"Brian Fletcher" <brianf88@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:Z_DSg.37396$rP1.23452@news-server.bigpond.net.au...

"Don H" <donlhumphries@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:qXeSg.36828$rP1.35630@news-server.bigpond.net.au...

"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1159223287.649842.147260@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

gibbs wrote:

"Don H" <donlhumphries@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:ozXRg.35999$rP1.7673@news-server.bigpond.net.au...

population. Civilisation, as such, has gone; the remnants of
humanity
exist
in caveman mode, scratching a living, where water is the most
precious
commodity. Mutant beasts roam the deserts, as the wild winds
blow,

and

the
stink of dead seas waft inland, under the blazing sun. Way above,

a

long-disused space station circles the earth....

And then someone uses dilithium crystals to create warp drives...

Most likely correct since there are only three or four ways this can
go; we end life here on Earth or watch things slowlely get worse and
worse till our dicks are in the dirt, go along as we have been
recently
for many centuries sometimes better sometimes worse, or things get
progressively better and better till we're stinking so good we never
run out of energy and are immortal.

Scientific & Technological Utopianism
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/SF/chrono.html

Scientific and technological utopia are set in the future, when it is
believed that advanced science and technology will allow utopian
living
standards; for example,

the absence of death and suffering;
changes in human nature and
the human condition.

These utopian societies tend to change what "human" is all about.
Technology has affected the way humans have lived to such an extent
that normal functions, like sleep, eating or even reproduction, has
been replaced by an artificial means.

Other kinds of this utopia envisioned, include a society where human
has struck a balance with technology and it is merely used to enhance
the human living condition (e.g. Star Trek).

Opposing this optimism is the prediction that advanced science and
technology will, through deliberate misuse or accident, cause
environmental damage or even humanity's extinction. Critics advocate
precautions against the premature embrace of new technologies.

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

Technological utopianism derived from the belief in technology --
conceived as more than tools and machines alone -- as the means of
achieving a 'perfect' society in the near future. Such a society,
moreover, would not only be the culmination of the introduction of new
tools and machines; it would also be modeled on those tools and
machines in its institutions, values and culture

...More clearly, more methodically and more intensely than any other
group, the technological utopians espoused positions that a growing
number (even a majority) of Americans during these 50 years were
coming
to take for granted, or wanted to: the belief in the inevitability of
progress and the belief that progress was precisely technological
progress.

...The utopians were not oblivious to the problems technological
advance might cause, such as unemployment or boredom. They simply were
confident that advancing technology held the solution to those
problems
and to other, chronic problems, including scarcity, hunger, disease
and
war. In addition, they assumed that technology would solve the
psychological problems that were increasingly worrisome, such as
aggression, crowding, rudeness, and social disorder.

...Despite its basis in modern technology, technological utopia was
not
to be a mass of sooting smokestacks, clanging machines, and teeming
streets. The dirt, noise, and chaos that invariably accompanied
industrialization in the real world were to give way in the future to
perfect cleanliness, efficiency, quiet and harmony

...Connecting all sectors of the technological utopia would be
superbly
efficient transportation and communication systems, powered almost
exclusively by electricity. These systems would enable widely
dispersed
citizens to live and work wherever they might choose. As one of them
puts it, 'we have practically eliminated distances.' The specific
means
of transportation would include automobiles, trains, subways, ships,
airplanes, even moving sidewalks. The means of communication would
include pneumatic mail tubes, telephones, telegraphs, radios, and
mechanically composed newspapers.

http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/science_fiction/jenkins/jenkins_1.html

Subliminal Affluence from America The Wise pg 88

Infrastructure or superstructure
is itself an entitlement
or welfare system.

People tend over time to lose sight of how affluent they are. They
drift away from experiencing luxuries and at last experience them as
"necessities" to the point of feeling hard pressed in the midst of
plenty...

How rich are we? Take one telling instance of subliminal affluence.
The
automobile. It is an example that has played a significant, even
colorful, role in the lives of the New People; it should call to mind
a
number of fond, nostalgic episodes from their youth, such as the
suburbanization of America that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, the
drive in movie theaters of the day, and any number of cheery
television
commercials for the great chromium behemoths that dominated the road.

