/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9895618
>>9895627
Informational evolution replaced genetic evolution over 10,000 years ago. The former has gotten us to the moon and made us the dominant life form on the planet, while in that same period of time, all genetic evolution has given us is slightly better lactose tolerance.

Plus, CRISPR's on the table - genetic engineering will eventually make all subsequent natural evolution moot.

Less than 2,000 years ago, it was readily accepted that individual people could know all recitable recorded knowledge of man. Now you'd be hard pressed to get someone to buy the idea that a million people could possess all that knowledge between them. That's simply how vast our knowledge base has become, and our ability to access that knowledge base, and add to it, is growing at a faster rate than ever before, and it's more interconnected than ever before.

We're just, as a result of all of this, more specialized than ever. Today, the smartest person in the world can't compete with the average expert in a field they've never explored before. It used to be people were expected to know nearly everything, as knowledge could not be quickly referenced, while now, folks are only expected to be experts, at best, in their own fields, which are increasingly narrow, as that knowledge base continues to get ever broader and deeper. We increasingly offload information to that base, and draw upon it when needed, freeing us to only store those things which we truly need to know by rote in our gray matter. This creates the illusion that we're becoming dumber as individuals, while we become smarter as a collective.

>>9160271
>>9160117
not this shit again.jpg

>>9022243
Yeeeah, never say never.

Granted, no one serious about the subject is actually suggesting literal immortality... Just, under ideal circumstances, extremely extended life spans.

And truth be told, even without all the other cutting edge stuff, if you just beat cancer, and maybe a handful of brain diseases that also seem to be inevitable with age, there's not a whole lot left to end you that can't generally be fixed even under today's medical technology.

It's also entirely likely we'll have some sorta suspended animation/temporary death sorta thing some day - which technically gives you an extremely extended life span, even if you aren't doing anything in the meantime.

I entirely agree that people sensationalize this crap, but I'm also tired of curmudgeons going on about how we've discovered everything of use that will ever be discovered and never have any achievements beyond the ones we have now, as they have since the days of the Roman Empire (and, probably before, even if they were less apt to write volumes on the subject.)

>>9004366
>keep a plane on air for a century or two and report back
Not him, but we could probably do that, and it'd be a lot harder. We solar powered aircraft that can continue flying through the night, perpetually. Albeit they can't carry much, and certainly won't last centuries, but the tech to do that, if you really wanted to for some reason, isn't exactly out of reach.

More importantly, it seems more likely we'll have several self sustaining colonies throughout the solar system before we get up the nerve to look at the daunting task of colonizing another, so we're looking so far into the future that the methodologies available to us are almost beyond speculation.

...and further, it's looking increasingly like that we may have virtual biological immortality before we even have those colonies here, the mechanisms for which are looking as about as close and perhaps more viable, in terms of economics, willpower, and profit potential. If such long lifespans under reduced consumption comes to the forefront, or if suspended animation becomes a thing, we might not care so much about how long the journey takes, and may not have to reach other systems at such ludicrous speeds.

Plus there's always the old embryonic colonization models. They may require some sci-fi level automation and DNA manipulation, but it is the sort of vanity project a civilization of the distant future could easily have access to.

I mean, yeah, we're not going to see much of any of this in our lifetime (save maybe some drastic human genetic engineering for the youngest of our members), but to call things we can theorize about, impossible, should really be reserved for patent clerks of the 1890's. Really, anything we can imagine potentially possible tends to one day be possible - it's all the impossible stuff we never thought about, however, that tends to have the most drastic changes when it suddenly becomes so.

ITT:

Science, as we currently define it, has been around maybe two or three centuries. We've understood that light has a speed for just a bit longer than that - understood that it is indeed the maximum speed of information propagation for considerably less than that, and turned our standard model of the universe on its head four times in just the past hundred years.

>Is this about 90% of what we're going to get?
0.09%, maybe, and, should the pattern continue, a good deal of that is going to turn out be resting on incorrect assumptions.

>Or is there still good reason to believe that the future will be radically different? Could the world be as different in 2116 compared to the world of today as our world is from the world we had in 1916 or 1816; fundamentally different in many material respects?
Further, a lot of what we could be doing, right now, is held back out of a healthy fear of the unknown.

Should we start getting the balls to play with genetic engineering and start CRISP'ing ourselves before 2116, odds are, you won't even recognize the average human, as human, by then. (And if we start playing with such things sooner, rather than later, you may even have your life extended enough to see said gene-pocalypse.)

That's leaving aside things that may or may not happen - such as AI. A simulated brain is more or less inevitable, and while that doesn't get you into singularity territory, in and of itself, it does raise a whole lotta inheritance and authority issues that could rend civilization a new hole or two, just in and of themselves.

Granted, a dark age could always happen, and some of these things, among others left unmentioned, could lead to one, so there's always the possibility we maybe we'll all be back to playing with sticks and stones again or living Mad Max, only with more genetic aberrations running about.