Butters

I was actually thinking it's basically a big trapezoidal prism, so the walls would be slightly sloping inwards. That way it could have an enormous open area on the roof, although of course depending on the height of it this could be a fairly unpleasant place to be and may need to be enclosed in glass anyway. This would also be a good place for a wind farm, as you could make the walls of the whole structure into solar panels. This shape is also better for stability. Building a big tower of that kind of height creates a lot of problems in that area I would imagine.

I saw a movie called 'Unknown White Male', which is a documentary about an English man this happened to. His personality was radically different, and there is a lot of actual footage in the film. Following that I googled it and read a few random examples, but of course this is all anecdotal and not really evidence. That's why I ask if anybody has anything more reliable than that. Also, I'm not talking about twins exactly, because I intuitively feel that personality has a formative stage in children. But if the exact copy were made after my adult personality had formed. I suppose that's what I mean. Is there a 'final' personality that develops or is it constantly developing and the term personality is not anything that can be defined scientifically? The movie shows footage of him before the accident, but not a huge amount, because he was nobody in particular so was not filmed that much beyond the usual social occasions. By personality I mean the most likely response to various situations and events. Somebody I have known for a long time, I would be able to pick up definite 'trends' as to how they are more likely to respond to something, and I would be right more often than I am wrong.

I saw a movie called 'Unknown White Male', which is a documentary about an English man this happened to. His personality was radically different, and there is a lot of actual footage in the film. Following that I googled it and read a few random examples, but of course this is all anecdotal and not really evidence. That's why I ask if anybody has anything more reliable than that.

1. Definitely a massive problem. Probably insurmountable. 2. It seems it might require less energy than a standard city of similar population, as it would be a lot more efficient in its use of power, being purpose built right from the start. 3. It wouldn't necessarily be a bigger problem than for any large city. Treatment plants for waste could be well away from the structure itself. 4. Agree. Big problem. 5. Crime wouldn't be any worse than anywhere else. In fact, privacy would be more the issue as you say later, because it's seems likely the whole structure would have surveillance in most areas. 6. Maybe by the time this is possible, people will have so much of their lives on facebook that privacy won't be as large an issue as it is to people today! People are voluntarily giving up more and more of their privacy. But yes, it would require a fairly big shift in attitude which is something people tend not to be good at en masse.

That's true enough. But what about the competition for existing resources that would inevitably lead to conflict? Preventing that so the remaining food could actually help people to survive rather than be spread so thin as to do nobody any long term good seems preferable, from a utilitarian point of view. If we just let nature take its course with no plan, then it seems unlikely that humanity would have any sustainable food production left and be reduced completely to scavengers, who would also be doomed to die off eventually. Also, in terms of the millions of people already starving or dying from lack of access to water, there is hope in that circumstance. We have the means to stop that already, just not the will. In this scenario there is no remaining societal structure outside of the affected area that could help. PS- want to make it aboslutely clear I am not advocating this in any way! My sense of morality tells me it's wrong, but I just wonder if an ethical case can be made for it.

I was wondering if anybody knew what the general consensus was on the separation of experience and personality, or if there even is one? For example, I have heard of people who have had total memory loss that they have not recovered from, and they end up being radically different people following that. This could be seen as evidence that the loss of memory is equivalent to the loss of personality, but it could also just be that whatever caused the initial memory loss was also responsible for other damage to the brain. This is not something you can ethically experiment with of course! Let's say, for example, it were possible for an exact copy of me to be made and then the two of us went on to experience entirely different lives from this point on. Would you expect to see a radically altered personality by the end of our lives in another fifty years or so? I mean this as distinct from mood as well, where if one copy had a miserable life and a lot of bad luck he would likely be more unhappy than the other who married a beautiful woman and opened his own go-kart track. Is there a more fundamental difference, or is that all that personality is? An accumulation of reactions to past experiences. Is there any evidence either way to separate experience and personality?

Is there any major disadvantage that anybody can see in centralising human populations in massive vertical cities? By this I mean single structures that can hold tens of millions of people, several thousand storeys tall. Okay, I am aware of the very obvious disadvantage of putting all your eggs in one basket, but I'm assuming that if you had the ability to build such a massive structure, then you would also have the ability to make it earthquake proof and able to contain any fires and so on. Also it wouldn't just be one basket. It would be several hundred worldwide, presumably. Such structures would have farms in them, or on the roof, and could be powered by solar fields, wind turbines on the outside of the structure, geothermal and so on. This would allow the human footprint to be much smaller, once of course the resources to build such a thing in the first place were taken into account, and there would need to be a huge amount of maintenance, which would provide the majority of employment for people. On the plus side, a large amount of the earth's surface could be reclaimed by nature and return to its natural state. Are there any obvious social problems with this? I personally feel that although the first generation may struggle with living and dying indoors, those that were born into it would not. It's not like people could never leave either, it would just be that the majority of people lived in these vertical cities most of the time. Could be wrong about that, any studies anyone can think of about inherent problems in people living almost exclusively in enclosed environments? Any other more obvious problems I'm overlooking?

