The Singularity is coming

[cowboyangel]

one of the other aspects to the peak oil question......

Melting Away
by Mike Davis

The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row
over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence.
But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing "storm of
the decade" took place in March 2004. Hurricane Catarina--so named
because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa
Catarina--was the first recorded South Atlantic hurricane in history.

Textbook orthodoxy had long excluded the possibility of such an event;
sea temperatures, experts claimed, were too low and wind shear too
powerful to allow tropical depressions to evolve into cyclones south of
the Atlantic equator. Indeed, forecasters rubbed their eyes in
disbelief as weather satellites downlinked the first images of a
classical whirling disc with a well-formed eye in these forbidden
latitudes.

In a series of recent meetings and publications, researchers have
debated the origin and significance of Catarina. A crucial question is
this: Was Catarina simply a rare event at the outlying edge of the
normal bell curve of South Atlantic weather, just as, for example, Joe
DiMaggio's incredible fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 represented
an extreme probability in baseball (an analogy made famous by Stephen
Jay Gould)? Or was Catarina a "threshold" event, signaling some
fundamental and abrupt change of state in the planet's climate system?

Scientific discussions of environmental change and global warming have
long been haunted by the specter of nonlinearity. Climate models, like
econometric models, are easiest to build and understand when they are
simple linear extrapolations of well-quantified past behavior--that is,
when causes maintain a consistent proportionality to their effects.

But all the major components of global climate--air, water, ice and
vegetation--are actually nonlinear: At certain thresholds they can
switch from one state of organization to another, with catastrophic
consequences for species too finely tuned to the old norms. Until the
early 1990s, however, it was generally believed that these major
climate transitions took centuries, if not millennia, to accomplish.
Now, thanks to the decoding of subtle signatures in ice cores and
sea-bottom sediments, we know that global temperatures and ocean
circulation can, under the right circumstances, change abruptly--in a
decade or even less.

The paradigmatic example is the so-called "Younger Dryas" event, 12,800
years ago, when an ice dam collapsed, releasing an immense volume of
meltwater from the shrinking Laurentian ice sheet into the Atlantic
Ocean via the instantly created St. Lawrence River. This "freshening"
of the North Atlantic suppressed the northward conveyance of warm water
by the Gulf Stream and plunged Europe back into a thousand-year ice
age. Abrupt switching mechanisms in the climate system--such as
relatively small changes in ocean salinity--are augmented by causal
loops that act as amplifiers. Perhaps the most famous example is
sea-ice albedo: The vast expanses of white, frozen Arctic Ocean ice
reflect heat back into space, thus providing positive feedback for
cooling trends. Alternatively, shrinking sea-ice levels increase heat
absorption, accelerating both further melting and planetary warming.

Thresholds, switches, amplifiers, chaos--contemporary geophysics
assumes that earth history is inherently revolutionary. This is why
many prominent researchers--especially those who study topics like
ice-sheet stability and North Atlantic circulation--have always had
qualms about the consensus projections of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on global warming.

In contrast to Bushite flat-earthers and shills for the oil industry,
these researchers base their skepticism on fears that the IPCC models
fail to adequately allow for catastrophic nonlinearities like the
Younger Dryas. Where other researchers model the
late-twenty-first-century climate that our children will live with upon
the precedents of the Altithermal (the hottest phase of the current
Holocene period, 8,000 years ago) or the Eemian (the previous, even
warmer interglacial episode, 120,000 years ago), growing numbers of
geophysicists toy with the possibilities of runaway warming returning
the earth to the torrid chaos of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
(PETM: 55 million years ago), when the extreme and rapid heating of the
oceans led to massive extinctions.

Dramatic new evidence has emerged recently that we may be headed, if
not back to the dread, almost inconceivable PETM, then to a much harder
landing than envisioned by the IPCC. As I flew toward Louisiana and the
carnage of Katrina three weeks ago, I found myself reading the August
23 issue of EOS, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. I was
pole-axed by an article titled "Arctic System on Trajectory to New, Seasonally Ice-Free State,"
co-authored by twenty-one scientists from almost as many universities
and research institutes. Even two days later, walking among the ruins
of the Lower Ninth Ward, I found myself worrying more about the EOS
article than the disaster surrounding me.

