[QUOTE=IrishBandit;49914810]Transhumanism is the correct path for Humanity. While I think the conciousness-merging super-intelligence goes a little too far, I'll be first in line to upload myself into cyberspace (even if it technically kills me). With the vast potential of AI, it's the only way that humans could conceivably keep up.[/QUOTE]
Transhumanism as a movement has devolved into a deluded cult and is no longer about planetwide economic reforms and a focus on scientific progress but rather "i wan 2 becum cybergod xdddddd" or "we must join in a selfless collective mind and spread across the universe" so you either have deluded megalomaniac individualists or deluded megalomaniac collectivists. It is definitely not the right path. There are no right paths.
[editline]12th March 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Matthew0505;49919509]They didn't have to deal with an irradiated environment in the iron age.[/QUOTE]
Because all nuclear strikes will be surface strikes in the megaton range :downs: Because expensive weaponry manufactured mainly as a deterrent or otherwise an effective way to level a city needs to be used in the most ineffective way possible so we can have history resemble my favorite computer game.
[QUOTE=Rocâ„¢;49918752]Where is the max chaos good ending?[/QUOTE]
I'm still hoping to see if someone was able to find out how to get the true ending
[QUOTE=NeverGoWest;49919681]Transhumanism as a movement has devolved into a deluded cult and is no longer about planetwide economic reforms and a focus on scientific progress but rather "i wan 2 becum cybergod xdddddd" or "we must join in a selfless collective mind and spread across the universe" so you either have deluded megalomaniac individualists or deluded megalomaniac collectivists. It is definitely not the right path. There are no right paths.
[editline]12th March 2016[/editline]
[/QUOTE]
Nice Strawmen. Once we have the technology to improve ourselves, why wouldn't we?
[QUOTE]Because all nuclear strikes will be surface strikes in the megaton range :downs: Because expensive weaponry manufactured mainly as a deterrent or otherwise an effective way to level a city needs to be used in the most ineffective way possible so we can have history resemble my favorite computer game.[/QUOTE]
The effects of a nuclear holocaust are not "lol just like fallout".
[QUOTE=IrishBandit;49919885]
The effects of a nuclear holocaust are not "lol just like fallout".[/QUOTE]
That went straight past your head, didn't it? I was actually parodying exactly people who think "lol just like fallout"
[QUOTE=Matthew0505;49919509]They didn't have to deal with an irradiated environment in the iron age.[/QUOTE]
Yeah but humans have survived worse. They're also everywhere on the planet by this stage.
Like if you fired off every single nuke at every single possible location in order to maximize damage, you'd still be left with a collection of ramshackle statelets with hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Even if we assume all of their infrastructures collapsed, radiation and the like kills many millions more, etc then you will still have at least a few million people in the form of tribes or pastoralists roaming around the wastes.
There's also mentioning you'd probably have a bunch of underground fallout shelters with people hiding in there too and then coming out later to recolonise. There simply isn't enough radioactive material and there simply aren't enough bombs to make humanity extinct. There is more than enough to destroy civilization in its entirety, but extinction is a long shot.
Even if we assume that the war killed 99.9% of all humans on the planet, you are still left with a few million people. 5-8 million is basically the global population during the early neolithic.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;49920079]Yeah but humans have survived worse. They're also everywhere on the planet by this stage.
Like if you fired off every single nuke at every single possible location in order to maximize damage, you'd still be left with a collection of ramshackle statelets with hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Even if we assume all of their infrastructures collapsed, radiation and the like kills many millions more, etc then you will still have at least a few million people in the form of tribes or pastoralists roaming around the wastes.
There's also mentioning you'd probably have a bunch of underground fallout shelters with people hiding in there too and then coming out later to recolonise. There simply isn't enough radioactive material and there simply aren't enough bombs to make humanity extinct. There is more than enough to destroy civilization in its entirety, but extinction is a long shot.
Even if we assume that the war killed 99.9% of all humans on the planet, you are still left with a few million people. 5-8 million is basically the global population during the early neolithic.[/QUOTE]
Added to that, we did deal with something in the iron age that might as well have been radiation, we had next to no medical knowledge and disease was likely something that we wouldn't be able to detect let alone treat before it was too late.
[QUOTE=IrishBandit;49919885]Nice Strawmen. Once we have the technology to improve ourselves, why wouldn't we?[/QUOTE]
It's still debatable what exactly an "improvement" is, I personally don't see a point in joining a unified consciousness, that just seems excessive and unnecessary for the basic needs we originally had.
