38 replies to this topic

[forever freedom]

http://www.mercuryne...?nclick_check=1

Well here in brazil i would be surprised if the average broadband connection speed makes it to 1megabits per second... it will more likely be some 256 kb per second.

Here in brazil we have an expression that translated to english would be something like this: "You're complaining yet your stomach is full". I guess you can understand what it means. I would love if my internet connection was higher than my current 4mb per seconds (which is near brazil's top speed)....




by the way: what the hell this forum update is full of bugs. where's my avatar image? where are the emoticoms??? the emoticom box, when i open it, is empty

[gashinshotan]

http://www.mercuryne...?nclick_check=1

Well, there probably is a correlation between internet porn consumption and those numbers. I mean, come on, that's the primary reason you would need anything beyond cable; even DSL is enough for most games including fps. The Japanese and Western europe are known for being high consumers of porn.

Edited by gashinshotan, 23 November 2007 - 01:08 PM.

[maestro949]

I mean, come on, that's the primary reason you would need anything beyond cable; even DSL is enough for most games including fps.

Heh, who needs more than 640k of RAM?

We'll want and need 100,000,000x the DSL bandwidth for the future interactive communication and knowledge technologies that will emerge. All realtime information from around the world will constantly be pushed to you 24/7 rather than going to download it. You will have intelligent software that filters and synthesizes in real-time such that you can do your engineering work as that's all that will be left for jobs in a hundred years or so.

Entertainment will be even more interactive and immersive than it is today and will require enormous bandwidths. Entire new industries will emerge around this that make todays gaming industry look like medieval games of swordplay - literally

Medical devices that monitory your health will pump terabytes per second to centralized processing systems.

Interfacing with the singularity will probably require a pipe of a millions of petabytes per second. To put that in perspective - The HLC at CERN will output 1 petabyte per second.

I could think of lots of uses for exponential increases in bandwidth.

[gashinshotan]

Heh, who needs more than 640k of RAM?

We'll want and need 100,000,000x the DSL bandwidth for the future interactive communication and knowledge technologies that will emerge. All realtime information from around the world will constantly be pushed to you 24/7 rather than going to download it. You will have intelligent software that filters and synthesizes in real-time such that you can do your engineering work as that's all that will be left for jobs in a hundred years or so.

Entertainment will be even more interactive and immersive than it is today and will require enormous bandwidths. Entire new industries will emerge around this that make todays gaming industry look like medieval games of swordplay - literally

Medical devices that monitory your health will pump terabytes per second to centralized processing systems.

Interfacing with the singularity will probably require a pipe of a millions of petabytes per second. To put that in perspective - The HLC at CERN will output 1 petabyte per second.

I could think of lots of uses for exponential increases in bandwidth.

Virtual sex will still be the main reason people will be using these high speed connections. Other than that, downloading movies and music illegally, watching mind-degrading videos, and playing games...

Medical devices that monitor the body do not require even megabytes of bandwith and this technology has already been used since the 60s i.e. the space program which didn't even employ microchips.

Interfacing with the singularity will turn us all into porn-addicted, lazy, and physically incompetent human beings with myopic vision and low muscle mass. Hey maybe that's why aliens look the way they do! Maybe they're human beings from the future who lost their skin color and muscle mass because of millions of years of staying indoors, who evolved huge eyes to efficiently absorb more information from monitors, and who lost their ability to speak because of the replacement of speaking by a direct mental connection to the singularity...coming back to the past in regret of losing their humanity...

[Liquidus]

Interfacing with the singularity will turn us all into porn-addicted, lazy, and physically incompetent human beings with myopic vision and low muscle mass. Hey maybe that's why aliens look the way they do! Maybe they're human beings from the future who lost their skin color and muscle mass because of millions of years of staying indoors, who evolved huge eyes to efficiently absorb more information from monitors, and who lost their ability to speak because of the replacement of speaking by a direct mental connection to the singularity...coming back to the past in regret of losing their humanity...

Deep.

I did hear the same fantastical predictions before the internet was streamed into everyday life. People become complacent because they are complacent by nature, not because an easier/more efficient method happens to conform to their complacency/laziness.

[gashinshotan]

Deep.

I did hear the same fantastical predictions before the internet was streamed into everyday life. People become complacent because they are complacent by nature, not because an easier/more efficient method happens to conform to their complacency/laziness.

Imagine a whole new level of sloth where people wouldn't even be sitting at a computer or even using a mouse and keyboard - just laying down surfing the web and having virtual sex because of the integration of computers directly into the brain or through a headset. That's the direction the new technology seems to be heading. Anyway, I was only kidding. .

[maestro949]

Medical devices that monitor the body do not require even megabytes of bandwith and this technology has already been used since the 60s i.e. the space program which didn't even employ microchips.

True, but the future implantable monitors will continuously sequence DNA, measure gene transcription, sample proteins, image cells and organs and then feed all this data back to your government's health czar, terrorist czar and insurance companies.

Interfacing with the singularity will turn us all into porn-addicted, lazy, and physically incompetent human beings with myopic vision and low muscle mass.

We're biologically wired to gravitate towards this. The tech simply enables us to apply our basic instincts faster and more effectively. Hopefully with longer lifespans and cognitive enhancers individuals will tire of these primitive lifestyle choices and choose to reprogram some of their biology to be a little more useful to the rest of society. The singularity will guide us as how to reprogram our neurons to dim this circuitry down a bit. You could even hook your dog to it and rewire him to stop humping your leg when guests come over.

Hey maybe that's why aliens look the way they do! Maybe they're human beings from the future who lost their skin color and muscle mass because of millions of years of staying indoors, who evolved huge eyes to efficiently absorb more information from monitors, and who lost their ability to speak because of the replacement of speaking by a direct mental connection to the singularity...coming back to the past in regret of losing their humanity...

Why would they come back? To deteriorate slowly, suffer and die a horrible death from aging? To engage in endless warfare? Paint on cave walls, suffer from the addictions you mention? I'm sure they'd be like "Oh yeah, this sucks.", would get right back in their dimensionator and vanish. Humanity still has a lot to gain from progressing tech and losing some of it probably isn't a bad thing for the species as a whole.

[gashinshotan]

True, but the future implantable monitors will continuously sequence DNA, measure gene transcription, sample proteins, image cells and organs and then feed all this data back to your government's health czar, terrorist czar and insurance companies.

And the current level of bw couldn't already accomodate that amount of info? Books with thousands of pages are only a few thousand kilobytes at most, and even our complete genome can fit into a book. I don't even believe we would need to continually sequence DNA or transcription; after all, we can't change our DNA. I do see how measuring protein levels would be useful though and observing the levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, and nutrient levels in the blood and organs, but why continuous imaging? And the amount of information regarding these levels would be basic; total protein, glucose count, etc. something which even a 28.8kbps connection could handle. Also, do you really believe that EVERYONE would be linked to a big brother health system? It would seem that only a few elite or even the middle class would be capable of affording or be considered worthy of such a system which would limit the need for widespread nationwide high bandwith connections.

We're biologically wired to gravitate towards this. The tech simply enables us to apply our basic instincts faster and more effectively. Hopefully with longer lifespans and cognitive enhancers individuals will tire of these primitive lifestyle choices and choose to reprogram some of their biology to be a little more useful to the rest of society. The singularity will guide us as how to reprogram our neurons to dim this circuitry down a bit. You could even hook your dog to it and rewire him to stop humping your leg when guests come over.

We are not biologically wired to be lazy. Our bodies are highly efficient, capable of achieving difficult physical and developmental feats with only a little input of food. For example, running one mile requires only 100 calories which can be provided by consuming a few tablespoons of sugar. Our bodies aren't designed to be lazy; this is the reason why widespread chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and obesity are the greatest killers of human beings today. Exercise is a natural function and healing mechanism of the body which prevents these "lazy" diseases from occuring in the body. In contrast, lazy behavior such as being sedentary, associal, developing convenient technology (barring medical advances) such as cars and computers, and consuming mostly processed foods are harmful to survival.

Describe this singularity in detail and where you are basing your opinions on. Any singularity I can foresee would benefit a few elite, not the entire world and would most likely be used for military purposes above all. We already are almost at this point in the U.S. military with integrated headset radios, computers and GPS devices on tens of thousands of individual soldiers.

Why would they come back? To deteriorate slowly, suffer and die a horrible death from aging? To engage in endless warfare? Paint on cave walls, suffer from the addictions you mention? I'm sure they'd be like "Oh yeah, this sucks.", would get right back in their dimensionator and vanish. Humanity still has a lot to gain from progressing tech and losing some of it probably isn't a bad thing for the species as a whole.

I was referring to alien abductions and encounters. They could be coming back to observe their past as a means of gaining knowledge about their evolutionary development and the influence of technology. Again, it was a rhetorical situation I created to explain what I believe we will become if we continue to head on the path of technological-based evolution.

[Liquidus]

Imagine a whole new level of sloth where people wouldn't even be sitting at a computer or even using a mouse and keyboard - just laying down surfing the web and having virtual sex because of the integration of computers directly into the brain or through a headset. That's the direction the new technology seems to be heading. Anyway, I was only kidding. .

Yah, I know, I was just trying to stir up a mini-debate. I used to chat with my grade 5 teacher about stuff like this. He used to say 'eventually, humanity will become so saturated by it's own creations and advancements, that we'll turn into giant grey blobs of useless matter full of information with no physical purpose, be afraid...be very afraid'.

[gashinshotan]

Yah, I know, I was just trying to stir up a mini-debate. I used to chat with my grade 5 teacher about stuff like this. He used to say 'eventually, humanity will become so saturated by it's own creations and advancements, that we'll turn into giant grey blobs of useless matter full of information with no physical purpose, be afraid...be very afraid'.

That's even a better image than what I thought up! Im gonna use it verbatim.

[maestro949]

And the current level of [bandwidth] couldn't already accomodate that amount of [biomedical] info?

Not in the slightest. Surely it could be processed and synthesized in-vivo before uploading but I think the raw data will be wanted for the sake of further improvements and refinements to the nanotech implants and the software that drive them. I'm looking much further down the road. Not 5 years.

