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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (9623)	11/9/2010 8:56:27 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

>You and I have perhaps reached the limits of our vision (and mine admittedly has been growing dimmer for some time now) but if humankind survives and harnesses the brains of his computing machines and integrates...what will we know in say one million years?? < Now there is a question with some serious meat on its bones!! ...if we can survive the next few hundred, as a culture and an ecology... I agree wholeheartedly about vision, its limits and (alas) about age dimming mine. I grew up with the Space Age, that absolute climax of technology as a driver for mythology, the stories we tell each other and our children to illustrate who we are. I am watching the dream of space travel recede as its real costs stubbornly refuse to come down ... and our societies come up against the planetary limits to the exponential economic growth that fueled and characterized two centuries of technocracy on the heels of the industrial revolution. Is it just me, or is the pace of innovation slowing, turning away from revolutionary enabling technologies, focusing inward on the next cell phone or social software release? Goodness I hope not. I hope that within my lifetime something really new will be announced, perhaps a cheap way to orbit or a quantum jump in gene tech. I do believe that mankind is on the brink of one thing that is so (bad word) big that it defies the minds of even our premier sf authors. That is the slow but steady unraveling of the genetic code (its text, to address a previous semantic niggle) and the cellular machinery used to express it. Until now (asbestos we can determine) evolution has been driven by blind chance. When we get the tools to rewrite our geno- and phenotypes, the makeup of our bodies will be spectacular ... but secondary. The real excitement will be the changes in our minds. Once our consciousness feeds back into its neural substrate - the results will be literally unimaginable. Our sapient minds will undergo a tornadic event of differentiation and growth equal to or greater than the Cambrian explosion did for the innovation of multicellular organisms. We are living (in geological or biological terms) in the immediate extreme ultimate moment before the biggest thing since mitosis. In my ever so humble opinion... (grin) cheers js