109 replies to this topic

[macdog]

Cosmos has it most clearly here, though like everyone else he misuses the term decimation (which means a loss of 10%).

Everyone is largely concerned with the end of human civilization, and as the stakes are so high, everyone wants to think they have THE answer.

Nate you quite clearly stated that the affinity for biology is the impediment to survival, and wrongly assume that my own affinity for such is sentimentalist rather than rational. As I clearly stated, biology has been perfecting itself for billions of years, and computer science for less than a century. What could be more rational than turning to biology for future advances for human survival? What could be more sentimental than trusting new fangled tech to save us from extinction? The ultimate faith in technological supremacy hit its height in the 1920's, and has been disproven ever since. The world has not suffered toxification as a result of biology getting out of control, but technology. You talk about effeiciency and advances where the electricity that powers your computer most likely comes from the burning of coal, or even the compression of radioactive materials to boil water. That's nothing special at all.

You get mad at me because I get mad at you for espousing ideas that are essentially, anti-life. You call me irrational, or excessively sentimental for doing so, but your blaise attitude, your ineptitude at expressing your thoughts, are exactly why the anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-progress factions won a landslide in the last Presidential election. Because you countered values with arrogance. You countered divinity with glib reductionism. And if you keep doing that, you will long, you will pine, you will ache for the days when a man such as me was willing to speak to you plainly. You can either grow up, face the real world, and deal with real people who will be even less tolerant of your tendency to trivialize questions than I, or you can see everything you pray for not come to pass. To hell with what Kurweil's projections are, you are all a tiny minority, and I am an even smaller minority in that I am willing to put up with your cr@p, and if you ever wandered more than 100 feet from the nearest vending machine, you'd start to realize what a tiny freakish minority you are and start to act accordingly.

The biggest impediment to your Singularity may not be technological, but personal. You can either blame the rest of the species, and hate them for it the same way you hate women for not falling for such computer potatoes as yourselves, or you can get out of your lumbar supporting chairs from office depot, take a walk, and realize that there is a magnificent planet out there waiting to be explored and try to learn something about it before the climate change that your wondrous technology has wrought upon it makes it too dangerous to go out in.

I have no sympathy for your position, only a desire to let every human live life as they can and as they see fit. Your declarations of what must be done for survival are as empty as all those who state we are simply waiting for Jesus to come again and take us all home. It has the intellectual depth of the flat earthers and the creationists. You want to question my basic premises on terraforming? Well, then don't get your panties in a wad when I question yours. I still find you uploaders direct responses to my direct questions entirely wanting of reason or sentiment, and until I get suspended from this organization, you can expect me to be here challenging you in my angry monkey animal way, and throwing a few punches if need be. Should you get any further in your agenda without considering what I directly put to you, you will beg for such an amenable debate partner as I.

[Kalepha]

We are dealing with abstract forces, yet you keep alluding to threatening me personally with violence, or suggesting that “I’m gonna’ get it.” You also keep continuing to make assumptions about my physical appearance and social life that are not only far off, but you have no basis for making, and subsequently allowing these stereotypes to inhibit your ability to precisely interpret my thesis.

It doesn’t matter what you and I think. Abstract forces dictate our volitional range (and not necessarily narrowing it, but shifting it on an Output Type continuum). You want to terraform within the domain of biological substrates, perhaps nominally integrated cybernetically. But since this still requires too many accommodations due to our sub-optimal form that will concomitantly exist with superintelligent cognitions having fundamental access to all the capital and manipulated it as to dictate the efficiency-complexity level of abstract components – including estates – that are available for us to utilize or integrate with, your hoped-for lifestyle is likely not going to turn out anywhere near how you presently envision it. All the rebellious anarchism in the world will be futile.

And no, these are not answers or my stamp on the future. These are adaptations.

[Thomas]

I agree with Nate.

Consider just scaling down to 2 cm. You need million times less mass for your body and the Earth's area becomes relatively larger 10 thousand times!

This is of course nothing, compared to uploading possibilities.

[macdog]

actually the dictionary supports me, 1. to destroy a large part of, 3. to draw by lots and kill in out of ten. From the old Roman tendency to punish troops or populations for disobedience. Decimation of the human population would be 500,000,000. Like losing half of India. I've heard it said that the "Twin Towers were decimated on 9-11", which would have meant they lost what, 10 floors. Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine.

