minimum viable colony populations
Matthew DeBell
common in science fiction, and they can be good stories. The Mars mission
thread from a few weeks ago had me thinking about the minimum viable
populations for colonies. What factors determine the minimum viable
population?
The main factors seem to be environmental conditions, available technology,
colonist characteristics (skills, culture, health) and the criteria we
establish for colony success.
I'm assuming conservative hard SF technology, earthlike environments, and
colonists with an average skill level inversely proportional to colony size
(i.e. a group of 5 is all healthy experts, a group of 5 million has the
inevitable distribution of human qualities). With these assumptions, the
minimum viable population depends mostly on the criteria for a successful
colony.
Suppose success just means the original colonists stay alive for the
remainder of a normal lifespan. In an earthlike environment, with advanced
technology, one person should be able stay alive.
What about seeding a colony that survives indefinitely? If the colony is to
survive for generations then there is a minimum size for the starting gene
pool. Much reproduction among close relatives is bad. I've read that
400-500 is a minimum population. This seems high to me, but I don't know
squat about it. Anyone care to comment?
Suppose the goal is to maintain a society with a norm of not more than a 40
hour work week and not more than 50% of the population in the labor force:
This requires pretty good agricultural productivity, but with an advanced
farming set-up agriculture doesn't have to be labor-intensive. Yet
low-labor agriculture requires automation, and the infrastructure required
be able to manufacture automated farm equipment is not small. If the
colonists arrive with good equipment then the first generation might manage
this requirement with hardly any population at all. But after the equipment
needs replacement, I suspect the population requirement gets pretty large.
Maybe on the order of 10,000? Suggestions?
Maintain a society that can design and manufacture a spacecraft from raw
materials in a few years: This requires advanced industrial infrastructure.
Would a million people be enough?
Maintain a society with substantially all of opportunities and creature
comforts we have in contemporary industrial democracies: I'm assuming
higher tech than we have, so productivity is higher, so the same goods can
be had with fewer people working to produce them. Still, the population
requirements will be fairly high. If we want 1000 hours of new TV
programming every week, there have to be tens of thousands of people working
just in the television industry. I'll take a guess that millions are
necessary to approximate a contemporary lifestyle over the long term.
These are just guesses; anyone care to offer alternatives? Good answers
would seem to require more knowledge of both technology and economics than I
have.
--
Matthew DeBell
Brandon Van Every
"Matthew DeBell" <m...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:3a2f4...@news1.prserv.net...
> What factors determine the minimum viable population?
Zero, if you have a human DNA bank and an AI called "Mama" that's smart
enough to raise no dummies.
> The main factors seem to be environmental conditions, available
technology,
> colonist characteristics (skills, culture, health) and the criteria we
> establish for colony success.
Indeed, how much control over human DNA are you going to posit? Inbreeding
isn't a problem if you can edit. And if you have that level of DNA editing
technology, then you can clone everyone from 1 person.
> I'm assuming conservative hard SF technology, earthlike environments,
So, I'd advise that you have to fix your DNA engineering level before you
can decide anything else.
> and
> colonists with an average skill level inversely proportional to colony
size
> (i.e. a group of 5 is all healthy experts, a group of 5 million has the
> inevitable distribution of human qualities).
Why? The number of slouches and malcontents is going to depend on the
energy/wealth provided to your colony. If they're scrounging for resources
then you're going to have criminals. If they're not, well you could still
have violence in paradise as Lord Of The Flies illustrates. But if you have
lotsa energy/wealth coupled with strong education and a good moral system
then you're going to have very few people falling off the bell curve.
You'll have a society of elites. There's no class struggle when everyone is
ridiculously wealthy and all property is owned in common.
So, the second thing you need to fix are the resources/energy/wealth
available to the colony.
> Suppose success just means the original colonists stay alive for the
> remainder of a normal lifespan.
But indeed, what's a "normal" lifespan? Back to DNA control again. What if
humans have achieved clinical immortality?
> Suppose the goal is to maintain a society with a norm of not more than a
40
> hour work week and not more than 50% of the population in the labor force:
Again, how many resources/energy/wealth at what technology level? By cosmic
standards you're saying these people are dirt poor, i.e. year 2000 energy
production. To get to Proxima Centauri 4 light years away it's going to
take a lot more energy than that! Much more if you go farther afield. But
if you want to colonize Mars, no problemo.
> This requires pretty good agricultural productivity, but with an advanced
> farming set-up agriculture doesn't have to be labor-intensive.
Agriculture isn't labor-intensive today. Machines can do all the things
that really need to get done. The USA uses underpaid, underpriveledged
Mexicans in copious volumes because it can. If it couldn't it wouldn't.
> Yet
> low-labor agriculture requires automation, and the infrastructure required
> be able to manufacture automated farm equipment is not small.
Again, just how far are you going to travel? I'm sending 10,000 colonists
on a 20 year journey to Proxima in a ship the size of a small town. To make
that kind of journey, humanity has already solved the wealth/energy problem.
> If the
> colonists arrive with good equipment then the first generation might
manage
> this requirement with hardly any population at all. But after the
equipment
> needs replacement, I suspect the population requirement gets pretty large.
> Maybe on the order of 10,000? Suggestions?
How much digital sentience are you going to assume? I'm assuming we see our
first hard AIs in 2050.
> Maintain a society that can design and manufacture a spacecraft from raw
> materials in a few years: This requires advanced industrial
infrastructure.
> Would a million people be enough?
You could do it with 0 people if the robots really cared about their work.
Problem is, if they're smart enough to do that kind of work, will they stop
caring and stop obeying? Heck, that's true of the colonists too. Who says
they want to build spaceships? These schisms of "why did *I* waste 20 years
of my life to come here?" are the basis for the game I want to make.
> Maintain a society with substantially all of opportunities and creature
> comforts we have in contemporary industrial democracies: I'm assuming
> higher tech than we have, so productivity is higher, so the same goods can
> be had with fewer people working to produce them. Still, the population
> requirements will be fairly high. If we want 1000 hours of new TV
> programming every week, there have to be tens of thousands of people
working
> just in the television industry.
Using our current technology, which is labor intensive bullshit. I figure
it stays that way because nobody wants to fund the R&D to do something
better, and the media moguls have an empire that works for them. I'm an
independent software developer, I intend to do better within the next 10
years.
> I'll take a guess that millions are
> necessary to approximate a contemporary lifestyle over the long term.
>
> These are just guesses; anyone care to offer alternatives? Good answers
> would seem to require more knowledge of both technology and economics than
I
> have.
There are dozens of alternatives. I think the first step is to drop the
Cold War mentality that everything is about belching out metric tons of
steel for the military industrial complex. I believe the critical human
advances are going to be in biogenetics, artificial intelligence, and
nanotechnology, as a matter of science fact within our lifetimes. Getting
to the stars requires a huuuuuuuge leap in energy production on top of that.
So, take your pick: colonize Mars and you can have something more gritty, if
you really want to. Colonize space and you have to assume the luxury liner
IMHO.
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA
J
"Matthew DeBell" <m...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:3a2f4...@news1.prserv.net...
> Stories of isolated small groups who have to survive on their own are
pretty
> common in science fiction, and they can be good stories. The Mars mission
> thread from a few weeks ago had me thinking about the minimum viable
> populations for colonies. What factors determine the minimum viable
> population?
Everything determines the population. If it is a scientific colony, the
population can be very low and still work. If the population is supposed to
be a foot hold on a new world you need a few dozen people to help with the
work. If it's a colony of seperatists it doesn't matter how many or how few
there are. It completely depends on what type of colony it is.
Anyway, what am doing is looking back in history, with my story I plan on
adapting the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to suit the politcal terms of a
colony, which doesn't say much because there will still be "colonies" that
won't meet the terms of this "Galactic Ordinance".
Later, J
--
_____________________
http://webj.cjb.net
m...@webj.cjb.net
C.Stuart-Bennett
"Brandon Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
news:ZCIX5.44375$II2.4...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
>
> "Matthew DeBell" <m...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
> news:3a2f4...@news1.prserv.net...
> > What factors determine the minimum viable population?
<Snip>
<incidentally this particular snip isnt supposed to imply any disagreement
with the snippsed subject matter, just that it was getting kinda long, and
this here is a short reply....>
Well the best way to overcome the whole ' post-industrialised, hi tech
society, high standard of living and this isnt really a colony its just a
quick holiday for us dilettante scientists away from our utopian home'
problem whilst using a minimum of colonists per colony would be the
judicious application of nanotech ( which from what ive read on sci.nanotech
recently is closer to becoming reality than the whole planetary colonisation
thing anyways) so the colonists could happily sit in their orbital colony
ship, bombard the planet with nanites, then a few months later go and settle
in their pleasant new eden and screw like bunny rabbits for the rest of
their natural lives to build up the poulation, whilst molecular assemblers
take care of their every need, possibly whith some form of servitor
construct ( see big robot ala Lost in Space, or servitor chimps ala
Nightsdawn trilogy scifi ) for simpler tasks ( again easily built by your
all purpose reprogrammable assembler nanites...)
quick easy, eliminates need for large 'working class' colonist population
and satisfies every reason why i like sci fi.
see new planets, fight exotic creatures, rescue fair maidens (alien or
otherwise) then subvert the whole damn thing to your personal vision of
perfection and make it back to base in time for a banana daquiri...
Chris
NB. whilst the second part of this is a little flippant, the first part is
not. see Frank Tipplers 'The Physics of Immortality' for an interesting view
on nanotech driven colonisation of other planets...
Ray Drouillard
pretty
> common in science fiction, and they can be good stories. The Mars mission
> thread from a few weeks ago had me thinking about the minimum viable
> population?
Hmmmm... How big was the group of mutineers from the HMS Bounty? I
understand that they settled on an island, and that their descendants are
still around.
> What about seeding a colony that survives indefinitely? If the colony is
to
> survive for generations then there is a minimum size for the starting gene
> pool. Much reproduction among close relatives is bad. I've read that
> 400-500 is a minimum population. This seems high to me, but I don't know
> squat about it. Anyone care to comment?
Is genetic engineering available? If so, each person can have his/her
defective genes replaced before moving. If this technology can be supported
on the colony, a database full of genetic material can be used to inject
diversity into the gene pool as the population grows.
>
> Suppose the goal is to maintain a society with a norm of not more than a
40
> hour work week and not more than 50% of the population in the labor force:
> This requires pretty good agricultural productivity, but with an advanced
> farming set-up agriculture doesn't have to be labor-intensive. Yet
> low-labor agriculture requires automation, and the infrastructure required
> be able to manufacture automated farm equipment is not small. If the
> colonists arrive with good equipment then the first generation might
manage
> this requirement with hardly any population at all. But after the
equipment
> needs replacement, I suspect the population requirement gets pretty large.
> Maybe on the order of 10,000? Suggestions?
Again, technology is a big factor. With good automation, everything from
mining and farming to final manufacturing can be done by the machines.
Based on that, it would merely take the machinery and a whole bunch of
software (imported from the originating planet) to keep everything going -
no people necessary at all.
>
> Maintain a society that can design and manufacture a spacecraft from raw
> materials in a few years: This requires advanced industrial
infrastructure.
> Would a million people be enough?
Same as above :-)
Obviously, the economy would be based on people owning the means for
production. If someone is stupid enough to sell off his share of the
machinery, he will have a really difficult time making the cash necessary to
buy it back.
OTOH, we may very well invent lots of services that specifically need to be
done by a human by then. Aside from the obvious "oldest profession" type
services, I suspect that there will be a lot of people making extra cash by
singing, dancing, acting, and other such things. Perhaps clever
conversation will become an art form and a profession. Also, we will need
people to design new types of widgets and art forms for the machines to turn
out.
Any service is going to be priced by the laws of supply and demand. If you
can already have every form of material good that you want for no effort,
someone is going to have to pay you a whole lot to get up and do something
for them.
Imagine how absurd the idea of a fashion designer or beautician would be a
few thousand years ago.
Also, I suspect that gambling will be a popular activity - perhaps more so
than today.
>
> Maintain a society with substantially all of opportunities and creature
> comforts we have in contemporary industrial democracies: I'm assuming
> higher tech than we have, so productivity is higher, so the same goods can
> be had with fewer people working to produce them. Still, the population
> requirements will be fairly high. If we want 1000 hours of new TV
> programming every week, there have to be tens of thousands of people
working
> just in the television industry. I'll take a guess that millions are
> necessary to approximate a contemporary lifestyle over the long term.
>
> These are just guesses; anyone care to offer alternatives? Good answers
> would seem to require more knowledge of both technology and economics than
I
> have.
>
> --
> Matthew DeBell
>
Ray Drouillard
Oliver Neukum
> colonist characteristics (skills, culture, health) and the criteria we
> establish for colony success.
And the amount of equipment carried by the ship.
> I'm assuming conservative hard SF technology, earthlike environments, and
> colonists with an average skill level inversely proportional to colony size
> (i.e. a group of 5 is all healthy experts, a group of 5 million has the
> inevitable distribution of human qualities). With these assumptions, the
> minimum viable population depends mostly on the criteria for a successful
> colony.
How earthlike ? Is native life edible ?
Even if it is malnutrition is certain. Native life will lack terran
vitamines.
> Suppose success just means the original colonists stay alive for the
> remainder of a normal lifespan. In an earthlike environment, with advanced
> technology, one person should be able stay alive.
Unless he becomes insane, which is possible.
A small group could exist until supplies run out or equipment fails.
I wouldn't call that a colony.
> What about seeding a colony that survives indefinitely? If the colony is to
> survive for generations then there is a minimum size for the starting gene
> pool. Much reproduction among close relatives is bad. I've read that
> 400-500 is a minimum population. This seems high to me, but I don't know
> squat about it. Anyone care to comment?
The gene pool is the least of your worries. You could carry frozen sperm,
ova or embryos in your ship.
> Suppose the goal is to maintain a society with a norm of not more than a 40
> hour work week and not more than 50% of the population in the labor force:
> This requires pretty good agricultural productivity, but with an advanced
> farming set-up agriculture doesn't have to be labor-intensive. Yet
On an alien world it requires you to keep pretty advanced technology,
at least until terraforming is complete, if it could be completed to that
degree at all.
> low-labor agriculture requires automation, and the infrastructure required
> be able to manufacture automated farm equipment is not small. If the
> colonists arrive with good equipment then the first generation might manage
> this requirement with hardly any population at all. But after the equipment
> needs replacement, I suspect the population requirement gets pretty large.
> Maybe on the order of 10,000? Suggestions?
Too low. Much too low in fact. On the order of millions is necessary in
the long term.
> Maintain a society that can design and manufacture a spacecraft from raw
> materials in a few years: This requires advanced industrial infrastructure.
> Would a million people be enough?
No. You are of the mark at least by an order of magnitude, unless building
space ships becomes much easier.
> Maintain a society with substantially all of opportunities and creature
> comforts we have in contemporary industrial democracies: I'm assuming
> higher tech than we have, so productivity is higher, so the same goods can
> be had with fewer people working to produce them. Still, the population
> requirements will be fairly high. If we want 1000 hours of new TV
> programming every week, there have to be tens of thousands of people working
> just in the television industry. I'll take a guess that millions are
> necessary to approximate a contemporary lifestyle over the long term.
My private lowest estimate is 20M, more likely 50M+
> These are just guesses; anyone care to offer alternatives? Good answers
> would seem to require more knowledge of both technology and economics than I
> have.
A modern economy needs an enormous amount of specialised devices.
