Observations From the Edge: October 2007

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Human Species 'may split in two'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6057734.stm

Human species 'may split in two'

Human species 'may split in two'
Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Race 'ironed out'

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.

Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.

Receding chins

Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.

Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.

Further into the future, sexual selection - being choosy about one's partner - was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.

The logical outcome would be two sub-species, "gracile" and "robust" humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.

"While science and technology have the potential to create an ideal habitat for humanity over the next millennium, there is a possibility of a monumental genetic hangover over the subsequent millennia due to an over-reliance on technology reducing our natural capacity to resist disease, or our evolved ability to get along with each other, said Dr Curry.

He carried out the report for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/6057734.stm

Published: 2006/10/17 08:47:57 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

http://spiritof.info/discovery/articles/cnnmoney/discovery.cnnmoney.story3.html

The Smartest Futurist On Earth

If legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil is right, the future will be a lot brighter - and weirder - than you think.
By Brian O'Keefe

(Fortune Magazine) -- If you went around saying that in a couple of decades we'll have cell-sized, brain-enhancing robots circulating through our bloodstream, or that we'll be able to upload a person's consciousness into a computer, people would probably question your sanity.

But if you say things like that and you're Ray Kurzweil, you get invited to dinner at Bill Gates' house - twice - so he can pick your brain for insights on the future of technology. The Microsoft chairman calls him a "visionary thinker and futurist."

Kurzweil is an inventor whose work in artificial intelligence has dazzled technological sophisticates for four decades. He invented the flatbed scanner, the first true electric piano, and large-vocabulary speech-recognition software; he's launched ten companies and sold five, and has written five books; he has a BS in computer science from MIT and 13 honorary doctorates (but no real one); he's been inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame and charges $25,000 every time he gives a speech - 40 times last year.

24 Innovators at the gate

And now, if anything, he's gaining momentum as a cultural force: He has not one but two movies in the works - one a documentary about his career and ideas and the other an adaptation of his recent bestseller, The Singularity Is Near, which he's writing and co-producing (he's talking about a distribution deal with the people who brought you The Day After Tomorrow).

When Kurzweil isn't giving keynote addresses or reading obscure peer-review journals, he's raising money for his new hedge fund, FatKat (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies). He's already attracted a roster of blue-ribbon investors that includes venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, former Microsoft CFO Mike Brown, and former Flextronics CEO-turned-KKR-partner Michael Marks.

Being a hedge fund manager may seem an odd pursuit for an expert in artificial intelligence, but to Kurzweil it's perfectly natural. The magic that has enabled all his innovations has been the science of pattern recognition - and what is the financial market, he postulates, but a series of patterns?

Kurzweil, however, has something bigger on his mind than just making money -after half a lifetime studying trends in technological change, he believes he's found a pattern that allows him to see into the future with a high degree of accuracy. The secret is something he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, and the basic idea is that the power of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Mankind is on the cusp of a radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen, he says, and almost more extreme than we can imagine.

The fate of the $16B Walton estate

Everything will be subject to his Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil says, because "everything is ultimately becoming information technology." As we are able to reverse-engineer and decode our own DNA, for instance, medical technology can be converted to bits and bytes and zoom along at the same fantastic rate. That will enable overlapping revolutions in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Which is how you end up with nanobots living in your brain.

And if you're a Baby Boomer with the right fitness plan (for Kurzweil that involves over 200 supplement pills a day plus intravenous treatments once a week), you may just live long enough to live forever.

By the time a child born today graduates from college, Kurzweil believes, poverty, disease, and reliance on fossil fuels should be a thing of the past. Speaking of which, don't get him started on global-warming hype.

"These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous," says the man who once delivered a tech conference presentation as a singing computer avatar named Ramona. (That stunt was the inspiration for the 2002 Al Pacino movie Simone.) "They don't account for anything like the technological progress we're going to experience."

Kurzweil's crusade, if you will, is to get across that most of us (even most of his fellow scientists) fail to see the world changing exponentially because we are "stuck in the intuitive linear view." To hammer home his point, Kurzweil packs his presentations with charts that show, for instance, supercomputer power doubling consistently over time.

