The future of humanity

Theoretical physicist, championing an area of quantum mechanics known as "The Many Worlds Hypothesis".

Extremely daft (the theory) but one of most respected physicists of the modern era.

A quote I like is, "if the age planet earth was the distance from New York to London, the age humanity has been around represents only the last 5 yards".

Kind of difficult to put into perspective on day to day terms but, suffice to say in terms of cellular evolution, we're definitely..... I guess, a chance occurrence in many respects?

Against incalculable cosmic odds, earth formed a habitable zone, the genesis of single celled organisms somehow materialized, subsequent evolution to multi-cellular organisms and presumably millions of years in the interim - now we're sentient self aware beings that have cultivated ourselves and environment such to develop some impressive technology, and some pretty tasteful improvements in quality of life and living.

.....

What does the future hold though?

Let's face it, in many respects, we still leave a lot to be desired.

In a sense we're predisposed to being fuck-ups (we're certainly not born optimized), and despite good intentions, most of humanity lacks the emotional maturity not to inadvertently hamper our own quality of life (shoot ourselves in the foot, f*** ourselves in the a$$) on a fairly regular basis.

....

Question being, will we surmount this adversity of our own biology and move forward, reducing the probability of self induced extinction?

Will we manage to get it done before it's too late (i.e. before we induce said catastrophe that condemns us to the cosmic history books)?

Or does the probability veer more toward us just being some incurable fuck ups destined to a certain collective obsolescence, so we may as well spend most of our time drowning our sorrows and misery before that fateful moment arrives? (i.e. pretty much what the majority of Irish culture has promoted and been doing up until now).

🤨

Anyone reading this post and the phrase "Against incalculable cosmic odds" should pause - and shout out to Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson on this one - to realise that the reason most of it is "incalculable" is because the "denominator" is so large - and not because the events above it are.

That is all :)

I am loving the consistency on how you structure your thread opening posts though dude :) It's like every one is a thesis :)

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117906550#Comment_117906550

Oh really?

I would have thought expressions such as,

"f**k ourselves in the a$$" and,

"incurable f**k ups" would have made such a post unsuitable for thesis material;

Unless institutions are more open minded these days?

....

Incalculable, more so cause the adversity is so large, probability of success so small, whilst chances of random extinction events are ever present (super nova, asteroid impact etc).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA

This channel is my guilty pleasure.

From the creators of "Brilliant", an educational forum not dissimilar from "Khan Academy".

Point being - extinction events and unpredictable nature of the universe = we could potentially just be an evolutionary flash in teh pan before planetary life returns to baseline.

Strumms

Many scientists or most scientists believe climate change is unavoidable and irreversible and if things take their natural course this is the most natural predicted end of life on this planet scenario but at the current rate of climate change this is predicted to occur in millions of years. By that stage there may be technological advances that can help keep the planet and people alive.

my own thinking is that some nuclear major terror event / war could be the catalyst to the end of life before the climate gets us. The US and the Brits gets nobbled by some nuclear attack from within , hmmmmm...

I was under the impression climate change was a factor of atmospheric carbon content.

i.e. earth is like, 0.2 or 0.3%.

Venus that was mentioned, where atmospheric pressure is like being in an ocean trench and temp is like 800 or so?

I think its atmospheric carbon content comes in at around..... 97% - ?

Therefore reigning in carbon emissions is (rightfully) front and center on the politiek agenda.

......

Elon Musk seems to be leading the charge there and it has to be said, personality wise, the dude is no Donald Trump.

That's the point I'm trying to make really is that, putting aside this gung-ho, alpha male, toxic masculinity crap, in terms of determining overall societal and humanitarian evolution, I think it's going to play really, potentially the most critical possible role.

Short interview segment, two timestamps, where this exact question is put to Elon Musk:

"How on earth has one person, been able to innovate in this way...?"

https://youtu.be/SRI2ss_bmQ0?t=10

• And the answer: "I have no good answer".

lol, the dude can answer questions about technology for days, but a question about what makes him proficient about answering questions concerning technology.... nothing doing.