Once upon a time, through the first thirty years of the twentieth
century, the automobile was an obvious luxury. Those days were long
gone by the time the New People came of age. By then the car had
evolved into a necessity that impinged upon jobs, shopping, and chores
of all kinds. From there, the car rolled steadily forward to displace
most cheaper, more practical forms of public transport, which were
literally torn out of the social fabric at enormous expense during the
Eisenhower 1950s as part of the highway program.

Today a busy suburban mother does not think twice before driving some
miles to the shopping center to buy a quart of milk; a father may use
the car to drive still further to buy a washer for a leaking faucet.
Neither mother nor father has any other practical way to buy milk or
the washer. Nor do they have any other way to get to their jobs to
earn
the money to buy the milk and the washer. As a result, they no longer
see commuting as extravagant.

A pattern of life has closed around the car that would require us to
redesign the working life of the nation and dismantle whole
metropolitan areas in order to diminish our dependency on the car.
Yet,
though we regard it as a necessity, the car is a dazzling
manifestation
of our social wealth. Simply look around you nest time you are on any
freeway; estimate what it costs to transport so many people, usually
one person to each internal combustion engine. Calculate the cost of
the cars, the fuel, the freeways, the city streets, the parking lots,
the entire traffic control system, the insurance we must all pay, the
medical care and litigation that follow accidents.

Jane Holtz Kay made just such an estimate. She discovered that
American
taxpayers lay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for every mile of
highway that must be repaved. And that is only the beginning. As of
the
mid 1990s, her best approximation was that the car culture costs each
of us $6000 a year in direct expenses for owning, running, fueling,
licensing, and insuring the vehicle.

In addition, Kay concluded,that the "external" costs -- the cost of
parking facilities, traffic police, land use, and so on -- range
anywhere from $3000 to $9000 per citizen per year. At an even more
subliminal level, Kay has further estimated that the price we pay each
year for people stuck in traffic and off the job may total as much as
$40 billion. But we have long since stopped tracking these costs, just
as we overlook the installment debt that people are carrying on their
cars, which amounts to nearly half of all consumer debt in the
economy.


At a modest estimate, we are spending well over $1 trillion a year on
what Kay calls our "car culture," vastly more than the cost of welfare
and senior entitlements combined.

The same commonsense analysis that we apply to cars could be carried
out with respect to any number of necessities of life. Our supermarket
pattern of buying food, the shopping mall pattern of buying clothes,
the suburban pattern of housing, our way of dealing with refuse and
sewage, our public health, our forms of entertainment and
recreation...

...none of these is any longer carried out in a direct, local, and low
cost way; all have become complex and convoluted, with maximum
overhead
and echelons of highly salaried intervening personnel to administer,
supervise, and transport. These are forms of affluence in our society
so enormous that asking people to estimate their dimensions would be
like asking a flea to measure the size of the elephant it rides on.

America the Wise: The Longevity
Revolution and the True
Wealth of Nations -by Theodore Roszak
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/039585699X/

Technological innovations of automation, corporate reengineering, lean
production, and computers have replaced the need for workers at an
alarming rate culminating in "The Third Industrial Revolution". Every
sector and industry has experienced significant trends in unemployment
and underemployment. Although virtually every worker has been
affected,
technology has undermined the worker and reconceptualized our notion
of
the workplace. Technology will replace nearly all labor in today's
rapidly changing globalized economy.

Solutions to global worker displacement include shorter work week to
share the remaining work to all workers. Rifkin also argues for
investment in the third sector of volunteerism and social services to
combat the rise in crime and violence that is inevitable in a society
of large scale employment. In the near future there will be massive
unemployment and we are headed to a society run by machines.

Look forward to the end of private ownership of the means of
production. Hypercompetitiveness will eliminate owners, replacing them
by better robot decision makers. Then enter nano-technology by which
individual atoms are stack in any way that please man or robot, then
fusion whereby abundant elements are combined to create scarce
elements
as if by alchemy. Then the robots become a vast "welfare state" with
humans living totally for free. They will shout "tax the robots more"
when they need to alocate more resources from scientific research the
robots complete.

