spaceships

[komodo]

spaceships.

at some point in the future, 4 billion years perhaps, our planet is going to be consumed by the fusion fireball of sol as it enters its red giant phase. gaia consumed, vapourised, kaput, inevitable, anitta. so, if you're like me and you'd like to see some fruits of our beautiful blue orb continue on their evolution and wanderings through the cosmos, you're ought to help out with the spaceships. only a bit. we've got awhile, just keep them in mind now and then.

and even if i didn't want our planet to have a cosmic diaspora, i'd still want a spaceship

so the question i'm pondering is; do we need engineering-metallurgy-electronics-type ones, or do we fold them up somehow with psychic technology?

i think we need the mechtech version. this has far-reaching consequences for me as it means prioritising technological progress, which means keeping the silicon/titanium industries going, which means etc. etc. i think we can do a kind of techno-utopia if we stop fighting over plasma screens and penis sizes, but this means a global change in direction. i'm hoping for reasonably mellow mad max future with continued [psy]ence research over functional global info network and highly developed (nano?) manufacturing in isolated pockets... so we still get sattelites and missions to mars, just running on zero-carbon emission rocket fuels with permaculture gardens feeding the technicians, etc. pie in the sky yes, but would be alright eh! only way off this place when the radioactive plumes of hellfire start licking.

this is because im passionate about our genesis, our genetic evolution and the excellent state of affairs of being in this bizarre monkey body and its sensorum. otherwise, id be happy to with the disembodied outside-of-time unipresent kind of spaceship, the frequency surfing sort where maybe you build a kind of space-board out of mind configuration and surf off out of monkey-body-world altogether and stay out there (monkey would have to die or become a vegetable at this point). also i think the psychic version, while maybe possible, is more far fetched than the physical version.

anyway those are some contents of my brain, how about some feedback :D

[nabraxas]

http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/smi2le_...ft_humanity.htm

As Timothy Leary said, SMI2LE is a good formula for the future – space migration + intelligence increase + life extension = infinity. These three ways of increasing humanity’s potential go hand in hand and allow any who dare to achieve anything they can imagine.

[sobriquet]

spaceships.

at some point in the future, 4 billion years perhaps...

Only 4 billion?

It reminds me of a story about a couple who were talking at dinner one night...

The husband said to the wife.... "look if we just won that $33 million lotto draw on Saturday, I'd give my parents half of it...." the wife cuts him off and says "why your parents? what have they ever.... blah blah blah" and it starts a fight that ruins the weekend.

It's too hypothetical and too distant. I enjoy speculations as much as the next person but surely there's more immediate things we should think about

Just a friendly post which I hope you can see the humour in.

[t st tantra]

there are a number of 'light body' techniques going around,

i've been wondering if anyone here has become involved in such things ?

these are often discribed as spaceships.

t s t .

[komodo]

thanks for the link nabraxas, i'm sure a lot of these issues have been discussed in the past, seems timely to me to bring them up again given issues like peak oil and overpopulation are becoming increasingly urgent. fractal flowering sounds very 70's, but very nice

and hi sobriquet... i do appreciate your friendly tone, but not sure what you were saying to me.. was it, don't worry about this, it isn't important?

this isnt a far off hypothetical, humanity badly needs to reassess it's direction. going round in circles wondering what to do to fill the emptiness of having no direction is wasting most of our earths limited energy and resources. at this time, a lot of high-energy-access first world people who are trying to disconnect from babylon are adopting a luddite philosophy, and i think it's kind of important to discuss the merits and problems there. the way i look at it, technological progress is vital to the seeding of gaia life beyond this one temporary home (also for problems like overpopulation and habitat destruction), and this is a guide for the kind of civilisation and society we should be aiming for. you might regard the journey and possibilities of life on earth as a bit of a laugh, but these issues are pretty immediate and real to me.

Edited January 6, 2007 by komodo

[wandjina]

Off topic sorry.....but I've lways loved this little tidbit from Terrence McKenna:

"To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant".

I couldnt agree more...SETI is a waste of time and money IMO. Ditto fantasies of old school 'star trek' style futures, tooling round a galaxy chock full o' humanoids in suped-up tin cans. Pffft. Silly.

High tech intergalactic hot-rods? Same dog different collar in my mind.

Judging by Earth's track record re extinction, especially mass extinctions....in 4 billion years highly unlikely Homosapiens sapiens would be around to build space craft. Mega-cephalopods perhaps?

