Aylee
Posts: 24103
Joined: 10/14/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jlf1961 quote:
ORIGINAL: Aylee quote:
ORIGINAL: jlf1961 Something popped up on my facebook today, and it got me to thinking. "The planet does not belong to us, it belongs to those who will follow us." Looking at the condition of the world today, political, environmental, and the basic way that human civilization is behaving in general, what will the future generations say of us when they look back at the 20th and early 21st centuries? Insufficient information. We are in the middle of a technological change as profound as when the hunter/gatherers became agriculturalists. Nobody knows how a society where most people are close to economically useless (we aren't there yet, but we are headed that way) works. Nobody knows how a society with the kind of quick meme propagation we have works. Uh, Aylee, you really think that we will develop technology that will clean this mess up? Clean up? Who knows. You would have to define "clean up" and "mess." Change? Yeppers. The tech changes coming will change society in ways comparable to the introduction of agriculture or the industrial revolution. The combination of nanotech with genetic engineering would almost guarantee that. Adding the increasing probability that we will finally get a glimpse of the real nature of mass and some forms of energy means that the following revoulutions in technology are already being prepared. Since a change in technology creates a change in resources which drives a change in society, we can have no clue how society will respond to the huge advances we will be making in the next decades. Uncertainty breeds fear. We had it pretty good then, but not so good now; any more change must be for the worse. I'm a pessimist and will plan for the worst to the extent I'm able. I'm sure the Great American Experiment will not survive, because we've already girdled the tree and chopped the roots. But who knows? Maybe the horse will sing.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam I don’t always wgah’nagl fhtagn. But when I do, I ph’nglui mglw’nafh R’lyeh.
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