The article begins with a recounting of trends familiar to any reader
of the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times: For almost
thirty years, Arctic sea ice has been thinning and shrinking so
dramatically that "a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean within a century is a
real possibility." The scientists, however, add a new observation--that
this process is probably irreversible. "Surprisingly, it is difficult
to identify a single feedback mechanism within the Arctic that has the
potency or speed to alter the system's present course."

An ice-free Arctic Ocean has not existed for at least 1 million years;
the authors warn that the earth is inexorably headed toward a
"super-interglacial" state "outside the envelope of
glacial-interglacial fluctuations that prevailed during recent Earth
history." They emphasize that within a century, global warming will
probably exceed the maximum Eemian temperature and thus obviate all the
models that have made this their essential scenario. They also suggest
that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a real
possibility--an event that would definitely throw a Younger Dryas
wrench into the Gulf Stream.

If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of a
runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations marked
"Altithermal" and "Eemian." "Outside the envelope," moreover, means
that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic
parameters of the Holocene--the last 10,000 years of mild, warm weather
that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and urban
civilization--but also those of the late Pleistocene that fostered the
evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa.

Other researchers undoubtedly will contest the extraordinary
conclusions of the EOS article and--we must hope--suggest the
existence of countervailing forces to this scenario of an Arctic albedo
catastrophe. But for the time being, at least, research on global
change is pointing toward worst-case scenarios.

All of this, of course, is a perverse tribute to industrial capitalism
and extractive imperialism as geological forces so formidable that they
have succeeded in scarcely more than two centuries--indeed, mainly in
the last fifty years--in knocking the earth off its climatic pedestal
and propelling it toward the nonlinear unknown.

The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to
worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans or using too much
toilet paper, when, soon enough, we'll be debating how many
hunter-gatherers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or
the tropical forests of the Yukon.

The good parent in me, however, screams: How is it possible that we can
now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children's
children will themselves have children? Let ExxonMobil answer that in
one of its sanctimonious ads.

This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/davis

[can't sit still]

NASA has some interesting things to say on the subject too. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004 ... ist1101254
Dan

The singularity is interesting. I'll start a new thread for global warming.

[geekster]

The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence.

Bullshit. Happened in both 1960 AND 1961 back to back. The period of the 1970's through the 1980's was one of very mild hurricanes. We are now back into a cycle like we were from the late '30's to the early '70's. It is a cycle. Happens over and over. We will have 20 to 30 years of major hurricane activity and it will go quiet again.

[geekster]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9417904/

Max Mayfield told a congressional panel that he believes the Atlantic Ocean is in a cycle of increased hurricane activity that parallels an increase that started in the 1940s and ended in the 1960s.

The ensuing lull lasted until 1995, then “it’s like somebody threw a switch,” Mayfield said. The number and power of hurricanes increased dramatically.

Under questioning by members of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on disaster prevention and prediction, he shrugged off the notion that global warming played a role, saying instead it was a natural cycle in the Atlantic Ocean that fluctuates every 25 to 40 years.

[geekster]

The 1961 Cat 5 hurricanes in the gulf were Carla and Hattie. Hattie was interesting because she had three names as she went across central america into the pacific and then crossed again back into the atlantic.

The 1960 storms were Donna and Ethel

The 1960 Atlantic hurricane season was an ongoing event in the annual cycle of tropical cyclone formation. It officially started June 1, 1960, and lasted until November 30, 1960.

The most notable storm of the season was Hurricane Donna, a Category 5 for a time in the open Atlantic. It was the worst storm to strike Florida in ten years, causing six direct deaths, and causing $387 million in damage ($2.4 billion in 2000 dollars).

Also, Ethel reached Category 5 strength very briefly before falling apart prior to landfall in Mississippi. This marks the first of only three seasons that two Category 5 hurricanes have formed (the others being 1961 and 2005). Miraculously however, it weakened to a tropical storm within 24 hours of hitting land in Mississippi.

[can't sit still]

I'm just going to sit back and watch it all happen. You can bet your pabst that i'm not going to be in a trailer park in Florida.

[geekster]

Or Long Island or Cape Cod, if you are smart.

[Steven bradford]

'so long as you have plenty of Long Islands or Cape Cods, or PBRs in ya, you won't notice a thing!

[joel the ornery]

In contrast to Bushite flat-earthers and shills for the oil industry

and this is where you lost my attention.

