On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 10:21 AM Lawrence Crowell < goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [Me] I'm not talking about humans snuffing themselves out although I >> admit that's possible, I'm talking about humans replacing parts of >> themselves until there is no longer anything very human about them. Some >> signals in the brain move as slowly as .01 meters per second, the slow >> diffusion of hormones for example, but even the very fastest signals in the >> brain move at only 100 meters per second and light moves at 300,000,000 >> meters per second; and in a computer made with Nanotechnology the distances >> the signal must travel will be far shorter because the components will be >> much smaller. And that's without even considering Quantum Computers. There >> is just no way biology can compete with that. >> > > > I have serious doubts about a lot of these hyper-tech ideas that border > on science fiction. > These ideas are technology fiction maybe but they are not science fiction. I'm not talking about backward time travel or faster than light spaceships, those things are probably physically impossible and would require a major breakthrough in science that would upend nearly everything we think we know about how the world works, I'm just talking about an improvement in technology. We just need to be able to place atoms where we want them to go (and we don't even need to get close to Heisenberg's limit). Everything else follows from that. > *These ideas sort of give me a sense of why there were so many of those > 1950 science fiction and horror films about mad doctors or scientists hell > bent on bizarre quests. I think for the average person these sorts of ideas > probably sound little different.* > That is certainly true today and that's why Cryonics is not enormously more popular than it is. So I guess I'm not the average person. To tell the truth, when I was a kid I usually identified more with the mad scientist in those 1950s movies (Forbidden Planet was my favorite) than with the purported hero, and I thought Lex Luthor had more fun than Superman. *> One has to remember that while we can pursue a better understanding of > the universe, few people want their humanity taken away or to become > robots.* > What people want is not terribly relevant in this case, I'm sure the dinosaurs didn't want an asteroid crashing into the Yucatán 66 Million years ago, but it happened nevertheless. *> For some practical reasons I also think there are limits on these > things. * That might be the most comfortable thing for some people to believe but I see no reason to think it's actually true. Modern humans have only been around for about half a million years and you think that's as smart as things can get? A machine can approach our level of intelligence but never reach it? If humanity manages to avoid destruction by Trump and other existential threats you think the human species will remain unchanged on a geological time scale? With the twin factors of the computer revolution and genetic engineering I don't think the human race will remain stable even for the remainder of this century. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1sb1ekd-xwG%3D%2BBbW9yfdZM_OH-1wvTPGV6Qakzc74ycw%40mail.gmail.com.
