[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Dvandorn and BruceMoomaw,

my point was certainly not to discuss which is the best from capitalism or communism, even if it is apparently a sensitive topic. I just noted that USSR failed its stated purpose, for the reasons you explained in detail, thanks you for it Bruce.

My point was just to recal that, to avoid self-extinction, we must be able to develop some form of awareness of the issue, and some way to "change human nature". The bargain is just that: if we do, we survive, if we don't, we disappear.
So we must find the right way, and if it does not exist yet, to create it. For this we need to heed at history lessons, see peoples who suceeded, and those who failed. USSR told us that violence is not the right way. Democracy proved better than dictature, as we were able to stop fluorocarbons and asbestos (After 30 years of fight. it is welknown that the levers of power in a democracy are money, TV, medias, psychology...). The only persons who succeeded to "change human nature" were those who were engaged into practical spirituality, or at least some form of practically engaged rationality or humanism. The reason is that changing our opinion is not enough; it needs years of training (and a thorough education of our children) to be practically able to behave in the right way without having to sustain a terrible effort at every instant.
Things are like that: without education we are just chimpanzees. What makes humans civilized is transmitted by education, that it is learning things or training to do things.

[dvandorn]

And on this, Richard, we must agree to disagree. I am of the opinion that basic human nature is immutable; that, as a race, it cannot be changed via *any* degree of education or training.

Individual examples of behavior modification exist, yes. But they are accomplished by using the very traits (fear, mostly) that must be eradicated for any real, lasting change in human nature to come about.

I'm sorry, but I am of the very definite opinion that *any* plan or architecture to bring about an improvement in the human condition that begins with "all we have to do is change human nature" is just plain doomed to fail, and pursuing such goals is, basically, a waste of time. Time that could be better spent working *within* the limitations of human nature to do the best possible job at keeping as many people happy as possible...

-the other Doug

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

And on this, Richard, we must agree to disagree. 

Not as you think

I am of the opinion that basic human nature is immutable; that, as a race, it cannot be changed via *any* degree of education or training.

True that the basic "chimpanzee" layout of the brain, as coded by the genes, cannot be changed, at least not until we are able to re-engineer it. (I wrote a novel about this "Dumria", a planet where they did, with the advantages and inconveniences of it).

But what we do with this can be changed. Simply it cannot be changed by wishes, opinions, laws or constrains. It can be changed by education and training, this is basic neurology stuff, and it is proven to be changeable. Alas, as you say, fear and hope are the only methods useful for persons who do not actively involve themselves in the process. But when we do it VOLONTARILY, when we lead ourselves the process, there are many other means, and much more pleasant means. Read Ghandi's life, how he managed.

Time that could be better spent working *within* the limitations of human nature to do the best possible job at keeping as many people happy as possible...

Immediate practice is worthy too. In fact we cannot do an opposition utopia* versus pragmatism. My experience showed me that these two are non-dual, you cannot succeed in one without accounting with the other.


What I think is that, if scientists are rational people, they must rationaly question the matters of mind and the ways to solve these problems, especially this one: how to become selfless and responsible enough to be able to survive without choking under our own s*** and psychological problems. And this is a mind problem, a problem of how we involve in life. So the solution can be only here.


Perhaps you will prefer to involve into things like humanitary action, than into inner questionning. You are perfectly right to do so. But just not forget that these two are just two aspects of the same thing. Even if you see the unity point only once in your life, it will be very important.



*of course I use this word "utopia" in its original meaning of "blueprint" not in the newspeak meaning of "impossible".

[RNeuhaus]

Setting back to the topic, after a nuke explotion on an asteroide, the radiactive particles will also hit on the Earth and consequently the Earth will be contaminated. Is the nuke a good solution to minimize the threat to Earth in spite of the fact that after the explotion, the impact debris from asteroide will be smaller but greater amount, and the distribution of impact will be even bigger and many will be evaporated in the atmosphere. But, where the radiactive particles will go? Anyway, they will hit on Earth.

Maybe, that the nuke solution must be changed by the gravity tugging technique.

Rodolfo

[ljk4-1]

Not as you think
True that the basic "chimpanzee" layout of the brain, as coded by the genes, cannot be changed, at least not until we are able to re-engineer it. (I wrote a novel about this "Dumria", a planet where they did, with the advantages and inconveniences of it). 

Humans may be able to change for the better, but it will require some radical methods that will essentially render us a different type of being. We are currently trying to live in a civilized, technological society where the majority of people are still biologically programmed to behave as our distant ancestors did. It may have worked out on the savannah, but not in the city.

