Just heard that Arthur C. Clarke has died; truly a sad day.
On one of his TV shows he once opined that had the ancient societies that had employed the electrochemical cell (Babylon), mechanical computing (Greece) and jet propulsion (Greece, Rome, others) been able to persist and flourish, humanity by now would have colonized the planetary systems surrounding all the stars visible to the naked eye.
In summary: if there was no war, we would be a far more advanced civilization, because war wastes resources. Unfortunately we're built to fight, which implies we're not built to be an advanced civilization.
I regret not having a prehensile tail as well, but both issues are species limitations and there's nothing to be done about it.
Hiram Maxim contributed to the development of the art of surgery. He invented the machine gun.
The whole success of the information theory, nuclear physics, jet propulsion, electronics, computers/software industry, etc. is the direct result of the war effort. Those areas require the great amount of investment at the initial stages. This investment can only be done by the governments in the course of wars or the war preparations.
I am sure the first evolutionary monkey who used a stick as the tool first used it as a weapon against the other monkeys.
Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
Arthur C Clark was a prolific letter writer in the early days of the personal computer revolution he sent notes of encouragement and suggestions to many of the early innovators. He saw better than most what would happen when low cost computers would be generally available.
You say "only" purely because you're part of the same species as myself and those governments. Fact of the matter is, if resources exist, it is only culture and instinct that tell us to which projects we should allocate them. There is no law of the universe that says "in order for a species to develop fission power, it must first have a war as incentive". Any scientific problem can be posed as a theoretical question, it doesn't have to have "fight off the invader" as a motive in order for the scientist to go find an answer.
In fact, you could argue that a completely rational civilization sufficiently advanced to understand the concept of other planets should have a Darwinian goal of extending its breeding habitat to those other planets as the first possible priority.
It just so happens that our species is hardwired to have internecine conflict as a high-priority goal.
I'm sure Swift would have had something interesting to say in this argument.
Just think how handy it would be. How many times have you needed to hold three things at once? And a tail is more convenient than a trunk or an extra set of arms.
Recent behavioral research suggests that Clarke got it right in his depiction of early hominid cooperation involving skirmishes with other hominids; other great apes and primates lack the motivation (perhaps lack the cerebral circuitry) to cooperate, to empathize (theory of mind issues) and to teach each other. OTOH, domestic dogs clearly have the ability to understand the state of mind of others and to cooperate in problem solving, which suggests that their cerebral development has been rapidly selected by social context.
Somebody used to make a foot pedal with PS/2 keyboard wedge for this purpose. I imagine you can use the pedals from one of those USB driving simulator kits for the same effect.
One thing for certain is that humanity has to vacate this planet within the next billion years or perish. We seem to be behind schedule on this project already.
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Paul E. Bennett...............
Hahaha. Reminds me of the old Commodore Amiga easter eggs. Hold this key down while typing this, AND eject the floppy in the internal floppy drive. You often needed a second person or have really big hands.
Most of the messages were engineer written/hidden, and included pictures of half-naked women, vulgar anti-IBM PC messages, etc.
What fun. It's a shame that the world has gotten so PC that doing these types of things today have become fodder for lawsuits, feminists, and other would-be victims.
I assume this message was intended to be some kind of thinly-veiled Luddite-ism. I make no bones about the fact that I consider off-world colonization to be the single important engineering goal to which we can aspire.
Not considered whether or not it was any kind of Luddite-ism before.
The current scientific view is that, one way or another, the planet we inhabit will expire within the next billion years. Either by being fried by the Sun or ourselves managing to do the job before hand.
So, I'll agree that the highest priority of all engineers ought to be to the ends of getting humanity off of this lump of rock and out there colonising the other worlds we seem to be detecting with greater frequency these days. I think that, based on the time-frame in the majority of SF, we should have been already out there before the year
2000 so are somewhat behind the schedule.
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Paul E. Bennett...............
The earth won't be fried by the sun for about 4 or 5 billion years - stars are pretty stable throughout the main phase of their lives. We'll have more to worry about before then, however - as the earth's core cools it will get colder, and when the Milky Way and Andromeda crash in about 2 billion years it's impossible to predict what damage (if any) it will cause to our solar system.
Indeed, and not just for the oft-cited justifications of the need for an expanding frontier to accommodate social experiments and provide relief for persecuted groups, but as an accommodation to expanding populations, and especially necessary to mitigate objection to life- extension technology.
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