[cowboyangel]

In contrast to Bushite flat-earthers and shills for the oil industry

and this is where you lost my attention.

flat-earthers=code for creationists
shills=code for oil-men in the white house....Cheney, Bush, Rummey etc
Cape Cod = my old stomping grounds, ruined by over-development

[can't sit still]

We could all buy one of these. http://www.usbunkers.com/

The real problem is agriculture. We'd have to drop beef production like a hot potato. It takes too much land and water. Change over to Buffalo and caribou. They're hardier.
If the cooling scenario for the north atlantic is correct, Europe is shafted. They haven't got enough reserves of farmland with adequate growing season.
They may have to take over sub-sahara Africa for a century or two.

If the globe warms up and the Atlantic cools down, where does that leave the majority of the continental US? I imagine that someone, somewhere has some models.

The northwestern US will probably be warm enough to still have decent growing seasons. The problem is that the east has the people and the soil
The west has a lot of denuded land. I guess the solution is for the people in the east to fill their pockets with good dirt and come west.

I read a figure of 300 ft more ocean if all the ice melted. Of course, it won't all melt. One way or another we'll lose a lot of seaboard real estate. Louisiana and Florida will be singin the blues.
I'm looking at Tazzie.
Dan

[geekster]

During the most major cooling since the last ice age ended, a period called the Younger Dryas, most of the equatorial rain forests died out because of dry conditions and were replaced by grasslands. In a warming situation in the US we are probably looking at an expansion of lakes in the Great Basin, increased snowpack and rainfall in the Sierra, Cascades, and Wasatch Front. The western plains east of the rockies will probably get a bit dryer and storms in the central midwest will be more active. You would probably see a decrease in Rio Grande drainage and an increase in Mississippi drainage. Growing seasons will lengthen northwards allowing crops to grow there than can not be grown today. Canada would see a boost in their agricultural production and increased biodiversity as more species will be able to survive.

In general, periods of warmer climate result in greater abundance of food and species. Periods of cooling tend to result in famine, drought, and periods of reduced biodiversity and extinctions. Where there are now forests in Michigan and Minnesota there wouldn't be a lot of biological diversity under a mile thickness of ice.

What people have a hard time understanding, and what the media tends to mis-report, is that in general, worming temperature cause overall WETTER conditions, not dryer. This is because warm air holds more water vapor. Warmer air holding more moisture arrives from the ocean. In areas with coastal mountains, this means higher rainfall/snowpack in those mountains and an increase in runoff ( Pyramid Lake rises). Grasses give way to trees, rivers and lakes expand, overall rainfall increases but snow tends not to last over the summer and glaciers retreat even though winter snowfall is higher.

At the same time SOME deserts will be impacted because the rain shadow effect is more pronounced. This means that when this air descends after dropping it's load of moisture on the mountains, it is dryer than in the past. So you have more extremes of very wet on one side of the mountains and very dry on the other.

When the temperature is cold, little water is in the air but what does fall on the mountains tends to stay and not melt and run off. So you have a period of snowcapped mountains but much dryer conditions. Trees give way to grasses. Deserts expand. Overal rainfall decreases.

Earth's climate is changing. It generally is. While over the short term it tends to oscillate around an average, on a scale of decades it is always varying. In other words, chances are pretty good that the climate of today is different than the climate when your grandparents were children. Earth is also prone to quite dramatic changes in climate over rather short periods of time but there really is no evidence that we are experiancing one now. McIntyre has done a pretty good job of debunking the Mann "hockey stick" graph often used by certain groups to justify their political discussions. That graph was produced by "cherry picking" data in order to produce a desired result.

Bottom line? Earth is warming. It isn't as warm as it has been in the past couple of thousand years and it certainly isn't as warm now as it has been since the last ice age. What will happen in the future? Things will change, that's what. As glaciers retreat more, more CO2 will be scrubbed from the atmosphere from rock erosion. The warmer earth gets, the better it gets at removing CO2. CO2 isn't as major of a problem as it is made to be either. Water vapor is a MUCH more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. So is methane. If you want to see some historical jumps in temperature, you should look sometime at what happened in the past when the huge oceanic deposits of methane hydrates vaporized. The poles went tropical. The number of species exploded. Dinosaurs evolved. Cold blooded creatures could survive over nearly all the planet.

For most of nature, warming is a good thing.

