The year 3000

[Marxist ßastard]

So then you're saying that in the future, we will outgrow our resources, and will have to send a significant portion of the world population, a few people at a time, to a very specific building. Those people would be promised that upon entrance to the building, they will have a better life, devoid of suffering, with their every need fulfilled. They would enter the building and be unable to affect the rest of the world for the remainder of their lives. Once inside the building, they would take up less resources so that the rest of humanity could prosper.

 

Of course, to limit the impact of their departure from society, it should be a priority to eliminate what would effectively be widows and orphans of people sent to the building --- thus, one would have to strive to send entire families to the building at once. In the case of larger families, we would probably have to put more distant relatives into the building at the same time, too. Naturally, close friends and love interests would be right by the side of whoever is being sent in. That's not to mention how people can have a lasting effect on their neighborhood, or even their entire nation. Obviously, the maintainers of the building would have to help to ease society's suffering by helping them forget about whoever gets sent to the building. Ideally, there should be no record at all that a person removed from society even existed --- papers would have to be burned, events denied, and people sworn to secrecy. Maybe it would be prudent to focus first on those that society would easily forget: vagrants and bottom feeders, just to name a few. There are some groups that society would just love to see gone, such as violent criminals...

 

This all sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it?

[Ginji]

as far as I know someone has had their hand modified (right word?) to include wires to control a lamp (true)

Is that the same guy that put a chip in his wrist (attached to his nerve system) so that he could control robots (that were linked to the chip by a signal)?

 

I know that that is true.

[Fitzey12]

That's what i was talking about, Ginji

 

And Marxist, the way humans are using resources it'd be one of the only ways other than finding some resources on other planets , it wouldn't be about morals or anything else. People would have a life the same if not better than their old one due to the computers simulating real life, so no it's not what you're talking about it's NOT mass genocide, there'd be no discrimination because by then the human race would probably look like clones and wear cool jumpsuits :ph34r: I attached a power point illustration of what it would be like

 

http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/3604/matrixka7.th.png

[Peregrine]

And Marxist, the way humans are using resources it'd be one of the only ways other than finding some resources on other planets,

 

Which is infinitely more practical. Creating a "matrix" is completely beyond anything we understand. Harvesting resources from other planets/asteroids is just a matter of having the determination to do it, and investing the effort needed. The technological advances needed are much simpler, and actually a realistic possibility.

 

it wouldn't be about morals or anything else. People would have a life the same if not better than their old one due to the computers simulating real life,

 

Just repeating the same statement over and over again doesn't make it true. The burden of proof is on YOU to prove that it is possible to create a simulation of the real world that is so convincing that the user would be happy living in it forever.

 

so no it's not what you're talking about it's NOT mass genocide, there'd be no discrimination because by then the human race would probably look like clones and wear cool jumpsuits

 

This is just hillarious, taking bad science fiction films as an accurate vision of the future. Why would humans look like clones? Do you even have the most basic understanding of genetics and variation?

 

 

 

 

And the "matrix" idea is just stupid beyond belief. You're claiming that all the billions of humans would have their own personal world, so detailed and convincing that they have no desire to leave it. What, you thought you could just put everyone in one MMORPG-like world? Absolutely not... lets look at the example of the poor janitor. To create an accurate and convincing copy of the world for the CEO, you need to have all the people under him, all the way down to the janitor scrubbing his toilet. So now you've doomed our poor janitor to spend the rest of his life in a computer simulation, pretending to do his job so that someone else can have a more convincing world. Not really fair, is it? So the only solution is to put everyone in their individual world, where they can live however they like.

 

But that's an even bigger problem. Now you're talking about artificial intelligence of unbelievable complexity. Modern AI technology is nowhere near this level, even if we limit ourselves to single-task specialists, not a general "artificial human". There have been some promising hints in the area of self-programming adaptive networks, but that's all done by trial and error. Here we run into another fatal problem... the human brain evolved over hundreds of millions of years of natural selection. To duplicate this process would likely require similar amounts of time (remember, you need the entire lifespan of the organism to properly account for the selection factor, you can't just spawn a billion generations at once). Even if it can be shortened, it is likely that even, by some miracle, we found the perfect AI framework and started evolving it right this minute, it wouldn't be anywhere near finished by the year 3000.