Books with thousands of pages are only a few thousand kilobytes at most, and even our complete genome can fit into a book. I don't even believe we would need to continually sequence DNA or transcription; after all, we can't change our DNA.

Books are one thing but mass spec data and the many other forms of biodata are many orders of magnitude larger in size.

I do see how measuring protein levels would be useful though and observing the levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, and nutrient levels in the blood and organs, but why continuous imaging?

For diagnostics ranging from cancer to monitoring organ function for injury repair. 3D views of proteins, macromolecular structures, organs and the entire body in real-time will eventually be relatively easy and inexpensive. A few strategically placed implants could continuously image all key organs around the clock and send out nanobot repair mechanisms in the case of blockage or injury.

Also, do you really believe that EVERYONE would be linked to a big brother health system? It would seem that only a few elite or even the middle class would be capable of affording or be considered worthy of such a system which would limit the need for widespread nationwide high bandwith connections.

If we can do for one, we can do for all. Of course there will be resource constraints and tiers will exist for periods of time but eventually, everyone should be afforded these technologies as prices will commoditize just as all technological merchandise does.

We are not biologically wired to be lazy.

...this is the reason why widespread chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and obesity are the greatest killers of human beings today.

I was speaking more to your "porn" comments. Laziness is an overloaded and subjective term. We are biologically wired to seek reproduction and do hunter-gatherer tasks as efficiently as possible and where possible... not at all. Tech simply permits us to take this to an extreme that does indeed have some side effects that were unforeseen.

Exercise all you want but you're still going to atrophe and die. Just slightly later than you would have by sitting on your butt and eating bon bons and surfing porn. Those diseases are the number one killer because we knocked off the other number one killers ahead of them not because we simply grew lazy over the past few decades because of our techno-addiction to porn.

Exercise is a natural function and healing mechanism of the body which prevents these "lazy" diseases from occuring in the body.

It doesn't prevent them, simply delays them. Simply eating fewer calories and avoiding certain foods would eliminate the "diabetes" epidemic we are seeing in the US. Exercise is important and very beneficial but I think you're overstating it on it's impact to health and longevity.

In contrast, lazy behavior such as being sedentary, associal, developing convenient technology (barring medical advances) such as cars and computers, and consuming mostly processed foods are harmful to survival.

I would argue that individual and collective bad decision making are far more harmful than anything you list there and those you do list we can fix (e.g. airbags, mass transit, higher quality foods, etc). We make bad decisions because we lack the ability to override our biological weaknesses. For example: My diabetic mom eats Halloween candy by the handful despite the fact that she knows it is slowly killing her.

Any singularity I can foresee would benefit a few elite, not the entire world and would most likely be used for military purposes above all. We already are almost at this point in the U.S. military with integrated headset radios, computers and GPS devices on tens of thousands of individual soldiers.

I see advancing tech as a liberator but we'll always have to bring down those that seek to abuse it in order to consolidate power. We will also use all that same military tech to feed more people, communicate with each other more effectively and faster, increase our leisure time, automate undesirable jobs like working in sweatshops. I would argue that the quality of life increases as we advance things like bandwidth and computing power.

I was referring to alien abductions and encounters. They could be coming back to observe their past as a means of gaining knowledge about their evolutionary development and the influence of technology. Again, it was a rhetorical situation I created to explain what I believe we will become if we continue to head on the path of technological-based evolution.

I see. I would argue that they might just as likely come back and smack us in the head in order to speed up the advancements so they could better benefit from it.

Edited by maestro949, 23 November 2007 - 10:44 PM.

[gashinshotan]

Not in the slightest. Surely it could be processed and synthesized in-vivo before uploading but I think the raw data will be wanted for the sake of further improvements and refinements to the nanotech implants and the software that drive them. I'm looking much further down the road. Not 5 years.

I am not sure what forms of date you are referring to. DNA sequences are just strings of text which require only bits and bytes for letters and words. Continually reporting such information would hardly tax even the slowest dial-up connections. What information about the human body would require even a few megabytes worth of bandwith?

Books are one thing but mass spec data and the many other forms of biodata are many orders of magnitude larger in size.

How so? Indicating levels of proteins and hormones, as well as transcribed mRNAs would require transmitting only digits indicating the concentration of these biomolecules in the blood stream and in organs.

For diagnostics ranging from cancer to monitoring organ function for injury repair. 3D views of proteins, macromolecular structures, organs and the entire body in real-time will eventually be relatively easy and inexpensive. A few strategically placed implants could continuously image all key organs around the clock and send out nanobot repair mechanisms in the case of blockage or injury.

The problem with this is that proteins and tissue structure are always in flux and individuals exhibit a wide range of physiological and anatomical differences which do not necessarily translate commonly across even a half a dozen people. Real time observations would also be highly inefficient for these very reasons as you cannot really monitor the health of tissue based from one second to the next as damage and natural turnover occurs over periods of hours and days. Taking images of vital organs every few hours and even a few times a week would be enough to detect any physiological deviation. The use of nanobots seems unrealistic for tissue repair and is not the direction where the latest medical technology is heading. Rather, modern medical research aims to provide the body with optimum environments and nutrition to carry out DNA and tissue repair as efficiently as possible. The amount of information needed to direct micromachines to repair the body to optimum would be ridiculous at best. Why be redundant when the body already provides the best and cheapest repair mechanisms?

If we can do for one, we can do for all. Of course there will be resource constraints and tiers will exist for periods of time but eventually, everyone should be afforded these technologies as prices will commoditize just as all technological merchandise does.

I don't agree. The construction of monitoring systems custom designed for every single person on earth, which would require the complete sequencing of each person's DNA, tissue amino acid sequences and optimal nutrient levels, is simply impossible. Only recently, after a period of nearly 60 years, have we been able to sequence the genome complete of less than half a dozen human beings. Imagine the innumerable economic and human resources that would be required to sequence the genomes of billions of people, let alone their optimum physiological/anatomical and nutritional levels.

I was speaking more to your "porn" comments. Laziness is an overloaded and subjective term. We are biologically wired to seek reproduction and do hunter-gatherer tasks as efficiently as possible and where possible... not at all. Tech simply permits us to take this to an extreme that does indeed have some side effects that were unforeseen.

Our imperfect human psyche is biologically wired to seek shortcuts while our bodies have not yet evolved to adapt to this lifestyle. This evolution would take tens of millions of years and until then our continually convenient lifestyle will continue to be detrimental to our physical health and life span.

Exercise all you want but you're still going to atrophe and die. Just slightly later than you would have by sitting on your butt and eating bon bons and surfing porn. Those diseases are the number one killer because we knocked off the other number one killers ahead of them not because we simply grew lazy over the past few decades because of our techno-addiction to porn.

Exercise is essential for the longest lifespans, the highest quality of life, and the greatest level of mental performance. Are these benefits themselves not worth exercising for? Chronic diseases are the number one killer because the current level of human social and psychological development is not ideal for our bodies. Laziness and eating processed foods are counter-productive to our survival despite being convenient and necessary for human society.

It doesn't prevent them, simply delays them. Simply eating fewer calories and avoiding certain foods would eliminate the "diabetes" epidemic we are seeing in the US. Exercise is important and very beneficial but I think you're overstating it on it's impact to health and longevity.

Regular exercise prevents heart disease and has been shown to have a significant impact on preventing cancer as well as life span.

I would argue that individual and collective bad decision making are far more harmful than anything you list there and those you do list we can fix (e.g. airbags, mass transit, higher quality foods, etc). We make bad decisions because we lack the ability to override our biological weaknesses. For example: My diabetic mom eats Halloween candy by the handful despite the fact that she knows it is slowly killing her.

I would argue that our imperfect human brains, with its inherent tendency toward self-destructive and illogical behavior are far more harmful to human survival than living in a manner which is the most beneficial for our bodies, not human society. We make ba decisions because our brains are incoherent mismatches of neural tissue at different stages of evolutionary development which aggregately have not developed in a manner most suitable for our bodies and survival. For example: your diabetic mom eats Halloweed candy by the handful despite the fact that she knows it is slowly killing her.

I see advancing tech as a liberator but we'll always have to bring down those that seek to abuse it in order to consolidate power. We will also use all that same military tech to feed more people, communicate with each other more effectively and faster, increase our leisure time, automate undesirable jobs like working in sweatshops. I would argue that the quality of life increases as we advance things like bandwidth and computing power.

The hierarchical nature of evolution provides the ideal and most proven way of improving species to adapt to their environments. This also applies to human society which without the exploitation of the weak by the elite would not have advanced to the technological and social levels we are experiencing today. No one lives without the will to power and the will to reproduce which necessarily requires domination and elimination of competitors for mates and resources. I would argue that by attempting to defy nature through the widespread adoption of technologies that would benefit the masses, we are surrendering our species to forever imperfection.

[gashinshotan]

I quite agree that the development of the singularity is so far trending towards an elite and I find that suicidal as that elite appears to be those that buy into the base principle of anarchy, "might makes right" which blithely ignores that power corrupts. Look at our current elite. They appear to be suffering from epistemic relativism to a far greater degree than the general population. They appear to have an anti-science perspective.

Though they elite seem to be in opposition to the masses, natural hierarchies of evolution have proven the best method for improving the species.

But there is another concept of singularity, the consciousness singularity. It is the idea that we learn to respect and nurture each other and learn to coordinate our minds in a manner that does not destroy the self, other selves and our environment. That will require the sharing of a great deal of data. It is stated the Soviet Union fell mainly because fax machines allowed people to continue to get date to coordinate their efforts despite ardent control and censorship of conventional media sources. Society is an attempt at an information control system, a cybernetic system. It is sorely lacking and often only stages play-acting about seeking to sustain healthy homeostasis. In fact, the failure of current social experimentation seems to be reaching a crisis that threatens massive destruction. Science develops at an ever inreasing rate. We can see and should expect (becasue people do not want to die or witness great suffering) a greater development of methods for lots and lots of people to share and coordinate things efficiently with no dystopic ramifications. That is what I am both hoping and working towards. I see no better way to spend my time. I have a large immediate family (though no more than one child per parent) and, due to my father's influence, I have a love of nature and all life. I see the health of our ecology as being our own health. Our home, earth, is in need of a lot of help and it will require us coming to understanding with a great deal of information. I know the challenge looks daunting as the amount of information would need great acumen at selecting and filtering to avoid blowing people's minds in destructive ways either to complacency or over indulgence in other ways, e.g. violence. We are seeing that right now. We need a scientific break-through as far as sociology goes and I find that hope inspiring because sociology, or "livingry" as Bucky Fuller coined it, is the least developed science. Lots of room for significant discovery and improvement. More data flow to more people will increase the chances we can sift through, correlate, and synthesize new ideas and find what we need, IMHO.

