I fully expect that we will have to deal with extreme discrimination against thins like sentient custom-designed species (chimeras/furries) and artificial intelligence, possibly even within my lifetime. The arguments will be that, since they are not humans, and are not god's chosen subjects, they obviously have no souls, so it's ok to enslave or kill them. Religious fundamentalists and conservatives have to hate something...

It wasn't because "it made sense," it was because our particular species of ape migrated to the grass plains for whatever reason, and had to rely more on running around than jumping around branches and hanging on trees. Long tails between our butt cheeks made running a tad inconvenient, and only gave predators something to grab on to.

Actually we don't. It could have happened billions of times, in millions of puddles around the world, and just died out before it could get anywhere.

I have a feeling the counterstrike heads of today don't have the muscle to pick up an AK-47, let alone run around with it.

I could see this being a non-fiction book some day

I doubt it  If only because it wuld take him or eer to get back to you even if you asked 

I think you are getting trolled. Atheists don't care enough about any values to actually go out ad kill someone. They just want Christians to leave them alone

Another request. Can we use an innovative financial instrument to donate to a charity that focuses on innovative finance?

From Vanessa


This charity was actually introduced to us by DavidBAL, who found out about us at the Amsterdam conference, and was also at the Atlanta conference.
The first thing I notice, though, is that they don't have a donation page. Hmmm 

If you are talking about an extremely technologically advanced world, where jobs are being rapidly replaced by technology (and where things like taxation and regulations of goods and information are nearly impossible), then concepts like EU or US would no longer exist.

Reading through this thread, one thing that is completely missing is the notion of human technological evolution. Everyone keeps mentioning AI as some separate thing that will take over, when a much more likely scenario will be that humans will augment themselves with AI, in the same way that we have been augmenting our math skills with calculators, and our general knowledge wth google. Who knows, maybe later on in the future we will be able to augment ourselves with technology that lets us generate portable electricity, and augment our bodies with technology that lets us generate portable protein and vitamins (some custom created bacteria that replicates wildly under sunlight for example). At that point, your need for food will be mostly taken care of, and your need to be knowledgeable, skilled, and creative will be taken care of as well. Even now, software developers don't need to rely on knowing everything there is to know about programming syntax, or cary huge books with programming references. They just need to understand the concepts of computer logic, and everything else regarding the actual specifics of programing are just a google search away.

Didn't we switch from transistor dencity to multiple cored running in parallel a while ago, so that performance can still continue to double simply by increasing the amount of work we can do at the same time?


Ah, I wasn't aware of that (I'll take your word for it though). We do have some nanotech developments in diamond-based cores that can run stably at 1,000C+ temperatures, and some rudimentary light-based processors. Maybe those will become more common as we start to reach a limit, and cheaper as we end up needing them more and more.

I'm pretty sure the fault there was not exponential growth of technology, but rather extreme delays by a certain ASIC manufacturer, which made it impossible to predict when and how many new miners would be released on the market. Much of the negative ROI nowadays is coming from preorders that are just now being filled.

I find this quote from the article puzzling: "Unfortunately, I’ve haven’t seen the tech giants who’ve colonized the neighborhood do much to give back."

Aren't the appartment owners, who actually own the apartments and property in the area, earning much more, now that their rental properties are paying them more a month? How is that not giving back?


The useless population won't be able to pay for army or police. Army and police work for a paycheck, too.


I didn't bring up Russia, but Russia is a place where people have been brainwashed into socialism and subservience for almost a century, and most people who weren't got the hell out way back in the late 80's/early 90's. So Russia is a horrible example of everything that's horrible.

Why not? Why can't mechanics alone explain what is it that I am sensing and describing to myself?

Because their style of life, consumption, and reproduction does not require them to fly? They went the run fast and be big enough to fight things off route, instead of the fly away route. Plus they are not carnivores, and birds evolved from carnivorous dinos that needed to swoop down on top of their prey.

Oh yeah, don't forget Russia's recent rise to infamy as being extremely anti-gay, with gays being beaten, killed, and when protesting, arrested despite being the ones who got assaulted. Why? Because after the fall of USSR, the church ended up taking power. Russia is basically becoming a Christian extremist nation.

