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Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!
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.
And biological creatures use electricity, but they actually run
on chemical reactions, which are much slower than transistors.
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 ;-).
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.
Making "predator" machines would certainly be possible, but probably
not a good start for creatures we'd like to collaborate with. ;-)
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".
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.
Of course, the consequence of not shipping ourselves would be not
surviving...
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. ;-)
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.
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 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.
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. ;-)
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". ;-)
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!
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
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."