Envisioning the world of 2100

[sojourner]

publiusr, I recommend checking the things you link to before posting them. Half of them don't support your argument.

Reusability is now seen as a wasteful distraction--more and more we are seeing systems scale up

This is only true in respects to governments trying to make jobs programs, not rockets.

[publiusr]

The point is that the folks of the 1960s pre-Moores Law--thought big about space:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=16332
We need to get that mojo back.

Not everything has to be HLV but it should have its place. Surprisingly, that was advocated here: http://www.bis-space.com/products-pa...november-2011/

The article is called Heavy lift is part of balanced system by Mike Armitage

Space news
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/t...n-spaceflight/

At least ATK haters should enjoy this:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1209/07liberty/

[tighr]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Which is just a complicated way of saying "Everything will get better... unless it doesn't."

Actually, it sounds more like "everything does get better for everyone, but it gets WAY more better for some."

In this hypothetical future where the United States no longer exists, the future "poor" people are likely to still be better off than poor people of today, even possibly middle class people of today. Just compare today's poor people to those of 100 years ago. If you had a time machine, went back to 1900, and showed a poor person a picture of what being poor in the year 2000 looked like, they would jump at the chance to be poor today.

[Crazy Eddie]

publiusr wrote:

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The point is that the folks of the 1960s pre-Moores Law--thought big about space

And they were dead wrong. "Big" isn't sustainable in space flight for any amount of time, unless you have an infinite supply of either capital or political will. The United States has NEITHER, and in the 60s we only had the political will because we were trying to beat the Russians.

Not everything has to be HLV but it should have its place.

It DOES have its place. It's called "the past."

The article is called Heavy lift is part of balanced system by Mike Armitage

Space news
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/t...n-spaceflight/

At least ATK haters should enjoy this:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1209/07liberty/

More spam, still no point.

[Crazy Eddie]

tighr wrote:

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In this hypothetical future where the United States no longer exists, the future "poor" people are likely to still be better off than poor people of today, even possibly middle class people of today.

That depends on some VERY specific circumstances being in place, not least of which is the successor of the U.S. government being at least as socially responsible as the current one. One can hardly guarantee this after an unexpected regime change; the imposition of, say, a Fundamentalist Mormon Theocracy would suck pretty hard for anyone who isn't a white male Mormon with working ties to the finance sector. Whole ethnic groups being forcibly relocated to ghettos probably wouldn't buy the "We're better off" theory just because you can cure breast cancer cancer with $23 prescription.

Just compare today's poor people to those of 100 years ago. If you had a time machine, went back to 1900,

100 years ago was 1912, the height of the gilded age. Comparatively, the poor AREN'T that much better off today. To begin with, there's a hell of a lot more OF them, and the unemployment rate is considerably higher at a time when average purchasing power for the lower two quintiles is actually LOWER than it was during the great depression. The Census Bureau intentionally changed the way they measure the inflation rate for this very reason: because people were getting pissed off at the rising cost of essential goods, so they rolled non-essential goods (computers, cell phones, TVs, etc) into the calculation to balance things off.

In what way are the poor better off than 100 years ago? Their legal and civil rights have far stronger protections, and the social structure of the country has been largely reformed. To assume this would still be the case after the disbandment of the Union would be to assume continued economic and social/political progress DESPITE institutional upheaval, and that's not even a safe assumption if the United States continues to exist. It's just as possible that Jim Crow segregation will go back in style by the 2050s, this time divided up by economic class.

[tighr]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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In what way are the poor better off than 100 years ago?

Running water/plumbing/sewage
The easy availability of food
Air Conditioning
Public transportation
Low Income Housing
Better health care (no dying of polio or smallpox anymore)

Even poor people today have cell phones and the internet, shoot even television, things that even the richest of the rich would never have dreamed of 100 years ago. Technology like that is available to everyone.

Life is quite simply better today than it was 100 years ago. You may think that life is shitty today, but it is remarkably less shitty than it was 100 years ago. Yes, we still have a ways to go with social reform, health care, education, and many other things, but Rome wasn't built in a day. You are lying to yourself if you think a poor person today has a worse quality of life than a poor person 100 years ago.

I had almost this exact same argument on another forum, except the time frame was 30 years. The question was "Is quality of life better today than it was 30 years ago". You can always tell the difference between a pessimist and an optimist when answering questions like these, because some people refuse to see that despite the walls we still have left to climb/tear down, we have made improvements to society.

The only way your dystopian future will come to light is in a "Hunger Games" type scenario, which I think the American people would be loathe to blindly accept.

