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

[alawther@spammenot.mac.com (Anthony Lawther)]

Paul Schlyter <pausch@saaf.se> wrote:

> In article <vtednTqtcr1xpYTbnZ2dnUVZ_vGinZ2d@comcast.com>,
> Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
> 
> > sicklittlemonkey wrote:
> >> On Apr 8, 5:12 pm, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
> >> 
> >>>In article <20070408181642119+1...@News.Individual.NET>,
> >>>Roger Johnstone  <r...@roger.geek.nz.removethisbit> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>"We salute those amazing products that changed technology--
> >>>>and our lives--forever."
> >>>
> >>>Another exaggreation....  does the guy who wrote that have the
> >>>faintest idea of what "forever" actually means?  Does he really
> >>>believe that when the Sun has gone nova and mankind has been extinct
> >>>for millions of years, that it then really matters whether Mosaic or
> >>>Netscape "changed our lives" in our brief moment of time?
> >> 
> >> 
> >> There's nothing wrong with using forever for emphasis.
> >> 
> >> Try this: Next time your wife says "I'll love you forever ..." explain
> >> to her that although you appreciate the sentiment, in fact her
> >> adoration will only last until brain death disrupts the neuro-chemical
> >> pattern of its representation.
> >> 
> >> And since you're nit-picking, our sun is too small to go nova.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> It always amuses me when people believe that "mankind" will still be
> around several billions of years into the future....

Given the meaning of "mankind" (the kind that use their hands: from the
same stem as manual: "to perform by hand") then unless "we" evolve into
or are replaced by creatures that either don't have hands or don't use
their hands then we'll still be "mankind", just maybe not the same
"mankind" that you and I are familiar with.
> 
> 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, and modern man
> has been around for only some hundreds of thousands of 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.

I guess the other point to consider is the difference between
macro-evolution and micro-evolution. Our tampering only seems to have an
effect on micro-evolution, Hollywood notwithstanding.
> 
> 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....

In reality, while we try to predict what will occur in the future (it's
in our nature to do so), most of us are actually unable to conceive a
half accurate picture of what will happen a decade away, let alone
several hundred millenia. After all if most of the public predictions
from the '80s had come true, we'd be arguing over which rocks were best
for throwing at radioactively poisoned animals by now.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
>  
> > -michael
> > 
> > NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
> > Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

Regards,
Anthony.