Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

I'm actually for terraforming mars, but with a "sleeper" station that was set to wake itself up in a hundred thousand years when the terraforming is completed, and assumedly Earth is humanless or totally toast. Terraforming is one of my favourite topics, but the time involved hurts. I read a great book by some lady and co-written by Niven (though of course his name was the big one on the cover) called Building Harlequin's Moon that was insanely HARD Science Fiction, spanned tens and tens of thousands of years. I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in what might really be involved in terraforming.

The thing with terraforming too, is that while I hate the lame "hey, you can't say we'll never do that, you don't know what we might invent" argument - in this case it actually applies. If we come up with atmosphere building self-replicating micro-bots (I think nano-bots are a pipe dream, nano-tech is more likely to remain in the realm of new materials rather than making tiny bots) and just dump them on Mars, who knows what we could pull off. No one ever really considered self replicatig atmosphere factories in the old models for terraforming, they always assumed it would be mainly done by micro-organisms.

Thanks for the space fountain mention, Lundse. I'd never heard of it before. Cool.

(Minsky, McCarthy & Moravec ... what a combination!)

Wow, I'd never heard of one of those either, very very cool. I need to read more about how the redirecting pellets hold the structure up, I get the idea but I can't visualize the forces yet.

Super cool...

Just wanted to point out about the Sun getting hotter over time, i.e. before it becomes a giant that is, it has apparently been found that while the output of the Sun's energy has increased by some 30% the temperature of the Earth remains (fairly) constant. (As in not exponentially increasing, I'm not saying it doesn't change at all).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypot ... hypothesis

I have never read into this in detail though.


(I know this is a late reply; sorry about that).

Meh. Look me up in 500 million years and we'll take some temperature readings and compare notes.

SandChigger wrote:Meh. Look me up in 500 million years and we'll take some temperature readings and compare notes.

Sweet, let me know when you get your brain vat address.

Brain vat?

Oh, darling, aren't you quaint? Brain vats are SO last century!

I'm going to hold out for upload into some sort of quantum computer matrix.

SandChigger wrote:Brain vat?

Oh, darling, aren't you quaint? Brain vats are SO last century!

I'm going to hold out for upload into some sort of quantum computer matrix.

Mr. SandChigger, are you trying to seduce me?

Doo dee doo doo doo doo dee doo doo dee doo doo doo!
So here's to you, Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you but What Would He Do?
Koo koo kah choo!

SandChigger wrote:Brain vat?

Oh, darling, aren't you quaint? Brain vats are SO last century!

I'm going to hold out for upload into some sort of quantum computer matrix.

DUDE. Thats my plan!

No it's mine! And there's not enough computational power in the world for the three of us!>:|

Maybe not now...

well as long as obamarama keeps institutions like NASA on the back burner we are frakking screwed!

I'm going for the whole Jedi Ghost thing. Much more mobile and less maintenance.

Jedi Ghost or worm evolution. We all could craft our own variations of the golden path, slipping them in between the fibers of the future.
That could be disastrous .

Snowball wrote:I'm curious...does anyone know how far in time Leto's vision of the Golden Path extended?

Also, why did he consider the continuation of the species important in the first place? He was barely human even before his transformation, so it wasn't self-service, which I don't think would have been a good explanation anyway.

Ah! A genuinely good question! AND one that stays on topic in this long debased thread of mine! Shall i rejoice?

Rather than explain why He does (as i do not know), i would like to attempt to deal with why i think the question is a good question per se.

It is easy to search for dharma that would lead our hero in it's path, psychological explanations that would make believable the choice of a prebubescent boy for the metamorphosis into a huge lump of organic matter. This approach is present in Paul's "terrible purpose", and, while it might reveal some interesting aspects of our Great God Guide Leto the Second, err... Herbert the First's chronicles, i believe the other approach is fundamentally more fruitful.

Namely, the golden-path-as-philosophy approach.