[Crazy Eddie]

tighr wrote:

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Running water/plumbing/sewage
The easy availability of food
Air Conditioning
Public transportation
Low Income Housing

All of which were available 100 years ago. We weren't exactly living in grass huts in 1912, and neither were the poor. The best you can say is that outcomes were negative for the VERY poor (e.g. the homeless) but that's just as true today as it was then.

The difference, as I said, is the balance of civil and social rights now enjoyed by the poor and their ability to resist economic and legal oppression by others. This is not due to any inevitable social evolution or a technological marvel, but due to the fact that four generations of Americans fought tooth and nail to impose change on the system that would benefit them and their children. A sudden regime change could easily undo all of that change overnight, depending on who ends up in charge when the dust settles.

Even poor people today have cell phones and the internet, shoot even television, things that even the richest of the rich would never have dreamed of 100 years ago.

And scaling for technology, black and white television in 1912 would be the equivalent of a '60 LCD with 6-channel surroundsound, high speed internet and an Oculus Rift for good measure. Television was cutting edge 100 years ago, barely out of experimental. Yet even the poorest families in America owned radios and record players.

Don't get dazzled by the change in technology. A hamburger is still a hamburger, whether you buy one in 1912 or 2012. The question we're asking here is whether a hamburger was easier or harder to get for poor people a hundred years ago. Turns out not only was it a tiny bit easier, but the 2012 equivalent is about 30% food byproduct and slightly carcinogenic. Which leads to your medical equivalency: we trade polio and smallpox for diabetes and cancer. Nobody dies from tuberculosis anymore, so trade in for MRSA (for old people) and HIV (for everyone else).

Nothing new under the sun. Again, the singular difference is the legal protections the poor and minority classes managed to acquire through more than a century of civil combat against their adversaries. Tellingly, the legacy of that struggle remains in force and political machinations still exist which aim to reverse those gains at any cost.

Same shit, different century.

Life is quite simply better today than it was 100 years ago. You may think that life is shitty today, but it is remarkably less shitty than it was 100 years ago.

Indeed it is, for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with economics or technology (see above).

I had almost this exact same argument on another forum, except the time frame was 30 years. The question was "Is quality of life better today than it was 30 years ago".

30 years ago? Definitely not. Not least of which because that would put it around the start of the 1980s, by which time Eisnhower's "Great Society" was just hitting their stride and unemployment hit an all time low. That period is remembered by people -- tellingly, by many black people -- as a short-lived economic renaissance that completely disintegrated by the end of the Reagan presidency.

I'm beginning to think that your view of American history is just a tad simplistic.

You can always tell the difference between a pessimist and an optimist when answering questions like these, because some people refuse to see that despite the walls we still have left to climb/tear down, we have made improvements to society.

Yes, SOCIAL improvements. Improvements to our legal, civil and social rights. Improvements like laws that make it illegal for people to prevent you from voting in an election, or laws that make it illegal to fire you just because you're a homosexual. Better yet, laws that require women to be paid an equal salary as their male counterparts for the same job.

That does NOT translate to "better off" for poor people. You can flood the market with cheap computers and TVs from now until doomsday, but a man who makes $14,000 a year isn't going to do very well in a country where a bachelor's apartment costs $15,000 if you're willing to pay your own utilities. Comparable housing just half a century ago could be rented for a tenth of that, and even a new car in 1965 could be bought and paid for on a teenager's allowance.

And for all our advances in medical technology, you're quick to ignore the fact that the COST of basic healthcare has increased nearly a thousandfold in the past century; without insurance, hospitalization costs the average patient $20,000 a day.

That's simple arithmetic. You raise my wages by 50% and my expenses by 200% and then you ask me if I'm better off. I'm supposed to say "yes" just because I have an iPod?

The only way your dystopian future will come to light...

Nothing dystopian about it. As a matter of historical inevitability, NO government, however well organized, has ever existed continuously for more than 600 years. Most of them, considerably less than that, with an average lifetime of 200 to 400 years. The more violent and aggressive ones burn out a lot faster by bleeding themselves dry in non productive military adventures (sound familiar?). The stronger a particular government is when it is disbanded, the more violent the upheaval when it collapses, and a violent upheaval has an unfortunate tendency to resolve with the most radical factions seizing power, either by force or by lack of coherent opposition.

In which case, there are two things about America that deeply disturb me. The first is that we have an incredibly powerful central government with an EXTREMELY powerful military. The second is that we have an extremely radical and (somewhat) well organized political movement that mostly lacks a coherent opposition. The missing ingredient here is some sort of fundamental instability in the government itself, which -- appearances aside -- is largely absent now. OTOH, if the Washington D.C. government were to collapse tomorrow morning, that "dystopian" future would become a reality for a very large number of people.

