I don't know Darkone, it sounds a bit "Deus Ex" to me <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_confused.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':?' /> The tech would be amazing if it could be developed, but if it was, we would also run a big risk of it being perverted into terrible new weapons or more forms of state control. There are dangers here if we don't try to control our aggressive tendencies first before rolling things like that out. If history teaches us anything, it's that humans are very good at turning new, seemingly beneficial technology, into ever more efficient ways of killing or controlling each other <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//sad.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' />

Agreed, maybe we can use this tech to actually find a new planet out there somewhere and live to tell about it. I think the best thing for the race is for some of us (you know the good people) to leave it behind and start a better society. I think most people would want to live forever, but I believe there should always be an end, I would just like my end to be somewhere else and not here on earth. 🙂 I don't think I would like to be a brain in a bionic shell either, but if I remember my science correctly we age now only because certain cells start to die off in our bodies. So if we could replenish them a little we could live longer.

I try not to think about the whole govt control thing, but you are probably right Geraldine. There would be some governments that would abuse this type of technology for the betterment of themselves and not the people. I guess we won't know until we get to that point, we as a society have to be able to even get to 2045. I know I would be 70's when this tech arrives (hopefully) and I think being that age I would welcome any technology that could make my life easier and possible prolong it just a little. I guess I would want to live my old years in a body that doesn't ache and breakdown on me.

But with this type of technology runs huge risks of over-population (which we are already) and massive food and natural resource shortages. I think we can only use this tech to stick ourselves on some large colony ships and send us off into space, of course we would have to be asleep most of the time. Because us violent humans would probably kill each other before we got there. Ah life as a human is such a challenging thing.

Yea, "getting the hell out" manoeuvre will always get my vote! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' /> The only long term way to save the planet is for most of us to leave it. We have wasted so much time bickering amongst ourselves and placing selfish short term gains over long term stability, that we have missed the big picture. It remains to be seen if we will ever become mature enough as a race to realise whats important and if we can, also do so in time before we go on the next useless big "killing each other spree". So far, from what I have seen, we still have a long way to go.

To be fair though, humans can come up with surprising solutions at times if those with the vision to see better possibilities are listened to.

Most especially when the chips are down - a desperate situation often drives innovation (and its funding). We can only hope that we do get at least some sort of colonies established somewhere out there one day - away from this still-beautiful planet, before it's too late!

I don't think the human race has, or will ever learn from its own mistakes. If we colonise another planet things won't be any different there. We are animals, ones which have the instinct to rise and achieve. But that manifests itself in many bad ways as well as good. We don't really need to save the planet anyway, the "beauty" is our creative perception, without our presence the planet is just a planet. If we nuked the whole lot, the planet would remain. Humans behave best when the population of a community is very low, look at the remaining tribes in the jungle and although primitive, they still live in relative equilibrium. Once you have millions or billions, things go wrong. Basically, we're screwed until there is population control.

Forgive me, I'm drunk.

Done! I used to get drunk - far too often in the end! Single malts or quality red were my tipple, but I had to give it up eventually.

You can only drag yourself out of a bottle so many times. I haven't got rat-assed since millennium eve... crikey!

http://vigilantcitizen.com/sinistersite ... idestones/

Pay attention to the first commandment on the stone, for this to happen we would need a hell of a apocalyptic event or war(s). I have stated population is our problem for a few years now.

As you can see by this chart projections...

In the 60yrs since the 1950's we have almost tripled the population of the planet, what took over 200yrs to achieve we as a populous almost tripled the population 60yrs. At that rate we are in for some serious resources and i'm not talking about oil/coal. Talking about food and water, at this rate by about 2025 we should have 8 billion people on the planet. Food prices are already rising and people need it, so my guess is that nations will start limiting their exports of food to satisfy their own countries needs.

With droughts and freak natural events happening these days the crops get less every year. Farm land is starting to be drained of all of its nutrients to grow food successfully. So either we need to invent better growing techniques or sturdier seeds or get used to other alternative food sources. The world I doubt could sustain a 8 billion mouths to feed.

It is a shame we all cannot put our power hungry governments aside and just work together for the betterment of human race. and it is true, a new start would still be tainted as well. Because we are still human 🙂

But in the end, I think technology might actually help instead of harm, but all we can do is wait and see... 2045 is a while yet and I hope I can share it with some of you here when the time comes. I wonder if there would even be a WWW in 2045?

