vger

These are the kinds of things that computers are good at, which again, if we DON'T want a master dictator, computers can still play a crucial role. An advanced A.I. can still show us the results of a prospective change, using graphical aids. The kinds that practically anyone can understand. Remember, even though issues may be complex, we have a tendency to over complicate them further using language that no "outsider" can comprehend. It borders on an immature secret club wanting to use a special code, just because it's "cool." This is the main thing that makes self-representation in court proceedings impossible. The operation of computers used to be this way. Now we have GUI's and WYSIWYG editors, completely eliminating the "secret code." Imagine if there was a way to do the same thing to legalese. We're already running into this problem actually. But "preservation of culture" is not an excuse for defending agressive behavior. We are ALL imposing changes to try to "make people better," and have been ever since the first monkey cracked a skull with a femur. If we weren't trying to force changes to improve society, we wouldn't even have laws against murder. Unless this was actually a historical documentary... ...evolution has zero experience with the kind of environment that humans have created. Evolution has us geared for raw survival in the most violent environments imaginable. In our current society, much of that programming is harmful instead of beneficial. Hawking was just recently quoted as saying that aggression is our worst enemy, and has the capacity to destroy us completely. Before advanced civilizations it was absolutely necessary though. Heh, we already have this problem now, but for the exact opposite reason. People are unmotivated because they know that their work has an insignificant impact on their chances of success. Even working your hardest in a dead-end job can have no impact on whether you will have that job tomorrow. There can still be consequences for people NOT doing their share. But work should never equate to misery. In a strictly capitalistic sense, I have always believed that NO job should pay a wage that is lower than what is necessary to live comfortably. How many more people would be fine with sweeping floors or cleaning toilets if they knew that it would earn them enough that they wouldn't have to worry about tomorrow? All jobs out there are necessary for one reason or another, yet there is an unbelievable wage disparity, and I'm not talking about CEO pay here. Farmers for instance, are barely able to scrape by, but the work they do is so crucial to our survival, that what they are paid for it is laughable. Then of course the argument shifts to, "but if we paid them well, it would cost os $50 for a gallon of milk." Even the actual cost of doing that job isn't factored in. Blue collar work typically get paid far less than white collar, but it actually costs a person more to do heavy labor. I could sit at a desk all day just eating bread and water and do my job fine. Last time I did a labor job, I had to eat four times as much, and it had to be more costly high-protein food, or I would've wasted away to nothing. So I had to SPEND MORE to do my job, while getting PAID LESS. Conflicts like this are why doing away with money is probably a better (and simpler) option than trying to balance it.

We've seen greed undermine democracy just as easily as everything else. I don't want to delve too deeply into this for risk of the discussion turning to a purely political one, but I think the current system of democracy is outdated. Representatives as we view them, are an unnecessary relic of a lost age. At the time, horses was the fastest means of transportation and communication. If you wanted to know what your constituents wanted, you had to go out and talk to them. It simply made more sense to send one guy to represent the whole town, city, etc instead of shipping the entire populous somewhere to vote on something. In our current communication age, this is no longer the case. EVERY single citizen can conceivably vote not just on politicians, but everything. If I had the power to do so, I would do away with representatives altogether. This isn't to say that we wouldn't still have an "elite" group of folks in Capitol Hill, but their function would be different. Instead of being decision makers, they would serve as think-tanks. They come up with proposals and present them to the People through the technology that is now in our grasp. And we the People then vote on those proposals electronically, to decide if these plans should be put into action, scrapped, or revised. No tallying votes for a state and then treating the state as a yay or nay. Every single voter remains an individual, not a party member. This only gives credence to the A.I. concept. You're absolutely right. People who weren't there to fight for their freedom, are less apt to understand the value of it. An advanced A.I. could retain that memory and understand it - it would essentially be immortal, so there is no need to worry about whether or not the next generation of representatives or voters "understands" the gravity of the situation. We can try to teach history to children until we are blue in the face, but that still won't guarantee that they can empathize with the situation. Just as an example: Teaching about war is not going to give them any clue of what it is actually like to be in one, not even with using extremely graphic films as visual aids. The only way that 'might' work, is through some high-tech equivalent of telepathic memory transfer ala "The Giver."

The idea has been put forth by a number of different sci-fi stories. THX-1138, Logan's Run, numerous episodes of Star Trek, The Day the Earth Stood Still. I can't say whether or not such a civilization is a good idea or a bad idea. But as far as resistance to change is concerned, major changes have ALWAYS started with just one person's idea, and then it spreads. The idea of using a computer to control us though is almost metaphorical. Everything seems to boil down to the fact that we are driven by instincts that are no longer beneficial to the race as a whole. When we were hunting mammoths, only 1 out of 5 kids survived, everything was trying to eat us, etc. All the fighting, mating, hoarding; it all made sense. It doesn't make sense now, but it still wants to control everything. Barring a really brilliant way of altering our biochemistry/hormones (and that's really no less violating of freedoms than a mechanized dictator), an external equivalent of a Fruedian super-ego, doesn't really seem so ridiculous an idea. The only other alternative is to hope we survive a few million years as we are; long enough that our more primal urges get weeded out of the gene pool on their own. That is going to happen no matter what. Regardless of what kind of government/society we have, population control is going to become an issue. And really when you think about it, reproduction comes from the same mindless instincts that produce greed. Our evolutionary behavioral programming, sadly, has absolutely no idea of how to adapt to the environment that we currently live in.

