SaxonViolence Posted August 24, 2013 Report Share Posted August 24, 2013 Leaving out most "The End Of The World As We Know It" (TEOTWAWKI) Scenarios—because they have been covered... And "First Alien Contact" for the same reasons. What are your favorite and not too far fetched... Daily Life As We Know It Enders (DLAWKIE) (Newly coined by me...)??? My short list: Intelligence Drugs that would speed up the "Drawing Board" development of radical new Inventions 10, 20, 100 times or more... Stuff that works and no "Popiel" type infomercial sold crap. *********** A Working Faster Than Light Drive... Today! {Unless it includes anti-gravity, can lift from Earth and can be built in the back yard, there would still be a generation lag...} ************* A Working Dean Drive... Ditto. *************** A new "Logic" that allows one to Objectively deconstruct most "Matter of Opinion" Arguments... And allows one to "Convince folks against their Will" I mean, you might not "Approve" 5 being the Square root of 25... But it's damned hard to seek to deny it, even to yourself.... ******************** Anti-gravity—like suitable for those floating Cities. Time Travel... Large-Scale "Parallel Universes" Travel. Cheap Effective "Fountain of Youth" Treatments. These really Elegant Evacuated Glass Tubes with Current-Bearing Conductor and/or Semi-Conductor Filaments inside—Replacing Transistors and other Solid State Devices... What are your candidates? What comments do you have about my list??? If your mission was to rock folks routines as thoroughly and as quickly as possible, where yould you lay your bets down? Hope this is coherent—All at once I'm falling asleep, but was determined to post the Question before turning in... HMMMmmnnn.... Eliminate all need for sleep (I'd run from that one)... Saxon Violence Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CraigD Posted August 25, 2013 Report Share Posted August 25, 2013 What are your candidates?The main EOTWAWKI scenarios that come immediately to my mind fall into 2 non-mutually exclusive (both could happen at the same time) categories:Some sort of benevolent Vingean singularity –nice AIs rule the worldAbundant energy + omnipotent fabbers – everybody can have anything for free in a post-scarcity economyTo my thinking, the main feature of a benevolent singularity (versus the malevolent kind more often depicted in pop fiction – killer robots rule the world) would be humans surrendering sovereignty to computer systems. This would be an end to politics as we know it, because humans would no longer hold power over one another through government – humans would simply be removed from ultimate decision making authority. The absence of attention to who was ruling who would, I think, radically change social life as we know it. Were technology to solve the problem of producing sufficient energy and machinery that could manufacture anything in sufficient quality and quantity for any person’s needs at effectively zero cost (that is, any effort to control and charge money for it would fail), the fundamental basis of all human economies – limited supply and non-zero demand – would cease to exist, and the WAWKI would be unlike any in human history. What comments do you have about my list???There's a lot in it! Here are my comments: Intelligence Drugs that would speed up the "Drawing Board" development of radical new Inventions 10, 20, 100 times or more...I don’t find much scientific support for the idea that this is possible. Like most biological systems, the human brain is the product of a long evolutionary process. The most effective psychotropic drugs, of which nootropics are a subset, work by mimicking molecules that occur naturally in the brain. Their effects, therefore, are more quantitative than qualitative – they can make us more or less alert, and change our mood and ideation, but don’t qualitatively improve or hurt our creative or formal abilities. We humans have long used drugs that enhance our mental abilities. The most popular, IMHO, is caffeine, usually from coffee. Although there have been many “fad nootropics” in recent decades, including simply hyperoxygenation by breathing O2 gas and tryptamines such as LSD and SSRIs (eg: Prozac), there’s little and inconclusive evidence that such drugs actually work – that is, make their users effectively smarter. In short, I believe the best we can hope for in intelligence-enhancing drugs has likely already been realized in ones like caffeine, which can allow us to be awake and alert more quickly and longer. I think it’s possible, and assuming legal barriers don’t block it, likely, that increased understanding of human genetics will soon make available therapies that allow us to increase the intelligence of our children by inserting genes associated with high intelligence into them. I don’t expect such genetically engineered people would be qualitatively more intelligent than the most intelligent people who have lived to date, but this therapy could result in very intelligent people being much more numerous in the population. Other traits, such as athletic ability, bravery, and reduced likelihood of mental illness, many of which contribute practically to high intelligence, could also be genetically engineered. A Working Faster Than Light Drive... Time Travel...These things are related. Though not scientifically impossible, I believe achieving such things, if they are possible, would be several orders of magnitude more difficult scientifically and technologically than anything humans have done to date. If shown to be possible in principle, yet so difficult practically as to be impossible or possible only in very few times and with very small masses or amounts of information, these things might have little impact on the WAWKI. Anti-gravity—like suitable for those floating Cities.True anti-gravity – via “exotic matter” that exert a repulsive gravitational force – would, I think, be better applied to making time machines, such as by the wormhole time machine describe by Kip Thorne (see this wikipedia section, than floating cities. A sufficiently advanced technological civilization – one with much more available energy than our present one - could make floating cities using conventional technologies. I suspect, however, that