Even today no European country is able to produce useful products in all
fields of economy. Many industrial processes scale badly. If you look up
how many top notch chip factories there are today, you can count the
nummer with fingers and toes. Being on an alien world makes it even
harder.
Regards
Oliver
Brandon Van Every
"Oliver Neukum" <neu...@fachschaft.cup.uni-muenchen.de> wrote in message
>
> How earthlike ? Is native life edible ?
Someone else has posted recently that native life is never edible.
> The gene pool is the least of your worries. You could carry frozen
sperm,
> ova or embryos in your ship.
Heh! How deliciously low tech.
> A modern economy needs an enormous amount of specialised devices.
> Even today no European country is able to produce useful products in
all
> fields of economy.
But the EU as a whole can. As can the USA. So if you've got 250
million people and trading partners....
> Many industrial processes scale badly. If you look up
> how many top notch chip factories there are today, you can count the
> nummer with fingers and toes. Being on an alien world makes it even
> harder.
What happens when you send in the AI robots? "Workforce" doesn't have
to be measured in humans.
uray
"Matthew DeBell" <m...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:3a2f4...@news1.prserv.net...
> Stories of isolated small groups who have to survive on their own are
pretty
> common in science fiction, and they can be good stories. The Mars mission
> thread from a few weeks ago had me thinking about the minimum viable
> populations for colonies. What factors determine the minimum viable
> population?
>
Luck?
> The main factors seem to be environmental conditions, available
technology,
> colonist characteristics (skills, culture, health) and the criteria we
> establish for colony success.
>
The number of "skills" in our society is quite large. Do you mind having
your hair cut by the cook? How about having your entertainment provided by
your neighbor kid trying to play the cello from a "how-to book". Is a GP
sufficient or do you want experienced surgeons, cardiac specialists and
such? Care to clean up after yourself, or would you rather have a janitor
do it? Need a seamstress? One SF story I read indicated a minimum of about
50,000 just to get a good skill balance. Not sure which book it was though
:(
> I'm assuming conservative hard SF technology, earthlike environments, and
> colonists with an average skill level inversely proportional to colony
size
> (i.e. a group of 5 is all healthy experts, a group of 5 million has the
> inevitable distribution of human qualities). With these assumptions, the
> minimum viable population depends mostly on the criteria for a successful
> colony.
>
Exactly....
> Suppose success just means the original colonists stay alive for the
> remainder of a normal lifespan. In an earthlike environment, with
advanced
> technology, one person should be able stay alive.
>
Sure, if everybody else in the world drops dead tomorrow I suspect I could
live out a pretty good but lonely life.
> What about seeding a colony that survives indefinitely? If the colony is
to
> survive for generations then there is a minimum size for the starting gene
> pool. Much reproduction among close relatives is bad. I've read that
> 400-500 is a minimum population. This seems high to me, but I don't know
> squat about it. Anyone care to comment?
>
As another poster pointed out... frozen embryo's, genetic manipulation, etc.
James P. Hogan did it with zero colonists in his story _Voyage from
Yesteryear_.
> Suppose the goal is to maintain a society with a norm of not more than a
40
> hour work week and not more than 50% of the population in the labor force:
> This requires pretty good agricultural productivity, but with an advanced
> farming set-up agriculture doesn't have to be labor-intensive. Yet
> low-labor agriculture requires automation, and the infrastructure required
> be able to manufacture automated farm equipment is not small. If the
> colonists arrive with good equipment then the first generation might
manage
> this requirement with hardly any population at all. But after the
equipment
> needs replacement, I suspect the population requirement gets pretty large.
> Maybe on the order of 10,000? Suggestions?
>
I lean towards the 50,000 figure that unremembered author used. I prefer a
real barber.
> Maintain a society that can design and manufacture a spacecraft from raw
> materials in a few years: This requires advanced industrial
infrastructure.
> Would a million people be enough?
>
Sure if they were committed to it. They cut their own hair though.
> Maintain a society with substantially all of opportunities and creature
> comforts we have in contemporary industrial democracies: I'm assuming
> higher tech than we have, so productivity is higher, so the same goods can
> be had with fewer people working to produce them. Still, the population
> requirements will be fairly high. If we want 1000 hours of new TV
> programming every week, there have to be tens of thousands of people
working
> just in the television industry. I'll take a guess that millions are
> necessary to approximate a contemporary lifestyle over the long term.
>
Pre-planning is important. Our society is overburdened by specialization and
our economic systems. Problem with our competitive market driven system is
it encourages diversity. Know how many specific make/model TV sets exist in
the world? Guess how many models of proximity switches? Seems I always need
the part that's only made in some town in Italy, and they took the month off
:(
> These are just guesses; anyone care to offer alternatives? Good answers
> would seem to require more knowledge of both technology and economics than
I
> have.
>
> --
> Matthew DeBell
>
>
It's a big "it depends"
uray
Ray Drouillard
a
> > few thousand years ago.
>
> history. The Romans were very vain. Pompeii had brothels, perfumeries,
> clothiers, even streets with glowing lights down the middle. They just
used
> naturally luminescent rocks for the job.
I had actually considered that :-)
Think back more thousands of years - back to sustenance hunting/gathering.
Hmmm... come to think of it, even the most primitive of societies seemed to
be fond of painting their bodies, piercing themselves, and the like.
OK... I guess I'll have to think of another example. Accountant? Lawyer?
Ray
Julie Pascal
"Brandon Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
> >
> > Well, I'm not assuming a communist utopia. A small close-knit group may
> > prefer to own all property in common, but I don't assume this will work
> > generally. Also, as you note, the number of "slouches and malcontents"
> > depends on a lot more than the energy and wealth available to the
colony.
In some cases the slouches and malcontents pose more of a problem
than in other cases. The range of human personalities will exist.
Without the ability to carry dead weight there will have to be some
method of dealing with those people who refuse to carry their own
weight.
> > Above some threshold, energy and wealth probably have less to do with it
> > than social organization and culture; there will be crime, mental
illness,
> > civic indifference, and so forth, because these blights are the
seemingly
> > inevitable results of complex society (and its attendant bureaucracy,
> > inequality, violence, anomic tendencies, etc.).
>
> On what basis do you make this leap of logic? I agree with you about it
> being culturally dependent. I do not agree with you about the "seemingly
> inevitable results." For instance, I seriously doubt that 1 million Amish
> in space would have anywhere near the range of laziness and indifference
as
> you see in the average USA populace. They'd have a range *within their
> society* but that range might appear negligible to an outside observer.
You
> have to consider the rigidity of the social indoctrination, the equity of
> resources that the indoctrination makes available to its citizens, and the
> overall level of wealth. I find it equally hard to imagine a Spartan
> military society having tons of slouches. You don't work, you're thrown
> into the wilderness to fend for yourself.
This is no support or proof that "above some threshold" that this list
of social ills are "seemingly inevitable."
How different cultures deal with those inevitabilities is hardly
an indication that they don't exist.
> > So far we know of no way
> > for complex society to exist without bureaucracy, inequality, violence,
> > etc.,
>
> Societies exist as a matter of self-perpetuation. You can't expect our
> current societies, which have all the negative qualities you mention, to
be
> uprooted in any way and become something other than what they are. Ergo,
I
> see no basis for making predictions about possible societies using our own
> societies as the base material. You'd have to perform your social
> experiments with ideologically committed people.
For goodness sake, he said "seemingly".
> > and I don't see how increasing economic productivity by a factor of 10
> > or 100 or 1000 will change that.
It won't. Because you get the new problems of boredom and
feelings of uselessness to deal with. Rich kids are senselessly
destructive just as often as poor kids.
> You can certainly remove the contest for resources and one-upsmanship as
> motives for violence. You may still have crimes of passion, although the
> permissiveness of resources might influence the permissiveness of
sexuality.
Only if no one cares if they get stuck with the ugly chick. The
BUTT UGLY chick.
"What if you could have sex with anyone you wanted, and
anyone who wanted to could have sex with you?"
> The only remaining frontier of violence is ideology. It's a hard stretch
to
> maintain violent ideologies when people are basically happy, well-fed, and
> under-stressed.
No. The population of the US is more materially comfortable
(I suppose this would include Europe as well... the *West* then)
than has ever been before in the world. Why are we still
violent? Even the *poor* are ridiculously well off compared
to some historical periods. Not that poor people are demonstrably
more violent than people who are not poor by the standards of
the society. Wealth does not make us better people or less
violent.
> Sure there will be inequality. Somone gets a 4 bedroom house instead of
> your 3 bedroom house. People will bitch and moan about their slice of the
> pie. But the pie is huge.
So why are they bitching and moaning?
(...)
> > that lets the colonist say "Gimme an
> > automatic tractor, and then a milling machine, and then a computer,"
your
> > 10,000 colonists may in fact have a real bitch of a time 50 years down
the
> > road making, say, semiconductors (or whatever they're using at that
point)
> > to replace the AI that runs everything.
Yes. You would need a *very* large population to
support the kind of highly specialized technology that
we have today. 10,000 colonists probably would need
far more generalists who could fix tractors and any
other farm equiptment, hydroponics pumps, etc. than
could make various computer components.
A "replicator" would be a very handy crutch, though,
until the population increases to be able to support
large numbers of specialists.
> They've been travelling for 20 years already. Think they didn't replace
> some semiconductors?
They have really durable semi-conductors.
--Julie
Matthew DeBell
>>
>> Well, I'm not assuming a communist utopia. A small close-knit group may
>> prefer to own all property in common, but I don't assume this will work
>> generally. Also, as you note, the number of "slouches and malcontents"
>> depends on a lot more than the energy and wealth available to the colony.
>> than social organization and culture; there will be crime, mental
illness,
>> civic indifference, and so forth, because these blights are the seemingly
>> inevitable results of complex society (and its attendant bureaucracy,
>> inequality, violence, anomic tendencies, etc.).
>
>On what basis do you make this leap of logic? I agree with you about it
>being culturally dependent. I do not agree with you about the "seemingly
>inevitable results." For instance, I seriously doubt that 1 million Amish
>in space would have anywhere near the range of laziness and indifference as
>you see in the average USA populace. They'd have a range *within their
>society* but that range might appear negligible to an outside observer.
The Amish are not a good example. Amish society is not what I would call
"complex" relative to other societies. It is a small, relativley
homogenous, technologically hobbled group. And the Amish are unlikely to go
to space.
I'm not denying that significant cultural variations do and will exist. I
do deny that a large, complex society can consist entirely of industrious,
intelligent good citizens. At least, I deny that it's plausible. Social
complexity increases the standard of living, and it brings with it
alienation and anomie and isolation, which sow the seeds of political and
social conflict.
>> So far we know of no way
>> for complex society to exist without bureaucracy, inequality, violence,
>> etc.,
>
>Societies exist as a matter of self-perpetuation. You can't expect our
>current societies, which have all the negative qualities you mention, to be
>uprooted in any way and become something other than what they are. Ergo, I
>see no basis for making predictions about possible societies using our own
>societies as the base material. You'd have to perform your social
>experiments with ideologically committed people.
If we can't make predictions about possible societies using what we've
observed about other societies as the basis for prediction, then we have no
basis for prediction at all. Nothing makes any sense, and all fantasies are
equally plausible.
>> and I don't see how increasing economic productivity by a factor of 10
>> or 100 or 1000 will change that.
>
>You can certainly remove the contest for resources and one-upsmanship as
>motives for violence.
You cannot remove the contest for resources if people bear any cultural
resemblance to people today. Scarcity is universal.
>You may still have crimes of passion, although the
>permissiveness of resources might influence the permissiveness of
sexuality.
>The only remaining frontier of violence is ideology. It's a hard stretch
to
>maintain violent ideologies when people are basically happy, well-fed, and
>under-stressed.
Economic bounty does not eliminate stress. Rich people are just as
stressed, depressed, neurotic, and agitated as middle class people. The USA
is one of the richest societies that has ever existed, but it's still very
violent.
>Sure there will be inequality. Somone gets a 4 bedroom house instead of
>your 3 bedroom house. People will bitch and moan about their slice of the
>pie. But the pie is huge.
Huge relative to what? Americans have a "huge" pie to divvy up, certainly
far more than is needed to provide everyone with adequate housing, food,
education, health care, etc., yet inequality remains one of the most salient
features of modern society. Being collectively rich (which western
civilization already is) does very little to mitigate social inequality or
its consequences.
>> What I'm getting at is that unless the technology in the box in the hold
>of
>> your ship consists of a self-replicating vertically-integrated automated
>> manufacturing plant (or magic nanotech)
>
>Why "magic" nanotech? Nanotech in 100 years' time may be able to do quite
a
>bit, especially in conjunction with bioengineering and artificial
>intelligence. I agree that industrial self-replication is a desireable
>feature for a colony.
I think it was Clarke who said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic"?
>> that lets the colonist say "Gimme an
>> automatic tractor, and then a milling machine, and then a computer," your
>> 10,000 colonists may in fact have a real bitch of a time 50 years down
the
>> road making, say, semiconductors (or whatever they're using at that
point)
>> to replace the AI that runs everything.
>
>They've been travelling for 20 years already. Think they didn't replace
>some semiconductors? The ship is going to have to bring some factory
>equipment with it. Stuff for gathering raw materials and processing them
>into components. Hmm, maybe that's a big part of what the ship is designed
>to be: an orbital manufacturing complex. Capable of grabbing an asteroid
>and turning it into terrestrial industrial equipment. This sort of
>technology would have been perfected during Martian colonization. Maybe
>that pushes the timeline to 2200.
Some things don't scale down well at all. Integrated circuit manufacturing,
for instance.
--
Matthew DeBell
Julie Pascal
"Brandon Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
>
> "Ray Drouillard" <droui...@home.com> wrote in message news:4fYX5.136652
> > Imagine how absurd the idea of a fashion designer or beautician would be
a
> > few thousand years ago.
>
> What are you talking about?
He was making a comparison to how unlikely future professions
may seem to people from this time. It was meant as a generality.
> If you believe this then you do not know
> history. The Romans were very vain. Pompeii had brothels, perfumeries,
> clothiers, even streets with glowing lights down the middle. They just
used
> naturally luminescent rocks for the job.
Which things may have struck most people in that time as
pure lies, if you told them, because they all did their
own hair and make-up and didn't live in Rome.
--Julie
Julie Pascal
it rather well.
--Julie
"Oliver Neukum" <neu...@fachschaft.cup.uni-muenchen.de> wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4.21.001208...@fachschaft.cup.uni-muenchen.de
...
Phideaux
<droui...@home.com> wrote:
>> > Imagine how absurd the idea of a fashion designer or beautician would be
>a
>> > few thousand years ago.
>OK... I guess I'll have to think of another example. Accountant? Lawyer?
>
>
Microsoft Support Techs and Windows Programmers -- you wouldn't
have to import them with your colony, just choose the most
baboon-like native creatures.
Welfare/Social workers -- the smaller the community the more
likely for individuals to help where they may without formal
structures.
Genaologist (sp?) -- you'd all know where you came from, and the
records wouldn't be easily available anyway.
Priests/Shamans/Witch Doctors -- they would evolve over time to
fit the new situations.
Phideaux
____________________________________
I never really liked computers until
my IBM went down on me.
Julie Pascal
"Julie Pascal" <ju...@pascal.org> wrote in message
news:90sdl6$1s1p$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com...
> This is no support or proof that "above some threshold" that this list
> of social ills are "seemingly inevitable."