[T'Girl]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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All of which were available 100 years ago. We weren't exactly living in grass huts in 1912, and neither were the poor.

Add a additional fifteen to twenty years of life expectancy, and a much lower infant mortality rate, compared to 1912.

A hamburger is still a hamburger

Except it isn't, quality and safety of food for the urban poor is much better than a century ago.

but a man who makes $14,000 a year isn't going to do very well in a country where a bachelor's apartment costs $15,000

When I was making about $14,000 a year, I shared a "bachelor" apartment that cost $10,500 a year plus utlities with three other people. My share was $300 per month.

What kind of absolute fool makes $14,000 a year and personally spends $15,000 on housing?

[Crazy Eddie]

T'Girl wrote:

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Add a additional fifteen to twenty years of life expectancy, and a much lower infant mortality rate, compared to 1912.

Except it isn't, quality and safety of food for the urban poor is much better than a century ago.

Debatable, considering the majority of food sold in markets a century ago was being produced locally where food quality vis a vis contaminants and pathogens was less of an issue. Salmonella poisoning didn't become a recurring problem in raw eggs, for example, until the average transit time from product to customer was extended from hours to days. The natural response to this was to add preservatives and/or antibiotics to everything, although some factories now irradiate their meat with UV or gamma radiation to remove microorganisms prior to freezing.

Also curious is the fact that in 1912 the mortality rate from cancer was 76 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2012, that rate is now 188 for 100,000 people. Specifically, fatalities related to breast cancer went from 14% in 1912 to to 24% in 2012. This is because despite the existence of better treatments for cancer in the past hundred years, the rate of OCCURRENCE has more than quadrupled.

Granted, we're still not entirely sure what's causing the increase, but it seems evident to me that we have simply traded one ailment for another and called it progress.

When I was making about $14,000 a year, I shared a "bachelor" apartment that cost $10,500 a year plus utlities with three other people. My share was $300 per month.

Don't know where you live, but in Chicago, a bachelor's apartment is what they used to call "studio."

What kind of absolute fool makes $14,000 a year and personally spends $15,000 on housing?

Someone who does not wish to live in the ghetto.

And at any rate, this is just the baseline for a single person working an entry-level position who find himself paying upwards of 80% of his income on basic housing for himself. What, then, do you do with a small family -- two parents and two children -- where a two bedroom apartment anywhere but South Austin can run from 18 to 20 thousand a year? The result is a two-income family that nevertheless remains in poverty, raises its children into poverty, and whose singular opportunity to escape from poverty is a vague "go back to college," a maneuver guaranteed to produce an additional 40 to 70 thousand dollars worth of student loan debt. Contrast with a worker in 1912, when it was possible to eject ones entire family out of poverty by obtaining a manufacturing job, no prior skills required (no one HAD them at the time; on-the-job training was a foregone conclusion).

General point I'm making here is this: despite vast improvements in quality of medical care and technology, the BASIC COST OF LIVING has increased enormously in the past century where by and large median incomes have not in any way kept up with this increase (in the auto industry, adjusted for inflation it has actually DECREASED by 25%). You could make the case that this is a fair trade for the middle class who have to dig just a little bit deeper in exchange for FAR superior service from a century ago. But this is not the case for the POOR. Not only do those enhanced services remain forever out of their reach, but even BASIC services begin to exceed their grasp and things that were easily obtainable a century ago -- basic housing and gainful employment, in particular -- come to require massive financial investments in and of themselves. That is NOT an improvement, and as a nation we've done a truly shameful job even acknowledging the problem.

[Mars]

STR wrote:

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If a child born today will be 88 in 2100, that child will have had an entire life to make the world a better place in 2100. It's his responsibility, not ours. The generation in power has to make sure things don't get FUBAR between now and 2020. The generation after that has to keep things intact until ~2050 and even the generation mentioned in the OP will really only be in control until ~2080. The succeeding generations will have a far better understanding of the needs of their time than we will. Our best thinking could create massive problems down the road. Choking, sooty pollution used to be viewed as a good thing, a symbol of productivity and advanced technology less than a century ago.

It's fine to think about the future, but thinking there is a lot we can do, aside from climate change mitigation, is false. Also, futurists need to really get off the idea of "exponentially faster" development. There will be no singularity.

Ah, I can see your agenda now, "aside from climate mitigation" how do you know we can mitigate the climate of an entire planet if we can't do other things like space travel? You want is belt tightening, reducing our standard of living in order to curb carbon-dioxide emmissions and for that we need rules and regulations imposed by the government to curtail our freedoms. So you don't want us looking to the skies with wide eyed starry wonder, don't want us building space ships and migrating into space, instead you want us down shifting our standard of living, riding bicycles, and recycling our manure for fertilizer and limiting our number of children to replacement values so we can live in harmony with nature, is that it?