 

By the way, I realize that there is a high US population on this forum, and something like 90% of you are dumb enough to reject evolution (I know, the US sucks, I'm embarassed to live here) and will likely rush to disagree with my point about natural selection. Let me just state that evolution is the best-case scenario for the matrix fanboys. Lets say we reject all of science, and arbitrarily declare that "god did it". Now we're in an even worse position, because creating human-level intelligence (mandatory for the matrix) requires an omnipotent god. Since it is highly doubtful that humans will achieve divine status within the next 993 years, it's a safe bet that we will not be able to reproduce Genesis and simply wish our matrix into existence.

[CJD]

I dont hav an elaborate answer like that but i do believe it will just be more urban. I dont think we will change much in a thousand years. We will however hav flying cars, and virtual reality of that im sure.

[RedPlague]

By the way, I realize that there is a high US population on this forum, and something like 90% of you are dumb enough to reject evolution (I know, the US sucks, I'm embarassed to live here) and will likely rush to disagree with my point about natural selection. Let me just state that evolution is the best-case scenario for the matrix fanboys. Lets say we reject all of science, and arbitrarily declare that "god did it". Now we're in an even worse position, because creating human-level intelligence (mandatory for the matrix) requires an omnipotent god. Since it is highly doubtful that humans will achieve divine status within the next 993 years, it's a safe bet that we will not be able to reproduce Genesis and simply wish our matrix into existence.

 

I couldn't agree more, except that i have a hard time believing we came from primates. The whole missing link thing lends itself fairly well to reasonable doubt. Though divine intervention is significantly less plausible. Just call me a disbeliever.

 

CJD, we were supposed to have flying cars what, fifty years ago? Give it up. Besides most people are horrible drivers in two dimensions, do you really want them driving in three?

[Peregrine]

By the way, I realize that there is a high US population on this forum, and something like 90% of you are dumb enough to reject evolution (I know, the US sucks, I'm embarassed to live here) and will likely rush to disagree with my point about natural selection. Let me just state that evolution is the best-case scenario for the matrix fanboys. Lets say we reject all of science, and arbitrarily declare that "god did it". Now we're in an even worse position, because creating human-level intelligence (mandatory for the matrix) requires an omnipotent god. Since it is highly doubtful that humans will achieve divine status within the next 993 years, it's a safe bet that we will not be able to reproduce Genesis and simply wish our matrix into existence.

 

I couldn't agree more, except that i have a hard time believing we came from primates. The whole missing link thing lends itself fairly well to reasonable doubt. Though divine intervention is significantly less plausible. Just call me a disbeliever.

 

Just a note to Switch/Dark0ne: I know you can't stand the fact that I'm an atheist, but this has nothing to do with religion. RedPlague explicitly stated that he's not talking about divine intervention, and neither am I. So don't even think of deleting this post. Now then...

 

That's a common misconception: we didn't evolve from primates, humans and primates both evolved from a common ancestor. And the evidence is unarguable, we share an incredibly high percentage of our genes with primates. Even ignoring the fossil record, it's easy to trace back these genetic similarities and contruct an approximate evolutionary tree for pretty much any species. We know what genes we have in common, we know the approximate mutation rate, we know the structural similarities, etc. The only "doubt" comes from creationists who reject the entire concept of science and empiricism.

 

But the whole "missing link" thing is just a giant appeal to ignorance fallacy. Think about it for a moment... lets take two species, modern humans and the common ape/human ancestor. There's a gap, your so-called missing link. Now lets say a record of an intermediate species is found, call it Species A. The gap-ist's response would be "now there are TWO gaps!" (instead of human-ancestor, now we have ancestor-A, A-human), considering the overall theory twice as weak, not better supported. Now lets say another species, Species B is found, filling the gap between A-human. Now we have three "missing links" (ancestor-A, A-B, B-human) to deal with. I think you can see the pattern... unless we have a record of every individual organism between the ancestor and modern humans, there's always going to be a "missing link" you can point to.

