I’m not sure what your point is exactly.

I am not denying that the term ‘terraforming’ can have various, graduated connotations. If you wish to argue that farming is a form of terraforming or that human driven climate change is a form of terraforming, I can see the point. That is not the connotation of terraforming I am using though, and that should be clear.

I think that you may also be arguing that because we have altered Earth’s biosphere it strengthens the case that we can do so elsewhere through a mix of technology and biological processes. I don’t believe I argued otherwise. There is, however, a very large difference between altering a biosphere already capable of supporting intricately complex biomes and ecologies and transforming a planet like Mars into a planet that into one that can support similar biodiversity and complexity.

Would it be impossible to terraform Mars in this grand sense? I’m certainly not qualified to say, but my guess would be that it is possible. My point, to state it again, is that I don’t think that’s the direction humanity will go in. I think that the path of least resistance, so to speak, is the virtualization of human society and mind in general. That path is woven of many unrelated trajectories that are all being followed of their own accord. Just to give a few examples I would offer the building more realistic games and VR media, medical treatments (amputees, neurology, etc.), social networking, AI research, and so on. There is a confluence of myriad smaller paths that are leading toward the virtualization of human society; it will develop organically and without any single entity (i.e. a government or corporation) having to engage in a focused and extensive engineering project. It is simply a direction that humanity is already going in. I think that once we begin to expand into virtual space in earnest, the impetus for things like terraforming will lessen. I’m not implying that it will dissipate entirely, but it will cease to be a necessity for the long term (and we are talking crazy long term here) survival of mind. It will become a luxury that may or may not be realized. You simply don’t need to create planetary biospheres to maintain virtual environments.

I hate to sound like some supplicant to the cult of transhumanism, because I’m not. I’m very far from that, but I can’t see any empirical reason why it won’t happen eventually. It is simply my guess that it will happen before we start terraforming planets or building Dyson Spheres.”

I alluded to this point when I said “assuming we are terraforming for us.”

Indeed, Mars’ lower mass/gravitational field strength is a major factor in atmospheric degradation, but Mars has enough mass that it could hold onto an atmosphere should it have a stronger magnetosphere. Of course it could hold on to a more substantial atmosphere with more mass, but the radiation would still be a factor if you wanted Mars to be Earth like. Neither is likely to happen, but I suppose it would be easier to generate a surrogate magnetosphere than increase the mass of the planet. Moreover, creating a magnetosphere or similar shield would kill two birds with one stone. Again, I'm not suggesting this will happen any time soon or at all for that matter.

That’s a matter of semantics I suppose. We have certainly altered the biosphere of Earth, intentionally and unintentionally, but I personally wouldn’t count that as terraforming in the most colloquial connotation. I get your point, but it’s really usurping my comment to make a separate point. My point is that it is more likely that technology will go in the direction of virtualization of mind than immense scale engineering projects like making a planet like Mars, which cannot support an Earth like biosphere, into a planet that can.

One of the problems with terraforming Mars (and potentially lots of other rocky, goldilocks zone planets) is the lack of a substantial magnetosphere. Earth’s magnetosphere greatly mitigates solar wind and radiation. Solar wind can strip a planet of its atmosphere and solar radiation isn’t good news for ‘earth like’ life.

The conditions for life might be quite common in the universe, but the conditions for complex Earth like life are much, much more rare (but perhaps still substantial given the numbers). We have a lot going for us here. We are part of a solar system in a ‘quiet’ part of the galaxy. The vast majority of stars in our galaxy, and most others, are in areas of great cosmic violence. They are too close to the galactic core, or too close to a star that goes supernova or hypernova during the evolutionary process. There are planets that don’t have a moon or nearby supergiant plants (like Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) to protect them from comets and asteroids, and they don’t have strong magnetospheres. Of course a planet like Mars does have a lot of these things going for it, it doesn’t have a strong magnetosphere which is a sizable technological hurtle to terraforming (assuming we are terraforming for us).

