That is by no means certain.

We're going to need it, eh?

Sometimes I think the technophiles live in their own cheerful reality, worshipping as much fiction as the other guy

But at least technophiles have reason to hope for a better future. All the doomers have is nonsensical paranoia, half-truths, and a want for psychological self-gratification to sustain them. Hell, I could say the same for InfoWars junkies and a lot of the survivalists out there, too.

as is "disasterbater." I've seen some get almost giddy about the future prospects of whatever disaster is predicted next.

Never understood how ostriches could breath with their heads in the sand.

Wow. Seriously? You're calling me a troll? Care to have a look at my profile, my post count, how long I've been on DU before making such an accusation?

And apply the same analysis of your so called credentials when dismissing the concerns of the disasterbaters as you not so cleverly refer to realists.

I take it you were insulted by my use of the word "disasterbater."

Please do not assume about me. I hope you at least know the little phrase about ass.u.me.

As I mentioned in my edited response which must have occurred after your response, I doubt you applied similar analysis to those you casually dismiss as doomers and disasterbaters.

And neither profile nor longevity excuses you if your behavior is troll like in some topics, but not others.

Here it is again, with the important part italicized:

Notice my use of the words "some" and "giddy." I can't give posts as evidence, just my own observations of some posters here over the years. They welcome any disaster to befall the human race, even to the point of celebrating it. That is a disasterbater, or doomer. And so, not troll-like in the least.

By the way, it's rather pointless to go back and rephrase/edit a post later in a conversation. Better to point that out in a subsequent post

As for the edit, I hadn't expected such a quick response. But perhaps adding content is worthy of a new post.

Because we just don't call each other "troll" around here without repercussions (usually a hidden post.) I decided against it to see how everyone else reacted to its use.

Thank you for ending this little feud over words

Stay active in the Environment group. It's a good forum

Talking about Rock..


I just realized something we are missing...Some NICKELBACK!

I KNEW you were a troll! What with your posts and good musical taste, but lack of having read Dune.

Dune is for spice-trolls, anyway

Sid

I think many of them are just wading in a sea of fearful ignorance & paranoia and not actually *hoping* for disaster.....though that may be a tad too optimistic, maybe, I dunno for sure.

I would say the giddy ones are only a literal handful, and easily dismissed as a bit off.

I do trust the technology will slow things. I don't know if we'll be able to reverse the damage completely. Yet, we did manage to do that with CFCs and the ozone layer. Sure, that's only one system out of all the rest globally. However, if we can do that, I think we can do the rest over time

YouTube search shows that it's a band name as well

I wonder if they read Treehugger.com, 'cause that's where I found disasterbater

they are already printing 3D food.

You can also grow it. For now. Genuis lab rats.


I was being a bit sarcastic mind you. I didn't mean to ask: "can they mash up food and print it in shapes". I meant: "can they create food out of raws in an efficient manner to actually be able to feed people when crop yields fall (as a consequence of overproduction)". You don't need a printer to do that really, but this seemed like a good opportunity to make the point as these printers are being presented as God's next gift to mankind.

IOW, this utopia machine is actually not quite adequate for creating a necessity which will grow in great scarcity, thereby questioning if it is in fact a utopia machine (and being that it will make food more scarce via emissions, it greatly puts its revolutionary status into question).

It can't give us what we really need, but it can definitely make our needs more scarce. But hell, we can make a bunch of cool plastic shit

Everything is made of the same stuff. If the technology progresses to the point where we can have one solar powered machine that breaks down sand (or whatever) into atoms and molecules and another one that reassembles them as nutritious substance, then our food problems are solved.

It's not inevitable but it's also not impossible. And once I can create my own food, good luck getting me to go to work...

Yes, humans will be able to simulate the infinitely complex biological processes developed over billions of years of evolution, but at what energy cost, and to what efficiency level, and after how much time & investment, and ultimately, to what quality level?

