I'm not one to point out that the very idea of a utopian society seems impossible given human nature. Unless we have a radical change in the psychology of how we treat each other, I'm more inclined to believe that we'll destroy each other in the next...oooh...200 years.
On the note of eternal life and being/not being a part of society: the idea is not that we would force you to continue living, only give you the choice to do so. Hell you could opt to be put in cold storage till certain parameters were met (like interesting things happening) or the like. You could probably opt to end your life permanently again - with clear guidelines not to be brought back.
You seem to now be referring to a Culture utopia, in which its people are free to perform what they like and live as long as they wish. Of course the Culture utopia in itself has faults. The machines that control the Culture could at any moment decide that the humanoids are unneccessary and turn on them.
Certainly though a Culture utopia is how i'd imagine a utopia to be like, but I still can't quite see it coming to pass unless we invent machines that determine everything.
Well that might also happen, but I don't think constantly talking about how it totally will is beneficial. I prefer to dream of and work towards the alternative.
Yeah, regarding fusion all the estimates I see talk about using fuel x and it lasting y years in theory, but it's pretty obvious that the more power we have available the more people are going to use. Having a gigantic excess of power just means we'll be lazier and more wasteful with our usage.
Which is a good thing. If we can afford to waste energy then we can do all kinds of cool things.
Case in point: Computers fucking sucked until we could afford to waste bits. And now, we use them for everything because we can "waste" bits on interfaces.
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
The Culture utopia is what I model all my utopias on. I welcome our machine overlords. I would calculate Pi for them.
I wrote up a plan for a synthetic utopia as part of a group project, and one of the members kept repeating "Oh, like in The Culture" and I kept looking at him funny. I should probably get started on those books.
What is this mysterious "debt" that we owe to our predecessors?
That aside, presumably a super-utopia would not draw a line, meaning the resurrection of every once-living creature in our evolutionary history (3.5 billion years of life).
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited March 2010
I think Mass Effect has the right picture - humanity only really gets its grip on the whole "unification" thing once it's discovered there is intelligent life out there in the universe.
But I don't think cheating death is a desirable part of a utopia. A perfect society, to me, would make life as fulfilling and happy for everyone as possible, but wouldn't artificially prolong life far beyond our natural lifespans. Death is not a bad thing.
Back from page 1, but it's a very bad thing for me. If I could choose, I would live forever in a heartbeat. There is something to see in our world alone easily for millions of years, that I can't even imagine what the universe would hold. Yes, I would live forever, but the universe would be infinite too. Neverending life of discovery.
So, you know, I'm all for OP's idea. Hey future people, if your cyber-archeological findings unravel this message, bring me back.
Unless, you know, the dolphins have finally taken control. If that is the case, I'm okay.
Is it really a utopia if people who don't want to be a part of it (because it clashes with their culture / religion) are made to be?
I envision cities in the sky, and those who want nothing to do with it can walk the earth, live their tribal lives out. After many generations, we will have civilized humans and feral humans. Civilized humans will occasionally send hunting parties down to the surface for exotic foods or resources, well armed to defend from attacks from their feral cousins. Among the land-walkers will be those who wanted some middleground, maintaining a society, fending off the feral and civilized, but occasionally trading with those who live among the clouds.
... <_<
See Pieres Anothony trilogy Sos the Rope, Var the Stick, Neq the sword.... collectively called "Battle Circle".
(This is not just a blue dot post... this series is infinitely awesome and must be read, IMO)
Our present technology has basically eliminated information scarcity, and rather than take advantage of this we've done everything in our power to try to go on pretending that we still print music on vinyl and employ monks to transcribe our books.
I'm not terribly optimistic that we will achieve utopia simply by virtue of eliminating materials and energy scarcity.
Yeah. The biggest obstacle to any utopia is that power holders in the current society work against any change.
But I don't think cheating death is a desirable part of a utopia. A perfect society, to me, would make life as fulfilling and happy for everyone as possible, but wouldn't artificially prolong life far beyond our natural lifespans. Death is not a bad thing.
Death isn't a good thing, either. Freedom from the fear of death would be nice. Not necessarily immortality, but the ability to live as long as you want. I mean, what kind of utopia is it if you can still be randomly hit by a bus and die?
My proposal is thus that the ultimate utopia would be one where we use our technology to bring every human being that has ever lived back to life as well. We must build our own afterlife.
My proposal is thus that the ultimate utopia would be one where we use our technology to bring every human being that has ever lived back to life as well. We must build our own afterlife.
Alright, say someone from this magical futureland made a perfect copy of me.
