bascule

You're missing the point. Life is all one giant chemical chain reaction. Anything which isn't a product of the initial reaction (likely to be a variadic autocatalyst) isn't "alive"

The center portion of that shape has significance to the Celts as well, in the form of the Triquetra:

Just wanted to say that's awesome, heh

Life denotes all entities which have descended from the progenotes, the common ancestors of everything which is presently alive. In a grander scheme of things, life denotes any naturally occuring mechanisms which garner extropy through gradual yet progressive incremental process of self-replication. Replicators which don't evolve (e.g. fire) aren't alive

Ordinarily I'd agree with you. I've certainly argued the "civilization falls" bit against the peak oil people... But what's really happening here is that knowledge is getting more and more dangerous. Nuclear weapons pose an existential risk, but how practical is it for your average joe to acquire enough uranium/uranium ore (and mill it), convert it to uranium hexafluoride in ultracentrifuges, cast it back into solid, weapons grade form in the shape of the implosion lens of a bomb core (not exactly public knowledge, although certainly something someone with enough know-how could figure out for themselves), and arm it with enough conventional charges to initiate a nuclear blast? Given that only about 10 nations have actually managed to arm themselves, I think we can agree: not very practical. But as nanotechnology becomes a hot item and we see, for example, university students begin to become trained to create whatever nanorobots they can conceive of, how hard does it become for someone to build a self-replicating monster that gobbles up all matter it comes in contact with in order to build copies of itself? I see the same potential in genetic engineering of viruses. For example: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/specterdeadliersmallpox.html What's really happening is the barrier-of-entry for a single person to destroy the entire world and/or wipe out the human species is growing lower and lower with each passing year.

I completely dismissed the aquatic ape theory until I read about how a diet rich in fish provided us with DHA and the fats we needed to support rapid brain growth. I certainly think our common ancestors went through a period where they were quite the fishermen, but as to whether or not this entailed actually going in the water to fish versus developing tools like spears to let them fish from shore is another question entirely.

Wow, so I've just stumbled upon this whole "consciousness singularity" idea (yay, more singularities!) which is essentially that the amount of intelligence in the universe is increaing in an exponential trend and will eventually reach some sort of limit where the universe has been completely consumed by consciousness. Then I found this little piece someone wrote: http://www.decillion.us/dmax/essays/BootStrappingGod-orig.html Here's what he had to say about it: And yeah, that's pretty much what I believe, that we're heading towards a future where the amount of intelligence in the universe continues to balloon exponentially and we are basically sitting on the knee of the curve, right before the intelligence "explosion" happens. I've thought for a long time that we're soon going to produce a distributed, redundant network of self-replicating nanorobots that will provide the ultimate material platform for human collective intelligence to accomplish anything it wants to, and that these nanorobots will essentially swarm and consume the entire universe. So yeah, just another thread in the same theme of others I've posted before. I think I'll change my signature.

As far as I'm aware causality can only come about in one of three ways 1. First cause: This would be something like the singularity 5614 described, or a supernatural source like a God/Gods, or pretty much anything which transcends time and therefore provides the source from whence time itself (i.e. causality) originates 2. Infinite regression: The universe always was and always has been, and no matter how far back in time you go, time just keeps on going backwards ad infinitum 3. Cyclical causation: Time is a never-ending loop that just keeps repeating itself over and over

Has someone been reading Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"

Hmm, here's some equally retarded attempts to use statistics to "disprove" evolution: http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?page=article&id=590

Where do their numbers come from?

Perhaps sunspot's artificial cells can interact with the earth's fusion core to reverse the circulation patterns of tropical depressions

Also, some sort of Forward Error Correction (usually Vandermonde matrices) are typically used with digital video signals so that part of the signal can be lost or distorted without losing enough information to reassemble the picture. If you transmitted a raw signal, perhaps coding for only luminance (i.e. black & white) with a fixed size integer, it would be much easier to decipher the signal, but without forward error correction, it may come out quite distorted.

Shouldn't this be under Computer Science? Why is it in cosmology? Deciphering a perceptually coded visual image is arguably a few orders of magnitude more different than deciphering a language. A very specifically designed algorithm must work upon the data set. Attempting to decode the image without the knowledge of the algorithm is an amazingly difficult task. It's for this reason, perhaps, that RealVideo has not been successfully reverse engineered, and in that case we even have a machine language version of the codec to crib off of. I'm not putting it past the abilities of a super advanced alien civilization, but I think we'd be much better off transmitting unencoded audio.

Optimistic as I may sound, I know that accelerating change will bring with it the knowledge of a whole new assortment of ways to destroy ourselves. I'm fairly convinced that if we don't manage to get Eric Drexler's proposed nanotech shield up quickly, we will run into a grey goo situation before too long...

Again, I think Tesla spent too much time dreaming and too little time calculating. What he was attempting is not feasible due to the inverse square law (i.e. it becomes exponentially more difficult to send electricity through the air as the distance increases) The solution is to turn the electricity into high-energy photons and beam the energy that way, but the device Tesla needed to do that, the magnetron, was just starting to become successful in the application of RADAR around the time of Tesla's death.

What's sad is anti-GMO alarmism has kept the governments of several African countries from approving GMO crops, so their people continue to starve when we have a solution...

http://www.wmo.ch/wmd/

As far as the underlying idea of the thread goes: If you believe in cyclical causality (and therefore strong determinism) the same events that lead to you being born will happen over and over again ad infinitum. So if causality is cyclical (and strong determinism holds), you will be born again ad infinitum because your birth is ultimately causally linked to the creation of the universe, i.e. there could not be a universe without you being born when you were.

Any kind of out-of-control chain reaction has the ability to wipe out the human species, or possibly all life on earth. Singularitarians generally discuss this in terms of "GNR" technologies, referring to genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics (i.e. strong AI), discussing replicators in the biological, nanotechnological, and informational worlds.

That would be me. AMD64 gets a 30% average speed boost from having 8 general purpose registers instead of the 4 provided by IA32

We don't know if the universe is infinite or not. I happen to believe it's finite. The latest WMAP data tends to agree... but it isn't proof.

It doesn't really matter what the example is. Humans are presently doing not-so-great of a job identifying and preparing for all sorts of existential risks.

iPods, especially the Mini and Nano, are fragile and will most likely break after 3-4 years. It would not surprise me if a few years down the road we start hearing about Nanos dying from worn out flash. Rather insightful thread though, I never thought about the iTunesDB wearing out the flash, but what you're describing is entirely possible.

I'd rather be pensively knowledgable than blissfully ignorant