After all, we already know man has grown a ~$400,000 hamburger in a petri dish (and wealth is not infinite, as it abstractly represent a tangible amount of actual energy that can be commanded). When you think about the amount of energy that went into making that hamburger, inefficiently feeding a cow pales in comparison.

The problem with trying to--within a blink of the universes' eye to keep up with a rapidly eroding biosphere--recreate billions of years of evolution, it quite quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns compared to simply maintaining a healthy biosphere. We have little time, and less energy that we can comfortable expend (emissions and all considered), so throwing it at reinventing biology's wheel rather than fixing the existing one is among man's stupidest feats. Its technophilia baby.

For one, plants "waste" a lot by building the plant itself. Also, plants require very specific materials to produce anything. You can't throw sand and light at a seed and expect the seed to grow.

Intelligently directed technology is much quicker than evolutionary biology. It took nature millions of years to create an entity with the computing power of a spider's brain, but it took us only a few thousand years. (That's not to diminish natural evolution - it did, after all, create us and our ability to achieve technological progress. Technology is just evolution's more productive offspring.)

We re-invent biology's wheel all the time. It's what we do. And thank god - my eyesight is too bad to wait around for mother nature to fix it for me.

You really couldn't be more wrong.

It took nature millions of years to create an entity with the computing power of a spider's brain, but it took us only a few thousand years.

I'm not sure we've even done this yet, as we really cannot create self-replicating nano machines to fill every spider niche in the world absolutely while maintaining harmonious balance with the existing biosphere. We don't even understand the patterns and behaviors encoded into the spiders' DNA that compels it to act the way they do.

And please remember, when you talk of efficiency and energy, do mind that when man creates now, they do so while leaning upon 3 billions years of reserve energy built up and left over from photosynthetic organisms. Biology has left a bounty of energy on this earth that man is flying through. Somehow this is never accounted for in the cost of development and production. Man did not create this energy out of thin air. We are scavengers of over-efficient organisms. A plant can grow food with the real-time energy input of the sun. Man must build a vast complex infrastructure blowing through years of sun captured energy from past plants. No, this isn't more efficient than plants. And unfortunately, we also know that tapping into the solar reserves in the form of hydrocarbons is directly causing a climate catastrophe.

It is laughable to suggest that man could more efficiently produce their own food by developing a system that may lean on millions of years of solar reserves, when man could simply plant trees and let the real time energy of the sun produce the food.

This is technophilia

It's gonna take a lot more than just global warming to entirely kill off humanity......(hopefully we don't get slammed by a dino-killer or zapped by a gamma burst anytime in the next century or two; we could be in real trouble then. )

By the science fiction you embrace?

Sure, why not.

"It's gonna take a lot more than just global warming to entirely kill off humanity."

But I could be wrong.

And no, the science, the actual science, does not indicate an actual risk of total humann extinction.

Anyone that develops such technology will charge a million dollars a kidney.

It means many must die. Only the wealthy will survive. The world can't handle limitless lifespans or even much longer lifespans. That's the realm of evolution and the "willingness" of the planet to support it. If we mess with life to the extreme there will be a trade off. Greed will win over human kindness. The earth will win over greed.

But then again, I can't blame you, I guess, what with all the continued Wall Street greed and all.

But what to one person is pessimism is another person's realism. I like fluff for the fun of it but most of the time I like to make sure I'm not wearing blinders for the convenience of comfort. It's important to face facts as unseemly as they may be, and the math of prolonged life merged with the record of human history make for a pretty nasty scenario. It's old history in a new environment encapsulated in an ecosystem a million times older than our civilization.

We live... and hopefully we live with joy.... then we die... and that is a good thing because our children survive.

... we're sure not going to give them access to this costly technology. There is nothing pessimistic at all about that assessment, it is demonstrable fact.

The wealthy will literally become genetically/robotic super humans and the rest of us will be their slaves.

Thanks for posting this article, btw.

I have read that someone did just that, but the teeth that were grown were almost microscopic. So, until they can grow them full-size, I have to make do with crowns and Cerec.

