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I was reading a book recently that says the building or artificial minds, genetic manipulation, and nanotechnology will lead to a singularity sometime in the Mid 21st century. The most obvious trends are the improving capabilities of computers. Genetic manipulation, I don't know yet. Nanotechnology is creeping along, nothing quite Earth shaking yet, but the trend with computers is unmistakable. When planning for the future, it is hardest to believe that computers will just stay the same passive objects that we're used to. I can imagine Genetics being much more frusterating, and nanotechnology being difficult to implement, but the trend of computers has already been established. By 2010, we may have a Supercomputer that's equal to the human brain in its complexity and 10 years after than, the same could be said of a laptop computer, I think a 2020 laptop computer won't be the passive object that we now understand such computers to be.
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Was it by Ray Kurzweil?
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Yep, that's the one. I'm not sure if I agree with all of his conclusions, but the trends in computer science seem clear. It would be really helpful if smart artificial minds would break the logjam that has been holding us up in space, and if Ray Kurzweil is partially right about nanotechnology, I'd want to be on the first starship out of here, before we encounter "gray goo" problems and nanowars that destroy civilization. Now there is this silence from the heavens, no contact has been made with extraterrestial civilizations. If Kurzweil is right either we are the first or all the others have destroyed themselves, or the third alternative is that we are actually living in a computer civilization where no other extraterrestrial civilizations are simulated, we just get images of distant stars and galaxies when we look through our telescopes. The Universe may be one vast computer running multiple simulations.
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All these people saying that humanity was seeded by aliens don't seem to get it. Maybe haumans are the ones supposed to seed alien life throughout the universe. Maybe that's humanities purpose of existence.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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I don't know. What's the actual probability of our being first or one of the first in this vast cosmos of ours? Our supposed "Universe" being a simulation would actually explain alot of things, such as for instance why is it so hard for NASA to get the funds it needs when other government programs are rolling in dough? Seems to me that our spreading into space would require additional computing resources on the part of the computer that is simulating us. So maybe some subtle manipulation is going in in the simulated minds of our leaders so as to make it seem to them that colonizing space might not be such a great idea. I mean suddenly we went to the Moon 12 years after the beginning of our space age, and then the master computer said, "Uh oh! and then subtly changed the minds of our leaders and opinion makes, making it seem to them that space travel is a waste of resources and that we should solve our problems here on Earth first before we venture into space. Problems that are of course simulated on that same computer that simulates us. Maybe the perameters of this simulation are bound to force us to live on one planet so we are forced to live with that planets resources.
We sort of have to take it as an article of faith that our Universe is real after all. If our universe is real, then we have to accept either we are the first civilization or that other civilizations have perhished before they were able to reach us. if we look at our planet's fossil record, it doesn't appear that our planet was visited by intelligent aliens in any major or meaningful way. We can look at the fossil record of our Moon as well and see if any sentinels have been left behind. The Moon is after all the logical place to leave such things.
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