DoctorOfSpace, awesome video!

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[youtube]78ikZANw_Z8[/youtube]the future of star trek is very interesting. maybe one day the human race will get there.

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Great episode!  I have a certain fondness for space elevators, and that was a very thorough review.

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Continued from: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic. ... t=60#p5919

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Most of the singular issues you point out could be contributors in the long term, but many are not really issues at all.

The planet's sixth mass extinction is underway and it's because of human overpopulation crowding out the rest of the species on the planet and altering the balance.

I don't agree with overpopulation.  While there is local overpopulation and poor resource distribution, we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the Earth.  When I mention population increase as a contributor, I mean only in regards to the number of ways a technology can be misused and how devastating a mistake could be.

Nick Bostrom's example about nuclear weapons applies
suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed.

Future and near future technologies will put equally dangerous capabilities in the hands of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions of people.  Advanced 3D printers, biological printers, and perhaps eventual nanofabricators will give people incredible powers over their environment.  

It seems almost inevitable to me that even with proper safety nets in place someone will use these technologies to develop their own WMDs.

rising rates of various illnesses is actually indicative of that happening.

Humanity is also fairly close to curing most diseases, big changes are happening in the biotech field.  I don't see this as being a cause of human extinction.

Incidentally our food and fresh water supply isn't in such good shape either.

Vertical farms, lab grown meats, genetically engineered crops, and breakthroughs in desalination are currently happening.  It is only a matter of a few years before these things start becoming more mainstream.  The idea of a water crisis on a planet that is over 70% water is absurd, it is inevitable that desalination will become economically viable.

because the vast majority of our food comes from about half a dozen sources, and if even one of those collapses, we're going to be in really bad shape.

Poorer nations would be but most developed nations have excess food storage for themselves.  Unless there is a horrific environmental collapse this is not a huge concern.

As for fresh water and yet another reason NOT to consume meat (besides the problems of antibiotics and hormones, and how animals get treated on conventional farms and the fact that meat farming significantly contributes to climate change) is the fact that meat farming uses up a significant amount of fresh water.

Same thing applies as I said before, water is only an issue because we make it an issue.  Desalination will happen, it already is happening, and there won't be a water problem.

I'm not even going to get into the dangers of corporate monopolization a la Monsanto or any of the other issues we face due to collusion between multinational corporations in terms of the dumping of toxic waste and its cover up.  This occurs across a wide range of industries, from the fossil fuel industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, to agriculture and beyond.

This is something I would agree is a problem, but current advancements will also help to correct these issues.

What are your thoughts about AI actually helping our long term survival and us being able to use it for space travel?

Unlikely.  I used to agree with the Kurzweil notion of AI being benevolent and growing beyond it's programming until I went for my degree in biology.  I came to the conclusion that any notions of going beyond your programming is impossible, you are limited by your programming because you are your programming.  

Human systems have always been imitations of nature, while a designer can design better tools nature has had a few hundred million years head start on things like brains.  We humans only function in the way we do because of conflicting goals, we have to rationalize a compromise for these goals, any AI we design with current or even near future level tech will probably only have one or two goals and inevitably those goals will not align with ours.  I see it as almost inevitable that humanity in one way or another will go extinct from AI, either by merger (optimistically unlikely), or incidental as a byproduct of the AI just doing what it was going to do.  There are more ways for AI to go wrong than for it to go right.

The idea of placing human consciousness inside bodies that can last indefinitely has always intrigued me- however that won't help allay the human overpopulation problem any.

It would solve any overpopulation problem if you could do it efficiently, but we are nowhere near an overpopulation crisis.

We have to get to ZPG somehow, but if we do

Population right now is declining in all developed nations, outside of immigration.  I see no problems with curing aging now and giving people indefinite lifespans.  The resources to sustain around 12bil humans already exist and it wouldn't take much to at least guarantee people the basics.

That and portable and controllable fusion

This ties into what I said regarding inevitable destruction.  Humanity right now could survive another 50 years or another couple million years but the inevitable end is extinction.  We will go extinct by either changing ourselves or accidentally destroying ourselves.  

I currently lean more towards self destruction, but that may be long after I am dead.  Lots of people often mention solving the energy problem or heat death problem by breaking physics, this applies

Would humanity be better off with a smaller population, or a larger population with more available resources?

All this talk about ~Alien signals~ all the time. Why do we even bother? We have yet to build a set of telescopes capable of hearing/seeing radio or radar more than 50 light years away. Arecibo can barely see past 12 light years, plus it can't be moved around. The Square Kilometer Array, that hasn't broken ground yet, will be aimed towards the center of the Milky Way, towards all the incredibly damaging radiation that prevents molecules from exchanging energy and replicating, presumably because alot of other imaging projects and test ranging from extreme testing of General Relativity to the new fudge factors of Dark Matter and Dark Energy are worth the time and money.

Ba-humbug I say! Who would gamble that, in all the time the universe has been around, that the inconceivably small fluke of having another form of life basically right up under our butts show up, announcing themselves with godlike energy to be able to even send us a message that is decipherable, before they could possibly know we are even here, it utter completely preposterous and fiscal lunacy. It does make a few people donate to PBS though, I guess, so that's cool.

The one and only possibility I believe the radio telescopes would be useful for in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not a WOW signal, but rather in finding a probe, maybe similar to our own Voyager, from another world, that wakes up every few tens or hundreds of thousands of years to check on a star it passes by and we could detect energy it uses for such. That and checking the spectrum of atmospheres that are conducive to life as how we understand it to work. When people get unjustifiably optimistic and giddy about "Aliens could be everywhere!" I wonder why they don't also think the universe was created just for the purpose of meeting these new life forms and shaking hands and philosophizing together under the stars about the Grand Creator. I mean, the chances seem the same to me, infinitely small. I think my blood sugar is low. brb.



We are already past the point of sustainability. If everyone on Earth were to live like US citizens, we would need three to four more Earth to sustain that kind of lifestyle. We have already used 86% of all the arable land on this ball of mud. 10 Billion is a rough number of humans tossed around before people start talking cockroach infused gelatin bars and Soylent Green cupcakes. Then we rely on new technology to come along, something with as much life changing power as oil and the Industrial revolution had on population growth. When people say Earth can sustain up to 100 billion people, it just depends on the types of people, I wonder again, WotThaFudge!? Why would any intelligent species elect to live within such confines? Out of altruism? Because seeing the movie Judge Dredd was really cool with 1 million people living inside a single housing project? What kind of future do we REALLY want? Rather than watching out if I burp or pass gas and it will upset my carbon credits left on my Lagniappe card, I prefer to see a world with a minimal number of people, with Nature being the steward of us rather than the reverse. Where we could someday each have our own planet or galaxy, with all the trappings of a Type Omega-minus civilization.