....someone might slap a laser beam on your head.

but, I don't get it. Do you mean use a laser as a weapon against me? Or are you talking Borg? Really, I'd rather talk "full prosthetic body" as used in Ghost in the Shell

I think the editor really should have persuaded him to leave out that paragraph. It makes Dr. Pangloss look pessimistic. It also makes him look like someone who has spent the last 10 years on a desert island.

.

According the the republicans, financial parasites are the engine of prosperity.

Sunlight tomorrow. Storms, somewhere. Stocks up! Stocks down... Wind! Terrific scientific advances in the future! Earthquakes... Volcanoes! FIRES! I also GUARANTEE my predictions will come true.

I could listen to Michio talk all day. He's one verrrrry interesting and intelligent person. He overstepped though, on one small thing: The phrase "organ failure" WILL NOT DISAPPEAR ever. "Organ failure" might be mitigated one day, and the effect of organ failure might not necessarily be FATAL, but the organs we are born with will SURELY fail sooner or later.

"The key is to grasp the importance of science and science education." isn't even a very profound statement.

IMHO, he's right. In the future, humans will be able to extend their lives almost indefinitely through use of organ replacement and some kind of telomere reinforcement. The upper 1% will never have had it so good; they'll be the ones who can afford it.

And I predict it will utterly backfire on them. First, by removing natural and gradual means of death, they condemn themselves to an eventual sudden and violent death. But more than that, through restricting access to such treatment to the very wealthy, they'll guarantee a bloody global uprising that will make the French Revolution look like a Sunday school picnic.

I wonder what the world will look like after that happens...

Sid

I'm tired of dicking around with all these machines. Let the machines dick around with machines, out in space or wherever the hell they want to go. I'll stay home, and the machine-people, our intellectual children, can send pictures.

All I really want is a warm clothing-optional beach, plenty of good food to eat, clean water to drink, and a safe comfortable place to sleep. There's no place like that on Mars.

I'd like to live in a world where the human population is declining, not because of war, disease, famine, or existential crisis (the later seems to be the reason for declining populations in "first world" societies), but because there are simply too damned many of us and we ought to leave some room for our fellow life forms. Sure, my fellow humans, go fuck your brains out. But please use birth control and don't leave a mess. Pull yourselves back into your cities and make some room for the trees and the tigers and all the other marvelous life forms we've met here.

I don't think humans are all that special in the larger schemes of life. We do not add any meaning to the universe. Yes, humans are important to humans, but no god created Adam and Eve, gave them keys to the planet and told them to go forth and multiply exponentially.

Plenty of other innovative life forms have experienced exponential growth in the history of life on earth and one thing we might learn from all of them is that exponential growth always ends, often with a crash. We're just more of the same, doomed to become a confusing layer of garbage in the geologic record. The earth has been there, done that. And here we go again...

Maybe when I see an autonomous self-reproducing intelligent robot bouncing naked across the surface of the moon or mars just for the joy of it, like a dog playing in a pile of leaves, then maybe I'll believe humans have accomplished something grand. (A human in a smelly suit does not qualify...) But until then we humans are just a mob of spoiled teenagers trashing the house. Certainly we've had our moments and created great art, and we've loved one another, but there is a lot of useless crap packaged with the all good stuff.

Happiness isn't something that can be manufactured.

We live in exciting times. I hope I live to see that moment.

These type of predictions are hit and miss. I don't doubt that it will be possible to grow replacement organs from your own tissue. I do doubt that this will be common place in my lifetime (I am 50 now).


The phrase "organ failure" disappearing is simply wrong. Organs will still fail. The phrase "tissue rejections" will disappear so long as replacements are grown from the person (or animal) that is receiving the new organ.



I really don't think much of Michio Kaku. It seems he will say pretty much anything so long as he is in front of a camera (or some other recording device). For instance, look at #4 on this list and try not to laugh. Good luck with that.