After reviewing my post I see nothing claiming that intend personal violence to anyone in this this thread. On a another thread I told susma that if we had been talking personally, I probably would have smacked him in the nose. What I have said is that the abstract forces you're so fond of include the tendency of human violence, and there is likely no level of technical sophistication that can effectively counter. We have the best military in the world, and they're getting their @sses handed to them by an insurgency describe by Al-Gezeera reporter as pathetic, and I don't think we've seen anything yet. January 30 is going to make the Tet offensive look like a picnic. If you keep talking about giving up the affinity for biology, and shrinking everyone down to 2cm (now that is funny) to make the world bigger, all those steelworkers who lost their jobs to the revenge of the nerds revolution are going to come after everything, absolutely everything, that you have built so far. It will be gone, forever. That's not a threat by me, that's just a simple social equation with countless proofs throughout history. When I said I was going to throw punches, I meant that metaphorically, which should be obvious.

There are all kinds of technological promises from our past, and 99% of the time they have been dead wrong and absolutely laughable in hindsight. I think this Singularity business will be like that. But I started a thread on terraforming, and instead I get slapped in the face over and over again about the Singularity. As I said, I don't go into the Singularity forum and start trivializing the ideas in there, which is exactly what Nate admitted to doing. That was just darn rude, and you deserved every hard word you got in return. More importantly, you could have learned something from it, which is that it is oh so easy to have big ideas when everyone agrees with you. If you start to counter people who don't agree with you by saying we're going to shrink everybody (that is just so freakin funny), or that we need to give up our affinity with biology to survive, or that everyone but us guys in here (and where are the women anyway?), and that lot is just a bunch of superstitious idiots who luckily won't survive this Singularity you should expect things to get rough. Getting rough and tumble has a long tradition in science, and if you do some investigating, there are a large number of times when those who trivialized ideas were found to be dead wrong, and those who threw intellectual punches saved the world from ignorance.

Maybe I got your waist size wrong Nate, (you tech-geeks need to read a book or something and figure out what a metaphor is) but I'd say that outside of this forum a lot of people will understand exactly what I meant.

2cm. Oh man, that is funny.

[Kalepha]

macdog, leave it alone. You don’t (because you don’t want to and not because you can’t) understand the implications of intelligence optimization. I don’t claim to fully understand it, either. But I understand enough to know that default design features are launchers, not canonical frames, and that if I want to avoid having to resort to violence (unlike your mob friends, which would be futile and intellectually incoherent anyway) to protect my meaningless values, I would need to become a non-violent cognitive optimizer and distinguish between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, realizing that comprehension and meaning are enriched and illuminated only from a predisposition toward the latter.

[Lazarus Long]

I have debated myself about this subject for a while but there is one overlap of the subjects that I have pondered as a limit to intelligence and more over to the Singularity (except as a relatively local phenomenon) and that is Light Speed, *C*.

Oh sure we can all say that once we achieve super intelligence overcoming *C* is no problem but what if it isn't and what if relativity actually is simply insurmountable in the manner of travel AND communication tech?

If there is no FTL then even the fastest synaptic process cannot exceed light-speed, that is unless the simultaneity of the quantum effect is able to disseminate itself through the rest of the circuitry faster than the interface that functions in the material universe. If there exists a true quantum communication effect then it is an absolute requisite technology for something of the magnitude of a true Singularity to function IMO.

This wouldn't preclude a far greater than human intelligence developing first but assumptions about what this intelligence can and cannot do from our perspective is like being just another species of urban ant trying to contemplate building Ringworld or a Dyson Sphere and this still isn't necessarily a Singularity.

Such a state even at far greater rates of evolution than life has ever before experienced could still require a hyperbolic rate of progress taking eons by our current understanding. However the overlap of FTL is too tantalizing to ignore.

While I don't think FTL is requisite for developing our Solar System, terraforming new habitats or even reaching nearer star systems it is impossible to contemplate farther travel without it. It seems the very same speed of light limits the speed of intelligence and the horizons we can reasonably reach.

[Kalepha]

Laz If there is no FTL then even the fastest synaptic process cannot exceed light-speed, that is unless the simultaneity of the quantum effect is able to disseminate itself through the rest of the circuitry faster than the interface that functions in the material universe. If there exists a true quantum communication effect then it is an absolute requisite technology for something of the magnitude of a true Singularity to function IMO.

