Jive Turkey
ONE love, blood, life
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2005
- Messages
- 13,645
I do find Entropy as...well...Biblical.
whatchoo mean?
I do find Entropy as...well...Biblical.
Lift up your eyes to the heavens, look at the earth beneath; the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever, my righteousness will never fail. - Isaiah 51:6
the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. - Romans 8:21
This is what God the LORD says - the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out - Isaiah 42:5
we're about the reverse the aging process within 10-15 years -
How do you, as a believer, see the line between such (potential) scientific advances and 'playing God'? Does it depend on the subject?
How do you feel about things like Transhumanism? Can humans be trusted with such extreme tech?
For the most part I don't see scientific advancements as a threat to God, or my faith. Since I accept that God is ultimately sovereign - if he really wanted to stop our progress, he would (and he still might, but until he does - I say with press forward).
However, I do think there will be some serious issues to address if we continue our rapid technological progress. For instance - if we could live forever (or very extended lives) - then some evil person or system could in theory lock someone in a torture chamber for a million years. A literal Hell.
But I would personally welcome the chance for a radically extended life (provided it also came with youth and health). We live in a wonderful universe and I'd love to take a few billion years to explore it and maybe write some poetry on some distant moon. Maybe, when I'm bored some day in the way distant future - I'll surrender my "life" in this realm for my life in the next one.
How do you feel about things like Transhumanism? Can humans be trusted with such extreme tech?
-are we not morally obligated to step out of the way for future generations? We're already stressing our natural resources as it is
There are some assumptions I've made:
1) Technology such a molecular manufacturing, desalination, cheap solar, graphene, food printing, nanotechnology...etc will greatly reduce our reliance on natural resources and allow us to expand the earth's population.
2) Over the course of a few hundred years, that same technology will allow is to begin colonizing the moon, Mars, spaceships...etc.
I imagine in a world where we're able to stave off death, they'd feel very sorry for us unfortunate folks who were unlucky enough to have been born before that technology was realized.
Thanks, man. It'll be awesome. I love the this move toward open/free courses. I've done enough "official" schooling for me resume, not I can take classes that actually excite me.Oh, and congrats on the decision to go back and take more courses that's awesome
Ray Kurzweil is a kook. He might've got some things right in the past, but he seems to have spiraled into this weird obsession with death after his father passed away. It seems to have clouded his judgement a great deal
I don't know, man. We can't even figure out how to keep people dying from cancer, heart disease, and countless other ailments and this guy thinks we'll be extending lifespans indefinitely in the coming decades? He's never even clear on how he proposes we do that other than "start getting serious about it" as if researchers aren't already working tirelessly to try and find cures for these things. Not sure I'd put much stock into this
Researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara set out to test this possibility. They hypothesized that there is a deep-seated perception of science as a moral pursuit — its emphasis on truth-seeking, impartiality and rationality privileges collective well-being above all else. Their new study, published in the journal PLOSOne, argues that the association between science and morality is so ingrained that merely thinking about it can trigger more moral behavior.
One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person's grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.
So, alongside the regular airings of the hoary old myth that the Bible was collated at the Council of Nicea, the tedious internet-based "Jesus never existed!" nonsense, or otherwise intelligent people spouting pseudo historical claims that would make even Dan Brown snort in derision, the myth that the Catholic Church caused the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period was a scientific wasteland is regularly wheeled, creaking, into the sunlight for another trundle around the arena.
The myth goes that the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational types who loved science and were on the brink of doing all kinds of marvelous things (inventing full-scale steam engines is one example that is usually, rather fancifully, invoked) until Christianity came along. Christianity then banned all learning and rational thought and ushered in the Dark Ages. Then an iron-fisted theocracy, backed by a Gestapo-style Inquisition, prevented any science or questioning inquiry from happening until Leonardo da Vinci invented intelligence and the wondrous Renaissance saved us all from Medieval darkness.
The online manifestations of this curiously quaint but seemingly indefatigable idea range from the touchingly clumsy to the utterly shocking, but it remains one of those things that "everybody knows" and permeates modern culture. A recent episode of Family Guy had Stewie and Brian enter a futuristic alternative world where, it was explained, things were so advanced because Christianity didn't destroy learning, usher in the Dark Ages and stifle science. The writers didn't see the need to explain what Stewie meant - they assumed everyone understood.
About once every 3-4 months on forums like RichardDawkins.net we get some discussion where someone invokes the old "Conflict Thesis". That evolves into the usual ritual kicking of the Middle Ages as a benighted intellectual wasteland where humanity was shackled to superstition and oppressed by cackling minions of the Evil Old Catholic Church. The hoary standards are brought out on cue. Giordiano Bruno is presented as a wise and noble martyr for science instead of the irritating mystical New Age kook he actually was. Hypatia is presented as another such martyr and the mythical Christian destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria is spoken of in hushed tones, despite both these ideas being totally untrue. The Galileo Affair is ushered in as evidence of a brave scientist standing up to the unscientific obscurantism of the Church, despite that case being as much about science as it was about Scripture.
A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.
Science will try to prove this theory wrong and if it can't then great!
LOL - I guess The Universe Has No Beginning and No End Theory just doesn't have the same ring to it.Does this mean CBS will finally cancel The Big Bang Theory?
There are other problems to an infinite universe though. For one, our night sky should be lit up like a giant skylight from all the light of every star in the universe having an infinite amount of time to reach us.
Unless the exponential "expansion" is faster than light...just a thought...