Starting with contemporary robotics research, a likely course for the
next 40 years of robot development, will be the rise of
superintelligent, creative, emotionally complex cyberbeings and the
end
of human labor by the middle of the next century. Robot corporations
will take up residence in outer space with rogue cyborgs; planet-size
robots will cruise the solar system looking for smaller bots to
assimilate; and eventually every atom in the entire galaxy will be
transformed into data-storage space, with a full-scale simulation of
human civilization running as a subroutine somewhere.

The end result of the robotic evolution, will be beings with awesome
intelligence that are able to arrange spacetime and energy for
computation. The physics of time travel, conscious robots are indeed
possible in the author's eyes, or at best possible given our current
understanding of it. The robots themselves, with their enhanced
capabilities, will have their own arguments about us, we fight to
merge
with them, we (merged with them) become the government.

We live happily ever after in the dreamstate utopia with little
flowers
in
out hair....

The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of
the Post-Market Era
http://makeashorterlink.com/?X53813A21

Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O4B720A21

http://tinyurl.com/6kcs

# We may all hope for the best, and even do something about it to
ensure
our
future.
However,
(1) More than 90% of all biological species, which have ever existed
on
Earth, are extinct. What are our odds of survival, on this basis?
(2) The sun is a middle-aged star, so life on Earth will perish, as

will

Earth itself - eventually.
(3) Dinosaurs lived for millions of years; Homo Sapiens has existed,
as
such, for one million. Might our meteoric rise be matched by equally
meteoric fall?
(4) Human population has increased rapidly to a massive 6.5 billion,
currently. Can our environment support this number (and more)
indefinitely,
or are we so degrading our habitat, eliminating other species, and
consuming
raw materials - that a crash will come? (Such is typical of most

species

which are free of predators, and have ample food supply.)
(5) Homo Sapiens has an enlarged brain, especially the cerebral
cortex.
We are the only species which will attack and kill others of our kind

due

to
some dogmatic beliefs within our minds, and not for any externally

obvious

reason. Are our brains thus an "over-specialisation" which is as
likely
to
prove an adaptive defect, as benefit? Time will tell.
(6) Humans tend to "rationalise", ie. we decide what our conclusion is
desired to be, then find arguments to accord with it. This is as
likely
to
be the case with "global warming" as anything else. What is unpleasant
news, tends to be ignored or explained away, if possible.
(7) Predicting the future is a difficult task. We need all current
facts,
and be objective in our assessment. But "Futurology" is an important
"science", and it is valid to extrapolate past and present trends - if
there
is a consistent pattern, and nothing of likely relevance has been

ignored

or
overlooked.
(8) Distinguishing Fact from Theory is important, and while global
warming
(overall) may be considered fact, the explanation, of greenhouse
effect,
is
a theory; possibly the most likely one, but doesn't rule out
alternative
explanations.
(9) Are current climatic changes purely Natural, or due to Human
influence? We can't be sure, but the only way to find out is to

eliminate

the Human Factor, insofar as this is possible. Why bother? It might
be
prudent to do so, as if we don't, extinction may be upon us when it is

too

late to act.
(10) To stabilise the planet we must stabilise ourselves, and this

means

less emphasis on "growth" both economically, and re population.

Recycling

is the key economically; as is zero population growth (or even

reduction).

Respect for Nature; no wars; and mutual goodwill.

Heaven on Earth.......OF COURSE....(please excuse my sarcasm, I'm just
recycling :-).

Invariably in such discussions, people are included, but "outside" of
nature.

Very unnatural, don't you think?

BOfL

# No doutbt I'm stating the bleeding obvious in all this, and, yes,
you're
right, we tend to regard ourselves as distinct from Nature, but are an
integral part of it - and that's the crux of the matter. Either we
recycle,
or Nature will recycle us.

I wish you would grow up. There is no "democracy".

What do you mean? There's far more around the world today than at any
point in history. Still there is progress to be made, but that's not to
discount everything that has happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy