Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Scorpius on August 30, 2008, 05:13:51 pm
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So many of you probably read the link I posted about what life would be like 40 years from 1968 and many of you probably read the comments on the bottom. Many of the comments were extremely bleak outlook of life in 2048. I have noticed there is a big end-of-the-world craze going on in recent times (the whole 2012 thing, the new popular kids books are about a post apocalyptic society living underground, movies like I am Legend, 28 months later, etc..) I was wondering what people here thought.
Do you think the world as we know it is coming to an end very soon? Or is this just a generation of doomers exacerbated by a slowing global economy?
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Hope it does, especially because this particular "generation of doomers" depend their lives only on global economy. :pimp:
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Things like this come and go. They're always wrong.
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In the 50's and most of the 60's most people were pretty optimistic about the future. Now not so much, probably because of the failure to deliver on the promises of the past.
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For the past decades the world is being rouled by the people who were young and optimistic back then. :(
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The Singularity is coming. Prepare to upload!
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You have to look at what science was doing then vs. what science is doing now. In 68, we were one year from the moon landing, which is a good "culmination point" for the massive postwar scientific advances that had revolutionized life in almost every way. Science in the fifties and sixties was about opening doors - think about it - TVs were in every home, streaming in information in quantities far greater than ever before, superphosphates and massive irrigation engineering was opening vast tracst of land for farming, labour saving devices were entering every conceiveable niche in the home, nuclear power was cheap, plentiful and safe, buildings were taller and more complex than ever, antibiotics had come out of WW2 as wonder drugs, Smallpox was being eradicated, polio vaccines had been developed etc. etc. etc. There are a million examples. And that doesn't even take into account more esoteric stuff like genetic and atomic research moving ahead in leaps and bounds.
In essence, the last thirty years had been about examining the potential of science and not finding any limits, and in the process making everyone's life better.
Modern science, particularly in the last ten or fifteen years, has been more about finding the limits of science. We know now that we're running out of phosphates for fertilizer, that fresh water is getting harder to find, that metal resources of stuff like copper are scarcer and scarcer. We have global warming people telling us that all those labour saving devices use electricity, the generation of which will destroy the planet. Chernobyl shattered everyone's nuclear idyll, so that's off the table as well. Science has also had much less impact on people's every day lives over the past twenty or so years than it had in the twenty years preceeding 1968. Walk around your house and find stuff that they didn't have in 1988. With the exception of your more advanced entertainment stuff (which often had less advanced analogues at the time) and the internet, you wont find too much. Try to imagine performing a similar experiment comparing a 1968 home to a 1948 home. Much more dramatic change. Even medical science, despite advancing in leaps and bounds behind the scenes, curing lots of diseases that most people wont encounter int heir day to day lives, it hasn't had the hands on impact it had had in 1968. Back then, we'd eliminated a lot of the major diseases of the time. In the last 20 years though, new diseases have jumped up to replace them (AIDS, Cancer, heart disease and obesity etc.), and science has failed us against these illnesses.
It's a cyclical thing I think. Ask again in 20 years and I think we'll be on an upward slope again - new sources of energy wuill have made the oil crunch and global warming somewhat less critical (I'm thinking hydrogen here), and stem cells will make organ replacement viable, getting around cancer in a lot of cases. Metal and fertilizer shortages I'm less sure about, but there are alternative sources we can tap if things get desperate - first low grade deposits that are currently uneconomic, then underwater, arctic and antarctic stuff, direct extraction from seawater etc. etc. Also, I think we'll start to see even more computer integration into houses and routines (especially as online shopping continues to gain acceptance for non-luxury items), which'll show dramatic, positive, "hands on" changes to lifestyles. Stuff like wireless networking and bluetooth letting all your gear talk to each other, true roaming profiles and customization, etc. etc.
In essence, I think the doom and gloom of today vs. the optimism of yesteryear tells you more about people's perceptions of science than it does the true state of modern technology, or the potential of the future - it's social, not so much scientific. I'd be particularly keen to see what the mentality would be in upwardly mobil countries like China and Malaysia and such - probably hugely more optiistic than most of the western world.
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Well said, well said Black Wolf. Admitedly though, with every advancement we do seem to come closer to destroying the earth... but hopefully that won't be so much of a problem once we terraform mars...
