The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in spacetime. (more
You said we expect people to live further in space. Distance is farther, metaphorical distance is further.
I expect us to live in cycles, as we always have. A renaissance here, oppression there, resistance will dominant anything new that doesn't offer convenience. Our next likely scenario will be worldwide catstrophe followed by technocracy ruling over labor slaves. Basic commodities are being depleted at an alarming rate. It's almost inevitable. Human rights and other fine rules are likely to go out the window as nations crumble under the weight of governing a human surplus while attempting to control increasingly scarce resources. The time to overcome it is NOW. We must actively safeguard human rights and fight to conserve pottable water, wood, access to iron, oil, rare elements to see they are no longer squandered to keep stocks viable. And thats only the beginning.
We may not outlive our next pass through the cosmic cloud. Spacefaring is more than an ideal, it's virtually a must. Even colonies in orbit may ensure the survival of the human race, come another planet killing asteroid.
But deciding what the future holds is a question of time. And thats like trying to decide how to handle a snake you can't see well enough to be sure what kind or how big it is. With your bare hands. Pronto.
noematic, I'd say this is more a result of the self-conscious attempts to break with historical influences during the early 20th century Modernist art and design movement.
The Classical, Romantic, Symbolist, etc. movements were all seen as innovations (or alternately reforms of previous movements) but not all simplified their predecessors.
Simplicity seems to be an intrinsic part of how we perceive future life - what supports the contention that future people will have a greater preference for simplicity? The means to achieve it? Is this just hopefulness on our part?
Whether you get more blue or more yellow would appear to depend on the intensity of the object you are looking at - relative to the ambient light level. But yes, many day-time distant objects at ground level will be dark.
True, but the claim is not that destruction followed by conquest would not increase entropy, but that it would increase resources available to the conqueror. My civ with damaged resources > your civ with undamaged resources.
It's true that it would be slower to rebuild a planet that was nuked into a cinder that it would be to get value out of taking a developed one as is, but how much of a difference would it really make, especially when you're dealing with sublightspeed travel on multilightyear scales?
Robin, have you looked at portrayals of the distant future, fantastic lands, etc. in other cultures or time periods?
I am thinking particularly of the Medieval mindset which is said to have viewed the past and the future as being more or less like the present (that is up until Judgement Day).
Pre-modern Chinese thought tended to view the future as likely getting worse and worse the further society got from the Zhou dynasty.
The Norse don't seem to have had a very optimistic view of either the distant past or the far future.
My concern is that you may be picking up on a very culture-specific conception of Progress as opposed to evolutionary/universal forces.
Razib analogizes our assumption that stone-age people didn't eat grains with our imagining a race of aliens as more homogenous in their religious beliefs than us.
Mass-energy is conserved; entropy is not. It's much easier to ruin resources than to improve them.
In particular, it is currently easier to destroy a target than to exert even relatively incomplete control over it - if President Bush had merely wanted to destroy Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, the military task would have been done with a few thousand of ICBMs in a few hours, not hundreds of thousands of men over many years.
That calculus may change with future technology, but I suspect the dichotomy will only go further in the same direction. Conquering a Dyson sphere around a distant star, to pick your example, at least requires you to accelerate and decelerate enough military power to hold your conquest. To destroy the same Dyson sphere, you just don't decelerate.
Robert, the correction yielded a correct argument and conclusion, so was hardly illogical. If anything was illogical, it was the original argument and conclusion. But Robin admitted that error. So what's the problem? Must robin retain his original garbled illogic - reversing both argument and conclusion in order to preserve the original illogic - in order to be logical? That hardly makes sense.
Sure, blue light from distant objects would presumably scatter, leaving them yellow, but this effect is evidently overwhelmed by the scattering of sunlight by the air - leaving the sun looking slightly yellow (just as you predict) but leaving everything else looking slightly blue. Do you see why? If not, consider this. Between you and a distant object is a lot of air. Sunlight hits that air, and the blue is scattered. Some of that blue is scattered in your direction. So when you look at a distant object, a lot of what you see is blue light from the sum scattered off the air between you and the object. Consequently, the object looks blue.
I wonder if this would explain the nostalgia folks tend to feel toward the "distant" past? It always seems to have been rosier then, as opposed to now.
The future is higher quality. The future is uncertain. Therefore the future is a trade-off between quality and uncertainty.