I agree. And I don’t believe my implicit reveries are too over-extending, Laz. (I’m only guessing, however, that you are thinking this.) If a major aspect of intelligence can be defined as formulating and solving increasingly novel problems with less and less resources (i.e., tighter constraints), it might be that we’re converging toward operating in the realm of quantum gravity.

This takes me back to my main point. Once we dispose of the arbitrary attitude, conditioned by a host of self-defeating and counterproductive socio-economic signals, that mind-external objects have intrinsic meaning, our projects begin taking on the general form of being cognitive-based rather than non-cognitive-based. Indeed, it is not practical for everyone in the present to have this initiative on a short-term scale, but it is within the capacity of every functional person to have perspective and redirect their long-term outlooks, if only to save themselves from the agony of living too long with the wrong heuristics.

[kraemahz]

Even if we somehow manage to overcome C, most likely only in our thought processes utilizing quantum entanglement or somesuch, the universe would still seem to be moving at an agonizingly slow pace. Thinking at several million times the speed we do now, relativisticly one revolution of the Earth would seem like millions of years to us. Recieving data from outer colonies light years away would be what felt like hundreds of millions of years before the first signals started arriving, and of course that data would be the same amount of computer thought year cycles old, maybe even useless. Experiments on stars thousands of light years away would, even to a human mind, at least take two thousand to begin recieving data, in computer thought years it would be billions.

Even at the minute level the universe would seem like it was moving at a crawl. Chemists would boggle at how long it took actual molecules to react with one another. At the speed of computer thought, it would be like watching paint dry (And watching paint dry would be like watching a rock weather, and so on). It would probably come to the point where no actual experiements were being performed any more, and everything was being done in a computer model. If something was intriguing then maybe they'd bother to gather the molecules and react them together. C is the antithesis to infinite thought, even if we can make ourselves and everything we do move faster than light, we can't make the universe run any faster. To get to that point would be ultimate boredom, would we even WANT to clock our thought that high?

[123456]

Replying to the initial post.

I believe in making a self contained Planet system which is self-sufficient. Everything is recycled on a planetary basis including energy. Imagine earth contained in another sphere or other, perhaps a metallic sphere of some kind; Nothing gets in nor out; access will be granted through specific areas only. A project of such magnitude is going to require a technological level which is, righ now, so far away.

[sfty]

[Lazarus Long]

Replying to the initial post.

I believe in making a self contained Planet system which is self-sufficient. Everything is recycled on a planetary basis including energy. Imagine earth contained in another sphere or other, perhaps a metallic sphere of some kind; Nothing gets in nor out; access will be granted through specific areas only. A project of such magnitude is going to require a technological level which is, righ now, so far away.

Thanks 123456 in so many ways. Yes I agree completely and that is only one of the reasons for building balanced bio-habitat ships on asteroids before BS'ing ourselves about terraforming.

If we can't survive on a few thousands of acres now, how are we able to even survive on this world? [wis]

Actually all kidding aside I do see this a variant on a Beagle Project.

[Lazarus Long]

And yes Cosmos, the concept of say perhaps some type of *Hawking Radiation* containing a form of data, information, or in particular any type multi-directional content is then a fascinating hypothesis to examine with respect to FTL in addition to the possibility of Quantum Entanglement.

If theoretically *something* exits a Black Hole then at least it demonstrates FTL in terms of the escape velocity for the event horizon. )

However, if that is the case then we just may have to redefine the velocity required to even call it an *Event Horizon*.

[macdog]

Nate, you tell me to leave something alone, and then go on with it yourself, you tell me that I refuse to understand something that you admit an inability to understand yourself. It doesn't seem like I'm the one in need of consistency or intelligence optimization.

Once again, I go back to the story of the iron age shaman poo-poohing the existence of boats in expectation of airplanes. Are you all really so unwilling to deal with the possibilities before you so to satiate an internal feeling of superiority?

