Okay, here we go again:
It means what it reads. The actual point of that piece of text was that you're justifying your anti-environmentalist attitude with utopia of the future. Perhaps I hide it too well.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying, and it is why I support environmentalism as a practical issue today but not in its full principle.
I did not argue about the technology not becaming profitably available in the first place. I argued about your pukely-positive time taken to develop to that point. Even during the Moon Race the development of space technology was way slower than you're anticipating, and the research spending is much less these days. When the actual demand for it, which is probably a much longer time than your "few decades", the spending and progress will most definately be boosted. But that's just so far off, that's a fact.
No, it is not as far away as you seem to think; I would say about another 150 years or so at the most. The demand will increase as soon as the Earth's resources are used up, which social analysts do not place all that far away actually with the rapidly increasing population. But even 150 years can be considered as "far off" in the lifetime of a single person, which is why as I said earlier, I support environmentalism in practice today but not in its entire principle value. (at some point, no matter how far away, there will come this time where the spending and progress are boosted)
What the hell is that supposed to mean, "the technology to change ourselves"? I thought we were talking about something even a little bit concrete here, not about someone's fantasies of becoming JC Denton.
And by "environment", I did not mean the universe. I meant Earth's biosphere. You've been doing nothing but focusing on biological dependancy, and haven't even done that right since you've dismissed a few very crucial points like gravity and microbic lifeforms. There are other kinds of dependancies, like for example mental and social effects of the biosphere to the human society.
I am talking about the various advances in biology that have been made in the last ten years. Most notably, cloning and genetic alteration. The history of human technology can be divided into a series of distinct technological eras for our purposes here (they can overlap, of course), and these biological advances can be considered as the beginning of yet another period. Also, I don't see what this has to do with JC Denton, seeing as he had views more like yours throughout the game.
And no, this concept of biological dependancy cannot be applied to the human all that well (the human is a very special case of species), or we would have been long dead by now considering how much damage we have already done to the global ecosystems.
And gravity or microbes are crucial points here? How do they have anything to do with what we are talking about here? As for mental and social effects, those can change over time with the varying cultural conditions; this is where I do agree with Kuhn's system of paradigm change. It is quite easy to convince someone that they "need" something for survival, which can range from water to a biosphere to the newest stylized clothing. At the dawn of humanity, I bet that people were concerned with completely different things than they are today.
I had already assumed that the Soviet Union would be utterly crushed without a second front in France, and a third in Italy (okay, so the order is mixed up. Who cares?). However, that victory would have been costly, even given the undivided attention of the Wehrmacht. The sheer numerical numbers of people to be killed (in defence of the USSR) make it a long-term and costly battle.
I also don't disagree that had the USSR fallen Hitler would be free to attempt a takeover of the rest of the joined Contnents - right across to Japan, and possibly Australasia. However, given the resources he had would there be a benefit?
Also, although I acknowledge that Hitler might have wanted the Americas, it was simply impractical given the technology of the time. It's not appeasement, but simply taking time out to repair - or an unrealisable goal because of physical obstacles.
But why would anyone but Hitler
fight in the first place? We are assuming here that the Allied nations hold peace above everything, even in the short term, and are not willing to fight for any reason, even to bring about peace. And it is quite practical, very simple in fact, to take over a nation that offers no resistance whatsoever, which is the assumption we are going by here.
I'm glad I can understand you logically. I just can't understand you emotionally. This end you describe is only inevitable if people liken you continue to push for this warped form of 'progress' - which isn't really progress at all, because you're distorting people's bodies and minds to fit the system you think would work. True progress should mould society around humanity. In effect what you are creating is some kind of twenty-xth century workhouse or slave system, where humans are just economic units - power sources, stores of knowledge to be tapped into. People would just be happy because they have been biologically altered and socially conditioned to feel that way.
What you have created is...The Matrix.
And as I said before, that is monstrous.
To me, it is not monstrous at all, but the ultimate. But that is beside the point. People would indeed be happy because of what you say, but the
exact same thing is happening today, and the only way to bring things back to a "natural state" (which has no real meaning, but we can assume it to be what we started off with) is to ditch all technology and science and instead go back to living like the animals we came from. Do you think that these social and psychological conditions and preferences are an inherent part of human nature? They change over time and are just as prone to outside influence as the other ideas I was talking about. For example, some of the opponents of capitalism today say that people are seduced into believing that they need certain things and when they get those things, it makes them happy, and the whole system is thus quite "unnatural." There is no such thing as "distorting a mind," because the brain has no "natural state" in the first place which can be considered as distorted; every distortion is distorting yet another distortion. As for why the social machine is headed towards this system and not another, I'll cover that in more detail in that publication, but it is mainly due to the way in which all the other major systems lead to some sort of fundamental contradiction. (this is sort of like Euclid's "exhaustion" and "reductio ad absurdum" systems)
Perhaps then, the structure of an 'argument' is skewed in favour of a rational viewpoint to the detriment of emotional ones. This is just a suggeston, not a belief - but I know you'd want evidence, say I was clutching at straws, etc.
In other words, you are conceding defeat.
I am going against my
own emotional viewpoint here, which mostly agrees with all of you, so talking about "skewed viewpoints" would actually be heavily in favor of my argument. Hey I don't blame you for trying to defend your point, because of exactly what I said in that part you quoted.
I agree completely. Studies such as the Standford Prison experiment and various interrogation techniques, flawed as they are, show us the effects of artificial environments and stimulation on human minds. CP, although you might be right about efficiency in a theoretical sense, your idealised human minds do not represent the real thing: they don't have an intrinsic need for things like a natural biosphere. As a result, your theory is a little...removed from reality.
Since when do people have an "intrinsic need" for
anything?
Besides, that is not a really good explanation for why a biosphere is required as far as a logical argument goes. These experiments probably revealed the current cultural conditions, but as I said earlier, those are subject to change. I would probably become "depressed" and all that if I did not have my computer stuff, my math and my legos to keep me busy all day but does that mean that these things are absolutely necessary to my survival? I think not. Not only that, but these "necessities" subtly change over time with other varying conditions.
Regarding the rockets, like I said before, the terrorist don't need ICBMs, as they do not care about losing some men as long as the other guys die out as well, which makes the suitcase nuke the ideal solution for them.
Alright, let's keep those arguments coming!
Although one thing I should mention is that it might take me a little while to respond, as I am trying to cut back my time spent arguing here (which I have been lately spending lots of time on) and instead focus on finishing my FS2 project, which is nearly complete.