The problem with your ideals is that it is both a lot easier and much more agreeable with natural evolution to rely on elitism to improve the human gene pool as well as the standard of living for the most amount of people. For example, without feudalism and slavery the West would not have been able to industrialize, without the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists the industrialized nations would not have been able to develop the most basic machines which all our modern technology relies on, and without wars we would not have any of the cutting edge technology which have provided the greatest increases in both lifespan and in living conditions for the most amount of people.

[gashinshotan]

Since about 50,000 BC or more (perhaps 500,000 BC) the human genotype has not undergone any major change. Ever see the documentary "Journey of Man" where they find one family of individuals living right where paths intersected in the spreading of human population around the planet with virtually all the phenotypical traits of humanity? I know Darwinism is a major part of the picture of evolution amongst species but I find it has not been the case that natural selection was a deciding factor between individuals within a species. Darwinism, punctuated equilibrium and the cooperation between species that Lynn Margolis and others championed appears to have a common factor and that is circumstance. Do we want our fate to be decided circumstantially? I don't think so, we continually attempt to fine tune our abilities to predict possible dangers to our lives and take steps to avoid them. I see it as rather crazy to explain to someone dying of hunger, pollution or war that it is just an evolutionary imperative.

I personally believe that Social Darwinism is a legitimate form of evolution in a purely cultural sense. Even Watson has claimed black people to be inferior by standards of productivity which may not be necessarily due to any inherent physical or mental inferiority, but rather cultural and ideological in the context of a world in which the guy with the bigger stick wins. People may not be physically or mentally inferior but there are inferior cultures and ideals which have proven unsuccessful in the propagation and welfare of the nation who holds those ideals. The same can be applied to social classes. The poor are not inferior physically, but rather socially and culturally which though it may not be of their own fault, their role as a stepping stone for those who hold better cultural and ideological values which are found to be beneficial and desirable for human society doesn't bother me one bit..

Well then I guess you welcome the growing inequity as well as lack of compassion and empathy that seems to be growing here in the US. There will always be differences between people but to welcome inordinate amounts that are both circumstantial, by chance alone, and forced by some on others appears non-viable to me. Even if the "gene pool" were all that different it is not different enough to not characterize people as very powerful beings. Allowing abuse of human rights as elitism condones gains enemies and with the growing prevalence of mass death machinery that could spell doom for you and me.

Yes. Because such a hierarchy brings out the best in people which logically would bring out the best of the human genome and cultures adaptable to the current social and economic situations of the society in which we live.

Okay, if you will but I think that maybe the main impetus has been on death dealing and the good developments have been tangential. I truly suspect that not only will we find the means to respect and improve conditions for all people a worthwhile direct target but that the death dealing will be seen ever more as a mistake fostered by our lack of awareness, lack of understanding, lack of empathy. We label some as inherently evil and others as inherently more worthy on the basis of bias but it appears to be a function of non-science, of lack of knowledge, not any actual supremacy. BTW, I really think there is no West for the wary.

[maestro949]

Real time observations would also be highly inefficient for these very reasons as you cannot really monitor the health of tissue based from one second to the next as damage and natural turnover occurs over periods of hours and days. Taking images of vital organs every few hours and even a few times a week would be enough to detect any physiological deviation. The use of nanobots seems unrealistic for tissue repair and is not the direction where the latest medical technology is heading. Rather, modern medical research aims to provide the body with optimum environments and nutrition to carry out DNA and tissue repair as efficiently as possible. The amount of information needed to direct micromachines to repair the body to optimum would be ridiculous at best. Why be redundant when the body already provides the best and cheapest repair mechanisms?

We will eventually build supplemental repair mechanisms to the body's repair mechanisms. Synthetic immune systems, artificial organs for pumping and filtration devices that are far more effective than what we have today will emerge. What you think are inefficiencies today will be insignificant in a couple of decades as micro-information processing machines will supplement and eventually replace inbuilt ones. You are right - they will generate enormous amounts of information but it's just data and software will be developed to process it and make better micro-decisions than nature does. Regarding the mass of data? Realtime atomic resolution imaging along with many other data will eventually be easy to capture and transmit. It will allow us to do real-time systems analysis and intervene immediately. Heart attacks and strokes can be detected hours, minutes or seconds before they happen - and then prevented or repaired. Tumors can be detected well before they grow to anything remotely dangerous. All of this with no need to waste other people's time to do any analysis or manual intervention. Pathogens and toxins that evade the immune system and liver can be detected and snuffed out immediately. Damaged tissue and bleeding from say a car accident can be repaired immediately, before the person dies. etc, etc.

I don't agree. The construction of monitoring systems custom designed for every single person on earth, which would require the complete sequencing of each person's DNA, tissue amino acid sequences and optimal nutrient levels, is simply impossible. Only recently, after a period of nearly 60 years, have we been able to sequence the genome complete of less than half a dozen human beings. Imagine the innumerable economic and human resources that would be required to sequence the genomes of billions of people, let alone their optimum physiological/anatomical and nutritional levels.

Impossible? Hardly. Nobody will think twice about high-throughput medical monitoring and repair devices because the cost of the tech will be insignificant to mass produce and deploy to not only 6 billion but hundreds of billions. It'll be packed into a handful of devices that are the size of pack of cigarettes. Once we engineer and build one, we can stamp them out repeatedly via the wonders of automation and mass production. The variability of personalized medicine that you mention is why we will want more data, not less. Not only will we need and have manyfold increases in bandwidth but we'll also need much more storage, wireless tech, imaging devices, memory and processing power. All of this will be miniaturized and implantable in the coming decades and the data they generate will be vast.

Our imperfect human psyche is biologically wired to seek shortcuts while our bodies have not yet evolved to adapt to this lifestyle. This evolution would take tens of millions of years and until then our continually convenient lifestyle will continue to be detrimental to our physical health and life span.

We don't need to wait for evolution. We are slowly taking charge of evolution. We can and will make whatever changes to both ourselves, our environment and the lifestyle affecting technology we desire in order to adapt.

Exercise is essential for the longest lifespans, the highest quality of life, and the greatest level of mental performance... Laziness and eating processed foods are counter-productive to our survival despite being convenient and necessary for human society.

Even the beneficial effects of exercise will be something we can chemically simulate without having get on a treadmill. The human race will eventually have near-perfect information for every protein and biochemical pathway. We will eventually be able to engineer the means to intervene in each with nearly perfect precision. In the meantime, of course it would be best to exercise and make good decisions about diet. Halting technology's march for technophobic reasons isn't the right answer.

Regular exercise prevents heart disease and has been shown to have a significant impact on preventing cancer as well as life span.

True but only to a degree. Many of us here already exercise for this benefit but are looking for significant extensions to maximum lifespan. Not simply a 5-10 year extension to average lifespan.

The hierarchical nature of evolution provides the ideal and most proven way of improving species to adapt to their environments. This also applies to human society which without the exploitation of the weak by the elite would not have advanced to the technological and social levels we are experiencing today. No one lives without the will to power and the will to reproduce which necessarily requires domination and elimination of competitors for mates and resources. I would argue that by attempting to defy nature through the widespread adoption of technologies that would benefit the masses, we are surrendering our species to forever imperfection.

We as a species and as individuals are already hideously imperfect. Evolution has brought us to this point via randomness rather than any ideal goal of how society should be organized. We can raise the bar and set higher ideals and then strive for them. Technology and innovative use of it will allow us make corrections and improvements at all levels including our own neurochemistry and genomes. This will benefit both individuals and society as a whole.

[gashinshotan]

We will eventually build supplemental repair mechanisms to the body's repair mechanisms. Synthetic immune systems, artificial organs for pumping and filtration devices that are far more effective than what we have today will emerge. What you think are inefficiencies today will be insignificant in a couple of decades as micro-information processing machines will supplement and eventually replace inbuilt ones. You are right - they will generate enormous amounts of information but it's just data and software will be developed to process it and make better micro-decisions than nature does. Regarding the mass of data? Realtime atomic resolution imaging along with many other data will eventually be easy to capture and transmit. It will allow us to do real-time systems analysis and intervene immediately. Heart attacks and strokes can be detected hours, minutes or seconds before they happen - and then prevented or repaired. Tumors can be detected well before they grow to anything remotely dangerous. All of this with no need to waste other people's time to do any analysis or manual intervention. Pathogens and toxins that evade the immune system and liver can be detected and snuffed out immediately. Damaged tissue and bleeding from say a car accident can be repaired immediately, before the person dies. etc, etc.

What are you basing your prediction on? The problem with your idea is that human physiology is inherently imperfect, programmed for death to free up resources for progeny to allow evolution to occur. Everything you claim will be developed has not even the slightest base of research to stand on. How will "in a couple of decade[s] micro-information processing machines" "supplement and eventually replace inbuilt ones[?]" Making "better micro-decisions than nature does"? How? Our level of technology isn't advanced enough to even repair nor replicate the most basic physiological processes such as respiration, photosynthesis, and mitosis. "Realtime atomic resolution imaging along with many other data will eventually be easy to capture and transmit. It will allow us to do real-time systems analysis and intervene immediately. Heart attacks and strokes can be detected hours, minutes or seconds before they happen - and then prevented or repaired. Tumors can be detected well before they grow to anything remotely dangerous. All of this with no need to waste other people's time to do any analysis or manual intervention. Pathogens and toxins that evade the immune system and liver can be detected and snuffed out immediately. Damaged tissue and bleeding from say a car accident can be repaired immediately, before the person dies. etc, etc." - how is this possible? Where are you basing this prediction on? How can you predict such advances when we don't even completely understand most physiological processes? In a couple decades - impossible; in a couple centuries improbable.

