This really did not turn into a debate. I am moving this informal poll to IMHO.
(MOIDALIZE, don’t be a jerk.)
[ /Moderating ]
This is a very real possibility.
This is very true. It could well be that people of the future will look back in horror on our legalization of gay marriage, abortions, separation of church and state, and so on. History is not necessarily a straight line of things getting ever more liberal/open.
It also depends who “wins” the future and gets to write their version of history. Our descendants may hate us for supporting Israel and/or Taiwan.
Other things they may hate us for:
legal cigarettes
male circumcision
I don’t know if this is something they’d “despise” us for, but I suspect they’ll think we are pretty disgusting, unhygienic, overly hairy people, and that we live crazily dangerous lives - e.g. the number of fatalities we’re willing to accept from car accidents.
You realize that in the u.s. alone we let 2.5 million people a year die. It is probably physically possible and even within our technology to preserve the brains of these people in such a way that their neural structures can be later copied and emulated. I’m not saying that cryonics as offered by Alcor/CI necessarily works, but that this is not a technical problem our civilization is incapable of solving at the present time.
I mean, a single major hospital commonly spends more than a billion dollars a year extending the lives of it’s patients only slightly. Yet we spend not even 1 million working out a way to preserve and scan our brains, a technology that could defeat death completely. (well, at least until the heat death, I suppose)
In a century or so we’ll have the technology such that no one need ever die for any reason. It’ll probably be possible to make backup copies of neural structures such that the dead can be revived from their last backup.
Imagine how monstrous our primitive, indifferent medicine will seem then. We’re letting all the ww2 veterans fade into oblivion instead of preserving their knowledge for the record. The Vietnam vets are next. And so on.
I bet legal cigarettes will seem about as stupidly dangerous as the Radium ore Revigator - Wikipedia and Shoe-fitting fluoroscope - Wikipedia seem to us today.
How can they have been so abysmally stupid as to allow animal raisers to breed antibiotic resistant bacteria and leave us with all these incurable infections?
How could they have put so many people in prison for selling and smoking a mostly harmless weed?
How could they have been so dumb as to get involved in wars in the Middle East, despite having no knowledge of the region?
That’s a good one. Shit, a lot of people have figured this one out today.
“Tradition!”
I completely disagree with everything in this post. We cannot and will not be able to back up the human brain. Ever. Way too complex and memories are chemical in nature. No. Not gonna happen.
Based on a gut feeling or do you have actual cites for this? The brain isn’t magic. It’s a set of circuit connections that obey rules due to physical laws. Also, there’s a strong reason to think that the brain has a lot of redundancy such that even if you missed some connections and/or your simulation were not completely accurate (off by a small amount), you would still end up with very similar output signals from the simulated brain.
I can cite about 5 papers showing all this, trivially, but don’t want to waste my time if you simply believe the above based on “faith”.
Our intellect.
Future generations will despise you for your lack of trying.:mad:
Seriously, how can you say that. A brain just stores and processes information. It may be complex, but so is my cell phone compared to one from a decade ago.
Why? Is Mars going somewhere?:eek:
Porn
Surely future tech will evolve human sexual reproduction and pleasure from the messy, animalistic enterprise it is today, into a more refined and clinical recreational activity. One can only hope.
…I mean, since I’ve been off my Androgel, I see “bumping uglies” for what it really is: bumping uglies. I’m embarrassed for my generation and all generations leading up to ours for our fornicating ways. Our distant progeny will collectively cry, “ewwwww, look what they used to do!”