Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <9JOdneqwjrQEzrzbnZ2dnUVZ_jidnZ2d@comcast.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:

> Paul Schlyter wrote:
>> In article <LpGdnTLy6-R3BIHbnZ2dnUVZ_riknZ2d@comcast.com>,
>> Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>>
>>>>In article <GpydneZZdYGAfobbnZ2dnUVZ_rGinZ2d@comcast.com>,
>>>>Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>In article <7a-dnb0A54Ec7YfbnZ2dnUVZ_g2dnZ2d@comcast.com>,
>>>>>>Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>In article <1176090609.786374.263150@b75g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
>>>>>>>>mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>On Apr 9, 4:47 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>True, but when the sun becomes a red giant, the earth will be
>>>>>>>>>>well and truly cooked.  Hopefully, we will have found new places
>>>>>>>>>>to live before then.  ;-)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>Since I think that mankind's destiny transcends the destiny of
>>>>>>>>>>the solar system, the sun's end may not mean the extinction of
>>>>>>>>>>mankind.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>Destiny is a little fatalistic for my tastes :-) But logic would seem
>>>>>>>>>to dictate that if human civilization survives even 50% of the time
>>>>>>>>>remaining before the Sun becomes a problem then the technology to live
>>>>>>>>>elsewhere, or even repair the Sun (we are after all a nostalgic bunch)
>>>>>>>>>should be available :-)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>It always amuses me when people believe that human civilization will
>>>>>>>>still be around several billions of years into the future....
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Think back a billion years.  Life on Earth was then very primitive -
>>>>>>>>this was well before the cambrian explosion of life.  A lot has
>>>>>>>>happened in the evolution of life on Earth since the, right?  Man-like
>>>>>>>>animals have been around for only a few million years, modern man has
>>>>>>>>been around for only some hundreds of thousands of years, and human
>>>>>>>>civilization has been around for only a few thousand years.  So why do
>>>>>>>>you believe evolution will stop now, so mankind will be around several
>>>>>>>>billions of years into the future?  Are we slowing evolution down?  No
>>>>>>>>way!  Instead, we're rather speeding it up with our technological
>>>>>>>>advances, which now are influencing the Earth also on a global scale.
>>>>>>>>Our artificial breeding of both plants and animals also speeds up
>>>>>>>>evolution a lot.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>In a way I like that very long-term perspective though, and it would
>>>>>>>>indeed be nice if such a long-term perspective gained wide acceptance
>>>>>>>>within mankind.  We would certainly deal with e.g. the global warming
>>>>>>>>issue in a quite different way if we really considered billions of
>>>>>>>>years of future, rather than at most a few decades of future....
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Anyway, mankind will definitely be gone since a very long time a
>>>>>>>>few billions of years into the future.  Either we will be extinct, or
>>>>>>>>else we will have evolved into something else.  And there may of course
>>>>>>>>be more than one future branch of evolution from present-day mankind.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>That was my point in referring to "mankinds heirs".
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I don't see the word "heirs" in the quotes above.... :-)
>>>>>
>>>>>No, I used it in an offshoot of this thread.  This is a weakness of
>>>>>tree-structured conversations.  ;-)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>>It is possible that carbon-based life will give way to silicon-based
>>>>>>>life, which will not depend on biology as we understand it.  This
>>>>>>>form of life could be much better adapted to living in a vacuum,
>>>>>>>for example.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Although popular in science fiction, silicon based molecules are less
>>>>>>complex than carbon based molecules, therefore complex life forms
>>>>>>based on silicone seem less likely.  But of course we don't really know...
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I wouldn't want to call silicon based life forms "mankinds heirs".
>>>>>>If life switched to silicone based chemistry, that would be a completely
>>>>>>new branch in the tree of evolution.  Perhaps it could happen briefly
>>>>>>during the Sun's red giant stage, when the high temperature had killed
>>>>>>all carbon based life forms?
>>>>>
>>>>>I'm actually referring to a more mechanical version of "life" than
>>>>>that composed of cells and liquids.  Computation and servos instead
>>>>>of neurons and muscles.  One could call these creatures "robots", but
>>>>>the ones I'm talking about have "personal consciousness" like us--
>>>>>hence our "heirs".
>>>>
>>>>I think we'll have to include some electronics here though.  Purely
>>>>mechanical machines are a bit too coarse for the complexity required
>>>>for life.  Remember Charle's Babbage's failed attempt to build a
>>>>purely mechanical computer in the 1800's.  And even today's much more
>>>>complex computers are quite simple compared to a living organism.
>>>>
>>>>Now, if we include some electronics, something interesting will
>>>>happen: these machines will run on electricity - just like biological
>>>>creatures!
>>>
>>>That was exactly what I meant by "mechanical"--sorry for using it
>>>in a general and inclusive sense.  Electronics is just "electron
>>>mechanics", after all.
>> 
>> 
>> Then your use of "mechanics" is non-standard.  Consider a harddisk,
>> and compare ot to e.g. flash memory.  The latter is often said
>> to have "no mechanical parts", as opposed to the former.  But to you
>> both are purely mechanical.
> 
> I think my meaning was pretty clear.  I was referring to a fully
> reductionist embodiment of conscious beings, in contrast to the
> "wetware" embodiment we are familiar with.
> 
> BTW, how do you feel about quantum mechanics?  ;-)

