Here is an interesting fact.
Orville Wright 1903. Fisrt powered flight in a heavier than air machine.
Neil Armstrong 1969 First man to walk on the moon.
A gap of 66 years. Yet they could have actually met each other, their lives overlapped. I find that staggering.
Where do you think we will be in another 50 years?..Mars?..
If we is humanity, I still think we will be on this planet,
if we is the U.S. I think we will be occupying more of the middle east.
If we is you and me, then I am sorry, we hare no future
i occassionally think about this myself when reading about history. since the late 1800’s the industralized nations thave made such massive leaps and bounds in technology and sciences. yet the last couple decades sometimes seem pretty dull to me. i’m not sure if that is because when you see and live something everyday you don’t notice the changes. like watching your kid grow up and all the inches they get taller blur together yet a friend who hasn’t seen them in a year will be shocked.
yes, we’ve had the internet and genetic advancements in the last few years. do these compare in their quality to the quantity of advance that happened in the early 1900’s?? it seems to me that we are moving along more slowly than ever before. even in the 1980’s people were expecting us to be living on other planets by now. yet here we sit. at this rate, by 2100 are we destined to be where we currently? maybe we’ll have better internet and better gene therapy, but will we have new advancements?!
how about aids and cancer?
We have solved so many illnesses that killed thousands in the past, with all the medical technology, why haven’t we solved this one.
How much funding does aids and cancer studies get, does anyone know?
Cancer is incredibly difficult to solve because it isn’t monolithic. While many cancers share certain similarities (for example, in 90% of leukemia, Stat3 is constitutively active) but every type of cancer is certainly distinct, and even within the sub-types, every cancer is as unique as the individual with it.
On top of that, it is important to remember that the cancer isn’t an alien entity in the body – it is the patient. It is very difficult to destroy something in the patient’s body without destroying the patient since they are, functionally, one-and-the-same.
AIDS is a different story, it just mutates incredibly quickly (the reverse transcriptase is very sloppy) so it is literally changing faster than we can keep up with! Humans may be evolution’s darling because we can effect changes to our condition without the tyranny of reproduction – but good ol’ genetic mutation can still give us a run for our money sometimes!
Sometimes? I think not! Don’t get me wrong I love the quote but the genetic mutation is what keeps use in order. If not for that what would? Every population has a carrying case, why, humanity, are no exception. Speaking of cool quotes, I quote the James bond villain that had a weird fetish for the ocean:
“Why does man look to explore the stars when almost 80% of his plantet is unknown to him”
Or something like that.
In 50 years I don’t know were we will be. Maybe we will build a giant computer, with memory big enough to calculate the meaning of life? I am not sure how many of you live in the U.S.A, but N.A.S.A is still having a hard time getting people into space. Space tourism is getting popular, uh what else… “Planet” is getting a new nick-name, our solar system might go beyond 12 planets, How exciting, that’s all I got for now but I am sure some other person can come up with something…
-Guy
Just some clues: the years from 1900 to 1970 were an exceptional quirk of rapid advancments of the simpler things. Now to advance requires alot more effort, the easy things have been done (TV, space travel, etc.).
Advancments now are very problematic from a moral-philosophical point of view. How much should we engineer genetics ? How much should we modify our own neural networks and brains ? How much should we put on the internet etc.
The myth of linear progress up to the utopistic “hippies” is gone. Now we live in a quirky world full of odd contradictions and random connections between things. I think the idea of progress is obsolete and no longer valid. We live in a random quirky world with no direction. Who on earth would have thought Religion would be so important in the year 2000 ???
Just an example, but we may even end up back to the middle ages and even forget how to do science and technology. Maybe in the year 2300 we will be more primitive than the ancient romans…
That remains to be proven. The evidence (objective, scientific evidence I mean) for Armstrong walking on the moon is weak.
I don’t.
The presumption of progress is the most dangerous dogma in all of scientific philosophy, yet almost every scientist subscribes to it without a single question in their head.