Follow up:

"What is it about you, what's your secret, can we have that recipe and incorporate it into our education system?"

https://youtu.be/SRI2ss_bmQ0?t=65

Again really, nothing doing.

Plus his girlfriend is a hottie almost 20 years his junior, what man wouldn't love that?

So I'm just saying, addressing cultures of that territorial, alpha male crap (wealth and status accumulation and all the malice and greed that goes along with it), I think that's going to be an important future step.

bnt

To follow up on a previous comment: the effects of greenhouse gases on atmospheric heat absorption are not simply being extrapolated indirectly from observations of the atmosphere. The effects can be measured directly in lab experiments, and they have been, which is where statements such as "methane is 23 times worse than CO₂" come from. From all these sources, climate scientists have created models that are constantly being tested and refined. No, they're not perfect, and to expect perfect predictions is silly, but the models are good and getting better. To dismiss climate science with a claim that it's based solely on (fallible) observations is incorrect, because it's not.

SantaClaw

Civilisations will change but at this stage humanity has a whole can't be wiped out.

Climate change is a serious threat for sure but it is not going to turn the entire planet uninhabitable. It has been hotter before, the earth hat multiple major extinction events before this. Could a few billion die if we do nothing? More then likely. But that still leaves billions of humans left.

Gamma ray burst, solar flare and all that are again a major disaster that could wipe out a large junk of people. But not all of us. Might lose a couple hundred years or progress but we got there once we will get there again.

Even something like the a major asteroid impact or nuclear war are not a extinction event anymore. We basically have the technology to hide underground for as long as needed. And in all those cases that would just be a couple of years. Especially in the asteroid case where we would have years to prepare.

So extinct is of the list.

Unrecognizable might be an option if we go full on genetic engineering. But naturally humans have been in their current form for a couple hundred thousand years and we managed to basically fix any evolutionary pressure through technology. Might get a bit bigger or a bit smaller or some other changes but there is no pressure to turn into bat people or something.

So my guess is either terraforming and colonising the solar system or in a cave because we hit the reset button for the 10th times.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117907013#Comment_117907013

Well that was a pedantic response about the thesis. I was making a tongue in cheek comment about your structure - not the content. What I was actually saying was your structure seems like a mold and every thread seems to fit the mold.

Again though that version of "incalculable" just ignores the size of the denominator. The sheer enormous unimaginable number of galaxies each with similarly large unimaginable numbers of planets. That life might be difficult pales in comparison to the sheer number of places it had to attempt to form.

So when I read the phrase "Against incalculable cosmic odds, earth formed a habitable zone" - I generally realize the writer has entirely missed the point. It is exactly backwards. What there actually is - in an incalculable number of rolls of the dice where a habitable zone could result and that the incalcuable number of planets resulted in one coinciding with the other is not at all as remarkable as many people try to pretend.

Yeah well, I guess there are varying points of view on existence of life.

My point in general is that "crap rolls downhill", this is an infallible universal law, so when advanced civilizations (let alone life in general, multi-cellular organisms) establishes itself - to me that's a measure of success against some pretty harsh cosmic adversity.

Maintenance and potential proliferation (not to mention refining quality of existing life) = yet another contention, and in many respects we're at a potential turning point now.

Well yes. There are varying points of view on pretty much everything.

The interesting thing for me is not usually the variety of views - but the evidence or fallacies behind a given point of view.

So when I read a sentence like "Against incalculable cosmic odds, earth formed a habitable zone" I can see the fallacious thinking there rather than any support for the sentence being a useful or interesting one.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922679#Comment_117922679

Okay, sorry bruh but you're clearly not up to speed on your astro-physics.

And seems as this discussion is based around "future of humanity" here on planet earth, not "nature of star formation" and "uncharacteristic nature of our systems solar mass", I'm not gonna get side tracked educating you.

When you find this ubiquity of extra-terrestrial life you speak of, be sure and let us know.

Until then, Godspeed.

