astronomy – thotbag

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How will emerging artificial womb technology affect the growth rates of off-Earth human populations?”

It won’t affect any “off-Earth” human populations because there will not be any sustainable “off-Earth human populations” any time in the foreseeable future. At best, we’ll see colonies with rotating populations because of simple biological issues such as bone density loss.

Every month in space, an astronaut loses the equivalent of what a senior on Earth loses every couple of years.

For this reason alone (and setting aside numerous other issues like prolonged exposure to radiation, isolation, etc.), any near-future space initiatives such as asteroid mining will depend heavily on robotics and automation technologies to exploit the mineral wealth floating about in our space neighbourhood.

Extraterrestrial human colonies are still very much out of reach and within the realm of fiction.

It’s impossible to predict when such initiatives will be possible because of the varying change factors we are undergoing now that are predominantly defined by our evolving technological capacities.

We could develop technologies to mitigate the biological impact of life in space, such as artificial gravity (which is probably the easiest hurdle to jump, but I’m guessing outside my wheelhouse of expertise here and understand that’s more of an engineering design issue rather than a technological limitation — rotation strategies for creating an artificial gravity are possibly doable now but an expensive and small part of the overall mix of requirements).

Transhumanism may result in a branch of human evolution that permits sustained life in space. However, that’s still quite “science-fictiony” to consider now, and where that technology goes from where we are now is radically unpredictable.

Our knowledge of biochemistry may result in chemically based solutions for protecting and prolonging life in space. In contrast, our communications technologies could result in holographic experiences that psychologically connect people more intimately than videoconferencing does now.

Too many factors influence success in establishing “off-Earth living,” and I haven’t yet mentioned the financial implications. At this point, asteroid mining is the only valid financial justification for establishing some form of presence in space.

Tourism is a complete non-starter, and quite frankly, the arrogance of Bezos and his billionaire clan’s initiative of promoting this vanity stupidity is too environmentally destructive at the moment to justify, never mind that it’s an elitist microsecond Disneyland excursion for no more than a few hundred humans. It’s not sustainable unless a far better way to reach space can be developed… like a space elevator or railgun technology… anything other than polluting our atmosphere more than a year’s worth of a dozen oil rigs does while feeding our energy hunger.

Otherwise, the social impact of artificial womb technology is explored in the movie “The Pod Generation.”

It’s a worthwhile watch for stimulating conversations on technology and how it will affect society.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15768848/https://youtu.be/rGMx_7oAeUM?si=xAAGxxKaRqySI7Gw

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is Neil deGrasse Tyson wrong to suggest that talented athletes credit God when they win on social media?”

I think there is something severely wrong on so many levels that it’s impossible to address them without an entire book and a lot of research to identify the dynamics of a business decision justifying the dissemination of lies in society to stimulate engagement and generate revenue.

This is horrifying on so many levels that it insults every aspect of humanity, human society, and the social contract. This contributes to the widespread decay and ultimate destruction of civilized society on the most malignant levels. This crap is worse than the stage of “subliminal seduction” we went through in the 1970s when laws were crafted to prohibit embedded “invisible messaging” within entertainment media.

Psychorama — Wikipedia

Neil deGrasse Tyson has never suggested any such thing, and although it’s easy to attribute this claim to a believer on a mission of Lying for Jesus, it’s not. This is even worse than a believer trolling for reactions by lying.

For non-Quorans: This screengrab indicates the question author, and in this case, the question was written and posed by a bot designed to stimulate engagement on this social media site. This is a common revenue-generation strategy employed by media outlets across the board. Fox Entertainment, for example, has built its empire entirely upon this toxic revenue generation model.

Targeting information appealing to the limbic system is like serving up crack to a heroin addict, and that shapes the society we are cultivating by allowing this practice to dominate media. The effects are profound.

Not only does this represent an abysmally immoral strategy for generating revenue, but it’s also a strategy that furthers a divide between people in a society already at the edge of fracturing into chaos. This strategy for engagement is ultimately a violent assault on our social contract and is responsible for the dramatic divisiveness characterizing our social dynamics today.

This precisely reinforces the post on my Thotbag space, citing Yuval Noah Harari’s statements during a round table discussion about the threat democracy itself is facing. Here is the meme I posted that includes his full text:

Along with Mr. Harari’s warning, Ian Bremmer pointed at the problem this divisive, conflict-escalating disinformation creates for society:

This fraudulent question is worse than Quora violating its own, now primarily defunct BNBR policy; it’s an assault on human decency on the most corrupt of levels for the most corrupt reasons.

This should not be disturbing only to atheists who fight back against a daily assault from believer trolls seeking to provoke emotional reactions. This should be disturbing to everyone who cares in the least about things like integrity and the social contract that has never been strained to such a degree as what we are living with today.

If society collapses into chaos — If people’s lives are unnecessarily lost because we can’t or won’t back away from the cliff we march toward — Then this kind of manipulative nonsense perpetrated upon us all for the sake of profit will be responsible for the nightmares ahead that we are about to encounter.

This is central to my argument on why social media should not be operated on a for-profit model. Social media is a community development endeavour, and we must consider how we approach its role in society more thoroughly than consigning personal information to a feeding ground for mining material profit.

That we are being strategically and systematically provoked by algorithms to hate each other should horrify all of us.

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