DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... How Will We Die?

I don't know about the rest of you but I plan on being shot at 105 by a husband jealous I was having relations with his 25 year old wife.

I'm thinkin' you should give more thought to this.

so you have met my wife

if your junk is even still working at that age, i'mma make sure you get a 21 gun salute at your funeral.

I dig graves for a living so I try not to think about it. Gotta die someday, not going to waste my time above ground thinking about it.

Any day above ground is a good day.

Some really good discussion going on here. Sorry if this makes you guys depressed. Just thought we could dive into a new topic and this was the one that I currently just got done writing about for class.

I'll get back to what I think, but finals week is approaching and my time is decreasing. But anyway, back to this article.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

When I retire, I will write the book, it will be turned into a movie, and I will live happily ever after.

It is a subject that has fascinated me for a while, and begins with a simple premise. If good vision allows one to survive, now it is no longer part of the species, and it goes down from there, what about inadvertent mutations that propagate through the human race, and ultimately we become weaker as a species. Yes, we can medically make it right for the person, but is that right for the species?

Trillions of little life forms scattered on billions of little planets across the universe. The space between them prohibitively far. Only a tiny tiny subfraction of those life forms will evolve on a stable enough planet, in a stable enough solar system, around a stable enough star, countless variables aligning 'just so' in their favor to allow them to rise out of the soup and into something that can build beyond itself. Then another great phase of winnowing happens and only another tiny tiny subfraction of those learn how NOT to destroy themselves before they run out of time, before their genetics break down, something naturally catastrophic happens, before they eliminate themselves in one of a billion ways. The clock is ticking.

In all probability we represent a tiny tiny fraction of a possibility in a giant sea of negative outcomes. So is immortality getting off of earth? Spreading our seed outward to other planets? I don't know but that does seem like the string. To move on from here I think will require less sheer luck than what came before. But the hurdle is prohibitively high. The odds are stratospherically stacked against us.

I had an astronomy class in college and the professor kind of crushed dreams on the first day when he was giddily describing that actual nature of distances on the cosmic level. The fastest thing we've ever created, the thing that has traveled farther than anything we've ever built, the voyager 1 is now, 36 years later, just beyond our door step, in 2013 it passed into interstellar space. It's benefited from being strategically whipped by planet after planet's gravitational force in our solar system to a speed of over 35K MPH. At this rate it will get to the closest neighboring solar system in... 77 thousand earth years. Or 72 thousand years longer than all recorded human history. And that just gets us to our closest neighbor which most astronomers believe harbors no inhabitable plants. So... linear travel, that's out. We're basically banking on some kind of advancement, some leap that makes linear travel not so, well, linear. There's a lot of ideas floating around but few take into the consideration just how big the distances really are, how violent and unpredictable it is out there and just how tiny we really are. There's a lot of people a lot smarter than me in the world but that kind of advancement is on the order of nothing we've ever known. But who knows.

I look around and I see us as one of the species that doesn't clear the next hurdle. We're at 7 billion people right now. Some predictions have us at 16 billion by the end of the century. It'll probably level off before that and it'll get ugly at some point. That won't be the end of it but it'll effectively mean the end in sight IMO. We simply don't, as a species, embrace balance and coordination with our environment. That's not some hippy crap, it's a fact. We really believe that we can do what ever we want and the planet will just absorb it and nothing will really change. Unless we embrace, on a cellular level the idea that we need to preserve what we have we will simply run the clock out on ourselves. The oceans will have some sort of acidic die off or we'll experience some sort of atmospheric shift that we won't be able to adapt to quickly enough and that'll be it inside of a few decades. It'll probably be a combination or knock-on kind of thing and we'll wise up when we're 175 years down the water slide already.

I suspect if we somehow thread the needle and our grand kids 1526 generations down the line are able to look at a wide swath of life forms on many planets they'll see many many more that burn themselves out than those that also threaded the needle. I'll bet space is lousy with dead planets that used to have a thriving something or another happening there. Just a hunch on how the whole whirligig works.

The wild card of course is some natural catastrophic thing. An asteroid or something similar. We've been very lucky for a long long long time but that doesn't really mean anything. You flip a coin a hundred times and get heads every time, what are the odds of it landing tails on the 101st time? 50/50. Tails can come, or not, at any time.

In the meantime, check this out for some "wow" perspective:
http://www.scoopwhoop.com/news/wow-nasa/

I think our species will suffer an extreme food and water shortage, and another mass plague like the black death, due to over-population long before we are capable of leaving the planet.

As some senses weaken, others become sharper. Perhaps the percentage of our brain that we currently use, will increase...

Morlocks?

I would never argue that we've had help. But also, I think the human mind can't really comprehend the timescales we are referring to either.

Actually, the weird part isn't that we're alive, it's that we know we're alive.

"Cogito ergo sum".....I think therefore I am.

What good is it to be an alive tree?

Same as a rock.

An Alive tree and sell Rock tickets

by me above: "What good is it to be an alive tree?"