First off, which stage of my life would they base my copy off of? Would they base it off the latest point of my life? If so, what about all the memories of the past that I would have? Couldn't those memories leave some sort of imprint that would affect my ability to enjoy futureland?
Second, if the futurelanders would be making a copy of me, what does that do for the original me?
Yeah, regarding fusion all the estimates I see talk about using fuel x and it lasting y years in theory, but it's pretty obvious that the more power we have available the more people are going to use. Having a gigantic excess of power just means we'll be lazier and more wasteful with our usage.
Which is a good thing. If we can afford to waste energy then we can do all kinds of cool things.
Case in point: Computers fucking sucked until we could afford to waste bits. And now, we use them for everything because we can "waste" bits on interfaces.
That's not what I'm getting at, and that's a bad comparison. The point I was making is that all estimates I see of how long using a certain fuel for power would last completely ignore the increase in usage that would occur.
There are severe constraints on the human body regarding age. Fixing this seems to me much harder (and if it can be done, much more costly and invasive) then achieving energy abundance, though a hard road lies ahead there as well. All forms of proposed energy I know of are limited in some way, including fusion, for which we don't have that much fuel on the planet. Add to that the impending metal scarcity (Dozens of metals will be nearly running out somewhere near 2050), and all of this seems quite far away.
Don't we have a fuckton of fusion fuel on the Moon though?
In looking this up, I discovered the best-named wikipedia article:
Anyway: not really. There's hydrogen on the moon (what with all that water), but we've kind of got a lot of that already. Lithium is what we'd be short on (maybe... there are other means of fusion, but lithium+tritium is the most promising)
[edit] Where'd you get that number from, L|ama? I did find [a href=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1971LPSC....2.1217C]this[/a], which actually gives around 6.6 ppm for moon rocks and 18 ppm for moon soil, for lithium. However, I don't think that there's any particular advantage to going all the way to the fucking moon for some goddamned rocks.
Wikipedia article on Helium-3, you give me too much credit :P
My proposal is thus that the ultimate utopia would be one where we use our technology to bring every human being that has ever lived back to life as well. We must build our own afterlife.
Alright, say someone from this magical futureland made a perfect copy of me.
First off, which stage of my life would they base my copy off of? Would they base it off the latest point of my life? If so, what about all the memories of the past that I would have? Couldn't those memories leave some sort of imprint that would affect my ability to enjoy futureland?
Second, if the futurelanders would be making a copy of me, what does that do for the original me?
Well original you is alive right now. Presuming they don't do this till you die, and then simply take the last salvageable mindstate, the effect subjectively is that you experience death (or get very close to it) and then wake up in however the future accomplishes this.
Since this is a future where we can do this, I also presume that we might have some sane understandings of mental health and be able to offer people memory removal/modification and the like to help them deal with traumatic memories.
Well, let's seriously ask the question that was posed earlier as a joke. Would we resurrect Hitler? Which is acceptable: selectively bringing back the dead with moral convictions appropriate to utopia, or overriding the atavistic nonsense in their brains with the divine light of the New True Way?
Our present technology has basically eliminated information scarcity, and rather than take advantage of this we've done everything in our power to try to go on pretending that we still print music on vinyl and employ monks to transcribe our books.
I'm not terribly optimistic that we will achieve utopia simply by virtue of eliminating materials and energy scarcity.
The idea of selling individual copies is getting more and more antiquated. For music and videos the idea is already irrelevant. When it comes to immaterial products, we already have a post-scarcity society - it's called the internet.
I'll just quote a blog entry a friend of mine wrote:
When a publisher fights for the right to sell copies or when a consumer is fighting for the right to resell a game, they are both doing the same fundamental mistake: they’re mistaking the game as being a plastic disc rather than as an experience. Back when copying was hard and game resales not much of a deal, the game basically became the disc (or cartridge), just like the music tightly associated with the CD it came on.
As soon as this connection is broken, old business models fail, and people inevitably complain. Publishers complain that people copy or resell their discs, consumers complain that publishers are greedy and think they have some sort of “right” to be paid more than once for each game.
What is happening now is a rough period of trying to invent new ways of making game development business work. It does not involve companies thinking they “have the right” to be paid, but the simple fact that the companies need to be paid or they will go out of business, which would be bad for everyone involved.
The problem now is that we’re in the middle of the transition. We’re in a world where we cannot expect everyone to be able to download a game from the net, which means we need to sell copies. At the same time, hyperdistribution is a fact and game resale is abundant.
I do not for a second doubt that if a "mass replicator" is invented, the Powers That Be will try to fight it as much as they can to keep their old monetary infrastructure unthreatened.
