional* design of the MacBook is far superior to the Thinkpad. Find me another provider of laptops that can match Apple for quality of build, features offered, and weight/battery-life and I'll certainly consider them. Until then, I'll stick with the equipment that works best for what I need, and right now that's the MBP.
I wanted to reply, but I didn't read your comment because nobody forced me to. Was it a good one? Did it involve cheese?
Tell me your address and I'll send the police over immediately - I know it's terrifying being forced to read these stories at gunpoint, but help is on the way!
Screw talking about some hypothetical gadget - what we should really be discussing is the huge number of people who are being forced to read and comment on articles they don't want to read. Why isn't the government doing something about this?!!
I don't disagree, though some workplaces are different. Where I work, depending on how funding cycles go and depending on whether or not we're launching a project or just in maintenance mode, nobody has a problem with people taking downtime in the form of gaming or whatever else. About 60% of the time, I have enough to do to keep me busy 40+ hours a week. The rest of the time my job is essentially part-time, and I'm encouraged to work on my own projects or just have fun to recharge my batteries for the next big project.
I think that you're reading my view of healthy behavior wrong.
I look at healthy behavior as "behavior that doesn't cut you off from options you want to do or interfere with your life in a way that causes problems" - more or less. In the case of someone who is cutting themselves off from personal relationships, losing a job, dropping out of school, or becoming physically sick from playing too much - yes, that's unhealthy. It is the same kind of unhealthy as any kind of addiction - drugs, alcohol, sex, food, work, whatever.
Some people can play games or use drugs or drink or have sex or enjoy food or work hard to succeed, or whatever else and it doesn't impair their ability to function in other areas - to me, that's healthy. It's when someone's activities start to really impact them negatively that it becomes unhealthy.
As to the issue of grinding in real life - it's only a grind if you don't enjoy the process. I love taking classes and learning new things, not just the degree that comes at the end of it. I love developing research protocols and not just the publication credits that come after. I'd damn well better, considering that being awarded a degree or getting a publication credit is a very brief thing, while the process stuff is a huge part of my life! Toiling away at something that you don't like doing in order to get a brief moment of reward - that seems very sad to me, and I'm fortunate not to be in that position.