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Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!
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".
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.
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. ;-)
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?
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".
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).
-michael
NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
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