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

[Charlie Springer <RAM@regnirps.com>]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 02:41:59 -0700, Paul Schlyter wrote
(in article <evd01h$160n$1@merope.saaf.se>):

> 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.

I suspect human natural selection ended about the time of the invention of 
agriculture. Sexual selection must have been significant in issolated 
populations. Any future changes should be called engineering. A human brain 
duplicated on a nano scale will fit on the head of a pin. If it is 
electrical, it will run 3,000,000 times faster than meat. Without some 
clocking, you would live three million subjective years for every real-time 
year. But you could also clock down for long space voyages of thousands of 
years, etc. I suspect "people" will be around in many forms from gene 
engineered organics to basically immortal cybernetic folks.

A concept being examined years ago by the life extension club in Palo Alto 
was nano wire infiltration of the brain to duplicate and save the "state" 
continuously. Backups would be made in case of total destruction and the tiny 
electronic copy in the head could be recovered in less catastrophic death. 
You would either live from then on in various engineered hosts like a 
spaceship or robot or perhaps have the option to infiltrate and control the 
brain of a clone.

Whatever, I don't see any reason (besides alien threats of several sorts or 
total destruction of human life before it can leave Earth) why descendants of 
humans shouldn't be all over the local group a billion years from now.

This foreseeable future of genetics and cybernetics and nano-tech has made if 
very hard to write good science fiction.

-- Charlie Springer