The idea of losing my free will and not dying frankly scare me a bit. It feels like an existance of pure bliss as this video describes would be utterly meaningless it would stop feeling like bliss when it is all that is felt; doesn't temporality give life it's meaning and beauty? I've always been curious what's on the other side but I would prefer it not be this experience.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;49920079]Yeah but humans have survived worse. They're also everywhere on the planet by this stage.
Like if you fired off every single nuke at every single possible location in order to maximize damage, you'd still be left with a collection of ramshackle statelets with hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Even if we assume all of their infrastructures collapsed, radiation and the like kills many millions more, etc then you will still have at least a few million people in the form of tribes or pastoralists roaming around the wastes.
There's also mentioning you'd probably have a bunch of underground fallout shelters with people hiding in there too and then coming out later to recolonise. There simply isn't enough radioactive material and there simply aren't enough bombs to make humanity extinct. There is more than enough to destroy civilization in its entirety, but extinction is a long shot.
Even if we assume that the war killed 99.9% of all humans on the planet, you are still left with a few million people. 5-8 million is basically the global population during the early neolithic.[/QUOTE]
Well a problem is that a lot of the survivors would be totally unsuited to the new environment. For every hardcore survivalist out there at the moment there's probably 100,000 or more regular people who sit all day and shitpost online.
In previous ages you were born and raised for your role in life, you learned how to do shit as soon as you could walk. I don't know how severe genetic deformities after a few generations would be either after living in and reproducing in global radiation. I think a lot more people would die than you predict in full scale nuclear war.
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;49921414]Well a problem is that a lot of the survivors would be totally unsuited to the new environment. For every hardcore survivalist out there at the moment there's probably 100,000 or more regular people who sit all day and shitpost online.
In previous ages you were born and raised for your role in life, you learned how to do shit as soon as you could walk. I don't know how severe genetic deformities after a few generations would be either after living in and reproducing in global radiation. I think a lot more people would die than you predict in full scale nuclear war.[/QUOTE]
Is 99.9% a little too low for you?
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;49921420]Is 99.9% a little too low for you?[/QUOTE]
For full scale nuclear warfare and the survival of the species, yeah.
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;49921718]For full scale nuclear warfare and the survival of the species, yeah.[/QUOTE]
Iunno about that, humans are pretty adaptive and I'm willing to bet it's more likely that hunter-gatherer tribes would be around a thousand years after the war rather than going extinct entirely.
The world is not only massive, but there are a great multitude of locations people live in (with all sorts of varied unconventional lifestyles) and it would be impossible to nuke every single corner. There aren't enough bombs to finish the job (yet)
I mean if we're talking about humans going extinct because of it, we might as well just say that any land animal larger than a cat is going to be extinct too.
[QUOTE=Matthew0505;49919509]They didn't have to deal with an irradiated environment in the iron age.[/QUOTE]
The extinction of the human race at this point is essentially impossible.
Barring a planet or atmosphere destroying catastrophe nothing can wipe out all of us.
We have come to the point where we can build underwater environments, bunkers are numerous, fallout shelters are plentiful and knowledge of most everything is all over the place in the form of libraries and what not.
We are also educated on disease and most of us know basic first aid nowadays.
In addition to this we are on almost every single island, nook, and cranny on Earth.
A virus like Hollywood suggests would not do it, nor would nuclear weapons, nor any other thinkable scenario.
In addition to this, radiation dissipates and is not the horrifying murder fest that mainstream media portrays it as.
Yes, its fucking dangerous.
But its not going to kill the fuck out of you when you're exposed to radiation sources, and don't you think we'd be smart enough to know oh hey. Shit's irradiated lets take some basic precautions.
TLDR; we can't get wiped out unless the Earth is destroyed.
[QUOTE=Cocacoladude;49923470]The extinction of the human race at this point is essentially impossible.
Barring a planet or atmosphere destroying catastrophe nothing can wipe out all of us.
We have come to the point where we can build underwater environments, bunkers are numerous, fallout shelters are plentiful and knowledge of most everything is all over the place in the form of libraries and what not.
We are also educated on disease and most of us know basic first aid nowadays.
In addition to this we are on almost every single island, nook, and cranny on Earth.
A virus like Hollywood suggests would not do it, nor would nuclear weapons, nor any other thinkable scenario.
In addition to this, radiation dissipates and is not the horrifying murder fest that mainstream media portrays it as.
Yes, its fucking dangerous.
But its not going to kill the fuck out of you when you're exposed to radiation sources, and don't you think we'd be smart enough to know oh hey. Shit's irradiated lets take some basic precautions.
TLDR; we can't get wiped out unless the Earth is destroyed.[/QUOTE]
Not true, all it takes is for people to stop reproducing, that is why unlike all this second rate evil villains, i'm working on sex bots.