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Hard to say what the result will be, but its gonna be a hell of a mess getting there.
The lack of resources is just getting worse, and the resource need/capita in any country is only increasing.
Then there are more people capable of fighting about these resources than there ever was.
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I wonder how long would it take us to destroy a terraformed mars :nod:
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Very little, I guess. Mars has no atmosphere, so they'll probably need to create biodomes or something like that.
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Well theres plenty of Co2, and the soil can support plant life... oxygen comes out of plants... But, yeah, you'd need to do it on a MASSIVE scale. and even then the atmosphere would be thin, and this is totally ignoring the temperature problem...
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Perhaps they could seed some plants all over the planet over the course of, I don't know, thirty years?
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What about the gravity? I think it is somethink like 0.6g.
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I suspect that once we spread to multiple planets, Earth will probably end up irradiated at some point. It's easier to throw stones when you are in a different tree.
Edit: As for the Worldwide 'Cult of Doom', to be honest, the situation was the same during the Cold War, every day could be your last. What changed it all this time round was this here 'Internet' thing. Now every crackpot can get their voice heard, and with the human nature of believing that everything is slowly getting worse as they get older (which is, in truth a case of them getting older as the world gets different) this sort of attitude is bound to get around.
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Ask shivans in this board, they know better :lol:
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Developments in science and technology that improve our lives are wonderful and all, but there's always the negative side. Taking a huge step back and looking at the world, we can see the problems - famine, disease, pollution - and where such developments would be useful in trying to solve them. But there are worries about, for example, genetically modified crops and the effects of crossbreeding with unmodified crops, the ethical issues of using stem cells, animal research etc.
I'm don't really know much about the history of science, but I wonder about the developments made in the last century and the "sacrifices" made to fulfill them. I mean, for example the experiments conducted by the Nazis on concentration camp victims, and by Unit 731 (the Japanese army's experimental medical unit in WW2), and so on. What came of those experiments and how much of the knowledge (if any) that they got from them ended up being transferred into modern day beneficial medical treatment? OK yes, I know that I'm bring up extreme examples here. But it's disturbing.
The means to get humans into space were based on technology derived from the design of the V2 rocket, IIRC. Then there's the Cold War arms race, from which there must have been lots of technological advancements that found their way into civilian use in some shape or form (I'm thinking of the space shuttle and all the innovations that went into its design that ended up in household gadgetry etc.)
I rambling a bit. What I'm saying is that it seems to me that there have huge developments over the last 100 years but some have been born out of the big upheavals in history, namely war and its associated nastiness. Gains made through sacrifice, or a huge cost. The '50s and '60s developed world looked back on the 2 world wars and didn't really want a third using nuclear weaponry... even though the threat of one happening was there. But it drove development... some good and some not so good. What seems to be (or rather what should be?) driving development now whilst things are... relatively quieter (depending on where you live in the world) is global warming (assuming that the cause is human activity), food crises, the fight against superbugs... maybe.
Of course science can't make our world perfect. The means of improving the planet's health and our lives may be in our grasp, and I'm sure that attempts to implement them will be made in the future, but as long as humans are involved, chaos reigns. As long as conflict keeps braking out we're still going to see famine, disease and poverty, no matter what science can bring us. I don't think that'll change in 40 years, or beyond that.
Sorry for my overall "heavy" view. Hope I didn't go off on too much of a tangent. I don't consider myself a doomerist but I have concerns...and sometimes current events get me thinking.
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Oddly enough, if Dinosaurs had invented 'War', they probably would have advanced a lot quicker, though, in all fairness, it's unlikely we would find evidence of civilisation from that long ago even if it did exist, even something like the Pyramids wouldn't last 60+ million years. I don't think most mountain ranges hang about for that long, come to think of it.
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As well as bringing some development it also creates a distraction from the big global problems, and exacerbating them overall.
On another note, over-reliance on technology... that could be a concern for the future.
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Thing is, we've created a sort of perpetual motion for creating technology, technology increases free time, which increases the amount of time people can dedicate to inventing ways of making more free time. Hence why you can get devices that talk to your plants, because the Western World has lots of free time.
I suppose this was my point in the 'Longevity' thread that was up a few weeks ago, that the changes inherent in extending life are far more wide-reaching than simply living longer, and that, as you say, a society that becomes too dependent on it's science is as dangerous in it's own way as a society that bases itself entirely on religion.