Impossible? Hardly. Nobody will think twice about high-throughput medical monitoring and repair devices because the cost of the tech will be insignificant to mass produce and deploy to not only 6 billion but hundreds of billions. It'll be packed into a handful of devices that are the size of pack of cigarettes. Once we engineer and build one, we can stamp them out repeatedly via the wonders of automation and mass production. The variability of personalized medicine that you mention is why we will want more data, not less. Not only will we need and have manyfold increases in bandwidth but we'll also need much more storage, wireless tech, imaging devices, memory and processing power. All of this will be miniaturized and implantable in the coming decades and the data they generate will be vast.

Again where are you basing these predictions on? Do you have a single credible research article which have analyzed the economic and social costs of this technology? How can you predict the advancement of human technology when even now we are incapable of even understanding the complete functioning of most physiological processes at even the cellular level? A pipe dream at best.

We don't need to wait for evolution. We are slowly taking charge of evolution. We can and will make whatever changes to both ourselves, our environment and the lifestyle affecting technology we desire in order to adapt.

Taking charge of evolution toward what end? What is the ideal that can possible be more perfect than evolutionary perfection? Human selfishness? Again please provide a single shred of evidence that "[w]e can and will make whatever changes to both ourselves, our environment and the lifestyle affecting technology we desire in order to adapt"? How can we make changes to ourselves when we have yet to clone a single human being, create a genetically modified organ, and gain control over the simplest environmental events such as rainfall and forest fires?

Even the beneficial effects of exercise will be something we can chemically simulate without having get on a treadmill. The human race will eventually have near-perfect information for every protein and biochemical pathway. We will eventually be able to engineer the means to intervene in each with nearly perfect precision. In the meantime, of course it would be best to exercise and make good decisions about diet. Halting technology's march for technophobic reasons isn't the right answer.

Again you are making baseless claims. Your ideals are utopian, not reality. We cannot even replicate the heart nor any other organ artificially, let alone a single cell. How can you predict that "[t]he human race will eventually have near-perfect information for every protein and biochemical pathway. We will eventually be able to engineer the means to intervene in each with nearly perfect precision. In the meantime, of course it would be best to exercise and make good decisions about diet" when we do not even have a nearly-complete understanding of our physiology, our proteins, and our biological pathways?

True but only to a degree. Many of us here already exercise for this benefit but are looking for significant extensions to maximum lifespan. Not simply a 5-10 year extension to average lifespan.

The fact that exercise prevents heart disease and has a significant impact on cancer multiplies it's life extension benefits. Include in this the age-reversing and immune boosting effects and exercise is still the best medicine for most human diseases.

We as a species and as individuals are already hideously imperfect. Evolution has brought us to this point via randomness rather than any ideal goal of how society should be organized. We can raise the bar and set higher ideals and then strive for them. Technology and innovative use of it will allow us make corrections and improvements at all levels including our own neurochemistry and genomes. This will benefit both individuals and society as a whole.

Evolution has not created us randomly. We have developed in response to our environment; evolution is continually producing organisms which are more perfect through natural selection. What is this "[i]deal goal of how society should be organized?" Do you realize how subjective that statement is? How are we to claim what perfection is when we ourselves are inherently imperfect? Or is perfection merely the satisfaction of human desires? Technological advancements may benefit individuals but it will not benefit society nor the species as a whole. Death and natural selection are necessary for perfection while human intervention forever surrenders the human species to evolutionary imperfection.

Edited by gashinshotan, 24 November 2007 - 12:50 PM.

[maestro949]

What are you basing your prediction on?

Rapidly advancing biotechnology. Examples: We can now measure molecular mass o f proteins to a fraction of a Dalton and we are reaching a stage where protein identification can be done simply via mass spectrometry. Go read up on it yourself Mass Spectrometry @ Amazon.Com. In Silico simulation of protein interaction networks also promises long-term exponential gains. Keep reading as I list more tech below...

The problem with your idea is that human physiology is inherently imperfect, programmed for death to free up resources for progeny to allow evolution to occur.

Human physiology has no programming for death built into it as far as we know. Please explain the molecular pathways that demonstrate this as none have been found to date. There is evidence across many species that enough repair mechanisms are supported to ages where child rearing is sufficient but nothing that specifically triggers an organism to die at a certain age.

Everything you claim will be developed has not even the slightest base of research to stand on. How will "in a couple of decade[s] micro-information processing machines" "supplement and eventually replace inbuilt ones[?]"

Making "better micro-decisions than nature does"? How? Our level of technology isn't advanced enough to even repair nor replicate the most basic physiological processes such as respiration, photosynthesis, and mitosis.

Absurd. Much is in the lab now and some is being used in nascent forms. We have pacemakers, artificial hearts, kidneys, livers, etc. These are all in various stages of development and even working bedside for patients on the edge of death. They will continuously be improved to the point where they are even better functioning than our own organs at which point a market (black or otherwise) could easily emerge for people to have these replacement organs put in prior to having a condition that requires it.

Regarding what we can't do... You're basing the future on what we can do today? Are you suggesting that we've reached an end to biotechnological progress? That no further successes across any fields of biotechnology are possible? That would be nonsensical. Where would this perspective stand 200,000 years ago, 20,000, 200 or even 20? Twenty years ago someone arguing from this viewpoint might say we could never put an dent in AIDS treatment because we haven't even sequence a human genome. Well respected scientists argued that we wouldn't be able to sequence the human genome in the 1980s. Discounting progress for the sake of dystopian fears has proven to be foolish for centuries.

how is this possible? Where are you basing this prediction on? How can you predict such advances when we don't even completely understand most physiological processes? In a couple decades - impossible; in a couple centuries improbable.

Again where are you basing these predictions on?

It's possible because it doesn't violate the laws of physics. Your "we can't do it today" argument completely discounts human imagination and our ability to engineer techniques and technology that make it possible tomorrow. I base these predictions on the history of progress across every scientific field and a steady stream of emerging products and technologies that result. This will continue and the products will continuously become more effective and efficient across all fields and markets.

Do you have a single credible research article which have analyzed the economic and social costs of this technology? How can you predict the advancement of human technology when even now we are incapable of even understanding the complete functioning of most physiological processes at even the cellular level? A pipe dream at best.

It's impossible to fully predict what is achievable when and how much anything will cost more than a few years out. What I'm suggesting is that it will happen and probably sooner than anyone anticipates. The 2-3 decade projections on much of this technology is based on what is in labs today and what scientists can do with sequencing technology, microwells, mass spec, recombinant techniques, microarrays, protein purification techniques, x-ray diffraction and multi-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance combined with the advancements permitting us to shrink complex lab equipment down to the nanometer and micrometer scale. What was in labs a few decades ago? Fiberoptics...and my telephone provider is going to wire my house up to it in the next year or two giving me 15mbps bandwidth. Still not enough IMO though.

Taking charge of evolution toward what end? What is the ideal that can possible be more perfect than evolutionary perfection? How can we make changes to ourselves when we have yet to clone a single human being, create a genetically modified organ, and gain control over the simplest environmental events such as rainfall and forest fires?

Evolution is pretty slick but it's too slow compared to what we'll be able to do soon. We can engineer a Utopia faster where there is no physiological pain or suffering and aging does not occur. It's just physics and some manipulation of some matter here and there. Harnessing energy better and managing it more efficiently will allow us to start building some megascale structures that are environmentally friendly and recycling technology will round out our ability to eliminate our destructive cycle of damaging our biosphere.

Regarding cloning... Again, where are you getting your data? We cloned a tadpole in 1952 and a rhesus monkey in 2000. Go chart that against their genetic variance, plot humans on it and draw a line. You don't think we'll ever be able to clone a human being? And DNA modifications? We can genetically modify cellular DNA at will in lab animals. Organs? We will eventually will be able to produce fully biocompatible lab-grown replacement organs in vitro in the very near future. We are very close already.

Again you are making baseless claims. Your ideals are utopian, not reality.

They are both. Todays "baseless claims" are tomorrow's reality. Utopia is the ideal to strive for rather than be fearful of what we can create. We're creating the 19th century Utopia today. Tomorrow it will be the 20th century's Utopia. When we hit that we'll raise the bar yet again. We are capable of looking at the problems of our technology from a long and wide perspective. There are answers to each to dismiss the technophobic viewpoint.

How can you predict that "[t]he human race will eventually have near-perfect information for every protein and biochemical pathway. We will eventually be able to engineer the means to intervene in each with nearly perfect precision. In the meantime, of course it would be best to exercise and make good decisions about diet" when we do not even have a nearly-complete understanding of our physiology, our proteins, and our biological pathways?

I could qualify every argument you throw at me with "not yet" as hundreds of thousands of scientists are working on accumulating the near-perfect information daily. Tens of thousands of additional engineers are developing the biotech to screen and enumerate every protein and it's function that our DNA generate. Bioinformaticians are building the software to crunch the numbers and assemble protein interaction networks in complete detail and will eventually build models that are spectacular in their precision. Molecular modelers are using computational chemistry and mathematical techniques to model subcellular function with atomic precision. Systems biologists will eventually synthesize all of this into fully working models of the human life form in silico with precision that dwarfs what we can do today manyfold. As all of this progresses biotechnologists will continuously take the data from these models and bring to market increasingly better solutions for all genetic and environmental damage far better than what evolution has devised.

The fact that exercise prevents heart disease and has a significant impact on cancer multiplies it's life extension benefits. Include in this the age-reversing and immune boosting effects and exercise is still the best medicine for most human diseases.

Exercise does not have age-reversing properties. Age slowing at best. Show me someone elderly who has significantly extended their life by exercise and I'll believe you. I don't mean by a decade or so because that's not very interesting to someone who wants significant life extension. Calorie restriction is far more effective than exercise at maximizing longevity. Bioengineering synthetic mechanisms to fix the repair mechanisms is the ideal and it's coming...

