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

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

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!

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.

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?

>>> 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.

> 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.

>>> 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?

>>> 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?   :-)

> 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.... :-)

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.

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.

> -michael
>
> NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>
> "The wastebasket is our most important design
> tool--and it's seriously underused."
-- 
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