Just look at the Red Flag Act when automobiles gained popularity - the train industry lobbied for laws that required three people to drive a car - one driver, one machinist (whatever he did), and one guy walking in front of the car waving a red flag.
at the Red Flag Act holy crap. At first I thought it sounded like some wonderfully forward-thinking carpool law but no. Oh no.
While I'm certainly on board with you that selling copies is antiquated and irrelevant, WIPO would probably have one or two things to say to the contrary. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that they "say things" with massive sums of money and armies of professional lobbyists.
The writing's on the wall; DRM has failed to materialize in any workable fashion and the costs of bandwidth and storage continue to drop. But the fight to deny the obvious is raging on, and there's no denying the money and clout being brought to bear in this assault on sanity. It is by no means a sure bet that we won't someday see a technique arise that actually fulfills the promises offered by DRM vendors. If we do, it's not at all hard to imagine that the promise of free information will be delayed beyond our lifetimes, at least.
It seems bizarre to me to discuss a utopia brought on by technology we don't have when technology we do have has brought about no such revolution. Advances in technology may make a better social order possible, but they do not make it inevitable.
It almost feels to me like a lot of us in the modern world already live in almost post-scarcity society with how goddamn frivilous our lives are.
Well, there is always the issue of money...though to someone who was born to billions and has never had to work for a day in their life, this is practically true. Fucking genetic lottery.
I do not for a second doubt that if a "mass replicator" is invented, the Powers That Be will try to fight it as much as they can to keep their old monetary infrastructure unthreatened.
Isn't there a conspiracy theory that there's already a grass-powered engine out there and the oil companies simply bought it up?
I have no doubt that we could be much, much closer to a happier, utopian society if not for those with the money and power. Doesn't matter how altruistic you are when an Oil representative turns up and says "I'll give you 10 billion to own the patent because we'll make 200 bill a year forever".
Like you said, if a Star Trek replicator was invented, every corporation and politician in the world would try to crush it to prevent economic collapse, I'd imagine the same is true for an infinite power supply.
And I'd love to live forever, but in my own body, its another discussion we've already had but my mind copied into a robot isn't me. I still die, its just a duplicate. However I'd happily replace sections of my body with superior technology, the only problem is the preservation of my organic mind.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
My favorite one is that someone invented a light bulb that can burn for a hundred years without costing much more than a regular light bulb, but it got suppressed by companies so they could keep selling plain old shitty light bulbs.
It's not as grand as "HYPEREFFICIENT ENGINE!" so it feels a bit more believable. If you're into that stuff.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
Things are invented when technology of the time has advanced sufficiently to enable their invention, not generally because of one person's stroke of genius and even then - if that one person drops the idea, someone else is very likely to then think it back up.
Outside of world changing devices, what reason is there to bury anything? Most of the things people go on to cite at this juncture is stuff which sounds cool but yields marginal improvements and probably got quietly incorporated into existing products.
Think of it this way: in a computer game which part do you focus on when you buy an upgrade? +10% to health, or "inter-woven carbon-nanotube strands with in-built drug nutrient channels improve repair and durability of gross-musculature"?
A real world example of this would be computer technology. The amount of time and effort which goes into building the general advance per year we expect is staggering. The standard hard drive read heads sits about 10 nanometers above a platter which spins at 7200 RPM and has to withstand the vibrations and knocks of room temperature operation.
Well, let's seriously ask the question that was posed earlier as a joke. Would we resurrect Hitler? Which is acceptable: selectively bringing back the dead with moral convictions appropriate to utopia, or overriding the atavistic nonsense in their brains with the divine light of the New True Way?
That is a very good question that I'd like answered.
Here's another one: what about people from the distant past? Assuming we had the magicology to bring back people from, say, Ancient Egypt or the Aztec world. Then what? We tell them, "Welcome back, by the way the world you knew has been gone for thousands of years, your cities are archaeological rubble, what little of your personal items that survived are museum artefacts, everything you knew or believed was wrong, and here's a pamphlet explaining the new world societies, governments, laws, science, beliefs, and traditions, and if you have any questions there's a talking paperclip over here that'll be happy to help. Enjoy the future!"
The culture shock would be too much. The historical spike in population from bringing everyone from the ancient past back to life would only be matched by the historical drop in population as they all commit suicide from desperation at having lost absolutely everything they knew or held dear.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
Things are invented when technology of the time has advanced sufficiently to enable their invention, not generally because of one person's stroke of genius and even then - if that one person drops the idea, someone else is very likely to then think it back up.
Outside of world changing devices, what reason is there to bury anything? Most of the things people go on to cite at this juncture is stuff which sounds cool but yields marginal improvements and probably got quietly incorporated into existing products.