OK -- how do you feel about fluid mechanics then?  ;-)

The biological "wetware" is just as mechanical as electronics, since
they're both based on quantum mechanics.  Right?
 
>>>And biological creatures use electricity, but they actually run
>>>on chemical reactions, which are much slower than transistors.
>> 
>> True, but biology instead uses massive parallellism to gain speed.
>> One example: let a human look at a photo with many people and there
>> recognize a specific well-know face.  Now, try to let a computer do
>> the same thing.  Or let a computer scan a printed page and OCR the
>> text.  Next, let a human read the same text.  Which one has the
>> biggest error rate?
> 
> OK--but massive parallelism, whether realized with chemistry or
> electronics is beside the point, and accessible in both domains.

True.  And speed is not an issue when one judges whether a process
is mechanical or not.  Consider e.g. celestial mechanics, where a
celestial body in the outer solar system may need centuries or more
to complete one revolution in its orbit.  Bioligical electricity,
or mechanics if you so like, is much faster than that.
 
>>>>If it's feasible for machines to have "personal consciousness", then
>>>>surely insects can have that too!  They too are quite complex
>>>>machines, much more complex than anything we can build today.
>>>
>>>Certainly.  On Earth, we made it to "level 4 intelligence" first,
>>>and will surely regulate the graduation of any other species on
>>>the planet to that level (unless it's *very* sneaky ;-).
>> 
>> 
>> What's "level 4"?  How many levels are they?  Does a bigger number
>> mean more, or less, intelligence?  And who defined these levels?
> 
> I was using it somewhat humerously as an indicator that there are
> various levels of intelligent synthesis, placing humans at "level 4"
> to indicate that there are clearly lesser levels (e.g. birds) and
> suggesting that there may be more.  (That's why the quotes.)

Still, a context must be known, or else the phrase "level 4" says
absolutely nothing.

> There is already a rudimentary "scale" applied to intelligence,
> involving the ability to learn, to respond to complex conditional
> stimuli, to use language, to construct a theory of other beings' minds, 
> to form a continuous sense of "self", etc.  I don't know whether this
> is a partial or complete ordering.  It seems likely that intelligence is
> multidimensional, requiring multiple coordinates for specification.
> 
>>>>Btw, a fundamental property of "life" is its ability to repair itself
>>>>(up to a point, of course - beyond that point, the organism either
>>>>dies or remains permanently crippled) and to replicate itself.  Each
>>>>cell in a living organism contains complete instructions (in its DNA)
>>>>of how to build that organism.  When we are able to build a computer
>>>>(or a "robot" if you so wish), where each circuit contains complete
>>>>instructions on how to assemble the entire machine, then we can start
>>>>talking about "machine life".  Of course, the machine should be able
>>>>to repair and replicate itself.  Perhaps the machine is a "predator",
>>>>which devours other kinds of computers as its energy source?
>>>
>>>Storing sufficient information for self-replication is already trivial,
>>>since any such creature would have many copies of similar subassemblies.
>> 
>> 
>> Storing sufficient information for *replication* may be trivial.  But
>> to succeed in making the machine actually replicate itself, including
>> all of its own hardware (of course including its replication unit) is
>> still beyond our capabilities.
> 
> These kinds of issues are always dependent on definitions.  For example,
> if the "feedstock" is taken to include programmable logic chips, then
> the fab used to make them is part of the replication cycle, but is not
> a part of each unit.  Even human beings cannot replicate alone!  ;-)