The question is, do the businesses even care? So far, all we've seen is a, "Not my problem" reaction to this sort of thing. It's a commonly-held belief, and not just among the upper class, that the only thing keeping EVERY SINGLE PERSON from success is laziness. They somehow are able to ignore any link between poverty rates and the elimination of jobs (entire industries in some cases). How long can this envelope continue to be pushed before something breaks? Who knows. I think it's still an important idea, though I don't think the goal should be to actually be the catalyst for change. Develop technologies, show it off. Let people see how awesome the future could be if we put our minds to it. That's something that there has been far too little of recently. Every child should at least be shown a vision or two of a utopia brought about through mutual cooperation, science, and technology. It doesn't matter if that vision arrives. What matters is that everyone gets to see hope for it, if even for a moment. People who have that seed put in them by such ideas, will be far more likely to try and actually change something later on in life. Even if it's just a tiny thing that makes the world better. It's just as important as promoting space travel, in my opinion. My feelings about this reflect how I feel when watching the Penny4NASA "we stopped dreaming" video.

To make an entire civilization doubt their ability to perceive color.

Oh comeon, that's not a fair thing to say. I am a very logical, unemotional, intellectu.... hey look! SQUIIIIIIRRRRREL!!!! ...in a renewable self-replenishing life support system.

A renewable, self-replenishing life support system? oooOOOOOOOOhhhhhhh!!!!!

My Kerbals tell me it didn't taste like funnel cake.

Someone needs to open an e-store. Seriously.

I wouldn't necessarily say that the Master Computer of "Paranoia" is a necessary element to eliminating money, but one could probably make a good argument that technology is swiftly coming to an event that will deal unimaginable chaos to the economy. Specifically I'm referring to automation. As the tech improves and continues to eliminate the need for humans, I really don't know where that will leave us for money. Money can simply be described as a physical representation of the value of a person's labor. We've already seen factory workers go the way of the dodo. And we're on the verge of seeing the same thing happen with food service (there are completely automated fast-food restaurants in Asia already). And after that will come the smart vehicles, eliminating the need for truck drivers. After that, the only industry that will remain for the largest demographic is retail, and that won't be able to sustain itself for long after such a large percentage of the population is put out of work. Meanwhile, automation will continue to evolve and become more complex, until only the most menial tasks remain for humans to do. We would reach a point where the value of labor (and consequently, money) will become nil. We're already seeing that process take place, in the form of stagnant wages while the price of goods continues to rise. Even slavery would be meaningless in any scenario where machines can do it better and cheaper than humans. In such a situation, what would humanity's spirit of greed be able to do with itself?

https://www.thevenusproject.com/ To try and even label exactly what this is seems borderline impossible because it covers so many different topics ranging from political (or perhaps more accurately, anti-political), science & technology, social issues, environment, etc. Just curious if anyone has given this a deeper look, because so far, I can't even be sure where it is or where it hopes to be going. Are they even serious? Could it just be a hoax? Online "World's Fair?" Crazy idea launched with an overabundance of confidence and naivety? Or is the objective right now to simply create awareness? Regardless, assuming this isn't just some kind of con-game, I wish them luck. It sounds interesting anyhow.

I think some people need to open up a paint program, and play around with the HLS color picker. "Brown" is just a dark shade of orange, for example. Hue does not equal saturation, which does not equal luminance. And that's not even getting into reflectivity. Common understanding of how "color" actually works is VERY poor.

We're going to need the fire department in here to hose down these flames.

It's a moot question anyhow. We still don't sufficiently have the "big bang" figured out, which would make it rather difficult to even take a guess at any bizarre attempts to prevent the universe from collapsing again. Just thinking about that just puts other weird pointless questions into my head, but I don't want to derail.

IF my some really finite chance, humans lived long enough to worry about it... that would be quite an interesting time.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what negative mass is, but IF this were possible, wouldn't a combination of positive and negative mass elements potentially produce a "perfect" machine? Like a radiometer, but without the need for sunlight?

Way too similar to my background, only the dot com crash happened before I even got the chance to make real money off of it. Web design just happened to be the ONLY "practical" thing I was any good at. All of my other talents were in "feast or famine" careers, such as filmmaking, and my parents who were always mainly obsessed with taking the "stable" route wouldn't let me pursue anything else as a career. And now there's no such thing as a stable career. Go figure.

...yet.

Now that you've brought that up, I just realized those three archetypes fit nicely into another classic space saga. Alright, classic might be too strong of a word.

Hypocrisy in high school leaves no stone unturned.

"Girls, don't give wedgies to the nerd in the back. He's the lead designer of the big missile we're about to strap you to."

Good luck 'bumping' into that.

Pretty cool concept. To see what space travel would actually be like if we had access to 1C.

Kind of a loaded idea, really. I don't know if I can say that his contribution to Star Trek and/or Space exploration is more important than any other member of the original Enterprise crew/cast. At the very least, when Michelle Nichols goes, she'll be an equally prime candidate as well, given the work she's done as a spokesperson for NASA.

Scarecake, if you remember having dreams at all, you're still doing better than some. There are folks who NEVER have any dream recall. Other people are able to dream lucidly whenever they feel like it. And some who have lucid dreams are able to consciously control what happens, like a film director. Others can't. So there's MANY different variables involved. I've had a FEW lucid dreams in my life, but they make up a tiny percentage of the ones that I have remembered.