Think of it this way: in a computer game which part do you focus on when you buy an upgrade? +10% to health, or "inter-woven carbon-nanotube strands with in-built drug nutrient channels improve repair and durability of gross-musculature"?
A real world example of this would be computer technology. The amount of time and effort which goes into building the general advance per year we expect is staggering. The standard hard drive read heads sits about 10 nanometers above a platter which spins at 7200 RPM and has to withstand the vibrations and knocks of room temperature operation.
I think you only need to look at America right now with Health care to see how much sway money has. If i owned a big company that did one thing and someone found a way to do it better, I'd quite happily swoop in and offer them a chunk of money to get them to give me that idea and make sure noone else can duplicate it. I'm not saying advancements aren't investigated themselves but if someone made a renewable fuel for cars the oil industry would nigh-collapse and with the money they have, they'd be stupid not to try and buy it up to ensure their own survival.
Well, let's seriously ask the question that was posed earlier as a joke. Would we resurrect Hitler? Which is acceptable: selectively bringing back the dead with moral convictions appropriate to utopia, or overriding the atavistic nonsense in their brains with the divine light of the New True Way?
That is a very good question that I'd like answered.
Here's another one: what about people from the distant past? Assuming we had the magicology to bring back people from, say, Ancient Egypt or the Aztec world. Then what? We tell them, "Welcome back, by the way the world you knew has been gone for thousands of years, your cities are archaeological rubble, what little of your personal items that survived are museum artefacts, everything you knew or believed was wrong, and here's a pamphlet explaining the new world societies, governments, laws, science, beliefs, and traditions, and if you have any questions there's a talking paperclip over here that'll be happy to help. Enjoy the future!"
The culture shock would be too much. The historical spike in population from bringing everyone from the ancient past back to life would only be matched by the historical drop in population as they all commit suicide from desperation at having lost absolutely everything they knew or held dear.
My rationale on Hitler is, since you're also resurrecting everyone he killed, after a fashion you're wiping the moral slate clean. Sure - we can't undo the psychological damage these people are going to have - but we can offer everyone a choice in continued existence.
I also do not think we have the same problems as the traditional immortality issue: we're bringing everyone back. Entire communities and civilizations - they would not be isolated from support structures and would not be alone in the universe. Confused, with a lot to process - yes - but not alone.
Well, let's seriously ask the question that was posed earlier as a joke. Would we resurrect Hitler? Which is acceptable: selectively bringing back the dead with moral convictions appropriate to utopia, or overriding the atavistic nonsense in their brains with the divine light of the New True Way?
That is a very good question that I'd like answered.
Here's another one: what about people from the distant past? Assuming we had the magicology to bring back people from, say, Ancient Egypt or the Aztec world. Then what? We tell them, "Welcome back, by the way the world you knew has been gone for thousands of years, your cities are archaeological rubble, what little of your personal items that survived are museum artefacts, everything you knew or believed was wrong, and here's a pamphlet explaining the new world societies, governments, laws, science, beliefs, and traditions, and if you have any questions there's a talking paperclip over here that'll be happy to help. Enjoy the future!"
The culture shock would be too much. The historical spike in population from bringing everyone from the ancient past back to life would only be matched by the historical drop in population as they all commit suicide from desperation at having lost absolutely everything they knew or held dear.
My rationale on Hitler is, since you're also resurrecting everyone he killed, after a fashion you're wiping the moral slate clean. Sure - we can't undo the psychological damage these people are going to have - but we can offer everyone a choice in continued existence.
I also do not think we have the same problems as the traditional immortality issue: we're bringing everyone back. Entire communities and civilizations - they would not be isolated from support structures and would not be alone in the universe. Confused, with a lot to process - yes - but not alone.
In the kind of utopia we're talking about, that can create immortals and ressurect the dead, I would imagine we'd have teleportation or fast interplanetary travel and would have colonosed/terraformed most worlds in our Galaxy, so population control wouldn't be as big a problem.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
Things are invented when technology of the time has advanced sufficiently to enable their invention, not generally because of one person's stroke of genius and even then - if that one person drops the idea, someone else is very likely to then think it back up.
Outside of world changing devices, what reason is there to bury anything? Most of the things people go on to cite at this juncture is stuff which sounds cool but yields marginal improvements and probably got quietly incorporated into existing products.
Think of it this way: in a computer game which part do you focus on when you buy an upgrade? +10% to health, or "inter-woven carbon-nanotube strands with in-built drug nutrient channels improve repair and durability of gross-musculature"?