A cultural shift might help were proper resource management is taught right from the get go. Don't over populate, don't use up planetary resources in unsustainable ways, if you have a surplus, share it with your neighbours who have less who in turn will help you if you come up short. Just imagine for a moment how much regulation and removal of personal freedoms that would mean <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_eek.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

So how do you get people to change their thinking? We usually fall back to our most common way of deciding who gets what resources, War, but it still wouldn't fix the fundamental problems in the long term. You can conquer a country through force of arms, but what do you do then? You have an even bigger population to manage and so your resource allocation is even more stretched. And, guess what? You used up even more resources in fighting that war to impose sustainable cultural values <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_rolleyes.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Such a world with little personal freedoms might work for a while, but sooner or later people will snap and you will have open revolt and so you would be back to square one again. You see, humans being human, like to eat and live in comfort and safely, but annoyingly for anyone seeking to control this, humans also like their freedoms too to live how they like. Humans will die in their millions to protect their freedoms as our history has proved over and over again. I am not saying this is right or wrong, its just how it is. Trying to change the world all at once just does not work. The (human) world does slowly change of course over time but only when it does not realise it changing. That would take too much time for the resources to last and time is another resource we are running out of.

Another way is a massive colonisation effort. Properly done, the solar system could support some of those billions of people, but interstellar travel would greatly improve this. Thats really the only way we could carry on as we do. If we could instantly travel to any star in the galaxy, that would buy us a good 10,000 years of expansion, or until we run into any "neighbours" <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_confused.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':?' /> But hey, imagine the "fun" we could have fighting them! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_razz.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-P' /> I can imagine the slogans............

"Join The Space Fleet! Meet alien cultures! Blast them into dust! Steal their technology! Protect our freedoms!"

"Would you like to know more?" <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_lol.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Seriously though,that technology (if we ever discover it) may lie too far in the future to be of any use. In that case, the best it could do is save what little is left after the inevitable apocalypse for a new beginning someplace else because the Earth will end up a ravaged hell that could take millions of years for the eco system to recover, if ever. Maybe the Earth will decide at this point that humanity was a bad idea and give the cats (Kilrathi?) a chance instead <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_lol.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Anyone fancy a nice Soylent Green biscuit? <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_confused.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':?' />

I wouldn't doubt that if we colonized space a bit and settled in that if we happened across an alien race that posed any threat or had resources we needed it wouldn't be but a matter of time before all of the Starship Troopers ad campaigns come out....

But tech like this would be amazing feat for us, when you think about 130yrs ago we were riding horses and not all homes have running water and electricity. But I do agree freedoms will be lost if some of this tech is used, like the mention of extracting memories, heck this might be a good thing for our legal system. We just hook you up and know the whole truth and we can exact punishment immediately 🙂 What are you going to say... someone implanted those memories (ie: total recall). I looked at this tech from a more personal standpoint that if you have a loved one, maybe you can download their thoughts/personality and maybe create some sort of program to have a conversation with a lost loved one from time to time.

I just want to stick around long enough to step foot on another planet 🙂 Sticking our brains in avatar bodies... hmmm would anyone do this?

The problem with your population graph is it doesn't show the whole story.

Traditional subsistence farmers typically have big families, because more children means more help on the farm, and most of those children will not survive to adulthood. For city dwellers, those kids become a burden, as you have to pay to house and clothe them and send them to school.

At the moment, Africa, South America and Asia are rapidly ubanising. The family starts on the farm, having twelve children, then moving to the city, where the healthcare system is better and survival rates are far higher. When those kids grow up, they are likely to only have two or three children themselves.

That is why population growth is so high at the moment, and also why it will plateau at some point. Really, the graph looks like this:

That doesn't mean there is no problem. At the moment, the current estimates are for around 12billion people before things get flat. That's just over double what we have now, so clearly we need to get better at living sustainably if we want to maintain the same quality of life. However, that is just the most likely scenario. UN estimates range from 9billion total to 21billion. Clearly 21 billion would be a lot harder to sustain than 9billion.