Dang... *not* "seemingly inevitable." This is not proof that these
social ills are *not* "seemingly inevitable"...
--Julie
Brandon Van Every
"uray" <ur...@remove-att.net> wrote in message
news:VfgY5.11340$Ei1.767760@bgtnsc05-
>
> I lean towards the 50,000 figure that unremembered author used. I
prefer a
> real barber.
It all depends on the quality of your expert systems.
> Pre-planning is important. Our society is overburdened by
specialization and
> our economic systems. Problem with our competitive market driven
system is
> it encourages diversity. Know how many specific make/model TV sets
exist in
> the world? Guess how many models of proximity switches? Seems I
always need
> the part that's only made in some town in Italy, and they took the
month off
> :(
Economic diversity isn't a "problem," it's a range of cost choices
driven lower by free market competition. You get what you pay for. If
you didn't have any choices you'd pay a *lot* more. Also the
competitive economy only lowers costs in markets where there's volume.
No volume, then no economies of scale.
Brandon Van Every
> > > Imagine how absurd the idea of a fashion designer or beautician
would be
> a
> > > few thousand years ago.
> >
> > What are you talking about? If you believe this then you do not
know
> > history. The Romans were very vain. Pompeii had brothels,
perfumeries,
> > clothiers, even streets with glowing lights down the middle. They
just
> used
> > naturally luminescent rocks for the job.
>
> I had actually considered that :-)
>
> Think back more thousands of years - back to sustenance
hunting/gathering.
Well you should have said 10,000 years then. "Few thousand" definitely
falls within recorded human history.
> Hmmm... come to think of it, even the most primitive of societies
seemed to
> be fond of painting their bodies, piercing themselves, and the like.
True, we don't know the ritual vs. economic implications of this for
societies that didn't leave a written record.
> OK... I guess I'll have to think of another example. Accountant?
Lawyer?
The accountant is the basis of the city state. Not sure when you get
magistrates, but worst case not long after. Lawyers, who represent you
professionally in court, come much later I think. I think they arose in
England?
Brandon Van Every
> an indication that they don't exist.
Your homework problems:
- go look up the Amish murder trial records
- go look up the Spartan lazy boy treatments
We'll be amused by your findings no matter what they are.
> > > and I don't see how increasing economic productivity by a factor
of 10
> > > or 100 or 1000 will change that.
>
> It won't. Because you get the new problems of boredom and
> feelings of uselessness to deal with. Rich kids are senselessly
> destructive just as often as poor kids.
I know it sounds cheesy but it does take a role model. There's no
inevitability in rich kids being bored and destructive.
> > You can certainly remove the contest for resources and
one-upsmanship as
> > motives for violence. You may still have crimes of passion,
although the
> > permissiveness of resources might influence the permissiveness of
> sexuality.
>
> Only if no one cares if they get stuck with the ugly chick. The
> BUTT UGLY chick.
Why do you assume monogamy? Even if you do, there's always plastic
surgery. I saw a book called "Survival of the Prettiest - The Science
of Beauty" if you really want to worry about it.
http://beauty.miningco.com/style/beauty/library/blreview25.htm YMMV as
to how causal you think beauty is.
> "What if you could have sex with anyone you wanted, and
> anyone who wanted to could have sex with you?"
How about teledildonics? That fits the bill.
> > The only remaining frontier of violence is ideology. It's a hard
stretch
> to
> > maintain violent ideologies when people are basically happy,
well-fed, and
> > under-stressed.
>
> No. The population of the US is more materially comfortable
> (I suppose this would include Europe as well... the *West* then)
> than has ever been before in the world. Why are we still
> violent?
Because people in the USA *aren't* all basically happy, well-fed, and
under-stressed.
> > Sure there will be inequality. Somone gets a 4 bedroom house
instead of
> > your 3 bedroom house. People will bitch and moan about their slice
of the
> > pie. But the pie is huge.
>
> So why are they bitching and moaning?
Because people like to bitch and moan. It's pleasurable to them. When
I read newspapers, and so-and-so starts bitching and moaning about some
civic issue, I have a criterion: is this a life-or-death matter, a
serious and grievous social injustice, or somebody whining about their
slice of the pie? Often it's the latter. In that respect, I feel
everyone is entitled to vote for their slice of the pie.
> > They've been travelling for 20 years already. Think they didn't
replace
> > some semiconductors?
>
> They have really durable semi-conductors.
Or else a big box of spares. Doing everything with identical
general-purpose CPUs would have its advantages.
Brandon Van Every
>
> Which things may have struck most people in that time as
> pure lies, if you told them, because they all did their
> own hair and make-up and didn't live in Rome.
Never went into town? Didn't live on the big Senator's estate as a
slave? Yew mus' think dem' country bumpkins ignert.
GrapeApe
>sperm,
>> ova or embryos in your ship.
>
>Heh! How deliciously low tech.
until you try to hatch them.
--cut and paste to adopt this sig file---
Make Deja a useful Usenet Archive again!
Douglas Muir
> > OK... I guess I'll have to think of another example. Accountant?
> Lawyer?
>
> The accountant is the basis of the city state. Not sure when you get
> magistrates, but worst case not long after. Lawyers, who represent you
> professionally in court, come much later I think. I think they arose in
> England?
Depends on your definition of "lawyer", but people who represent other people
before courts have evolved independently several times. The ancient Romans
had them, and so did several African civilizations, and the Arabs.
Present-day American lawyers trace their roots back to medieval England, but
even there the profession is pretty old -- there were full-time lawyers by the
12th century or so.
Doug M.
uray
"Brandon Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
I meant it is a problem in terms of starting an independent colony. I
suspect the early years of any such colony will have to rely heavily on
standardization so that manufacturing can be as flexible as possible. Parts
will need to be very universal so that replacement inventories can be kept
low. I have to keep repair components in stock for critical pieces of
equipment, my list of sensors is over 5 pages long! Yet they could all be
replaced with maybe a dozen specific ones. So instead of only having a
dozen spares I have hundreds. In many cases I do try to standardize,
however due to specific design issues, warranties and such substitution is
not always allowed or practical. Thanks to competing standards (English and
metric) I need two bolt cabinets instead of one, as well as drills, taps and
such. I've probably got more than a dozen specific types of screwdriver
tips.
I may pay more, but I'd have to buy a lot less!
A free market economy is a luxury that not all civilizations can afford.
uray
Douglas Muir
> Your homework problems:
> - go look up the Amish murder trial records
> - go look up the Spartan lazy boy treatments
>
> We'll be amused by your findings no matter what they are.
Um, you seem to be sharing in come popular myths about the Amish.
Per capita, the Amish aren't nearly as peaceful as most folks seem to think.
They are a lot less violent than the average American, yes, but at least part
of this is because they're fairly well-to-do; most Amish are middle-class, and
quite a lot of them are wealthy (though none are _very_ wealthy). On average,
they're upper middle class, and very few of them are poor.
Adjust for income, and a lot of the difference vanishes. Upper-middle-class
Americans are *always* much less violent than poor Americans -- they do still
commit crimes, just not violent ones. The Amish track this trend neatly.
A difference still remains, but it's smaller than you might think, especially
given that some violent Amish crime (domestic abuse and such) is almost
certainly underreported due to the clannish nature of Amish society. And the
Amish are actually *more* violent, per capita, than the citizens of some
European countries; a group of 10,000 Amish Americans will probably commit
more violent crimes in a year than a group of 10,000 Danes.
The Amish are both weirder and more normal than the popular stereotype. And
they vary more; several groups are usually lumped together under the single
label "Amish".
Doug M.
Brandon Van Every
"Douglas Muir" <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote in message
>
> A difference still remains, but it's smaller than you might think,
especially
> given that some violent Amish crime (domestic abuse and such) is
almost
> certainly underreported due to the clannish nature of Amish society.
And the
> Amish are actually *more* violent, per capita, than the citizens of
some
> European countries; a group of 10,000 Amish Americans will probably
commit
> more violent crimes in a year than a group of 10,000 Danes.
From where are you drawing this data and is it available on line? I'd
like to see "the Amish crime statistics." :-)
Brandon Van Every
"GrapeApe" <grap...@aol.comjunk> wrote in message
news:20001209032034...@ng-fa1.aol.com...
> >> The gene pool is the least of your worries. You could carry frozen
> >sperm,
> >> ova or embryos in your ship.
> >
> >Heh! How deliciously low tech.
>
> until you try to hatch them.
Not if you bring live nude girls with you.
Paul F. Dietz
> From where are you drawing this data and is it available on line? I'd
> like to see "the Amish crime statistics." :-)
What is this:
Clop clop.
Clop clop.
Clop clop.
BANG BANG BANG BANG
Clop clop.
Clop clop.
Answer: an Amish drive-by shooting.
Paul
Brandon Van Every
>
> I meant it is a problem in terms of starting an independent colony. I
> suspect the early years of any such colony will have to rely heavily
on
> standardization so that manufacturing can be as flexible as possible.
Heck, standardization, nothing, it has to rely on Earth. Or rather it
will rely on Earth, unless you have a means of cutting the umbilical.
Near-stellar travel will not cut the umbilical. If you can get there,
you can also send supplies, in a big long ant convoy one after the
other. Ditto stable wormholes, that's just a variation on proximity.
Random wormholes have the nagging problem that you don't know what's on
the other side. You have to scout them, and your ability to scout them
is limited by how long they're open. If you do even fudge factor math
on the findability of suitably habitable planets given different search
strategies, it looks grim. You can't open these things for 1 minute,
you need 1 year. Else you can bring rapid terraforming equipment with
you, in which case you had enough energy for rapid interstellar travel
anyways. Also even if you're good at terraforming inert rocks, you
still need the potential to hold an atmosphere, a certain distance from
the sun, and a non-eccentric orbit if you don't want to alternately bake
and freeze.
Oh yeah, opening wormholes in the first place is silly, it's
sacrifice-your-star kind of energy. Really only works if you're in a
star system with lotsa stars very close by, and no competing
inhabitants. (Remember, no *competing* inhabitants >-)
The only realistic "colonists rely on themselves" scenarios are:
- generation ships
- Earth blows up
"Colony presumed dead" isn't realistic. Once the colony lands it'll
build a laser and try to communicate with Earth. They'll know exactly
where to send the laser to increase the chance of reception. Contact
can only be temporarily lost.
"Weather interferes" isn't realistic. The colonists will just build
something that orbits somewhere that's free of the weather. In fact, it
might be a good idea to drop interstellar navigational beacons along the
way.
> A free market economy is a luxury that not all civilizations can
afford.
True. The question is, how do you separate the colonial economy from
the Earth economy? I say generally speaking, you can't. Unless Earth
doesn't have an economy anymore.
uray
>
> "uray" <ur...@remove-att.net> wrote in message
> news:C_lY5.22573$0r2.793770@bgtnsc07-
> >
> > I meant it is a problem in terms of starting an independent colony. I
> > suspect the early years of any such colony will have to rely heavily
> on
> > standardization so that manufacturing can be as flexible as possible.
>
> Heck, standardization, nothing, it has to rely on Earth. Or rather it
> will rely on Earth, unless you have a means of cutting the umbilical.
> Near-stellar travel will not cut the umbilical. If you can get there,
> you can also send supplies, in a big long ant convoy one after the
> other. Ditto stable wormholes, that's just a variation on proximity.
>
I can imagine the look on someone's face when I tell them: "The Component
is on order, should be here in about 8 years." They often cry when they
have to wait till the next morning..
Ever try to get tech support for a product made on the other side of the
planet? Because of time zone differences it is sometimes like having to
deal with speed of light delays. I often communicate via FAX/Email, but
when a FAX I send "right away in the morning" gets there right after they
all went home for the day it feels like I'm dealing with a supplier half a
light day from Earth.
A convoy is mostly practical for staple items, but why would you ship oil or
raw ore to Proxima? Getting self sufficient on staples would be an early
requirenment. I suspect the biggest "commodity" exchanged would
entertainment and general knowledge.
Another point to remember is that goods in transit exist, and appear
somewhere on a balance sheet. If the travel time is twenty years, and you
want a new supply ship landing say 3 times a year, that's 60 supply ships in
transit at any given time. Some accountant somewhere is going to balk at
having all that inventory sitting in those ships for so long. You would be
sending out ships for twenty years before your customer recieved his first
package. So much for short term quarterly gain.
> Random wormholes have the nagging problem that you don't know what's on
> the other side. You have to scout them, and your ability to scout them
> is limited by how long they're open. If you do even fudge factor math
> on the findability of suitably habitable planets given different search
> strategies, it looks grim. You can't open these things for 1 minute,
> you need 1 year. Else you can bring rapid terraforming equipment with
> you, in which case you had enough energy for rapid interstellar travel
> anyways. Also even if you're good at terraforming inert rocks, you
> still need the potential to hold an atmosphere, a certain distance from
> the sun, and a non-eccentric orbit if you don't want to alternately bake
> and freeze.
>
> Oh yeah, opening wormholes in the first place is silly, it's
> sacrifice-your-star kind of energy. Really only works if you're in a
> star system with lotsa stars very close by, and no competing
> inhabitants. (Remember, no *competing* inhabitants >-)
>
> The only realistic "colonists rely on themselves" scenarios are:
> - generation ships
> - Earth blows up
Isolationists.
>
> "Colony presumed dead" isn't realistic. Once the colony lands it'll
> build a laser and try to communicate with Earth. They'll know exactly
> where to send the laser to increase the chance of reception. Contact
> can only be temporarily lost.
>
> "Weather interferes" isn't realistic. The colonists will just build
> something that orbits somewhere that's free of the weather. In fact, it
> might be a good idea to drop interstellar navigational beacons along the
> way.
>
This all assumes the colony *wants* to talk to Earth. I could imagine a
political or religious extremist group starting a colony with the intent to
"sever all ties".
> > A free market economy is a luxury that not all civilizations can
> afford.
>
> True. The question is, how do you separate the colonial economy from
> the Earth economy? I say generally speaking, you can't. Unless Earth
> doesn't have an economy anymore.
>
The travel time/diffculty determines all. I'm considering it from the
viewpoint of an extrasolar colony and no FTL type drives/wormholes etc..
uray
Oliver Neukum
> > Even today no European country is able to produce useful products in
> all
> > fields of economy.
>
> But the EU as a whole can. As can the USA. So if you've got 250
> million people and trading partners....
So you've got an upper limit for necessary population.
> > Many industrial processes scale badly. If you look up
> > how many top notch chip factories there are today, you can count the
> > nummer with fingers and toes. Being on an alien world makes it even
> > harder.
>
> What happens when you send in the AI robots? "Workforce" doesn't have
> to be measured in humans.
You can patially replace humans with robots.
But its not only workforce, you need a market of sufficient size.
Regards
Oliver
GrapeApe
>> >> The gene pool is the least of your worries. You could carry frozen
>> >sperm,
>> >> ova or embryos in your ship.
>> >
>> >Heh! How deliciously low tech.
>>
>> until you try to hatch them.
>
>Not if you bring live nude girls with you.
And a technician or three that know what they are doing. At least in the cases
for stored ova or embryos. If you want true genetic diversity rather than
colony matriarcs.
Probably not the best sucess rate either getting those prefabs to take root in
the new oven.
Douglas Muir
> From where are you drawing this data
A book called "The Amish and the State", by one Donald Kraybill.
I'd bet there's also stuff online, though; the Amish are one of the more
intensely studied groups out there.