[geekster]

Here is a fairly nice article that describes several periods of very abrupt climate change. In fact, the Younger Dryas ended completely in about 50 years time. The climate went from basically ice age glacial to close to what it is today in the span of one person's lifetime. It did this in three jumps. Each jump lasting about 5 years, they stable for several years then another jump of 5 years. Some instances of dramtic climate change have been quite damaging to early civilizations. In fact, the below link shows that one instance of rapid cooling was in sync with a period of prolonged drought (roughly 300 years) and the collapse of a civilization on Mesopotamia.

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/arch/examples.shtml

[Davoid]

I leave the thread for a day or two and you guys go all mech and climate on me. Well, my cautious optimism has become more cautious, thank you Cowboy Angel. I suppose I should move father from the rising ocean than 1/2 a block. And here I thought I should be worried mainly about terrorist action against the port of Long Beach, where the majority of goods enter this country. Prime fuck-shit-up real estate.

I've often wondered where the safest place to live is, in the U.S. and the world, factoring in various catastrophe scenarios. 'Taint
where I am now no matter which way you slice it, but this creation called SoCal sure is pleasant while it lasts.

So we return to the question: will we bring about our own deaths, or will we transcend our current limitations? The trajectories are at once dark and ill and stunning and magnificent (not to count out business-as-usual mediocrity). BM 2025 above the not-so-Arctic circle, or in formerly-known-as Virtual Reality?

[can't sit still]

Hey, don't blame me. When the climate stuff became interesting, I started a new thread.
The mech stuff was Geekster's idea.
"I know nothing, Herr Comandant" [sgt Shultz]
The idea of the singularity is fascinating. We're in a race to see if climate can wipe us out before we get smart enough to save ourselves.

As far as port of Long Beach goes, do you get close-in LNG or CNG ships?
I'm too lazy to look it up myself.
The reason that I ask is because they're bombs just waiting for an excuse.
The day after 9/11 in New York, I called the FBI in LA and told them that if they wanted to guard against terrorism, they better watch gas shipments.
I told the guy that if you took a big model airplane and mounted a 5 lb shaped charge in the longitudinal axis, you could fly it against the side of a tankship. With a high velocity primer and a high velocity charge like RDX, it wouldn't ignite the gas. Just let it leak until it found a source and blew sky-high. A 100 kiloton fuel-air bomb.
You couldn't detect or intercept a model airplane at low altitude. It wouldn't take much skill or money. You would even have time to make a gettaway.
The FBI allowed that,yes, I was correct and that they would definitely think about it.
Enough of doomsday stuff, back to the singularity.
I think that in real-world time, his time-line is a bit optimistic. It may be correct for certain levels in research/ academia but, just when is it going to affect Joe Blow on the street?
Dan

[can't sit still]

The 20s are shaping up to be an interesting decade.
With current trends, our storms should be really destructive. Toss in a few earthquakes. Next in line in april of 2029 is the big killer asteroid.
Our financial and cerebral disparity will be even more pronounced [the poor and the stupid will be even further behind]
The Atlantic coastal areas will have year round skiing. Mt. washington will be glacier covered. We'll export bananas from Washington.
The playa will become a year round lake and BRC will be a floating city.
NYC a sinking city. Sunblock will be traded on the comodity exchange.

I'll be down in Tasmania reading about it.
Dan

[stuart]

what's to keep a bunch of college kids from racing their airplanes 200 feet over your house at night or circling over your swimming pool ogling your daughter

personalized stinger missiles

[can't sit still]

I understand that there were fewer deaths in the liberation of Kuwait then there were in the celebration afterwards. What goes up must come down. Preferably not on my head.
Dan

[Davoid]

Don't know much about CNG or LNG ships, or which come to the port, though it seems that Liquid Natural Gas isn't likely to cause more than a localized fire if ignited, according to some brief poking around. Hmm, compressed gas sounds a lot more applicable.

As far as defending your teenage daughter from flying-car ogling (like these kids won't have better voyeur toys at their disposal), I vote for WWII barrage balloons. Strung from a neighbor's yard, of course:

"A barrage balloon is a large balloon used as a defence against aircraft. The balloon is attached to the ground with metal cables, which are intended to ensnare the aircraft, notably its propellers. Some versions carried small explosive charges that would be pulled up against the aircraft to ensure its destruction. Barrage balloons were only really successful for low-flying aircraft, the weight of a longer cable making them impractical for higher altitudes...Some barrage balloons worked by allowing the part of their cable that was hit by a plane's wing to detach, after which parachutes at each end would open, breaking the plane's wing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon

Wait, flying cars won't have wings, will they? So much for that idea. Anyway, tell that girl to put some damn clothes on! Doesn't she care what people will think?

