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

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

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.
 
> 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?
 
>> 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?
 
>> 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.

> 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"....  ;-)

>>>>> 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.....
 
> 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.

> 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.

>>> 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.

>>>>> 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...

>>>>> 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.

"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......

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

>>> 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.

>> 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.

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.

>> 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.
 
> 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".
> 
> -michael

This is a reason for hope of improvement on mankind, true, but it says
absolutely nothing about what other intelligent species may be like.

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.

-- 
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