Most likely humans will become largely virtual data based organisms long before we develop the technology or focused the resources on things like terraforming planets. If this happens, the need to do things like terraforming other planets kind of goes away.

Though it’s a long way from being an interstellar probe; Deep Space 1 used ion drives (inadequate but new), self-repairing mission AI, and self-navigation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1

Also, NASA is working on a warp drive.

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

This comment is a good synopsis, but of course there is a matrix of factors in any group’s collective behavior pattern, and plenty of nuance for any given individual. I think Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ concept is apropos here (no time to really explain that). In short, individuals draw from a larger pool of contributing traits common to the group. When you look at the group as a whole you see the commonality, even though any two individuals in the group may share very few traits if any. In the case of nerds and geeks there are some common factors that contribute to their particular brand of arrogance (IMO):

Nerds’ particular utility to society is in ascendance.

Nerd knowledge is arcane and esoteric.

Nerds are generally more intelligent and educated; they are therefore particularly adept and perceiving and articulating the ways in which they differ from 'others.'

Nerds are typically focused of mind, and therefore less likely to appreciate alternate worldviews and forms of competence and intelligence.

Nerds tend to be socially challenged at a biological or genetic level. There is a lot of research that links aptitude in math and science with mild autism (where autism is seen more asymptotically).

Many nerds are compensating for being picked on. They were at the wrong end of a lot of power dynamics most of their lives and are now indulging in new found power.

Conversely, being a nerd is becoming cool.

Nerd communities tend to be insular and create self-reinforcing feedback loops.

Etc.

All that and, as has been said, you are in a giant hormonal pool of young adults who are all trying to assert themselves and adjust to a broader more cosmopolitan social milieu than most of you are used to experiencing.

I did read the article, but it doesn't give me a real feel for the issue from a legal perspective. In any case, this is like a lame plot detail from a bad dystopian si-fi story; it’s absurd.

Good luck enforcing this broadly. The logistics, should it become law, would be daunting. This isn't to say there might not be some enforcement for bigger ticket items or ramifications like ebay and craigslist, but I find it hard to believe there would be wide spread enforcement of this law for small scale deals, even things like car sales. Then again, if there is profit to be made if the law is enforced, I could be wrong.

And people talk to no end about how government is the enemy; corporations, at least what they are becoming, are the enemy...seriously.

A Dyson Sphere is a largely ludicrous concept, and it did not anticipate virtual reality. By the time a civilization has the wide array of capabilities required to create anything approaching a Dyson Sphere, such a construct would long since be superfluous. I won’t go into all the reasons a Dyson Sphere is logistically unrealistic, other have already done this.

The most realistic trajectory for any species is to eventual stop expanding into real space and transition to virtual space. Most advanced species will eventually evolve from biological organisms into technological organisms. Computational capability does require a high power density, but the power efficiency gains realized by the transition from real space to virtual space are staggering. In other words, the amount of raw power needed to sustain a highly advanced virtual civilization, with relatively limitless ‘space’ to expand is minuscule compared to the raw power needs of a civilization that needs lots of physical space, atmosphere, food, clothing, houses, leisure space, large scale transportation, etc, etc., etc. etc.

Any truly advanced civ will have a very limited physical footprint because they will be largely virtual. Even if a virtual civ wishes to continue exploring the 'real' world, the amount of power needed to move a computational system and some robotic or android 'physical avatars' around and sustain them is, again, minuscule compared to sustaining biological bodies and moving them around. Power needs will still be high, due to the power density of computation, but it will be very manageable. Couple these lower power needs with advances in efficacy (which have generally followed Moore’s Law) and you simply do not need to expend the tremendous effort required to construct a monstrosity like a Dyson Sphere.

Sure, there may be something that prevents civs from going virtual (like the soul), but as yet there is no empirical reason to believe this is the case.

From the perspective of civil law, abortion should be legal for a host of pragmatic and moral reasons. To put it dangerously concisely, there are many situations where choosing to abort is a morally defensible option, and, more pragmatically important, attempting to monitor pregnancies, prevent women from terminating pregnancy, and punish those who who do attempt/succeed is a daunting logistical task due to the biological realities of the gestation process. Moreover, such action is an overreach of power by any social body.