> I'd like to see "the Amish crime statistics." :-)
I Couldn't Make This Up Department:
When I was a law student in Illinois, I met a rural Public Defender who had
several young Amish clients.
According to him, Amish teenagers and young adults have a well deserved
reputation for hell-raising. See, the Illinois Amish don't formally baptize
until adulthood -- early 20s, typically. So until that point, young Amish
aren't bound by the strictures of their religion. They can drive cars, drink
heavily, sleep around, use drugs, go to discos, what have you. Their parents
may disapprove, and may discipline them if they're still living at home, but
it isn't a *sin*, and the Church won't take any action against them. So a lot
of Amish sow their wild oats for a few years before settling down.
One problem with this is that, as kids, they're not exposed much to some
aspects of modern life... especially cars. So they tend to be really horrible
drivers, since they don't have the instincts that come from having ridden in
cars for years. And they tend to have *no* grasp of the dangers of DWI; after
all, you can drive a buggy dead drunk, and the horse will just take you home.
This means that young Amish in cars get stopped by rural cops a lot.
My acquaintance called this a DWA: Driving While Amish.
Doug M.
John Schilling
>Brandon Van Every wrote:
>What is this:
>Clop clop.
>Clop clop.
>Clop clop.
>BANG BANG BANG BANG
>Clop clop.
>Clop clop.
Isn't that the Mennonite version?
The Amish one works like this:
Clop clop
Clop clop
Clop clop
BANG!
Rattle clunk
Tear spit ssssss
Tap tap tap
Rustle scraaape
"Hey, stand still!"
scrape tap tap tap
rattle scrape
"Dagnabit, I said stand still!"
Click sst click
Rattle
Click
BANG!
Clop clop
Clop clop...
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Timothy Little
>You can patially replace humans with robots. But its not only
>workforce, you need a market of sufficient size.
If the robots are capable of filling the whole role of workforce, then
the "sufficient size" could be 1 human. What they need, they have
their robot workforce build. They have a standing order for
replacement parts and repairs for their workforce, of course.
So I'd have to say that it is after all just a matter of workforce.
- Tim
GrapeApe
>
>The Amish one works like this:
what is the difference between a 'gun' and a flint lock as far as these sects
are concerned? Something to do with mass production?
Julie Pascal
"Brandon Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
>
> "uray" <ur...@remove-att.net> wrote in message
> news:C_lY5.22573$0r2.793770@bgtnsc07-
> >
> > I meant it is a problem in terms of starting an independent colony. I
> > suspect the early years of any such colony will have to rely heavily
> on
> > standardization so that manufacturing can be as flexible as possible.
>
> Heck, standardization, nothing, it has to rely on Earth. Or rather it
> will rely on Earth, unless you have a means of cutting the umbilical.
> Near-stellar travel will not cut the umbilical. If you can get there,
> you can also send supplies, in a big long ant convoy one after the
> other. Ditto stable wormholes, that's just a variation on proximity.
Wow.
I'm trying to get my mind around probable supply schedules for
*Mars*.... turn around.... communication lag....
Interstellar figure 9 or more years communications round trip... expense
for ships and fuel.... will they need what they thought they'd need
on what schedule?.. 20, 40, 100 year travel times....
Ooops... wave the magic wand, it will work fine. Just send
a supply ship.
I'm sure there is *some* scenerio where you could just
send a supply ship. I'd never dare say not.
--Julie
Julie Pascal
"Brandon Van Every" <vane...@3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
>
> "Julie Pascal" <ju...@pascal.org> wrote in message
> news:90se23$1tdk$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com...
> >
> > Which things may have struck most people in that time as
> > pure lies, if you told them, because they all did their
> > own hair and make-up and didn't live in Rome.
>
> Never went into town? Didn't live on the big Senator's estate as a
> slave? Yew mus' think dem' country bumpkins ignert.
Oops... silly me, the entire population of the earth lived
within horse-cart distance of Rome.
I am such an idiot.
--Julie
Oliver Neukum
You'd need to assume true AI.
You still need a large number of experts, probably in the hundreds.
Regards
Oliver
Urban Fredriksson
GrapeApe <grap...@aol.comjunk> wrote:
>what is the difference between a 'gun' and a flint lock as far as these sects
>are concerned? Something to do with mass production?
Rather when they were invented. (But I think even the most
conservative use _some_ things which weren't invented by
the time they were founded.)
--
Urban Fredriksson http://www.canit.se/%7Egriffon/
To get rid of an enemy, make him a friend.
Peter Kwangjun Suk
>The number of "skills" in our society is quite large. Do you mind having
>your hair cut by the cook?
Dreadlocks, mon!
>How about having your entertainment provided by
>your neighbor kid trying to play the cello from a "how-to book".
This is a prejudice formed from growing up in a specialized society.
Actually, given the right cultural environment, the neighbor kid's
music might well be better than anything you have in your album
collection. (By some accounts, there are some E. European gypsy
villages with 220 residents and 200 virtuosos.) And I find really
good storytelling (from someone handed down the tradition by a real
master, not a wannabe) vastly better than the stuff we get on TV
produced by paid experts.
A person can exhibit skills for a large number of tasks, if there is a
unifying paradigm for them all. A farmer in an agrarian society could
do hundreds of things, because they were all grounded in commonsense
physical principles -- including music. (I do this myself. Then
again, I also don't own a TV by choice, so I have a time advantage
there.)
Likewise, I can manage to do a passable job with programming in many
different domains.
However, many technical "skills" are grounded in things which are not
like physical principles, but which are arbitrarily (and often
inelegantly) devised by people. (Programming to certain schlock
operating systems.) These "skills" may themselves be very arbitrary
in nature and may not generalize as well.
>Is a GP
>sufficient or do you want experienced surgeons, cardiac specialists and
>such?
As an individual, I'd rather have all the specialists. As a planner
of a colonial society, the cold realist would note that it may be more
economical to let people with exotic conditions die, than to maintain
all that infrastructure. And in fact, this is how it worked with
colonies here on Earth.
>Care to clean up after yourself, or would you rather have a janitor
>do it?
I'm sure you'd survive.
>Need a seamstress?
Do away with fashion. Everyone can just wear sweatsuits and baseball
caps like Frat boys and Frat-rats. ;-)
--
Peter Kwangjun Suk
2000 Killfile Posterchild
Peter Kwangjun Suk
>
>>> >> The gene pool is the least of your worries. You could carry frozen
>>> >sperm,
>>> >> ova or embryos in your ship.
>>> >
>>> >Heh! How deliciously low tech.
>>>
>>> until you try to hatch them.
>>
>>Not if you bring live nude girls with you.
>
>And a technician or three that know what they are doing. At least in the cases
>for stored ova or embryos. If you want true genetic diversity rather than
>colony matriarchs.
[snip]
You could get a lot of diversity from stored sperm. Much easier to
store. Much easier to "implant."
John Schilling
>In article <20001209224006...@ng-fr1.aol.com>,
>GrapeApe <grap...@aol.comjunk> wrote:
>>what is the difference between a 'gun' and a flint lock as far as these sects
>>are concerned? Something to do with mass production?
>Rather when they were invented. (But I think even the most
>conservative use _some_ things which weren't invented by
>the time they were founded.)
Leaving the realm of jokes for the moment, the issue for the Amish is
not when a thing was invented. There's no "Tech Level Freeze" at work
here; that's an SFnal rather than religious/philosophical concept.
The issue is whether or not the technolgy, whether it be invented
yesterday or thousands of years old, is percieved as making people
lazy or decadent. A telephone in an outbuilding a hundred yards from
the house, that can be used to make calls when truly necessary, is OK.
Telephone in the house that distracts people from living a virtuous
life whenever anyone else wants to chat, not OK.
Weapons technology is irrelevant, because the Amish happen to be agrarian
pacifists who live in an area devoid of hostile fauna. I speculate that
if they had to cull a local coyote population to keep their farms running
they might come up with the interpretation that flintlocks are OK but
repeating rifles are not OK. Mountain lions eating Amish babies for lunch
on a weekly basis, and all bets are off.
Riboflavin
>The issue is whether or not the technolgy, whether it be invented
>yesterday or thousands of years old, is percieved as making people
>lazy or decadent. A telephone in an outbuilding a hundred yards from
>the house, that can be used to make calls when truly necessary, is OK.
>Telephone in the house that distracts people from living a virtuous
>life whenever anyone else wants to chat, not OK.
>
connected to the rest of the world, and so inviting in sin (or something
along those lines), so the reason why a telephone in an outbuilding is OK
would be that it's not really connected to your house. Are there any good
web-based sources on this? I've always found the Amish (and similar
anti-tech groups) somewhat interesting.
--
Kevin Allegood ribotr...@mindspring.pants.com
Remove the pants from my email address to reply
"Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may
have a meaning of which I disapprove." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Jonathan Cresswell
Riboflavin <ri...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:910um7$geu$1...@slb0.atl.mindspring.net...
> John Schilling wrote in message <910m55$h7t$1...@spock.usc.edu>...
> >The issue is whether or not the technolgy, whether it be invented
> >yesterday or thousands of years old, is percieved as making people
> >lazy or decadent. A telephone in an outbuilding a hundred yards from
> >the house, that can be used to make calls when truly necessary, is OK.
> >Telephone in the house that distracts people from living a virtuous
> >life whenever anyone else wants to chat, not OK.
> >
> I thought the issue for them with electricity/telephones was being too
> connected to the rest of the world, and so inviting in sin (or something
> along those lines), so the reason why a telephone in an outbuilding is OK
> would be that it's not really connected to your house. Are there any good
> web-based sources on this? I've always found the Amish (and similar
> anti-tech groups) somewhat interesting.
The original Amish web site is at
with a mirror site at
since traffic at the first site is often very heavy. ;)
--
Jonathan C
Brandon Van Every
>
> A convoy is mostly practical for staple items, but why would you ship
oil or
> raw ore to Proxima?
You wouldn't. But Earth would ship zillions of antimatter containers,
that's my current concept. Earth can make 'em on a gigantic,
planet-encompassing Martian complex. Proxima can't.
> Getting self sufficient on staples would be an early requirenment.
Yeah, I don't have a vision yet of what Proximan startup industry would
be like.
> Another point to remember is that goods in transit exist, and appear
> somewhere on a balance sheet.
Antimatter isn't traded, it's a freely given supply. Earth uses tons of
the stuff, it can be manufactured in effectively unlimited quantities.
(Hmm what's the hard science basis for that?) The difficulty is
transporting it to Proxima, you have to waste a lot of energy to get it
there. If Proxima starts getting uppity, Earth cuts off the freely
given supply. Or starts trying to send it only to the faction it
supports.
> If the travel time is twenty years, and you
> want a new supply ship landing say 3 times a year, that's 60 supply
ships in
> transit at any given time. Some accountant somewhere is going to balk
at
> having all that inventory sitting in those ships for so long. You
would be
> sending out ships for twenty years before your customer recieved his
first
> package. So much for short term quarterly gain.
Colonizing Proxima is not a profit-driven venture. It is a consequence
of ridiculous Earth wealth.
> > The only realistic "colonists rely on themselves" scenarios are:
> > - generation ships
> > - Earth blows up
>
> Isolationists.
Only if all the colonists are isolationist. Since they started off with
Earth's bounty, that is politically inconceivable. Isolationism can
develop later, once they're there for awhile. It probably represents a
military putsch.
> This all assumes the colony *wants* to talk to Earth. I could imagine
a
> political or religious extremist group starting a colony with the
intent to
> "sever all ties".
Of course. That's the point of the game. But it's not a starting
condition. It's not like "Lost In Space" where Earth supply is
impossible.
> The travel time/diffculty determines all. I'm considering it from
the
> viewpoint of an extrasolar colony and no FTL type drives/wormholes
etc..
If you can get there, you can always pump a supply chain. The question
is whether that supply chain is profit-driven or not. In my scenario,
it isn't. In your scenario... well for interstellar trade, what can
they possibly bring back from Proxima that is worth the trip? It would
have to be something that you can only manufacture on Proxima.
A wonder-element?
Native life? You don't need the latter in quantity, a few specimens
would do. My Dickensian premise is the planet is Earth-like, so ship
'em home and watch 'em grow, even if their biology is fundamentally
different. Not really a basis for much economic exchange. They're
seeds.
I suppose you could have a growth industry of advanced Proximan biotech,
if there's a compelling application that you can't possibly find close
proxies for on Earth. Sorta like those agro businesses that sell the
non-seeding plants nowadays. Control the supply.
Brandon Van Every
>
>
> Interstellar figure 9 or more years communications round trip...
expense
> for ships and fuel.... will they need what they thought they'd need
> on what schedule?.. 20, 40, 100 year travel times....
>
> Ooops... wave the magic wand, it will work fine. Just send
> a supply ship.
That's why the colonization of Proxima has to happen as a consequence of
ridiculous human wealth/energy production. Proxima isn't profitable.
It's a vast waste of resources... so Earth must have vast resources to
waste.
Brandon Van Every
>
> Oops... silly me, the entire population of the earth lived
> within horse-cart distance of Rome.
>
> I am such an idiot.
Rome wasn't the only city or civilization, you know.
Brandon Van Every
"John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message news:910m55
>
> Mountain lions eating Amish babies for lunch
> on a weekly basis, and all bets are off.
Sounds like a great game title! "Amish Hunter...."
Michael J Ash
> "John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message news:910m55
> >
> > Mountain lions eating Amish babies for lunch
> > on a weekly basis, and all bets are off.
>
> Sounds like a great game title! "Amish Hunter...."
I think you should maybe try another title. In "Deer Hunter" the player
shot deer, so in "Amish Hunter" the player would shoot.... :)
--
"Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
"Say not, 'I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the
soul walking upon my path.'" -- Khalil Gibran
Mike Ash - <http://www.mikeash.com/>, <mailto:ma...@mikeash.com>
Brandon Van Every
"Michael J Ash" <mik...@csd.uwm.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.OSF.3.96.100121...@alpha3.csd.uwm.edu...
> On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
> > "John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message
news:910m55
> > >
> > > Mountain lions eating Amish babies for lunch
> > > on a weekly basis, and all bets are off.
> >
> > Sounds like a great game title! "Amish Hunter...."
>
> I think you should maybe try another title. In "Deer Hunter" the
player
> shot deer, so in "Amish Hunter" the player would shoot.... :)
You keep out of this he doesn't have to shoot you now.
Timothy Little
>> So I'd have to say that it is after all just a matter of workforce.
>
>You'd need to assume true AI.
Yes, that's likely a part of having robots make up all of the
workforce. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is absolutely
necessary, though. I doubt you'd need full human-equivalence in all
respects.
>You still need a large number of experts, probably in the hundreds.
... or expert systems. Better than we have now, of course. Much of
the technology can be behind state-of-the-art, so that most of the
known problems can be designed into the control system software to
begin with. Likely the software itself would be capable of at least
some form of robust adaptation to local conditions.
Nearly all of the tasks will be relatively routine, or can be made so
by accepting increasing degrees of inefficiency. e.g. repairing a
broken machine is probably more complex than manufacturing a new one.
Robust but less efficient machines may be easier to maintain than
lightweight and energy-sparing yet highly complex and fragile devices.
I must admit that I'm thinking more along the lines of tried and
tested self-sufficiency technology being developed and used widely in
the home system for a hundred or so years before the first
interstellar colony.
If self-sustaining industrial bases do prove capable of being directed
by small groups of people, that would provide a very good reason to
undertake such a lengthy journey to another star. I doubt it would be
long before every dirty snowball in home system was grabbed and put to
use if human workforce no longer provided a limit to industrial
expansion.
