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flaminbats Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 06:24 PM
Original message
time and technology may harm as well as help...
How many millions of years did it take for Homo sapiens to evolve from Homo erectus which evolved from Homo habilis? Cancer has existed longer than mankind, but what about the growing variety of causes?

Humans have been exposed for millions of years to low levels of radiation, but have only been exposed to nearby fission reactions since the 1940's. What impact will this have on evolution 50,000 years from now, what impact shall it make in a million years? Could the increased use of microwave ovens be related to the growing rates of breast cancer, could growing use of cell phones be leading to higher rates of brain cancer? What about high frequency cell phone towers visible everywhere we drive? What impact will germ warfare have on evolution?

Diabetes was once a cause of death, now it is treated with insulin injections. Kidney failure was once a cause of death, now it is treated with dialysis.

Nature has a role to play, but it cannot save us now. We are doomed to live or die by the fruits of our technology. The human race may no longer exist in 100,000 years. Will all life on Earth perish with us, or will we evolve into another race of beings..Homo cyberis, Homo cloniens?:grouphug:
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Speck Tater Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 06:34 PM
Response to Original message
1. The human race will become extinct...
... but not before building the race of machines that will replace us. It is the natural progression of evolution. We will be replaced by something better, only this time we get to create that something better.

However, it will still be "us" since once we have created a machine sufficiently complex to host consciousness then our soul will be able to reincarnate into silicon instead of flesh, and we'll be better off for the improvement. I can't wait!
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McKenzie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 06:35 PM
Response to Original message
2. we've evolved physically as far as we can
we have binocular vision, we are bipeds and so on. The next evolutionary leap might be in the development of the brain. Interesting stuff the idea of cerebral evolution. Fritjof Capra discusses it a little in "The Turning Point", the sequel he wrote to "The Tao of Physics".
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The Doctor. Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 06:37 PM
Response to Original message
3. I've posted this before - see what you think...
The Real War.


The Human Race is in jeopardy. Currently, a vast war is raging unseen below the surface of our consciousness.

We believe we are engaged in conflicts for many different reasons and under the impetus of many ideals. For the most part, this is true.
We are at war in the Middle East for a number of reasons depending upon whom you ask. We are at war here at home over issues of freedom, happiness, and values.
We are at war with economic forces that will spell our demise as a nation unless we all become economic warriors with the understanding that triage may become a very real necessity.

But there is a greater war, one from which all of these symptoms arise. It is the War for the salvation or obliteration of the human race.

I have come to understand, through study of human nature and human consciousness, just what fate humanity has mapped out for itself. I have come to describe my theory as “The Human Omega”.
No one can argue that humans are not an ambitious species. In fact, we know very well that humanity will ALWAYS reach for what it perceives to be within it’s grasp. It is because of this that we have come so far as a species.
We have the capacity to become so much more than we are, and that is precisely what we have done for millennia. We will reach forward to grasp new concepts, new ideas, and new technologies we are not now even capable of imagining. We will take hold of our own evolution. Whether it takes one hundred years, one thousand, one million… it does not matter; it WILL happen.
I have no doubt that left to explore and flourish humanity will attain transcendence tantamount to true divinity. We will become our own God, made in our image and vice-versa.
Our descendants will become masters of time, space, and consciousness.

All we need do is survive.

One of the greatest hallmarks of the human race is the retention of knowledge. As we acquire the technology to retain information we utilize it – immediately.

Perhaps you are reading this on a website – imagine the amount of information that site backs up and retains. There may be a Library of Congress’ worth of posts, threads and information held in the server memory and backed up for permanent storage.
Now… think of how much information was stored only thirty years ago - A fraction of a fraction of what we store today. How will we preserve everything we want to?

Our divine descendants may well deal with that too, but their methods know no boundaries we can imagine. As masters of time, space, consciousness, and perhaps a number of other curricula we cannot imagine, why not save EVERYTHING?