He explains that Moore's Law - the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years - is but one excellent example of the Law of Accelerating Returns. One of Kurzweil's favorite illustrations of exponential growth is the Human Genome Project. "It was scheduled to be a 15-year project," he says. "After seven years only 1% of it was done, and the critics said it would be impossible. But if you double from 1% every year over seven years, you get 100%. It was right on schedule."

Ask Bing: My boss is a slacker

He believes humanity is near that 1% moment in technological growth. By 2027, he predicts, computers will surpass humans in intelligence; by 2045 or so, we will reach the Singularity, a moment when technology is advancing so rapidly that "strictly biological" humans will be unable to comprehend it.

He has plenty more ideas that may seem Woody Allen - wacky in a Sleeper kind of way (virtual sex as good as or better than the real thing) and occasionally downright disturbing à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (computers will achieve consciousness in about 20 years). But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true.

Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening).

His current vision goes way, way past the web, of course. But at least give the guy a hearing. "We are the species that goes beyond our potential," he says. "Merging with our technology is the next stage in our evolution."

The Butterfly Effect and the Environment: How Tiny Actions Can Save the World

http://www.copyblogger.com/butterfly-effect-environment/

[quote]The Butterfly Effect and the Environment: How Tiny Actions Can Save the World

by Brian Clark

Blog Action Day

This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day, joining thousands of other bloggers to write about one topic for a single day. This year’s topic is the environment.

The acre of land my family and I live on rests on a heavily-wooded elevation, which provides a panoramic view of a sparkling lake to the south. It’s quite a departure from the suburban tract home I grew up in, and I’m hoping my kids end up with fond childhood memories of frolicking in a beautiful natural setting.

One remarkable thing about the property is the amount of butterflies it attracts, no doubt due to the variety of plant species that are permitted to grow undisturbed. My 5-year-old daughter and her little brother spend large chunks of time hopelessly chasing after scores of Monarchs and other brightly-colored, flitting butterflies.

And all I can think about is the havoc these little critters are having on the weather in China. Not the kids… the butterflies.
The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect is a term that has leaked into popular culture thanks to time-travel stories, but its actual meaning is steeped in no-nonsense science. From a technical standpoint, it refers to the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory.

In plain language, tiny changes within a complex system lead to results that are impossible to predict. For example, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could create tiny changes in the atmosphere that lead to violent weather conditions elsewhere on the planet.

Although the concept has been around since 1890, the Butterfly Effect gained popular acceptance in 1961 due to weather prediction modeling performed by meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He found that changes that should have been statistically insignificant led to completely different weather scenarios. The butterfly analogy began in 1972, when Lorenz delivered a speech entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?

What’s that got to do with the environment?

Well, given the changes we humans have introduced into the complex ecosystem known as Planet Earth, it’s fair to say that we’ve done the work of billions of butterflies. What we’re trying to figure out now is what’s going to happen, but it’s most likely going to be pretty significant.
What if Butterflies Disappeared?

While there’s little agreement as to what’s going to happen ecologically due to human activity, there’s no doubt that we’ve made drastic changes to just about every natural habitat on the planet. Our oceans and natural water sources are polluted, the composition of our soil has been chemically altered, the atmosphere has been heavily influenced by emissions, our forests have been dramatically reduced, and on and on.

One area of particular importance is biodiversity. Beyond the fact that biodiversity itself protects humans from the effects of agricultural catastrophes like the Irish Potato Famine, the loss of a species results in significant changes in natural habitats that can hurt us badly down the road.

Maybe you don’t personally care about the Mexican long-nosed bat, but if they disappear completely, there will most assuredly be consequences that ripple well beyond Texas and New Mexico over time. We just can’t predict what they’ll be.

If butterflies disappeared, the world would most certainly be worse off for children of all ages. But it’s much worse than that. Many flowering plants are so closely linked to butterflies (and vice versa) that one cannot survive without the other. When you think about the natural interdependence network that could collapse due to the extinction of one important species, it starts to get a little scary.

In the last 439 million years, there have been five cataclysmic extinction events, each one wiping out between 50 to 95 percent of existing life, including the dominant lifeforms of the time. Many scientists believe that:

* we’re in the midst of the sixth extinction event
* we’re the cause, and
* we’re in danger of being wiped out ourselves

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson predicts that if things don’t change, half of all plant and animal species will be extinct by the year 2100. Worse, a poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that 7 in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a much more dire threat to human existence than global warming does.