A line like "not up to speed on your astro-physics" is just an empty throw away comment much like the "incalculable odds" one. It is incredibly easy just to shout at people that they are ignorant in some field or another. As is posturing with words like "bruh" or "pal" is also common around here.

But actually showing what they said wrong - explaining what is right - and explaining the evidence for your position is a harder thing to do. I suspect your wish not to "educate me" on anything is more founded in an inability to do any such thing. A line like "not up to speed" merely flung out pointlessly is just a smoke screen for that. You can either argue your position - or you can not - the latter however is not to be blamed on my lack of knowledge or understanding. In any field.

I have explained exactly what is problematic with one of your comments. It was one of your own comments in your own OP so that is hardly being "Sidetracked". It was the whole first section of your post and in fact the largest single section of your post! Sidetracked? Come off it :)

If you do not want to reply then do not - but getting side tracked into a long reply about how you are not going to reply - that is just an odd "cop out".

But when talking about the odds of anything - whether it be the probability of our planet and life forming in the first place - or the probability of our species continuing in the long term - we need values and workings. Not merely declaring things "incalculable" and then getting uppity when being shown why often things being "incalculable" has nothing at all to do with whether they are likely or unlikely.

Unfortunately there is no workings of any kind in your OP or your thread. Rather it is just pessimistic doom saying about something none of us know anything about.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922531#Comment_117922531

It's truer to say we quite simply don't know either way Tax. We have an example of one and that's the problem. Now we can certainly look to the vastness of the universe and quite reasonably come to the conclusion that surely it must have happened elsewhere, but with a sample of one it's a pretty empty conclusion. The same vastness could also give rise to wild outliers and we could well be one of those.

Plus when we look at our example of one other questions and possibilities arise. For example life could well be quite common in the universe but of what sort? On our one example single celled organisms, fungi and plants make up 95% of all life. That 5% left is all the animals including us. Complex multicellular organisms are the tiny minority. A decent sized flower pot full of soil could contain more bacteria in number than all the animals on the planet. For the first few billion years of life on Earth the simple single celled stuff was the only game in town. Something drove the evolution of multicellular life. Some reckon the big freeze that happened just before the Cambrian(IIRC) where the Earth effectively turned into a ball of ice was the selective pressure that drove this. On another identical world where life evolved, if that big freeze didn't happen well, complex organisms may well have not formed or would have taken a lot longer to do so.

But let's say they do form then what? Again there were all sorts of different selection pressures including mass extinctions that drove life in one way or another on thsi planet. If the permian extinction hadn't happened, maybe dinosaurs wouldn't have come along, but come along they did and hung around for hundreds of millions of years. Then their extinction event happened and mammals took over. And these are just big changes. Without Jupiter acting like a gigantic hoover in space sucking up a lot of the stuff that would otherwise be fying in and hitting us life on Earth could be very different.

Take intelligence of the human sort(huge brained and symbolic and abstract). As an adaptation it has only arisen once in the Earth's history. Flight has come along across a few quite different species, even fish will give it a go. Swimming ditto. Social groupings of different kinds similarly. But intelligence? An adaptation that clearly makes for about the most successful complex animal on the planet. Once. In billions of years. Hell, even within the human family, we Sapiens are the outliers. Now it seems some like Neandertals did indeed have a symbolic life, but compared to us not nearly so much. You'd find more evidence of modern symbolic thought in a metre square of Sapiens cave floor than in the entirety of the record of previous hominids. So even on our lucky little ball in space we're still a rarity.

How is it "truer" to say that when that is pretty much what I am saying? I would certainly rush to point out that I have never once suggest it has h appened elsewhere either. Let alone that it "surely" has.

We have this concept of a "habitable zone". And we have the concept of some of the variables we think we mean by that. We can look at other planets or zones and say how they miss one or more of those variables. But the point is that each zone/planet is a dice roll of those variables.

So while it seems to us unlikely for a planet to form in that zone - the sheet immense quantity of dice rolls in question is a denominator that messes up the figures. A cheap analogy is the Irish Lotto. If you buy a single ticket it is unlikely you will win. But people win it very very often. Why? Because of the relative number of people buying tickets.