You deny violence, and then (once again) assert the dominance of strictly nootic constructs over physical manifestation. Do you imagine mentation is so thoroughly self-reciprocating as to deny the requirement for a substrate composed of mass and charge? (Yeah, I can write this way too) If you do not see that the logical conclusion of your intent is the dissolution of manifest existence for what is perceived (innacurately) as the ultimate economy of pure cognition within the greater vacuum space of the multiverse so that all those with a preference for corporate experience should have their desire shunted aside in the name of maximization of resources as inherently violent, then you are the one sufferring from self delusion, not I.

Is shrinking everyone to 2cm in height, to where we are tripping over sandgrains and fighting termites for surface dominance, an interim measure?

Simply because one is unable to see the value of existence outside of the individual mind, does not mean that it has no value. It strikes me as being akin to a two year old child, barely able to speak, saying to their parents "I hate you". Not only is it untrue, it is much more a revelation of the tendencies of the child than one of parents. Humanity has yet to get beyond potty training (our atmosphere is literally filled with our waste products), not yet able to walk and the talk has gone on to talk about FTL. It is like a toddler trying to break the world record for long distance jumping. That is why I do find canonical overtones in your talk about the AI. As much as the AI may have a greater understanding of existence than we do, do you really imagine that it will instantly be able to overcome every intellectual challenge the universe has to offer? That's ridiculous. I've heard better science on Star Trek. What we do know about the universe is that 90% is made up of stuff we don't understand called dark matter and 90% of its energies come from an energy source we don't understand called dark energy. If it's all really so simple to comprehend where are the Jupiter minds from other galaxies that should have evolved by now? Why don't we see the evidence of them engineering sectors of our galaxy?

It is easy to dismiss me, not because I am dogmatic, but because you are. I'm so sick of hearing "the AI will solve it" on this forum I could puke, and so depressed by the dearth of conversation regarding the issues we actually face real time that I see little reason for me to continue in this forum. Might as well try to convince the hare krishnas to convert to Catholicism.

But remember me, if for nothing else, than giving you the following warning

Your arrogance will be your doom.

[Lazarus Long]

Humanity has yet to get beyond potty training (our atmosphere is literally filled with our waste products), not yet able to walk and the talk has gone on to talk about FTL. It is like a toddler trying to break the world record for long distance jumping.

Actually Mac, maybe it's more akin to a toddler planning to steal the keys to the family car and actually thinking about driving it )

[kraemahz]

Actually Mac, maybe it's more akin to a toddler planning to steal the keys to the family car and actually thinking about driving it )

Which would work depending on how observant the kid was, he just wouldn't be able to see where he was going.

Mac, I think its folly to say the human race is in its infancy. I'd say we're more like a teen going through puberty. With each passing decade we grow closer to understanding aspects of the universe that we would have never even dreamed of a hundred years ago. The statement you're hearing "The AI will solve it" is not so much a case of intellectual laziness, it's more of a "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it" mentality. I don't think most of us believe our work is going to magically get done for us (that wouldn't be any fun, now would it?) but rather we currently don't know the answers, the solutions, we don't know enough of the problem to even begin just as you say. So I ask, if we know that we don't know enough, why bother trying to think of the answer from a limited perspective? It's better to take the hits as they come and do things as they're needed, isn't it?

[Kalepha]

macdog But remember me, if for nothing else, than giving you the following warning

Your arrogance will be your doom.

Thanks for the heads-up, macdog.

Edited by Nate Barna, 17 March 2005 - 12:50 PM.

[antilithium]

Hate to walk in on your pleasant chit-chat, but there something I have to ask...

Do you believe that space tourism is the key to our expansion into the cosmos?

I mean look at Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic

BBC NEWS-Virgin Galactic: The Logical Next Step

Overall it seems that Virgin Galactic is just an glorified rollercoaster ride. Branson: "It will enable people to go into space, to become astronauts, to see the Earth, to enjoy weightlessness" [:o]

I'm all for private space travel but how the hell is "becoming astronaut, to see the Earth, and enjoy weightlessness," for three to six minutes going to make up for the $210,000 I pissed away.

If you ask me, all this hype about space tourism is BS. Save the aviation analogies, I've heard them all before...

Maybe Branson will use the profit to establish a better infrastructure... But until then, the only kind of people who'll enjoy early space tourism are the stinking rich, celebrities and maybe a few lucky nobodies.

Here's a good example of how space should be done: Webpage [sfty]

Edited by antilithium, 07 April 2005 - 02:09 AM.