Whatever the case, I doubt our ancestors, if indeed there are any, would approach this 'problem' in the same way. That's if they (or whatever organisms/'intelligences'/'beings' may evolve) perceived a problem to begin with ...or if life as we know it will exist at all in our solar system - or anywhere else for that matter. Ever.

4 billions years CE, 4 billion light years thatta way....who knows what lies there? I reckon JBS Haldane was onto something when he (reportedly) said:

"I suspect the truth is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose" (or words to that effect).

Maybe whatever else is 'out there' is largely beyond our everyday comprehension...or at least on the periphery.

Within a 'search for extraterrrestrial intelligence' paradigm...perhaps the best approach is a stretching, an extending beyond, the peripheral.

Traditional or conventional notions of ETI, and spacecraft for that matter, are too limiting in my view.

[faustus]

when i was really into astral projection, i had the conviction that alien races would be more inclined to use their minds as 'spaceships' rather than conventional UFOs. think of the savings on fuel!

in some of their music TOOL make reference to the term merkaba... which from memory translates to light body ship... it's meant to be some term from an esoteric school that teaches you to travel to other dimensions using your soul as a vehicle. if you buy into this sort of stuff you should check out the book "nothing in this book is true but it's exactly the way things are" ... i think the book is all nonsense, but makes for some good science fiction.

[nil]

this thread is kindasorta reminding me of barbara marciniak's 'bringers of the dawn' and 'earth'. anyone?

[wandjina]

bringers of the dawn!!!!! Any Pleiadians here? lol

[egad]

bringers of the dawn!!!!! Any Pleiadians here? lol

Lol, i'm sure there's many pleadians here, they are after all simply ourselves from the future. ;)

The merkaba refers to our light body as twix elbert has pointed out already, it is a vechile of light for us to connect with our divinity within and ultimately utilise to travel to higher dimensions and other times and spaces. For a brief overview check out http://www.crystalinks.com/merkaba.html. For more information and a detailed overview check out the merkaba meditation offerred by drunvalo melchizedek (meditation is also listed on crystalinks) through the Flower of Life workshops and Ancient Secrets of the Flower of Life Parts 1 & 2.

You will find a wealth of information out there on the merkaba and it's significance at this time in our global evolution. We are ascending and if we wanna be getting around in higher dimensions we gotta remember how to activate and utilise our light bodies. The reality of interdimensional space travel has always been within us, we're just waking up to it en masse at this time in preperation for the dimensional shift upon us.

From my own perspective, i see us utilisting our merkabas en masse for multidimensional travel and experience within the next 1 - 5 years, it's up to us when we decide to pull back the veil and reveal our true selves and infinite beings of light and one with all creation, the sooner the better the way 3rd density earth has been continuing lately. So let's all activate and awaken, it's the global shift in consciousness and planetary ascension, here, now, ah fuck yeah!

[nil]

bringers of the dawn!!!!! Any Pleiadians here? lol

my mom reckons she's pleiadian, so i'm half. hehe.

but seriously.......

[komodo]

hrmmm!

sure, a bunch of slightly tweaked star trek monkeys isn't a likely scenario for ETI, but it is our current scenario here on earth, and into the future (if probably less 'slightly') some experiences confirm that the human body is a site of fascination, power and wonder, not a crude lump of meat we'd be better off without. there is also enormous energy in mass, and it's density gives it great durability. if you support the persistence of identity (individuation) rather than dissolution/immersion into identity-less-ness, strong force bonded atomic mass seems to have a lot to offer.

unless one of us is actually some kind of merkaba channeling html, or has personally experienced perception/cognition while in an externally verified EEG (or similar) flatline, we can't claim first hand experience of absolutely disembodied consciousness, just plenty of the embodied kind. i think it seems unlikely we can preserve identity-over-time without a physical matrix (maybe a little jaunt now and then for 2-5min with some kind of astral umbilical back to an organic body) ... mass feels like our anchor in the timeline, our memory and storage/story. maybe experiences of 'aliens' are of beings deploying projected states like this, which can be traced back to hardware/wetware someplace, rather than not existing in 4D space at all.

to state the obvious, we as human beings have massive bodies, and 'who we are' is tied up with our genesis and our situation within gaia. when the life that is in us disconnects totally from our bodies it is reasonably likely we are no longer around in an individual sense at all, let alone eating lasagne.

Edited January 19, 2007 by komodo

[t st tantra]

theres also this fellow,ananda from sweden

http://www.akasha.de/~aton/HOME.html

he's into a lot of things including pineal stimulation using dmt

t s t .

[Hagakure]

im going to address a different part of the question here.

