Abacus

I'm not so sure. If we could build a spaceship that could maintain a decent acceleration for a long, long time, and thus reach a significant fraction of the speed of light, interstellar space travel becomes possible. And, due to relativistic time dialation, those long trips across many, many light-years wouldn't take nearly as long as one would at first think. Of course, if you wanted to come back home to earth and see your friends and family again, you might be in for a bit of a disappointment.

Of course, building such a spaceship is the real challenge. It may not be possible.

fando

Hey! I didn't say that we will be spacefarers for certain. I was pointing out that we would have no trouble imagining spacefaring civilization. Ask someone 500 years ago if they could have imagined the fleet of satellites, balloons and planes that course through our skies regularly.

Hmm, I believe we are in agreement about the nature of technology in the far future. I stated that there would be no fundamentally new technologies that would change our civilization into something that is completely alien to us today. The very fact that you are imagining what a world driven by common genetic engineering would be like, and that I am imagining life saturated with nanotechnology, demonstrates that there won't be anything that will surprise us to such a degree that we can't cope with it.

Let me delve deeper. I was really asking whether we would feel fear when confronted with the tecnology of the far future. If we don't feel fear, then we are already familiar with the technology. So will we be shocked by civilization after pulling a Rip van Winkle for 500 years? I believe that the answer is no. But for someone from the recent past, say about 300 years, the answer is very likely to be yes. I bet Newton would crap his pants had he seen a supersonic jetfighter scream past him. But we would just yawn at the sight of a space elevator ferrying cargo with the assistance of inertial drives.

I'm not scared of the future. Are you?

[ July 26, 2002: Message edited by: fando ]</p>

Bill

The young (and un-wise) have no fear. The older you get, the more you realize that the future presents a greater probability of "going bad" than it does of "going good." We need young people, if for no other reason than to go out and get killed by their un-wisdom. Those that survive will learn to fear, and to take care.

I fear the future because I feel the encroaching wave of thought police. The idea that the happiness of the majority can be guaranteed only if the minority are controlled leads eventually to the idea that all of technology will be focused on controlling people so as to make the ruling class happy; and the servant class happy with their lot in life, etc.

Where will we get atheists 200 years from now if the government mandates that all children must contain the full dose and range of all "god belief" genes so as to predispose us to being good servants of the will of our fearless leader? Genetic predisposition and cultural indoctrination are the two prongs of ensuring that the total population does what it is supposed to do. The latter we already have the ability to do. The former is within our grasp from a technology standpoint.

You can't be an unbeliever if the reality of belief is bred into your brain! (And by this I mean whatever genetic quality causes you to experience "religious ecstasy" when stimulated with some sort of religious thought pattern.) If the government can force religious belief upon you by controlling your genetic make-up, then what is left of freedom, anyway? Nothing, IMHO...

And THAT is truly something to fear!

== Bill

ishalon

And THAT is truly something to fear!

No its not, you'll be dead by then.

Bill

How can you be certain? The key to immortality can very well be locked up in the human genome, and we've just finished decoding that. By the time it is "my time to go" humanity could very well have a recipe for immortality.

== Bill

Bible Humper

Clinical immortality, yes.

I wonder what would be done with this knowledge though, would clinical immortality become a right or a priviledge?

I agree that the future is most likely going to be grim for Joe six-pack though, the arm of the elite grows longer and it's grip gets only stronger.

Religious genes aren't the best thing either, induced docility is much worse. The way religious people simply project their own wants and impulses into "God" leads me to believe that hyper-religiosity might not be as desireable as it might seem. The common Joe would be just as pissed, but now he would think Yahweh is pissed too! No doubt he will interpret any actions he takes in lashing out as being a ticket to heaven, thus making his potential for violence much worse.

The WTC incident shows how "docile" religious people are, IMHO, it's much better for them to have docile atheists.

pz

I really, really doubt it. I rather suspect that what we'll find in ourselves is that mortality is a necessary and intrinsic part of life itself. It's not going to be an extractable element.

Besides, you're incorrect in saying we've just finished decoding the human genome. We've just begun.

Friar Bellows

If you constantly accelerated a spaceship at 1g, then it would reach 99% the speed of light within a mere few years. If you carried the fuel along with you, basic physics tells you that the amount of fuel required to maintain 1g for a few years is astronomically large. If you tried to scoop it up as you went along (ramjet concept), again basic physics tells you that the "scooper" would have to be astronomically large. My point is that even before you consider things like fuel efficiency, radiation shielding, and so on, the simple physics of conservation of momentum makes it practically impossible.

The other possibility, if you can call it that, is some new and extremely exotic physics. Dream on, in other words.

elwoodblues

You might want to look into some of this yourself, especially the cutting edge genetics research.

Let me try to break one bit of it down. The ends of our genes start to unravel when we get old, sort of. It's a kind of built-in self-destruct mechanism. There's no other point to it other than evolutionary (ie, get the old generation of resource users out of the way for the new generation). It is conceivable we could 'fix' this, so the genes don't unravel. This would mean we could keep growing new cells our whole life, instead of that ability tapering off in old age, leading to myriad problems.

That's just one bit of many. Take a look. Death isn't inextricably tied to life. That's just a sappy piece of malarky. It sounds nice; that doesn't mean it has any bearing on reality.

There's plenty of money going to geriatric and life-extension, if for no other reason than old people have lots of money.

And, yes, we've just started decoding the genome. But what we've done so far took many-fold times shorter than we thought. Our ability to predict technology short-term is spotty. Long-term it's pathetically myopic.

ishalon

the chances of you being chosen to become immortal in that time are minute.