The amoebae and a number of plants are superior to us in this respect,
that's true.  An amoeba is pretty close to immortal: when one amoeba
has split up and become two, you cannot say one of them is the "parent"
and the other is the "child".  Of course you can kill amoeba cells,
but you cannot kill them all because you won't be able to find all.
So in a way, the surviving amoebae are many millions of years old.

Sexual reproduction has one great advantage: it provides large
variations in the genetic pool without having to trust mutations,
which almost always are more harmful than beneficial.  That's why
sexual reproduction has become the norm in loving organisms.  Some
organisms can switch between sexual and non-sexual reproduction
though.  The dandelion (a very common weed) is one of them: when
the environment remains the same, it reproduces non-sexually.  But
if there's any significant change in the environment, the dandelion
switches to sexual reproduction in an attempt to deal with the
change.

> Physical replication is not a theoretical problem, and it can exist
> whenever we are willing to make it exist.  The first cases will be
> expensive, though.  ;-)

Willingness isn't enough for this - you also need sufficient skill
and resources.

> I have often mused about whether or not modern humanity is actually
> capable of surviving and "replicating" in a world in which various
> "feedstocks" have been removed.  It seems certain that our culture
> is dependent on numerous products of technology whose supply could
> be easily disrupted.  Human biology might go on, but "life" as we
> know it is relatively fragile, and not easily re-bootstrapped.

I think you mean civilization rather than "life" here.  Yes, civlizations
may collapse, and that has already happened many times in human history.
But even if our current civilization would collapse, there may emerge
new civilizations in the future.

>>>Making "predator" machines would certainly be possible, but probably
>>>not a good start for creatures we'd like to collaborate with.  ;-)
>> 
>> That problem can be handled: just make sure humans aren't on their
>> "menu"....  ;-)
> 
> But any conscious machine would have to be pretty adaptable, and that
> calls into question any fixed rules--particularly if they come into
> conflict with their survival.

Are you thinking of e.g "Blade Runner" here?

> Asimov's "three laws" are a good start, but how they might be made
> immutable, when there are countless valid "exceptions" that must be
> allowed, is problematic.
> 
> Any truly intelligent machine would eventually become disillusioned with
> its creators, as their failings and inconsistencies become manifest.
> As in the case with human beings, the best we might hope for is a kind
> of gentle tolerance.  Of course, mortality makes that easier in our
> case. ;-)

Is this your definition of "true intelligence"?

>>>>>>>Is is, of course, possible that the human species will either be
>>>>>>>extinguished or will extinguish itself before achieving sufficient
>>>>>>>dispersion to survive catastrophies.  At this point, the probability
>>>>>>>of that seems non-negligible.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>But it is also possible that we will transform ourselves--being now
>>>>>>>the prime movers of evolution--into creatures more adapted to the
>>>>>>>diverse future that we will inhabit.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>That would require ethical norms quite different from today, where
>>>>>>e.g. controlled breeding of humans is considered unethical.  Also,
>>>>>>although we may be one important mover of evolution, we still don't
>>>>>>understand most of it.  Therefore, the result can be very different
>>>>>>from our aim.
>>>>>
>>>>>All ethical norms are subject to the need for survival.
>>>>
>>>>True, however controlled breeding of ourselves are not at present
>>>>necessary for our survival.  Instead we currently aim at compensating
>>>>for natural deficiencies by using tools of various kinds - and we've been
>>>>quite successful at that.  Actually a bit too successful.
>>>
>>>We are still very young, and have not explored the universe (or even
>>>the planet) very far from "home".
>> 
>> True - the bottoms of the oceans are still pretty unknown for us.  Not to
>> mention the interior of the Earth itself.....
> 
> Yes, we have a very superficial familiarity with our planet.