That’s not good news, but let’s step away from the negative. Instead, let’s look at how we can put the Butterfly Effect to work for us in a good way.
The Positive Side of the Butterfly Effect

Let’s face it—things will likely change for the worse regarding the environment no matter what. Some of those changes will be pretty bad, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

That doesn’t mean we should give up. The more positive change we introduce into the system starting right now, the more bad things we avoid. Plus, we buy time for technology to help protect us from adverse conditions, and even reverse some of the damage.

The corollary of the Butterfly Effect is that tiny changes you make do in fact make a difference. And when those tiny changes are aggregated among millions of people, we can truly make a real difference in how much nature we save for our children, grandchildren, and beyond.

We might even be saving them.

It doesn’t need to be a sacrifice. Why not make changes that simply save you money?

Check out these planet-saving actions that keep more coin in your pocket:

* Cut out bottled water: Producing plastic water bottles consumes massive amounts of fossil fuels only to crowd landfills. American demand alone requires 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel approximately 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. And if you think gas prices are bad, you’re paying $10 a gallon for water when you buy individual bottles. Get a simple home filtration solution, and a reusable stainless steel bottle.
* Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs: CFL bulbs are more expensive, but they last 5 times longer than conventional bulbs. Save $30 in energy costs per bulb and help save the planet.
* Buy a new monitor: You know you want a new LCD monitor, so go ahead and do it. They use 1/3 the energy, and they look cool. Just hold on to your computer as long as you can stand it, or learn to recycle it when you trade up.
* Quit your job. Telecommuting twice a week can save 40 percent of your gas costs according to the Telework Coalition, or $624 per year. To further maximize your happiness and the future health of the Earth, start that home-based business you keep talking about.

Here are 52 other ways to save money while you save the planet.
What Have You Got to Lose?

It’s mid-October now, and the butterflies are just about gone for the year. My daughter provided the inspiration for this article when she asked me in a concerned voice:

“Daddy, where have all the butterflies gone?”

“It’s okay sweetie… they’ll be back in the spring.”

I hope no parent has to answer that question differently.[quote]

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Monarch II Project Phoenix: Mind Control

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A635412E22918B9C

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Monarch II: Introduction
08:31
microwave nonlethal weapons have plausible deniability, invisible bullets leave no physical evidence. Mind control and weapons developments programs are being used on Cointelpro targets across the country. What better use for the US Govt enemies list than to use them as human guinea pigs in terminal experiments.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt one)
03:32
Seven facts that make the case for US intelligence agencies using nonlethal weapons on US citizens in terminal experiments.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt two)
03:54
The seven facts that prove there is an ongoing war crime of torture and assassination against thousands of American citizens.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt three)
03:51
An activist minded lawyer takes on a powerful law firm only to experience a sustained attack on himself and his family by microwave "nonlethal" weapons.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt four)
09:30
whistleblowers and activists comprise at least 30% of the Targeted individuals (TI's). TI's are people who are being attacked in the tradition of Cointelpro and the Phoenix Program. Loyal Americans are 'enrolled" into a weapons development program using EM nonlethal weapons and gang stalking to neutralize and destroy potential threats.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt five) In Their Own Words
09:51
Two Targeted Individuals tell their stories of harassment, intimidation, psychological warfare, and torture by 'nonlethal" weapons.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt six) In Their Own Words
06:01
Helen Anderson speaks to why she and her family have been targeted, dating back to the Manhattan project. John Mecca and Debra Lamb briefly discuss the technology and legal aspects of using the DOJ by the DOD to test and perfect experimental weapons.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt seven) In Their Own Words
05:43
Three TI's from different parts of the country briefly tell their story.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt eight) In Their Own Words
04:18
Two Targeted Individuals living in Florida testify about their harassment through gang stalking and EM weapons.

Monarch II Making the Case (pt nine) In Their Own Words
06:29
Katherine Griggs, wife of Colonel George Griggs talks briefly about her life as a targeted individual. Except from her filmed testimony.

Monarch II Project Phoenix: Mind Control

Friday, October 05, 2007

Raytheon's Torture Weapon Technology Has Been Used Ten Thousand Times

MIT touts new mind-to-machine algorithm