Leader Bee

Okay if natural selection only selects the most beneficial mutations to the organism

Natural Selection doesn't select the most beneficial mutations for an organism it just appears so because that RANDOM mutation happens to be beneficial and hence more of the organisms that develop this trait survive, due to it being beneficial.

Evolution does not discriminate between good or bad, it is indifferent and an equal amount of mutations that are detrimental can occur - you just don't see many antelope with 3 inch legs because it makes it difficult to run away from the lions.

whats wrong with Sven?

 

Because according to everyone else i'm anything but...

I get Stephen, Spen, Ben, Spence, Spencer "Suh-ven" and even Seven.

On occassion I do get "Oh as in Goran Erricson?!" which at least means they know how to pronounce it.

I don't even bother correcting anyone on the phone at work anymore as I usually have to repeat my name 3 or 4 times and the whole office turns to watch me.

On the bright side it means I don't have people calling the office for me and I can quietly get on with my work without those interuptions.

Merged post follows:

Ah, young warrior, many people don't like their first names, or rather they envy someone else's first name. Have you registered over at Sven.com?

I have not registered, no. As much as i'm not keen on my first name I don't think I would change it or go by a psudonym, it would feel weird and unnatural after going by Sven for so long.

I've always been partial to Greek mythological names so maybe my offspring can bear a name like Achilles or Heaphestus. I 'unno ?

I'm Sven

Wooo for stupid names, I think i'll call my children something equally stupid so that I feel I have a connection to them.

The difference is that on the moon you could actually offset the costs by exporting minerals and ore from the moon to the earth using something similar to rail guns to get product back to earth.

So you're proposing we fire hypersonic chunks of rock at the earth?

I hope the containers have some sort of air brake because I wouldn't want to be near where they land otherwise.

The vatican city in Rome. It's the smallest country in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_city

Theoretical limit

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield

 

 

 

If I'm reading this correctly a 100 megaton warhead would weigh a little more than 16 tons.

 

300 lbs for a one megaton war head would be about right.

Tsar Bomba, a nuclear device originally planned to be 100 Megatons but downscaled to 50, incidentally also the biggest nuke to ever be atmosphericlaly tested, weighed close to 29 tons.

With todays boosting technology I reckon you might be able to get it closer to 16.

If you look up the nuclear test series of Starfish Prime you'll see this deals with testing nukes in space and EMP managed to knock out all of Hawaii and several other places.

It would be significantly more expensive. It costs~ $10,000 per kilogram to reach LEO and i'm sure robotic peopel weigh more than normal people despite the lack of food, water and oxygen they need to take with them.

The problem with torture is that it can coerce people into confessing to something they have never done in the first place, just so that it will end. While used in moderation I agree torture is useful for extracting information excessive use is counter productive and can produce false positives for information therfore being misleading.

If the withdrawl symptoms are that severe from lack of this "pleasure stimulus" then I would guess the prisoner would lie just to get his fix therefore rendering this procedure just as useless as regular torture.

As for if it is more moral or not then that depends on what side you are with. What if the prisoner holds information that could save millions of people is it moral to torture this information out of him and save millions or not tortue him and preserve his human rights, though that million people could possibly die a grisly death as a result?

I'm guessing number 3 would take the longest to induce rust but would seperate into two layers anyway. So why mix to begin with?

Now that we're moving away from the original topic and speaking about how this new form of life would like to create its own culture, do you not think that it is dehumanising to instantly think of ushering them into solitude - basically a barren wasteland where no other humans live? Space, the moon, deserts?

After all, the conciousness that is implanted into their artificial brains still contains what was their human conciousness, they still think like a human and we're basically "Sending them to Coventry" A "we don't want you around here" attitude "go live somewhere you can do your own thing and leave us alone" thought pattern.

I would assume that a human conciousness would still require the mental stimulation and social interaction that a regular human would need and by deporting them we are taking away what is esentially a human right.

The question remains then, do human rights still apply? We have established they are no longer part of the human race from the physical augmentations they have undergone but can we just change how they are treated?

Are human rights revoked if you decide to leave the human race; If for all intents and purposes your thought processes are still human but everything physically about you is not?

In that case there is plenty of desert for them to inhabit. Nice and dry and i'm assuming if they're enveloped in some kind of synthetic skin they'd be failry well protected from sandstorms inteferring with their systems.

Much cheaper than packing them off to space and they might actually be able to turn that land arable in time.

Dolphins have mastered time travel and fight space aliens you know...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EccoTheDolphin

So are you suggesting that we deport androids to distant planets?

Going back to Ydoaps' initial question about whether a human being replaced with mechanical parts is still the same person I would say yes, as long as the conciousness acts in the same way it did when it was biological.

Is it still human? No.

It may have "evolved" from humans but aside from it's mind everything is different. What you have created here is a being that is stronger, faster, hardier, lasts longer, more than likely has no need to eat or sleep and is generally in every way superior to Homo Sapiens.