A real world example of this would be computer technology. The amount of time and effort which goes into building the general advance per year we expect is staggering. The standard hard drive read heads sits about 10 nanometers above a platter which spins at 7200 RPM and has to withstand the vibrations and knocks of room temperature operation.
I think you only need to look at America right now with Health care to see how much sway money has. If i owned a big company that did one thing and someone found a way to do it better, I'd quite happily swoop in and offer them a chunk of money to get them to give me that idea and make sure noone else can duplicate it. I'm not saying advancements aren't investigated themselves but if someone made a renewable fuel for cars the oil industry would nigh-collapse and with the money they have, they'd be stupid not to try and buy it up to ensure their own survival.
This is what happens...except the company buys the new thing, and starts building it themselves. Innovation continues.
The calculus breaks down with world-changing devices though because they're world-changing - no amount of money anyone could reasonably offer you is going to cut it, you will make more (and be far more famous for it). It would also be obvious - there are not a lot of middle-class inventors mysteriously getting rich for apparently doing nothing.
And it doesn't address the second problem: if 1 person can do it, then the time is right for someone else to do it. It's a losing battle.
Also a third problem: how did you find out about this device, but other people didn't?
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
Things are invented when technology of the time has advanced sufficiently to enable their invention, not generally because of one person's stroke of genius and even then - if that one person drops the idea, someone else is very likely to then think it back up.
Outside of world changing devices, what reason is there to bury anything? Most of the things people go on to cite at this juncture is stuff which sounds cool but yields marginal improvements and probably got quietly incorporated into existing products.
Think of it this way: in a computer game which part do you focus on when you buy an upgrade? +10% to health, or "inter-woven carbon-nanotube strands with in-built drug nutrient channels improve repair and durability of gross-musculature"?
A real world example of this would be computer technology. The amount of time and effort which goes into building the general advance per year we expect is staggering. The standard hard drive read heads sits about 10 nanometers above a platter which spins at 7200 RPM and has to withstand the vibrations and knocks of room temperature operation.
I think you only need to look at America right now with Health care to see how much sway money has. If i owned a big company that did one thing and someone found a way to do it better, I'd quite happily swoop in and offer them a chunk of money to get them to give me that idea and make sure noone else can duplicate it. I'm not saying advancements aren't investigated themselves but if someone made a renewable fuel for cars the oil industry would nigh-collapse and with the money they have, they'd be stupid not to try and buy it up to ensure their own survival.
This is what happens...except the company buys the new thing, and starts building it themselves. Innovation continues.
The calculus breaks down with world-changing devices though because they're world-changing - no amount of money anyone could reasonably offer you is going to cut it, you will make more (and be far more famous for it). It would also be obvious - there are not a lot of middle-class inventors mysteriously getting rich for apparently doing nothing.
And it doesn't address the second problem: if 1 person can do it, then the time is right for someone else to do it. It's a losing battle.
Also a third problem: how did you find out about this device, but other people didn't?
How did Dyson come up with that special vacuum cleaner? Takes someone with an idea/vision to come up with some simple solution thtat noone ever thought of or pursued before. I'm not saying its happening on a daily basis but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to hear it had happened or if it happened in the future.
There's a conspiracy theory that there's an <fuel type> engine out there that's been suppressed. Those are all crap, and usually rely on something which doesn't really work as fuel in a scalable way.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
Things are invented when technology of the time has advanced sufficiently to enable their invention, not generally because of one person's stroke of genius and even then - if that one person drops the idea, someone else is very likely to then think it back up.
Outside of world changing devices, what reason is there to bury anything? Most of the things people go on to cite at this juncture is stuff which sounds cool but yields marginal improvements and probably got quietly incorporated into existing products.
Think of it this way: in a computer game which part do you focus on when you buy an upgrade? +10% to health, or "inter-woven carbon-nanotube strands with in-built drug nutrient channels improve repair and durability of gross-musculature"?
A real world example of this would be computer technology. The amount of time and effort which goes into building the general advance per year we expect is staggering. The standard hard drive read heads sits about 10 nanometers above a platter which spins at 7200 RPM and has to withstand the vibrations and knocks of room temperature operation.
I think you only need to look at America right now with Health care to see how much sway money has. If i owned a big company that did one thing and someone found a way to do it better, I'd quite happily swoop in and offer them a chunk of money to get them to give me that idea and make sure noone else can duplicate it. I'm not saying advancements aren't investigated themselves but if someone made a renewable fuel for cars the oil industry would nigh-collapse and with the money they have, they'd be stupid not to try and buy it up to ensure their own survival.
This is what happens...except the company buys the new thing, and starts building it themselves. Innovation continues.