Like I keep saying - there’s no conclusive difference between science and religion.
Where do I think we’ll be? Nuclear war, or a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Gee thanks SIATD for being such an optimist. Can I ask what evidence there is that he DID walk on the moon, however weak it may be?
moon pies
-Imp
here is my prediction,
we (16 nations) keep using huge sums of money to keep building the international space station (instead of investing it here on this planet) and then as soon as it is completed, some astroid comes a long and then all the money, research and effort will be just as Imp said . . . moon pies.
I like star crunch more than moon pies. The carmel and crispy rice is the selling point
Mostly agree. Worldwide, companies have billions of dollars stashed away not knowing what to do with it. If science-technology were so promising you would see loads of research institutes and programs and huge demand for science people. The opposite is true. It is no longer viewed as it was in the 70s and 80s. That means there is little to discover or little to profit from science anymore.
The real directions are when we start manipulating genetics and embryos and opening our own brain - minds and manipulating all the circuits in our head. But then we will be in a twilight zone not knowing where we are anymore. Is the modified brain something valid ? Who judges - measures who, the modified brain the “normal” ones or viceversa ? How far can we manipulate our brains-virtual reality ? Should we add some chips in our heads ? Some wild chemicals ? what is the limit ? Where does reality end or start ?
we will probably go down this semi-twilight zone for a while, and then there will arise a moven’t to go back to the “good old days.” And then it will reverse the other way around. Humans love to believe in utopia’s, and then go after them.
Just as i thought SIATD cant back up what he says about there being weak evidence for the moon landing…were you just spouting SIATD or can you prove me wrong?
There are many conspirers out there that think America never set foot on the moon, I am not one of them, however I will present information of what I know.
The moon photos are fuzzy, so is the film, but my parents say they saw the landing in clear high definition, or at least to that time.
The crew of the Apollo never mentioned stars, but planets were frequently mentioned.
Would you be excited, if you landed on the moon for the first time? I would, yet the astronauts weren’t hugging each other, or shooting champagne into space. They didn’t even, when hey got out, look up at the sky or down on the grown, or test to make sure the moon wasn’t cheese.
Also wouldn’t the golf ball they smuggled aboard explode in the vacuum of space? Or pop in the varying tempters of the moon?
And finally wouldn’t the astronauts fear for their lives when stepping on to the moon…I mean there suits weren’t tested before…
Then again…
How in hell would we hide such a thing from the world? The Russians would have tried to use it against use by now. They have actually taking pictures from the surface of the moon too.
Maybe the moon isn’t all to thrilling?
The first astronauts were crazed with boredom and wanted out.
Playing golf on the moon was one of the astronauts dream and had a special space ball™ made.
-Guy6870
It depends on the ability of the science community, as in dealing with envy and greed. Do they want to keep making dollars on dead end theories or will they open it up to the truth? I say they don’t open up and that means a small number of people will develop the concepts and separate themselves. This may or may not be good for humanity but I think it’s the only way.
Traveling to the moon had a lot of symbolic value, but it didn’t do much good for anyone down here. If the Cold “War” would still be ongoing, humans probably would have visited Mars a long time ago just for show. I don’t see much benefit in space travel myself, I guess it’s a fun pastime but not real progress for humanity. We should probably solve terrestrial problems before aiming at real space colonization, indeed I think it is unlikely that humans will survive long enough to colonize anything more unless we can create a peaceful society at home first.
Just try to imagine what the odds are of humans surviving the next 1000 years when we will soon be able to build weapons strong enough to nuke the hole planet to dust? Current nuclear weapons may not be powerful enough, but there will certainly be “progress” in this area as well as soon as the right leaders get power. These questions have receded to the background in the past 30 years because the world system has been relatively peaceful, but would you really expect this peace to last for the next 100 years? 1000 years? I say technological development is great, but without some major political and cultural changes it will be a short swansong.