If humanity got a point where our population was unsustainable, could culling humans ever be considered ethical? This would take place in the context of a global societal collapse for example, where no outside help could be expected as the whole population is in the same situation. Let's say we have enough food and the means to continue producing small yields that will feed one billion people worldwide. Let's say we also have access to an engineered virus made before the collapse. One in six people have a natural immunity to this virus and suffer absolutely no ill-effects. If we try to feed everybody (assuming also that the food is spread evenly throughout the population and transporting it is not an issue) then we may all eventually die. By overreaching ourselves we eventually lose the ability to produce any crops at all. There would also be constant food riots that could destroy all future means of production. Is it ethical to release the virus on purpose, to allow humanity a definite chance to recover? Or is the slow decline the more ethical decision, despite it greatly lowering humanity's chances of survival overall?

Hi. Just wondering what the general consensus on race is. Obviously humans enjoy categorising things, and sometimes that means forcing things into a category that they don't necessarily fit in to. This seems to happen quite a lot with race, whereby we use a lot of generalisations in physical appearance and place of birth to define a person's race. It seems likely that in the future, with travel becoming so much faster than previously, and people not necessarily living in the same country or continent they were born in that these lines will only blur even more. My question is this; how long do you think it would take before the concept of assigining somebody a race is irrelevant, assuming that the current rise in inter-racial relationships increases steadily (although not exponentially). Or do you think that there will always be some distinction between the people of the world, and if so is this because of genetic reasons or social and political reasons?

We aren't at all sure that dark matter exists. Consider the theory of the celestial spheres. They described the movement of the heavens very precisely by postulating the existence of an element called quinetessence that made a series of spheres encircling the earth. They contained all the celestial bodies embedded within them. Because these models could be used to quite accurately predict the movement of planets they seemed a reasonable explanation. There was a slight problem caused by the fact that the orbits were spherical and not elliptical, but the theory seemed at least as plausible as dark matter and dark energy seem now. In my opinion, dark matter and dark energy are analogous to this theory and will be superceded once we have more information.

I see Dark Matter and Energy as basically place holders for gaps in our understanding. Dark Energy is the explanation for the increasing acceleration between galaxies, as I (very basically) understand it. It's also possible that we simply do not understand the effect of gravity over very large distances, or when involving very large masses and it actually has a repulsive effect. Dark Matter is also just an invention to cover why galaxies spin in the way that they do and hold together as they do (again, very basic understanding on my part) but there could be a variety of reasons why this may happen which we simply haven't observed yet. I believe that we will soon come to explain these 'dark' areas of our knowledge with one or perhaps several explanations for each...

Thanks Brad. It's interesting stuff. The whole site is actually. It's going to take me some time to wade through it all I think, but I'm sure I can come away with a more realistic environment. Thanks for your help!

I agree that the justice system is deeply flawed. I live in Australia, and was recently on a jury trial for a murder case. It was an absolute joke and all it did was make me deeply concerned about the whole structure of the legal system. Our alleged murderer was Filipino, and there was one man who decided he was guilty from day one. His arguments were as follows... 'The cops wouldn't bring him to trial if he wasn't guilty.' 'You know what these Filipinos are like. They all cover for each other.' I've done four other murder trials in my life, and we found the guy guilty every time.' Yes, he wanted to keep his record off guilty verdicts going. Then there were about half the jurors who kept commenting how it was 'just like CSI' and were determined to solve the case by inventing intricate motives, of which there was ABSOLUTELY no evidence. They wanted to crack it and have everyone go 'Of course! Why didn't the police notice this! You're a genius!' In the end we found the guy not guilty, although it was 11 to 1 against with the racist refusing to even speak to us or review the evidence. Our last day was spent playing cards whilst he listened to his walkman and refused to discuss his reasoning. One kid, 19, decided that although he didn't think he had done it, that he was a 'bad man' and should be punished so he voted guilty anyway until convinced otherwise. My point is, this was a murder trial. We don't have capital punishment here, but if we did, there is absolutely no way that myself, or any of the people in that room were fit to judge whether or not a man should die. I would remove the jury system entirely and work with a panel of five judges. At least they have the necessary reasoning and legal skills. If we do allow the jury system, then the selection should be final with no vetos allowed from either side, as this is a form of jury rigging in my opinion. But in that case, the death penalty, even if it was somehow ethically justifiable in terms of the crimes, should never be allowed when this is how verdicts are decided. There is also a strong emotional element in somebody killing a child, as opposed to an adult that could skew judgement. There are just too many variables involved. Just my opinion based on a terrifying experience...

