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

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Apr 9, 7:41 pm, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

> > 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....

Excellent! I aim for insight, but I'll settle for amusement :-)

> 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?

You know what I find funny? The currently popular meme that evolution
is some benevolent ever present force that guides all life in the
universe toward some unspecified apex of development.

A more interesting question might be: Why do you believe human beings
will continue to evolve? The selective processes that are the drivers
of evolution no longer apply to human beings, so why would they
continue to be subject to it?

Implying an effect without causation is the very definition of
superstition.

> 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.

You're kidding, right? Causing extinctions by the bucketload and
reducing biodiversity? This helps the great wheels of evolution spin
faster?

Come on, you're anthropomorphizing something that is nothing more than
an emergent property of a complex system. A common and excusable trait
to be sure, but equatable with creation mythologies and other forms of
romanticism.

> 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....

Too bad if you're right; we won't be around to reap the rewards of our
forward thinking ;-)

> 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.

Definitely? Don't you think it's just a *little* arrogant to assume
that your particular fetishes when it comes to futuristic intellectual
masturbation are any more valid than mine?

Matt