Topic: On the meaning of life and the long-term merits of technologic improvement - page 2. (Read 23683 times)

God gave us what we needed to make technology, we decided to make weapons out of the materials God gave us.

You can't always blame God for the choices of man.

God gave us noses, but some use it to sniff cocaine. Is that God's fault?





What Satan gives man appears to be good but it's rotten at its core.

If you want to kill a rat, you get a nice piece of steak and sprinkle a tiny amount of rat poison on it, isn't that so?



God tries to save us from ourselves the same way you would save your toddler from hurting himself.

God is far more intelligent than we are, creation attests to that.

Actually, Bakunin, writing about the tree of knowledge, makes satan the hero and god the villain.

Satan (assuming the form of the talking snake) is the one that tries to teach humans, giving us access to knowledge.

God is the one that tries to keep us ignorant and expels us from paradise for becaming what we are, sapiens.

Hahaha. I agree with this. Whenever good thing happen theist people say "it's the work of god" but when there's horrible event happened people says "That's the work of Satan" like they never knew all things is because of God's divine plan.

The fate of the Universe

 I already posted about the beginning of the Universe and wrote also on its end. Let me add something more on it (it’s not my field).


The consensus about the fate of the Universe is moving into the Big Rip or the Big Chill. And that is good, since the Big Crunch would be the worst of the scenarios.

The precise numbers change from author to author, but the numbers about the composition of the Universe are more or less around these:

Normal stuff: 4.9% (the numbers go around 4.6 and 4.9%: mostly, 4%, are hydrogen and helium; with stars amounting to about 0.5% and neutrinos for approximately 0.3%).

Dark matter: 25% (the estimations oscillate between 22% and 27%).

Dark energy: 70% (the opinions swing between 66% and 73%).

See, accessible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Contents https://www.spacetelescope.org/science/composition_of_universe/ http://space.about.com/od/astronomybasics/a/Composition-Of-The-Universe.htm

This composition changed during the life of the Universe. It seems that dark energy has been gaining preponderance.

Clearly, now it is this energy that is controlling the Universe.

Basically, the specialists only know well regular matter. They know little about dark matter and know almost nothing about dark energy.

It’s known that dark matter responds to gravity and constitutes the back bones of the Universe, around which galaxies are formed (with a strong help from black holes, since every galaxy seem to have one on its centre).

So, dark matter is what keeps galaxies united.

However, what is controlling things now is dark energy and it has the contrary effect. This energy is pulling apart galaxies.

It seems that some time ago the velocity of the expansion of the Universe was decreasing.

But, currently, the Universe is expanding faster, because of the increase of dark energy.

Therefore, once, the Universe was dominated by dark matter, but now is controlled by dark energy.

The issue is still debated (it depends on the intensivity of dark energy, on the reason for its increase and its rate and possible limit), but now specialists are saying that the galaxies will expand faster and faster.

Some controversial calculations point out for 22 thousand millions years from now as the date of the Big Rip.

In due time, if humankind is still here, our descendents will only see the stars of our galaxy, Milky Way, on the night sky. All the other galaxies will be out of sight.

Then, at about 60 millions before the Big Rip, even our Milky Way will be ripped apart. All solar systems would follow the same path a few months before the final Rip.

On that time, our Solar System won’t probably be here.

Our Sun will start expanding and destroy all life on Earth on one or two thousand million years and will explode on about five thousand million years.

But these are not the only problems, even if the Solar Systems could resist the growing speed of expansion, it’s also confirmed that the Universe is dying.

The number of stars created has been diminishing. One day, the Universe will be a dark place, because, one by one, stars will die and less and less ones will be created.

So, what can kill us first? The Big Rip, caused by the speed of expansion of the Universe, or will it be the Big Chill, provoked by the slow death of the Universe?

From a natural perspective, one or both of these situations seem inevitable.

But no need to feel gloomy about this.

A touch of human magic might be possible.

If we won’t screw up and end destroying ourselves, we know for sure that we shall be very far from this planet and solar system long before the end of the Sun.

And, if we accept the theory of the Multiverse (saying that there are other universes besides this one) we might also find a way out of this Universe long before he fails us.

Michio Kaku argues that it's (theoretically) possible to create a wormhole to another universe.

Nothing like keep hoping for some meaning by dreaming we “can” endure forever (we won’t, because forever never ends).

It was a contractual thing. God gave us freedom in the Garden. We made a deal with the serpent. Of course, the serpent couldn't fulfill his part of the deal. But as long as we don't know that...