[can't sit still]

I think that this fits in well with the singularity post. I can't follow the physics, but this is a "worked out" design for a craft that is a bit slower than c
http://www.americanantigravity.com/docu ... gn_501.pdf

Cool antigravity stuff. This company holds quite a few patents.
http://www.americanantigravity.com/products.shtml

Tons of interesting projects. These aren't just theoretical. They're electro-gravitational propulsion. I'd kill to make something like this for BM.
http://www.amazing1.com/grav.htm


This site is a bit old, but interesting
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/advprop.htm

It looks like anti-gravity is an off the shelf item,,,in it's most basic form.
Dan

[Davoid]

By the by, I think I first heard Kurzweil's ideas through this site, involving real bets about the future:

http://www.longbets.org/

The bets aren't all scientific in nature, and some are made or accepted by well-known names. Ted Danson won one about the Red Sox winning the World Series; Brian Eno won about Bush still being in the White House in 2005. The year range seems to be anywhere from a few years to over a hundred.

Maybe I'll bet that the website will no longer exist in a couple decades. I'll donate the $ to the Davoid's Retirement Is Pending (DRIP) foundation.

[cowboyangel]

The only singularity I can see right now is the collapse of the American way of life within 20 years as oil becomes too expensive to extract and alternatives have not made the timely movement towards massive implementation. The rest is just futility.

[spectabillis]

By the by, I think I first heard Kurzweil's ideas through this site, involving real bets about the future: http://www.longbets.org/

Not a unique idea.

The Foresight Exchange Prediction Market
http://www.ideosphere.com/

They recently open sourced thier software - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ideafutures - so you will see more sites like this http://www.washingtonsx.com/ .

[stuart]

I first heard about Kurzweil while lusting after one of his synths many ages ago. He should not have quit his day job.

[can't sit still]

I was looking for info on scalar energy.
Scalar energy has been proved since Maxwell. I read a site from a brilliant guy named Bearden. I'm getting a headache. He cites all kinds of researchers and laws. Bearden is famous for putting things together that other people haven't thought of. He explains anomalies that are beyond comprehension. You have to give him credit for his synthesis. His credentials are extraordinary too.
This is a long read but it's extraordinary. http://www.cheniere.org/misc/interview1991.html A few examples;

"Since 1959, it has been known in quantum mechanics that the EM force fields are not primary agents at all. We know that classical EM theory is completely wrong on this. QM shows that it's the potentials that are primary, not the force fields"

"There exists a rare, completely bafflingly medical phenomenon - which has until recently been concealed - called hydrancephaly. To the normal materialistic Western biologist, this condition is astonishing, to say the least. In hydrancephaly, a person's cranial cavity is filled almost totally with fluid, not with brain matter. There may be only 5% or so of the brain in there; typically just the small portion on the tip of the spine. The other 95% of the brain case is filled with fluid. Yet the individual may be as normal as you or I. Except, of course, that x-rays of his head will astonish all the doctors. A few years ago, for example, such a hydrancephalic individual graduated from a university in Great Britain, with a degree in mathematics. British news actually made a video documentary on this subject, and particularly on that individual."



"So ironically, the biggest foundations problem in quantum mechanics today is the problem of the missing chaos! Try as they will, quantum physicists cannot find the missing hidden order, because they continue to use the Gibbs statistics that already excludes it. So they now know that somehow QM is wrong, and many of them fear that this most successful of physics theories will have to be completely redone."



I'm sure that they're is plenty of truth on Bearden's site, but i'm not qualified to judge.

Dan

[geekster]

I just had a chance to thumb through a bit of that book and a thought struck me ... (but it didn't hurt)

Okay, let's take for granted that technological advancment is exponential. Who is to say we would really notice the difference. Maybe our "response" to advancement is non-linear as well. In other words, for someone living in the year 500, our society would be completely alien starting with toilet paper and sliced bread, let alone riding in boxes without horses that can fly faster than 20 MPH down paths made of some strange black rock-like substance. Don't even begin to explain how people can get into a big tube with wings and fly the entire distance from China to Europe in hours. Marco Polo would be pissed.