That being said, we must also face the fact that in many cases, perhaps even most cases, abortion is tantamount to murder. Again, this does not mean abortion should be illegal; abortion is simply a case where there are no easy, clean solutions. The fact that abortion should be legal does not minimize the fact that abortions often terminate a healthy life trajectory, and speaking about abortion as an act of privacy or simply a medical procedure is morally disingenuous. To put it bluntly, sometimes life sucks, and sometimes we are given horrible choices between undesirable alternatives. I am certainly not saying that abortion is always wrong, or that it is easy to know when it is or isn’t. I am arguing that in the effort to defend the right to abortion, we tend to minimize and mask the fact that abortion is the termination of a life trajectory that will, with luck and nurturing, lead to a first smile, a first word, a first kiss, and all the wonders we hold dear and hope for in human life. Terminating life is not always wrong (in abortion as well as other situations), but it should never be easy. I know that sounds like some tough love non-sense or an attempt to shame people, but it is real...taking life should never be easy. The fact is that some choices have more gravity than others, and the choice to abort or not is one of the most weighty, unfair, and cruel burdens to place on a human being. I bear no ill will to anyone who is forced to make it, due to their own actions or the actions of others.

The argument for why abortion is tantamount to murder is too large to give in full, even if I were capable, but here are some points to consider.

Once the paternal and maternal gametes genetically combine in/into a zygote, a distinct and novel genetic organism has gained a purchase on life. That distinct organism is on a trajectory that will end in its biological death, and the trajectory itself, however long or short, is the life of that organism. Many things can end this trajectory, but intentionally and actively ending this trajectory, in the case of humans, is often murder (but certainly not always murder). Trying to impose some arbitrary bifurcation point that divides the trajectory of life into a person that can be murdered and a sack of cells that cannot be murdered is disingenuous because life is a process not a specific form (e.g. zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, teenager, or what have you). With nurture and luck, a zygote will move along all the stages of human development remaining to him or her in a trajectory no less real than that of an infant. Put simply, terminating that trajectory at any point is terminating a distinct life, and you would have a hard time convincing me that such an interpretation is a matter of opinion.

While we are on the subject, I find the argument that goes something like “I can do whatever I want with my own body,” particularly misinformed and alarmingly overused. Arguments that a zygote, or developmental stage thereafter, is part of the mother’s body are factually incorrect. The zygote and onward has a distinct genetic footprint, and the mother’s immune system would identify the child’s genetic code as an external threat and kill it were it not for the placenta. I won’t tarry on this point, but I do hear the “It’s my body” argument all the time. The fact that a fetus is in your body, doesn’t make it part of your body.

This subject is complex, often very situational, and massive. We can do this subject very little justice in this forum. There are strong and compelling argument to be made on many sides. My point is simply that minimizing the gravity of abortion is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than outlawing abortion.

Comcast wants to be able to claim internet customers as cable TV subscribers. Sure they would like you to buy everything they have, but at the very least they want you as a statistic. I haven’t checked pricing recently, but in the past the discount for bundling basic cable (local channels + a few others) made the bundle a few dollars less than the stand alone offering of equal throughput. In this way Comcast can count internet customers as cable TV subscribers and bolster their marketing numbers. Perhaps this is no longer true.

To comment on the capitalism side bar going on here I’ll say the following. A free market is a market in which prices are set by supply and demand; it would be awesome if we actually had that. In any case, a free market can and must be regulated. ‘Regulation’ is a multivalent term that generally means several things, two in particular: 1) rules for fair competition (i.e. policing and fraud protection); 2) manipulation of market prices by non-market forces (i.e. a managed economy). Unfortunately these two most common connotations of regulation are often conflated.