"do we really need the engineering-metallurgy-electronics-type ones?"

i dont see why not

the work that is being done in terms of launching various objects into space is important groundwork for work in the future that could play a very important rolein our survival or may simply fit into a different type of plan.

the way i see it life starts on earth, perhaps by an asteroid loaded with carobon rich building blocks of life crashing into a potent soup waiting to be fertilised. life begins. life develops from simple molecules forming other molecules due to complementry shapes that catalyse reactions to eventually single cell organisms. the most sucessfull single cell organisms grow at a fast rate making use of the various molecules available and shifting them into a circle of life.

cells fuse with other cells to create eukaryotic cells which now have machinery to form multicellular organisms. multicellular organisms like sea sponges develop systems that allow cells to start to work together and differentiate into different cell types etc etc. they then learn to organise along planes of symmetry - some cells go in direction of jellyfish and have many lines of symmetry. others develop to have one line of symmetry to creat organisms that have a front and a back.

you then simple organisms that go on to worms, develop spines and become fish, develop lungs and go on land, yadda yadda yadda until we get to humans.

ancestors of apes are puny llittle apes in an enviroment filled with animals with big teeth and sharp claws.

due to not being able to rely upon physical characteristics like strength purely for survival greater importance is placed on the brain. apes that are smart and work together to defend against predators and trap prey survive better than stupid apes that become sabretooth tiger food or whatever.

human ancestors become smartest organism on planet (apart from dolphins that play around in the water all day ) this intelligence allows humans to colonise whole planet and have a molopoly over almost all resources.

to bring up a bit of a terrence idea i should say that all of those steps happen faster than the last step. after reaching the level of the cell the time required to develop into multicellular organisms is, in comparison, quicker.

so we get to humans that start developing technology and communicating ideas (im getting to the spaceships soon).

now if we had everyone working by themselves the brain would keep on evolving to become more and more intelligent.

because we can communicate we only need a basic level of processing power etc because you can just network brains and have them work at problems together.

this allows ideas to be developed very quickly and improvements to be made that are not dependent on evolution etc. changing things at a molecular level takes a long time. if we had to evolve to a point where we could fly that could take another 100,000 years or so. with brains we can develop planes or many other means of flight in a fraction of the time. the capacity to think is a very very powerfull tool.

but there is still more fun to go. wiith our brains we have developed amazing technology. i can write this text and you can read it even if you are in another country. one very important technological development is artificial intelligence.

brains are just computers. mostly digital messages firing along neurons. neurons are on or they are off. your brain can change neurons so they trigger other neurons or ignore some signals etc etc but computers can handle those types of changes as well.

neural networks are being developed on computers and with enough work will easily reach the same level of conciousness as humans. a friend of mine used to always say that that will never happen because we cant understand our own brains to program the into a computer. you dont need to do this though. neural networks on computers will be able to evolve. give it a task. it generates millions of options to meet this task, filters through them rapidly to select most efficient them using these as templates, crosses them together to generate millions of other options that are better at achieving task. repeat this enough and you are going to be able to do that task very efficiently.

AI is the logical next step. if we wont to upgrade our brains we have to follow evolution to slowly make changes to them. it takes a very long time to improve the hardware. thats why through communication and culture we were able to proceed at a very fast pace by relying upon the software.

with AI we now have brains that can network and can draw information from anywhere, like human brains, but the hardware can also be improved at an incredible rate.

AI will eventually reach a point where it is the main thing in control, we will program it to meet all of our goals and estabblish something of a utopia on our planet. (at least i hope so, i have certain ideas about how to establish a utopia and sadly it revolves around pissing off humans just enough to keep em happy but thats another thread)

now all through this history of life etc you have a development which allows radiation outwards. life devlops in some pool of nutrients in some tiny corner of the planet and radiates out to cover the entire planet.

seems clear to me that the pattern is going to continue. when we can colonise the solar system, we can colonise the solar system, when we can colonise the universe, we will colonise the universe.

and lets face it. us humans have some serious shortfalls. we wont live long enough to reach the end of our solar system. AI is going to be the main power off of our planet.

nanotechnology and the fusion of more conventional types of technology with biology is going to give us a pretty powerfull technological arsenal. surely we would be able to create and launch new lifeforms that have fused with specialised technology to collect energy on the planets that are with us on earth and convert this energy into mobilising the resources on these planets and placing them into some type of circle of life, even if this circle looks completely different to what we have on earth.

this may start with selfish plans of humans in terms of establishing new colonies etc but just because its selfish, it doesnt mean it doesnt fit into the grand plan.

