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The last person to Post here wins! (now with Prizes!) (pg. 112)
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View this Thread in Original format
| Mortyman |
| naesean. no offense, but looking at your sig and see you post a link with the word 'wierd' in it... i'll take my chance and save a click. :stongue: |
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| Mortyman |
| and i've been sitting here for hours now, and just came across this now. I don't know how much more i can take!?!? |
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| Cosmic Fur |
hahahahahah
BTW, by my n00b comment I meant those who are new to this thread, not those who are new to TA or partying or gay sex or furniture pr0n. |
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| naesean3 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Cosmic Fur
hahahahahah
BTW, by my n00b comment I meant those who are new to this thread, not those who are new to TA or partying or gay sex or furniture pr0n. |
LOL!
;)
googlegooglegoogle |
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| naesean3 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Mortyman
naesean. no offense, but looking at your sig and see you post a link with the word 'wierd' in it... i'll take my chance and save a click. :stongue: |
Mortyman...
no problem bud - you'd never win it anyways......
:p |
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| naesean3 |
| in a round about way - people are square |
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| naesean3 |
Seems as if our entire industrialized civilization is one big suicide cult. The symptoms surround us.
We propel our bodies about in fragile metal boxes, at potentially fatal speeds, without much care or reason.
We ingest so much poison that meat from our bones wouldn't meet government standards for pork.
We pull strands from the web of life, jump up and down on it, and expect it to hold our ever-increasing weight. Few notice there's no safety net.
:( |
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| naesean3 |
| Are we living a shadow existence that only fools us into thinking it is real? This age-old philosophical question still reverberates through cultural thought, from the writings of William S. Burrows to the cinematic mind games of The Matrix. Hut of the Institute of Advanced Studies sees an analogy to the danger of the collapse of the vacuum. Just as our empty space might not be the true, most stable form of the vacuum, what we call reality might not be the true, most stable form of existence. In the fourth century B.C., Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu framed the question in more poetic terms. He described a vivid dream. In it, he was a butterfly who had no awareness of his existence as a person. When he awoke, he asked: "Was I before Chuang Tzu who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being Chuang Tzu?" |
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| naesean3 |
| At the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a cadre of dedicated scientists sifts through radio static in search of a telltale signal from an alien civilization. So far, nothing. Now suppose the long-sought message arrives. Not only do the aliens exist, they are about to stop by for a visit. And then . . . any science-fiction devotee can tell you what could go wrong. But the history of human exploration and exploitation suggests the most likely danger is not direct conflict. Aliens might want resources from our solar system (Earth's oceans, perhaps, full of hydrogen for refilling a fusion-powered spacecraft) and swat us aside if we get in the way, as we might dismiss mosquitoes or beetles stirred up by the logging of a rain forest. Aliens might unwittingly import pests with a taste for human flesh, much as Dutch colonists reaching Mauritius brought cats, rats, and pigs that quickly did away with the dodo. Or aliens might accidentally upset our planet or solar system while carrying out some grandiose interstellar construction project. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill speculated that contact with extraterrestrial visitors could also be socially disastrous. "Advanced western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization," he said in a 1979 interview. "I don't see any reason why the same thing would not happen to us." |
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| naesean3 |
| While physical health has improved in most parts of the world over the past century, mental health is getting worse. The World Health Organization estimates that 500 million people around the world suffer from a psychological disorder. By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease. Increasing human life spans may actually intensify the problem, because people have more years to experience the loneliness and infirmity of old age. Americans over 65 already are disproportionately likely to commit suicide. Gregory Stock, a biophysicist at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older. If such an extended life span becomes common, it will pose unfathomable social and psychological challenges. Perhaps 200 years of accumulated sensations will overload the human brain, leading to a new kind of insanity or fostering the spread of doomsday cults, determined to reclaim life's endpoint. Perhaps the current trends of depression and suicide among the elderly will continue. One possible solution— promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac— heads into uncharted waters. Researchers have no good data on the long-term effects of taking these medicines. |
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| LucasMead |
| This isn't a thread. Its the TOTA chat room! |
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| naesean3 |
| People create smart robots, which turn against us and take over the world. Yawn. We've seen this in movies, TV, and comic books for decades. After all these years, look around and still— no smart robots. Yet Hans Moravec, one of the founders of the robotics department of Carnegie Mellon University, remains a believer. By 2040, he predicts, machines will match human intelligence, and perhaps human consciousness. Then they'll get even better. He envisions an eventual symbiotic relationship between human and machine, with the two merging into "postbiologicals" capable of vastly expanding their intellectual power. Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence expert at MIT, foresees a similar future: People will download their brains into computer-enhanced mechanical surrogates and log into nearly boundless files of information and experience. Whether this counts as the end of humanity or the next stage in evolution depends on your point of view. Minsky's vision might sound vaguely familiar. After the first virtual-reality machines hit the marketplace around 1989, feverish journalists hailed them as electronic LSD, trippy illusion machines that might entice the user in and then never let him out. Sociologists fretted that our culture, maybe even our species, would whither away. When the actual experience of virtual reality turned out to be more like trying to play Pac-Man with a bowling ball taped to your head, the talk died down. To his credit, Minsky recognizes that the merger of human and machine lies quite a few years away |
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