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Thing is, we've created a sort of perpetual motion for creating technology, technology increases free time, which increases the amount of time people can dedicate to inventing ways of making more free time. Hence why you can get devices that talk to your plants, because the Western World has lots of free time.
I suppose this was my point in the 'Longevity' thread that was up a few weeks ago, that the changes inherent in extending life are far more wide-reaching than simply living longer, and that, as you say, a society that becomes too dependent on it's science is as dangerous in it's own way as a society that bases itself entirely on religion.
I agree.
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I suppose this was my point in the 'Longevity' thread that was up a few weeks ago, that the changes inherent in extending life are far more wide-reaching than simply living longer, and that, as you say, a society that becomes too dependent on it's science is as dangerous in it's own way as a society that bases itself entirely on religion.
We have long since passed the point of no return. Even our food nowadays is a result of our technology.
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Yeah...even cars these days are electronically limited.
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We have long since passed the point of no return. Even our food nowadays is a result of our technology.
Indeed, at least in the case of the Western World, which is contributing in no small factor to the entire 'equality' question here, no hunters, no gatherers, just Online Shopping.
I suppose we need remind ourselves that whilst society uses technology, it doesn't consist of it.
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We have long since passed the point of no return. Even our food nowadays is a result of our technology.
In terms of food processing, I suppose it is to an extent. It's interesting in that there's a market for organic produce, though. But even then I think there has to be some degree of technology to ensure quality.
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I dislike the amount of insect-sprays we use on crops, though we've always added chemicals to our crops, be it DDT or Camel Dung, it's always mildly funny how people will claim that plants that have been sprayed with weedkiller are contaminated by soaking up the chemicals, yet ones that have been grown on a bed of manure are perfectly fine and healthy ;)
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Doesn't manure work as some kind of fertiliser? :confused:
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Manure = organic fertilizer.
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it's always mildly funny how people will claim that plants that have been sprayed with weedkiller are contaminated by soaking up the chemicals, yet ones that have been grown on a bed of manure are perfectly fine and healthy ;)
It's especially funny when they go on and on about how artificial fertilisers are bad for you and that they refuse to eat anything unhealthy like that....and then end up with E. Coli poisoning. :p
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It's especially funny when they go on and on about how artificial fertilisers are bad for you and that they refuse to eat anything unhealthy like that....and then end up with E. Coli poisoning.
Huh? During the 26 years I have lived - 18 first pretty close to farmers - I have never heard of a single case of this happening (in Finland that is), and those farmers put quite a lot of **** on the fields. Unless such people are morons, I have no idea how could they get E. Coli. There have been far more better chances for food poisoning in the ethnic restaurants who most likely use imported food. In here, that is.
Mika
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/13/MNG71LOT711.DTL
Too sleepy to search for a link where it came from plants where there was no possibility of contamination from actual cattle but I remember reading once that out of the 400+ outbreaks one of the major government bodies in the UK had looked at the majority hadn't come from eating meat but were instead from eating vegetables grown in manure.
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a society that becomes too dependent on it's science is as dangerous in it's own way as a society that bases itself entirely on religion.
How so? We're already well past the point of no return (at least the developed world). Everything we eat uses technology in some form or another to grow the food and get it to the market.
Too sleepy to search for a link where it came from plants where there was no possibility of contamination from actual cattle but I remember reading once that out of the 400+ outbreaks one of the major government bodies in the UK had looked at the majority hadn't come from eating meat but were instead from eating vegetables grown in manure.
So Finnish **** is cleaner than British ****?
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Because, as Terry Pratchett put it, if the plug ever got pulled out of the bottom of the Universe, there'd be a human at the other end of the chain saying 'I was only curious'
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Read my signature...
though you need more info for what it really is - I'm thinking of writing a story, but it may take a while before I release it to anyone. I haven't even finsihed the characters, places, objects/weapons, things, etc.
And I want it to become a movie with my selection of atmospheric music. (Hint at someone who can't be seen around here - check out his name to find out why - if you visit him you'll nver return)
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Because, as Terry Pratchett put it, if the plug ever got pulled out of the bottom of the Universe, there'd be a human at the other end of the chain saying 'I was only curious'
So basically we will destroy the universe out of curiosity?