The calculus breaks down with world-changing devices though because they're world-changing - no amount of money anyone could reasonably offer you is going to cut it, you will make more (and be far more famous for it). It would also be obvious - there are not a lot of middle-class inventors mysteriously getting rich for apparently doing nothing.
And it doesn't address the second problem: if 1 person can do it, then the time is right for someone else to do it. It's a losing battle.
Also a third problem: how did you find out about this device, but other people didn't?
How did Dyson come up with that special vacuum cleaner? Takes someone with an idea/vision to come up with some simple solution thtat noone ever thought of or pursued before. I'm not saying its happening on a daily basis but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to hear it had happened or if it happened in the future.
He patented it before someone else started selling it. Interesting thing about patents too: they're public domain by law. Even patent applications are.
Well at the current level of the species' existence, it is a matter of entropy vs. negentropy, with us being the latter.
After all, we need a level of order and stability for us to exist and be healthy, and the physical direction and constant state of the universe is hostile to order and stability. We are temporary anomalies, withered down slowly but surely.
All our technologies and thoughts mostly go towards erecting as solid and permanent protections against the entropy as possible.
All of the aims of the individual goes towards a state of peace, of instant fulfillment of all urges (or just a lack of them, beyond the rudimentary - man as extremely large molecule) - in other words, even on the individual level it is a matter of stability, immobility and predictability vs. the friction of a hostile, chaotic universe.
It's a battle of time - either we create some kind of technology that lets us triumph and reach a state of self-sustaining improvements, or entropy eventually sneaks up on us and either forces us to destroy ourselves (wars and the escalation of them) or just breaks our spines (climate change, meteorites, dearth of resources).
The question is - what conceivable technology will let us defeat entropy so decisively? Well, we need to overcome issues of sustenance, sustainability, resources, pollution, energy and the like before we can all keep our minds securely locked in little disks, like in Altered Carbon.
Actually life is about producing more entropy. The mathematics needs a lot of consideration, but essentially the net increase in entropy as the product of a living cell is >> then if the cell died. This is only true though so long as the cell produces entropy at a sufficiently high rate to sustain itself.
What would the result be if you did have replicators that, I assume, convert energy to mass? If you could achieve such a thing sustenance and sustainability and resources are taken care of, based on a renewable energy source.
Those two devices would completely reshape humanity, bring in teleportation and things would be incredible. I wish I could be sure I'd see such things in my lifetime.
Entropy has nothing to do with societal changes or wars or such. We live in a universe where the law is "entropy always increases". Any transition of any system from a less ordered state to a more ordered state (speaking of order in purely thermodynamic terms) requires that the entropy of a connected system increase accordingly. In order to make your freezer ice-cold the air around the coils on the back of the fridge has to be quite hot. As ELM said above this post, the actions of a cell toward order are balanced by the entropy produced in performing those actions.
Humans aren't fighting entropy, we're fighting hostile forces (be they natural phenomena like weather, non-human predators, or other humans). If we live long enough then maybe one day the entropic decay of the universe will become an issue, but we're certainly not there yet.
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You seem to now be referring to a Culture utopia, in which its people are free to perform what they like and live as long as they wish. Of course the Culture utopia in itself has faults. The machines that control the Culture could at any moment decide that the humanoids are unneccessary and turn on them.
Certainly though a Culture utopia is how i'd imagine a utopia to be like, but I still can't quite see it coming to pass unless we invent machines that determine everything.
Your calculations would be unneccessary. They would have already calculated Pi up to the trillionth number before you had time to blink!
Which is a good thing. If we can afford to waste energy then we can do all kinds of cool things.
Case in point: Computers fucking sucked until we could afford to waste bits. And now, we use them for everything because we can "waste" bits on interfaces.
I wrote up a plan for a synthetic utopia as part of a group project, and one of the members kept repeating "Oh, like in The Culture" and I kept looking at him funny. I should probably get started on those books.
That aside, presumably a super-utopia would not draw a line, meaning the resurrection of every once-living creature in our evolutionary history (3.5 billion years of life).
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Back from page 1, but it's a very bad thing for me. If I could choose, I would live forever in a heartbeat. There is something to see in our world alone easily for millions of years, that I can't even imagine what the universe would hold. Yes, I would live forever, but the universe would be infinite too. Neverending life of discovery.
So, you know, I'm all for OP's idea. Hey future people, if your cyber-archeological findings unravel this message, bring me back.
Unless, you know, the dolphins have finally taken control. If that is the case, I'm okay.
See Pieres Anothony trilogy Sos the Rope, Var the Stick, Neq the sword.... collectively called "Battle Circle".