floating cities would be a short-lived fad, as they’d not be much better places to live than present day cities on high mountains. An exception would be floating cities that were parts of space elevators, not because such cities were better than ordinary ones, but because space elevators would be very useful, especially to civilization that do not have much more available energy than our current one. By themselves, I don’t think floating cities, or space elevators would greatly change the world. Space elevators would greatly improve human access to space, but would, I think, only incrementally change day to day human life. Exotic matter might be an DLAWKIE, but I expect creating it will prove either impossible or very difficult, and if successful, will be so weird as to be unrecognizable as connected to what present day people are talking about when they use the term true anti-gravity. A new "Logic" that allows one to Objectively deconstruct most "Matter of Opinion" Arguments... I don’t believe such a logic is possible, because many people who argue for or against propositions with the assertion that their conclusion is a “matter of opinion” are essentially rejecting logic, and would as easily reject a “new logic” as they do an old one. More possible is a source of authority that so few people would reject that the few that do would be marginalized by society or compelled to accept it. At various times and places in human history, churches have been successful at this kind of authority and coercion. I think the Vingean singularity DLAWKIE I described above might be another, even more successful source of practically infallible authority. Cheap Effective "Fountain of Youth" Treatments.I entirely agree. Effective immortality – either biological, via medicine, or the more transhumant possibility of storing a human minds in computer and either embodying them in biological or mechanical human-like bodies, or allowing them to live in computer-generated realities, would be a utter DLAWKIE, even for people who were not allowed or chose not to avail themselves of its availability. These really Elegant Evacuated Glass Tubes with Current-Bearing Conductor and/or Semi-Conductor Filaments inside—Replacing Transistors and other Solid State Devices... Such device – vacuum tubes – have long and continue to exist and be used. Use of them since their near total replacement with solid state electronics has not much changed the world to date (unless you consider some art, such as the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix, to be world-changing), and I don’t expect will in the future. Eliminate all need for sleep (I'd run from that one)...Have you, SV, read Nancy Kress’s 1993 novella Beggars in Spain? It’s a masterful (the same-titled 1991 novella of the first third of the novel won both the Hugo and Nebula award) exploration of this question. Large-Scale "Parallel Universes" Travel.To the best of my understanding, this is impossible, so is in the same EOTWAWKI class as the magic of Harry Potter happening in real life. A Working Dean Drive...AFAIK, the Dean drive is not only impossible, but worse, was part of a scam. In short, Norman Dean was egotistical, scientifically inept, but a persuasive salesman. No competent test of his drive showed that it worked. The Wikipedia article Dean Drive, and from its references, this account by Jerry Pournelle, back up my opinion of Dean and his idea for a reactionless drive. A reactionless drive – wither actual, or effectively - would be a technology-changer for spaceflight. I think effectively reactionless spaceflight systems are feasible, and, assuming humankind is socially able to pursue increased advances in spaceflight, will likely become an important future technology. My favorite candidate technology is artificial-light-driven spacecraft, such as those proposed by Robert L. Forward, described here Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SaxonViolence Posted August 25, 2013 Author Report Share Posted August 25, 2013 Well never mind Dean or his supposed device or sanity... But picture Pournelle's "Atomic Submarine in Space"... It spins a Massive Flywheel at high speed and somehow the Rotary Motion becomes Forward Momentum. Pournelle was at some pains to stress that if you DO figure out how to do that, it wouldn't violate any Fundamental Laws of Physics. You could say, maintain a .1 Gee Acceleration (maybe as much as a Gee—or more) like the Proverbial "Torchship"... Boost halfway there; flip and decelerate halfway there... And you'd arrive with 100% of the mass that you started out with. ************ I champion Vacuum Tubes at the Expense of Transistors. I was being ironic by not identifying them. ****************** Vingean Singularity: I never heard the term. Cain and Abel... Granted there was probably more to the Story... But when God apparently favors Abel over Cain for no objective reason... God didn't Wrong Cain... And not Just Because he's God... Abel did wrong Cain grievously though—Through the completely passive and quite possibly unintended act of "Being Chosen" or "Being Preferred." If benevolent AI's ever displace Mankind as the Ruler's of Earth, they will be richly deserving what Cain gave Abel—for exactly the same reason. ********************** 'Eureka Moments"—What precisely precipitates them? If it were something that could be cranked up by a factor of 10 or 12... And since we seem to have little idea where they come from, it seems at least conceivable that some Drug might do this... If we could jump-start "Eureka Moments" all forms of creativity that rely on Deduction and not slavish Inductive Experimentation should progress far faster. I am convinced enough that LSD-25 May jump-start creativity,that if I had convenient access to Laboratory Grade LSD-25 of known purity, minus legal hassles... I'd certainly give it a Shot. {And if I only had access to all the Boldenone and Anovar that I wanted...} *************************** The beauty of flying cities is that anyone with some concrete and rebar could create their own Sovereign City State and tell the Government to sod off. I hadn't heard of the Kress novel. Saxon Violence Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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