Don't forget, we are actually actively trying to kill them there. And that still doesn't prove one way or another whether the christian nucases would go on a killing spree if they weren't concerned about the law coming down on them. They are quite vocal and supporting about stoping abortion by any means, after all.



Yeah, no, not that one. More like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBT_people_in_the_United_States#Violent_acts_against_LGBT_persons and even that is still a short lits. Used to be I would read about some gay person being beaten or killed almost every months just maybe 5 to 10 years ago. Typically people doing this are christian religious extremists.


That's true. They wait until we cross into their borders before shooting at us, unlike US military going into other countries, or the mexican border patrol rednecks taking potshots are illegals.


Are you sure about that? I'm not saying that all, or even the majority, of Christians are like that, but some of the religious zealotry out there (that has been caught on tape even) is downright scary 


I will concede, Christian extremists are not AS crazy, insane, violent, and righteously-murderous as Muslim extremists. They are only somewhat crazy, insane, violent,  and murderous. (glad the KKK is almost gone, but we still have nutcases like the guy in Norway 2 years ago)

Consciousness likely evolved in gradual stages as well. To survive, animals have to be aware of their surroundings, of where their own limbs and bodies are, of things happening to and inside of their bodies (pain, illness, etc), and to predict where things will go in the short term, either to catch prey, or to avoid predators. Just from that you have all the basic building blocks of self awareness.

The Hadron Colider doesn't actually create anything. It's a large sensor that senses stuff happening in our universe, or things our universe is composed of. Essentially, "30 years of man made effort, $6 billion in materials and labour, the worlds greatest scientific minds to create" a really damn good microscope, which was able to see things come from nothing.

Did you know black holes form all around us all the time too? We don't notice them, because they are too tiny, burn out too quickly, and exist for too short a period of time for us to notice them (like, tiny fractions of a nanosecond). We could use things like the Hadron Colider to detect them, but that doesn't mean they exist only in its tube. They're everywhere... o.o

Penguins used to have wings, but have evolved them into more like fuzzy flippers instead, since in their environment they get more food by "flying" under water than flying through the air. If you ever get a chance to see them doing that at a zoo, do it. They are quite amazing to watch.




Species evolved through random genetic mutations, which were selected by their environment (viable mutations reproduced, bad mutations died off). Birds, mamals, and reptiles all came from the same fish ancestors. Insects came from crustasians like crabs and trilobytes. Plants came from seaweed, which came from algae. All three of those classes came from complex sponges and from single-celled organisms, some photosynthetic in nature, some predatoreal. Those came from even more basic single-cell life, which came from proto-life consisting of very basic proteins, which was created in gasy bubbly pools of water, mud, geothermal activity (volcanoes), and air. Those things came from planet Earth, which formed when dust clouds from a prior star (or a number of stars) congealed with gravity to form the big round balls we call planets, and the giant ball of gas we call the sun. Of those previous stars, some were formed from the most basic element hydrogen, and some were formed from more complex elements, but their enormous pressure and fusion was what transformed the basic elements and gasses into the more heavier elements, like calcium, carbon, iron, oxygen, sillicon, and other elements that we and our planet are made of. Those stars, in turn, were formed from gravity pulling together very basic elements which originated from the big bang, which until recently was theorized to have come from nothing. When measuring the mass of the universe by observing how things move and gravitate around each other, we discovered that the parts we are able to see only make up half of the universe. The theory was that our universe is composed of matter that we can see (electrons around protons) and anti-mater which we can't (protons around electrons) which nonetheless has gravitational mass, and that our universe is composed of equal parts matter and anti-matter. As such, if you take all of the stuff in universe and put it together, it will all cancel each other out (matter canceling out anti-mater), meaning our universe is still technically a sum of nothing. The theory also claimed that an event that can spontaneously create a bunch of matter and antimater (in exactly equal parts so as to maintain that "energy can not be created or destroyed") could happen randomly, at any time, completely on its own. This theory was completely confirmed with the Large Hadron Colider, when we observed exactly that happening many times on a tiny scale - essentially numerous tiny big bangs creating mater and antimater, popping spontaneously into existance - though they were too tiny to survive in our already existing universe.

So, there's your answer. A big sum of nothing spontaneously popped into existence out of nothing.