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It's a metaphor, it means that the reason society is sometimes wary of Science is because has a habit of doing things just because it's a good idea at the time, after all, we don't send death-row prisoners off to be tested on until they die for a reason, it's inhumane, even though it's scientifically sensible.
Look at the state the UK is now in because it was 'efficient' to use technology to put cameras on every street corner, it's certainly a scientific solution, not a human one, and it's caused nothing but trouble. Look at ID tags, Microwave crowd suppression devices etc, all of them scientifically viable, Science can be a bigger monster in the closet than Religion can, because the nature of Science is that it works.
Science thinks about the tool, not the hand that wields it, and that's it's weakness, it doesn't deal with people, it deals with cold, hard facts, and that's the one thing that people aren't.
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...well, except for social sciences.
And, of course, all our morality and culture is just a way to hide from the fact that the universe really is made of cold, hard facts. Not to say I disapprove -- I like our morality very much -- but science, as you say, doesn't deal in illusions.
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Social Sciences are mostly considered 'Humanities' in most circles, you certainly won't find a Chemistry professor who cared what a Psychology Professor thought about the ramifications of his research (or, in some cases, even understood the danger). Indeed, Science has always made a large issue of the fact that they are finding knowledge for knowledge's sake and aren't responsible for the practical application of what they discover.
Even the scientists who did suspect the potential of Nuclear Fission as a weapon continued to research it, and this was despite the fact that, at the time, they weren't sure if the weapon would set the atmosphere of the planet on fire or continue to react beyond the blast area, consuming the entire planet. We now know they won't, but when the first bomb was dropped, they weren't actually sure, since Germany was suspected of developing an H-bomb too, it was decided that if anyone was going to destroy the planet, it should be the good guys.
And, of course, all are morality and culture is just a way to hide from the fact that the universe really is made of cold, hard facts. Not to say I disapprove -- I like our morality very much -- but science, as you say, doesn't deal in illusions.
The Universe may be cold, hard facts, but people are not, they are random, and frightened and selfish. Science can push society upwards, but we should never let the Science become more important to us than each other.
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We now know they won't, but when the first bomb was dropped, they weren't actually sure, since Germany was suspected of developing an H-bomb too, it was decided that if anyone was going to destroy the planet, it should be the good guys.
:wakka:
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Even the scientists who did suspect the potential of Nuclear Fission as a weapon continued to research it, and this was despite the fact that, at the time, they weren't sure if the weapon would set the atmosphere of the planet on fire or continue to react beyond the blast area, consuming the entire planet. We now know they won't, but when the first bomb was dropped, they weren't actually sure, since Germany was suspected of developing an H-bomb too, it was decided that if anyone was going to destroy the planet, it should be the good guys.
Not true. That possibility had worried the scientists earlier on in the project but by the time of the actual Trinity test they considered setting the atmosphere on fire to be impossible.
As for the rest, I feel a distinction needs to be made between science and its application. Saying that you shouldn't research something because it might be used for evil is like saying you shouldn't own kitchen knives because they might be used for stabbing someone.
While science might be responsible for the invention of these things it's very rare that the same person who invented something is also responsible for its deployment.
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While science might be responsible for the invention of these things it's very rare that the same person who invented something is also responsible for its deployment.
True, that. It wasn't Richard Trevethick who deployed the steam engine. That went to George Stephenson. Trevethick made the first steam locomotive, but Stephenson made it into a form of transport.
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As for the rest, I feel a distinction needs to be made between science and its application. Saying that you shouldn't research something because it might be used for evil is like saying you shouldn't own kitchen knives because they might be used for stabbing someone.
But just to look at science without looking at the fact the other people get their hands on it's results is equally as pointless. That's exactly what I mean by science distancing itself from the outcome of what it does.
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But just to look at science without looking at the fact the other people get their hands on it's results is equally as pointless. That's exactly what I mean by science distancing itself from the outcome of what it does.
Seconded. Scientists have social responsibility. It is not that they could stop someone misusing the results, but they can at least keep some noise of that to increase general awareness. Unfortunately according to my observations, the credibility of those scientists that go public takes a dive in the eyes of the scientific community.
Mika
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i like gloom and doom...
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But just to look at science without looking at the fact the other people get their hands on it's results is equally as pointless. That's exactly what I mean by science distancing itself from the outcome of what it does.
