Duck Goes Moo!

Going back to an earlier post of mine about the extropian movement, a book recently came out called The Singularity is Near that posits that within a few decades we may reach the critical point of biological, nanological, and computational technologies for the creation of computers that transcend human intellegence, allow humans to live forever, eradicate poverty by allowing anything to be artificially constructed cheaply, and bring about a permanent blending of humanity and the technologies it creates.

The author’s name is Ray Kurzweil, and he lives a life very much like those of the extropians, taking hundreds of suppliments a day to slow his aging as much as possible. He claimed on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” that he feels he has not aged much at all in the last 15 years.

With the advances of technology and bio-sciences, humanity is growing ever closer to completely reverse-engineering the million-old technology known as homo sapiens, perhaps soon giving birth to a new species: homo superior.

The idea of a “new man” or cybernetics is one often tied in with Orwellian nightmares and fears of losing that which makes us what we are, our humaness; however, not everyone fears the idea of tinkering with what God blessed us with, some even relish it and see it as humanity’s only hope for true survival and freedom from a certain doom from war, famine, and the “de-humanization” of free will by our more animalistic desires.

The Extropians were originally about finding ways to live forever, but as the movement has grown it has come to embrace new ideas about modifing humanity to cure it of its ills and suffering as well as escaping the grave. They do not fear modern bio-science but view it as their savior, the doorway to a new way of life not limited by our biological faults.

This is all part of a growing movement called Transhumanism, which is not neccessarily a new concept but is quickly becoming more and more of an issue as the lines between science and science fiction blur.

Once back in 1924 two scientists, namely Satyendranath Bose and Albert Einstein, brought forth the idea that atoms could be bound together to form a structure that acted as a single atom. This conceptual structure became known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, which was first created in a lab in 1995 at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

Research on BECs, plus our growing knowledge of dark matter and dark energy, has continued since then and is beginning to change the way we view the mechanisms behind how subparticles come together to form matter and the properties there-in. Could this spell the end of the classic Periodic Table of Elements?

WikiPedia Entry

Physics Web Article

An extreme case of sexual conflict has been unearthed in the little fire ant Wasmannia Auropunctata. Queens produce sterile workers by sexual reproduction, but all new queens are produced clonally. This potentially reduces male reproductive success to zero but in an apparent response, males thwart queens by eliminating the female genome during brood development. Sons therefore have nuclear genomes identical to those of their father: they too are clonally produced. This remarkable reproductive system effectively results in a complete separation of the male and female gene pools.

Men, having trouble finding a ballroom dancing partner or fear actual human contact? Then Tokhuro University has the answer for you: the Partner Ballroom Dance Robot, or PBDR fpr short. She is designed to perfectly follow the movements of a real dance partner and comes in hot pink and pastel blue.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/06/07/robots.ballroom/index.html

Medical Scientists in Britain have discovered a way to help a patient with advanced liver failure survive without transplantation of a donor’s liver. They have taken stem cells found in the patients bone marrow and used them to help the liver regrow into a healthy one.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/841932.stm

This makes me wonder if perhaps the body sometimes creates and releases stem cells naturally. Maybe this has something to do with the placebo effect.

http://skepdic.com/placebo.html

Through the use of advanced imaging technologies, scientists have no been able to reveal the writing on ancient papyrus scrolls orginally believed to be irretrievable. Now a whole new view of our ancient history has become available to us. Plays by Sophocles and Euripides, poems by Parthenios, details of the events leading to the Trojan War by Homer, and possibly even lost gospels.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

From the 05/09/1999 “They Saved Lisa’s Brain” episode of “The Simpsons”:

LISA: “Principal Skinner, how’s your transportation project coming?”

SKINNER: “Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they’re running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it’s the dawn of a new enlightenment.”

As funny as this scene was, I actually rather like the idea:

http://zapatopi.net/metrictime.html

I think going on metric time would be a great, though of course the adjustment would be difficult. If it were ever to happen it would take quite some convincing of the majority of the human populace. Perhaps the E.U. would be the first to adopt it, or maybe Iceland.

The land of Bjork is rather progressive. Iceland is trying to become completely fossil fuel independant by 2050, an admirable goal for any nation, though perhaps easier for a smaller sized nation unlike the United States.

Still, I hope we do start pressing harder for non-fossil fuels in this nation soon, though with the current administration that might not be so probable (can you guess I’m a liberal?).

I must note that I do have some concerns about these supposidely “clean” energy sources. Hydrogen production and distribution on a massive scale might lend to more and more hydrogen being released into the atmosphere, potentially being worse in the end than the current air pollution. Also, harnessing the power of the wind or the sun takes energy out of the ecosystem, perhaps altering climates and causing harm in other ways.

Not that I am against non-fossil fuels, just thinking that there’s no such thing as a completely clean source of energy, but solar and air power are most likely far better for the world than burning dead dinosaurs.

One last post before I go to sleep. Here is a really interesting article in Wired magazine that talks about how attributes we normally assign to living organisms are showing up in modern technologies:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/machines.html

There is also this article about micro-machines that have a metal skeleton but real organic material which grew over it to form living robots:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4181197.stm

And, finally, scientists have successfully isolated Gene Simmons:

(note: joke stolen from “The Onion”)