On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 10:22 AM Lawrence Crowell < [email protected]> wrote:
> the real issue with human survival is over the next century or so. > I agree. > > Homo sapiens will not exist into geological time spans of the future. > True, Human beings will not exist over a geological time scale, but the AI's they create probably will. I would be surprised if anything you or I would consider human will exists a century from now, perhaps not even in 50 years, and if I am ever lucky enough to be revived from a liquid nitrogen sleep I don't expect to come back as a biological being that lives in a non-virtual world as I (presumably) do now. > I did not comment on the von Neumann probes. The idea is sort of > interesting and it is a cyber-space-based idea analogous to biology. > Exactly, and if random mutation and natural selection can do something then intelligent designers, aka Human engineers, can do it too and do it better because Evolution is a stupid way to get things done, it's just that before Evolution finally managed to make a brain, after 3 billion years of stumbling around, Evolution was the only way complex objects could get made. A jet engine works better than a prop engine in an airplane. I give you a prop engine and tell you to turn it into a jet, but you must do it while the engine is running, you must do it in one million small steps, and you must do it so every single one of those small steps immediately improves the operation of the engine. Eventually you would get an improved engine of some sort, but it wouldn't look anything like a jet. If the tire on your car is getting worn you can take it off and put a new one on, but evolution could never do something like that, because when you take the old tire off you have temporarily made things worse, now you have no tire at all. With evolution EVERY step (generation), no matter how many, MUST be an immediate improvement over the previous one. > > So far self-replicating algorithms, search engines and viruses as > examples, have only worked in a virtual sense. I do not know how realistic > this is with micro-probes in the solar system. Maybe they would drift > around dormant for along time before landing, presumably at low velocity, > into an asteroid. > Such a probe would be about the size of a large bacteria so you could make trillions of them, or rather they would make trillions of copies of themselves. > If people shift their hopes and fears associated with religion to > science, then we can expect policies and economics to shift accordingly. > That would be wonderful if it happened, nobody would give the keys to a Trident nuclear submarine to a creature like Donald Trump if it did, but religious evangelicals saw no problem in doing exactly that in 2016. > I am not sure an aim of science is either to disprove religion, > Science will never be able to prove that religion is untrue, but it hasa lready proven that religion is silly. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3ky34u%3DZOjzP921%2BCbCS561P7rBWCr1uUcvyKN%2BPHOuA%40mail.gmail.com.