I am also of the inclination that we are not the end product of evolution and that what comes next will come from our minds, not our loins:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

When that happens, we will truly be able to survive just about anything the Universe throws at us, including its eventual demise.

http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php.6701.html

[tty]

Actually, as I've said before, if you could break a large (2-10km in largest extent) asteroid into millions and millions of chunks no bigger than your fist, the resulting meteor storm would cause *some* damage -- but it wouldn't be a major extinction event.

The key is that you would be increasing the surface area of the mass by more than a millionfold.  The more surface area it presents to the atmosphere, the more of it is ablated away -- it's the only way you can get such a large mass to mostly burn up in the atmosphere.

Yes, it would have a definite impact, and you'd probably get a large numbr of car-sized chunks get through that would create pretty large craters.  But overall, it would be far more survivable than an extermination-event-type impact, which would be the alternative.

-the other Doug

It's not quite that simple. The primary killing mechanism in the Chicxulub impact seems to have been heat in the form of IR radiation from vast numbers of re-entering fragments of material ejected from the primary crater. This affected essentially the whole Earth, though probably rather unevenly.
Breaking up the primary impactor into chunks small enough to vaporize before impacting would actually increase the kinetic energy liberated in the atmosphere since a lot of it is absorbed in the cratering process.
"Spreading out" the energy from a Chicxulub-class impact (10 km impactor) is not a viable mitigation strategy because the energy is simply too large (equal to 10-20 Hiroshima-sized explosions for each square kilometer of the entire Earth).
However if the impactor could be fragmented without the material stringing out along the trajectory it would mean that about half the Earths surface would not be directly affected. The secondary effects (stratospheric dust, NOx, smoke, Ozone, CO2 etc) would still be extremely nasty, though perhaps survivable.

tty

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Believe me, when the human race starts modifying the structure of its own mind, it's a safe bet that they will do so in the most destructive manner imaginable. Just consider, for instance, what people will do when really effective emotion-control drugs become available in the coming decades...

(While SF writers have been routinely writing stories about this kind of Lotus Eaters' Apocalypse for half a century, they're not the only ones to notice the implications anymore -- "The Economist" did a cover story on the problem a few years ago. Nor do I see any conceivable solution to the problem.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

While we're on this cheery subject: I've always thought that humanity's acquisition of the ability to deflect asteroids will almost certainly greatly ACCELERATE the destruction of life on Earth, rather than delaying it. Natural Dinosaur Killers come along only every few tens of millions of years -- but if we develop a Solar System-wide civilization capable of deflecting asteroids, it's highly probable that some political faction will DELIBERATELY and precisely aim one at Earth some time in the next few thousand years. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward -- or, in this case, downward.

[tty]

Believe me, when the human race starts modifying the structure of its own mind, it's a safe bet that they will do so in the most destructive manner imaginable.  Just consider, for instance, what people will do when really effective emotion-control drugs become available in the coming decades...

(While SF writers have been routinely writing stories about this kind of Lotus Eaters' Apocalypse for half a century, they're not the only ones to notice the implications anymore -- "The Economist" did a cover story on the problem a few years ago.  Nor do I see any conceivable solution to the problem.)

Cheer up - it's largely a one-generation problem. The lotus eaters either won't procreate or not take care of their children, so evolution will take it's normal course.

It's not a coincidence that inuits and native americans can become alcoholics in a few months while europeans have to work on it for years. In Europe the more sensitive genotypes became extinct long ago.

tty

[ljk4-1]

While we're on this cheery subject: I've always thought that humanity's acquisition of the ability to deflect asteroids will almost certainly greatly ACCELERATE the destruction of life on Earth, rather than delaying it.  Natural Dinosaur Killers come along only every few tens of millions of years -- but if we develop a Solar System-wide civilization capable of deflecting asteroids, it's highly probable that some political faction will DELIBERATELY and precisely aim one at Earth some time in the next few thousand years.  Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward -- or, in this case, downward.

There is the hypothesis that if you go along with the concept of all life on Earth being part of a superorganism called Gaia that regulates itself, then humans were made to keep it safe from another major celestial impact (it learned the lesson the hard way back about 65 million BCE -- actually it was trying to get the dinosaurs to evolve up to making tools, but they took too long).

Read "Are Humans Gaia's Immune System?"

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb073102.shtml

Apparently any political factions that threaten Gaia will be taken care of as well.