(This is not just a blue dot post... this series is infinitely awesome and must be read, IMO)
PSN - sumowot
Death isn't a good thing, either. Freedom from the fear of death would be nice. Not necessarily immortality, but the ability to live as long as you want. I mean, what kind of utopia is it if you can still be randomly hit by a bus and die?
Even useless people?
Alright, say someone from this magical futureland made a perfect copy of me.
First off, which stage of my life would they base my copy off of? Would they base it off the latest point of my life? If so, what about all the memories of the past that I would have? Couldn't those memories leave some sort of imprint that would affect my ability to enjoy futureland?
Second, if the futurelanders would be making a copy of me, what does that do for the original me?
That's not what I'm getting at, and that's a bad comparison. The point I was making is that all estimates I see of how long using a certain fuel for power would last completely ignore the increase in usage that would occur.
Wikipedia article on Helium-3, you give me too much credit :P
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Well original you is alive right now. Presuming they don't do this till you die, and then simply take the last salvageable mindstate, the effect subjectively is that you experience death (or get very close to it) and then wake up in however the future accomplishes this.
Since this is a future where we can do this, I also presume that we might have some sane understandings of mental health and be able to offer people memory removal/modification and the like to help them deal with traumatic memories.
I'm not sure how you open a bucket, but you just did it.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
https://medium.com/@alascii
Paris Hilton: boldly exploring new paradigms of human subsistence.
The idea of selling individual copies is getting more and more antiquated. For music and videos the idea is already irrelevant. When it comes to immaterial products, we already have a post-scarcity society - it's called the internet.
I'll just quote a blog entry a friend of mine wrote:
I do not for a second doubt that if a "mass replicator" is invented, the Powers That Be will try to fight it as much as they can to keep their old monetary infrastructure unthreatened.
Just look at the Red Flag Act when automobiles gained popularity - the train industry lobbied for laws that required three people to drive a car - one driver, one machinist (whatever he did), and one guy walking in front of the car waving a red flag.
While I'm certainly on board with you that selling copies is antiquated and irrelevant, WIPO would probably have one or two things to say to the contrary. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that they "say things" with massive sums of money and armies of professional lobbyists.
The writing's on the wall; DRM has failed to materialize in any workable fashion and the costs of bandwidth and storage continue to drop. But the fight to deny the obvious is raging on, and there's no denying the money and clout being brought to bear in this assault on sanity. It is by no means a sure bet that we won't someday see a technique arise that actually fulfills the promises offered by DRM vendors. If we do, it's not at all hard to imagine that the promise of free information will be delayed beyond our lifetimes, at least.
It seems bizarre to me to discuss a utopia brought on by technology we don't have when technology we do have has brought about no such revolution. Advances in technology may make a better social order possible, but they do not make it inevitable.
Well, there is always the issue of money...though to someone who was born to billions and has never had to work for a day in their life, this is practically true. Fucking genetic lottery.
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Island. Being on fire.
Isn't there a conspiracy theory that there's already a grass-powered engine out there and the oil companies simply bought it up?
I have no doubt that we could be much, much closer to a happier, utopian society if not for those with the money and power. Doesn't matter how altruistic you are when an Oil representative turns up and says "I'll give you 10 billion to own the patent because we'll make 200 bill a year forever".
Like you said, if a Star Trek replicator was invented, every corporation and politician in the world would try to crush it to prevent economic collapse, I'd imagine the same is true for an infinite power supply.
And I'd love to live forever, but in my own body, its another discussion we've already had but my mind copied into a robot isn't me. I still die, its just a duplicate. However I'd happily replace sections of my body with superior technology, the only problem is the preservation of my organic mind.
Moreover the suppressing big ideas thing falls down in the face of competition. Being first to market with an infinite energy device would could you staggeringly rich. I mean you'd have monopoly control on the only working device, replacement parts, that sort of thing. Executives are still human - and most of them are not as rich as Bill Gates but would like to be.
My favorite one is that someone invented a light bulb that can burn for a hundred years without costing much more than a regular light bulb, but it got suppressed by companies so they could keep selling plain old shitty light bulbs.
It's not as grand as "HYPEREFFICIENT ENGINE!" so it feels a bit more believable. If you're into that stuff.
Depends. After the installations, how much can you feasibly get away with charging for something thats self sustaining and only requires exterior maintenance? The initial setup would make you rich as hell but you can't move into a utopia if you've having to pay an energy bill.
As for the conspiracy stuff, you got to imagine theres some stuff out there thats been crushed, maybe not world changing but buried to maintain a monopoly.
Things are invented when technology of the time has advanced sufficiently to enable their invention, not generally because of one person's stroke of genius and even then - if that one person drops the idea, someone else is very likely to then think it back up.