Having said that, some things will work in our favour. It is a lot more efficient to have everyone living together in cities than spread all round the countryside. Transport for one is more efficient as the office is closer and 200 people can share one train, rather than all taking individual car journeys. One apartment block takes less to heat and power than 50 individual homes. However, city dwellers, culturally, tend to be more consumeristic and wasteful, so how much is actually saved is debatable

I agree absolutely that the best solution is to get off this planet, but that's not going to happen without capitalism (the same force that is raising all those people in Africa, Asia and America out of subsistence farming). We need to make space really profitable, or we're just going to have to sit around and wait for some eccentric billionaire to fund our space dreams for the fun of it

I guess I only found a graph that went out to as long as I will be around, unless some good ole life extension tech can save me 🙂

You do bring up some good points though James, I would pay extra money for public transportation in NH. There is just no profit in it because of the size and how people are spread out. NH is one of the smallest states and we have no transit system at all, yeah we have some buses in a few of the largest cities but that is as good as it gets. I travel an hour to work everyday and its a huge time waster and of course the money factor.

Approx. 12 billion people on the planet in 100yrs, not too bad if you think about the increases we are going through right now. But in most countries there is already a huge strain on the fresh water supply. Guess we will need to start building de-salization plants soon (we should have them now but you know how that goes). Its going to be tough either way and I think it will be the simple food/water that pushes us into space to discover something new.

Hmmm nice piece and good luck to them but

A copy of yourself gives the impression of immortality possibly to everyone else and even possibly to the avatar into which you are downloaded. I suspect however in reality its you stopping existing and a copy starting.

I like the quote from Woody Allen

"I don't want to become immortal through my work I want to become immortal by not dying"

We are definitely advancing in tech....

Singularity stuff with regards to mind/machine uploading and whatnot always reminds me of the Star Trek episode where they discuss the idea that the transporter actually kills you... and just produces an exact copy on the other side.

The same question sort of hangs over the technologically induced immortality shtick.

It's not really "you", it would be another you, a copy as Dalkeith pointed out, your mind is not a file that can be moved (heck, we don't really know what it is at all), maybe it's just a series of patterns that can only be copied.

Maybe software could be created to write algorithms that perfectly replicate your mind, your memories, your personality... but it's still not really YOU.

The counter argument for this is that when you enter deep dreamless fully unconscious sleep and wake up... the exact same thing has occurred and does so every night.

Every morning a new copy is assembled from the (organically stored neurological) data in your brain to create a new "mind" with the same traits and memories as the one that went to sleep.

So if it happens every 12 hours or so anyway then at least uploading your mind to a machine would be the last copy that would ever need to be made, that copy would (barring some catastrophe) never need to become unconscious and so that "you" becomes the final everlasting version of you.

Maybe that's why they call sleep "the little death"?

Hmmm,

It's actually quite difficult to forecast what will happen amongst science & technology next year, let alone 30 years.

Especially when you learn about ground breaking stuff popping up via unplanned/accidental/lucky research.

Heh, you can probably predict the average rate of breakthroughs using some probability voodoo.

Kurzweil has repeatedly demonstrated that the curve is not only exponential but predictable mostly because we keep making the same stuff over and over, just better.

Better ways to transmit data... from the smoke signal to quantum entanglement. Better ways to move from A to B, from domesticating horses to Ion drives and so on.

Humanity has a set pattern of stuff it does/wants and we just refine the heck out of it over and over.

People like Arthur Clarke were famous for accurately predicting technological advances (in fact there's a good argument that Clarke is the reason telecommunication satellite technology couldn't be patented... which in turn allowed a global communication/information revolution, gps etc etc so cheers Arthur.)

Obviously Clarke's big one (manned mission to Jupiter by 2001) didn't happen but I believe he was actually correct in his projections and we could and should have been there or very near it by then, but unsavory forces in human society such as corporate greed, power hungry political agendas etc derailed what should have been a logical progression from the Apollo program if we had kept up the momentum.

Breakthroughs however are indeed the wild card that always falls in our favor because they only serve to accelerate the process, but they cannot be relied upon.

Back in the days of Apollo humanity just assumed ftl travel would just come from some undefined "breakthrough" and by now we'd be at war with Gliese581 G.

But that breakthrough never came and still shows no sign of coming any time in the near or intermediate future. (which I assure you breaks my heart).

In the end it's all speculation because I'm sad to say we could easily just destroy ourselves tomorrow... and looking at the news right now, the middle east is really pushing the envelope.

It saddens me greatly to watch my own species squabble over a tiny patch of dirt when there are entire worlds waiting in the galaxy for any amount of nations to claim.

I love Earth, jewel of the Sol system no question, but she is not the only world worth having.

I better shut up before I start sobbing uncontrollably about Mars missions and asteroid mining... We should have been to Mars in the 1990s ugh!

/regain zen.