(and no a half serious but kinda of playfull ending)

eventually the whole universe oraganises itself into one omnipitent organism that even at the peak of your most crazy far out trip you are no where near comprehending.

this being decides, "well this is all quite boring now"

creates a big bang

and decides to dance the dance all over again

hope that answers your question.

[komodo]

hey hagakure, i liked your description of evolution of life on earth, but once you hit the AI part you lost me. not conceptually, just in terms of thinking along the same lines. i had some long arguments on the transhumanist forums about AI and remain completely unconvinced that hard AI is plausible.

brains are just computers.

now you're entitled to your opinions, but this is stated as fact, so im going to argue it: the human brain is not just a computer. binary code is a particular symbolic artifice, as are the programs run on it. it designates absolute conditions, and is therefore abstracted from the non-binary world (eg. is "virtual" and self referential). by contrast, organic life initiates processes of continuous engagement, it's 'encodings' and information processing are arguably replicable by an inorganic platform but there is a qualitative difference... the organic platform is not abstracted from the stuff around it. furthermore organic mind has the quality of "will" which acts outside of the causal chain of mechanism, this has never been remotely glimpsed in a hardware based computational system and i see no reason to expect it is possible.

the human organism/mind-brain complex is fluidly linked through the nervous system to the cosmos while a computer can only operate it's programs in isolation, or as isolate task-response. this is why machines cannot create, only simulate. further, living organisms differ from mechanisms in that they can manifest unpredictable action (eg. free will or similar) this is what i think of as a chaos channel, and is the source of diversity and change. if life was actually mechanical, it would never have arisen, ie. there is no motivation in mechanisms. like you say hagakure, AI "intelligence" would be great at performing tasks...

there is more to this argument but is a little off topic, just wanted to respond may be worth a new thread?

also, colonisation would be handy for those of us who want kids, but for me personally the idea of spaceshipping (be it heavy or light) is more about a crossfertilisation and continuing of earth/life/journey... id prefer to live for a very very long time and have no offspring, if possible

Edited January 19, 2007 by komodo

[Hagakure]

yo komodo

i am no AI expert but im pretty certain that AI is going to happen and i will state my main reason for this belief at the end of the post

in regards to the brains are computers statement im using a definition of computers to be

"A machine that accepts input, processes it according to specified rules, and produces output"

essentially what our brains do and what computers do

now brains arent purely digital. they arent all ones and zeros due to some neurons behaving a little differently in some cases but essentially neurons are on or they are off.

they send an on message, this reaches other neurons which pass along this on message to other neurons in the sequence. they revert to an off state with no on message.

but yeah they are not true digital but are similar in some ways

now the key to AI is replicating the processes of the brain on computers. throw out the conventional coding and bring in neural networks.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/jo...s11/report.html

here is a good intro. you dont need to read all of this and understand it all (i sure dont)

take away message is developing networks that can think in a similar way to the brain

now the key reson i think that AI will happen is not based on any theory or promising lead in somputer programming. when we look at the history of this planet all you need fpr developing intelligence is a flexible framework where the processes of replication randomisation and selection can happen.

all that needs to be develpoed is a very flexible brain like program which can be exposed to selection to meet a required goal and that brain will be able to develop into a sentinant being like ourselves.

all the work lies in making that framework for it to operate on.

computers today may be like the first organisms on the planet that simply copied and copied and copied.

you could say that these organisms werent linked to the cosmos, they had no sensory apparatus at all.

as the computers develop they will grow sensory apparatus, and they wont be limited to only seeing the spectrum that we can see or only hearing the frequencies that we can hear. with the potential of telescopic and at the same time microscopic vision future AIs could be more in tune to the cosmos than we could every dream of (unless you dream of downloading your brain into a robot or becoming a cyborg)

as for colonisation of the cosmos, i have a very simple reason for this. i like seeing things in my garden grow. i would like to see ecosystems on other planets grow. that would be awesome.