So yes we do not know "either way" but we do know that people harping on about the incalculable odds of a habitable zone are not really on strong ground in saying this at all. Which was my point to the OP that appears to have upset him somewhat.

And this is all before pointing out the obvious that our concept of a "habitable zone" is also somewhat limited to our current concepts of life. We have been surprised before - even on our own planet - where life turned out to thrive and survive. Enough to be humble about it's ability to do so in any other "Zones" out there.

All in all we simply do not know at all how "unlikely" our situation is. It certainly seems unlikely. But what do we know? Very little it seems. And probabilities need numbers and the OP has provided literally none. In fact his rebuttal of a respected physisit speaking about a theory was just to call it "daft" and move on. Hardly a robust discourse. Nor is simply going "bruh" at someone you disagree with.

I like the Douglas Adams Puddle image when it comes to concepts like habitable zones. The puddle that marveled at the perfection of the hole it finds itself in - would have marveled regardless of the hole.

The future of humanity is we become smartphones and literally push each other's buttons.

This won't happen until we're at full of sh!t version 4.0 which isn't very far away at all it seems. 🤔

Wibbs

On topic... 😁 Unless there was a major catastrophy it's unlikely humans would go extinct. It would require the world being also near barren. It nearly happened before where we see a genetic bottleneck in humans which shows at one point we were squeezed down around 20,000 people, but we bounced back from that.

Technology could be a double edged sword. On the one hand it can save us, on the other we have become ever more reliant on increasingly complex systems to support ourselves. Complex systems are far more vulnerable to shocks. Take covid 19, a pandemic that compared to previous pandemic agents is the least agressive and fatal to the vast majority of people. With a tiny few tragic exceptions it left those of reproductive age almost entirely alone. On the other hand the 1918 flu was more likely to kill people in the prime of life. And that was a sniffle compared to the various "plagues" that ran through our world in the past on a near annual basis. Smallpox is not long gone and that could kill a third of those infected, while leaving another third severely weakend. The plague once killed half of the population of Eurasia. Covid barely registers as a threat and yet it in many ways put the brakes on the world for over a year, not least because we don't have the spare capacity in our technologically advanced health services. Even a slight blip in mortality puts them under massive pressure. An outbreak of a new smallpox type pathogen would overwhelm it in weeks, if not days and life would change rapidly.

Europe and Asia survived, even thrived thorugh and after the Black death and all the other poxes because it was a far less complex society and way of life. Nearly everything was made and grown local, so wasn't as affected by wider mortality, or was confined more locally.

cnocbui

Is it coincidence that the 3.2 million years of human evolution has coincided near perfectly with an ice-age? If not, then humanity may have to make way for some other species when the planet warms back up again to it's natural state, which it always does, and which is a far warmer global average of 22°C than the current chilly 16°.

Those birds, that so many clueless people seem to adore so much, may evolve back into velociraptors - or worse, and the bird lovers will soon see what cold calculating and vicious creatures they really are, as they are being torn apart by a pack of them.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117923142#Comment_117923142

Ease up on the oul ego there Tax. You'll note I said "we", not "you" might reasonably conclude. I 100% agree with you on the "incalcuable odds" part(and don't get me started on the 'Murican bruh nonsense). The habitable zone, at least our version of it is pretty easy to calculate and it's pretty wide and the chances of a planet in a multi planetary setup falling into it are not particularly low. After stable sunned planetary systems themselves coming along it's one of the lower bars. After that it gets a bit messy. On our current concepts of life angle that's interesting too. Not so much regarding extremes, but more that on this planet with apparently the goldilocks setup conducive for life and all that cool chemistry going on only one form of life evolved. All life on Earth is related. The bacteria thriving in nuclear cooling tanks or boiling away in hot springs or trilobites, T rexes and trees are our relatives. There are no "aliens" even here.