- Tim
Oliver Neukum
As I said: true AI.
> Nearly all of the tasks will be relatively routine, or can be made so
> by accepting increasing degrees of inefficiency. e.g. repairing a
After the initial adaption to local circumstances.
Unless you go for a space based society in a colonial system.
> I must admit that I'm thinking more along the lines of tried and
> tested self-sufficiency technology being developed and used widely in
> the home system for a hundred or so years before the first
> interstellar colony.
Very reasonable.
> If self-sustaining industrial bases do prove capable of being directed
> by small groups of people, that would provide a very good reason to
> undertake such a lengthy journey to another star. I doubt it would be
> long before every dirty snowball in home system was grabbed and put to
> use if human workforce no longer provided a limit to industrial
> expansion.
Why would someone develop them ? Total self sufficiency probably doesn't
pay. At that technological level there should be some traffic. Self
sufficiency seems reasonable only with respect for bulk materials.
Regards
Oliver
Brandon Van Every
"Timothy Little" <t...@freeman.little-possums.net> wrote in message
>
> I must admit that I'm thinking more along the lines of tried and
> tested self-sufficiency technology being developed and used widely in
> the home system for a hundred or so years before the first
> interstellar colony.
As am I. Some things to consider:
- before bothering with another solar system, wouldn't they do
everything on Mars?
- before bothering with Mars, wouldn't they do everything on the Sahara,
Antarctica, the oceans?
Timothy Little
[...self sustaining industrial base...]
>Why would someone develop them ? Total self sufficiency probably doesn't
>pay.
You're probably right that total self sufficiency doesn't pay too well
where there are billions of people to run things. However I think it
could easily get to the point where the technology is available
anyway, so why not use it?
I think the biggest hurdle would be developing the software -- that
would likely take trillions of hours of human labour. The process of
writing the first primitive components of such systems has already
started though, and there would be increasing returns at every step.
Our ability to write and maintain large systems will increase, but
software maintenance is still the biggest aspect I can see standing in
the way. Physical maintenance will probably be a secondary issue.
> At that technological level there should be some traffic. Self
>sufficiency seems reasonable only with respect for bulk materials.
Certainly, within the home system. Even if the industrial base is
capable of providing all its own needs, that doesn't mean that they
will have to use it. There are distinct advantages to having at least
the potential for complete economic autonomy though. Being able to
build anything you need without having to pay someone else for it is
pretty useful, since it puts you in a very strong bargaining position.
I think that by itself would be a sufficient reason to use such
technology, even apart from ideologies that might drive people to want
to be self-sufficient without giving up industrial technology.
It would also be useful technology for building such huge-scale
engineering projects as those required to support interstellar travel.
The first industrial machines build more complex and larger systems
that actually do the work of constructing the final solar->antimatter
production plants (or whatever), along with the supporting industry
required to maintain and expand the whole thing while it churns out
ever-increasing quantities of antimatter.
- Tim
Timothy Little
>
>As am I. Some things to consider:
>- before bothering with another solar system, wouldn't they do
>everything on Mars?
I expect so. Probably many other places too.
I'm not so sure I see a lot of advantages to Mars in particular.
>- before bothering with Mars, wouldn't they do everything on the
>Sahara, Antarctica, the oceans?
Very likely much of them, yes. Earth has the advantage of having lots
of different elements in abundance. The only major disadvantage is
how close your nearest neighbours are, since any side-effects of your
industry there will affect them far more than some random place in the
solar system. For example, people probably wouldn't like you setting
up a major fusion-powered antimatter production plant in the Atlantic,
but might not mind if you had one somewhere in orbit of Saturn.
- Tim
Brandon Van Every
> would likely take trillions of hours of human labour. The process of
> writing the first primitive components of such systems has already
> started though, and there would be increasing returns at every step.
More likely that some day software systems will converge with biology.
It's ridiculous for humans to keep writing everything manually forever.
Past a certain complexity, the system must write itself. Big question
when that day will come.
> There are distinct advantages to having at least
> the potential for complete economic autonomy though. Being able to
> build anything you need without having to pay someone else for it is
> pretty useful, since it puts you in a very strong bargaining position.
But then why would you be trading? You'd just build it. Nobody trades
unless they're lacking something.
> The first industrial machines build more complex and larger systems
> that actually do the work of constructing the final solar->antimatter
> production plants (or whatever), along with the supporting industry
> required to maintain and expand the whole thing while it churns out
> ever-increasing quantities of antimatter.
Indeed, self-assembling systems would be the software and hardware
manufacture of the future. The main struggle is how to get these
systems to be energy-efficient at a strategic scale. Things that put
themselves together are going to waste a lot of energy doing it. You
could run optimization cycles, essentially wasting energy now to make
something more energy efficient later. Size of prototype training set
and scaleup of the training would be big issues.
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com Look, a troll, er,
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA um, a witch! <|;-)
Brandon Van Every
It's nearby. It's way easier to terraform than Venus.
> For example, people probably wouldn't like you setting
> up a major fusion-powered antimatter production plant in the Atlantic,
> but might not mind if you had one somewhere in orbit of Saturn.
Yep, the old NIMBY in space.
--
Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com Look, a troll, er,
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA um, a witch! <|;-)
Peter Kwangjun Suk
(Timothy Little) wrote:
>Oliver Neukum <neu...@fachschaft.cup.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
>[...self sustaining industrial base...]
>>Why would someone develop them ? Total self sufficiency probably doesn't
>>pay.
>
>You're probably right that total self sufficiency doesn't pay too well
>where there are billions of people to run things. However I think it
>could easily get to the point where the technology is available
>anyway, so why not use it?
>
>I think the biggest hurdle would be developing the software -- that
>would likely take trillions of hours of human labour. The process of
>writing the first primitive components of such systems has already
>started though, and there would be increasing returns at every step.
>
>Our ability to write and maintain large systems will increase, but
>software maintenance is still the biggest aspect I can see standing in
>the way. Physical maintenance will probably be a secondary issue.
[snip]
Okay, then we take Brandon's suggestion, and we let the little
bugger's control programs evolve. What we get is essentially a
machine ecology like James P. Hogan described in the "Code of the
Lifemaker," but on a virtual level. BTW, I was at OOPSLA this year,
and some of the Object Oriented programming gurus are talking about
precisely this!
--
Peter Kwangjun Suk
Cincom Systems, Inc.
s...@pobox.com http://ostudio.swiki.net
(Opinions expressed may not be that of my employer.)
Timothy Little
>
>when that day will come.
Yes. The question in my mind is whether we are capable of writing
such software in the first place. There are beginnings already, of
course. However, all the indications are that it will require a
qualitatively different approach, not just quantitative.
The biggest limitation to self-writing software seems (IMO) to be in
specifying what you want the final product to do. Current software
design is about 90% 'how'. Completely eliminating the 'how' still
leaves the 'what', allowing for only about one order of magnitude
increase.
>But then why would you be trading? You'd just build it. Nobody
>trades unless they're lacking something.
Trade happens far more often that just that. Suppose you have your
self-sustaining industrial base, and for some reason you want Widgets.
Now, Widgets may require yttrium, which is in short supply in your
area. Now, you can certainly get it by nucleosynthesis if nothing
else. Or you just step up production of stuff that's easier for you
and trade it for yttrium.
The fact that you can build Widgets yourself means there is a limit to
how much you'll pay, so you're in a better bargaining position than if
you couldn't produce them at all. There will still be stuff that's
easy for you to make but harder for others and vice versa, so I think
there will always be trade.
> Things that put themselves together are going to waste a lot of
>energy doing it.
Like humans do :^)
It's not like robot systems will have any energy problems that humans
don't have. The main problem is getting a "critical mass" of
flexibility, so that maintenance requirement are less than 100% of
total output.
I don't think energy efficiency will be the main issue. I suspect
growth time will be a larger concern.
Suppose you're build an antimatter production facility, and a choice
of two startup systems. One can reproduce itself in 6 months, and
makes a facility that is 0.01% efficient at producing antimatter. One
reproduces itself in 1 year, and is ten times more efficient. Given
equal input energies to begin with, the first will overtake the second
in output after only 4 years.
Unless you believe that the rate of reproduction will be limited
primarily by efficiency of use of input energy? I personally doubt
it, though I'd like to hear any arguments to the contrary.
- Tim
Mark Lanett
> You're probably right that total self sufficiency doesn't pay too well
> where there are billions of people to run things. However I think it
> could easily get to the point where the technology is available
> anyway, so why not use it?
I don't think you'll see "self sufficiency with current technology level
comforts" for any level of technology. If you have bunches of people around,
then they have to be providing *some* value added. If you had technology
that could do everything, people wouldn't have to do anything. It'd be one
of those boring artistic utopias. And as long as resources of some type are
both scare and desirable, competition will ensure it doesn't happen.
What you *can* have is "self sufficiency with 'roughing-it' technology level
comforts", what we call today "camping". People can take hunting and camping
gear and how-to books out today and live the rest of their lives in the
wilderness. That's self-sufficiency, just at a lower level of technology. As
technology gets better, the camping will get better too.
ObSF: Marooned in Realtime, Vinge. The "high-techs" had cool toys, but they
couldn't keep it going and new they had to develop a society before it all
broke down.
~mark
Brandon Van Every
"Peter Kwangjun Suk" <s...@pobox.com> wrote in message
>
> Okay, then we take Brandon's suggestion, and we let the little
> bugger's control programs evolve. What we get is essentially a
> machine ecology like James P. Hogan described in the "Code of the
> Lifemaker," but on a virtual level. BTW, I was at OOPSLA this year,
> and some of the Object Oriented programming gurus are talking about
> precisely this!
Well did these gurus have something to demonstrate beyond talk?
Brandon Van Every
"Mark Lanett" <mlanett-f...@no-spam-please.thank-you> wrote in
message news:gf%
>
> I don't think you'll see "self sufficiency with current technology
level
> comforts" for any level of technology. If you have bunches of people
around,
> then they have to be providing *some* value added. If you had
technology
> that could do everything, people wouldn't have to do anything.
But the truth is, many of us are already in that condition, we just live
under a veil of illusions. The past few years, I *didn't* have to do a
darned thing. But I didn't quite realize this, so I alternated between
cycles of creative productivity and fear over my shortening finances.
Nowadays I realize we get done what we believe in getting done. Just
because we don't *have* to do things doesn't mean we won't take action
on something. It's just more likely something we like rather than
dislike.
> It'd be one of those boring artistic utopias.
I take it you are not an artist? Perhaps you would comfort yourself by
building a harbor.
Brandon Van Every
> specifying what you want the final product to do. Current software
> design is about 90% 'how'. Completely eliminating the 'how' still
> leaves the 'what', allowing for only about one order of magnitude
> increase.
Well, the brute force approach would be to evolve it. We play God. Of
all the programs randomly generated, we say which ones we want. Since
zillions of programs could be produced, we'd need some automated metrics
for the success of the programs. If automatic metrics cut the crop down
to a reasonable number of candidates, then we could sift the rest
manually. I think our job would be rather like a gardener trimming a
topiary.
> >But then why would you be trading? You'd just build it. Nobody
> >trades unless they're lacking something.
>
> Trade happens far more often that just that. Suppose you have your
> self-sustaining industrial base, and for some reason you want Widgets.
>
> Now, Widgets may require yttrium, which is in short supply in your
> area. Now, you can certainly get it by nucleosynthesis if nothing
> else. Or you just step up production of stuff that's easier for you
> and trade it for yttrium.
Sounds to me that you're proving my point. You were short of yttrium.
> The fact that you can build Widgets yourself means there is a limit to
> how much you'll pay, so you're in a better bargaining position than if
> you couldn't produce them at all.
That depends entirely on how much demand exists for widgets vs. your
supply of them and anyone else's supply of them. Just because you can
make them doesn't mean anything.
Anyways, this is sounding like a "glass is half full/empty" argument.
Not much utility.
> I don't think energy efficiency will be the main issue. I suspect
> growth time will be a larger concern.
>
> Suppose you're build an antimatter production facility, and a choice
> of two startup systems. One can reproduce itself in 6 months, and
> makes a facility that is 0.01% efficient at producing antimatter. One
> reproduces itself in 1 year, and is ten times more efficient. Given
> equal input energies to begin with, the first will overtake the second
> in output after only 4 years.
Yep these issues matter. In fact, the reproduction of human beings
matters quite a bit for what's going to get done when.
Timothy Little
>
>I don't think you'll see "self sufficiency with current technology level
>comforts" for any level of technology. If you have bunches of people around,
>then they have to be providing *some* value added. If you had technology
>that could do everything, people wouldn't have to do anything.
Oh, you mean it isn't possible because its too appealing an idea? I
was hoping for a more technical objection.
> It'd be one of those boring artistic utopias. And as long as
>resources of some type are both scare and desirable, competition will
>ensure it doesn't happen.
Competition also ensures that it is desirable for you to be capable of
producing whatever you want. Competition lowers prices, so if you can
produce anything you want then you get to pay lower prices for it.
>What you *can* have is "self sufficiency with 'roughing-it'
>technology level comforts", what we call today "camping".
That's only because we aren't currently able to build high-tech tools
that maintain themselves. We have to rely on natural products. At
the moment, there are some things that can only be built by humans.
Do you think that this will persist indefinitely?
I suspect that more and more goods will be constructible by fully
automated systems. At some point, the systems themselves will be
constructible, all the way from raw materials to finished products.
I'm pretty sure that once the capability is present, some people will
make use of it.
At first, it will probably cost more than anyone could possibly
afford. With further refinements I'm sure it could be condensed to
only the equivalent of a few trillion dollars. But once you have one
such system, it can build another one (as well as some other stuff).
With the experience gained from the first ones, you can build the
later ones more efficiently and quickly. I don't see any particular
limit on how cheap they could be, eventually.
Much like one person can already grow a million plants, each capable
of reproducing itself, for a tiny cost per plant. No-one today could
build one from scratch, but they don't have to. They have the ability
to reproduce themselves. Only these 'plants' have the ability to
produce more specialized things to do almost anything.
>ObSF: Marooned in Realtime, Vinge. The "high-techs" had cool toys,
>but they couldn't keep it going and new they had to develop a society
>before it all broke down.
ObSF: Diaspora, Egan. A single individual was capable of recreating
all their comforts in a new universe from subatomic particles upward.
I'm not postulating *that* level of self-sufficiency, though. It
doesn't take magic nanotech. I'd say the physical capabilites are
already present in today's technology. Direct human muscle-power is a
small fraction of our ability to maintain our technology. If
necessary, it could probably be replaced by machines already.
However, most jobs still require human intellect and instinct. I
think that will change. If not in the next hundred years, maybe the
hundred after.
- Tim
Timothy Little
>Nowadays I realize we get done what we believe in getting done. Just
>because we don't *have* to do things doesn't mean we won't take
>action on something. It's just more likely something we like rather
>than dislike.
I agree totally. At least part of society is definitely moving in
that direction already. It's not as efficient in terms of 'stuff done
per hour', but I believe it is certainly capable of maintaining itself
and will become even more so as technology improves.
- Tim
Timothy Little
>Well, the brute force approach would be to evolve it. We play God.
>Of all the programs randomly generated, we say which ones we want.
>Since zillions of programs could be produced, we'd need some
>automated metrics for the success of the programs.