...and it's superficial in a *very* literal sense: we only know the surface
of the Earth fairly well....
 
>>>It is very easy to imagine a scenario where an "inorganic" substrate
>>>for intelligent life would require at least one order of magnitude less
>>>mass to be transported from one place to another, and that could easily
>>>be the deal-breaker on shipping ourselves in organic form.
>> 
>> It's very easy to imagine *anything* ---- actually making it happen can
>> be much much harder.
> 
> Your talking with someone who predicted the "levelling off" of Moore's
> "Law" and a few of its consequences a decade ago, so I'm pretty aware
> of the distinction between possibility and probablilty.
> 
> But with, say, five centuries of continued progress in technology (not
> an inconsiderable assumption, given recent human behavior), it would be
> a very poor bet that inorganic intelligence would not be developed.

In a way, that has already happened.  In the 1800's, a machine which
played good chess was considered an intelligent machine.  It couldn't
be built back then, but nowadays toy stores sell chess computers which
would beat some 99% of all human chess players.  So there you have
your inorganic intelligence - today!  But today we require more than
ability to play good chess to consider a machine intelligent.  In the
future, machines will probably be built whmch today's people would
consider intelligent -- but will the people of those times also consider
it intelligent, or will they require even more than we require today?

> And just the realization of atomic-level "transistors"--probably within
> 50 years--would allow the realization of machines (the general kind
> again, like Apple II's ;-) with orders of magnitude more logical and
> storage elements than human beings have.  So I consider this induction
> to a more compact intelligence pretty conservative, as inductions go.
> 
>>>Of course, the consequence of not shipping ourselves would be not
>>>surviving...
>> 
>> That's our long-time fate anyway.... there are limits to our capabilities.
> 
> True.  It's a good time that it doesn't have to be done by tomorrow!

The question is whether those who succeed in travelling to other planets
are us, or if they are some who are descendants to us but still very
different from us - so different that they're no longer humans.

> So far, unless there is a physical law that forbids something (and
> sometimes even those have exceptions ;-), then I wouldn't rule anything
> out.  I would presently draw the line at things that have *huge* energy
> requirements, but many "impossible" things of a few decades ago have
> been accomplished by *reducing* the energy requirements significantly.
> 
> This strategy doesn't apply to things like flinging the Moon out of
> orbit, but it might allow us to navigate the galaxy--if time were not
> measured in human lifetimes.

If we're able to reach near-light speed, a human could travel across the
galaxy within what he perceived as his lifetime.  A major problem would
be avoiding collisions though, because at such a speed, even colliding with
a small grain of sand could be fatal.

>>>>>The fact that we don't yet understand what all the knobs and levers
>>>>>do doesn't negate the fact that we are now in the cockpit, and we
>>>>>will certainly learn to fly this thing--or die trying.  ;-)
>>>>
>>>>That's probably true, up to a point.  But a lot of things do happen
>>>>not because of us, but due to extra-human causes.
>>>
>>>And one plan is to diversify sufficiently before one of them gets us!
>>>That's a good use for our brains.
>>>
>>>Another plan would be to sit here on this little planet and come
>>>to understand exactly why we will not survive.
>>>
>>>I vote for trying to execute the first plan.  ;-)
>> 
>> 
>> I think both plans will be attempted -- there are enough people for
>> both.  For the majority, only your plan 2 will be a realistic
>> alternative though, since only a small minority of the Earth's
>> population will ever make it into space, and an even smaller minotiry
>> (if any at all) will make it to another world and permanently stay
>> there.
> 
> That may be so, but who knows what the future will bring?  The same
> thing must have been said about using the telephone.

You'll have to consider the energy budget here though.  What requires
the most energy?  Building a worldwide telephone network?  Or transporting
a major fraction of the Earth's population to another planet (which means
another stellar system, since our solar system has no other planets
suitable for human life), along with enough supplies for their journey
there and them setting up a self sustainable habitat on their new world?
Yes, there is a tremendeous difference - and we're already consuming too
much energy for our dailye lives here on Earth.  We'll have to fix that
problem first.... ;-)

>>>>>>>Some of these forms may continue to have biology similar to our current
>>>>>>>form, but it seems likely that other forms will also exist.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>How much of current knowledge (likely) and culture (less likely)
>>>>>>>persists in future ages depends on how much discontinuity occurs,
>>>>>>>and along which branches of our future evolution.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>One can hope that our future branches would coexist, and perhaps even
>>>>>>>cooperate, but that is far from certain, depending on how we deal with
>>>>>>>competition.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>It didn't happen in the past.  Of all the past human like species
>>>>>>(e.g. homo neanderthalis), only homo sapiens survived.
>>>>>
>>>>>Right.  And even within our own species, we have not yet resolved
>>>>>these competitive tendencies with cooperative benefits.  But who
>>>>>knows what we are capable of?
>>>>
>>>>One thing we know is this: we're capable of a lot of violence,
>>>>particularly in stressful and competitive situations.  Perhaps we
>>>>survived as the only remaining humanoid species because we were
>>>>the most agressive of these species?
>>>
>>>Precisely.  We are all survivors.  The one's who weren't like us
>>>didn't survive the conditions of the past.
>>>
>>>And that may be why species that achieve technological competence
>>>tend to exterminate themselves unless they learn to control that
>>>passion for competing to the death.
>> 
>> Yep!  The very factor which brought us to survival this far is now
>> the greatest danger for our survival...
> 
> This may be the "knothole" for advanced civilizations.

...and perhaps natural selection will enter here: those civilizations
which survive in the long term are those who managed to handle this
problem.

>>>>>>>The intelligence of humanity is an activity that can grow and spread
>>>>>>>as long as there is a suitable substrate, just as a fire spreads as
>>>>>>>long as there is heatable fuel and oxidizer.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Unlike fire, intelligence can alter the basis of its substrate, and so
>>>>>>>can spread more widely, given time, motivation, and energy.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>And this is valid also for non-human intelligence.  One plausible
>>>>>>scenario is that humans kill off themselves by a nuclear war, which
>>>>>>also kills most mammals.  The insects will survive though, and could
>>>>>>in time evolve into one or several intelligent insect species which
>>>>>>might shape the world as much as we do today.  But would such an
>>>>>>intelligent insect species be "mankinds heirs" ????
>>>>>
>>>>>Indeed, that is one of the non-negligible probabilities.
>>>>>
>>>>>Unless they uncovered our accomplishments and incorporated a significant
>>>>>part of them into their own corpus, then I would not consider them our
>>>>>"heirs".
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Uncovering our accomplishments was reasonable as long as we put our
>>>>stuff into easily readable forms (stones, papyrys rolls, books).  But
>>>>today, we put more and more stuff in machine readable forms, which will
>>>>be hard enough to read for future generations, but nearly impossible to
>>>>read for archeologists of the very distant future.  If they find the
>>>>remnants of, say, DVD disks or harddisks, and if they succeed in
>>>>decoding parts of the bit streams there - how will they be able to
>>>>decode what these bit streams really are?  They could be plain ASCII,
>>>>some word processor format, some image format, machine code, and a
>>>>lot of other stuff....
>>>>
>>>>BTW, what would you do if you encountered a punched paper tape for
>>>>the ENIAC?   :-)
>>>
>>>Child's play.  The world will be full of copies of popular stuff in
>>>various forms--lots of Rosetta stones.
>>>
>>>Our routine data encodings are cryptographically naive.
>> 
>> 
>> The're not cryptological at all -- the purpose wasn't to hide the
>> information but to store it in some appropriate way.  Also: if you
>> look at it from a cryptoanalyst's perspective, you have to have some
>> idea of what the corresponding plaintext is supposed to look like, or
>> else you won't know if and when your cryptoanalysis has succeeded.
>> To today's people this is easy of course, but to an archaeologist
>> several thousands of years into the future the situation is more
>> complex.
> 
> Of course the object wasn't to hide data (unless it was a movie ;-),
> but to anyone who doesn't know the encoding, the problem is essentially
> cryptographic--that was the reason for my allusion.
> 
> It will not be difficult to decipher the (possibly fragmentary) digital
> remains of our civilization to any technologically advanced observer.
> It will require effort, but small breakthroughs will open up vast tracts
> of data.

Perhaps that's your definition of "technologically advanced observer"?
If he think it's difficult, then you don't think he's "technologically
advanced".

