Future of Humanity Institute
I highly encourage you to explore topics which are close to my heart over here. It's the site of Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Don't get worked up, it sounds impressive but it's actually a small joint at the University of Oxford philosophy faculty.
Nick Bostrom's site has a whole bunch of rather excellent papers, all penned by him. He happens to be the author of the famous Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, an allegorical piece on the virtues of engineered senescence - long-winded but powerful. Spread it far and wide.
I came upon this stuff in my search for research materials related to Hellstar. It's actually lurching forward, paragraph by paragraph (finally started writing it seriously). The chief topic of the book has also shifted a bit away from future prediction to ponderings on the subject of extraterrestrial life - though the book is much the same after that redirection. Of keen relevance to this subject is this paper; it actually resonates with some not-yet-mature ideas that have been dancing around in my head for a while. Essentially, the author writes, finding pond scum on Mars would reveal to us a great existential risk. If there's life on Mars, that means life on Earth isn't the result of remarkable chance - but is rather piss-cheap and likely to be very common among the stars out there. This comes to a speeding trainwreck with the demonstrable absence of ET signals (our own radio has already radiated beyond many light years). The combination of common ET life and nonexistent ET communication suggests that there might be something decimating ET civilizations, making them too unstable to survive for any reasonable length of time (e.g. a miserly million years, at least). Nick Bostrom calls this the "Great Filter" - I forget if it's his original term or something he lifted elsewhere. He goes on to point out that there might be more Great Filters in our past - evolving into eukaryotes, evolving into multicellular constructs, evolving intellect... However, all of these are increasingly easy. It is that hypothetical survival-oriented Great Filter that's still in our future which is cause for worry. Perhaps it's as simple as one of the proverbial Four Horsemen: War (two minutes to midnight style), Famine (running out of resources), Pestilence (biotech apocalypse/gray goo), and Conquest (getting pwned by something alien). Of course, the Jesoid concept of the Four Horsemen neglects to fathom the possibility of Strange Apocalypse by way of Satan's Stargate, heh heh.
It's not the point I want to stress in Hellstar, though. It seems to me like we'll survive for the time being. Our likeliest risk is that of global thermonuclear war; lest the peaceniks forget, USA and Russia still have thousands of mighty nukes pointed at each other, and thousands more in storage - ready to get assembled on short notice. However, this devil isn't as scary as they paint him. Here's an excellent, reasonably accurate analysis of a hypothetical US-USSR thermonuclear war in 1988. A couple billion dead, northern hemisphere ruined for half a century and turned to Third World for centuries to come; but Nuclear Winter is basically a sham and human civilization will endure. The casual mention in that analysis of how Utah Mormons fare better than average in the wake of thermonuclear war reminded me of this dystopian feminist sci-fi novel about a thoroughly Jesoid-headfucked United States in the 'near future'. It was so fucking depressing that I couldn't bring myself to actually read the whole shit - a plot synopsis had to suffice. If it depressed you too - go cheer up with some Insanity Wolf.
Nick Bostrom's site has a whole bunch of rather excellent papers, all penned by him. He happens to be the author of the famous Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, an allegorical piece on the virtues of engineered senescence - long-winded but powerful. Spread it far and wide.
I came upon this stuff in my search for research materials related to Hellstar. It's actually lurching forward, paragraph by paragraph (finally started writing it seriously). The chief topic of the book has also shifted a bit away from future prediction to ponderings on the subject of extraterrestrial life - though the book is much the same after that redirection. Of keen relevance to this subject is this paper; it actually resonates with some not-yet-mature ideas that have been dancing around in my head for a while. Essentially, the author writes, finding pond scum on Mars would reveal to us a great existential risk. If there's life on Mars, that means life on Earth isn't the result of remarkable chance - but is rather piss-cheap and likely to be very common among the stars out there. This comes to a speeding trainwreck with the demonstrable absence of ET signals (our own radio has already radiated beyond many light years). The combination of common ET life and nonexistent ET communication suggests that there might be something decimating ET civilizations, making them too unstable to survive for any reasonable length of time (e.g. a miserly million years, at least). Nick Bostrom calls this the "Great Filter" - I forget if it's his original term or something he lifted elsewhere. He goes on to point out that there might be more Great Filters in our past - evolving into eukaryotes, evolving into multicellular constructs, evolving intellect... However, all of these are increasingly easy. It is that hypothetical survival-oriented Great Filter that's still in our future which is cause for worry. Perhaps it's as simple as one of the proverbial Four Horsemen: War (two minutes to midnight style), Famine (running out of resources), Pestilence (biotech apocalypse/gray goo), and Conquest (getting pwned by something alien). Of course, the Jesoid concept of the Four Horsemen neglects to fathom the possibility of Strange Apocalypse by way of Satan's Stargate, heh heh.
It's not the point I want to stress in Hellstar, though. It seems to me like we'll survive for the time being. Our likeliest risk is that of global thermonuclear war; lest the peaceniks forget, USA and Russia still have thousands of mighty nukes pointed at each other, and thousands more in storage - ready to get assembled on short notice. However, this devil isn't as scary as they paint him. Here's an excellent, reasonably accurate analysis of a hypothetical US-USSR thermonuclear war in 1988. A couple billion dead, northern hemisphere ruined for half a century and turned to Third World for centuries to come; but Nuclear Winter is basically a sham and human civilization will endure. The casual mention in that analysis of how Utah Mormons fare better than average in the wake of thermonuclear war reminded me of this dystopian feminist sci-fi novel about a thoroughly Jesoid-headfucked United States in the 'near future'. It was so fucking depressing that I couldn't bring myself to actually read the whole shit - a plot synopsis had to suffice. If it depressed you too - go cheer up with some Insanity Wolf.