That's what I meant. You're solving the "how" -- we still need to
define the metrics to give us the "what". I strongly suspect that
writing those metrics will be not many orders of magnitude easier than
designing the program from scratch. And we will need many orders of
magnitude.
>Sounds to me that you're proving my point. You were short of yttrium.
I misinterpreted what you said, then. Sorry. I thought you meant
that nobody would trade unless they were unable to produce it
themselves. In my scenario you could produce the yttrium yourself.
>That depends entirely on how much demand exists for widgets vs. your
>supply of them and anyone else's supply of them. Just because you can
>make them doesn't mean anything.
In my scenario your supply of yttrium is unlimited, as is anyone
else's. Alternative use of resources makes it viable to trade, not
just scarcity. Suppose you can produce 100 TJ of energy with the same
resources as every gram of yttrium. If someone else can produce 20 TJ
of energy for each gram of yttrium (either because they have more
yttrium or less energy), then you have a basis for trade.
If you give them 50 TJ of energy for each gram of yttrium, you're
better off because you only need to devote half the resources to
yttrium production that you otherwise would. They're better off
because they need to devote less resources to energy production.
Trade will only fail if the cost of transporting the goods exceeds
this difference, or if by some coincidence there is no difference.
[...reproduction time...]
>Yep these issues matter. In fact, the reproduction of human beings
>matters quite a bit for what's going to get done when.
I don't think it will be long before we can physically produce humans
at a massive rate unlimited by natural reproduction processes.
Actually raising them to be, well, human is a far more labour
intensive process that probably shouldn't be given to machines even if
it was possible. I can't see any way to significantly speed up human
physical, mental and social development, and it would certainly bring
up all sorts of thorny social questions if it could be done.
- Tim
Ray Drouillard
> unless they're lacking something.
You would trade for the latest and hottest video games, or movies, or
software, or plans for some widget that you never knew that you needed.
OK, OK... by then, video games and movies will be more like virtual reality
recordings or interactive programs - perhaps even with direct neural input.
Considering the "gotta have something new" paradigm or the entertainment
industry, along with the constant flux of new material that is produced by
the pornography industry to profit from the addictive nature of that type of
"entertainment", things could get quite out of control if we come up with a
way to involve all five (or six) external senses.
Ray Drouillard
Ray Drouillard
> such software in the first place. There are beginnings already, of
> course. However, all the indications are that it will require a
> qualitatively different approach, not just quantitative.
>
> The biggest limitation to self-writing software seems (IMO) to be in
> specifying what you want the final product to do. Current software
> design is about 90% 'how'. Completely eliminating the 'how' still
> leaves the 'what', allowing for only about one order of magnitude
> increase.
We started doing that when we wrote the first Fortran compiler. Fortran
means "Formula Translator". The first version simply translated an
algebraic formula to machine code. Instead of telling the computer 'how' to
calculate the formula, we told it 'what' formula to calculate.
Now, compilers and interpreters are quite complex. I haven't had to sort a
file since I took Fortran class. Now, I just tell the computer to create an
index, and tell it 'what' to index it on. Instead of figuring out where to
put fields on a window, I just put them there with graphics tools. The
program figures out how to accomplish this.
There is still plenty for the programmers to do, but we are able to do a
whole lot more with a whole lot less time and effort. My job isn't in
danger because the users keep finding bigger and better things for us to do
:-) I can now write a program in a few hours that would take days to write
just ten years ago.
We are on course. As the boring and redundant tasks become more automated,
our time and creativity can go to more interesting projects. Instead of
spending hours goofing with a plan, and redrawing it to make a minor change,
we can now spend a few minutes with AutoCAD or some other tool. When we're
done, we can feed the results into a simulator and see what happens.
Ray Drouillard
Ray Drouillard
> > bugger's control programs evolve. What we get is essentially a
> > machine ecology like James P. Hogan described in the "Code of the
> > Lifemaker," but on a virtual level. BTW, I was at OOPSLA this year,
> > and some of the Object Oriented programming gurus are talking about
> > precisely this!
>
> Well did these gurus have something to demonstrate beyond talk?
They have demonstrated plenty. I have watched programming become more and
more automated over the past fifteen years or so.
(see my earlier post)
Ray Drouillard
Brandon Van Every
> define the metrics to give us the "what". I strongly suspect that
> writing those metrics will be not many orders of magnitude easier than
> designing the program from scratch. And we will need many orders of
> magnitude.
I don't agree. I think it depends on the acceptable failure rate of the
application. If we just select results by convenient, ad hoc processes,
and users don't experience errors in their word processing applications
more than 1 time in 10,000, then we've won the engineering gambit in
that arena. Whereas this isn't acceptable for an operating table.
Getting things absolutely perfect to prevent loss of human life requires
a very strong spec.
> In my scenario your supply of yttrium is unlimited, as is anyone
> else's. Alternative use of resources makes it viable to trade, not
> just scarcity. Suppose you can produce 100 TJ of energy with the same
> resources as every gram of yttrium. If someone else can produce 20 TJ
> of energy for each gram of yttrium (either because they have more
> yttrium or less energy), then you have a basis for trade.
Then what one side lacks is better resources other than yttrium. I
think you're going to be led into "reducito ad absurdium" no matter how
you try to push this problem into other resources.
> I don't think it will be long before we can physically produce humans
> at a massive rate unlimited by natural reproduction processes.
> Actually raising them to be, well, human is a far more labour
> intensive process that probably shouldn't be given to machines even if
> it was possible.
I dunno, there are tons of shitty parents in the world. With true AI
I'd lay odds that machines could actually do better than these sorry
excuses for parenthood. We'd want to program the machines to be patient
and altruistic.
> I can't see any way to significantly speed up human
> physical, mental and social development, and it would certainly bring
> up all sorts of thorny social questions if it could be done.
Well, social development isn't measured by speed, it's measured by the
prevailing standards. 2000 years ago women were getting laid and
married by 15. Nowadays they get laid by 15, but not married.
Education standards have stretched into the future, childhood is longer.
Also careers are more demanding for those who pursue them. Lifespan is
longer and short of world disaster, that trend can only continue. The
question is under what circumstances is humanity willing to throw out
its cultural bureaucracy. For ordinary humans, I'd say the answer is
"none." For purpose-built humans, I'd say the willingness directly
correlates to violating human rights. The purpose-built humans will
never fit society because they are denied equal rights at birth. It is
slavery in a new guise.
We will also see the same issues regarding the socialization of robots.
The difference here is that some robots will be purpose-built not to
mentally function as humans do. The more we make them "like us," the
more likely they will lobby for their civil rights at some point.
Brandon Van Every
"Ray Drouillard" <droui...@home.com> wrote in message
news:PL9_5.147183$hD4.37...@news1.rdc1.mi.home.com...
> > But then why would you be trading? You'd just build it. Nobody
trades
> > unless they're lacking something.
>
> You would trade for the latest and hottest video games, or movies, or
> software, or plans for some widget that you never knew that you
needed.
Then you're lacking these items. You don't have to lack them
completely, you can have your own games, movies, software, widget plans,
etc. But you're lacking the ones that the other guy produces.
Timothy Little
[I wrote]
>> Completely eliminating the 'how' still leaves the 'what', allowing
>> for only about one order of magnitude increase.
>We started doing that when we wrote the first Fortran compiler.
>Fortran means "Formula Translator". The first version simply
>translated an algebraic formula to machine code. Instead of telling
>the computer 'how' to calculate the formula, we told it 'what'
>formula to calculate.
Yep, and programming in Fortran is not a trivial matter. There's
still a lot of "how" as well as "what".
> Instead of figuring out where to put fields on a window, I just put
>them there with graphics tools. The program figures out how to
>accomplish this.
Yes. As you are no doubt aware, programming is no trivial matter.
The "what" question is not greatly easier to solve than the "how".
That's what I meant by saying that even if the computer could do *all*
the "how" aspects itself, it would still be non-trivial to define
"what" we want it to do.
> I can now write a program in a few hours that would take days to
>write just ten years ago.
Yes, more and more of the "how" aspect is being solved automatically.
I haven't seen any tools that even begin to solve the "what" aspect of
design. That's where I expect to see the first big barrier to
massively complex software.
A tool that automates "what" would need to know a lot about the
desired behaviour of the system, without you telling it. That sounds
like deep AI to me. Not impossible, but not a simple evolutionary
path from current systems.
- Tim
Timothy Little
>"Timothy Little" <t...@freeman.little-possums.net> wrote:
>> That's what I meant. You're solving the "how" -- we still need to
>> define the metrics to give us the "what". I strongly suspect that
>> writing those metrics will be not many orders of magnitude easier than
>> designing the program from scratch. And we will need many orders of
>> magnitude.
>I don't agree. I think it depends on the acceptable failure rate of the
>application.
True enough. It is quite plausible that relatively high failure rates
are acceptable. The difficulty is in determining just what constitues
"failure". You can provide some absolute conditions, and some
heuristics, but they aren't going to strongly constrain the space of
all possible programs.
It's easy to conceive of such a thing for a single problem.
E.g. genetic algorithms already do this sort of thing (in a very
primitive and grossly inefficient manner). Generalising to complex
systems seems far less straightforward. e.g. a system to diagnose and
repair a car. The first problem is specifying what a car is, and what
performance parameters are acceptable.
Sure, you can run trillions of iterations of canditates for car repair
software. You may even be able to supply a sample database of cars
and common problems. You can even model the robots acting on the
cars, simulating making measurements and performing repairs, and
testing them. But you still have the problem of generalisation, and
making sure that it is appropriate generalisation. That is, "what" to
do in practice.
[...100 TJ vs 20 TJ per gram of yttrium...]
>Then what one side lacks is better resources other than yttrium.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by this. Are you referring to
the internal relative ease of producing yttrium? What do you mean by
"better" resources?
Your assertion was: "But then why would you be trading? You'd just
build it. Nobody trades unless they're lacking something."
I provided an example where you are perfectly capable of being able to
build it yourself, but you are still better off by trading. It seems
to me that you are fixating on the "lacking something" aspect, not the
overall assertion. In context, it appears that by "lacking" you meant
"unable to build it yourself".
I agree that a wider definition of "lack" will suffice to make your
3rd sentence true, though as a result it loses connection with your
preceding sentences and leads me to wonder why you included it.
>I dunno, there are tons of shitty parents in the world.
That's true enough. Machines might be better, but my guess is that
people will *want* children to be raised largely by humans, even if
humans aren't the best at it. That may change, of course, like any
other cultural behaviour.
>Well, social development isn't measured by speed, it's measured by
>the prevailing standards.
The original question was about production capability of automated
systems. I mentioned how efficiency was less important than speed of
reproduction, and we drifted into considering humans as producers. I
don't think the social development of robots is quite so important,
unless we bring strong AI into it. We seem to agree that increasing
speed of production of humans is not really a good thing.
[...robots...]
> The more we make them "like us," the more likely they will lobby for
>their civil rights at some point.
I agree. The biggest question would be what sort of civil rights
would they want? Their mental and physical needs could be vastly
different from our own even given the similarity of having a desire
for civil rights.
The same applies to other human or humanoid societies. Unlike much
science fiction, I think cultural differences are far more likely to
be greatly amplified than diminished.
- Tim
Ray Drouillard
> trades
> > > unless they're lacking something.
> >
> > You would trade for the latest and hottest video games, or movies, or
> > software, or plans for some widget that you never knew that you
> needed.
>
> Then you're lacking these items. You don't have to lack them
> completely, you can have your own games, movies, software, widget plans,
> etc. But you're lacking the ones that the other guy produces.
Very true... and they are lacking what we produce.
The U. S. sells Rock & Roll to the Japanese, and they sell Pokemon to the U.
S.
(no editorial comment on who gets the better deal :-)
Even if the "magic make-me-anything" machines exist, a smaller colony will
have less creative minds than a large world. They will, therefore, have
less to trade.
OTOH, their stuff may fetch a premium price specifically because it is more
scarce and because it comes from a different point of view.
Ray Drouillard
Ray Drouillard
> Yes, more and more of the "how" aspect is being solved automatically.
> I haven't seen any tools that even begin to solve the "what" aspect of
> design. That's where I expect to see the first big barrier to
> massively complex software.
>
> A tool that automates "what" would need to know a lot about the
> desired behaviour of the system, without you telling it. That sounds
> like deep AI to me. Not impossible, but not a simple evolutionary
> path from current systems.
I foresee what I have seen - a trend towards the automation of programming
and engineering. We will still have to come up with some idea of 'how' to
make something new, but we will be able to easily run off any variation we
want of something that already exists.
We already do it with software. We want to edit the contents of a single
record, so we instantiate a standard "file maintenance" object and tell it
'what' fields we want to view and modify. The ancestor object already has
the code necessary to do all of the multi-user locks, referential integrity
checks, etc.
Eventually, we'll tell a smart (but not necessarily fully AI) program that
we want a car of a certain size and shape, and with specific performance
characteristics, and it will come up with a design. If we like it, we can
use it. If not, we can instruct the program to change a few parameters and
try again.
The creative process will always be necessary for new stuff. It will be
either supplied by humans, or by truly AI programs.
Ray Drouillard
Phideaux
t...@freeman.little-possums.net (Timothy Little) wrote:
>Ray Drouillard <droui...@home.com> wrote:
>
>[I wrote]
>>> Completely eliminating the 'how' still leaves the 'what', allowing
>>> for only about one order of magnitude increase.
>
>> I can now write a program in a few hours that would take days to
>>write just ten years ago.
>
>Yes, more and more of the "how" aspect is being solved automatically.
>I haven't seen any tools that even begin to solve the "what" aspect of
>design. That's where I expect to see the first big barrier to
>massively complex software.
>
>A tool that automates "what" would need to know a lot about the
>desired behaviour of the system, without you telling it. That sounds
>like deep AI to me. Not impossible, but not a simple evolutionary
>path from current systems.
>
My personal opinion is that we need a step backward to make any
great steps forward.
By eliminating the 'how' a program works, we can only push and
shove data back and forth, and programs to do that are easy to
write but they don't really mean much in the long run.
We need to get back to the type of programming where we are
telling the computer 'how' to solve problems. This is the area
where we are superior (presently) to computers. The fixed paths
that a computer follows will not lead to anything new, they are
just roundabout ways of getting to where you started. Only a
human brain can (presently) find new paths to follow, and even
the dead-ends and wrong turns are valuable insights which a
program/computer cannot appreciate. (Almost half the significant
scientific dicoveries of the last three hundred and fifty years
were the result of someone seeing something new and valuable
because of a mistake.)
In the days of Fortran (and before), we had a saying: "I don't
want to write programs, I want to write programs that write
programs." Only by stepping back and formulating processes that
we can program into computers that will give them flexibility in
the way they approach the 'how do I solve this' question will any
significant advances be made.
Phideaux
Brandon Van Every
> are acceptable. The difficulty is in determining just what constitues
> "failure".
It's not difficult at all. It's whatever you can sell. Sorry, but this
really is a marketing issue, not an engineering issue. Microsoft has
already long since proven this.
> Generalising to complex
> systems seems far less straightforward. e.g. a system to diagnose and
> repair a car.
This is a life or death problem. It's not subject to the same ease as
other kinds of software. You're not going to generalize a car as much.
> I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by this. Are you referring to
> the internal relative ease of producing yttrium? What do you mean by
> "better" resources?
To paraphrase, you said supplier #1 makes widgets using yttrium, element
A, element B, and element C. Supplier #2 makes widgets using yttrium,
element B, element C, element D, element E, and element F. Let's say
supplier #1 has the more successful product in terms of how efficiently
he can whip out widgets. Therefore, supplier #2 lacks element A.