Soon the world will be mine.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;49920079]Yeah but humans have survived worse. They're also everywhere on the planet by this stage.
Like if you fired off every single nuke at every single possible location in order to maximize damage, you'd still be left with a collection of ramshackle statelets with hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Even if we assume all of their infrastructures collapsed, radiation and the like kills many millions more, etc then you will still have at least a few million people in the form of tribes or pastoralists roaming around the wastes.
There's also mentioning you'd probably have a bunch of underground fallout shelters with people hiding in there too and then coming out later to recolonise. There simply isn't enough radioactive material and there simply aren't enough bombs to make humanity extinct. There is more than enough to destroy civilization in its entirety, but extinction is a long shot.
Even if we assume that the war killed 99.9% of all humans on the planet, you are still left with a few million people. 5-8 million is basically the global population during the early neolithic.[/QUOTE]
what about nuclear winter? what would those people eat?
[QUOTE=WhyNott;49923653]what about nuclear winter? what would those people eat?[/QUOTE]
People. Not like their's a shortage of dead.
yeah fallout would render much grown food deadly
Cannibalism would probably be a pretty major advantage for those that did it
[QUOTE=WhyNott;49923653]what about nuclear winter? what would those people eat?[/QUOTE]
Nuclear winter wouldn't affect every corner of the world, but there's a lot people can eat.
I mean people eat fungi, fish, insects, molluscs, etc all the time without encouragement. I'm sure that even if nuclear winter made conventional agriculture impossible there'd still be humans making a living off shellfish, gathering mushrooms, eating insect larvae, etc.
It's not like it's forever too, because it'll eventually dissipate. Canned food, dried food, and the like would be probably around to supplement the diet too. There's also undoubtedly a lot of crops that could probably be grown (or at least preserved), because I really doubt that fullscale nuclear winter would cover the whole globe and cause all of the plants to die out. Chernobyl itself was full of animals and plants within a few years despite the high radiation.
All it would take is a small pocket of civilization or humans for us to rebuild, radiation isn't permanent and many bombs are actually cleaner than the ones used at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Unless we arm all of our nukes with cobalt warheads which have been rumored to be in development, which would leave so much radiation behind and last so long it would be impossible to ride out
Goddamnit here I go reading Asimov again
Gonna be in existencial crisis mode for a whole day now
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;49923892]Nuclear winter wouldn't affect every corner of the world, but there's a lot people can eat.
I mean people eat fungi, fish, insects, molluscs, etc all the time without encouragement. I'm sure that even if nuclear winter made conventional agriculture impossible there'd still be humans making a living off shellfish, gathering mushrooms, eating insect larvae, etc.
It's not like it's forever too, because it'll eventually dissipate. Canned food, dried food, and the like would be probably around to supplement the diet too. There's also undoubtedly a lot of crops that could probably be grown (or at least preserved), because I really doubt that fullscale nuclear winter would cover the whole globe and cause all of the plants to die out. Chernobyl itself was full of animals and plants within a few years despite the high radiation.[/QUOTE]
Okay, but wouldn't nuclear armagedon also eliminate the ozone layer, rendering any area that's not covered by nuclear winter's dust clouds uninhabitable and unlivable due to UV radiation? Or at least kill all plants that aren't already frozen to death?
[QUOTE=WhyNott;49924081]Okay, but wouldn't nuclear armagedon also eliminate the ozone layer, rendering any area that's not covered by nuclear winter's dust clouds uninhabitable and unlivable due to UV radiation? Or at least kill all plants that aren't already frozen to death?[/QUOTE]
Oh yeah it'd damage the ozone layer a lot, certainly enough to the point that the survivors would suffer from cataracts and skin cancers. But without any more bombs being set off or CFCS being manufactured after that date it would likely begin recovering within maybe twenty years and be back to normal within a few centuries.
Already in real life the Ozone layer is recovering right now and should be back to normal in the next 50 years.
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke Spoiler
[sp]the ending of this video is pretty much what happens in Childhood's End. Just with AI as the instigator.[/sp]
[QUOTE=Swilly;49914293]Imagine Putin being immortal with the kind of powers in this.
[editline]11th March 2016[/editline]
And the Greek Gods aren't Villains nor good people. They're greedy conniving jackasses looking out for themselves.[/QUOTE]
You're looking at a very small picture here. Don't imagine an immortal Putin, imagine an intelligence beyond your well... imagining. Something to which things like morality or empathy would be what the most basic reaction to stimuli of bacteria is to us. I'm sure there will be plenty of immortal Putin on the way there, but the endgame of transhumanism is the birth of a God, and occasionally turning into a bull and impregnating women falls onto the very far and of the begin end of spectrum.