So the genome size tends to be related more to the age of something than to its complexity. As in an older, simpler organism may collect a load of junk over the millenia that serves no purpose and is not actually expressed?

I actually aim for hard scifi. I have no faster than light travel. Ships can travel at about 20% the speed of light, which yes is very fast but still so very slow! They don't use generation ships though, they use cryogenics. In fact, the whole society uses cryogenics, preserving those with skills that are not currently needed and reviving them as necessary. There is not a problem reintegrating people as the technology level has stagnated (this stagnation is a major part of the plot, not merely a device). Energy is not infinite, and ships cannot turn on a dime. They must decelerate when approaching a planet, and Alpha Centauri is as far as we've gotten so far. Also, no ftl communication and no artificial gravity. That is why I am likely to dump the idea of entanglement communication. I'm more likely to have encoded personalities transferring themselves at light speed and existing as a series of copies, sharing their memories as they update them. Obviously, the transfer is several years apart, but I would rather not just invent something purely magical. I'd prefer to have the characters work around the limitations of known science. If it's inconvenient for the narrative, then so be it! My characters shall be inconvenienced!

Thankyou. That answers my question very well. So in summary, although there are a large variety of limiting factors in specific organisms, there is no theoretical limit on the length of a genome. Great news!

Ah, so my mistake was in the simple glossing over of the idea that you can affect the result at the end your measuring. Oh well, like you say, a bit of sci-fi vaguery will tide me over there.

Well no. What I mean is that a true Nazi who knew of Jews being hidden and then subsequently reported that to the authorities would feel that they were doing the right thing. That is was a moral thing and a duty to report this breach. In their mind, they would feel that it was morally correct because they perceived that the result was for the greater good of the Reich. That's true. But I was wondering whether there is anything that could be described as a universal moral absolute. As in, something that applies to everybody, rather than a single person sticking to their own convictions of what they believe is right or wrong. Okay this is a tricky one that goes against every fibre of my being, but I'll give it a go. Several hungered years ago, a white European male saw themselves as the pinnacle of cultural evolution. Far superior of course than the 'savages' of other continents. They had gunpowder, complex machinery and metal working skills far in advance of anything Africans or pacific islanders had. In their view, this technological superiority also gave them moral superiority. After all, their women weren't running around half-naked, and they didn't believe in ridiculous pagan gods. No, they believed in an unridiculous Christian God! So quite apart from the biblical idea of man having dominion over all the creatures of the earth (including the inferior human races, as white Europeans were God's chosen people of course), they also could have seen slavery as an attempt to 'civilise' other races. People were not willingly separated from their homes and families, but for their own good, they could be civilised into the ways of Christianity, and modern social ideals and technology. They could never be equals, as they were deemed genetically inferior, but surely living in a modern civilisation was better than their primitive lives back home living in squalor and sin. None of this is true of course, but the point is that the people who did this would have considered themselves to be very moral, Christian people. Some of them may even have freed their slaves once they had been sufficiently 'civilised' by their servitude. I'm Australian for example, and up until the late 60's in my country Aboriginal people were classified as 'flora and fauna' by the government. They took children from their families by force and moved them into schools where they were taught white Australian values, whatever the hell that means. The hope was that the next generation would cast off their traditions and become anglicised. That is cultural genocide right there, as opposed to the actual genocide of the aboriginals that was comitted in Tasmania. There is not a single Tasmanian aboriginal left because they were hunted to extinction. Hunted because they were considered 'flora and fauna'. Now although these things are pretty much as bad as a lot of what the Nazi's or the Khmer Rouge did, the people comitting these acts certainly did not consider themselves immoral. In the case of the stolen generation, they genuinely thought they were doing a very good thing in helping these children break free of their primitive lifestyle. There. That was hard work trying to take such arguments seriously, but at the time, people did. Now I feel dirty. I'm going to go and have a shower...

