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

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

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....

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.

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.


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