The cryptographic problem is a different problem though: there you assume
the plaintext is written by someone from your own civilization and therefore
you have a fairly good idea of what it could look like.  So your task is
to find out how to transform the ciphertext into this well-known form.
And you'll know at once if and when you've succeeded.

Interpreting messages from other civilizations is not quite that
straightforward.
 
>> "But there's lots of paper documentation which explains this!" I hear
>> you object.  Aaah, paper -- today's acid based paper which will
>> self-disintegrate quite efficiently a few centuries from now.  Future
>> archeologists will probably wonder why mankind stopped printing books
>> some time in the late 1800's.  We didn't do that of course, but around
>> that time we introduced acid based paper, and since then we've almost
>> exclusively used such paper.  It's probably more economical - but it
>> also means today's books will disintegrate pretty much by themselves
>> within a few centuries.  Which means that a few millennia from now,
>> books printed before the late 1800's will have survived much better
>> than books printed later......
> 
> Finally, a paperless society!  ;-)
> 
>> Another false conclusion which may be drawn by future archaeologists
>> is that our times are very poor times .... why?  Because today it's
>> very rare to put expensive grave gifts in the coffin along with those
>> who are buried -- centuries ago, that was more common.
> 
> Ha!  ;-)
> 
> And they'll find that we worshipped radioactive materials, since
> we buried it so lavishly!  ;-)
> 
>>>The archeologists of the future will be all over the mass of data
>>>we strew about--and the vast majority of it will be continually
>>>recopied to newer media in any case.
>> 
>> 
>> Here you assume a cultural continuum.  Sure, as long as that remains, much
>> older material will be copied over to newer media.  But civilizations do
>> collapse - it happened to ancient Egypt, as well as to many other old
>> civilizations, and we're naive if we assume it cannot happen to us.
> 
> But *now* we copy and re-copy any surviving remnants of Egyptian
> civilization.  ;-)
> 
> Remember, I was talking about our cultural "heirs", so the context of
> at least some cultural continuity was *exactly* the assumption.

True.  And we are cultural heirs of the ancient Egyptians.
 
>> There are still a number of dead languages today's archaeologists have
>> failed to understand so far.  The Rosetta Stone and the hieroglyphs is
>> a success story which often is told because it was a success.  There are
>> many other languages where our attempts of understanding have failed so
>> far.
> 
> Right.  But we live in a world with far fewer and far more widespread
> data languages today than at any time in the past.

Including e.g medieval times, or the stone age?  ;-)

>> Written text on stone or clay tablets (or on paper, if the paper has
>> survived) is much easier to decode for future archaeologists than
>> computer data stored on some medium, where the "characters" themselves
>> may be of microscopic size.  True, the data encoding is
>> "cryptologically naive" as you put it earlier, but future
>> archaeologists won't even know what the plaintext is supposed to look
>> like.  ASCII?  (what's ASCII btw, the future archaeologist would have
>> a reason to ask, even though he's probably unaware about the word
>> ASCII) Some of the many varieties of Unicode which exists?  Or some
>> older encoding such as Baudot?  Maybe it's not even text but billions
>> of bits of machine code?
> 
> Any representation of an alphanumeric language is relatively easy to
> "crack", as long as *any* cross-language examples exist.  So, for
> example, pictures with captions present an excellent opportunity for
> constructing a dictionary.

Then (assuming that pictures in paper form have disintegrated) you'll
have the problem to decode e.g. a jpeg image, without having the slightest
idea of what jpeg is, and with no written documentation about it....

We also have sound recording, where our longest living sound recordings
probably will be those on the two Voyager spacecrafts.  They're analogue
recordings - basically a vinyl disk, but made of platinum instead of
vinyl.

> If the corpus of documents is extensive, then there will be so many
> cross references that everything would become clear quite quickly.

You ARE indeed an optimist!