Ease up on picking on things I never did or said Wib :) "We" or "you" is not relevant to what I asked you. I asked you how one thing is "truer to say" than the other when they both appear to be saying the same thing. Nothing else. No ego involved or required. But I am also similarly happy to distance myself from conclusions "we" (by which I assume - like me - you mean our species as a whole) tend to reach on such questions. For me it is a series of fun thought experiments but the moment we claim to know one way or the other - or know what is more likely than the other - I think we have stepped so far. Especially the people who think they "know" we are alone and their counter parts the people know "know" There must be life elsewhere.

To be honest I see little to no light between what I said and what you said. Therefore I was - and remain - confused as to how one is "truer to say" than the other. Perhaps one was "clearer" to say. Which is certainly a useful attempt to make given the OP managed not to get it when I said it. And saying the same things two or many ways to someone not on the uptake certainly can have some good effects.

To try again for the OP to see if he can get past "Bruh" and "Daft" as standards of response - I think people like the OP can look at our "Zone" and our evolution and it does seem massively complex and unlikely. Especially when you see the long litany of things that seem to be required to be "just right" to get there. Everything from the quantity of water on the planet - to the moon acting both as a shield and a tidal agent - to our distance from the sun - and much much much more. It all can seem overwhelming and the moment one gets overwhelmed - I think the human brain throws up it's metaphorical hands and delcares how unlikely and impossible it all is. Which people like god bothers like to use of course to say "Well actually it is all really easy - a magical god thing did it".

But what is much larger and much more overwhelming is the sheer number of planets - hell even the sheer number of galaxies - in which those dice were rolled. And with a denominator that large one has to wonder if something that seems incredibly unlikely to us is unlikely at all.

I was hoping to steer the direction of the conversation more toward, what are the most important considerations such to ensure continuity of current civilization?

• Reduce carbon emission, increase reliance on sustainable energy.
• Not nuke each other back to the ice age
• address potential cataclysmic issues such as super-volcanoes and asteroid impacts
• generally address the malice and hatred an contempt between humans, and factions of humans.

And in many respects I think efficacy of the former three will depend largely on potential success of the latter.

Quantum Erasure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHmevUH0kGg

its heading that way...

Given how negative your OP and subsequent posts are about "current civilization" is it true to say that that is in fact what you hope to "ensure continuity" of?

Perhaps it would be interesting to explore what it is you want to maintain - why - and for how long. Perhaps the things worth of maintaining are only a mere fraction of what makes up "current civilization"?

For example "nuking ourselves back to the ice age". Clearly nukes are probably not a great thing - but there are many ways our species - along with it's cultures and technologies - could be reset to a very significantly smaller group. Nukes are one way. Recent events would suggest the right virus in the right place at the right time would be another way.

But aside from the horrific loss of life - in terms of our species would it be the worst thing in the world if it all started again? I simply do not know and until right now I have not actually consider the question at all - let alone deeply.

But there is simply too many things that could go wrong that could wipe us out entirely. You could spend all your time building defenses against what you call "super-volcanoes and asteroid impacts" only to wake up after project completion to be greeted by a giant solar flare or an invasion from an alien species. Who makes the decisions on which potential cataclismic events might ever occur - and which ones to focus our species funds and resources on defending against? I suspect that whatever many we can defend against - it will be a mere fraction of what could befall us.

As for point 4 - certainly addressing human animalistic tendencies, hatreds, tribalisms, suspicions, racisms, bigotries and more is a worth endeavor. It is more the wheelhouse I try to spend my time and efforts in. But it does seem that our ever more polarized society is going in the exact opposite direction to the one that would seem healthy.

So my quick and dirty answer to your thread topic/title? I think addressing our current "Information space" and our species tendency to seek truth and fact in the wrong way - and to tend towards dogmatism over objectivity - might be the place I would start overall. Right now we appear to be a species in the throes of a moral panic and intellectual stampede.

SuperTortoise

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117925321#Comment_117925321

None of those points can be solved, in theory of course they can, but in this inperfect world they won't be.

I think the biggest threat could be some sort of virus, and i think it could happen long before an asteroid or a nuke gets us.