[komodo]

all you need for developing intelligence is a flexible framework where the processes of replication randomisation and selection can happen.

when you're talking AI i'm guessing you mean 'hard' or 'strong' AI which is, roughly, sentient, self-aware, true decision-making AI... the kind of AI you give the vote to. this is different to 'soft' AI which is the kind of thing we see now with programs that self-program or 'learn' but have no self-awareness. i see no reason to doubt that 'soft' AI will continue to develop and become extremely good at things like playing chess or managing climate terraforming systems.

i'll settle on the a key word here: randomisation. there is no computer ever built that can produce a truly random number, they all come down to a certain crypto-keyed algorithm. this equates to free will, so i'd suggest that if you allow computers sentience, knowing they cannot produce a truly random variable, you also believe that free will is an illusion, and essentially we are mechanisms also, running on some kind of keyed algorithm. personally i believe life is genuinely unpredictable and outside of a cause/effect chain, which is why living things (humans) are qualitatively different to non-living things (computers).

this also ties in with my idea that we need our bodies to be identity/located individuals; that organism is a crucial part of living and if we want to travel beyond our earth we need to take our wetware along.

Edited January 24, 2007 by komodo

[XipeTotec]

personally i believe life is genuinely unpredictable and outside of a cause/effect chain, which is why living things (humans) are qualitatively different to non-living things (computers).

I think we are very much within a cause and effect chain

Edited January 21, 2007 by shroomytoonos

[komodo]

hey shroomy,

if life is all cause and effect, 'you' don't really 'think' at all

my basic problems with determinism are i) it's totally depressing and ii) it means you're stuck with the paradox of action without an actor, or creationism (which seem like unneccesary luggage to me).

there's another thread and a half in free will vs determinism.

Edited January 22, 2007 by komodo

[XipeTotec]

oh right, so what action started it?

..

Edited January 22, 2007 by shroomytoonos

[komodo]

ah you got to that while i was in the midst of editing it into something more thoughtful but it was a reasonable question anyway... you cant have cause and effect without an original cause.. and that requires a non-causal impulse (paradox/volitional god). if you want to play this one out further, it'll need a thread of its own.

Edited January 22, 2007 by komodo

[Hagakure]

so we dont know the first cause, im not loosing any sleep tonight

what it boils down to is this

neurons work in a specific manner

neural networks on computers can work in the same manner

whether we have free will or not, it doesnt really matter, AI will be able to have what we have and more

[XipeTotec]

ah you got to that while i was in the midst of editing it into something more thoughtful but it was a reasonable question anyway... you cant have cause and effect without an original cause.. and that requires a non-causal impulse (paradox/volitional god). if you want to play this one out further, it'll need a thread of its own.

whether or not we know what happened at the beginning, doesn't mean that we arn't subject to cause and effect. but you are right, we may need a new thread to discuss this further

[komodo]

whether we have free will or not, it doesnt really matter, AI will be able to have what we have and more

hrm.. i feel a bit like my last post to you fell on deaf ears hagakure! you can't dodge the question of free will if you want to discuss AI seriously. although there are many other problems, the key concept with hard AI is consciousness; my position is that non-living mechanisms are not conscious/sentient but biological organisms are, i arrive at it based on my direct sensory experience of the world, philosophical interrogation and analysing the arguments made for and against. it is not only counterintuitive but a bit fantastic to project a hypothetical future in which consciousness is abruptly attained by a bunch of physical switches (how many switches = life?) i suspect other ideas/values are driving the desire for hard AI to be true against all odds.

Edited January 24, 2007 by komodo

[The Dude]

Consciousness arises from self referencing yes? A machine can do this but it cannot be a truely random problem solving entity. Here's another question though.. regarding free-will / determinism. are any of our creative/random moments random at all? or just the effect of a cause unknown to us. If all time is predefined then all instances, problems and their solutions are pre-existing. How do we come up with anything novel. Ok here's where it's at. in the theory of reality that i entertain at the moment. We are not the originators of thought only a tuning device for it. The information is in an invisible field like electro-magnetism, it has been dubbed the morphogenetic field.

Likewise machines are not the originators of information or thought, they merely work with it. We input the original conditions for them to work with I suppose. Ok so the problem here is from what comes our creativity and randomness.

For consciousness to arise out of machines, the information it works with cannot be finite as it currently is. Even if one were to build a self referencing system, it must learn how to adapt and evolve in order to be truly sentient and that requires randomness. I suggest that for a machine to be truly conscious it must connect to the source of all thoughts and be truly random like other lifefroms. ...Which makes me contradict myself.

So say NO life is truly random but merely part of the system. Computers can simulate randomness in a convincing illusion, but we Know it is not random and merely the effects of a cause that has been pre-defined. The only difference here is that we do not Know the overall mechanics of the larger system (reality) and anything acting within it seems random, when it may well be pre-determined.

Any simulation of free-will and randomness within a machine will be just as much an illusion as it is within ourselves (machines).

To GOD or lets just say The Architect haha, all our actions would be just like the computations of a program being carried out with no randomness to speak of.