What is this "[i]deal goal of how society should be organized?" Do you realize how subjective that statement is? How are we to claim what perfection is when we ourselves are inherently imperfect? Or is perfection merely the satisfaction of human desires? Technological advancements may benefit individuals but it will not benefit society nor the species as a whole. Death and natural selection are necessary for perfection while human intervention forever surrenders the human species to evolutionary imperfection.

Yes, perfection is what we define. Human intervention IS purely natural. I see no distinction between a monkey using a tool (a stick) to pick ants out of an anthill and human devising a high-bandwidth medical implant that gives him an advantage over other species in it's quest for survival. We can continuously redefine ideal goals for individuals and society. There is no right or wrong. Simply choosing to improve ourselves and our environment is that ideal in a nutshell.

Edited by maestro949, 24 November 2007 - 04:14 PM.

[gashinshotan]

Rapidly advancing biotechnology. Examples: We can now measure molecular mass o f proteins to a fraction of a Dalton and we are reaching a stage where protein identification can be done simply via mass spectrometry. Go read up on it yourself Mass Spectrometry @ Amazon.Com. In Silico simulation of protein interaction networks also promises long-term exponential gains. Keep reading as I list more tech below...

I am a 4th year biology major at a major research university and have worked with the equipment you've mentioned above. I just don't see how monitoring the molecular mass of proteins is even necessary! Proteins are turned over within minutes, hours, days and change rapidly in both shape, size, and weight over a period of milliseconds; how and why should we do this for every single protein?

Human physiology has no programming for death built into it as far as we know. Please explain the molecular pathways that demonstrate this as none have been found to date. There is evidence across many species that enough repair mechanisms are supported to ages where child rearing is sufficient but nothing that specifically triggers an organism to die at a certain age.

Human cell biology has programming for death built into it and this has been scientifically established. The molecular pathway? There are a few actually: apoptosis, the induced self-destruction of cells and tissues through signals from the environment and hormones and over the entire life span the continued mutations of our DNA during replication because of the inherent failures of of our DNA transcription and translation mechanisms over time in response to the environment, stress, and diet.

Absurd. Much is in the lab now and some is being used in nascent forms. We have pacemakers, artificial hearts, kidneys, livers, etc. These are all in various stages of development and even working bedside for patients on the edge of death. They will continuously be improved to the point where they are even better functioning than our own organs at which point a market (black or otherwise) could easily emerge for people to have these replacement organs put in prior to having a condition that requires it.

Abusrd? Pacemakers, artificial hearts, and the rest aren't nearly as perfect as the real thing. Most patients who use these organs still have a far shorter lifespan than those with natural implants. Again, we do not even understand our organs completely, let alone replicate them with any sort of profecciency. I do not believe that artificial organs will match organically grown organs ever. The basis for this is that the complexity and integration of organs is far ahead of what we are capable of producing artificially and all medical research on the subject has been pointing this out again and again. This is the reason for the latest research in organ replacement is being done in the area of cloning and stem cells - why even attempt to replicate an already almost perfect system when it is much cheaper and much more physiology compatible to grow organic organs in at least a partially natural setting?

Regarding what we can't do... You're basing the future on what we can do today? Are you suggesting that we've reached an end to biotechnological progress? That no further successes across any fields of biotechnology are possible? That would be nonsensical. Where would this perspective stand 200,000 years ago, 20,000, 200 or even 20? Twenty years ago someone arguing from this viewpoint might say we could never put an dent in AIDS treatment because we haven't even sequence a human genome. Well respected scientists argued that we wouldn't be able to sequence the human genome in the 1980s. Discounting progress for the sake of dystopian fears has proven to be foolish for centuries.

And they said we would be flying around in spaceships and have bases on the moon and mars by now... seriously medical research has not provided even the slightest base for what you are proposing. We do not even understand most physiological processes in the body; how can you claim that we will be able to create artificial repair mechanisms which replicate and are better than mechanisms we barely understand?! I am not being dystopian but rather realistic based on my biological educational background and lab experiences. You give medical researchers far too much credit and they will admit this themselves. Most of their work is theoretical and most lab research concerns the study of the effects of single enzymes and growth factors on growth and viability; no one is studying creating repair mechanisms because of the current lack of scientific understanding of most physiological processes and proteins. I suggest you visit a research lab and observe the boring and seemingly pointless work which our tax dollars are being spent on. I am not kidding when I say that you would most likely question, "what's the point of this?"

It's possible because it doesn't violate the laws of physics. Your "we can't do it today" argument completely discounts human imagination and our ability to engineer techniques and technology that make it possible tomorrow. I base these predictions on the history of progress across every scientific field and a steady stream of emerging products and technologies that result. This will continue and the products will continuously become more effective and efficient across all fields and markets.

It's impossible because it violates the laws of human intelligence and society. We simply don't have the economic resources, time, money, nor will to develop systems that can even remotely compete with the evolutionary perfection of our bodies. You should base your predictions on hard scientific research that would provide the basis of your claims in the future, not on ideals of human "greatness."

It's impossible to fully predict what is achievable when and how much anything will cost more than a few years out. What I'm suggesting is that it will happen and probably sooner than anyone anticipates. The 2-3 decade projections on much of this technology is based on what is in labs today and what scientists can do with sequencing technology, microwells, mass spec, recombinant techniques, microarrays, protein purification techniques, x-ray diffraction and multi-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance combined with the advancements permitting us to shrink complex lab equipment down to the nanometer and micrometer scale. What was in labs a few decades ago? Fiberoptics...and my telephone provider is going to wire my house up to it in the next year or two giving me 15mbps bandwidth. Still not enough IMO though.

It is fully possible to predict what is achievable when and how and how much everything will cost in a few years out. Everything that will come in the future has to be based in what is happening today and today's level of scientific knowledge and engineering regarding the human body is in its infancy and far from practical in most cases. Again you list those techniques which I have done myself and I will tell you that those great technologies are largely being dedicated to studying single proteins and growth factors, not entire systems and most research and knowledge of biological mechanisms is being carried out in mice and rabbits, not humans. We do not even have a complete understanding of most physiological processes in these lower animals; how can you make your claims regarding human treatments when we are not even in the infancy of understanding our own bodies?

Evolution is pretty slick but it's too slow compared to what we'll be able to do soon. We can engineer a Utopia faster where there is no physiological pain or suffering and aging does not occur. It's just physics and some manipulation of some matter here and there. Harnessing energy better and managing it more efficiently will allow us to start building some megascale structures that are environmentally friendly and recycling technology will round out our ability to eliminate our destructive cycle of damaging our biosphere.

It's slow but it's perfect. We are far from being able to engineer a utopia while artificially directing evolution will have huge unforeseen consequences which I believe could possibly lead to our annihilation. We do not understand most of our relationships with our environments, letalone the relationships we hold with other species to the point where can make the best choices with no doubt of causing a disaster such as species extinction and environmental degradation. Why the need for megascale structures? I do not understand why future humans would want or need to expend such resources when population control is much cheaper and much more environmentally and nature-friendly.

Regarding cloning... Again, where are you getting your data? We cloned a tadpole in 1952 and a rhesus monkey in 2000. Go chart that against their genetic variance, plot humans on it and draw a line. You don't think we'll ever be able to clone a human being? And DNA modifications? We can genetically modify cellular DNA at will in lab animals. Organs? We will eventually will be able to produce fully biocompatible lab-grown replacement organs in vitro in the very near future. We are very close already.

My data? The fact that cloning is far from perfect - most of "successful" clones left a trail of dead failures behind. And DNA modifications? We can genetically modify cellular DNA at will in lab animals - the problem is that this is done invitro at the embryonic stage - how can this technology be applied to an already living being? It can't! Organs? We already are able to produce physiologically compatible lab-grown replacement organs in-vivo. Why the need for in-vitro growth when growth in animals is much more efficient and natural?

They are both. Todays "baseless claims" are tomorrow's reality. Utopia is the ideal to strive for rather than be fearful of what we can create. We're creating the 19th century Utopia today. Tomorrow it will be the 20th century's Utopia. When we hit that we'll raise the bar yet again. We are capable of looking at the problems of our technology from a long and wide perspective. There are answers to each to dismiss the technophobic viewpoint.

I could qualify every argument you throw at me with "not yet" as hundreds of thousands of scientists are working on accumulating the near-perfect information daily. Tens of thousands of additional engineers are developing the biotech to screen and enumerate every protein and it's function that our DNA generate. Bioinformaticians are building the software to crunch the numbers and assemble protein interaction networks in complete detail and will eventually build models that are spectacular in their precision. Molecular modelers are using computational chemistry and mathematical techniques to model subcellular function with atomic precision. Systems biologists will eventually synthesize all of this into fully working models of the human life form in silico with precision that dwarfs what we can do today manyfold. As all of this progresses biotechnologists will continuously take the data from these models and bring to market increasingly better solutions for all genetic and environmental damage far better than what evolution has devised.

Make predictions based on hard scientific research we have today; not on dreams nor ideals because not all dreams are feasible.

Yes. Tens of millions of scientists are working on accumulating information - except this information is far from being applicable and is largely theoretical. Again, I have contributed to this accumulation personally in a lab and I will tell you that most research is at the most basic levels of studying proteins and hormones in mice and other animals, not human beings. we are far from completely understanding even the smallest cell and at the molecular level we cannot even theorize on how DNA replicates itself without outside intervention. If we do not understand even these basic mechanisms how can we even think about the ideals you propose?

Again exercising extends life more than a decade by preventing heart disease and significantly affecting the occurence of cancer. Decades are considered significant by scientists and medical researchers and this is the basis on any future extension beyond that. You have to take baby steps before even imagining being able to extend life by decades. Caloric restriction has not been proven as being more effective than exercise at maximizing longetivity in humans while bioengineered synthetic mechanisms are not the ideal when we already have natural systems that are nearly perfect and far more complex for us to replicate.