I realise that you would have to separate the entangled particles by moving them apart at a speed no faster than the speed of light, but once you'd set up this network (over the many hundreds of years it would take to do so) then wouldn't the waveform collapse of the particles appear to be instantaneous? I could well be wrong on that point, which is a pity, because it destroys my whole premise. But say there were enough entangled particles arranged in a configuration (whereby an up or down spin represented the firing or not firing of a neuron- very simplified brain model of course), and one end could alter these spins as they simultaneously measured them. Would this not then give rise to a consciousness at the other end when it was measured at a pre-arranged interval? Or does the altering of a particle's spin destroy entanglement? Or if it doesn't, would it be a 'one time use' only and you would need an entangled 'black box' transmitter for every single time you wanted to update the mind. I realise the accepted rule is you can't transmit information in this way, but I was hoping that at least theoretically this limit only applied to an outside observer. I apologise for my ignorance in this, and if I've restated something, but I am very much a lay-person when it comes to quantum mechanics so I appreciate things being spelled out for me!

Thanks. I have researched this a bit (for a novel) and it seemed plausible and not unproven so I went with it.

But if someone's personality is negatively affected by lying, isn't that still just the result of the society's standard of what is moral behaviour. Even if they were not discovered and made to feel guilt by outsiders, their own moral views are shaped by that society and thus they feel bad because they have been made to feel that they have done something that is 'wrong'. Even when taking social costs into consideration, which is probably the best way to view the topic, social costs are relative anyway. In the Nazi dilemna, it would seem to us that it is a negative social cost to reveal the location of our Jewish stowaways, but to somebody who truly believed in the Final Solution it is a negative social cost to allow them to remain hidden. As horrible as that may be, there were people who felt like that. If people of a similar upbringing to me (as compared to a neolithic hunter-gatherer say) can have an opposite moral view to me, then surely ALL moral positions have to be relative. Yes I realise it's dangerous and stupid to give one example to say it proves a rule! I would love to hear an argument that persuades me otherwise, as it is a bleak view of humanity to have!

Okay, thanks for the replies. I clearly have very limited knowledge in this area. I guess what I'm asking is, if we were to develop the technology to make an organism artificially, would there be any physical limit to how mlarge we could make the genome? Whether it is efficient or not, would there be a size where an organism simply could not physically exist?

I thought that entangled particles reacted apparently without any observable delay, but only in terms of collapsing into a specific probability (of what direction they are spinning for example). Isn't that what the whole 'spooky action at a distance' quote refers to? I did consider that the minds at both ends would also be duplicated, but that is not necessarily a problem. In fact, as these minds are stored artificially, we can make the assumption that there is also a way to amalgamate the two into a newer updated version in terms of memory and temprament at all points at once. So the minds would exist in all places at ones, in more or less the same state. Of course, they could be having external sensory information being fed from all the points at which they exist, and act locally on that. Although their mind may be thinking the same thing at all points, they could be focusing on the input from one specific area. This would mean you wouldn't have multiple copies of different versions. Although bots could accomplish this in much the same way, and the result to the minds as they were updated would be indistinguishable from the other method. Also, the asteroids could simply be hub points. If one was in orbit around a planet for example, that planet could be colonised and populated with blank androids or something similar, which could be used by telepresence as required by the minds. Far from stagnating them, it could free them up for far greater exploration than is otherwise possible.

Can there really be any kind of moral absolute about anything? It feels like a moral absolute that murdering children (or anyone for that matter), rape, genocide or some other such horrible act is wrong, but isn't it just a construct. I'm not just talking about a cultural construct. Although different cultures have varying degrees of what is morally permisable, there is still a fairly large consensus on certain extreme behaviours. But could these be no more than an evolved response to maintain stability within a group, and therefore ensure survival? Some animals will eat their young if given the opportunity, or their mates, but we would not describe these animals as immoral. If a human was to do the same thing, they would be condemned for it. Although I realise we have to do so, is there really any point in debating the ethics of human activity when it is so flexible and often arbitrary once we remove emotion from it. PS- Yes, I realise that emotion and conscience may be part of a moral compass, but I question again where these come from...

Hi all. Just wondering if anybody could speculate on the possibility of an earthlike planet orbitting Alpha Centauri A. By Earthlike I simply mean a small rocky planet, not something that has a breathable atmosphere or hospitable temperatures necessarily. I have read that it is not impossible, although because it is a tri-star system it's orbit would be more erratic and prone to bigger fluctuations in temperature and the like. It would also have a far shorter life span than earth because of this, eventually being torn apart. I guess what I'm asking is, is there any reason that such a planet, however inhospitable, could not POSSIBLY exist at the present moment. Any ideas? Thanks.