If we started from scratch with ten couples, each with 1,000 sqaure miles of land, wealth inequality would start immediately for the next generation. Assuming (without loss of generality) that inheritence is passed with equal weight to all children born of a given couple, next generation sole children will be twice as wealthy as those children with a sibling, and these will in turn be wealthier than children who number one of three, and so on. The deterioration of wealth is natural. Eventually we arrive at a time when most land owners get so poor in land, that disasters force them to sell off parcels of their land. Thus we eventually get a landless class of worker bees. Disasters such as the plague temporarily reversed this natural trending by creating labor shortages, and thus temporarily increasing the power of the working classes. Today we live in the age Power Laws, and lifetimes far exceed the time for major paradigm shifts. The network connectivity to planetary assets by the top percentiles far exceeds the tiers down below, and Moore's-like laws lead to increasingly disproportionate growth. All roads once led to Rome, but everyone still had to walk or ride horses at best. Today technology is in runaway self-criticality. Who will first be able to afford creating improved offspring and buy life extension technology as it takes off in the near future? The race will become more disproportionate. Barring some great Mad Max catastrophe, which I don't buy into (we're more likely to vanish entirely in a modern disaster, say jetting a killer virus across the globe at the speed of airlines, than pull off some Hollywood survival fantasy) it is likely already too late I suspect. The bulk of us have been run off the cliff. We just haven't struck the ground yet. Of course I hope I'm wrong.

Power laws. The network connectivity to planetary assets by the top percentiles far exceeds the tiers down below, and Moore's-like laws lead to increasingly disproportionate growth. All roads once led to Rome, but everyone still had to walk or ride horses at best. Today technology is in runaway self-criticality. Who will first be able to afford creating improved offspring and buy life extension technology as it takes off? The race will become more disproportionate. Barring some great Mad Max catastrophe, which I don't buy into (we're more likely to vanish entirely than pull off some Hollywood fantasy) it is likely already too late I suspect. The bulk of us have been run off the cliff. We just haven't struck the ground yet.

My experience from BS, MS, and PhD were pretty rough. I always felt I was learning a bunch of prescriptions: do this to get that. It would often take me years of self study to pin down the history of what I had learned, from good texts and references. A decade after finishing school, I finally felt I had tracked down all that had mystified me. I finally put together a syllabus of the miniminal set of physics ideas and math methods, references and key literature for students, from sophomore to postgraduate to study on their own and make their school experience better. I posted a short version (document at http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=540829&highlight=aalaniz ) more for the physics major, and, SCROLL down, a long document for STEM majors. I hope this helps. Alex Alaniz

What is your feeling on how a global economic slowdown might affect your funding prospects? With the crimes being perpetrated against those scientists who use animals on the rise, do you foresee the rise of a similar movement (aside, tacitly, from the religious) against mankind attaining potential immortality? If life extension technology matures, what percentage of humanity will be able to buy it? Is your field employing molecular dynamics simulations to research out viable methods for moving genes out of mitochondria? If so, might you consider making this work a distributed computing project over the internet? Clearly, many countries will advance, unhindered by religious troglodytes who push creation science and seek universal death--the Rapture--by means of a Middle East war. Do you see the US faltering into an idiocracy? Given nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, scarcity of resources, religious and culture conflict, the potential rise of a killer bug in the slums of our world, and its easy transport via jets to every corner of the world, the Matthew effect, not just in terms of wealth, but in terms of education, global warming, climate change, food production threats,...,and all the ways these pressures synergize, what do you think our odds are as a species? Can you point out a tipping point (or points) towards are demise which we should work to prevent? A.A. Los Alamos, NM