Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Evolution: What Next?

dkv,

Yes. You can choose your own goal. But there's a proviso and it is this: Nature doesn't care about your personal goal or mine or any goal that any individual or collective of humans assign to themselves.

All of your goals are good and worthy goals. I think those goals can form the basis of an excellent philosophy or a tolerable religion. But if those are really your goals, you should be aware that nature and natural selection are indifferent to them. Many other people are also indifferent to your goals. Now the question is this: given that those are you goals and that the threats are likewise as you have related and that nature is indifferent, how does that affect your actions?

Unfortunately, that itself is not a part of science. Science gets to the 'how' and 'what', not to the "ought."

I've often thought that ADD and ADHD are nature's attempts to produce humans able to comprehend the increasingly large and chaotic flow of information that engulfs us.

I am surprised to say the least when we try to exclude our next evolution process from Science....It appears that we are not willing to discuss our destiny...(may be because it leads us to the complex domain of free will and consciousness)
In my opinion the greatest strength of science comes from its ability to predict future within allowable limits of errors or exceptions.
Therefore let us rephrase the question .. can we create a computer simulation model in which when we feed all the data related to the Present Universe we will be able to guess future Universe...?You may replace humans(and other species) with Nerual network based Virtual Human beings who learn.
We know that we already have virtual god , fish and plants ... so it will not be impossible.
My desire is to know whether this problem can be solved or not.
Our new physical theories have managed to remove singularities from the past and future ... the universe looks comprehensible but what about the life which it carries ... is it also comprehensible and can it be also subjected to laws of Physics...
In my opinion yes... but I know most of scientists will get scared because they know ... knowingly or unknowingly they will be playing with discarded or ridiculed philosophy of free will...
Having said all that .. allow me to give you an answer myself...
With the process of new evolution as new problems occur , we will become more aware .. we will realize that there are billions of Universes having billions of stars with say a million diffirent types of life forms...
we will know how to tap the inexhaustible source of energy for our peaceful growth ...
We will be able to build the psycological aspects of life into equations ...
we will know why peace is required ...
we will know why science is required
we will know why god is required
we will know why love is important ...

Ultimately we will know that it was all about comprehending the so far incomprehensible...
this is what each and every species in this Universe wants ...

(Everything doesnt need a complicated maths to look genuine...every tried consulting a mathematician for producing your offspring!!)

dkv,

I think we already have some insight into why love is important and why science and peace are good things.

It could be that humans - some of them at least - have a predeliction for believing in some sort of deity.

Here is a problem: Say you have a rock balanced precariously at the top of a very tall mountain with a very broad base. The top of the mountain on which the rock is perched is kinda pointy and when we look at the system - with a telescope - it appears the rock could fall in any direction. There are winds blowing up there all the time. They swirl about - producing eddies and back eddies. Eventually we sense the rock will fall. Now some one asks you, "When the rock falls, where at the base will it land? Surely it is the goal of science to make such predictions!"

How do you answer such a question? How do you address such an assertion?

Of course one pretend that! That's how science works in practise. You make reasonable approximations. The makeup of a cell probably resembles the contents of the primordial soup. DNA is the mater molecule mnaking reproduction possible in an efficient way so that the cell can function as a more or less independent organism. The fact that DNA also evolved is not relevant when trying to undrstand evolution of complex organisms.


I'm not sure what you mean. The analogy is crystal clear.

You wrote:
"Of course one pretend that! That's how science works in practise."

Surely you can do better than this. A sentence lacking in both grammar and subject followed by a total fabrication. Science does not work the way you seem to think.

The science I work in does work this way and frankly I don't know of any scientist who would disagree with me.