> I provided an example where you are perfectly capable of being able to
> build it yourself, but you are still better off by trading. It seems
> to me that you are fixating on the "lacking something" aspect, not the
> overall assertion. In context, it appears that by "lacking" you meant
> "unable to build it yourself".
I think we're having a definitional argument in which we're jousting for
terms, and not clarifying anything about the phenomena. I think we're
actually saying exactly the same thing and we completely agree, we are
just choosing to describe things differently.
> That's true enough. Machines might be better, but my guess is that
> people will *want* children to be raised largely by humans, even if
> humans aren't the best at it. That may change, of course, like any
> other cultural behaviour.
Well, a lot of people in the Republican party want abortion to be
illegal, because it's "bad for the family." This has little to do with
the realities of child rearing in poverty. One group will want it,
another group will not want it. People will fight about it.
> I
> don't think the social development of robots is quite so important,
> unless we bring strong AI into it.
Which to raise children is a given IMHO. You gonna raise your kid with
a toaster?
> We seem to agree that increasing
> speed of production of humans is not really a good thing.
But to me, only from a human rights perspective. It's a perfectly good
idea from a cruel murdering military expansionist enslavement
perspective. Quite functional.
>
> [...robots...]
> > The more we make them "like us," the more likely they will lobby for
> >their civil rights at some point.
>
> I agree. The biggest question would be what sort of civil rights
> would they want? Their mental and physical needs could be vastly
> different from our own even given the similarity of having a desire
> for civil rights.
Well, we need food, they need electricity. Both of us need money in
exchange for labor, otherwise society has you by the wing nuts. Both
need safety in the workplace. Both need due process of law before
disassembly. Basically, they need all the rights we need.
Ray Drouillard
> illegal, because it's "bad for the family."
You're misrepresenting the reasoning. The pro-life folks are against
abortion because it involves killing an innocent human being - often very
painfully. I have never heard "bad for the family" given as a reason.
> This has little to do with
> the realities of child rearing in poverty.
So... the way to prevent poverty is to kill the inpoverished? Very
effective, I must say.
> One group will want it,
> another group will not want it. People will fight about it.
How hard they will fight depends on how much it directly involves them.
While some can be motivated to fight over a princable, it isn't all that
easy. Most people won't compromize or risk their comfort or lifestyle for
anything less than a direct threat.
To take the above example, most Christians are very much against abortion
because it is murder. When it comes to voting, however, many of them vote
for the candidate who promises them economic advantage. They voted comfort
over sincerely held belief.
> But to me, only from a human rights perspective. It's a perfectly good
> idea from a cruel murdering military expansionist enslavement
> perspective. Quite functional.
There have been SF stories about this. Super soldiers are either
genetically engineered, bred, cloned from some naturally occuring super
soldier, or modified cyborg style. Sometimes, this is contrasted with the
"philosopher utopia" types of societies - sort of like a Sparta vs. Athans
type of a universe.
I believe that there is at least one story out there that combines both - a
"philosopher utopia" that is guarded by a soldier caste (which most citizens
never see), and supplied by a slave or factory worker caste.
It all comes down to the ability of the society to consider this other group
of humans (military caste or slave caste) as "other than human" or "less
than human". Unlike the slave issues of our own past, they would actually
have reason to consider these genetically engineered people to be "created
for the task".
Ray Drouillard
Timothy Little
>"Timothy Little" <t...@freeman.little-possums.net> wrote in message
>> True enough. It is quite plausible that relatively high failure rates
>> are acceptable. The difficulty is in determining just what constitues
>> "failure".
>It's not difficult at all. It's whatever you can sell.
I was hoping for something useful in the development phase without
human intervention. Certainly development cycles would be no shorter
than they are now if you have to wait for consumers (or suitable
stand-ins) to make their preferences known. In short, determining
failure by whatever you can sell is an extremely labour-intensive
process.
>This is a life or death problem. It's not subject to the same ease as
>other kinds of software. You're not going to generalize a car as much.
That's why I thought that developing software for fully automated
production would be extremely intensive. Cars, robots, assembly lines
-- all complex systems with their own problems, desirable outputs, and
repair necessities.
>To paraphrase, you said supplier #1 makes widgets using yttrium, element
>A, element B, and element C. Supplier #2 makes widgets using yttrium,
>element B, element C, element D, element E, and element F.
No, I said #1 uses yttrium. Alternatively, they can make energy.
Supplier #2 uses yttrium. Alternatively, they can make energy.
>I think we're having a definitional argument in which we're jousting for
>terms, and not clarifying anything about the phenomena.
You may be having a definitional argument. I'm trying to clarify
whether trade would halt if people could make everything themselves.
You snipped the bit where I re-posted your assertion that it would.
Do you want to talk about it or not?
>> We seem to agree that increasing speed of production of humans is
>> not really a good thing.
>But to me, only from a human rights perspective.
Yes, me too.
>> I agree. The biggest question would be what sort of civil rights
>> would they want? Their mental and physical needs could be vastly
>> different from our own even given the similarity of having a desire
>> for civil rights.
>Well, we need food, they need electricity.
Having enough food to survive isn't a fundamental right. Not even for
humans, not now and probably not in the future. Some countries make
it an entitlement, but (as far as I can see) always a conditional one.
> Both of us need money in exchange for labor, otherwise society has
>you by the wing nuts.
Not if you can make everything you want by yourself :^)
> Both need safety in the workplace.
Assuming there is a workplace. And provided that safety is a
meaningful concept when you can split off a special-purpose copy to do
work, losing only a day of your "life" if it dies. Or something
equally non-human.
> Both need due process of law before disassembly.
Future legal structures -- now there's room for discussion! Of the
rights you've mentioned, this is about the only one I agree with.
Even then, the details depend on a lot of factors. If the legal
system is set up for humans, it probably makes a lot of assumptions
that almost certainly do not apply to software entities. I expect it
would need a massive overhaul, the likes of which have never been seen
before.
- Tim
Marc Lombart
<droui...@home.com> wrote:
>> This has little to do with
>> the realities of child rearing in poverty.
>
>So... the way to prevent poverty is to kill the inpoverished?
And you were complaining about missrepresenting the reasoning.
Tsk, tsk.
--
Marc el Kato
mailto:master...@netzero.net
ICQ UIN: 3337155
Please, reply either to the group or via eMail, not both.
Mark Lanett
> >What you *can* have is "self sufficiency with 'roughing-it'
> >technology level comforts", what we call today "camping".
>
> That's only because we aren't currently able to build high-tech tools
> that maintain themselves. We have to rely on natural products. At
> the moment, there are some things that can only be built by humans.
> Do you think that this will persist indefinitely?
Cutting-edge technology is developed by humans. The technology *can't* get
so good that humans aren't contributing to it any more, because they will
always be competing with each other, and if really high-tech equipment is
available, they will use it to build even more complex equipment, or systems
incorporating it. This would only change if the technology met or exceeded
the understanding of humans, a sort of transcendence. If *one* piece of
technology reached a point of maturity where it was self-maintaining or even
self-replicating, people would design new things using it as a component. At
any point in time, "modern technology" will always refer to a set of
technology in a society which requires the whole society present and
functioning to use and maintain that technology.
Or look at it this way. You want to be able to take the technology in use by
some society, and remove the people, and have one person be able to use and
maintain it. That's not going to happen, because there is no incentive for
that society to overengineer their technology to accomodate such a scenario.
The only equipment one person can use and maintain solo for an extended
period of time is going to be mature technology, which is only going to be a
small part of what people actually use on a daily basis, i.e.. camping gear.
What constitutes camping gear in some future may be quite fabulous, but it
won't match the level of technology that is available to society as a whole
at that time. Technology is built by and for use in a society, and you need
to drop down a few levels of sophistication to find something that is
maintainable by one person.
Long before transcendence, you'll find technology which is "good enough" for
self-sustenance of a colony. After all, Aboriginals lived for thousands of
years with hardly any technology, and we'd need a lot more for Mars, but
it's doable. But again, the level of technology which that colony can
maintain, build and use will not match which could be built by a larger
colony (say, an entire planet, like the Earth), simply because the larger
colony/society/planet will have more brainpower at its disposal to build
better technology.
~mark
Timothy Little
>Cutting-edge technology is developed by humans. The technology *can't* get
>so good that humans aren't contributing to it any more, because they will
>always be competing with each other, and if really high-tech equipment is
>available, they will use it to build even more complex equipment, or systems
>incorporating it.
That still doesn't mean that the high-tech is impossible for
self-sufficient technology. It's going to be a catch-up game, sure.
In our history, yes -- self-sufficiency has diverged from cutting-edge
stuff. I see that mainly as being due to the fact that our technology
needs tools that can only be built (not just designed) by humans.
New designs may remain a human province (though I'm not at all sure of
that). But designs are very easy to copy. All you need are the
tools. If you have them or can build them, then nothing prevents you
from having the latest and greatest.
I believe I can see your point though -- I have a general-purpose
computer, which can (with the right tools) compile and run any
software. That does not mean that I can write cutting-edge speech
recognition software by myself. I'd have to get it from someone else.
Is this the sort of thing you meant?
> That's not going to happen, because there is no incentive for that
>society to overengineer their technology to accomodate such a
>scenario.
I don't think it will be "overengineering". I think it will be a
natural consequence of having highly flexible production systems. If
a new technology is developed requiring human maintenance, someone
will realise that the most expensive part of the technology is the
human requirement and work out a way to create and maintain it with
standard assembler systems.
More likely still, new technology will start with standard assembler
systems (or maybe a couple of levels on top) as a base and work up
from there. This would reduce development and production costs
*greatly*. That aspect alone is likely to make it attractive.
>The only equipment one person can use and maintain solo for an
>extended period of time is going to be mature technology,
I think that the difference between mature and new technology is going
to diminish greatly. With that meaning of "mature" technology, we
have basically *no* mature technology. Well, maybe software applies.
Actually, it applies pretty well. Replace 'raw materials' with
'computer hardware', 'technology' with 'software', and 'designs' with
'source code' and I think most things go across fairly well.
Only direct copying of software fails to translate, since similar
duplication of physical objects can't be done. It would be like if
the only way to produce a new copy of software was to compile it from
source with appropriate tools (themselves produced by compilation, and
so on backward).
With that metaphor in mind, I'd say our current technology was roughly
at the "only 6 computers in the world" stage, with many people
continuously maintaining the operation of each one.
In fact, the division between the two types of technology development
above correspond pretty closely to closed-source/open-source software
development. I'd better leave it at that, I don't want this to turn
into an OS flamewar or worse. :-(
> Technology is built by and for use in a society, and you need to
>drop down a few levels of sophistication to find something that is
>maintainable by one person.
I think that's only due to our current inability to build anything
other than a human capable of doing maintenance.
- Tim
Ray Drouillard
"> >> This has little to do with
> >> the realities of child rearing in poverty.
> >
> >So... the way to prevent poverty is to kill the inpoverished?
>
> And you were complaining about missrepresenting the reasoning.
> Tsk, tsk.
Ummm... let me check this out.
He discussed some reasons for banning abortion, and stated:
"> >> This has little to do with
> >> the realities of child rearing in poverty.
Since he connected the statements, I take the statement to mean that it is
better to abort a child than to force the impoverished mother to raise him
(or her) in poverty. I have heard this statement many times before. Even
if the Mr. Van Every didn't make that statement, (which would be quite a
reach), many others have.
So, based on that standard statement of the "pro choice" crowd, I conclude
that they believe that it is better to kill the child rather than to let him
(or her) live in poverty.
Ray Drouillard
Bill Snyder
wrote:
>
This of course begs the question of whether a fetus and a child are the
same thing, but I probably should leave it at that.
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Marc Lombart
<droui...@home.com> wrote:
>"> >> This has little to do with
>> >> the realities of child rearing in poverty.
>
>Since he connected the statements, I take the statement to mean that it is
>better to abort a child than to force the impoverished mother to raise him
Like I said, missrepresenting the reasoning. His statement
does not lead to your claim.
Ray Drouillard
> same thing, but I probably should leave it at that.
I was wondering when someone would get to the root of it. The whole
discussion is a good example of how two groups of people can disagree so
rabidly, and still both groups feel that they have rock-solid logical
reasons for believing as they do.
If you believe that a fetus is a living human being, then abortion is
murder.
If you believe that a fetus is somehow not human yet, then you have a big
problem with the restrictiveness of the pro-life crowd. It is obvious and
perfectly logical that it is better to kill this sub-human being before he
becomes a real human and <inconveniences his mother, lives in poverty, adds
another hungry mouth to an already crowded world... take your pick>.
Of course, this argument requires that you define some kind of a transition
point where the sub-human developing fetus becomes fully human.
Ray Drouillard
Brandon Van Every
"Mark Lanett" <mlanett-f...@no-spam-please.thank-you> wrote in
message
> any point in time, "modern technology" will always refer to a set of
> technology in a society which requires the whole society present and
> functioning to use and maintain that technology.
The "whole" society? Only if you assume that consumers are essential
for creating an R&D revenue stream.
> Or look at it this way. You want to be able to take the technology in
use by
> some society, and remove the people, and have one person be able to
use and
> maintain it. That's not going to happen, because there is no incentive
for
> that society to overengineer their technology to accomodate such a
scenario.
They could build it *without incentive*. It depends on the
exponentiation of wealth and resource production. You don't need lotsa
incentive if the cost of experimentation is cheap.
> The only equipment one person can use and maintain solo for an
extended
> period of time is going to be mature technology, which is only going
to be a
> small part of what people actually use on a daily basis, i.e.. camping
gear.
> What constitutes camping gear in some future may be quite fabulous,
but it
> won't match the level of technology that is available to society as a
whole
> at that time. Technology is built by and for use in a society, and you
need
> to drop down a few levels of sophistication to find something that is
> maintainable by one person.
You are positing that the power balance between individuals and groups
is going to remain the same forever. Measured in centuries, I would not
assume that. Consider how much labor a single person can do now with a
computer compared to 100 years ago.
Brandon Van Every
> > Well, a lot of people in the Republican party want abortion to be
> > illegal, because it's "bad for the family."
>
> You're misrepresenting the reasoning. The pro-life folks are against
> abortion because it involves killing an innocent human being - often
very
> painfully. I have never heard "bad for the family" given as a reason.
Ok, the most uncontroversial way I can rephrase the above is "because
it's 'against family values.'" This is definitely one of the reasons
cited in pro-life rhetoric. I don't have to define or explain what it
means, I'm just quoting the words uttered.
> So... the way to prevent poverty is to kill the inpoverished? Very
> effective, I must say.
In the sense of society's youngest, unborn, 1st trimester members: yes.
My own personal view is that at this point of human life, you're killing
a fish. I'm an atheist, I'm not encumbered with the notion of a "soul."
I'm also not a vegan so I don't have a problem with killing animals.
When that fish becomes a person is a slippery slope, but I don't
personally have any problem with 1st trimester abortions. In fact,
maybe there should be an arbitrary cutoff after that. If you can't get
your act together about what you're going to do in 12 weeks, then maybe
your toes should be held to the candle of responsibility. Else some
women would slack off and get their abortion whenever they jolly well
felt like it.
> > One group will want it,
> > another group will not want it. People will fight about it.
>
> How hard they will fight depends on how much it directly involves
them.