As in: OK, but given that Leto was mature enough to, even in cases where he WAS set on a course of action by primitive urgent causes outside rational, reflexive consideration, even then to be able to think about such actions and build then into a consistent framework -- which we shall call Golden Path -- and furthermore considering that Leto used amongst other things a very ellaborate, careful, sophisticated argumentation to tune and orient his actions, and finally that generally speaking His view seemed to be mostly free of radical question-avoiding morally-based qualifications (like good vs evil, peace vs war and so on) which would accept "humane" as an unquestionable value, given all that, it would seem pretty much reasonable to say that humanity itself was just a curious phenomenon in an otherwise uncaring infinite world. Even assuming that as a human this boy would come default with a "preserve offspring" clause, he was flexible enough to dump the "produce offspring" clause that is lots more urgent.

So, i would say that, in my view, Leto could have regarded humanity as disposable, and that he chose not to. I believe that the dedication to the continuation of humanity was a throughly thought-out idea. And i believe that this idea is not a matter of taste, is not that he thinks humanity is beautyful, but a matter of understanding. I believe that in GE's view, and also in FH's view, humanity has some qualities that are A) valuable in and of themselves and B) fairly rare or nonexistent outside of us.

But what are those qualities?

Given that the universe is infinite, and therefore bound to show almost every possible configuration of things, what exactly could have both A and B?

I don't know if there is (or even if it is advisable to come up with) some definite answers for those, but i am fairly convinced that the general principles can be discerned from FH's general ideas (as for example in "Listening to the Left Hand") and also in some of the stuff that influenced him (like General Semantics).

As SC will be glad to point out to all of you, i basically talked a lot but said nothing. I hope, though, to have cast a different light on Snowball's question. Let's say to attack it from another angle.

As what regards to how far in time Leto would peek... That is totally unrelated. Or is it?

This is fascinating.

I'm not too sure exactly how I want to contribute here, but let me wade in anyway.

I've always taken it for granted that Leto saw the need to preserve, and mature, humanity - and I've never really questioned what it was that he saw in Us.

I accept that we're a species of chimpanzee, but of course, being a member of this species, I lack the objectivity to fully understand in what way We are, or indeed are not, important.

But here's a thought which comes from my own spirituality: if indeed We are the universe, as is all Life, is it possible that our self-reflecting consciousness is somehow inextricably linked with the evolution of All?

Forgive the apparent gobbledygook, but I pretty fully internalise Our Godhood, and the consciousness which creates, shapes and destroys is to me one of the supporting threads of the entire cosmos.
In other words: could it be (what FH had in mind) that Leto saw that, without humans, the Universe would not be?

(Did morpork find his way out of his own ass long enough to post something? How delightful. )

I think you guys are forgetting that while Leto II was genetically "non-human" his personality was pan-human i.e. he carries enough of the the ancestral memories of Humanity that he transcends the placeholder of a single human individual and represents humanity as a whole, or as Herbert considered it, Humanity as an organism. That makes doing what he can to save humanity extremely relevant and very much in his own self interest.

I also think that he represented Herbert's idea of the Ideal God: nigh perfect with some flaws, an integral and dominant part of his species progress, and a tangible interactive God, not an illusory, invisible, non-interfering one.

You might even say the fact that Leto still has hands and hasn't fully transformed (yet) is a representation of a "hand's-on" God whose acts are physically present.

Aquila ka-Hecate wrote:
I accept that we're a species of chimpanzee, but of course, being a member of this species, I lack the objectivity to fully understand in what way We are, or indeed are not, important.

Sorry to derail this, but we are not Chimpanzee's, they are a completely seperate species. We are a species of apes, I think might have been the word you were looking for, I see people often accidently insert "chimp" in place of "ape" (I've even done it myself a couple times).

words have meaning
meanings are important

mrpsbrk wrote:Given that the universe is infinite, and therefore bound to show almost every possible configuration of things, what exactly could have both A and B?

Come on mate, can't you try a little harder than "Space is big".

Also, that really depends on what you mean by "universe" because as far as we understand it, ours is NOT infinite... there may be infinite other universes though.

(Not missing much blocking some people, I see.)

I think the best way to put the monkey thing is that we share a common ancestor with modern chimpanzees.

Ya, ya guys - I see what you mean. Correction, then ...we are a species of great ape.
Yes, I'm lazy in the biological sciences sometimes. My Dad would kill me.
Or perhaps I was being influenced by The Third Chimpanzee.