Because we are bound to causality. There is no such thing as a new thought. It is all just a rational progression from previous events. If an idea is irrational, that is because the person who had that idea is crazy. Being crazy is always a rational effect of something (be it genetics or becoming disturbed or whatnot).
Kind of sad and scary for some people, but I don't care.
The world will not end for a long time. Life will find a way through almost any extreme Earth faces (until the earth is destroyed or the universe reaches equilibrium). There's probably simple life elsewhere anyways... Life may have just formed on some random planet last week. (we're talking really simple stuff here, like catalytic RNA strands)
I figure the experiment is safe... we've been meddling in quantum mechanics for a while now, and nothing bad has happened (except that guy who disappeared, but nobody liked him anyway :P).
dimwit: I was joking, I don't actually think the world is going to end. I was saying "if the world can end in 3000 years why couldn't something screw it up now?"
I don't claim to know if the world will end or not or when. How would I know? Though I do doubt that the world is going to end anytime soon.
dimwit Wrote:There is no such thing as a new thought. It is all just a rational progression from previous events.
Thank you. Someone else noticed.
I think that this world has an extended warranty. We're pretty well off in that case. Not sure though.
:>
Everything in life must one day end; Death is the great equalizer that no man can escape. Some people fear it, some people embrace it. Perhaps it is not so important as to when, or how one dies, rather than one's potential destination AFTER one dies....
Well, not me though; I've got the Gameshark code for Infinite Lives!
And besides, we'll feel no pain; if they find this particle, I imagine the Earth would be collapsed into a small, ultra-dense particle about the size of a pea.
Not completely true. According to modern theory, most of aging is caused by the breakdown of telomeres, long strands of nonsense codons on the ends of your chromosomes. Each time a cell is duplicated, some telomere is lost. From the time you are a single cell up till your early 20's, you are constantly producing telomeres. After that, your telomerase (the protein that makes telomeres) breaks down.
So, every cut, every bruise, and all your daily maintenances start to break down telomere. Eventually, you run out, and the useful part of your DNA starts to feel the pain. As data is lost, your cells lose effectiveness dramatically. So, we are actually programmed to die. However, with some excellent genetic engineering work, one could make a virus that would cure aging (but it would be a preemptive cure, not something a 90 year old could take).
A person free of aging would not be invincible; they could still starve, catch on fire, be shot, or die in some other way (even things like heart attacks if they are fed improperly). Still very mortal, but capable of living for an indefinite amount of time if you kept them away from harm (in theory... perhaps the small effects of other things, like free radicals, would eventually build up and cause a noticeable amount of damage).
It's gonna tick me off when somebody figures this out. There's too many people already dammit!
Humanity is much like a virus in and of itself, if you think about it; we spread to other areas, and we tend to ravage and destroy said area; we consume all known resources, we multiply and reproduce ourselves, and move onward to repeat the cycle.....
And, to take it a step further and mention racism (which I personally find to be utterly pointless), one might argue that, like a virus, we seek to alter native 'cells' (in this case other races), into carbon copies of ourselves.
Therefore even if this solution to the problem of aging is viable, I am not certain it would be a good thing; still, I suppose one would then have to consider more creative methods of crowd control....heh heh heh.....
nooooooooo...
Viruses are not anything like people, biologically or metaphorically...
Viruses are not even alive, in any respect.
People are just animals with an extreme sense of reason.
Viruses do not turn cells into viruses, they provide instructions to build virus parts. This usually kills the cell, but the resources are still around.
Quote:we multiply and reproduce ourselves
erm... would there be any of us if we didn't reproduce?
Racism is important, because it gives stupid people something to do. If they weren't racist, then they'd just bother everyone! However, as racists, they only hate a small fraction of humanity. I figure we could put all the racist people on an island (that is the solution for everything) and they'd hate each other away from us.
dimwit Wrote:Racism is important, because it gives stupid people something to do. If they weren't racist, then they'd just bother everyone! However, as racists, they only hate a small fraction of humanity. I figure we could put all the racist people on an island (that is the solution for everything) and they'd hate each other away from us.
That doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?
Alexander Smith Wrote:dimwit Wrote:Racism is important, because it gives stupid people something to do. If they weren't racist, then they'd just bother everyone! However, as racists, they only hate a small fraction of humanity. I figure we could put all the racist people on an island (that is the solution for everything) and they'd hate each other away from us.
That doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?
That part was a joke, of course. The passage was far too positive to be a proper treatise on racism.
Well said! You know, I never thought of it that way; though the island would of course have to be quarantined to prevent them from ever re-entering society.
After I build my Doomsday Device and my army of killer robots (who all look like Bob Dole; they will enslave humanity by broadcasting a speech so boring everyone will fall asleep or commit suicide trying to escape the monotonous droning, after which my killer gerbils can take over), I'll get right on that!