The second thing was that God had said that the day that we eat of the fruit, we will die. God in mercy commuted the sentence to a lot longer, because in the form of God and man, Jesus came. Jesus didn't sin, thereby upholding the length of days to the new amounts He gives us.

Jesus was a trust Person in the Garden. God trusted that this new form - the God/man - would uphold godliness when He came. And Jesus did it. So, the authority was given to Jesus, and Jesus commuted the sentence.

Of course, we made the nasty things, but he made the good ones... the usual "peculiar" logic...

Actually, it seems it was the serpent that gave us the ability to develop technology (at least, that is what the "good book" says: the story of the tree of knowledge and the talking snake...) and we were expelled from paradise because of that.

Perhaps He did. I don't know.

He gave us the ability to make technical advancements. He also maintained much of the freedom for us that He always had for us. We made the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

I think we have all technologic improvement because people are never comfortable with what they have right now,
they target is to get something better,to improve every day,to just get better,richer or more popular.
People are greedy,you cannot change human minds.

Therefore, God gave us also nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

The only reason that we have technological improvements is because God felt sorry for us. Entropy is advancing so rapidly that people have neither the stamina or the intelligence to live a decent life without technology. God wasn't ready to bring the universe to an end in the judgement, yet, so He gave us technology to help us with our physical and intellectual weaknesses. But as usual, we reject giving Him the credit for this, just as people have been rejecting giving Him credit for the creation of the universe almost since the Beginning.

People are so depraved.

Good quote. The problem is this terminology isn't consensual and, especially, it's generally ignored. Even specialists publish papers saying that a species from who we most certainly descend, like the Homo Ergaster, are extinct (not pseudoextinct).

Anyway, I prefer outevolved than pesudoextinct.

I wrote evolution is gradual. Being slow or fast are relative concepts. Evolution can be pretty fast, but it's always gradual, because depends on the build up of multiple changes on at least a few generations.

Insular dwarfism is a well know case of fast evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_dwarfism). There are reported cases of major changes on just a few generations: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080310-palau-bones.html

That is made possible by epigenetics. Studies show that if children have a poor nutrition, the boys, when they start producing semen, activate a gene of lower height on their semen. The girls activate the same gene during their gestation, when they produce their ovules.

In short, if the parents had a poor alimentation during the gestation of their children, or, in the case of boys, they were poor nourished during its infancy, their grandchildren shall be of short height.

Actually, poor nutrition during gestation has several other serious consequences on the children and the grandchildren, affecting the lifespan of both generations.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-an-1836-famine-altered-the-genes-of-children-born-d-1200001177

"Transgenerational effects of prenatal exposure to the Dutch famine on neonatal adiposity and health in later life"
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0528.2008.01822.x/abstract;jsessionid=66FCC69C3D042F971C65143D76B50FBC.f02t02
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I think where it is known that one species was replaced by a descendant species is called pseudoextinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoextinction the wiki gives the example of dinosaur and bird species. Problem is it is not always easy to know that is what happened. Or if both descend from a common ancestor or something.


Evolution may not be always so slow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyletic_gradualism is more what you describe. Small changes accumulating over time. And where a species ends and a new starts is not well known. But there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_gradualism don't know if they are more accepted. But those theories say new species appear when drastic changes occur. When members of the species reach a new environment and quickly adapt to it. Or when catastrophes happen for example. This can end in more extinctions and not pseudoextinctions.

I agree that we are all created beings but still our creator, God, gave us freedom and free will to choose our life.
We can live in the harmony with creation and our creator, God, and such way of life will bring us happiness, joy and love, and eternal life in spiritual world.
If we choose not to live according to god's will, our way of life will not bring us happiness, joy and love and we will not have ternal life in spiritual world.

There isn't any sense on classifying as extinct a species (or subspecies) that evolved into another one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction).
Doesn't make sense because the species is still alive, since its descendants are alive.

Also doesn't make sense because since evolution is gradual, it's impossible to mark the exact point where the subspecies was converted into another one, so it's impossible to identify the last individual of it and, therefore, when "extinction" occurred (actually, even the classification of outevolved species is very problematic because of this; think on all the discussions on the classification of certain fossils as Homo Habilis, Homo Rudolfensis or as Australopithecus; as more fossils are found this problem will increase).

Moreover, extinction has terrible consequences that outevolution hasn't.

Being outevolved is inevitable and positive. It means that the species is alive and is adapting itself successfully to its environment.

