RE: A Tech-'NO'-Topia: Imagining Our Future Paradise! A "DeepThink" Challenge
I don't eat processed sugar (which is absolutely distinct from unprocessed sugars). In fact, I eat whatever my instincts tell me to eat, and having cleared out all the cultural biases and programming from the culture I have been able to better listen to my instincts about what my body truly needs.
Don't you think this is something you have learned, rather than realized on your own? Even the term 'processed sugar' seems to indicate that's the case. What about children (whose instincts are closer to nature, I guess), would they, all on their own, say no to sugar?
I agree about addictions etc., but how are they created? Unlike cigarettes, sugar is nice the first time you taste it! The body naturally reacts well to it. Or, rather, our taste buds do.
We don't need to know this to eat healthy by following our instincts. That is what I'm saying. I use my instincts to pick out various herbs from my garden (not knowing what they are), and just taste them, if they taste pleasant I will eat them and maybe later I will look up what they were and determine through our 'science' what healing benefits they potentially contain and why I may have desired them.
Pls don't go out foraging for mushrooms!!
I believe it is not natural to live forever in the same body.
No problem: as long as my mind remains the same, I don't mind science giving me different bodies to wear! :P
? Really?, You must be famous? As the first person to have a mechanical heart! Where was the procedure done?
In the womb, I believe!
Also, this is just the beginning, who's to say how long they could achieve if they continued to master these methods, change their dna in doing so and pass on this gene to their kids who would be able to continue this method and advance it even further. All of this is already built in to our natural world. No need for our science to 'improve' upon it in a material barbaric way, when there are much more beautiful methods of co-creating and improving ourselves with our own natural abilities.
Don't mean to repeat myself, but I just find this interesting! Cos here, again, your problem isn't, say, with changing our DNA, but with how we do it. For some reason, doing it via science is bad. Doing it mentally/magically is good. Why is one method worse than the other? Why does the word "material" have to immediately be followed by the word "barbaric"? Our bodies are 100% material/mechanical, so I don't see what's wrong with material/mechanical interventions/methods.
To create. Your method of creating (using my spaceship analogy in the post) is to tear apart the ship and use the parts to design different technology that you believe is improving on the original design.
Remember when you were a child and you were breaking things apart in order to understand them? (You often reply in ways I don't anticipate, like with the snakes, so I'm half expecting you to say "I never!" :P) .. At any rate, I see things around me I don't like (death, for instance), and I don't believe meditating will solve the problem. If I want to travel to another continent, I think boats and planes are the way to do it, instead of rediscovering my innate wings that tradition has forgotten how to use.
Rather than learning memory techniques so that we can mater our own memory, even to the point of being able to memorize several decks of cards in a matter of minutes, material science wants to implant computers in our brains to do our remembering for us...
Well that kind of memorization I imagine is very difficult and time-consuming. We could do it, but it would be at the expense of doing something else with our time. The oral traditions of older cultures are also examples of amazing feats of memorization. I guess, like @philosophist was saying on discord, you can choose. Science will provide you with an extra option, is all.
In fact, just for fun. Name me a single qualitative (as in direct quality of life) that material science has brought as an improvement on our natural world!
The internet. But you'll probably say there's other ways to do it!
Don't think I don't see your points about science making a whole lotta mess in the kitchen in the process of making a cake. It's partly how science works, by breaking stuff to see how they function. But it's also to a large extent, I think, just plain ol' stupidity on the part of humans and modern culture. And also capitalism: natural substances can't be trademarked.
Not all science. just material science.
Btw, let's not forget our own role in all this, instead of blaming science all the time. Right now we have a huge population problem, and scientists would say pesticides are the only way to produce the massive amounts of food required for such a large population. The population problem, like most problems, can be very easily solved, in this case by each couple deciding to have just one child. Or at least just 2! With just one child, the population is halved every generation. With 2, the population is maintained, or it increases slowly (since people live longer).
I thought of this comment cos I happened to read this: https://steemit.com/science/@justtryme90/agricultural-pesticides-do-appear-to-cause-birth-defects-but-only-when-exposed-to-extreme-amounts
My focus on material science is purely because that is what we are debating. We were talking about technology (through various sciences) and the role of it in the future and I was pointing out the flaws of material sciences. So, that is merely my focus there. I'm not suggesting it's the source of the problem, merely a symptom.
Also, I don't think there is a population problem. There is a land use problem. This issue was touched upon on my ON proposal. So, I'm going to duplicate the concern and my reply here:
There is about 4.9 Billion Hectares of presently cultivated arable land
There are 4 Billion Hectares of forest.
There are 12 Billion Hectares of "usable land" on earth
However, with certain methods we are able to reverse desertification, and re-green many of our earths deserts and reinstate their previous glory. Many of our deserts today were once lush tropical paradises!
Ted talk on reversing desertification
So, if we are able to do that in it's entirety and bring earth into a majestic paradise there are a total of 51 billion hectares of land available!
All this is to say that my proposal allots 1 hectare of land per family unit (roughly 4-5 people). So, this proposal could theoretically accommodate a maximum of 200-250 Billion people and could with todays arable land accommodate 48-60 billion people. Even if I'm being completely outrageous in my figures, it's still a far cry from the paltry 7 Billion we see today. We just have extremely ineffective and wasteful land-use practices at present. Even today with 'commercial' and 'residential' buildings where effectively they are unoccupied over half the day...
Each hectare of land would be heavily designed and manicured (even the roughly half the land per hectare is meant to cultivate mature forests). Just half-one acre of land has been demonstrated with our still limited knowledge of effective land use to provide for an entire family. So, offering 2.4 acres per family would certainly fulfill this requirement.
This proposal would not only create forests covering half the land mass 25 Billion acres, but also be able to accommodate 200-250 billion people if seen to it's maximum potential (this doesn't accommodate other life, so I would never propose this population growth, just demonstrating the potential to support life on our planet). At this point however, we would have learned the process to cultivate other planets as well. So, a creation for another time...
Good response!