[Mars]

My own predictions for 2100 are very simple, the machines take over, whether the machines be us or they replace us the machines take over, simply because they become more capable than an unmodified human being, and there is no law in the universe that limits machines to less than human intelligence, and since their are no limits, the limits of the human race will be surpassed by machines.

[Crazy Eddie]

Mars wrote:

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My own predictions for 2100 are very simple, the machines take over, whether the machines be us or they replace us the machines take over, simply because they become more capable than an unmodified human being, and there is no law in the universe that limits machines to less than human intelligence, and since their are no limits, the limits of the human race will be surpassed by machines.

That is an almost childlike simplification of the entire process. And you are maybe unaware that in the many ways that "intelligence" actually manifest, machines have been more intelligent than humans for almost twenty years now. You are, in fact, conflating "intelligence" with the capacity for creative output, which are not at all the same thing.

When you peel the onion of human decision in the development of technology, the next layer down from creative output is goal-setting and prioritizing, another thing that machines do exceptionally poorly by their very nature. This means that even if we develop AIs that are creative enough to design space ships without human input, they still have to be TOLD to design space ships by humans who set the priorities for what kind of space ship is going to be designed. Humans spend less and less of their energy DOING things and resort to simply DECIDING things and making the machines do all the work.

Consequently, that is an eventual death sentence for industrial society, and ultimately for the machines themselves. Because a machine, by its very definition, is a tool, something wielded by others to do a job. If there is no one to wield it, the machine has no reason to exist and shuts down until someone tells it what to do.

[Mars]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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That is an almost childlike simplification of the entire process. And you are maybe unaware that in the many ways that "intelligence" actually manifest, machines have been more intelligent than humans for almost twenty years now. You are, in fact, conflating "intelligence" with the capacity for creative output, which are not at all the same thing.

When you peel the onion of human decision in the development of technology, the next layer down from creative output is goal-setting and prioritizing, another thing that machines do exceptionally poorly by their very nature. This means that even if we develop AIs that are creative enough to design space ships without human input, they still have to be TOLD to design space ships by humans who set the priorities for what kind of space ship is going to be designed. Humans spend less and less of their energy DOING things and resort to simply DECIDING things and making the machines do all the work.

Consequently, that is an eventual death sentence for industrial society, and ultimately for the machines themselves. Because a machine, by its very definition, is a tool, something wielded by others to do a job. If there is no one to wield it, the machine has no reason to exist and shuts down until someone tells it what to do.

Unless you ask a machine to simulate a human. The thing about computers is that they can model reality, and a part of reality is a human being, so machines can model human beings. Now imagine a computer in the form of a humanoid robot simulating a human being, and whenever the human in the simulation moves a leg, the robot moves a leg, when the human moves an arm the robot moves and arm, when the human looks around, the robot looks with its cameras and what the robot sees is relayed back to the human in the simulation and thus the sim human sees, feels, tastes, smells, and hears what the robot hears and is effectively the robot. What we have here is an android.

[sojourner]

^Sheer Genius.

[Crazy Eddie]

Mars wrote:

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Unless you ask a machine to simulate a human.

Machines can already do that, with varying degrees of fidelity. In the process of which they nevertheless remain machines.

The thing about computers is that they can model reality

... but only to the extent that they UNDERSTAND reality. The fundamental concept in any simulation is "GIGO", meaning "Garbage in, garbage out." In other words, the simulation is only as accurate as the variables being fed into it.

There is a practical upper limit to how accurately any theoretical machine could simulate a human being. But even leaving that aside, even if you could somehow scan a human being down to the subatomic level and feed every bit of that data into a computer, you then run into quantum indeterminacy whereby the computer cannot be entirely certain of the quantum states of that human's nervous system without ALTERING those states in the process. In other words, 100% fidelity is not physically achievable. Practically speaking, even 70% is probably a bit much.

Now imagine a computer in the form of a humanoid robot simulating a human being, and whenever the human in the simulation moves a leg, the robot moves a leg, when the human moves an arm the robot moves and arm, when the human looks around, the robot looks with its cameras and what the robot sees is relayed back to the human in the simulation and thus the sim human sees, feels, tastes, smells, and hears what the robot hears and is effectively the robot. What we have here is an android.

No, what you have there is TELEPRESENCE, which is just an extremely immersive form of teleoperation, which has been around since at least the 1960s. A teleoperated machine is still a machine, even if you choose to call it an android; when you remove the human from the simulation, it ceases to function altogether.