[tuomio]

Great power brings great responsibilities. Ongoing evidence with nuclear weapons shows, that we can survive. Developement has been insanely rapid upwards move in last 100 years. Maybe some nut could trigger nuclear war, maybe not. Its one of the uncertanities in the chaotic universe. Heck, nuclear war could even be triggered by some unlucky roll of electronic malfunctions for all i know. If that day comes, i will grab my sunglasses and go drink my last Margharita on some nice viewing spot with grin on my face.

The feared Greenhouse effects _will_ come and they _will_ come with furious power some day, there is no escape. Will it kill us? No way, maybe the Chinese farmers will die in mudslides, but we westerners have capabilities to adapt with the help of technology and capital. Planet earth hosts 5 billion people on it and we posting on this board represent about 1-2% of it. Most of the others work their asses off in farms to get daily cup of rice. Talk them how to be unselfish...bah..

All the oil will be consumed and burned horribly inefficently in Indian mopeds, thats a fact and there is nothing we can do about it. Just wait till we get back to the coal, that is the next step and no matter how nasty sunburns we will get, its probably the only way for a long time to come.

I am waiting the disasters with great interest, because when it hits, there is one less uncertanity in the back of my mind. Unselfish human race would consist of one man, is that the objective, i think not.

[mike]

Eh, the whole 'technology is bad' issue comes down to whether you think humanity is inherently good or inherently bad. I've never understood why someone would want to think humanity is inherently bad, since that would mean you were inherently bad yourself. I could blame christianity and the like for the problem, but I imagine the issue would arise in some form or another regardless..

As far as concrete examples, when we do indeed develop the technology to deflect asteroids onto planets, we will therefore also have the technology to deflect them back away. Supposing a large-scale nuclear war were to erupt, we would either die out and be replaced by a better (in this case, less likely to erupt into large-scale nuclear war) species, or we would survive, with the weaker members no doubt dying while the strong survived, arguably making the species better, and surely wiser. I personally feel that the entire nuclear threat is highly overplayed, myself.. A nuke to New York City or Washington, DC or London would be politically and economically painful for some period of time, but I don't think it would have much effect on humanity as a whole. Once we have the technology to really destroy the planet (insofar as concerns the human species' survival, anyway), we'll also have the technology to prevent that destruction.

At any rate, life is entirely what you make of it, and it seems some people are just predisposed to be pessimists. Obviously, though, the optimists are more influential, since we're not all living in caves and picking fleas off of each other...

[Bob Shaw]

While we're on this cheery subject: I've always thought that humanity's acquisition of the ability to deflect asteroids will almost certainly greatly ACCELERATE the destruction of life on Earth, rather than delaying it.  Natural Dinosaur Killers come along only every few tens of millions of years -- but if we develop a Solar System-wide civilization capable of deflecting asteroids, it's highly probable that some political faction will DELIBERATELY and precisely aim one at Earth some time in the next few thousand years.  Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward -- or, in this case, downward.

Bruce:

Latest research shows that the dinosaurs were doing just fine until they developed the Iridium Bomb...

Bob Shaw

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

"Cheer up -- it's largely a one-generation problem. The lotus eaters either won't procreate or not take care of their children, so evolution will take its normal course."

Of course, evolution taking its "normal course" in this case will consist of Homo sapiens bumping itself off completely. Exactly how many people are going to be able to resist the temptation to completely control their own emotions and erase any feelings of sadness or fear -- including those necessary to keep the species going? Damn few. (That's if we don't devise some genetically engineered doomsday plague, of course. In that case, evolution "taking its normal course" just might involve us managing to obliterate life on Earth -- or, at a minimum, animal life on Earth -- completely.)

As for my believing that humans are "most good" or "mostly evil": it's (obviously) irrelevant. The point is that advances in our understanding of biology are about to give us unprecedented power -- power far beyond that which even splitting the atom has given us -- and the most fundamental physical law of the universe is that it's always easier to use power to destroy than to create. The only thing that's kept humanity from not doing so up to now is that we haven't really understood very much about the operations of our own bodies and cells. Now we're about to. And I also have no doubt that every intelligent race in the Universe automatically and uncontrollably destroys itself when it reaches our level of technology -- how could it NOT do so? -- which in turn is one likely explanation for why we're not picking up radio signals from other civilizations (and for why the first race to achieve technology hasn't spread across the entire galaxy with Von Neumann machines).

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

As for "Gaia being a superorganism that deliberately created humans in order to preserve itself from another asteroid impact": puh-leese. You're just reviving Intelligent Design, with "Gaia" replacing God -- and there's no more evidence for evolution being controlled by the former than by the latter. The whole point about Darwinian evolution is that it's a BLIND watchmaker, which does its work as an incidental byproduct of incredible amounts of mass slaughter.