On 9/8/07, Tom McCabe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > --- Quasar Strider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > An out-of-context quote does not magically overrule > three historical examples. And I can easily provide > more: Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Mendeleev, > etc.
Please read some more about Plank. He tried to fight against Hitler from within the establishment and all he got for himself were some dead sons and a ton of grief. Plank was the opposite of most scientists. He did his most notable discoveries at a rather old age. He is one of the reasons we have lasers and quantum theory today. Galileo was sent to a monastery, while saying, "but it moves!" I believe. Darwin was a laughing stock at the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Darwin_ape.jpg I will grant you Copernicus. He was pretty smooth. > Until we stop hoarding academic seats and start some > > crop rotation, > > immortality is a problem, not a bonus. I believe we > > should have a mandate > > limit, like politicians. > > Even if you argue that immortality is bad, surely you > agree that killing someone instantly with a gun is > more humane than letting them rot for years in a > hospital, sometimes in extreme pain, knowing they're > going to die. Therefore, if you assume immortality is > bad, we should still get rid of aging; we just need to > round up all the old people and machine-gun them. Geez, I said mandate limit, not Stalinesque culling. Say, I have a maximum term limit of 20 years (a generation) at working in that profession. If I cannot do anything major, it is probably because I was not actually that good at it. Perhaps it is time I learn something else. So I learn something else for 20 more years, before going back to the same profession. 20 is just a number. It could be 40. Let's say 40. What is the fun of doing the same thing for 40 years in a row? I certainly hope we have more interests than that. If we can manage do that, I see no problem with even immortality, although I see little point in creating a living fossil race of immortals tired of blabbing with each other like the old men from the Muppet Show. I sometimes feel like I am one of those old men from the Muppet Show. There. I just had another mid-life crisis. Just after my 6 or 7 previous ones. Like each time I changed schools, or the first time I shaved my beard. Human neural capacity is limited by the size of the > birth canal. You can enhance a computer pretty much > indefinitely, until you run up against the laws of QM > (which we are far from doing). You cannot train a > worker indefinitely; the best athletes, poets, etc. > today have roughly the same skills as the best of > ancient Greece. The mean has increased, not the upper > bound. Yes but the books are getting better. I believe the Greeks mostly teached using dialetics. I am not dead set against enabling people to improve their bodies. I just see little point in most of the things being bandied about as advantages. In fact, I believe we are still a bit off from the Greek pinnacle. I suspect we are weaker than they were at the time. > My point is, I believe we are not protected from a > > mass extinction event. > > What if the atmosphere just vanished in an instant > > or the Sun decided to > > peter out? > > What the heck happened to the dinosaurs? > > Agreed! To learn more about mass extinction and how we > can prevent it, see http://www.lifeboat.com. > > Input isn't the problem, it's output. Well, actually, > it's output and our ability to process input; our > brain can't simply dump incoming data into a storage > cell for further use, so it must be analyzed in real > time, which cuts down dramatically on the amount of > information we can actually pict up. In other words, we have a phishing and spamming filter built in, which kicks in when we are overloaded. Autistic children do not. So they communicate by squeaks. This does not alter the algorithms; it just alters the > file's hash. It's the first sentence on > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code, for > Belldandy's sake. I'm talking about code that can > alter its own algorithms in an intelligent manner. Ok, you got me on that one, genetic algorithms with self-modifying code it is then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-modifying_code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm The fitness criteria can be replication speed. So we can spam the world. Who is Belldandy? :-) ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=39790000-5ed72e
