Sorry but "will mankind be doomed (physically/morally) by continous scientific advancement 100 years from now?" and "will the harmful effects of tech cancel out the beneficial effects say 100 years" are two very different things.

The first one is judgemental - you made a conclusion of doom. The second one is not - I make no conclusion about doom.

This is a PhD segment of LYN and if the terms are too difficult for anyone or if anyone finds it offensive, they need not join in the thread. Simple as that.

Come now, Beastboy. You do not seem like the type that cant take a critique. Take it as constructive crtiticism. Let it pass and mosey along.

Man when corner will do the best but it does not mean they will succeed. General Custer at Big Horn, Jim Bowie at Alamo ... They we impressive battle but they did not survive.

No worries faceless, I'm cool.

Yup, people can and sometimes do fail when pushed. I never underestimate survival instincts where people will fight to the death to survive (get the irony? lol...)

It does not matter wheather a rock fell down and wipe them out or lacking food. It has to come to an end for a new begining. If the end is by clobering each other, then so be it. Again I see the pause to be a warning for use to come to realisation. Time to embrace love and reject hate if we want to live longer. We can delay it but the end will come. Lack of resources or whatever reasons, the end will come.

Aha... could this where religion adds an evolutionary value becoz religion is all about embracing love etc?

But wait, who am I kidding.... much of today's wars are religious wars, lol...

Think of it a religion if you want. Confucius is a stateman. He was not deemed as a religious leader like Buddha. He propagate "Love Thy Neighbour" to his countrymen. They issue here is hate being the factor that caused the need to clobber each other. If we are to look beyond this hate we need the opposite.

Religion did try to solve that issue with these:

Part of Chritian 10 Commandments
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Buddhist 5 precepts
I abstain from killing.
I abstain from taking what is not given.
I abstain from sexual misconduct.
I abstain from false speech (lying, gossip, etc)
I abstain from taking intoxicants.

Taoism and Confucianism
Filial piety
Love thy neighbour
etc.

I picked the ones that didn't involve "worshipping."

Well its been a few thousand years & nothing seems to work. The bodies pile up and the doomsday clock keeps on ticking...

The teachings are there a long time ago does not imply that people are practising it all along. People are materialistic and self seeking. These concepts just do not appeal to them. The question now is if these concept been practise by the majority since Shi Huang Ti, would China been a different civilisation. A civilazaion that had managed to close the gap of technology and wisdom?

Yup, that's the question and without any live precedents, its hard to speculate. What we can do though is map a timeline of civilizations, find out what caused the deltas and extrapolate a conclusion. A civilization may be in any of these states:

1. Low wisdom, low tech
2. Low wisdom, high tech
3. High wisdom, low tech
4. High wisdom, high tech

We evolved from the dark ages (#1) to #2, where we are today.

We are seeing some instances of #3 in secluded communities of the religious, like a monastery.

I have seen some instances of #4 like the blackberry-weilding, internet-surfing monk I met the other day.

But these occur in negligible numbers. To jump from #2 to #4 on a massive scale I think would be impossible, not without a complete rebuild that can only happen from the complete destruction of #2. Sometimes its best to restart from scratch after being a little bit wiser, like when jumping from MS-DOS to Windows 7. Perhaps that's the function that wars try to serve after plagues and viruses fail to kill us.

So from that standpoint, self destruction could have an evolutionary value to humans in how it enables a quantum leap to #4, provided a few of us survive armageddon. Would that sound reasonable?

Edit:

Vulcan mythology depicts this scenario:



Source: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan_history

So it was the push of pain rather than the pull of high-flying ideals that brought them to civilization stage #4.



This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 21 2010, 12:40 PM

This is what I expected it to be, initially. After some rethinking, I changed my mind. Technology level is relative. In the early 1900 we dont even know how to build high rise. Yet the Eygptian had build huge pyramids. Technology had regressed in the middle aged from the Eygptian level. Could there already been an armegeddon for the Eygptian that none of their technology survived? It could be the Eygptians today are not the same race that built the pyramid. People just occupied their land after they were wipped out. Lets also revisit the mytical Alantis civilization. If they existed then they had faced the same fate as Eygpt. It seems to me that if you dont heed the warning them is goodbye. Back then it is one civilization die and another civilization takes over. Now the world is almost boarderless. Labour and capital migrate across the boarder more freely. We are looking at the world as a civilization. If an armageddon is due, we could we salvage our current technology. We may have the space to store the info but could we perserve all skills. Likely all willbe loss and any survivor started from scratch.

I agree with this. My personal opinion is that the reason we had 70 years of relative world-wide peace is that the global consciousness of humanity knows the crap we'll face once global thermonuclear war is started. Once the last WW2 veteran is 6 feet underground, all bets are off.

I think we *could* have made the jump to stage #4 after WW2, just that not enough people were effected by it enough to shift their way of thinking to more altruistic purposes.

Smith sorry to disagree. Since Confucius chinese had been taught to be benevolent. In spite of all the life they seen lost through the ages of civil war, the chinese are still self centered. They mind their own business on matters that dont concern them.

I dont think I get you well. Did you mean when the last WWII vetren dies we are ready to jump to #4?

Nope. I meant that when that happens, the chance of global thermonuclear war goes up. Way up.

Yup, I see quantum leaps happening in groups of hundreds but not groups of billions. Too much baggage in the way. Nothing short of a near-ELE (extinction level event) can provide the right conditions for a civilizational reboot. However the remnants need to have preserved enough knowledge to prevent a total decline of the technological curve and be able to hold it there while the wisdom element catches up, which brings us to faceless's opinion:

I'm just guessing here but the loss of knowledge from the Egyptians etc. could simply be due to their bad archiving habits and/or our failure to find the artifacts the data is recorded on. Even if we did find it, would we know how to translate it? Imagine a young survivor child stumbling on a hard drive 100 years after an ELE event. Would he know what to do with it?

The Mayans disappeared after an agricultural disaster going by the forensics of their bone remains. They weren't ready for it. Left nothing but their pyramids behind. We will face the same fate if we didn't prepare for a sudden ELE.

But we've wised up since the Egyptians. We already have a seed ark in the antarctic. We've got archives in underground bunkers. I just hope there's a damn good user guide left for whoever stumbles on these artifacts post-ELE.



This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 21 2010, 07:07 PM

What good is an ark or underground archives without practioners. The skills are important. A carpenter, black smiths, welders, mechanics, ... Well it is like the Noah's Ark issue. Noah had to choose all the different type of animals (He had problems identifing the different species. Evven now taxidermist dont know them all). The show 2012 gives some insight to the criteria of selection. As much as we wanted to select a breed of eugenics, we need some people to do the dirty work.

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Added on May 24, 2010, 2:30 pmOkay I see your point. The old guards is no longer there to remind us.

This post has been edited by faceless: May 24 2010, 02:30 PM

MAD seemed to be a good deterrent to this scenario so far...

What is MAD and what scenerio, lin00b?

MAD = mutually assured destruction.

You are right about arks and underground archives bring pointless without practitioners. One can only hope that in a catastrophic event, if only 'Adam' and 'Eve' survived, one of them had better be a damn good techie and the other wise beyond his/her years.

i have nuke,
u have nuke,
i fire u die,
u fire i die,
i fire u fire,
u fire i fire,
we all die,
so no one fire.

During the cold war, MAD worked as a deterrent becoz despite all the rhetoric, both sides were still rational. Must remember that today, not all nuke nations operate on reason and the danger is actually many times higher.