Re: a good person is a person who...

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:03:03 -0700, boots <no@xxxxx> wrote:

Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:29:41 GMT, gekko
<gekko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> fought off the bad guys, rescued
the hostage, phoned Mom on her birthday and then posted to
misc.writing:


On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:09:01 GMT, gekko
<gekko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

'If this doesn't crash Usenet, nothing will,' Josh Hill
<usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> said as the button was pushed to send
news:590cm3tl88sjr5d8noqpota649cju78n6l@xxxxxxx out into
misc.writing to proclaim:

(someone, prolly Josherdoo, then someone, prolly Ray, yadda)
Here's some silicon, copper, steel, aluminum, rubber, and other
assorted compounds. Use it to make a computer.

Given enough time, I can do so.

Sure. But in 1890, you could not have.

Man figured that out. Computers did not exist in nature prior to
Man figuring that out.

Man can probably eventually figure out how to make a chicken from
the pieces parts that start as an egg and a sperm.

<oops> that *go into the making of* an egg and a sperm.

But Man would
be copying something that existed in nature, and has refined
itself over time in nature, through a very odd, complex, and
not-yet understood series of shaping events.

When Man figures out how those things happened to coordinate in
just that fashion, and replicates that, Man will have found God.

Some very interesting things happen when you plug simple
evolutionary parameters into a computer: computer "life" forms and
evolves just as actual life did. We can't yet imitate the richness
of evolution on earth, and we don't yet have the knowledge to
design a genome entirely from scratch, but such is the rate of
progress that I've little doubt that we'll be able to do those
things within a few generations.


Biosphere II.

When Man attempted to create a model earth, capable of sustaining
life, Man fucked it up. That was merely to sustain the life that had
already been put together by some other unimaginable sequence of as
yet not fully comprehended events and conditions.

Precisely why I get so upset when people fail to grasp the
consequences of global warming. The ecosystem is enormously complex

You were okay with the first part of that sentence. The ecosystem
really is enormously complex.

Maybe we'll realize that it's also pretty simple if you have the right
understanding of it, but we'll need to accumulate some more
understanding before we find out... or maybe lose some, who knows.

Seems to me that it's both -- simple principles, intricate
elaborations. Like music. Only 12 notes, but look at what the
permutations and combinations can do.

and has evolved over billions of years.

Then you jammed your sentence full of your conclusions and fucked it
up the ass, making it something any fuckwitted retard can argue over
until the cows come home from their continued study of the ecosystem.

Dude, had I not mentioned my conclusions, I might as well not have
made my post. In any case, they're illustrations rather than
conclusions, the source of what I'm saying, not the other way around.
To observe and understand the significance of these things is to
understand that we're behaving like pernicious fools. I don't expect
that we'll destroy ourselves (I'm not discussing biotech, which may be
a different matter), but I do think we'll suffer -- are already
suffering from -- adverse consequences and impoverish ourselves
terribly, go even further towards creating a bleak shopping mall
existence stripped of beauty and diversity.

Birds that eat and disseminate
the seeds of only one species of tree, a species which can no longer
reproduce unless the seed passes through the bird's digestive tract.
Animals that migrate thousands of miles as the seasons change. Cold
adapted plants that retreat to the mountaintops during a warm period,
and spread out again when the climate cools. Destroy this beautiful,
intricate diversity, and pest species multiply, with results that
aren't generally to our liking. So yeah, the Biosphere fucked up
because those who made it didn't know as much about ecosystems as they
thought they did. Still, it's important not to extrapolate too far
from a first experiment, particularly one conducted by an eccentric
billionaire. I've no doubt that we'll figure out how to make a
reasonably fault-tolerant mini-ecosystem at some point.

I am reminded of a post I read elsewhere, "I can't see it taking more
than 20 lines of code".

The programmer apparently has no experience, but you crawled off the
trunip truck quite a while back now Josh. Go figure.

A hundred million lines of code will do where 20 won't. AFAIK, there's
no fundamental theoretical impediment here, though it's possible that
we'll find one, forex, that so many species are needed to maintain
ecosystem stability that an artificial ecosystem will have to be
impractically large.

--
Josh

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because
I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony
.