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

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

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.... :-)
 
> 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?
 
> 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.

> 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.

> 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" ????

> -michael
> 
> NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
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