 

And this is exactly what we should expect. Fossils only form under very specific and rare conditions, the majority of organisms simply die and are lost forever. Now consider the incredibly tiny percentage of the planet's surface we've searched for fossils. How many "missing links" are somewhere in a vast wilderness waiting to be found? How many "missing links" have been paved over to build another parking lot? How many "missing links" have been imperfectly fossilized and exist only as fragments or mis-identified random bones?

 

So in summary, not only does the proof for primates and humans sharing a common ancestor exist, but the only counter-argument is completely fallacious.

 

CJD, we were supposed to have flying cars what, fifty years ago? Give it up. Besides most people are horrible drivers in two dimensions, do you really want them driving in three?

 

/aerospace engineer mode on

 

Actually, we do have flying cars, they just haven't been practical (cost-effective, really) to mass-produce. The engineering problems for a car and a plane are just so different that a flying car would be far too inefficient at both flying and driving. Unless you have a very compelling reason to do it, you're better off buying a car and a plane, and driving yourself to the airport. And that reason just doesn't exist.

 

But the real reason for that is people insist on taking "flying car" literally, and thinking of some bizarre hybrid. In reality, the ideal "flying car" would replace roads completely, it would be nothing more than an increase in popularity of small planes. And there are only two reasons we can't do this to a high degree, in the modern age of computers and automatic pilots:

 

1) Our city layout generally sucks for something like this. Yes, you can cut takeoff/landing distance to pretty absurdly small levels (even without vertical takeoff, you can easily design a light plane to operate off a football-field size patch of generally flat ground). But think about how many places you drive to, and imagine putting a tiny airport next to each of them. You'll need some kind of ground transport to get you from a central hub airport to the destination (you might imagine dozens of these in a major city), but that's the bigger problem: our public transit system SUCKS. The necessary public mass-transit to support flying cars would be insanely expensive, and pretty unlikely in the forseeable future.

 

2) Computers are good, but not quite good enough to deal with problems. Making an autopilot that flies under ideal conditions is easy. Making an autopilot that can deal with bad weather/emergencies/etc is much harder. But this is a pretty straightforward engineering problem, it's only a matter of time before we can build a plane where you just press the "fly to the grocery store" button and the humans are just along for the ride. So poor driving skills aren't that much of a problem.

 

So there's no real technical reason why we couldn't make the change from driving to flying (and the extra volume for traffic in 3-dimensions is a good one in favor of it). In fact, I could probably design you one right now (well, after a couple more years of classes). The only thing standing in the way is nobody really wants to do it. If the economic/convenience factors changed for some reason and there was a real demand for them, we'd have flying cars just as soon as the companies could set up their production lines.

[RedPlague]

Interesting read on both counts. Though i cringe at the thought of what would be done with the refuse made from roads becoming obsolete.

[Peregrine]

Interesting read on both counts.

 

If you want to know more, I'd suggest any of Richard Dawkins' books on genetics/evolution. River Out of Eden is pretty short, and covers a lot of those issues, but the others are definitely worth reading. Whether or not you agree with his books and essays on atheism, his scientific work is both technically unarguable and well-written.

 

Or, if you had any specific questions, feel free to ask them... I can disprove pretty much any of the usual anti-evolution arguments. Whatever your reasons for not accepting the theory completely, it's pretty easy to address them convincingly.

 

Though i cringe at the thought of what would be done with the refuse made from roads becoming obsolete.

 

The answer is probably nothing. Like I said, you'll still need some kind of ground transporation, even if it's just over short distances (a mile or two). Whatever form it takes, it's likely that it would use the existing roads. And even if nobody wants them anymore (not even for walking), they'll just be left to decay. Nobody is going to bother tearing them up unless they're in the way of some future project, and even then it's a pretty simple issue. Roads aren't toxic waste or something, tear them up and it's just more bulk rubble to be disposed of along with the usual rocks and trees and stuff that get cleared out every day.

[The Hippie]

in my mind were screwed either way im having a lot of trouble imagining humans as a species conserving nature have you ever read the book caves of steel by isaac asimov? think that except communist (well have to be to conserve whats left methinks) i hope i die before that process starts

 

Edit: sweet im not the only aerospace guy