> While some can be motivated to fight over a princable, it isn't all
that
> easy. Most people won't compromize or risk their comfort or lifestyle
for
> anything less than a direct threat.
Abortion clinic bombings are a direct threat. As is the Supreme Court
being up for grabs under a Republican administration. I'm not really
interested in debating the abortion issue, I'm just pointing out how
this specific issue fulfils your criteria. I guarantee you're going to
see a *big* fight if the Supreme Court tries to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
One group will want it, another group will not want it. People will
fight about it.
> To take the above example, most Christians are very much against
abortion
> because it is murder. When it comes to voting, however, many of them
vote
> for the candidate who promises them economic advantage. They voted
comfort
> over sincerely held belief.
It would be instructive to look up exit poll results. I recall abortion
being a major issue, despite the fact that neither candidate spent much
time talking about it. People *know* that Roe vs. Wade is up for grabs
now. Anyways, number crunch some exit polls for us and then we'd have a
better understanding of whether your cynicism is justified, or whether
"most" Christians think abortion is murder. I think most of my
Christian friends have spent some time in church, and they seem to be
highly selective about which parts of Christianity are to be applied to
them.
> It all comes down to the ability of the society to consider this other
group
> of humans (military caste or slave caste) as "other than human" or
"less
> than human". Unlike the slave issues of our own past, they would
actually
> have reason to consider these genetically engineered people to be
"created
> for the task".
What on earth do you mean "unlike?" There were zillions of theories for
the racial inferiority of negroes and other enslaved peoples, including
"created by God" for the task. The method of birth is irrelevant, only
the propaganda is relevant.
Erik Max Francis
> I was wondering when someone would get to the root of it. The whole
> discussion is a good example of how two groups of people can disagree
> so
> rabidly, and still both groups feel that they have rock-solid logical
> reasons for believing as they do.
And that's why there's a special newsgroup for it. Because discussion
about it is nearly useless.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ We are victims of our own design
\__/ Oleta Adams
Maths reference / http://www.alcyone.com/max/reference/maths/
A mathematics reference.
pervect
"Ray Drouillard" <droui...@home.com> wrote in message
news:lIw_5.148711$hD4.37...@news1.rdc1.mi.home.com...
> > illegal, because it's "bad for the family."
>
> You're misrepresenting the reasoning. The pro-life folks are against
> abortion because it involves killing an innocent human being - often very
> painfully. I have never heard "bad for the family" given as a reason.
Republicans lie a lot. (So do other people, of course, especially in
politics).
It does appear to me that much of what passes for sexual morality is based
on the idea that people (even those who don't want them) should have
children. In addition, the father should support them financially, and the
mother should raise and nurture them. This is true because It Is The Way
Things Were Meant To Be, no arguments are accepted. Other ways of raising
chidren are not acceptable, nor is not wanting to have them.
Ray Drouillard
"pervect" <perv...@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:91jq7s$1hvb$1...@thoth.cts.com...
>
> "Ray Drouillard" <droui...@home.com> wrote in message
> news:lIw_5.148711$hD4.37...@news1.rdc1.mi.home.com...
> > > Well, a lot of people in the Republican party want abortion to be
> > > illegal, because it's "bad for the family."
> >
> > You're misrepresenting the reasoning. The pro-life folks are against
> > abortion because it involves killing an innocent human being - often
very
> > painfully. I have never heard "bad for the family" given as a reason.
>
> Republicans lie a lot. (So do other people, of course, especially in
> politics).
The Democrats would like you to think that Republicans lie a lot :-)
Anyhow, what does the truthfullness or lack thereof of memebrs of a
particular political party have to do with pro-life/pro-choice issues?
>
> It does appear to me that much of what passes for sexual morality is based
> on the idea that people (even those who don't want them) should have
> children.
Aside from the fact that sexual immorality increases the demand for
abortion, what does it have to do with the issue? How does anyone's ideas
of what is right or wrong with sex have any affect on whether a child can be
killed before it is born?
> In addition, the father should support them financially, and the
> mother should raise and nurture them. This is true because It Is The Way
> Things Were Meant To Be, no arguments are accepted. Other ways of raising
> chidren are not acceptable, nor is not wanting to have them.
A man who concieves child and chooses not to be a father is called a
"dead-beat dad".
A woman who concieves a child and chooses not to be a mother is called "pro
choice".
OK... I have had a little amusement with your statements. I must admit,
however, that I see very little real message - beyond a general emotional "I
like this, I don't like that" message.
That isn't to say that I don't understand what you are trying to express. I
just don't see it in the content.
I have been on both sides of the issue, so I am very familiar with the
arguments on both sides.
Ray Drouillard
Anton Sherwood
: Even if the "magic make-me-anything" machines exist, a smaller
: colony will have less creative minds than a large world. They
: will, therefore, have less to trade.
:
: OTOH, their stuff may fetch a premium price specifically because it
: is more scarce and because it comes from a different point of view.
Heh. Stock joke of the second century PD (post-diaspora):
"Centaurian ideas are precious because there are so few of them."
Scarcity and isolation aren't quite enough; I see no
disproportionate demand for Icelandic or Ainu art.
--
Anton Sherwood -- br0...@p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/
Matthew DeBell
>The pro-life folks are against
>abortion because it involves killing an innocent human being - often very
>painfully.
At what stage can the fetus feel pain? Some time in the second trimester?
--
Matthew DeBell
pervect
"Ray Drouillard" <droui...@home.com> wrote in message news:WBg%5.153078
> That isn't to say that I don't understand what you are trying to express.
I
> just don't see it in the content.
>
> I have been on both sides of the issue, so I am very familiar with the
> arguments on both sides.
Well, to a large extent I simply wanted to let out some steam. But I DO
think that anti anti-abortion sentiments very highly correlated with the
rest of what I could call, for lack of a better name, the "family values
package". Enough so that I think that the real issues are not necessarily
the ones being argued about when the rhetoric starts flying.
Isaac Kuo
"Ray Drouillard" <droui...@home.com> wrote:
>>This of course begs the question of whether a fetus and a child are
the
>>same thing, but I probably should leave it at that.
>I was wondering when someone would get to the root of it. The whole
>discussion is a good example of how two groups of people can disagree
so
>rabidly, and still both groups feel that they have rock-solid logical
>reasons for believing as they do.
>If you believe that a fetus is a living human being, then abortion is
>murder.
The basic non-religious argument put forward for this is the
argument of genetic code. The moment of conception is seen
as a defining moment because it the moment which separates
millions of possible humans and one specific human.
Never mind about twins.
Never mind that 2/3 of conceived eggs get ejected in the
menstrual cycle.
>If you believe that a fetus is somehow not human yet, then you have a
big
>problem with the restrictiveness of the pro-life crowd.
>Of course, this argument requires that you define some kind of a
transition
>point where the sub-human developing fetus becomes fully human.
Which is actually not hard if you look at our definition of
the point of death--brain death. Turn that around, and
you get a point of life--brain activity. ("Brain death"
doesn't actually mean all of the neurons are dead, it
means there's no neural activity.)
This still isn't an open-and-shut case, of course. One could
argue that a fetus which hasn't yet developed brain activity
still deserves some rights a brain dead person doesn't have
because it has the POTENTIAL to become a living person. An
adult who is brain dead does not have that potential--but if
we developed technology to revive a brain dead person (with
the same personality and memories), then we'd likely have
to change our definition of the point of death.
Of course, it would be prohibitively expensive and invasive
to save all of those potential people. 2/3 of conceived
eggs would die right off the bat without outside help.
Just imagine a universal program of periodically searching
each woman's uterus for conceived eggs! And then there's
the moral dilemma of deciding NOT to split the embryo into
twins or quadruplets or octuplets. A conceived egg isn't
just ONE potential person--it could potentially be many
people! With cloning technology, it could potentially
become hundreds or thousands of people!
If we look at "The 6th Day", the basic moral lesson is
hardly disputable--a clone of Arnold would be a person in
his own right distinct from the original Arnold. Neither
deserves to die; both deserve to live.
The other moral questions posed in "The 6th Day" are less
clear. Is it murder when the "blanks" get slaughtered?
Is Arnold committing mass murder when he destroys the
mind data banks?
This is science fiction now, but some cloning technology
is already real. If the research were done, it should
not take long to develop the technology to clone an
aborted fetus. Thus, an abortion would NOT destroy the
potential for a person with that genetic code. Would
the genetic code argument against abortion still have
any relevance in that case?
After all of these issues come into focus, I'm left back
where I started--with the conclusion that only humans
with brain activity deserve full human rights. Thus,
killing a late term fetus with a brain practically as
developed as a baby's is clearly murder, even if
sophisticated "The 6th Day" style cloning technology
allows producing an identical fetus (even if this
is done at the same time as the fetus's killing).
However, killing an embryo without any brain activity
(ala RU486) is clearly NOT murder.
This also touches upon another science fiction technology--the
Star Trek transporter. As originally envisioned by Gene
Roddenberry, the transporters were supposed to produce an
exact copy of the "passengers" at the destination site
while disintegrating the originals (recycling their
component atoms for later use). From what I've written
above, this certainly sounds like a recipe for sheer
horror! The "victim" of a transporter is slaughtered,
and this clone comes and steals his identity.
And yet, it's perfectly conceivable that people would
willingly use a transporter. If he's a transporter
clone, he could have memories of travelling thousands
of times by transporter with no ill effects. Why
wouldn't he travel by transporter "again"?
In a society where such transporters were in common use,
it is conceivable that their attitude towards life may
be like the clones in "The 6th Day". They'd equate a
person with his memories. In which case, even fetuses
with some brain activity are in trouble, if they haven't
started forming memories!
--
_____ Isaac Kuo mec...@yahoo.com ICQ 29055726
__|_)o(_|__
/___________\
\=\)-----(/=/
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
Jesse Mazer
> After all of these issues come into focus, I'm left back
> where I started--with the conclusion that only humans
> with brain activity deserve full human rights. Thus,
> killing a late term fetus with a brain practically as
> developed as a baby's is clearly murder, even if
> sophisticated "The 6th Day" style cloning technology
> allows producing an identical fetus (even if this
> is done at the same time as the fetus's killing).
> However, killing an embryo without any brain activity
> (ala RU486) is clearly NOT murder.
But "brain activity" isn't black-and-white either. Shouldn't the
complexity of the brain activity be taken into account? If the complexity
of a fetus' brain is similar to that of an adult cat, say, shouldn't
killing it be morally equivalent to killing a cat? I've always thought
that the abortion issue and the animal rights issue were closely related,
unless you believe in some kind of "soul" or essence that remains
unchanged throughout the growth process (as many pro-lifers probably
do...a person's answer to the abortion problem depends as much on her
philosophical assumptions as it does on morality).
Of course there are other issues here. There might not be a moral problem
with using newly-dead human bodies for dogfood, but there would be a sort
of dehumanizing psychological impact to doing that that could be harmful
to society. Similarly, even we think a baby is "intrinsically" equal to a
chimp or something, there would still be a good argument for giving it
full human rights, because of the importance others (the parents mostly)
place on its life.
And of course the problem of "potential" is relevant too...
> This also touches upon another science fiction technology--the
> Star Trek transporter. As originally envisioned by Gene
> Roddenberry, the transporters were supposed to produce an
> exact copy of the "passengers" at the destination site
> while disintegrating the originals (recycling their
> component atoms for later use). From what I've written
> above, this certainly sounds like a recipe for sheer
> horror! The "victim" of a transporter is slaughtered,
> and this clone comes and steals his identity.
You get into some tricky metaphysical issues here. How do we know that,
in the case of the transporter, my consciousness wouldn't "hop" from the
original body to the identical copy? If you think this is impossible,
what do you think of the fact that my body today is (supposedly) made from
a completely different set of atoms than it was 7 years ago? Is the
person I was 7 years ago dead, and are my memories going further back
false?
Jesse Mazer
pervect
"Jesse Mazer" <Jesse...@brown.edu> wrote in message
news:Jesse_Mazer-18...@level3-ppp-232.level3.brown.edu...
> You get into some tricky metaphysical issues here. How do we know that,
> in the case of the transporter, my consciousness wouldn't "hop" from the
> original body to the identical copy? If you think this is impossible,
> what do you think of the fact that my body today is (supposedly) made from
> a completely different set of atoms than it was 7 years ago? Is the
> person I was 7 years ago dead, and are my memories going further back
> false?
I think that it's proper to view identity as a "pattern". As long as the
pattern is maintained and undergoes smooth and acceptable transitions, I
think everything is OK. Certain sorts of transitions degrade the pattern's
ability to maintain itself, and are classified as harmful and fatal - other
sorts of changes are classified as unpleasant, and avoided.
I can see where this sort of definition really wouldn't satisfy a religious
person. That's fine, as long as they don't try to tell me (or other people)
what to do with their bodies (IMO).
Jesse Mazer
wrote:
> I think that it's proper to view identity as a "pattern". As long as the
> pattern is maintained and undergoes smooth and acceptable transitions, I
> think everything is OK. Certain sorts of transitions degrade the pattern's
> ability to maintain itself, and are classified as harmful and fatal - other
> sorts of changes are classified as unpleasant, and avoided.
>
> I can see where this sort of definition really wouldn't satisfy a religious
> person. That's fine, as long as they don't try to tell me (or other people)
> what to do with their bodies (IMO).
I tend to agree with you, but on the other hand if I *did* believe in a
supernatural "soul" I would argue that this isn't just about telling
people what to do with their bodies...after all, no one has a problem
saying it's wrong to use your body to murder another adult human.
It would be nice if abortion were "just" a moral issue, but like I said I
think it also depends on your background metaphysical assumptions...which
unfortunately makes me pretty skeptical that the different sides will ever
be able to come to any kind of agreement.
Jesse Mazer
Jesse Mazer
Jesse...@brown.edu (Jesse Mazer) wrote:
> It would be nice if abortion were "just" a moral issue, but like I said I
> think it also depends on your background metaphysical assumptions...which
> unfortunately makes me pretty skeptical that the different sides will ever
> be able to come to any kind of agreement.
...although if we ever perfect uploading and can show that "soulful" human
minds can exist within the confines of a deterministic computer
simulation, maybe this would change a lot of people's metaphysical beliefs
(although an outsider could never be *sure* the simulations were actually
conscious).
Jesse Mazer
Mike Combs
>
> ...although if we ever perfect uploading and can show that "soulful" human
> minds can exist within the confines of a deterministic computer
> simulation, maybe this would change a lot of people's metaphysical beliefs
> (although an outsider could never be *sure* the simulations were actually
> conscious).
Yes, that would always be the eternal "out".
--
Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hey, waiter, I'm in my soup!"
Overheard in a cafe in "A Bug's Life"
Jesse Mazer
mike...@nospam.comchgnospam2ti wrote:
> Jesse Mazer wrote:
> >
> > ...although if we ever perfect uploading and can show that "soulful" human
> > minds can exist within the confines of a deterministic computer
> > simulation, maybe this would change a lot of people's metaphysical beliefs
> > (although an outsider could never be *sure* the simulations were actually
> > conscious).
>
> Yes, that would always be the eternal "out".
It'd be hard to maintain that belief if people you cared about had been
uploaded and you continued to interact with them regularly, though. And
religious people who had been uploaded would try to convince other
religious people that they were still conscious, and that they still had
"souls" if they believed in them (nothing in the bible is actually
incompatible with the pattern theory of identity, as far as I know). But
this might be one of those cases where people only overcome their
prejudices against a group when a member of that group ends up being part
of their family.
Jesse Mazer