In contrast, extinction is a catastrophe. It means that the species ended completely and lost any meaning to life (read the OP).

It's absurd to say that the Homo Erectus or the Homo Heidelbergensis are extinct (as we see on most papers on evolution or encyclopedias' articles, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis or at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus), since we, under all accounts (in relation to the Homo Erectus, from his African subspecies, sometimes called Homo Ergaster), descend from them.

It would be preferable to qualify these species that evolved into us as outevolved or something similar. They were outevolved by their own descendants, us, but not extinct.

We could discuss if the Neanderthals can be qualified as extinct, since they didn't evolve into us, rather were absorbed by us, as dominant species, and left only tiny parts (2-4%) of their genes on each one of us that are not from African recent origin.

However, since those 2-4% are not identical, in reality taking in account all traces of their genes on us, it seems more than 20% of their genome is still alive (https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/29/neanderthal-lineages-excavated-from-modern-human-genomes/).

In any case, since we have their genes and, therefore, we are their descendants, even their absorption by us doesn't allow qualifying them as extinct. They are an absorbed species, not a extinct one.

There's 0% luck and 100% of God's creation to be alive.

Even 300 years from now, the technology that uploaded people into pcs will be obsolete and forgotten. But really, there is life after death...

   Enjoy your luck to be alive like if you had a chance on a trillion of quadrillions to be born, since your actual odds were even worst than these.

   Make the most of life like if it was a single drop of water tumbling on your thirsty lips on an infinite desert.

   Value every day of it as if you were on a death row, because you are; you just have a wonderful cell and no one told you yet when it's going to be your turn.

More news on fighting aging:

Scientists create mice with hyper-long telomeres without altering the genes
"The cells with hyper-long telomeres in these mice appear to be perfectly functional. When the tissues were analysed at various moments (0, 1, 6 and 12 months of life), these cells maintained the additional length scale (they shortened over time but at a normal rhythm), accumulated less DNA damage and had a greater capacity to repair any damage. In addition, the animals presented a lower tumour incidence than normal mice."
"The next step that the CNIO Telomeres and Telomerase Group is already working on will be to "generate a new species of mice in which the telomeres of all the cells are twice as long as those in normal mice", explain Blasco and Varela. "Then, we will be able to address some of the important questions that remain unanswered: would a mouse species with telomeres that are double in length live longer?"
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-06-scientists-mice-hyper-long-telomeres-genes.html

Less relevant:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v530/n7589/full/nature16932.html
Naturally occurring p16Ink4a-positive cells shorten healthy lifespan

No need to wait 500 years. Things might be going faster than what I expected on fighting aging.

This was old news, but a remarkable achieving:

On 2012, a telomerase genetic therapy was able to successful rejuvenate mice.

According to a scientific paper, the treatment "had remarkable beneficial effects on health and fitness, including insulin sensitivity, osteoporosis, neuromuscular coordination and several molecular biomarkers of aging. Importantly, telomerase-treated mice did not develop more cancer than their control littermates (...). Finally, telomerase-treated mice, both at 1-year and at 2-year of age, had an increase in median lifespan of 24 and 13%, respectively".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22585399 (abstract)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494070/ (full text)

But this is more recent:

On September, 2015, the CEO of a genetic company (well, she just used what was discovered by others) took the same therapy. She went to Colombia to escape American regulations.
She is still alive (https://www.facebook.com/BiovivaSciences) and is claiming that the telomeres of her white blood cells increased from 6.71kb on September 2015, before her took the therapy, to 7.33kb (http://bioviva-science.com/2016/04/22/promising-results-from-the-first-human-gene-therapy-against-aging/).

This allegation can be explained by different means:

a) She didn't take any gene therapy, her telomeres still have the same length (the increase is decisive to allow cell multiplication) and this is just a publicity scheme (trying to get some desperate customers).

b) She indeed took it, but the therapy is armless (and worthless) or, at least, armless on the short-term, and her telomeres still have the same length.

c) The increase on her telomeres is accurate (she claims she made an independent measure of her telomeres before taking the treatment), the treatment is safe and positive and things will move way faster than what was expected.

A reasonable account can be read here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542371/a-tale-of-do-it-yourself-gene-therapy/
Also http://www.geekwire.com/2016/bioviva-liz-parrish-reports-progress-controversial-gene-quest-reverse-aging/

I agree with you. I also think that in the future humans are capable to travel trough time. Maybe humans have some teleportation machines too that can be used in travelling from one country to another.