The trend toward this human destiny is utterly inexorable. Having studied how the human race reaches in all directions around the globe and ever further into the farthest reaches of space, into the future and farther into the past to understand the origin of life on earth. As we delve ever deeper into ourselves, into our intricate intellectual makeup, into our genetic composition, there can be no question we will one day achieve divinity.

Should there exist even a shred of human curiosity in our descendants, (Considering curiosity drove them, I imagine more than a shred will persevere.) they will most likely preserve every consciousness that has ever existed.
Everything will be preserved, perhaps they will have no need for machines, or their machines are woven into the very fabric of the universe; but every event, every dream, every thought, every blade of grass ever to exist, everything from the very beginning of time until the end will be forever preserved in living memory.

If this seems far-fetched to you, try to explain an automobile to a Neanderthal.
I don’t understand how these things would work any more than he would understand what makes a Porsche run… but he can understand what it does… as I can this.

So when a consciousness passes from life, that consciousness will find absolute access to every bit of knowledge, every event, and every perspective in the universe. Even yours.
You will come to know everything, and to be anything.
This is the gift our children can give us, our descendants, with the impetus to preserve gifted to them by our common nature, will preserve all.
The vast loop of the continuum will be closed, linear time will become meaningless, and we BECOME divine… We achieve the Human Omega.
For all intents and purposes – this may already be the case given that time is not linear.
We cannot know what philosophy our descendants will operate on, we can only know that we will not know or understand it until we rejoin the Omega Consciousness. We can pretend all we want to be right or moral, but there will certainly be more to the truth than second-guessing the will of God.

This brings us to the Great Fear.

There is no question that we are in pain. We witness the atrocities we visit upon each other, the tortures, the injustices... so much pain.
It is said that those who do evil do so because they are in pain.
One cannot imagine a pain they have not felt, but, in some fashion or another, they experience the pain they have caused.
This then becomes a cycle; The Tormentor is in pain because of the pain he has caused. He does not realize that his pain is self-loathing; he cannot understand his masochism – for he is immediately aware of his victim’s agony. He seeks to cause pain to punish himself. The Tormentor turns his pain back into anger that seeks to inflict pain once again.
This pain is unfathomable, but it does not merely reside in the individual, it pervades the human super-, sub-, and unconscious. It is passed around from person to person, culture to culture, generation to generation.
Like a virus, this pain begets itself perpetually; it will not perish until we rise above it.

Just like Jesus said.

But ‘it’ does not want that.
Without getting into Human Superconscious Theory, this is best explained by saying that this vast human suffering has taken on a life of it’s own. Somewhere in the interface between this vast suffering and human empathy, there has evolved a disturbing dissonance, which has yielded a self-sustaining entity.
Pain begets not only pain, but the methods of its continuation as well.

There is an operative effect on the human psyche because of this pain. There is fear.
This fear is so deeply embedded in our racial subconscious that it too has a ‘life of it’s own’.
The fear is of spending eternity with the pain we have caused.

We know that there are one of two ultimate outcomes for the human race.

One is the transcendence of humanity by constant growth and enlightenment.

The other is absolute Oblivion

The pain we are in are the cumulative screams of millions upon millions tortured alive, the tears of a child who didn’t want to die hungry the day the death squad came, the mother putting a plastic shopping bag over the head of her baby to futilely try to save it from the poison gas as she succumbs to a rasping death.
There is a great awareness of this horrific torment, both in the victims, and in the tormentors.

This is a pain so great it begs for Oblivion. To forget forever, to have never been is it’s only desire.

This pain has been at war with our destiny for thousands of years.

Should the Human Race survive, this pain will be preserved forever in the consciousness of The Human Omega.
Should the Human Race be extinguished, there will be no Human Omega, and we will all descend into the soft, eternal nothingness of oblivion.

This vicious agony has not sat still and waited for us to extinguish ourselves, nay – it has spent countless centuries engineering our demise.
Through the human subconscious it has worked to trigger our own undoing, and these are the times it has been brought to bear.