Claymation trees excepted.

Still have yet to write about this due to computer problems. But I did stumble across an article today about improving human eye sight to 60/20.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ocumet...20-20-1.3078257

It really speak to the Kurzeil/Joy idea that soon we'll be more than Humans. This is arguably the most fascinating time to be alive in world history as we might see humans without body mods.

I think we're at DEVO now.

Man will continue to develop more powerful weapons. We'll surely extinguish ourselves.

(username DEVO was/is one of the greatest posters in Browns Board history)

10yr, that echoes my thoughts on the matter, but you expressed them more eloquently than I could have. Thanks

yup.

10 yr's post was pretty much the thread-ender for me.

The robots will kill us.

The zombie robots.

I think we are going to die out because we killed the planet due to emissions, over population, pollution, World war 3 ect...

I am a nerd at heart so I read random stuff. I read that we basically can't improve our space technology to anything that will grant a huge technology leap for interstellar travel. We are limited by the current elements of earth and can't significant improve our rockets. For our species to have a shot we need a interstellar travel to get to Kepler-186 so our species can survive.

I have heard the same crap about over population, starvation and disease my whole life. The one factor no one seems to inject into their dire warnings is Mankind itself!

I remember the wise ones telling us there is no way the world could feed 6 billion people. There wouldn't be enough land to plant enough rice to feed most of the world. Well today we are closing in on 8 billion folks and Mankind has developed, through Genetic Engineering, a rice plant that produces 100 times the previous yield per acre.

This is the next big thing according to Mark Cuban...


If you ask Mark Cuban what the next big thing in technology is, you'll get an answer straight out of a science fiction film.

"I'm invested in a lot of companies related to sensors," Cuban said in Chicago at the iCONIC conference on Tuesday. Whether it's a digital tracker placed on buildings to monitor the surrounding area or a tattoo patch that can analyze chemical structures in the human skin, the future is all about health-care technologies.


He noted that the innovative tech in the pharmaceutical sector is going to be a game changer for the health-care industry and humanity as a whole.

"I've got a 5-year-old son. By the time he's 25, the idea of going to a drugstore and buying over-the-counter medication will seem barbaric," Cuban said. "He's going to say, 'Dad, what do you mean? You bought this medicine and on this over-the-counter-medicine there was a warning that said you might be the one unlucky schmuck that dies from this. And you actually bought it and paid for it?' "

Personalized medicine is the way of the future, according to the billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. New data analytics will aid physicians to better understand their patients' needs and potentially begin to diagnose diseases in earlier stages than traditional methods.

Cuban has invested in companies such as Mobile OCT, which has created a mobile colposcope to help improve cervical cancer detection. He's also financed Electrozyme, which focuses on temporary tattoos that analyze the chemical compounds of sweat, and Validic, a company that makes data collection easier for health-care companies and physicians via mobile health apps and devices.

"You don't live in the world you were born into," he added. Cuban expects that humanity will reach a point in the next few decades where scientists will be forced to rewrite the human genome altogether.

"There is going to be a time 25 years from now that, depending on what happens with global warming or the lack thereof, or however you want to think about it, where we are going to try and reverse engineer evolution and natural selection. We're going to say, since already screwed up or enhanced the Earth, how can we change ourselves in order to match what our environment is going to be?"

Yes, he's talking about genetically modified humans.

"It's already happening," said Cuban. "It's just who makes it work. How do we deal with it? Do we allow it? Do we not allow it? What are the ethics?"

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102695712

-So don't sell us short! Mankind won't be dying off anytime soon cuz there ain't nothing we can't eventually fix.

To be fair, and I'm not a big alarmist.. but a lot of the genetic engineering, hormones, steroids, and other things we are doing to our once natural food may very well be creating a long term crisis for a short term solution..

I find it ironic, and I've seen it on here a few times, people complaining that we aren't having enough babies to sustain ourselves in this country.. they cite the aging population... the only reason you need more babies to support an aging population is if the aging population cannot financially support itself and social security becomes unsustainable..

Fewer babies means fewer people entering the workforce in the future, fewer people entering the workforce means less unemployment, it means higher wages for those workers, why is that not a good thing?

At least in theory.....

DC,

Are you by any chance trying to sell me on the good old, all natural days, before GMO's, Hormones and the like when our average life expectancy was 45-50 years?

Heck, when Social Security was invented, the age for collection was 65 because few people lived that long and they wanted those who did to not die in abject poverty.

We certainly don't need a younger workforce because we have decided to exterminate the future through 55+ Million Abortions. America can't be that stupid.

I'm pretty sure they started pumping our food full of crap well after 1910.... In 1970, life expectancy among men was 67 and women 74...

Life expectancy has risen consistently in this country since data collection started in the late 1800s.. Largely because of safer working conditions, better medical care for children, vaccinations for small pox, diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, measles, polio, etc... I'm pretty sure it's only been in the last few decades that artificial growth hormone and such has been popular among food producers...