My point is that change in our environment also changes our baseline. The faster things change, the faster we *expect* them to change and in many cases, the changes are actually invisible. For example, I can take a chevy small block V8, mount it in a vehicle from the late 1950's or early 1960's, then equip it with a catalytic converter, computer controlled ignition and fuel delivery and weld the hood shut. Then I put it in the "wayback" machine and hand the keys to someone from 1958 and tell them to take it for a spin. They would not know that there is a single thing different under the hood than what they are used to. It will drive just fine and just exactly as they are used to it driving. No noticeable difference. They might notice some improved fuel economy but would probably chalk that up to a well-tuned carb.

The bottom line is that yes, the line might be exponential but for a person at any given time, it looks the same. When I was born there were no microwave ovens, color TVs, remote controls, personal computers, laser printers, MRI or CAT scans, jet planes were still an awesome sight to see and there were still many large prop planes about. But my kids are starting from a different baseline. They think nothing of sticking a hotdog in the microwave and it is ready in 45 seconds. If I could transport them back to MY day when I was their age, they would hate life. Black and white TV with only 3 channels, no such thing as cable. No email or IM, no video games, and a telephone with this funny *round* thing on the front of it. They would have no choice but to go outside and play with the other kids because it is so darned *boring* inside unless maybe they wanted to pick up a book or turn on the radio.

And even my experiance would have amazed my grandfather when he was my kids age because they didn't even have electricity to the house back then, let alone a radio or TV.

So while technology has advanced, there is a certain limit to it's advancement. As long as humans are doing the advancing, they can not advance it beyond their own recognition. There will be a limit to how fast it can advance in one generation before a following generation who is "baselined" on that technology can advance it further. If machines do the advancing, then all bets are off and we are at risk of runaway advancement that advances solely for the sake of advancement and not particularly to provide anything useful. It makes no sense to advance the technology faster than the people can comprehend and make use of it because at that point you are expending resources for no benefit.

Imagine giving someone from 500 a typewriter and before they can master keyboarding, you give them a VIC 20 and before they can master the concept of programming you shove a modern laptop at them. At some point they are just going to walk away because the new items are of no utility to them and so the advancement will stop or slow and wait to catch up. In fact, I could give everyone in 500AD a computer and they would probably all be put to use as a doorstop as soon as the battery went dead.

I guess there is a line between invention and deployment. And the invention of the sourrounding infrastructure that makes that invention useful. The computer is of little use without a power grid of some sort. Then only slightly more useful until a communications infrastructure is made.

So I wouldn't look at it like an exponential line so much as I would look at it like a fractal. A piece pops out. That allows more pieces to pop out of that piece (that first piece enabled the next) but at some point the thing can get so big you can't see it and if you can't make sense out of it, it isn't useful to you unless it is invisible and doesn't really change your life (like that 1957 chevy I built at the beginning of this). So ... maybe a lot of the technological advancement will simply be invisible. I will open up my laptop someday and there will be one chip inside and that's it, but it still looks and acts like the laptop I am used to, except it is a lot lighter and the battery lasts a lot longer.

I still want my fucking flying car.

[theCryptofishist]

IImagine giving someone from 500 a typewriter and before they can master keyboarding, you give them a VIC 20 and before they can master the concept of programming you shove a modern laptop at them. At some point they are just going to walk away because the new items are of no utility to them and so the advancement will stop or slow and wait to catch up. In fact, I could give everyone in 500AD a computer and they would probably all be put to use as a doorstop as soon as the battery went dead.

Don't forget to factor in that it's unlikely that the person would be literate, and if we handed them a qwerty that english was a very very different language at the time. (Literally even. If it existed.) There are letters that would be missing and possibly some extras.

[can't sit still]

Here's an update on the singularity. Kurzwiel is calling for immortality by 2045. This is a very scary thought considering that it would be VERY attractive to ruthless people.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/0859920481 ... RoZXllYXJt

[Simon of the Playa]

that was years ago, and i only dated her for a couple of months....leave ruth out of it...


Personally, i cant wait. Quite frankly, as a rabid trans-Humanist, one day, i'll suck your luddite childrens stem cells for lunch.


who the fuck needs Botox?

[cowboyangel]

For the singularity to be a real singularity means that it is already upon us, devouring everything but itself, because it is after all, The Singularity. So if you think that we're safe because from the look of things it appears that the singularity has not yet struck, think again. This thing we call life could be a version of death or illusion, given to us by the singularity as it contemplates that part of its consciousness that thinks it feels pain or separation.