Elon Musk has the right idea, life needs to be multi-planetry to survive, be this won't happen until we learn to travel at significant fractions of the speed of light, cracking that gives us a great chance of survival, until the heat death of the universe occurs, there's no escaping that!

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117925321#Comment_117925321

If religion was the opiate of the people as Marx reckoned I would contend that these days consumerism is. For all our talk about reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment we're more polluting than our grandparents. We go through "stuff" at an alarming rate while thinking we're doing our bit by recyling stuff most of which either can't actually be recycled or only recycled the once. So in my humble talking about carbon emissions and all that will only pick at the edges until we come to terms with our rampant consumption. An electric car is great, but not if you're buying a new one every four or five years.

I can't see widespread atomic horror any time soon tbh. One or two going off maybe, but the peak of worry was in the later stages of the cold war.

Events like super volcanos and asteroids are outside of our current capabilities to stop. Even prediction of such events is in its infancy.

Human nature is human nature. We can certainly strive to tweak it and that's a worthwhile endeavour, but I suspect it will always be with us. Sadly too that many of our greatest technological achievements came about because of times of malice and oneupmanship between factions. Maybe if AI actually happens and we evolve our replacements that will go away. Or they could be worse as we would be their parents.

I would say we need to stabalise and then reduce the world's population. The biggest thing as far as the environment goes someone can personally do is to have one less kid. In the developed world that's less of a problem as birth rates drop when we get richer, but in some parts of the developing world with people having five or more kids that's a problem. But again some of that is also down to consumerism needing more consumers and bigger tax bases etc.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117925468#Comment_117925468

Every problem can be solved.

Only the solutions are not typically readily forthcoming, especially since we're constantly battling up stream against the downhill crapflow the universe presents to us.

That's sentience as a means to cultivate, against that which must be cultivated.

The multi planetary life argument is ambitious but unlikely to ever yield anything of worth.

The closest I can conceive of something similar would be if Bob-Lazar's flying saucer spoof story is real and we can transcend space and time with anti-gravity machines.

....

Here's the kicker.

Look at a dude like Musk; he runs 17 companies simultaneously.

There's some dudes couldn't make it out of bed to work a 4 hour part time shift at the local Starbucks.

And when this question was put to Musk, "what makes you able to accomplish what you can", the only answer he had was, "I work alot".

No shit bruh; how you're able to work so much, that's the answer we need.

• Eliot Rogers
• Incel'ism
• Sexual frustration (arguably the cause of all conflict and a significant part of intellectual dysfunction in the first place).

I'm bullet pointing these as intuitively we all know they tie into the (currently dysfunctional) paradigm, just no one wants to actually concede it.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117925520#Comment_117925520

We are only just reaching a point of collective awareness and guilt about it. Hope that starting point isn’t too late.

It will be immensely difficult to reverse the massive big oil tanker of consumerism, we have become so habituated in it. We may laugh at voices like Thunberg, but they are there to be heard and I have to start to listen myself.

I for one, have been guilty of doing my share of destroying this planet. I’ve taken small measures to address this, but sometimes I get tired and fail miserably. It takes a lot of effort nowadays not to do stuff that’s easy and convenient, and it takes effort to find joy in non-consumer type things.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117925775#Comment_117925775

Maybe to a small percentage of people, but not the majority or anything like it. The Rogers of this world are outliers, incels are a minority of men(and a few women with it). The internet can make small groups appear much larger than they actually are and that introduces bias and confirmation bias with it, both within such communities and in the wider world. The reality is the majority of men and women pair up at least once in their lifetime and usually for long periods of time.

MyLove4Satan

A bleak Transhumanist Soulless squeaky clean globalist police state run exclusively for the benefit of the Biotech, Tech, Big Media CEOs and Chinese Communist Party. People will have so many DNA, Tech, Vaccine and other body augmentations that they simply won't be 'human' enough anymore to have 'human rights'. Handy for the previously mentioned leadership.

The Covid Scam was the Pearl Harbour in this war against humanity. I feel for people under 20 as their lives will be merely entertainment-filled existence and nothing else of substance or value. Ultimately the future is a place where the spiritual aspects of humanity and true value of life will be mothballed.