Being so imaginative, we have tried to devise methods to explain the world around us with little or no empirical rational.
Religion was one of those methods.
When we developed empathy as a race, we had to find a way to justify taking the life of a screaming animal for our own sustenance. We developed more humane means of doing so and also ‘told ourselves’ that a higher power said it was ok to do so.

Our survival was that ‘higher power’; we called it ‘God’.

But we took religion, which has roots in Human Superconscious understanding, too far.
We let the pain in.
Pain and Religion don’t mix. Just like Jesus said.

We created the ‘Deadly Meme’ of our own destruction.
There can be no doubt that the anger of ‘fire and brimstone’ and the ‘Wrath of God’ was not written out of enlightenment, but rather out of the realization that there was so much wrong… so much pain. These writings had such beauty and wisdom, they were accepted as carte blanche and absolute truth, and therein lay the danger.

For over a thousand years, huge portions of the human race have invested their faith in stories that tell them they will be favored when all else perish in fire.
They read that if they did ‘this’ and believed ‘that’, they would be given such rewards they cannot imagine. And so the faithful have divested themselves of human conscience, the precursor of faith, to acquire those rewards.
Such a powerful impetus as faith extends far beyond and much deeper than the empirical actions of the faithful, however.

This notion of the ‘end of the world’ has been invested in by so many, over such a period of time, and with such fervor – it may be impossible to stop it.

Because of a number of books written from the perspective of this pain, we may not survive as a race.

This belief in the end of the world has fueled the actions of so many of our leaders. They are so certain Armageddon is upon us that they have no intention of preserving our resources or our restraint. They have been fooled into believing that their actions are divine and that the destruction of the Human Race has no impact on achieving divinity.

The greatest deceiver has deceived them. The very thing they believe they are waging war against has fooled them.

They will go to any lengths to carry out its will by lashing out at the agony and creating more. This cycle will wind itself into a literal firestorm of extinguishing rage.

We must not allow these things to occur, we must not allow our leaders to take us into a holy war in this age of mass destructive capability.

For then surely we will embrace oblivion.

-Dr. Garth Eldritch




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McKenzie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 06:43 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. thanks - will read this - seen this article?
beware if you print it out because it's 26 pages. Alternative is to save it as an .html file to read offline.

regards

http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/GREED.htm
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flaminbats Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 07:25 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. fascinating article..
but does any animal or plant need to be civilized to evolve? Are ants more civilized than humans, how long have they existed? How civilized are trees, how long have pine trees grown on the surface?

There may be over six billion of us now, how much longer can the human population boom exponentially without dropping or even slowing?
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The Doctor. Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Dec-01-04 12:41 PM
Response to Reply #5
9. We'll probably 'keyhole' again...
Espesially if the fundies get their Armageddon.

That and our 'boom' is a fractional exponent - not an order of magnitude - there's hope if we get through the next 50 years that we can get education around the world - when that happens, populations steady off and even decline a little. We'll also be smarter with our resources.

Bush'll kill us.
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Ediacara Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 08:20 PM
Response to Original message
6. Humans in the wild have a lifespan of around 30 years
Cancer rates are higher, in part, because we live 2.5x longer than wild humans.

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flaminbats Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-30-04 09:08 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. but my focus is how will technology effect our physical evolution..
Edited on Tue Nov-30-04 09:13 PM by flaminbats
steroids, stem cell medicine, biomedical technology, the destruction of the environment, the longterm decline of biodiversity, and the always increasing population size. Clearly good times are the cause of booming population growth? What will lead to a decline human population size?

I don't believe technology is evil, or that humans are doomed..Just comparing the rise and fall of other living species to human beings. Microwave ovens and nuclear fission have not been around long enough to have a real impact on evolution, this is my whole point!!!
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muriel_volestrangler Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Dec-01-04 07:35 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. Good times do not necessarily cause population growth
The birth rates of most western European countries (ie affluent) are below replacement level. That situation, which seems to be largely by choice (few people have large families, unless for religious disgust with contraception, and some will always end up with no children) may not last, but it does show that population increase isn't inevitable.
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