On 7/23/19, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
yeah because of blind faith in 'technology'.
There is a lot of blind faith in tech, a lot of hand waving about hard problems from ostensibly "smart" people.
Ray Kurzweil, who is 71, thinks he will live forever - he predicts by 2029 medical tech will be at a point where each year will add at least another year to your life span, effective immortality.
2029 could easily be possible with moonshot sized levels of cooperative research, and a "go" signal. The real obstacle right now is probably not money or science, but religion (as infused into politics), the "go" signal... Every single major medical advance in history has been held back or at least shadowed by comments of "Gasp, you're playing God (or with Fire), only God can do that, stop now." Especially applies to any kind of "unnatural" life extension where you would have otherwise dropped... organ transplant (historically heart), etc. The Gasp's aren't making much noise about some outcomes... cancer cure, your own clone in a vat of jello in your house, brain / memory transplant, but seem to have moved on now, as their last stand in unprovable mystery, to intermediate research dependency of stem cells, embryonic blobs of a few 100k cells, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rqw4krMOug
Moore's law applied to renewables, it's no fucking problem :).
There seems to be a going hypothesis... If Humanity can engineer biology (example halt aging, regenerate arbitrary parts, food, cures, etc) in time to be useful, then it can engineer any fix to mistakes, in time to save Humanity.
It all sounds like technology as religious experience to me.
Even if you buy into the inevitability of this future tech, is it really a road map for utopia? Humanity is facing some tough shit, much of it directly tied to tech progression: massive surveillance states on levels never previously imagined, wealth continually centralized among a tiny world elite, existential risks as a direct result of technological advances - atomic weapons, other "WMD", and of course turning the heat up on the planet by dumping carbon into the atmosphere at ever greater rates.
It seems like we are on a race to destroy ourselves... Will tech help us or hinder us? Imagine the "democratization of high-tech" that comes with all this progress - what happens when anybody with the latest & greatest 3d printer and a few other relatively cheap odds and ends can create an atomic bomb? What happens when gene hacking becomes truly cheap and ubiquitous, and anyone with a little biology knowledge and the right hardware can engineer a plague?
Independant Nuke and Chem are local threats, not global existential, thus can be generally ignored. Independant Bio release is the only direct global existential threat, and it only needs a brain, a little money, and a small space. With all things independant, it's extremely hard to stop a determined player... even with a geopolitical "no go" progress cap set in the world, an independant will eventually be able to push at least marginally through that artificially set development boundary. Best bet with Bio may in fact rest on having widespread ability to engineer a fix faster than a total kill can sweep. That ability requires a "go" today. It's a bit chicken egg, but you've got zero chance if you don't.
What's the answer to the Fermi paradox?
Doesn't matter... alien's either do or do not exist, and they either will or will not kill us, mod any negotiations. Until Humanity itself goes interstellar or first contact or evidence happens, there seems little point in trying to plan, do, or not do, anything about such possibilities. Besides, all worthy aliens within at least a 100 light year radius already have a head start on us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_extraterrestrial_intelligen... https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06024 Best hope might be to bioengineer some brainless hot blondes to trade with them or use as trojan infiltrators, because on a galactic scale that might be the only unique and rare element you've got on your side... The Bimbo Attack. Another way of thinking is that Human DNA tends to do whatever it takes to survive, to advance, etc, and avoids suicide. Seems many of these debates people have "Woes, do or not do" end up moot since so long as it fits within that, it's likely to end up happening in its own course of time and progress anyways, no matter what you do.