A market can still be free while subject to the former form of regulation. History seems to indicate that a market cannot be free unless subject to the former form (i.e. regulations that mandate transparency and prevent fraud and collusion). A market cannot be free if subject to the latter (i.e. attempts to manage the economy by artificially altering the value of goods and services). You might call one’ good’ regulation and the other ‘bad’ regulation. Corporations and powerful players try to manipulate the price of goods and services far more often than the government, via the bad kind regulation, because there isn’t enough of or enough enforcement of the good kind of regulation.

A simple way to say this is people will cheat if there is no referee. The more complex the market, the easier it is to hide cheating in general. The more powerful and wealthy the player, the easier it is for that player to cheat. The most common ideological position of market champions is that consumers must regulate markets, and larger market players, via their purchasing power: the invisible hand as it were. The invisible hand was a pipe dream back in Adam Smith’s day, and global markets and titanic corporations make the idea of the invisible hand a ludicrous, blindly ideological stance in our era.

The massive complexity and thick opacity of most markets makes it unreasonable to expect that the average consumer can make consistently informed purchasing decisions. There may be some miniscule percentage of exceptional consumers that have the time, skill and fortitude to navigate the labyrinth of necessary data to make truly informed purchasing decisions, FOR EVERY SINGLE THING THEY PURCHASE AND ALL OF TH PRODUCTION CHAINS CONNECTED THERETO, but their purchasing power, if such people indeed exist, would be statistically insignificant. Moreover, even if every consumer were such a person, there would be a huge amount of duplicated effort. Fruther, there would be nothing to provident power players from colluding to manipulate prices. The only real solution is to have a social entity that is focused on the wellbeing and prosperity of all citizens to advocate on behalf of all citizens as well as all market players. That entity already exists; it is called government. Regulating markets is not the only role of government, but it is a key role. Government, as poorly run as it has become, is still the only advocate of the public good of its kind and magnitude. Government is the only viable referee.

You want a nation without big or potent government? Take your pick; there are plenty in the world, and they are hellholes like Somalia and Afghanistan. The nations with the most prosperous markets and expansive civil liberty all have huge, powerful governments. That’s a fact. If you think government is the problem, you aren’t looking at the facts. There are very few historical examples of prosperous societies that did not have potent governments. As mentioned, there are almost no examples in our era. Certainly there have always been problems with actual governments, and the US government is becoming increasingly inept, but the very concept of government is not the problem. The idea that government is fundamentally counterproductive to society is the stance of pure market ideologues as well as people who are simply greedy and don’t want a referee. Market champions feel that government usurps power that markets should wield: government competes with markets for power. That makes sense if you fundamentally see all things as a competition. That of course gets into a whole other and very interesting tangent. In any case, market champions aren’t interested in fixing what's wrong with government because government is the problem in their eyes: it should be dismantled as far as possible. Unfortunately they are winning the public debate and their long siege on government in the US.

I could go on about how market ideology has infiltrated and permeated the US government on multiple levels, from campaign finance to the competitive non-cooperative stalemate between parties, but it wouldn’t change anyone’s mind anyway. I’ve rambled enough already.

Right on! It is a soulless maneuver to take advantage of the civil society of the Unites States and its citizens, that is in no small part maintained by taxes, and then bow out on that society for greed and ego. This is a kind of treason IMO (assuming these facts are correct, I have not RTFA). I doubt there is a legal way to deny him reentry, but it would serve him right for what little difference it would make.

If Mind Uploading just means a working interface to upload a limited set of data contained in the mind (e.g. recording perceptual data like in Brainstorm, mental dictation, etc.), then mind uploading could proceed the rest.

If Mind Uploading is the digital immortalization of one’s consciousness: a full data/process (i.e. consciousness) port from a biological to a technological substrate, then I think we are a generation or two away from that, at best. In that case I’d say we have the best shot at undoing the effects and limits of biological ageing before any of the other choices. It might not be true immortality, but a bridge to a more stable form of immortality.

