"The Human Race Will Come To An End. What's Next?
"The Human Race Will Come To An End. What's Next?
Given evolution’s trajectory, we will almost certainly transform into augmented versions of our current selves. The big question now is, can we survive long enough to become the next humans?"
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/the-human-race-will-come-to-an-end
#transhuman
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/the-human-race-will-come-to-an-end
Given evolution’s trajectory, we will almost certainly transform into augmented versions of our current selves. The big question now is, can we survive long enough to become the next humans?"
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/the-human-race-will-come-to-an-end
#transhuman
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/the-human-race-will-come-to-an-end
wow. I'd say there are a lot of assumptions made there. Some of us believe in Intelligent Design and I think given Shaper activity, that whole idea of "evolution" should be re-examined.
ReplyDeleteConsider forced evolution, like how we've shaped dogs from the now extinct grey wolf progenitor.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.livescience.com/42649-dogs-closest-wolf-ancestors-extinct.html
Anne Miles The Evolution vs. Creationism discussion is unsolvable. Both are abstract ideas. The first is a description of a "self emergent dynamic process of a complex system that govern it's change" the other a "belief in an external knowable or unknowable force as a the changing force". And that's the crux of then tension between the two - as one is self contained and the other is not. IMHO see the external force theory as being actually a bigger unexplained assumption then any other. At the end it's a matter of belief nothing else. And that's something one cannot prove or disprove. I for one don't have this belief as it's unneeded in my worldview. For each his own.
ReplyDeleteEvolution is testable, but speciation would require a longer time than conventional human lifespan in order to replicate to achieve sufficient sigma. Intelligent Design is not necessarily Creationism, which itself has variants depending on which religion/sect it is grounded in. There are also crossover scenarios, such as the fictional alien intervention in 2001.
ReplyDeleteExcept one has fossils as a base and the other has a book written by humans based on faith.
ReplyDeleteBtw small, tiny, really minuscule correction the previous post from moonfleet .
Evolution is a theory. Not a belief. a scientific theory . please don't mix the 2 concepts. That is actually one of the biggest problems nowadays. Is people calling scientific theories, beliefs.
Jim Lai Evolution as applied to biology/ecology is testable. As an abstract idea it's just is. One can apply it to other fields. For example think of Evolutionary Algorithms. IMHO Intelligent Design is in principle the same as Creationism. As to to what is depicted in 2001 - personally i don't interpret it as a crossover scenario. It's still evolution, though there is another force meddling in it which are aliens... that's all.
ReplyDeleteWithout reading this I'm gonna throw this out there; Birds are the next dominant species. Another great extinction and fast forward a few million billion years and birds have diverged into everything. Heck, check out how they breathe... efficient much? Yes they are, and it fits with evolutionary progression of hearts and circulatory systems from insects to fish to reptiles, then humans and wow check out what dinosaurs turned into....
ReplyDeleteI think they're spread across the globe and fill enough niches to diversify into entire eco-systems should another great extinction occur.
Mammals fall, birds diverge to fill the niches in similiar way to mammals after cretaceous... fast forward long run and voila sentient bird people rule the world.
Hugo Neves Thanks for clarifying. I can see how I could be misinterpreted. I actually didn't mean that it's a matter of belief in one or the other. Rather that it's a matter of the one having (or needing) "belief" in "external force" vs. not needing "belief" as a a basis for a worldview.
ReplyDeleteJason Keyworth Birds already were the dominant species. They evolved from dinosaurs. I think they had enough though and decided they rather roam the skies... :-)
ReplyDeletemoonfleet Oh my gosh you are correct. They are the sneaky come back kings though... we gotta watch out. They're all cute and hopping around now but one day they'll be mega again. The coolest thing would be if then bats were all 'we're gonna take over the skies' and THEY evolve an analogous oxygen efficiency and then another mass extinction for the future birds and we have a chance at mammalian comebacks.
ReplyDeleteREH wrote stories involving serpent men. HPL wrote of a pre-human reptilian race.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Men
I wrote my own story about a Saurian race that way back when saw extinction coming set up a subterranean culture that lived off geothermal power with genetically engineered subterranean ecosystems to provide food and oxygen, while another branch of their race took to space.
ReplyDeleteSentient life apparently doesn't need a long time to do a hell of a lot. Check out how long we've been 'human' and all that we've done. Arguably we could vanish tomorrow and leave very little behind to show we were here within a few million years.
Meanwhile, don't underestimate birds.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/6450/20140327/crows-smart-seven-year-old-child-researchers-find.htm
Quote: The New Caledonian crows are known to be good at tool making. These birds are also good at solving problems.
I'm unaware of experiments to determine if crows are adept at decoding passcodes, unfortunately.
(moonfleet My Doctor Who fandom came later but yeah I saw that we both wrote the same thing. Cultural echos much? recursion..? Nah my story was more about human reaction to the revelation on a small family scale)
ReplyDeleteThe flaw with intelligent design is that it relies on a preexisting intelligence but gives no explanation for where that came from. Evolution is demonstrable as a biological process, but likewise offers no explanation of how the first life came to exist. There was that experiment decades ago in which they got amino acids and simple protein chains to form in a simulated primordial ocean, but the chemical composition of the atmosphere in that experiment I was wrong, and when they tried to repeat it with the correct atmosphere, they could not even get the amino acids to form. I'm not trying to suggest that we should adopt a dogmatic "god of the gaps" explanation, but the fact is, we presently have no explanation that holds up under any scientific scrutiny.
ReplyDeleteJim Lai thank you, there's some really good information in there that, as you said, has not yet become common knowledge. Now I am forced to wonder, if there are amino acids in interstellar space, if life may in fact have come from the depths of the void? If so, that would suggest certain interesting things about our universe. For instance, we could expect life to exist, possibly even in abundance, in forms we would biochemically recognize.
ReplyDeleteJim Lai I had thought it was fairly well established that RNA predated DNA, but maybe it just seemed likely to me because it's a somewhat simpler molecular form, and I fell into the (possible) logical fallacy of assuming that simple predates complex.
ReplyDeleteCertainly the notion of life coming to Earth from space is not new to me, being an avid fan of sci-fi. I think it's really cool the mainstream science now has more support for the idea than it used to.
The hypothesized RNA world didn't leave much in the way of fossils, so there's still a lot of room for conjecture. It is, as you say, probable.
ReplyDeleteAgreed that the notion of life originating in space is hardly new, but it's interesting to see a specific scenario proposed extrapolating from some astrogeological evidence.
Jim Lai agreed! I find it particularly interesting to see a plausible scenario for terrestrial life originating on Mars, which has often been speculated, but widely considered implausible until now. Even more fascinating is the possibility that life needed Martian conditions to first form, but then needed terrestrial conditions to thrive or even survive. If intelligent life truly is as rare in our universe as it appears to us so far, that could very well be an explanation for why, if the conditions for life to first occur are completely different then the conditions in which life can evolve the complex forms required for sapience.
ReplyDelete