Technology and the Future

@Best Of: Are you familiar with the works of Olaf Stapledon?

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Never heard of him.

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He wrote what many consider the epic of all sci fi epics. I think you would like him.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

If you like epic, and I mean EPIC stories I recommend Last and First Men which is basically a fictional history of humanity from the First Men (us) to our distant descendants and all the iterations of humanity in between. Then there's The Starmaker which is a history of the entire universe.

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Yeah, I checked him on Wikipedia and now I'm amazed that I hadn't known about him before - I'm not very well-read on sci-fi but I have read at least some of the classics and this guy seems like anyone interested in literature should've read him.

Now he's on my neverending reading list...

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You're welcome. Now, back to technology...

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Well, if you want to get philosophical about it, how can you say that any new configuration of you is truly "the same" individual as you in the past? Most cells in your body die and get replaced all the time, so after some number of months, a large portion of yourself is all new cells that took in nutrients from completely different sources. You're counting on a great deal of duplication in order to continue living, in other words. Now, the sticky situation that science fiction stories like to play with is when a teleporter works by creating a clone first, and then the original is killed... _{or not...}

Of course I believe the real problem with this model is that even if you have fine enough scanners to analyze trillions of atoms in one instant, you run into an uncertainty principle where the more precisely you know a particle's position, the less precisely you can know its velocity, and vice versa. And the way one author explained it to me, this isn't just a flaw in the proposed measuring equipment, but something fundamental to the particles that causes a destabilization in the actual physical certainty of the position or velocity. So this may mean the "copy by analysis" model is only feasible for the most inert objects, but I dunno for sure.

Erm...the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle doesn't quite work that way, and it's not the same thing as the Observer Effect.

To...massively oversimplify, you start with the deBroglie wave-particle duality (which has negligible effects until you get down to really, really small particles). Matter can interchangeably be expressed as a packet of waves, and since it's a kind of amorphous blob of waves (specifically, a Fourier solution to a Schrodinger probability density function), any reliable statement about the position of that packet can only be made down to its wave's dimensions. This effect shows up not only in particle movement, but any measurement of waves, and has nothing to do with interference from observing it. For the most part though, this only applies to electrons or smaller; once you get even into atomic particles, wave characteristics usually drop off pretty fast.

The Observer Effect has more to do with interference from the tools you use to observe things. The usual confusion happens in the case of quantum mechanics, where pretty much any substantive tampering with the particles causes a wave function collapse into one of its eigenstates. Heisenberg himself made this mistake, to be fair.

You wouldn't really see Heisenbergy things on the scale of human cells or even cell components. Electrons are pretty much interchangeable in a conductive medium. Theoretically, it would be possible to make a straight-up 3D print of a human being.

But then that gets into the question of whether that teleporter you're walking into is a teleporter or an incinerator that just happens to make another you. The way I see it, nothing about the process of reconstructing "you" on the other side actually necessitates destroying you on the first. If you want teleportation without that kind of conflict, you'd need to just straight-up bend space.

edited 31st Oct '13 4:46:36 PM by Pykrete

But real wormholes are very tiny and not very long-lasting, aren't they?

Real wormholes have yet to be observed at all, but they're valid theoretical solutions to general relativity. What you're talking about is called a Schwarzchild wormhole, which would collapse too quickly.

There are theories floating around about traversible wormholes though that aren't completely fantasy. The main obstacle is that you need to introduce some sort of negative energy density, but there are some effects that seem to imply that's actually possible.

edited 31st Oct '13 6:58:57 PM by Pykrete

On the topic of future technology, I am hoping that one day we have machines that can replace our bodies and keep our brains alive. I'm not hoping for immortality but becoming something not quite human would be good.

I can see that becoming a possibility fairly quickly - in fact, I'd like to be an experimental subject if I were to undergo bodydeath but not brain death (i.e. if I were in a condition where my body had to be maintained by some form of life support because my brain was still registering and thus I'm technically "not dead" even though my heart/lungs etc won't support me of their own accord).