Outside of world changing devices, what reason is there to bury anything? Most of the things people go on to cite at this juncture is stuff which sounds cool but yields marginal improvements and probably got quietly incorporated into existing products.
Think of it this way: in a computer game which part do you focus on when you buy an upgrade? +10% to health, or "inter-woven carbon-nanotube strands with in-built drug nutrient channels improve repair and durability of gross-musculature"?
A real world example of this would be computer technology. The amount of time and effort which goes into building the general advance per year we expect is staggering. The standard hard drive read heads sits about 10 nanometers above a platter which spins at 7200 RPM and has to withstand the vibrations and knocks of room temperature operation.
Here's another one: what about people from the distant past? Assuming we had the magicology to bring back people from, say, Ancient Egypt or the Aztec world. Then what? We tell them, "Welcome back, by the way the world you knew has been gone for thousands of years, your cities are archaeological rubble, what little of your personal items that survived are museum artefacts, everything you knew or believed was wrong, and here's a pamphlet explaining the new world societies, governments, laws, science, beliefs, and traditions, and if you have any questions there's a talking paperclip over here that'll be happy to help. Enjoy the future!"
The culture shock would be too much. The historical spike in population from bringing everyone from the ancient past back to life would only be matched by the historical drop in population as they all commit suicide from desperation at having lost absolutely everything they knew or held dear.
I think you only need to look at America right now with Health care to see how much sway money has. If i owned a big company that did one thing and someone found a way to do it better, I'd quite happily swoop in and offer them a chunk of money to get them to give me that idea and make sure noone else can duplicate it. I'm not saying advancements aren't investigated themselves but if someone made a renewable fuel for cars the oil industry would nigh-collapse and with the money they have, they'd be stupid not to try and buy it up to ensure their own survival.
My rationale on Hitler is, since you're also resurrecting everyone he killed, after a fashion you're wiping the moral slate clean. Sure - we can't undo the psychological damage these people are going to have - but we can offer everyone a choice in continued existence.
I also do not think we have the same problems as the traditional immortality issue: we're bringing everyone back. Entire communities and civilizations - they would not be isolated from support structures and would not be alone in the universe. Confused, with a lot to process - yes - but not alone.
In the kind of utopia we're talking about, that can create immortals and ressurect the dead, I would imagine we'd have teleportation or fast interplanetary travel and would have colonosed/terraformed most worlds in our Galaxy, so population control wouldn't be as big a problem.
This is what happens...except the company buys the new thing, and starts building it themselves. Innovation continues.
The calculus breaks down with world-changing devices though because they're world-changing - no amount of money anyone could reasonably offer you is going to cut it, you will make more (and be far more famous for it). It would also be obvious - there are not a lot of middle-class inventors mysteriously getting rich for apparently doing nothing.
And it doesn't address the second problem: if 1 person can do it, then the time is right for someone else to do it. It's a losing battle.
Also a third problem: how did you find out about this device, but other people didn't?
How did Dyson come up with that special vacuum cleaner? Takes someone with an idea/vision to come up with some simple solution thtat noone ever thought of or pursued before. I'm not saying its happening on a daily basis but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to hear it had happened or if it happened in the future.
He patented it before someone else started selling it. Interesting thing about patents too: they're public domain by law. Even patent applications are.
After all, we need a level of order and stability for us to exist and be healthy, and the physical direction and constant state of the universe is hostile to order and stability. We are temporary anomalies, withered down slowly but surely.
All our technologies and thoughts mostly go towards erecting as solid and permanent protections against the entropy as possible.
All of the aims of the individual goes towards a state of peace, of instant fulfillment of all urges (or just a lack of them, beyond the rudimentary - man as extremely large molecule) - in other words, even on the individual level it is a matter of stability, immobility and predictability vs. the friction of a hostile, chaotic universe.
It's a battle of time - either we create some kind of technology that lets us triumph and reach a state of self-sustaining improvements, or entropy eventually sneaks up on us and either forces us to destroy ourselves (wars and the escalation of them) or just breaks our spines (climate change, meteorites, dearth of resources).
The question is - what conceivable technology will let us defeat entropy so decisively? Well, we need to overcome issues of sustenance, sustainability, resources, pollution, energy and the like before we can all keep our minds securely locked in little disks, like in Altered Carbon.
Those two devices would completely reshape humanity, bring in teleportation and things would be incredible. I wish I could be sure I'd see such things in my lifetime.
Humans aren't fighting entropy, we're fighting hostile forces (be they natural phenomena like weather, non-human predators, or other humans). If we live long enough then maybe one day the entropic decay of the universe will become an issue, but we're certainly not there yet.