They will be free from biological diseases and old age (at least how we would classify old age now) and when parts begin to wear down they could be replaced easily. Over the course of generations more and more humans would convert and because of the low mortality rate in the new android species they would begin to outnumber us within time.

While their brains are still the conciousness of a human and considering that the androids are not just storage devices for a conciousness and can still learn, it's very likeley they'll realise they're tougher and better than us.

That would lead to all sorts of problems,economical: "people" that don't need to eat or sleep would make great workers no?

Social: People that dont need to eat or sleep get all our jobs and so are are prejudiced and looked down upon by society.

Historically, seperate races seek independence and I don't think too many of these androids would think differently despite their original minds originating from a particular race, they'll all have something in common.

Before I start rambling on too much my conclusion is that they will still be the same person conciously but in all other aspects they are not a member of the human race any longer due to massive differences in their strengths and weaknesses compared to Humans and how they reproduce (if at all).

Perhaps you do not need those criteria to consider it a person but it will need to be classified somehow. If it is not classified then how would you differentiate it from a sufficiently advanced A.I ?

If both were to have sentience and sapience, had the same level of intelligence and infact the only difference is that one was entirely conceived by humans and our the other, our cyborgs, are merely vessels for a naturally occuring mind would they both be people?

Will there be a time thousands of years in the future when us, Homosapiens are considered the common anscestor of silicon brained androids and our cyborg offspring?

Given the following definitions then, it would be debateable whether or not an android is indeed alive or not, especially in regards to point 7.

Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive, where life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following phenomena:

1) Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.

2)Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.

3)Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.

4) Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.

5) Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.

6) Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.

7) Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.

So how do we reproduce if we all end up as androids?

It's gonna be awkward to communicate with aliens if we ever find any, the distances are just too vast and getting larger thanks to cosmic expansion.

On the other hand I suppose that makes it harder for them if they decide to invade us, reinforcements will take some time to arrive.

I didnt realise the island was a series, I was talking about the film with Ewan Mcgregor where they grow peoples clones to harvest organs.

If you read my post I never said one nuclear bomb could kill us all. I was citing studies that a nuclear war yielding around 2 megatons could cause a global catastrophe.

Where is your source? The Mike shot of operation Ivy was over 10 megatons and is one of only many multi megaton weapons atmospherically tested before the Start & Salt treaties. I don't see any global problem from those detonations.

From Wikipedia:

However, 77% of the final yield came from fast fission of the uranium tamper, which meant that the device produced large amounts of fallout.

The fireball was approximately 3.25 miles (5.2 km) wide, and the mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 57,000 feet (17.0 km) in less than 90 seconds. One minute later it had reached 108,000 feet (33.0 km), before stabilizing at 136,000 feet (25 miles or 37.0 km) with the top eventually spreading out to a diameter of 100 miles (161 km) with a stem 20 miles (32 km) wide.

There have been over 2000 nuclear tests; atmospheric, underground and undersea since the advent of the trinity device. Britain alone has a stockpile of ~25,000 nuclear weapons (including radiological bombs) of varying designs and yields - we are one of the nations with the smaller stockpiles.

The biggest device to be detonated to date was a 100 megaton thermonuclear bomb scaled down to 50 because of the risks associated with fallout debris, this was detonated in Nova Zmelya in remote Siberia; The fallout is obviously a massive concern then from nuclear weapons if there are minimal people living in such a remote location that they decided it would be a risk to other countries.

All out nuclear war would scare me and if the bombs dont get me then the fallout will if all of those weapons are used, the mushroom cloud rises well into the stratosphere and spreads around the globe using the wind currents with radioactive particles settling absolutely anywhere (all that from just one!?)

To say that nuclear weapons are indiscriminate is an understatement and are clearly the most available type of WMD by their sheer numbers.

I do think possession of them is a perfectly viable political bargaining tool but their use should be very limited. Chemical and Biological weapons wont destroy buildings or even kill off food sources they are not designed to, nukes however will make people homeless, starve to death, die from radiation poisoning if they survive and eat animals or plants that have been exposed so the soil is unfarmable for generations.

Overall i believe Bio and chem weapons are not as destructive to the whole of the human race (pockets of survivors could relocate to remote locations the weapon wasnt used) as nuclear weapons are but can be just as disruptive and so we should not take like for like as a policy, it still doesnt mean i'm against having those nukes there as a bargaining chip even if they're never used.

I'm aware of this but I thought the context merited it being attributed to him.

Mars is not entirely red. At most the iron oxide dust is 2-3 metres deep and lays on what is probably a solid layer of bassalt from volcanic activity deep in the planets past.

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" - Oppenheimer.

"Man fears the darkness and so scrapes away at the edges with fire" - Rei Ayanami.

Someone has been watching too much "the island".