AFAIK, they've already experimentally demonstrated that the brain can be kept alive provided that they supply oxygenated and nutrient-rich blood. So I'd happily accept, on the death of my body, my brain being used to see exactly how far we can go - how long can it be sustained, can it be hooked up to machines to allow sight, sound, speech, control of motor functions etc.

The way I figure it, it's something that people may want to pay for in the future, to preserve their "life" when their body fails.

Prior to accepting money from someone, they would have to know that the processes work (if you're shelling out thousands/millions to have a replacement body, you're going to want some guarantee, so they'd better be able to provide it, eh) and so they would need experimental subjects who will be the ones to go through the "brain in a jar"... yep, it's still living, surviving on the nutrients, let's see if we can get it to hear... yep, it's responding to stimuli, let's see if we can get it to see.. yep, talk... yep.

Then progress to controlling a simple machine body, then work on making a body of more humanoid shape, now let's see if we can't make the body look more like a living human...

Oh, look, we've got a marketable product.

Best case scenario for me: I gain a cybernetic replacement body and extended life and I get to be part of something beneficial to extending the lives of others (and the spin-off tech would be invaluable to medical science for those just needing limbs etc)

Worst case scenario for me: it doesn't work out and my brain dies - y'know, what it was going to do anyway, since my body had shut down.

No, it wouldn't be "immortality" because the next question would be "what is the true lifespan of the human brain" - presumably it'd die eventually maybe another hundred years, maybe several hundred, who knows, theory is divided on that score.

But it'd mean more time to do stuff and a new body in which to do it. Maybe several bodies with specialised functions.

And a chance to be something other than human.

edited 1st Nov '13 1:11:45 AM by Wolf1066

If your brain is conscius during the time the scientists are trying to see whether they can input sensory stimuli you might get extended periods of being awake but without any sensory data. That sounds worse than death, to me. Before I'd agree to be isolated like that I'd ask for a guarantee that they make me able to communicate in some way in a set, relatively short period of time. If they fail to do so I'd like them to turn the machine off.

With those reservations I'd be willing to give it a go.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

I think the human brain requires certain amount of stimulation in order for it to function properly, so isolating a brain from information input entirely would be detrimental to the conscious at least, even if the neurons are kept alive.

Good idea.

I'd also want a guarantee that they wouldn't just stop at "yeah, we got him hearing, seeing and talking" and abort the project.

I'd want a guarantee that, initial tests going well, they'd keep at it until I was in some form of advanced humaniform vessel - I'd want to be able to do a lot of things I enjoy now.

Having volunteered to be an experimental prototype, I'd want to be trying out the improved stuff as it's developed.

I'd read that apparently the longest the human body can live, even if super-healthy, is 116 years. Around that point it all starts to shut down as cells rapidly die off. So there's the limit. The question is how to extend this limit.

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Oldest recorded person ever died at 122.

Really? Damn. The article I'd read was like a year old or less.

I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!

Less than a year ago and the author still can't use google.

There have been various theories proposed that the brain could survive a lot longer than that if it weren't trapped in a failing frail body.

Figured this fit here better than anywhere else so I'm giving it a bump.

edited 20th Dec '13 12:47:39 PM by tricksterson

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That baby that getting cured from HIV is awesome. I've heard that a German adult had already been cured, but it's still cool.

edited 20th Dec '13 1:28:45 PM by Ekuran

How do you know? I mean, how do we know it works that way?

Because the laws of physics. And before you argue about discovering new physics, first off new laws have to agree with existing laws in cases where they have been experimentally verified (which is basically anything on a practical scale) and a new law of physics is just as likely to make fun things even more impossible than it is to enable them.

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Predictions of the future that came true in 2013 Some overlap with my prevous post but not as much as you might think. A couple of the events are sociological rather than technological but still fits her IMHGO

edited 28th Dec '13 12:03:29 PM by tricksterson

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