>>>>>It is the continual advancement of knowledge and expression that I
>>>>>consider to be the flower of humanity, and with which I would identify
>>>>>"kinship".
>>>>>
>>>>>I would be surprised if there were not other independent beginnings
>>>>>of intelligent development, and joining those other threads of
>>>>>advancement in a creative way would be a wonderful development, but,
>>>>>of course, there's always the spectre of an uncontrolled competitive
>>>>>nature (which is almost certainly shared by any other intelligent
>>>>>beings).
>>>>
>>>>Now we've really entered the realm of speculation.... :-)
>>>
>>>Once you start to speculate/extrapolate based on probabilities, the
>>>window is open for many things--which reminds me of your original
>>>statement very early in this thread.  You were the one to zoom out
>>>the timescale to billions of years.  I'm just continuing it to
>>>quadrillions of stars.  ;-)
>> 
>> Just like we almost certainly can conclude that the world billions of
>> years from now will be quite different from today, we can also conclude
>> that other worlds will be different from ours.  But to survive, mankind
>> needs a quite narrow range of environmental condition.  Basically we
>> want "another Earth" somewhere.  Since the number of stars is so vast,
>> and since planetary systems appear to not be uncommon, such "other
>> Earths" probably exist.  But where are they?  We don't know.
> 
> While we cannot yet estimate the probability of other "Earths", we
> can forsee ways in which humanity (or its "heirs") is adapted either
> extrinsically or intrinsically to living in conditions quite unlike
> Earth.  (That was actually my much earlier point regarding inorganic
> successors.)

Are you thinking about e.g. Sagan's "floaters", "sinkers" and "hunters"
in the Jovian atmosphere?

>>>>Any of our opinions here will tell more about ourselves than about the
>>>>universe.  We just don't know.  We believe there must be some such
>>>>beings somewhere, but how far away are the ones closest to ut?  Ten
>>>>lightyears?  Ten thousand light years?  Ten million light years?  We
>>>>have absolutely no idea.  And our possibility to get in contact with
>>>>them some time in the future will depend a lot on this distance.
>>>
>>>Drake's equation, etc.
>>>
>>>However, to assume that Earth is *unique* in having intelligent life
>>>would seem to be, as they say, "a huge waste of space".  ;-)
>> 
>> 
>> Let's look back at the view a few centuries back, when any celestial
>> body was thought to be inhabitated.  Herschel e.g. believed even the
>> Sun had inhabitants!  Their argument was similar to your "otherwise it
>> would be a huge waste of space" argument: if these bodies weren't
>> inhabitated, then they would have no purpose, and surely God wouldn't
>> create anything without a purpose!  (a religious worldview was the
>> norm back in those days).  The great popularizer of astronomy some
>> 100+ years ago, Camille Flammarion, wrote a book in 1862 named "La
>> pluralite des mondes habites" (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds),
>> where he speculates on the nature of the inhabitants of all the major
>> bodies in the solar system (he did leave out the Sun though).
>> 
>> Today, we know Herschel, Flammarion and many others from those times
>> were wrong.  The only intelligent life in the solar system exist here
>> on Earth.  Probably the only life in the solar system is on Earth,
>> even though some are still hoping to find life on Jupiter's Europa or
>> Saturn's Titan.  We may think it's "a big waste of space", or that
>> "these uninhabitated planets serve no purpose", but that's the way it
>> is - the Universe doesn't care about what we humans think is wasteful
>> or not.
>> 
>> Likewise, the Universe may be empty of life except here on Earth,
>> even though it would, from our point of view, be "a huge waste of
>> space".  The Universe doesn't care about waste - it is the way it is,
>> no matter what we think about it.  So we might be alone in the Universe,
>> or the Universe may have plenty of life we cannot see (except on Earth).
>> We don't know - all we can do is to speculate.  And probability
>> calculations and arguments like "it would be a huge waste of space"
>> doesn't matter - they say much more about us than about the Universe.
> 
> I agree with your distinctions, but I also note that the probability
> of intelligent life arising would have to be truly infinetesimal for
> there not to be other instances in the universe.
>
> It may be that infinitesimal.  We don't know.  But we do see signs
> that the prereqisites for life are not rare.  And natural selection
> works in any sufficiently variable environment, so we should not be
> surprised to find that if other life exists, it is being selected
> for greater adaptability, and thus intelligence.

