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What if we're rounding ourselves up?

Started by memenode, July 26, 2009, 02:48 PM NHFT

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K. Darien Freeheart

QuoteI couldn't make it thru Firefly either, so guess you'd better smite me too, Kevin.

Smote!

QuoteFirefly was really corny I did not like it.

Smote!

QuoteEven the theme song was corny.

Sorry, you can't repeat a karma action without waiting 1 hours.

firecracker joe

when i think of other worlds i think of   SPACE BALLS  the movie  with dark helmet.  its all about
                                     moichendizing

K. Darien Freeheart

Evil will always triumph over good, because good is DUMB!


firecracker joe

so what do we got a quizinart?  dont show that again

memenode

I think I'll write my own perfect scifi.. eventually. So much has bottled up in me over time and I feel like, aside from blogging, just writing about a perfect yet realistic future and the progression towards it while expressing all my ideas to the last drop...

Besides, my future is in the entertainment and media. I'm a meme master after all. ;)

Lex

Quote from: memenode on August 26, 2009, 01:09 AM NHFT
My main beef with Firefly is that they're portraying a technologically super advanced society with a mentality of dark ages. This doesn't quite follow any more than it follows that Star Trek world is such an utopia yet they don't use money. Firefly makes the same mistake Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and so many other scifi make. They think humanity with a coercionist mentality would survive the onslaught of such incredibly powerful technologies without destroying themselves.

In the age in which Firefly is set there either will be no fascist alliance to fight against or there will be no humans.

Nuclear weapons aren't some future science fiction: they exist today... and yet, we're all still here. How do you explain that?

memenode

#66
Nuclear weapons are nothing compared to what's coming and even for them it would probably be a mistake to assume there is no threat. Last world war saw two of nuclear bombs being dropped. WW2 happened after Great Depression and probably as a result of it. We're now in what many call a Greater Depression and the future is quite uncertain.

Whenever I think something is just too horrible for a human being to be able to do I only need to be reminded of history to prove me wrong, and not even history, but day to day reality. Murderers being rewarded medals of honor? Enough said. Bad memes are still here and so long as so many human minds remain infected by them nothing should be assumed as below human honor.

I said nuclear weapons are nothing compared to what's coming. They're just bombs that can destroy entire cities and spread radiation across parts of a continent, but those who throw them are still capable of guilt. They don't remove the biological programming against murderous action, but merely obfuscate it. Technology that's coming, however, allows human augmentation and DARPA is already experimenting with it. Think soldiers who cannot feel guilt, not even biological, because that capacity has been engineered out of them, yet soldiers with super human strength, perception etc.

Human beings themselves can ultimately become the weapons of mass destruction far more disastrous than nuclear bombs. That's just one example. The onslaught of rapidly emerging technologies is dubbed NBIC in this article:
Human, Transhuman, Posthuman: the Implications of Directed Human Evolution for Global Security
. NBIC stands for Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno tech. Their potential power dwarfs even nuclear bombs. Human beings with coercionist mentality simply aren't ready for them. It's like giving a nuclear bomb to a cave man.

K. Darien Freeheart

You're far too negative. Maybe you should move to New Hampshire and be surrounded by like-minded people. It might chip away at your cynicism. It's got to suck to be in a world where the thing overwhelming you is human capacity to kill rather than the human capacity to persuade and improve.

memenode

#68
Cynism is easy for me yeah, but I don't have to be cynical (and am not as often as it seems) to point out certain issues to be dealt with and we can't begin to solve a problem before we know what it is or even the whole extent of it.

Of course, solution is voluntaryism, and anyone who pushes voluntaryism is solving the problem of destructive uses of technology as well, but knowing just how far can the threat go can provide a way to be motivated as well as further means of propagandazing the solution. NBIC stuff is a two edged sword though. If we prevent their destructive uses, we open the doors to making a heaven on Earth, in which we are the angels. It can't get more positive than that. As a geek, thinker, marketer and a bit of a sensationalist I love the potential of technology.

So the goal isn't to shoot fear through anybody's bones. It's to point out the full extent of the shift we're facing and therefore the extent to which voluntaryism is important and revolutionary. If voluntaryism prevails as we shift to these technologies it will be heaven on Earth. Otherwise it *may* be hell. In any case, it's clear that time to evolve is right now.

EDIT: Besides, the previous response was meant to clarify my position on what I see as unrealistically too negative science fiction. It might not seem like it, but saying that humans wont live to see that far into the future if such incredible technologies (or more) are put in their hands isn't necessarily pessimistic. One way or another, just as internet has inspired positive change, I think technology has an inherent positive change potential. In a sense, I might as well ignore the whole "we wont be here to see it" thing and just say Firefly, Babylon 5, BSG etc. are simply wrong period. It will be BETTER. The future must be better or it wont be. So if you're talking about the future you better talk about utopia. We've seen enough of dystopias.

Currently Star Trek seems to be holding a monopoly on describing the most positive future. Yet we know what Star Trek represents (mild form of fascism, no money etc.). This can't be. We need an alternative that will blow people's minds more than trek ever could, because it would be based on voluntary interaction, and would press the right buttons in human nature, making far more sense in the end than Trek ever did. It's one of my dreams to one day see such a scifi project come to fruition and perhaps be a part of it. We need to show people the way. We need to visualize what we're about beyond slogans and arguments - put it on the big screen, make people live inside of our ideal world for a while and come to desire it, strongly.