Think the Late Late Toy Show stomping on your head for all eternity.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117926805#Comment_117926805

Think the Late Late Toy Show stomping on your head for all eternity. 😮😂😂 Jaysis, there's a picture to paint.

I dunno, I'm not as pessimistic about the future. For most of history the average person led an all too short life of drudgery and there was feck all of "substance and value" to their lives other than feathering the nests of the top tier of societies and making more bullet stoppers and baby makers while social controllers like religion made sure they stuck to the script by telling them this was all substance and value.

Today in the west OK lots of people are stuck in cubicles doing jobs that for the most part are actually unimportant(and current IT could replace) but they can have lives of far more experience and meaning if they choose, even in cubicle land. Take travel. Your average 20 year old has travelled more and seen more things than a Renaissance princeling. We have never had more personal access to information, or healthcare, or food, or entertainment, or different ways of living. You can if you choose give it all up and traipse off to god knows where and sit in a loin cloth up a mountain going "ommmmmm".

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117925748#Comment_117925748

I wonder if the "how" is the wrong question to ask.

Our species is varied. If you pick any attribute most people will fall in the centre of the continuum on it. There will be people on the outliers and extremes however. So the question becomes not "how can Musk do it?" and becomes more a statement of "If it was not him - it would be someone else - eventually".

Another problem with that exact thing however is that we only marvel at the people we hear about. We can marvel at Musk and how driven he is because his drive has put him in a place where he is in the public consciousness. There are however other people who are equally driven to extremes but we do not often hear of them because they do not achieve anything particularly news worthy.

How is it for example that most of my social circle struggle to get up in the morning - stagger through their day - and collapse on the couch around sunset and stay there until bed time? While I get up at 4:30 or 5 every single day. I run 10 or 15k ever single day. I grow things. I hunt things. I keep some live stock. I cook a lot. I study. I work. I meditate. I train BJJ and capoeira. I spend time with my kids teaching them things. And I am training to use rifles (with my preteen daughter), my new bow, and horse riding. I also occasionally swim. And on top of that I am running a kind of "program" mentoring and educating some local "problem" kids. All while maintaining a more complex than average Romantic Relationship.

Am I more or less driven than Musk? Or equally? If I had turned my drive to the same work as him where would I be? In the news? A household name? I will never know. I am not attracted to the areas he is attracted to with his mind and body. But the drive I do have - I direct to things that will never get me in a news paper.

And if someone asks me "how" I do all that? I would flounder to answer them just like Musk floundered in the video you linked to. I simply do not know. I know I was not always like that. I was a lay about waster "incel" who barely dragged himself through college - until I wasn't. And the way I got to where I am now was very slow and incremental. But I still can not give you the "how" I managed to get myself there. I just - did.

I am not a Musk lover or hater. I prefer to live in the world with him in it - than live in a world where he is not. That is about as much as I can say. I love that he is out there doing his thing. But how "special" is he really and in what way? If we distill down his exceptionalism - would we find that really he is only moderately more amazing than the average human being and the rest of his achievements are a mix of luck - good team work - and other circumstance?

Piollaire

Our future lies in bio-mechanical development. We are working towards being the masters of our own evolution. A different type of humanity will arise - one physically capable of leaving the confines of this solar system and populating the universe.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117932294#Comment_117932294

We've externalised our evolution for quite a while. Another unique killer app of humans. When we developed tools we didn't need to evolve claws and carnivore teeth. Our taming of fire meant we didn't have to evolve a different gut or teeth to exploit new food resources. Cooking essentially predigests different foods. Not just meat either as many root veg are pretty undigestable without cooking(if anything raw meat is more bioavailable). Clothing meant we could exploit colder climes without having to wait for evolution to grow thick fur.

https://youtu.be/IxXaGzUnBRI

I need to basically time stamp the pertinent material in this documentary but, particle physicist outlining his view points on humanities evolution.

Very awesome, very precise observations..