Mark, why are you so culturally conservative, always being all crotchety about what my generation likes? You even have problems with pink or purple dyed hair.
You forgot to mention tattoos.
WTF? It's more difficult to develop complex virtual worlds than it is to colonize the Moon.
Uh, excuse me? A few guys sitting in front of high end PC's can create virtual worlds. You are too young to remember the massive infrastructure and vast technical workforce it took in the 1960's just to put men on the moon as a proof of concept.
In my generation, developing and exploring virtual worlds stirs up far more excitement than space colonization, that's the obvious trend, to think that space colonization is the future (or that it will even be difficult and non-automatic past a certain point) is to live in the 1970s again.
It comes down to a biologically determined hierarchy of needs. We'll need access to space resources (mainly electricity beamed to earth from solar power satellites to turn water and carbon dioxide back into a petroleum-like substance) sooner than we realize just to keep food on the table, not to mention the electricity online for our PC's. In case you haven't noticed,
technological civilization may have already started to decline, mostly from diminishing returns from current energy supplies. (It probably didn't happen coincidentally that oil reached ~ $140 a barrel just weeks before the world's banking crisis accelerated.)
We see evidence of this sense of a tightening Malthusian noose from the hostility Octo-Mom has generated, in a society otherwise sentimental about new mothers and their babies. One, people resent she'll need public assistance from the bankrupt state of California; and two, she has added eight new mouths to feed at a time when people feel like the economy has entered a zero-sum state. If we still lived in a society with a perception of progress and rising living standards, people would shrug off Octo-Mom as a circus side show.
Plenty of people that engage in virtual worlds are fit and healthy, they just do it with part of the time. I take it you've barely experienced computer and/or video games, so you just dismiss the notion that online worlds are the future. Having such limited enthusiasm for what is obviously the new wave of the future is not very transhumanist.
When you reach your 40's, Michael, you might realize how much time you've wasted on fads and gimmicks with no long-term value. You might characterize me as an aging "
sapolsky," but I counter that I study and try to incorporate
useful novelty, not novelty for its own sake, most of which looks pretty meretricious after a few years. (In 2029, kids who haven't even been born yet will ask, "What's a 'beyoncé'?")
Also, why did you take down your own blog? Did you even back it up?
I have had some problems with trolls. If I kept my blog, imagine what The Anticult could have done with it over at the Cult Education Forum. He already accuses me of advocating the murder of children for cryonics experiments.
Edited by advancedatheist, 13 February 2009 - 06:25 PM.