Out of Pod Experience

Maybe aliens created us just to be their random number generators.

i'm confused here... is no one in this thread a transhumanist / singularity believer? what's the point of exploring space... colonizing it and starting galactic empires when in the future... humans will merge with artificial intelligence and become cyborgs, eventually androids.

what i'm trying to say is... the current tech we are receiving now such as your phone will eventually be inside your head, you will not be required to ever move since you'll most likely live in virtual space... everything is possible there, there's no reason to keep living physically unless your body/presence is in danger by a super nova or alien tribe trying to delete you.

this is why you haven't seen any aliens in space, because there's no point expanding into space if you can live virtually forever.

lets say for religious reasons or for (dumb) reasons you neglect evolution (human to cyborg) and want to keep being human... what are you going to do... go into space and build a new home on a new planet? (you could do this in virtual space if thats what your mundane goal is)

everyone in this thread has no idea what the future is, you guys watch too much science fiction... we are not going to conquer the entire universe, it's entirely pointless to do so... what are you going to do if you did achieve this? keep tabs on inferior races? talk politics amongst the thousands of different species and dictate what they are allowed to do in life?

if you choose to evolve, you will get your own universe virtually and you can do whatever you please, each person on this planet could have their own universe to play with and talk to each other. one person could choose to live in virtual eve, another could choose to live in the ancient roman era... one could choose to keep living physically and search for extra terrestrials (completely pointless other than to feed curiosity).

i don't get this thread, i'm going to stay far away as possible from you war-hungry asshats. i'll join the joves and destroy every stargate that has a planned destination towards my entire galaxy, i'll put a force field around the entire galaxy and separate it from you stupid humans. you guys are sad.

Personally I find the idea of cybernetic transhumanism/technological singularity to be repulsive and for the life of me don't understand how having a bunch of electronics directly implanted into my body is going to make life any better when the digital age so far has in my opinion made life more complicated and caused people to feel apathetic and disconnected from each other in the physical world. Sorry but when I think of a transhuman this is what I imagine. You can be that if you want but I think I'll keep on being human until such time as I die a natural death and move on, without having my mind uploaded into some kind of technological purgatory.

I think I'd choose to stay here in the real world where I can enjoy things like breathing and walking through a real forest, and watching real animals, swimming in real water, eating real food, communicating with people face to face, and experiencing real physical sex, not hooked up in a chair filed away in some sort of apartment where I live out my days in a damn matrix that's creating a realistic simulation of those things in my head. I just don't get why some people would want to give up this beautiful living experience for a bunch of wetwired icrap pumping Facebook directly into their brain 24/7. Do you really believe that turning yourself into a cyborg and accepting the rule of intelligent machines is going to improve real issues humanity faces such as poverty and warfare? I think it's more likely that a technological singularity is going to make social issues like those that much worse.

And if you're thinking that my argument is flawed because here we are using this thing called the internet to chat with each other and playing inside a virtual universe called EVE Online don't. because the key difference between now and your transhumanistic future is that right now I can completely disconnect myself from all this and go outside or read a book or do any number of things without any of this following me. In a transhumanistic/singularity future all this stuff would be unavoidable because it would be a part of us.

Random rebuttals:

The virtual world isn't real. If you want to escape from reality, you can do that now with illicit drugs. More importantly, while you're in the VR world, someone will take your stuff in the real world. VR is about information sharing and is not a place to "live." Anyone who does choose to "live" in the VR world over the real world probably won't breed, and thus it's less likely that future generations will be pre-disposed to live in VR worlds. Finally, there's a three billion year time limit on the Earth before the sun turns into a red giant and cooks the Earth, so futzing around in VR can't be a full time plan.

Cyborgs wouldn't necessarily be smarter than plain humans. The brain's bandwidth and data processing rates would limit or even prevent a cyborg based singularity. You would need to evolve the brain's organics to take advantage of the electronics, and if you can do that, then you probably don't need the electronics except as a reference database. Meaning, cybernetics won't make you smart, nor will it allow anyone to be a scientist or artist.

An AI singularity could be possible assuming we build the hardware to allow it to happen. However, given the trend towards 3d printers and nano-assemblers, an AI could improve itself once it had a modest ability to manipulate its environment. More importantly, it's doubtful that an AI singularity would care about humans enough to include them in its plans.

As for humans achieving a singularity of themselves, it would take either a long time to evolve the capacity, or it would take some serious genetic tinkering.

As for immortality by uploading yourself into a computer, there's the problem that the 'computer you' isn't you. Meaning, it's a twin. You would still die while your twin runs around thinking he's you.

rebuttals:

sun exploding = space ship

immortality = doesn't require uploading to a computer, just requires editing the human body

living in virtual reality = don't need to breed more humans, there is enough, plus you can add AI to the mix, before living in virtual reality i'm assuming you'd be smart enough to apply some defences preventing from physical space interfering with your experience until you come back (such as a space ship away from everyone else)

human achieving singularity = will become cyborgs first, already said this, then we'll see from there

the question about becoming smarter and stating you won't become smarter is kind of stupid... a first generation cyborg would simply gather information like a human does with his keyboard/mouse although inside his head by thoughts, he wouldn't be smarter, he'd just have faster information... however a more advanced cyborg would remember all the information, download new skills like the matrix movie, and become a kung fu master in less than 1 hour (dunno how much time it would take just throwing a random number)

the term "ai singularity" makes no sense as singularity means when humans merge with ai... so i'll just say that it's possible for AI to advance and leave humans behind (but that won't stop humans from advancing and getting what they want) so it doesn't really matter whether AI chooses to flee from us or ignore us, it makes absolutely no difference

I would rather avoid all that conflict and violence by not going down that road in the first place. This is not what I want, and as for your "i want to upgrade myself, you can stay a human, what's the problem" statement, the problem is too many people WILL choose these upgrades for nonmedical reasons and it will make life crap for those who don't who will have to live like second class citizens just because they chose to remain a normal biological human being. And if that happens well, see above.

I don't have to stop anything, all I have to do is value and enjoy this short time I have as a living flesh and blood organic human being. If your perception of reality has become so warped that you find the idea of wiring icrap into your brain and hiding your self away in some matrix VERSION of reality more appealing than living in and experiencing the real world than thats your issue to work through.

No because EVE is just a game, and that's all it should ever be. And what exactly is so mundane about Earth? It's sad that some people just can't see the intricate beauty of this world, and now precious life is, so they become overly distracted by petty thoughts and things of human construction while all the while this amazingly precious gift of physical existance full of countless sensations and experiences both subtle and overt passes them by, moments in time lost to them forever because they were too busy off in their heads thinking about something that isn't even real. It's the greatest tragedy of this age in my opinion, an age where humanity has reached a point that it can perceive the universe from a sub atomic particle to entire galaxies, and yet so distracted most don't even notice a leaf on the ground in front of them.

Euh, why moved to out of pod?

rule 2 out of pod forum:

2. Unlike all other forums on the website, all posts here do not have to be related to EVE. In fact, they should not be related to EVE. The purpose of this forum is for all posts not related to EVE.

How is this thread NOT related to EVE? I ask to take EVE as reference in the original question and form an opinion on how we will behave in space BASED on EVE... This has got nothing to do with naming your cat and everything to do with EVE.

/me puts on tinfoil hat and looks around suspiciously

Space exploration and colonisation will be done with Von Neumann probes.