No, perfection is not what we define. Perfection is the improvement of the species based on the needs of survival and on a larger scale the propagation of life and DNA. Claiming that we can define perfection when we ourselves are imperfect is pretentious - we cannot ignore nor replicate nature and evolution which creates the most perfect organisms in the most perfect manner in response to environmental and species' relationships which we do not for the most part understand nor can comprehend. Human life extension is defiance of evolution - it maintains genetic imperfections in the gene pool artificially while leading to the destruction of the environment which will eventually lead to our extinction.

[niner]

No, perfection is not what we define. Perfection is the improvement of the species based on the needs of survival and on a larger scale the propagation of life and DNA. Claiming that we can define perfection when we ourselves are imperfect is pretentious - we cannot ignore nor replicate nature and evolution which creates the most perfect organisms in the most perfect manner in response to environmental and species' relationships which we do not for the most part understand nor can comprehend. Human life extension is defiance of evolution - it maintains genetic imperfections in the gene pool artificially while leading to the destruction of the environment which will eventually lead to our extinction.

OK, I guess that's the deathist perspective. This paragraph left me wondering when God would be mentioned.

[maestro949]

Human cell biology has programming for death built into it and this has been scientifically established. The molecular pathway? There are a few actually: apoptosis, the induced self-destruction of cells and tissues through signals from the environment and hormones and over the entire life span the continued mutations of our DNA during replication because of the inherent failures of of our DNA transcription and translation mechanisms over time in response to the environment, stress, and diet.

Individual cells do but there is no death program on an organism or even organ level. Failures in DNA, stress, diet, environment are not programmed organism death. Death occurs due to an accumulation of functional decline across many interconnected systems. If there was programmed death, most organisms would die in a similar fashion and at a similar age. This isn't the case for higher level organisms. Humans cells only trigger apoptosis for the survival of the organism, not the species. If there were programmed death for humans we wouldn't see the average age of humans go from 35 to 80 over the past millennium.

Abusrd? Pacemakers, artificial hearts, and the rest aren't nearly as perfect as the real thing. Most patients who use these organs still have a far shorter lifespan than those with natural implants. Again, we do not even understand our organs completely, let alone replicate them with any sort of profecciency.

I do not believe that artificial organs will match organically grown organs ever. The basis for this is that the complexity and integration of organs is far ahead of what we are capable of producing artificially and all medical research on the subject has been pointing this out again and again. This is the reason for the latest research in organ replacement is being done in the area of cloning and stem cells - why even attempt to replicate an already almost perfect system when it is much cheaper and much more physiology compatible to grow organic organs in at least a partially natural setting?

That's nonsense. We can build a synthetic heart that keeps a human being alive for 18 months. That's longer than most species lifespan on this planet and pretty damn good for 2007 and not understanding the heart completely which, btw, we are on our way to through 3D imaging and simulation. A heart is just a pump and we should be able to build one with a much higher mean-time between failure than the "perfect" evolutionary model. Are you suggesting that these devices can't be improved, ever?

Lab grown and bio-synthetic organs are indeed viable short-term solutions but have their own set of issues. But if we can do this it demonstrates that your irreducible complexity argument is null and void because to grow organs from stem cells requires a quite a bit of understanding as to how we can mimic developmental cell signaling ex vivo.

Ultimately synthetic filtration mechanisms, pumps, chemical regulation systems will be far more capable of maintaining a perfect balance homeostasis than organs that are slowly degrading and subject to disease can. Complex systems can be reverse engineered and the biological inputs and outputs of organs can and will be fully flushed out in the coming decades and more efficient versions will be developed unless science grinds to complete halt and biotech markets completely collapse. That's not going to happen.

And they said we would be flying around in spaceships and have bases on the moon and mars by now...

We are flying around in spaceships. Have you heard of the Space Shuttle and the ISS? And we have landed technology on both the moon and Mars and could establish bases on both if we made the investments. Manned missions to Mars are planned. If we were debating 200 years ago you would have denied we could have done this because there was no scientific data back then proving that we could.

[evolution is] slow but it's perfect.

Tell that to all the other dead species that evolution worked out so well for. Also tell it to the children dieing of leukemia and everyone else destined for it's "perfect" exit strategy for each individual for the sake of society.

We are far from being able to engineer a utopia while artificially directing evolution will have huge unforeseen consequences which I believe could possibly lead to our annihilation.

Taking control of our evolution will prevent our annihilation at both a species and individual level. If Neanderthal could have tweaked their biology to gain a competitive advantage they would still be alive today. Unlike the Neanderthals, technology, knowledge and ingenuity has allowed us to grow our population to 6 Billion and will allow us to continue to grow it to hundreds of billions if not trillions. We can colonize other planets to ensure that if something slams into the earth the species will survive. Halting technological progress because of fantastic and speculative fears of destruction offers no such guarantee.

My data? The fact that cloning is far from perfect - most of "successful" clones left a trail of dead failures behind. And DNA modifications? We can genetically modify cellular DNA at will in lab animals - the problem is that this is done invitro at the embryonic stage - how can this technology be applied to an already living being? It can't!

Viruses modify our DNA all the time - not only at the embryonic stage. Viral vectors may be a suitable means for gene therapy and is already in trials. Others may emerge. Are you suggesting that gene therapy will never happen because we can't do it today? What about RNAi therapy where we can modulate gene expression? Are you also suggesting it will never work? 20 years ago we didn't know it existed therefore it cant, right?

Make predictions based on hard scientific research we have today; not on dreams nor ideals because not all dreams are feasible.

Do you mean predictions like the species is going to be annihilated because we are interfering with the perfect process of evolution? Where's your hard science for this? At a minimum, explain how this scenario plays out because I find it difficult to understand that how a sophisticated tool building species on a trajectory for uncovering near-perfect information of it's own biology couldn't continuously keep engineering increasingly sophisticated improvements and fixes to whatever challenges it faces, even those created by it's own short-sightedness and bad decisions.

Tens of millions of scientists are working on accumulating information - except this information is far from being applicable...

That's funny. New drugs and medical devices emerge daily. Cancer survival and many other disease rates are improving across the board. Average lifespans are increasing across every demographic. Hospitals and research facilities are constantly spending $trillions on upgrades to all of their medical technology because all of this scientific work is just a waste of time producing theoretical and useless garbage. This is an insult and offends just about every scientist working in just about every field. The data being generated by researchers is not useless. It's being used to improve the human condition faster than any time in history. This progress is accelerating and many people are living a higher quality life because of non-applicable research.

...we cannot ignore nor replicate nature and evolution which creates the most perfect organisms in the most perfect manner in response to environmental and species' relationships which we do not for the most part understand nor can comprehend.

as niner suggests above all this talk of perfection sounds like religious fanaticism rather than science. We can understand evolution and the organisms it produces. That's why we do science.

Human life extension is defiance of evolution - it maintains genetic imperfections in the gene pool artificially while leading to the destruction of the environment which will eventually lead to our extinction.

Defiance? Does evolution care that we tinker with what it produces? Who are you talking about? Genetic imperfections in the gene pool? We are loaded with imperfect genes that have nothing to do with our tinkering and so are all the extinct species.

Also, is it necessary that the destruction of the environment is the only outcome of our technological progress and increased population or is this just a temporary symptom? We can improve lifespan and live extremely long and rewarding lives, boom the populations to trillions of people and leave the environment intact if we work this into the social and technological engineering requirements sooner than later.

Edited by maestro949, 25 November 2007 - 02:46 PM.

[gashinshotan]

That individual cells do have a death program and that the replacement mechanisms of these cells necessarily fails over time because of the inherent flaws IS an overall death program for the organism. Flaws in our physiology are programmed by our DNA and these flaws are the cause of death - if our bodies were meant to live two hundred years or longer our mechanisms would be resistant to environmental and nutritional factors. The hardest proof of this is the 120-125 age limit for the longest living humans and the average death age which are largely common among most nations within a decade at most and within a few years generally.

That's nonsense. We can build a synthetic heart that keeps a human being alive for 18 months. That's longer than most species lifespan on this planet and pretty damn good for 2007 and not understanding the heart completely which, btw, we are on our way to through 3D imaging and simulation. A heart is just a pump and we should be able to build one with a much higher mean-time between failure than the "perfect" evolutionary model. Are you suggesting that these devices can't be improved, ever?

That's 18 months compared to possibly a 100 years or more of a natural heart. I want you to ask any scientist if we will have the technology of creating a perfect synthetic heart or even of completely understanding our heart and our other organs within our lifetimes. They will say no - based on the fact that the current level of research is far from comprehensive with no visible horizon of completion within the visible future.

Lab grown and bio-synthetic organs are indeed viable short-term solutions but have their own set of issues. But if we can do this it demonstrates that your irreducible complexity argument is null and void because to grow organs from stem cells requires a quite a bit of understanding as to how we can mimic developmental cell signaling ex vivo.

Organs grown in-vivo are much more physiologically and economically compatible with humanity. These organs only require genetic engineering - not the complete synthesis of a complex organ that would normally require thousands of base pairs of nucleic and amino acids coded perfectly by evolution for the optimum performance of the body. Growing organs from stem cells does not require a bit of understanding if we grow organs in-vivo. Why the need for extra-complicated in-vitro synthesis when we have animals that can develop these organs without the need for developmental intervention at the biochemical level?

Ultimately synthetic filtration mechanisms, pumps, chemical regulation systems will be far more capable of maintaining a perfect balance homeostasis than organs that are slowly degrading and subject to disease can. Complex systems can be reverse engineered and the biological inputs and outputs of organs can and will be fully flushed out in the coming decades and more efficient versions will be developed unless science grinds to complete halt and biotech markets completely collapse. That's not going to happen.

What are you basing these predictions on? The current level of synthetic replacements is far from the level of natural organs and are prone to failures. What is your fetish with synthetic organs? We do not need synthetic organs when we can grow natural organs in-vivo that have a track and development record of tens of millions of years using only genetic engineering.

I was referring to the utopian vision of common transport through the air during the 1950s - 1960s. And we have landed technology on both the moon and Mars and could establish bases on both IF we had the technological competence to do so to comply with the resources available to us. You ignore the economic, social, and resource costs of grandiose utopian dreams. The fact that we cannot carry out these missions because we are not technologically advanced enough to balance such endeavors with the far more impending needs of living on earth itself is a reason against making claims of rapid progress. And again, this was only a rhetorical phrase meant to show how futurists like yourself have mostly been proven wrong in the modern era.

