Site Presented By
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Published Letters: 32 Editor's Choice: 6
This is utter nonsense. Garbage. Not worthy of attention. Present EVIDENCE, incontrovertible, peer-reviewed evidence, of anything supernatural, you'll get my attention. No one ever has. Candy heart moved? Boyfriend didn't do it?? What if he lied?
Please. Read Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" to debunk the ghost stories. Then read Ray Kurweil's "The Singularity is Near" and Stephen Pinker's "The Blank Slate," to learn the current state of knowledge of the brain. We're a lot closer than you think to putting this nonsense to rest forever. It won't be soon enough.
I spent the bulk of my life worried about nuclear war. Ever since my mom told me when I was 5 years old of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, I was paralyzed with fear. Who wouldn't be. After all, with ICBMs, we only have 15 minutes.
Flash forward a couple of decades. That same mom (Elizabeth Clare Prophet) was telling her flock of followers worldwide to build bomb shelters and they did. I helped her build them, working on the project for 5 years or so. Eventually we had spent over $20 million. Everyone involved felt as if they had already been through a war. Lives were put on hold, property sold, college and career plans postponed. In the end, there was no war, and people simply had to move on. But the years of their lives were taken just as surely as if a war had actually come.
If we imagine we have 50 productive years, then 5 years spent in fear is 10% of our life gone. Fear is just as certain a killer as actual danger.
Now we have fear of terrorism and species extinction. I've read all the same literature as you, and I agree with you that the combination of fossil fuel depletion and climate change could be a grave threat to humanity. But we don't know how it will play out. Human creativity and ingenuity have always combined to get us through previous crises.
There are plenty of doomers out there, using your fear to push their agendas. Learn their arguments, then avoid them like the plague. They are quite literally poison. Teach your children the same: that life is risky and limited, and we have to make the most of every moment.
Progress in nearly every scientific and technological field continues its growth on a double-exponential curve (the rate of increase is increasing exponentially). This is documented in Ray Kurzweil's excellent book "The Singularity is Near," which reads like future history. What gives rise to this growth is continued scientific exploration at the small end of the physical spectrum (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics). In approximately 2045, trends already in place for over a century will bring us to a convergence of intellect so stunning that it is impossible to predict what will happen after that. Humans may merge with their technology or launch off in entirely new directions. Either way, we will be millions of times smarter, and probably linked together in some sort of hyper-world-wide-web--Hence the term "Singularity."
What Horgan seems to be espousing is what Kurzweil calls the "intuitive linear view" of scientific progress. But it's hard to see how Horgan could have ignored what has happened in just the past few years, and what's happening now. We all already take for granted the approximate doubling in price-performance of computers every 2 years. But soon, this same accelerating trend will bring these improvements to other fields that have been more stagnant, such as energy and medicine. Kurzweil cites an example that the entire 20th century only achieved 25 years of progress at today's rate. But the 21st century will achieve 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate), just by extrapolating existing trends.
Horgan states another common misconception regarding diminishing returns. Even exponential technology trends always approach an asymptote where they slow down--just before a paradigm shift occurs to a replacement technology. Kurzweil refers to this as the "paradigm shift S-curve." There have been 5 paradigm shifts so far in the development of computers, from mechanical relays, to vacuum tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuts, to microprocessors, soon to 3D processor architecture, next to optical and quantum computing and beyond. Another such progression would be wax cylinders to vinyl LP, to CD, to .mp3, and-- Who knows what's next in the audio world?
We better hope that Horgan is indeed wrong, because another type of convergence is happening: Human population explosion, climate change, and depletion of fossil fuels--all at the same time. If it we were on a linear or decreasing path of development, it's hard to see how our species would even make it to 2045. We have invented ourselves into a corner where the only solution is to invent our way out of it. We need new energy sources, new ways of producing food, new ways of cleaning up the environment, and new ways of restoring the biodiversity that's been lost to our brute-force industrial methods.
The answer is to think small, really small, toward fine-grained solutions. Genetic modification, self-replicating machinery and tiny robotics can make all of this possible. I'm tired of pessimists of all stripes. Some see entropic or mental limitations, others see looming dangers, but progress will have to save us in the end whether we like it or not.
Please refer to the following sites:
KurzweilAI.net
WorldChanging.com
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
Salon headlines in your mailbox