Problem is that if you start saying that "This can be misused therefore I shouldn't research it" you end up with very little that can be researched. There isn't much that can't be abused.
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True, there is always a use for Science in society, don't get me wrong, I'm a staunch supporter of Science, even a supporter of taking a few calculated 'risks', such as starting the Hadron collider etc, but to make the focus of society to be solely based on something that doesn't consider the ramifications of its actions is just as dangerous as making it on something that is overly paranoid about some big beard in the sky taking notes, in my opinion ;)
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have you considered the possibility that you have made science into a stawman?
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but to make the focus of society to be solely based on something that doesn't consider the ramifications of its actions is just as dangerous as making it on something that is overly paranoid about some big beard in the sky taking notes, in my opinion ;)
Agreed. But who is doing that?
I think you'll find that no one is deriving ethics from science or suggesting that it should be the focus of society in the first place.
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Im glad that you guys are taking a rational approach to this argument instead of "Corporations will rape us to death and planet X will swoop out of the oort cloud and cover this planet in volcanic ash" crap that Ive read elsewhere.
My friend and I have been having this discussion for a few months now and we have different ideas about the future. He believes that society will move towards ultimate sustainability where people grow food via permaculture and we live in small isolated communities because the mere existence of a city is destructive to our planet. He seems to think that how most people lived during the middle ages was the future. I see this as him saying that all but about 5.5 billion people will have to die before this idea becomes feasible.
Finally, I believe that people love their technology and travel too much to give it up and will come up with more and more creative ways of maintaining their lifestyle. Even if society were to totally collapse, it wouldn't be long before we re-employ agriculture and our population will rebound in just the same way. It seems cyclical and agriculture is a genie that has been let out of the bottle 10,000 years ago. I feel that we are on the precipice of a major shift in economic and social reform and it will probably be violent and it will probably be destructive but in the end, I feel that we will be better in the long run.
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but to make the focus of society to be solely based on something that doesn't consider the ramifications of its actions is just as dangerous as making it on something that is overly paranoid about some big beard in the sky taking notes, in my opinion ;)
Agreed. But who is doing that?
I think you'll find that no one is deriving ethics from science or suggesting that it should be the focus of society in the first place.
Well, I'm talking extreme example here, the point I suppose I'm trying to make is that a society that becomes too dependent on technology may, in fact, most likely will find it turning round and biting them in ways they never suspected.
As people have already correctly stated, we are already overly dependent on the produce of technology to some degree, but that cannot be helped, sheer volume of numbers requires those advancements, and millions would be dead without them, technology certainly has its uses, but it's kind of like the Douglas Adam joke about expelling telephone cleaners to another planet, which led to the entire population of the previous planet becoming extinct via a phone-transmitted disease.
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As for the rest, I feel a distinction needs to be made between science and its application. Saying that you shouldn't research something because it might be used for evil is like saying you shouldn't own kitchen knives because they might be used for stabbing someone.
But just to look at science without looking at the fact the other people get their hands on it's results is equally as pointless. That's exactly what I mean by science distancing itself from the outcome of what it does.
I don't think that's true, science is not distancing itself anymore than it used to. There is a couple decade lag between when they prove a groundbreaking theory and when it actually shows up in a consumer product. Take for example quantum theories. 30 years ago they seemed pointless and so "distant", but now more and more of our electronics use them (how do you think your USB jump drive works?)
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Heh, well, this could very easily turn into a case of 'what have the Romans ever done for us?' ;)
I suppose the problem not so much that it filters down, but that to become over-dependent on technology, to rely on weight loss tablets and operations, rather than simply dieting (at the very least, in non-genetic cases), to rely on home delivery of your Internet ordered groceries, to expect the TV or Computer to provide entertainment at any time...
All those inventions are wonderful things, Surgery, Medicine, the Internet etc, but they are tools, and becoming dependent on them is already starting backfire in ways we didn't suspect, the decreasing effectiveness of anti-biotics, increases in Morbid obesity, even mental 'addictions' such as MMO's and Chat Rooms, it's all symbols of our over-dependence on the very technologies that are supposed to be nothing more than a tool to augment our own natural toolbox.
It's not Science that is at fault, it is society that is to blame, the Internet was viewed as a vast online library. It says a great deal about humanity that it ended up as a vast online Porn shop. Technology is great. People, not so great.