Tell that to all the other dead species that evolution worked out so well for. Also tell it to the children dieing of leukemia and everyone else destined for it's "perfect" exit strategy for each individual for the sake of society.

Evolution is perfect for the propagation of life. The death of inferior species and children contributes to the continued perfection of the genome in response to selective pressures. Evolution has allowed us to become the most adept at dominating the world down to the minutest detail of the shape of our thumbs and the size of our brains.

Taking control of our evolution will prevent our annihilation at both a species and individual level. If Neanderthal could have tweaked their biology to gain a competitive advantage they would still be alive today. Unlike the Neanderthals, technology, knowledge and ingenuity has allowed us to grow our population to 6 Billion and will allow us to continue to grow it to hundreds of billions if not trillions. We can colonize other planets to ensure that if something slams into the earth the species will survive. Halting technological progress because of fantastic and speculative fears of destruction offers no such guarantee.

How can taking control of our evolution cause anything BUT annihilation? Human advances in technology have caused far more damage and threats of extermination than benefits for our species and the life in general.

Viruses modify our DNA all the time - not only at the embryonic stage. Viral vectors may be a suitable means for gene therapy and is already in trials. Others may emerge. Are you suggesting that gene therapy will never happen because we can't do it today? What about RNAi therapy where we can modulate gene expression? Are you also suggesting it will never work? 20 years ago we didn't know it existed therefore it cant, right?

Viruses modify our DNA all the time - in a minute pathological manner on only an insignificant fraction of our cells which are for the most part wiped out by our immune system before the parasitic DNA can spread. The best application of genetic engineering is the sorting for and replacement of flawed genes of our progeny. You cannot use viral vectors on a remotely significant scale for application in medical treatment as this would cause massive inflammation that will lead to death. I am suggesting that technologies you are proposing will never work because it is literally impossible to modify the genomes of most cells in the body while such a treatment would have implications of conflict with the immune system and original cells that are not transformed.

Do you mean predictions like the species is going to be annihilated because we are interfering with the perfect process of evolution? Where's your hard science for this? At a minimum, explain how this scenario plays out because I find it difficult to understand that how a sophisticated tool building species on a trajectory for uncovering near-perfect information of it's own biology couldn't continuously keep engineering increasingly sophisticated improvements and fixes to whatever challenges it faces, even those created by it's own short-sightedness and bad decisions.

Evolution occurs through random mutation and selection against these mutations. MOST of these random mutations cause death. The same applies to artificial genetic engineering - most genetic clones and genetically modified organisms have inherent failures and live far shorter lives than their unmolested brethren and this is due to the unforeseen physiological and developmental consequences the genetic modifications caused. Humans are not excluded from this and while we may some day perfect genetic engineering to the point of nearing the competence of naturally developed systems, we still cannot predict the long term implications for the species and will have to continually play a game of hit-and-miss in which the latter has been proven the far more common occurence in evolutionary history.

That's funny. New drugs and medical devices emerge daily. Cancer survival and many other disease rates are improving across the board. Average lifespans are increasing across every demographic. Hospitals and research facilities are constantly spending $trillions on upgrades to all of their medical technology because all of this scientific work is just a waste of time producing theoretical and useless garbage. This is an insult and offends just about every scientist working in just about every field. The data being generated by researchers is not useless. It's being used to improve the human condition faster than any time in history. This progress is accelerating and many people are living a higher quality life because of non-applicable research.

New drugs and medical devices do not emerge daily. They emerge after a period of clinical trials during which most proposed treatments are discarded as unsafe or impractical. MOST scientific research being carried out on proteins and physiological processes has no application to human treatment as MOST scientific research on MOST proteins and MOST physiological mechanisms are being carried out on lower animals, not humans. The medical technology we have today is based on only a miniscule amount of research relative to the amount of research into the function and physiology of proteins and organs. Again, I suggest you visit a research lab and observe the individual projects going on - you will see that practically all of them involve only a single enzyme or mechanism which has no human application and that most reserachers are not even studying human systems.

How is it religious fanaticism to believe in a process that has the most amount of evidence supporting it's perfection? How is billions of years of evidence of evolution producing the best physiology and anatomy in response to selective pressures blind faith? Your faith in only a few hundred years of minutely productive human research against the research and development carried out by evolution over billions of years is far more fanatic and utopian.

Defiance is not merely emotional word and I was not using it in such a manner. By attempting to artificially extend our lifespans we are defying the system that has by far proven to be the most perfect in creating the best organisms. What is your basis for calling genes imperfect? Only the contribution of genes, proteins, and organs to the survivability and reproductive success of the species is the determinant of the perfection of genes. By extending life artificially, we are not only burdening our environment to the point of self-destruction, but we are preventing natural selection from eliminating those genes which have proven not only harmful to survival, but harmful to the enjoyment of life.

Also, is it necessary that the destruction of the environment is the only outcome of our technological progress and increased population or is this just a temporary symptom? We can improve lifespan and live extremely long and rewarding lives, boom the populations to trillions of people and leave the environment intact if we work this into the social and technological engineering requirements sooner than later.

So far history has shown human technological advances to be far more threatening to human existence and to the integrity of the environment than beneficial and this will not change according to the past and current behavior of the species. Increased populations is not the same as the survival of the species and in most cases is detrimental to the species. Why attempt to artificially maintain and propogate human life when most of our problems can be solved through simply reducing the population?

[gashinshotan]

Thomas Malthus' predictions were based on the most comprehensive collection of statistics for his time and his dire forecast was wrong. I expect that yours is too. Our progress has not been all bad.

It is not a simple thing to reduce population. People will fight against being murdered whether directly or through neglect and others who haven't been targeted will target those who condone and carry out policies of extermination. That is not the simple path. That course is the most complex and most dire.

Careful of what you believe. We tend to manifest our expectations for the sake of our self esteem.

The people do not have to be willing to die, to die. A single epidemic of an untreatable pathogen like SARS or the current wave of anti-bacterial resistant bacteria could annihilate billions while only requiring the work of a single person to spead the disease.

Our expectations are measurements of our self-esteem - those who have low confidence in their inherent abilities set low expectations. "Whether You Think You Can or Can't, You're Right"--Henry Ford

[maestro949]

Flaws in our physiology are programmed by our DNA and these flaws are the cause of death.

Too funny. So evolution decided to evolve mechanisms to gum up arteries in order to kill individuals, spawn cancer cells after x years, trigger amyloids to accumulate and cause memory loss? What were the evolutionary pressures that lead to these? I've been through all of the major biogerontology textbooks and have not found one paper that suggests any evidence of this. I was at a conference a few weeks back and two presenters also stated that no programmed death pathways have been identified. I think you're on you own on this theory.

That's 18 months compared to possibly a 100 years or more of a natural heart. I want you to ask any scientist if we will have the technology of creating a perfect synthetic heart or even of completely understanding our heart and our other organs within our lifetimes. They will say no - based on the fact that the current level of research is far from comprehensive with no visible horizon of completion within the visible future.

18 months is pretty good for 30 years of effort. Evolution had 4 billion years. These numbers alone indicate we're better engineers than evolution. We don't have to massacre hundreds of millions of test humans to get our heart versions working either. Furthermore we don't need a perfect heart in our lifetime. One (or two) that last 20 or 30 years would be fine as we can swap in new ones every decade or two. We'll want to anyway as new models will continuously roll out. I would bet you could find engineers that would agree that an artificial hear that lasts 20-30 years could easily be engineered in our lifetime. If you're 21 you'll probably live another 80 years. That's a lot of time for accelerating returns and emergent technology to evolve a better pump that pushes fluid around. The same goes for all organs.

Organs grown in-vivo are much more physiologically and economically compatible with humanity.

Short-term yes. Longterm I would argue they are not more economical simply because you have to wait for them to grow and time is money. Artificial versions can be mass produced, stored in warehouses (rather than feeding their hosts) and be designed to outperform biological versions thus they will be far more economical. They can be made smaller, faster and more efficient. Better in absolutely every way which translates into more economical. The cost and effort to design these is a one-time cost unless you take into account the followon versions that improve durability and pack in more features.

What are you basing these predictions on? The current level of synthetic replacements is far from the level of natural organs and are prone to failures. What is your fetish with synthetic organs? We do not need synthetic organs when we can grow natural organs in-vivo that have a track and development record of tens of millions of years using only genetic engineering.

Natural organs are overly complex for most of the functions they perform and are far more prone to failure than their future synthetic cousins will be. They are prone to cancers, disease, degradation and have millions of tiny moving parts that can misfire at any time. They don't even work well into today's industrial environment. A synthetic version can have built in redundancy, fault tolerance, self diagnostics, self tuning and communication mechanisms to the outside world when it needs replacement. Today they just fail and you die. Yuck. Your perfect evolutionary models are crap compared to what an engineer will be able to design for me.

Fetish? What is your fetish with evolution? It takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years to make simple adjustments. We will be able to redesign synthetic organs to match whatever environment we desire. Earth's gravity, Mars' gravity & atmosphere, the moon, space, etc.

I was referring to the utopian vision of common transport through the air during the 1950s - 1960s. You ignore the economic, social, and resource costs of grandiose utopian dreams. The fact that we cannot carry out these missions because we are not technologically advanced enough to balance such endeavors with the far more impending needs of living on earth itself is a reason against making claims of rapid progress. And again, this was only a rhetorical phrase meant to show how futurists like yourself have mostly been proven wrong in the modern era.

I don't ignore the costs. The costs of not doing these improvements are far more significant. Futurists have been mostly right in regards to what emerges but when is virtually impossible to get right due to the chaos that ensues from billions of will powered organisms doing crazy shit. I'm more than happy to admit that some of my predictions could be off by a hundred year or more. The world economy could collapse setting us back decades and knock us off track. What's important is that we're on a trajectory such that they will happen. If we want them to happen sooner, we need to redirect our effort and resources towards doing so. Obviously I'm in this camp and will use my freedoms to pursue and influence others help me with my utopia. You'd rather live like a stone age human and take your chances competing with nature and others simply for the sake of refining your genome for your offspring, which you are also quite free to do.