Maybe neither is going to happen soon, but they both appear to be possible unless there is some kind of hidden aspect to life that is heretofore empirically undiscovered. Great strides have been made toward both goals (i.e. transition of consciousness and combating the ageing process). Since most technologies advance exponentially it stands to reason that huge strides will be made on both fronts in the next 20 to 80 years. I don't think we are even close to human transportation or world peace.

Extinction is always possible, by our own hand or otherwise, but its probably not going to happen in the next 100 years. On the other hand, a great calamity could set back our current trajectories of progress, or AI could wipe us out.

Interestingly, what little plot there is in the reboot is strikingly close to Nemesis...Romulan underclass in big scary ship are heading to earth to destroy it.

I didn’t really address your points, which are reasonable, in my other reply. I simply elucidated mine. I'll try to do so quickly (I should be working).

I do get what you are saying, but I think a well-crafted film can both appeal to the masses and be more than a series of scenes and character introductions grafted onto an anemic plot. Doing so, however, simply takes a lot more effort and incurs a bit more risk. I think I would have been happy with something between the extremes erudite and vapid; and I doubt such a film would have alienated the masses. The masses have responded quite well to movies that are multifaceted and simultaneously appeal to multiple markets, but again, such a film is simply a much harder to craft.

I suppose I simply have a general problem with pandering to the lowest common denominator. I think it’s destructive to society in general, but that’s a tangent we don’t need to get into. I realize my disappointment is largely personal, but I feel I have sound reasons. I also realize there were sound reasons to choose the easy path. This isn’t a war of facts, but difference of opinions.

Few of my problems with the film are Trek specific. I’m not hot and bothered that this was changed or that wasn’t addressed from a ‘cannon’ perspective. Most of my issues are centered on the general style of the movie and the lack of core film elements like a plot, an antagonist of any worth (ok must regain will and not list issues). This was a movie crafted on easy mode and designed to be a light, accessible, and profitable summer blockbuster (or if you prefer vapid). That’s not a crime in and of itself; that’s a viable style for a film in the abstract, even if it’s not really my cup of tea.

My point intersects with the fact that the film is a Trek reboot in that the style is a cop out. When something reboots, you expect it take the best of what the original had to offer, expand and improve on the franchise, and maintain, and this is a pretty abstract concept, the spirit of the original.

I guess I feel like the reboot failed to improve and build on the best parts of Trek. As has been mentioned, one of Trek’s most captivating aspects was its ability to be imaginative, substantive and thought provoking. It tackled moral and philosophical issues, and it did so presented in a wrapper of action and humor. This reboot has very little if any substantive or thought provoking material. In fact it more often offends the intellect. In this way it was decidedly not in the spirit of Trek, at least as I see it.

Who knows; future films may capitalize on that deeper side of Trek now that the characters and framework have been established. There may have been a long term plan for a span of films. I’m simply dubious at this point.

To be fair, I feel it was one of the better Trek films even if it was vapid. Trek films don’t really have a great track record. I’m still putting Wrath of Kahn on top (even with its pacing issues); followed by First Contact. The reboot probably vies for third with some others, and it probably wins despite its problems. I hope that clarifies my position. I’m not saying the movie was an abject failure as a film; it was simply a HUGE disappointment in the face of its potential. I simply wish the film makers had tried to do more given the golden gift and considerably responsibility they were handed. Instead, I feel they decided to risk as little as possible and take the easy path.

I must admit I enjoyed the Star Trek reboot, if judged simply as a film. For me, it had it had just enough going for it to overcome the very, very long list of problems I had with it (and I am using all of my will not to share my list in great detail). This is all abstracted, however, from the fact that it was a Star Trek reboot.

Ultimately the film is a failure, in my eyes, because it squandered it’s incredible potential. You are given a chance to reboot one of the most beloved and fertile fictional universes in the history of the world--and this is not hyperbole--and the best you can do is a marginally enjoyable summer blockbuster. I think Abrams and company took the easy path; instead of risking a grasp at the brass ring, they slid under a lower bar and made a mint. Of course profit is the industry's prime directive; no one is obligated to make a masterpiece. It’s still disappointing.