You said we expect people to live further in space. Distance is farther, metaphorical distance is further.
I expect us to live in cycles, as we always have. A renaissance here, oppression there, resistance will dominant anything new that doesn't offer convenience. Our next likely scenario will be worldwide catstrophe followed by technocracy ruling over labor slaves. Basic commodities are being depleted at an alarming rate. It's almost inevitable. Human rights and other fine rules are likely to go out the window as nations crumble under the weight of governing a human surplus while attempting to control increasingly scarce resources. The time to overcome it is NOW. We must actively safeguard human rights and fight to conserve pottable water, wood, access to iron, oil, rare elements to see they are no longer squandered to keep stocks viable. And thats only the beginning.
We may not outlive our next pass through the cosmic cloud. Spacefaring is more than an ideal, it's virtually a must. Even colonies in orbit may ensure the survival of the human race, come another planet killing asteroid.
But deciding what the future holds is a question of time. And thats like trying to decide how to handle a snake you can't see well enough to be sure what kind or how big it is. With your bare hands. Pronto.
noematic, I'd say this is more a result of the self-conscious attempts to break with historical influences during the early 20th century Modernist art and design movement.
The Classical, Romantic, Symbolist, etc. movements were all seen as innovations (or alternately reforms of previous movements) but not all simplified their predecessors.
Simplicity seems to be an intrinsic part of how we perceive future life - what supports the contention that future people will have a greater preference for simplicity? The means to achieve it? Is this just hopefulness on our part?
Whether you get more blue or more yellow would appear to depend on the intensity of the object you are looking at - relative to the ambient light level. But yes, many day-time distant objects at ground level will be dark.
True, but the claim is not that destruction followed by conquest would not increase entropy, but that it would increase resources available to the conqueror. My civ with damaged resources > your civ with undamaged resources.
It's true that it would be slower to rebuild a planet that was nuked into a cinder that it would be to get value out of taking a developed one as is, but how much of a difference would it really make, especially when you're dealing with sublightspeed travel on multilightyear scales?
Good example.
Robin, have you looked at portrayals of the distant future, fantastic lands, etc. in other cultures or time periods?
I am thinking particularly of the Medieval mindset which is said to have viewed the past and the future as being more or less like the present (that is up until Judgement Day).
Pre-modern Chinese thought tended to view the future as likely getting worse and worse the further society got from the Zhou dynasty.
The Norse don't seem to have had a very optimistic view of either the distant past or the far future.
My concern is that you may be picking up on a very culture-specific conception of Progress as opposed to evolutionary/universal forces.
Razib analogizes our assumption that stone-age people didn't eat grains with our imagining a race of aliens as more homogenous in their religious beliefs than us.
Mass-energy is conserved; entropy is not. It's much easier to ruin resources than to improve them.
In particular, it is currently easier to destroy a target than to exert even relatively incomplete control over it - if President Bush had merely wanted to destroy Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, the military task would have been done with a few thousand of ICBMs in a few hours, not hundreds of thousands of men over many years.
That calculus may change with future technology, but I suspect the dichotomy will only go further in the same direction. Conquering a Dyson sphere around a distant star, to pick your example, at least requires you to accelerate and decelerate enough military power to hold your conquest. To destroy the same Dyson sphere, you just don't decelerate.
Robert, the correction yielded a correct argument and conclusion, so was hardly illogical. If anything was illogical, it was the original argument and conclusion. But Robin admitted that error. So what's the problem? Must robin retain his original garbled illogic - reversing both argument and conclusion in order to preserve the original illogic - in order to be logical? That hardly makes sense.
Sure, blue light from distant objects would presumably scatter, leaving them yellow, but this effect is evidently overwhelmed by the scattering of sunlight by the air - leaving the sun looking slightly yellow (just as you predict) but leaving everything else looking slightly blue. Do you see why? If not, consider this. Between you and a distant object is a lot of air. Sunlight hits that air, and the blue is scattered. Some of that blue is scattered in your direction. So when you look at a distant object, a lot of what you see is blue light from the sum scattered off the air between you and the object. Consequently, the object looks blue.
I was a decent guy. Why are you people always cracking on my height?
check out terasem movement and cyberev.org for organizations focused on the future and cyber reality.
I wonder if this would explain the nostalgia folks tend to feel toward the "distant" past? It always seems to have been rosier then, as opposed to now.