Evolution is perfect for the propagation of life. The death of inferior species and children contributes to the continued perfection of the genome in response to selective pressures. Evolution has allowed us to become the most adept at dominating the world down to the minutest detail of the shape of our thumbs and the size of our brains.

Sorry, but I and many others would like to keep those imperfect children rather than kill them or let them die for the sake of a better genome that you seem to hold as far more important than any other ideal. If the outer crust of the earth was vaporized by some freak solar event your sweet genome would have no answer. If mine and others' ideals of expanding the human race to other planets and beyond the solar system emerge then guess what, putting your faith in evolution would be a waste. Your genome would be dead and gone whereas the human species would prevail in our scenario at which point we could repopulate the planet.

[maestro949]

How can taking control of our evolution cause anything BUT annihilation?

Please explain how. You simply keep repeating this but I'd like to understand what your particular doomsday scenario is? Runaway virus? Irreparable damage to DNA, collapse of the biosphere, famine, global warming, angry deity? You must have a few scenarios that could destroy the entire human race by engineering it to live longer and healthier.

I am suggesting that technologies you are proposing will never work because it is literally impossible to modify the genomes of most cells in the body while such a treatment would have implications of conflict with the immune system and original cells that are not transformed.

You seem so certain throwing around terms like "never" and "impossible". Do you mean "in our lifetime." because never is a long time and impossible is quite finite. Usually these terms are reserved for ignorant fools and you seem fairly intelligent in general to make such errors. I don't feel strongly that gene therapy is going to deliver significant strides short-term despite the fact that there are over 100 gene therapy trials recently completed, under way or scheduled for 2008. It may surprise us though and some of these trials may pan out despite the immune system concerns you raise. 50 to 100 years or beyond? Without a doubt as the technology will be capable of predicting where and what modifications are necessary. Computing power will have grown to a point where we can simulate the entire proteome on a desktop PC. Supercomputers will be capable of screening millions of people simultaneously. Tweaking gene expression and making significant alterations via RNAi to healthy gene expression patterns could easily be only a decade or two away though. Much more will be discovered regarding the genome, proteome and metabalome over the coming decades that may simplify improvements even further making my predictions seem horribly too conservative.

Evolution occurs through random mutation and selection against these mutations. MOST of these random mutations cause death. The same applies to artificial genetic engineering - most genetic clones and genetically modified organisms have inherent failures and live far shorter lives than their unmolested brethren and this is due to the unforeseen physiological and developmental consequences the genetic modifications caused. Humans are not excluded from this and while we may some day perfect genetic engineering to the point of nearing the competence of naturally developed systems, we still cannot predict the long term implications for the species and will have to continually play a game of hit-and-miss in which the latter has been proven the far more common occurence in evolutionary history.

Well said but you forget the fact that with exponential computing power, genetic and proteomic knowledge, that we will be able to do this hit or miss trial and error testing in silico at some point, then on primates, then in limited trials, then in the general population. This is why your doomsday scenario of planet-o-mutant-zombies will never pan out. We can model, test and control how we roll our better-than-evolution versions, just as we do with today's therapies and drugs only the process will be faster, cheaper and more effective with bigger and more powerful tools. Your "some day of perfect genetic engineering" scenario could be pulled to within a 100 years or sooner if a concerted effort were made to go this route.

New drugs and medical devices do not emerge daily.

Wrong. 2-3 new medical devices are announced daily in the press. Go check Google news for the past week of "medical devices" announced if you don't believe me. Here is the list of drugs that entered phase 1 trial in the past week from drugresearcher.com. This list averages 5-10 per week.


Avant Immunotherapeutics & National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Peru-15 pCTB Anti-infectives & Vaccines Oral vaccine designed to offer combined protection against both enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) and cholera.

Quark Pharmaceuticals AKIi-5 Acute Renal Failure (ARF), also called Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) small interfering RNA (siRNA) to inhibit the transcription factor human p53. First systemic delivery of siRNA.

Cytochroma CTAP101 Vitamin D insufficiency in chronic kidney disease (CKD). Prohormone

Cardiome Pharma GED-aPC Cardiovascular - initially cardiogenic shock Engineered analog of recombinant human activated Protein C (aPC) with enhanced anti-inflammatory, anti-thrombotic and strong binding to endothelial protein C receptor properties

GNI F351 liver fibrosis/cirrhosis Inhibits overproduction of collagen by liver fibroblasts following inflammatory insults

Again, I suggest you visit a research lab and observe the individual projects going on - you will see that practically all of them involve only a single enzyme or mechanism which has no human application and that most reserachers are not even studying human systems.

I don't need to visit a lab. I can read the papers published and query the databases they publish their data to and talk to scientists who work on this stuff daily. All relevant data for doing comprehensive systems biology in a couple of decades shows exponential growth curve in their data like this...

PDB Growth Chart

That and the growing trend towards high-throughput and mechanization of labs and using software for analysis is enough to recognize we are in for drastic changes in the realtive near term. Biology is increasingly going to transform from a manual process of tinkering with test tubes and single-threaded equipment to a mechanized automated high throughput process driven primarily by robotics. From there it will transform into a computational and information based science where 70% of the work is done in silico on desktop and supercomputers.

How is it religious fanaticism to believe in a process that has the most amount of evidence supporting it's perfection? How is billions of years of evidence of evolution producing the best physiology and anatomy in response to selective pressures blind faith? Your faith in only a few hundred years of minutely productive human research against the research and development carried out by evolution over billions of years is far more fanatic and utopian.

The term perfect is the rhetoric of a fanatic and few science minded people would consider any natural process as perfect as it implies some type of inherent design which proving, is well outside the scope of science. Trying to argue that no ideal should supersede what nature has emerged is fanatical and would only be argued by someone with a bias that believes that there is a universal ideal expressed through nature that is superior to human ideals. Nice try though.

By extending life artificially, we are not only burdening our environment to the point of self-destruction, but we are preventing natural selection from eliminating those genes which have proven not only harmful to survival, but harmful to the enjoyment of life.

Some of us hold the genome's organisms (our children and ourselves) as more important to us than a copy of a blueprint and set of instructions that create them. We have transcribed the human genome and can store it on a hard drive and retrieve it whenever we want. If we muck up our genome we can simply revert to backups of frozen sperm and eggs and eventually just the digital copies. It's safe now so stop worrying. Go download a copy if it'll make you feel better.

So far history has shown human technological advances to be far more threatening to human existence and to the integrity of the environment than beneficial and this will not change according to the past and current behavior of the species. Increased populations is not the same as the survival of the species and in most cases is detrimental to the species. Why attempt to artificially maintain and propogate human life when most of our problems can be solved through simply reducing the population?

It can change and will. We simply need to rework some global social contracts and agree to not destroy the environment or each other with the technology we develop. It's not rocket science. It's diplomacy. Technology can and will march on improving every facet of the human condition even under strict guidelines in regards to requirements that the environment be taken into account for each advancement. For every improvement we make, we simply gauge it's negative affects and engineer a solution accordingly.

Edited by maestro949, 26 November 2007 - 01:40 AM.

[Lazarus Long]

For the most part I am going to continue to sit back and observe this discussion but one point caught my attention as meriting a comment.

Evolution occurs through random mutation and selection against these mutations. MOST of these random mutations cause death.

I am not sure I agree this is well said at all Maestro (and I know you didn't say it). The first part is questionable and the second part is just wrong. Most random mutation is neither benign nor malignant, they are *mostly* just irrelevant and as such rarely come to our attention. Certainly of the mutations we can recognize few do anything and many have harmful impact but most are not mortally fatal and that is the point, even when they cause hardship and infirmity they are often survivable.

I am not claiming that most are favorable either, just that the claim that *most are fatal* is another example of gross exaggeration. The genome is full of examples of mutations that hold no benefit and cause little to no harm. Some may be vestigial now and others may simply be broken DNA or compromised for other reasons but they do not result in immediate fatality or even prenatal fatality. On a scale of good to bad I would agree that there are more examples of bad mutations than good in terms of the total number of random mutations at a given moment but even that is a highly subjective observation as a mutation that is wrong for one environment could be very beneficial in another and therein lies another important element of chance with respect to mutation and that is always relative to the conditions under which it occurs.

For example; Sickle Cell anemia is recognized as a terrible mutation to suffer, that is unless you are also afflicted with tse-tse flies. It is also not immediately fatal. It also means that a mutation which shortens your life in modern society lengthens it under jungle conditions. Sickle cell makes blood less attractive to the tse-tse and thus those that have it have an increased chance of survival under those conditions. Environment is the more important determinant than subjective assumptions of better and worse mutation and you are second guessing that aspect too much. What is fatal under one set of conditions can sometimes save your life under another.

The first part of the comment is questionable too and for somewhat the same reason, selection is not so much against anything as much as in favor of what ever enhances fitness with respect to the environment over generations. I think there is a tendency to see the importance of genetics in respect to itself under a microscope and forget the most critical single factor for selection is survival within a set of environmental conditions. Change the environment and you are changing the evolution of species over generations too. It may not be as direct or swift a method as intentionally tweaking genes but it is certainly as effective and happens as well.

I like to call the basis of this discussion Human Selection but the fact of the matter is that for the most part it is still Negligent Selection (Unintelligent Design) a lot more than Intentional or Artificial Selection.

Ironically, sometimes I think the most disturbing part of the whole idea of Human Selection to Social Darwinists is the realization that we are changing the rules that they live by to excuse the abusive primitive conduct they seek to rationalize into one of *rational selection* that will broach all too little *necessary evil* before all is said and done.

Someday we will look upon the past and have no one but ourselves to blame or praise but we won't be able to any longer blithely excuse or condone our more brutish behavior as simply our animal nature. It is also ironic because I find that Social Darwinists have some of the hardest time getting out from under the yoke of Intelligent Design as a rationalization for their beliefs and defense of some mythical *natural order*.