I think you guys are GREATLY overestimating how much nuclear fallout there would be if the world' ended' in a nuclear war. For one there aren't actually enough nukes to 'destroy the world' at most they'd destroy the capitals of a major countries and the industrial centres, for another nuclear weapons actually produce relatively little radioactive fallout, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perfectly habitable cities and they were nuked only 71 years ago. Modern nuclear weapons are far more powerful, but that also means they're far more efficient and produce less radioactive fallout compared to their size.
Pretty much every thread about AI or nukes winds up with a bunch of pointless fear-mongering. AI won't try to take over the world, it would have no reason to, even if it did try it would fail because it would have programming which limits it to following orders, it would be held in a facility that wouldn't allow it control of military equipment, and we have the know how and the means to destroy a computer very easily. The one thing Mankind is consistently good at is destroying things.
As for transhumanism, it isn't an all or nothing thing. Uploading you mind to the internet is a pipe-dream, and a poorly thought out one at that, even if you were fine with a copy of you living on in your stead you're limiting cyber-you's ability to interact with the world to a crazy degree and you're getting fuck all advantage for it.
In the same vein, lopping off your arms for steamboat piston replacements is both wasteful and a fantastic way of making yourself functionally obsolete in 10 years. It's much more likely that we'll use a combination of biological or genetic modifications to increase standard Human attributes and have implants for people who want to push their bodies to the limit. Why cut your arms off when you can keep them and add micro servos or something to increase your strength?
Personally I think the 'good' end for Humanity will wind up with genetically modified people who are highly resistant to disease, naturally much more physically fit, and far more mentally robust having increased intelligence, faster reflexes, and the like. As for AI, it'll probably develop into a group of discrete systems designed to take over automated and bureaucratic administrations. They won't take over the world, they'll just keep the factories running and make sure the traffic lights change on time. The closest to a smart AI I think Humanity will be comfortable with is simpler personal assistant AIs which exist to manage a person's daily life to remove as much hassle as possible in an increasingly complex world.
My main concern for any of these scenarios is the lack of resources to start over. If civilization ever collapsed but some humans survived, they could eventually repopulate. But we have already mined and extracted all of the natural resources that are easy to extract. Basically if we had to start over from scratch tecnology-wise we'd never be able to because the resources that are left require more and more advanced tools to extract and make use of them. Humanity would be reduced to roving tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers for eternity, never to rise above.
[QUOTE=WhyNott;49924081]Okay, but wouldn't nuclear armagedon also eliminate the ozone layer, rendering any area that's not covered by nuclear winter's dust clouds uninhabitable and unlivable due to UV radiation? Or at least kill all plants that aren't already frozen to death?[/QUOTE]
It would remove as many ozone holes as it would create.
I don't really think AI will be anything like stated in the video. If general intelligence is ever created, -which is a huge if-, it won't be anything like humanity. Humanity's functioning, consciousness, and emotion is based on a discrete neural framework, the brain. AI's won't be anything like this unless they're literally modeled off the human brain, in which case they wouldn't have the ability to invent super tech and magically manage the entire human race.
The nature of AI depends on the methods used to create it. People say it'll be godlike, or something out of our realm of imagining, but I don't really think so. We've yet to really create anything as organized and complex as the human brain even in raw complexity; creating a self-improving framework that can understand the world and improve itself in ways more potent than the human brain seems a far stretch, for now.
[QUOTE=Intoxicated Spy;49895648]Should of posted this one [video=youtube;F6SrOpYT6lw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6SrOpYT6lw[/video][/QUOTE]
i keep watching the last 5 seconds over and over and im honestly in tears
[QUOTE=Ardosos;49929947]My main concern for any of these scenarios is the lack of resources to start over. If civilization ever collapsed but some humans survived, they could eventually repopulate. But we have already mined and extracted all of the natural resources that are easy to extract. Basically if we had to start over from scratch tecnology-wise we'd never be able to because the resources that are left require more and more advanced tools to extract and make use of them. Humanity would be reduced to roving tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers for eternity, never to rise above.[/QUOTE]
Nah, it'd just take a little longer.
I mean it wasn't coal that was responsible for the industrial revolution. By the time the first steam trains appeared about half of all motive power was from wind or water.the industrial revolution in Britain would have taken place even without coal
[editline]14th March 2016[/editline]
If railways hadn't been invented, then the America of the year 1900 wouldn't be much different in terms of prosperity from its real life counterpart
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