Dear TheFallibleFiend ,

We can not in principle predict outcome of discreet events like falling of a rock with good precision. However is we can increase our sample universe of obseravtion in a given condition then we will be able to predict with good amount of accuracy.
For e.g it almost impossible to deifne a direction of the molecule in a liquid but on an average we can make fairly good predictions...
Here I am not talking about evolution of an individual but of the entire species...
Further I also do not believe in the concept of "we are special to the extent that the whole Universe was created for us" ...
Having said that I would not like Science to run away from making future predictions with accuracy..
They must develop(if they havent already) means to tell us what will happen tomorrow.
As far as deity is concerned it is a very complex concept involving too many aspects of life...
Btw let us allow Literature and Grammer to coexist but dont expect them to be the best friends..

My dream Alien,
he will be very peace loving..
he will be calm and quiet ...
he will talk to me in my language ...
he will have a lifespan to 200 years..
he will always be in a happy state of ...
he will know the theory of everyhting....
he will gives us new sources of energy for growth..
he will share his special reciepe to stay young..

I do not see them as our invaders... because any intelligent species knows that war is not required to win ...

" Two things are coming out:
1.Evolution has no direction ..or rather the next step is going to be a random one...
2.Life's only purpose is to propagate itself. "

Evolution is an expression of change; such change is the successful 'local response to the following imperitive, survive..

Life's only purpose is to dissipate energy; its modus operandi is evolution ~

Life's only purpose is to dissipate energy ??!!!
There are so many other ways of dissipating energy and it doesnt take 'intelligence' or 'life' to do so....
Having said that I fail to understand what do you mean by that.
Need more explanation...

Why will any intelligent species try to destroy us if they are technologically and spiritually (or morally and executionally ) superior?
This question has a valid point....
today in most of the Movies, Directors believe that we will have zero utility value to our dear Aliens or we will be used against our will...
But the fact is we will be used in accordance to our will...something like Matrix.

ONe word for you-evolution equals mutants! we will all become teengae mutant ninja turtles! just messing with you DKV my dear,
Evolution is a random process, driven by the environment in which an organism exists. Change the environment sufficiently, and an organism will either have to adapt to it or perish. Thus it has always been. We 20th century humans have found a way to circumvent the process to a degree - by controlling our environment, we limit the degree of change our species is exposed to. However, we are still not immune. Even though we can moderate environmental forces to some extent, we still do not have the capacity to survive major geological or climatological upheavals. And in a subtle way, we may be our own undoing. Just as the stromatolites of prehistory poisoned themselves by filling Earth's atmosphere with oxygen (thereby making life possible for the animal kingdom), we are filling it with carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen. As well, at least in the West, we are allowing, through medical intervention, genes for such things as spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases which normally kill, to accumulate in our gene pool. What effect is this having on the survivability of our species? Who knows?

Your questions are extremely important ..
It will be very difficult to implement time travel as method to rollback our destiny....:-))

Not difficult ... impossible.

One can not do things in a neat clean Newtonian way in a universe that runs itself on quantum mechanics.

Things are being done 'cleanly' so far...
But qunatum mechanics does not prohibit the 'unclean' part...
Expect miracles to happen once in a lifetime..
:-))
Thanks to the God of probability...
Time needs to be understood properly before we can think of any such adventure...
Any such travel will violate Entropy ....when 'y' moment goes back to 'y-1' moment then the entropy decreases...assuming our consciouness to remain continuous ...(or observation can be communicated between two moments)...
Another puzzle solved. What say?

Actually it does as was published this year. Here is an item in the popular press that does a reasonably good job of describing the science story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4097258.stm

Like it said it is now considered IMPOSSIBLE!

Wow! I was again correct.

I don't think that there are any intelligent alien near us, but if there were, we would have two values to them:

1. The matter in our bodies/planet/solar system and the energy released from our sun. They may want to do something better with energy and matter than we are currently making of.

2. As a curosity, something unusual. Life is probably pretty rare in the universe, and semi-intellignet life even rarer. In this case they might want to preserve us in much the same way we want to preserve natural wonders.

In either case we would have some value to them

The important thing about evolution is trying to predict what is inevitable so that we can be on the gravy train or just survive. Trying to do this could be itself redundant if the process requires immediate almost unthinking responses. But since we're here, talking about it, lets hope the former is in fashion.