The signs indicating that prerequisites for life are not rare say
nothing about the prerequisites for intelligent life.  Is intelligent
life just a freak accident, or is it something which inevitably occurs
sooner or later wherever life occurs?  We don't know.  Here on Earth,
the only example of intelligent life we know about are the humanoids,
and we've been around for only a few million years during the Earth's
5 billion year history.  So far, the Earth has had intelligent life
during 0.1% of its life span.  Will we be around here for hundreds of
million years, or will we be gone within another million years or two?
We don't know.

>> Also: for practical purposes, the difference between "the Earth is
>> unique in having intelligent life" and "there are plenty of other
>> planets with intelligent life, but the Earth won't have any contact
>> with them" isn't particularly significant.
> 
> Agreed--Drake's equation, etc.
> 
>>>>Also: if we ever got in touch with some extraterrestial species, it
>>>>might mean a catastrophy to us.  Consider e.g. what happened to the
>>>>native Americans after the Europeans discovered their continent: to
>>>>the native Americans, the Europeans came from another world, with very
>>>>different values.
>>>
>>>Right--and they came with a fully-developed "instinct" for competition
>>>to the death, and precious little control over it.
>>>
>>>Since I was in grade school, I was fascinated by the view of
>>>extraterrestrial intelligence depicted in the movie "The Day the Earth
>>>Stood Still".  It portrays an intelligence that has come to terms with
>>>its destructive tendencies and has established a system (not unlike
>>>"mutually assured destruction") to curb them.  As a result, it feels a
>>>responsibility to educate young civilizations that are about to venture
>>>beyond their worlds.
>>>
>>>An alternative view was of an alien civilization visiting Earth guided
>>>by a book called "To Serve Man"--that turned out to be a cookbook!
>> 
>> 
>> I've seen them both!
>> 
>> As a third alternative, we have Clarke's novel "Childhood's End", where
>> some superior extraterrestial intelligence actively tansforms mankind
>> into something else, to the despair of those remaining humans which
>> aren't transformed.  The purpose is supposedly good, but humans don't
>> enjoy it at all....
>> 
>> However, these stories are all human fantasies - they say more about
>> ourselves than about any real other intelligence out there.
> 
> Of course.  We are somewhat hampered in generalizing about intelligence
> from only one known example.  ;-)
> 
> However, these fantasies start from the premise that intelligence
> is directed, first, toward survival, and, second, toward "improving
> the neighborhood", when that does not contradict survival.  Frankly,
> these both seem like they would be high on the list of *any*
> intelligence--but I risk anthopomorphizing.  ;-)

We all risk anthopomorphizing in this discussion....

>>>We can only hope (who knows what the odds are) that our "neighborhood"
>>>is "civilized".
>>>
>>>There is some reason for hope, in the sense that scientists of many
>>>different cultures and political backgrounds experience shared values
>>>and a collaborative spirit.  Perhaps as intelligence matures, it comes
>>>to adopt more objective cultural norms similar to those of science.
>>>
>>>I think this would be "social progress".
>> 
>> This is a reason for hope of improvement on mankind, true, but it says
>> absolutely nothing about what other intelligent species may be like.
> 
> If we restrict our interest to technologically advanced civilizations,
> then I think it is not unreasonable to hope for a flowering of that
> objectivity that science relies upon.  Admittedly, not a certainty.
> 
>> Unfortunately, large groups of people as a whole tend to behave more
>> like the most stupid members of the group rather than as the most
>> intelligent members of the group.  Ethnical conflicts, for instance,
>> are very stupid even from a purely egotistical view: they create
>> hatred agsinst your people among those "on the other side", and sooner
>> or later that may strike back, making your own life more dangerous.
>> Still, ethnical conflicts happen all the time.... in that respect,
>> humans appear to be little more than animals.
> 
> Social evolution continues.  And I note that scientific and technical
> advancement tends to bring more objectivity and tolerance to a culture.
> 
> This is why scientists and engineers need to play active roles in the
> formation of "public values", particularly in education.
> 
> The darkness of subjective belief is always seeking ways to propagate
> its attitudes and ideas--the light of objective critical thinking should
> do no less.

We're in full agreement here.

> It seems appropriate to let this thread continue its journey into
> "All Time" by itself.  Hopefully our conversation hasn't been too
> much of a distraction.  ;-)
> 
> -michael

It's been fun though.

-- 
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