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RE: Mustang - Part V

in #life6 years ago

I like this. Technology generally is one of my favorite subjects.

I also expect to see profound changes come about due to the influence of compounding advancements in technology. That said...

"Barring unforeseen cataclysm, the next century will do that exponentially more."

2 things to this point.

First of all, I think it's quite optimistic. I'd estimate exponential trends like that tend to be unsustainable in physically manifest systems. Like population growth in animal populations for instance. Take humans. You could fit an exponential to world population over the last 1000 years and use it to extrapolate future figures. We've (which is to say a casual internet search) reckoned the population two thousand years ago was about 10^8 people. even though figures today put it at some 10^9 I don't think there will ever be a world population of on the order 10^15 people even in twelve thousand years just because of the amount of space. That's the same order of magnitude as the earth's surface area in square feet, which we can't even use nearly all of. Similarly I don't expect to see 10^30 in another 36000 or 10^50 people living on earth ever, even though the function would breeze by that in less than a mere million years, since they're roughly the number of bacteria on and the number of atoms in our earth respectively. If we ride that exponential for just a bit of astronomical time we'd zoom past 10^100 people which is just nonsense since it's more than the number of atoms in the entire universe.

This also to illustrate logical pitfalls of stretching a simple theory to fit a world of immense scale and unknown (but probably high) complexity.

Briefly, I also see advances in physics becoming somewhat more rarefied, such as how we need massive, expensive, complicated machines like the LHC and greater amounts of energy (which I see as a much firmer ceiling than the engineering hurdles) to probe and make discoveries about fundamental particles.

Secondly, I'd say we are now experiencing an unforeseen cataclysm with the mass extinction brought about by anthropogenic climate change so we definitely cannot bar that. It's only going to fester in the coming years. Perhaps decades too, if we don't get our act together yesteryear. Many people aren't exactly scrambling to clean up right now either.

"I am reasonably certain that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle will be transcended, and Quantum Physics rectified with Relativity, or Classical Physics, within a generation..."

In a move that is somewhat puzzling to me, you predict what later amounts to an upending of essentially all that we've worked out about the nature.

This seem unlikely to me because it also seems to go against how scientific thought has developed historically. Einstein didn't come along and destroy the works of Newton. When new profound revelations in genetics and biology come about, like horizontal gene transfer or molecular phylogeny, we don't just toss out Mendel or Darwin. Often these things seem to me to be in concert with earlier works as opposed to in opposition.

Also, once you've undermined the underpinnings of what makes the universe how it is you're talking about who knows what kind of world where impossible things could happen. Not a fruitless exercise perhaps, but I wouldn't expect it to be predictive of the world as some think to know it now.

I like the next bits you say next about weather measurement.

"the size of those datapoints has decreased such that today there might be one per 10m cubed..."
"It is easy to predict that size will continue to decrease, to a meter, to a centimeter, and eventually - if nothing unpredictable prevents it - to the individual atoms, quarks, and ultimate granular state of Earth's atmosphere at the smallest scale."

This seems like the population tangent I went on earlier. While the simple principle, here the prediction that density of datapoints will increase, is not altogether unsound it is taken to a nonsensical conclusion. This example is a bit more subtle than the population one however, and doesn't necessarily seem on the surface to break just by increasing a parameter. Once we get to the atomic scale though, some things start to worry me. Generally the machines used to manipulate and measure individual atoms are themselves composed of quite a few atoms. Even if we could somehow make a machine that could measure the properties of a single atom (in a fantastically accurate way that defies modern physics) out of only a single atom you still need one atom-machine for each air atom. I'd think any device to measure an atom would have to consist of more than one atom (and probably some heavier than nitrogen), and so be many times the mass of what it's measuring and so we'd need many times the mass of the whole atmosphere to measure each atom in it. That's without needing to model the whole new, more complex problem of how these billions of gigagrams of deployed machines would effect the weather. I suppose if you're predicting physical limits will be transcended none of these are really constraints.

I like the idea that we could predict where every raindrop will fall, but I don't really ever see that happening. Pulling the scale all the way down to quarks is much more difficult still.

Alright enough criticism, now for some praise.

"...[I, @valued-customer] base none of my reasons on magic people in the sky or long dead prophets..."

Kudos to you. Such is a breath of fresh air in the church-stained world I see laid before me.

Also, while I've expressed some misgivings with some assumptions, the logical path is laid out quite well assuming what is given. Assuming we could measure the atmosphere in this way, I might expect the rest of what is laid out. Manipulation of the body, copy objects in atomic detail and the like seem to be low hanging fruit by comparison. Perhaps not the revival of all the long dead, at least because of destroyed remains and thermodynamic loss of information (though that might be transcended too?), but maybe even the immortality of the living.

In the end the hardest pill to swallow is this...

"...I simply project that all limits are exceeded over due time..."

It's mostly the 'all' part. It smells a bit like a hasty generalization, but a discourse based on this premise is indeed at least diverting.

I know I got something out of it, maybe you will too from this.

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