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| future plans for humans; were will you go? | |
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| Topic Started: Sep 29 2010, 03:50 PM (950 Views) | |
| Dragon wasp | Sep 29 2010, 03:50 PM Post #1 |
Prime Specimen
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in the far future what do you think will happen to humans? (dont know if this goes here...) will we travel to a different planet? stay on earth? die out? please disscuss |
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| skwirlinator | Nov 13 2010, 03:01 AM Post #16 |
Terminator Squirrel
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Thanx Holbenilord, I thoroughly enjoyed reading that! I had some issues with my ISP and could not promptly reply.
Wasn't trying to impress. My replies are based on me trying to form speculation. Self-aware AI is inevitable but I don't consider it a form of human evolution. Someday in the far future, humans may trend into artificial devices grafted to their bodies. Whether for pleasure or utility one cannot say. It would stand to reason that if a device is grafted to ones body it would need to be self-smart and very dependable. Such devices, over time, might become "normal" and any baseline human without augmentation might be considered a freak. Such as trending has already proven. (Humans found living in the natural wild are considered "feral") It seems to me that the next step for the artificial heart is to prevent the original equipment from failing in the first place. To repair the broken(No pun intended) or defective organ. To rid it of disease. If technology becomes available to repair damage or diseased/defective cells why would medicine choose to ignore it? Nanotechnology promises the ability to rebuild body cells at the atomic level. Rearranging molecules and stuff. Point is - Nanotechnology could become an artificial substance that all humans possess from the moment a zygote is formed. A molecular self-replicating machine that uses a medical blueprint of the human to prevent a heart from malforming in the first place. Sure it is far-far in the future but no time-frame was given concerning this conversation.
No you are not - according to our current standards. Monster was a poor choice of words and it has distracted from the intent of my discussion. The point I was trying to make is that we are very different creatures from the first humans. That has occurred in merely two million or so years. Imagine jumping in time to see what we would be 5 million years from now. Even if our genome stagnates. As long as we survive our bodies must change over time. Some of those changes are predictable (losing our little toe, brains getting larger and stuff like that. Some changes are going to be really weird. Larger lungs to supply our brains with more oxygenated blood in a decreasing oxygen atmosphere. Our chests will expand. Menstruation cycles that are no longer monthly because the moon's gravitational influence decreases. Ovulation cycles change causing less reproduction per lifetime. It may make us more sexually involved causing our sex drives and related organs to change. Puberty may start occurring sooner. More eggs may drop per ovulation giving rise to smaller body size and larger ... um...litters? More twins, triplets and quads being born per woman. These are just a couple of things I can come up with and I haven't even begun to look into it in depth. Thicker skin as temperatures drop, changes in our eyes as the length of a day grows longer, there are many things that will change us into the unknown.
No - I'm not. The point I was trying to make is that we don't know. We can't know. Science is not absolute. The universe is VERY BIG and VERY OLD. Our observations are limited to our time and spacial coordinates. We are a very young civilization. Always and Never are the terms of a closed mind. Closed minds stagnate discovery. Try to imagine infinity. imagine a number then add one, and add another and so on. We think there can be no end to infinity because we can always add one more. Imagine a hypothetical computer. Lets say a Roadrunner class super computer. At the moment of the big bang it started adding numbers as fast as it could. Who is to say that over the coarse of 14 billion years it wouldn't reach a point at which no more ones could be added? Our entire universe filled to bursting with numbers. We just can't say with any fact that it cant happen. Infinity is a unprovable speculation at our current understanding. Another concept along the same lines is the concept of Zero. There cannot be less than zero of anything. If zero is a concept of an integer then there cannot be a minus 1. But over the life of the universe there may occur an instance where something has broken our rule. we cannot say for certain. Sorry for my divergence. Science is not fact - it is ongoing discovery.
Consciously, according to the individual but society shapes us. Science shapes us. Religion shapes us. Not just our attitudes but our bodies as well. Two million years is not enough time to see many definable changes to our physical form but we have changed. The choice is individual when we decide to adopt a meme and make the change as a society. We only see one change but over time the small changes we decide to make affect our bodies. One great example is our noses. We can't detect odors like we used to. Not personally over your lifetime - I mean us as a species. Personal fitness has increased our longevity. Dental hygiene has increased our longevity. If we only had a lost tribe of prehumans to compare ourselves to you would understand what I mean. We are the product of our society no matter the outcome. Society is a conciseness decision of individuals to agree to a change. As society mutates so we must mutate.
ETHICS: Ethics are society driven. We no longer hold public executions. Someday we may hold public executions. It depends upon the memes adopted by society. Reproduction is not an ethical driven trait. It is fundamental to the continuation of a species. Humans as a species has already artificially reproduced (Test-Tube Baby) and cloning is inevitable no matter public opinion. Over time - Ethics change in unpredictable ways. IMPORTANCE OF PARENTS: Parents are required to contribute a sperm and an egg to create a zygote. That is biological and can be reproduced in the lab. In the Future - keyword= FUTURE. Our technology may make it possible to create a sperm and egg in a lab. It may occur that a sperm and egg may be able to be bypassed and we may create zygotes artificially. Will we be humans? If the zygote has the human genome then technically - yes. Morally - I don't think so but society may change to the point that morally it is acceptable reproduction. who knows - that's why it is called speculation. Parental guidance is not a natural requirement of life. Children have been raised from birth by surrogate parents and there are even instances where they have survived without parents at all. Look at the experiments done by the government in the 50s & 60s. Children raised in a laboratory by a team of scientists. Parents are important now but perhaps not in the future. LACK OF HORRIBLENESS IN THE HUMAN RACE: Ummm?, What does that mean? Humans are horrible. We define horror in the natural world. We are destroyers of nature. We kill for pleasure. We take ownership of objects and deny them to other lifeforms. I don't consider that statement a valid argument. Please explain... LACK OF NECESSITY: At our current technology levels there is no need to create specialized humans. In the future (Again - no time-frame was given), we may need a being to watch over our space ships while we travel to the stars. A being that is able to withstand long periods of micro-gravity that has skin features to resist prolonged exposure to cosmic rays. The future is unknown and this is speculation. The navigators of Dune are definitely busted. The whole concept of Dune is busted because the scenario is placed in too short of a time-frame. QUOTE: The year is 10,191. Not only could we not mutate as described we would not be able to traverse the distances they describe. 10,000 years is nothing. Our form has changed very little over 2 million years. Even if we found the magical 'Spice' it could not happen as described by Mr. Herbert. Nice Science Fiction tho. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It has been a long standing passion of mine to try to find examples of future humans. This community is wonderful. My passion for science fiction and fantasy is driven by my need to find a truly alien life-form. I love monster movies because the stranger a creature is depicted the better I like it. The universe is huge and very old. Our baseline forms may only be a cosmographically distinct phenomenon. Bi-lateral symmetry may be just natural in our galaxy. Human beings may only have our shape for a limited time. Our star takes roughly 225 million years to make one galactic year. If we survive to our first galactic birthday we may well be completely unrecognizable as the animals we are today. Only a gene sample would define us as humans. I would love to see what we actually become. GREAT DISCUSSION! |
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| Holben | Nov 13 2010, 03:08 PM Post #17 |
Rumbo a la Victoria
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fine, as long as i get a chat!  Self aware AI as inevitable... i'm not so sure. When we fully understand, i mean we know most of it already but not quite, conciousness then i'll be able to say whether a mind can be made of logic gates. Though lateral thinking gates and wetware are good. Indeed, a common depiction of future medicine involves injecting nanoprobes to remove clots or diseases, or to repair the stimulating cells. But that's only short tierm aughmentation, rather than the permament organ replacement you speak of. Preventing the heart from malforming is a noble aim, but embryo screening seems easier. I reckon that technology will supplant evolution in our quest to survive, really. And i don't think humans will be around for more than a few thousand years, however things turn out. Infinity and zero are concepts rather than numbers, infinity cannot be reached except by starting at itself and zero is impossible within time and space. But science has some of the facts, and that's what enables us to make predictions and interpreatations as we do, which fit. And these tell us that ther'e s a limit to what we can know- it could be established by our neurology or equally by the universe itself. Society has just enabled these changes to occur, rather than acting as a direct cause. Mutation of mentality is rather different, and not something i can really claim to be able to predict.  Certainly, ethics are influenced by the environment. But experiments suggest that, except in unusual neurologies, some things seem to be harder to agree to do for everyone. Certain things will change, and perhaps genetic drift could make our ethical circuits collapse, but not before we are no longer around for whatever reason. Surrogates work, yes, but only to an extent. A team of unrelated scientists won't act the same way as a true parent, and neither would a surrogate machine. The roles for specialised humans could all be done better by mkachines, though, and that's where future lack of necessity will lie. Except, perhaps, in anti-mechanical cultures. |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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7:30 PM Jul 13