26 Terabits per second laser

That's why it's called science FICTION.

Bluefan said:

I think a lot of these things aren't possible. We can't create computers more intelligent than ourselves, we're not intelligent enough to make those. If our brain would be simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it. I don't think we can pass that barrier.

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yep. a computer can grow as intelligent as ourselfs, but not more intelligent, smarter, or without error. a pc is programmed, thus the creator makes it as intelligent as he can make the computer.

besides, all pc's crash and do things wrong because us humans. we cant make it perfect, thus the pc wont act perfect.

So you dont believe in God, but you believe in The Borg? LMAO

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I don't really like stepping on people's toes when it comes to religion, it is always a touchy subject, but once you start studying any of the hard sciences with any sort of detail, the idea of God holds less and less power. While I do not deny the existence of a deity, as the idea can never be disproved, Science has taken away many of the powers that god is afforded in the judeo christian tradition. You could again go with the Platonist idealism "god has 'pulled the wool over our eyes' and created a reality we only think we understand through science" but once again, if that be the case, then who cares? We should study science anyway to try and improve our short lives in this world, and those who wish to retain their faith can believe what they want, and should they be correct at the time of their death, they shall receive salvation. There is no point in inhibiting scientific progress for the "if's and maybe's" platonic idealist interpretation of the christian faith, this isn't the dark ages.
As for the borg, as silly as it sounds, yes, I feel that the eventual fusion of human beings with AI is inevitable, simply out of necessity. Humanity like all other species on this planet are subject the environment we live in. Other creatures adapt to find an equilibrium with their environment, if they don't, they die out because they consume all their resources. Humans are not in an equilibrium with the environment, we consume far more than we give, and we are vastly overpopulated for the lifestyle we choose to live (with cars, cities, buildings ect). If we would like to continue advancing our technology, without destroying our planet, we will need to find a less wasteful way to live. They only way to do this and maintain the lifestyle we have become so dependent on, would really be uploading ourselves into servers, which would use a trivial amount of power, that could be harvested from renewable resources, all of humanity could run on a few kilowatt hours of energy from our environment. Further, when our sun burns out in ~4billion years, if we wish to survive longer we will need to relocate. Look up some information on special relativity, and specifically time dilation. When traveling at speeds near the speed of light, your perception of time becomes distorted, one day for a person travelling 99.999% the speed of light would be 70.71 days for a stationary observer, due the lorentz factor increasing with speed, calculated with gamma=1/sqrt(1-V^2/c^c) where v is velocity and c is the speed of light, gamma is the lorentz factor of "distortion factor. This makes traveling even to the nearest suns and planets ~4 light years away and returning very difficult. To make this journey in a reasonable amount of time would require speeds that would distort your perception of time. When you returned, hundreds of years would have passed on earth, and everyone you knew would be dead, you would have traveled into the future. Special relativity is not speculation, it has been experimentally verified, if it didn't work, GPS satellites would be incorrectly calibrated. There are only two solutions to this problem, 1) the space traveler must not care if he travels into the future or 2) all of humanity must travel together so that they are in the same reference frame and experience no relative time shift. This is an impractical solution, unless we were all programs running around in an increasingly small futuristic hard drive that has in immense storage facility. Essentially we would transplant our species, and all of our cultures. This is the only practical way to transplant a species of 6billion+. Besides this, in the reference frame of the traveler, it would still take a minimum of 4 years to travel 4 light years, no matter what the lorentz factor turns out to be.
Science fiction is not that farfetched once you study relativity :beer:

I'm sure what you typed is very interesting, however a lot of people won't read it because it's all jammed together without separation.

You guys forget one thing. As long as there is hatred, war, oppression, poverty, ect, we will never get to the points that are being discussed here. As technology progresses so does the fact we create something new everyday to kill ourselves with. Also there is the fact that the wold runs off money, so there will never be a uni-class. The corporate take over of the planet will never let that kind of technology reach common people. Which are 95% of the population. Only the elite 5% will have the power, and thats just not good for anyone. So dont look at it as a positive future, because it wont be. With that kind of power they will rule the world, just like they already do. Nothing will change.

Meh, who wants the live forever anyway. Everything must die, its just the way it is. No one person is so important to be above natural selection. Thats how people/things evolve. There are always ghosts in the machine, so I would never trust a digital brain.

You make a good point, it's very likely that any new technology we create will just end up being used for the wrong purposes, as it always has in the past. But that's just human nature I suppose.

"Here's an interesting idea: What if we could upload our conscience onto a computer, grow a younger version of ourselves in a lab, and transfer the conscience back onto the clone of our self? Using this method, one could technically live forever, as long as cloning and transference of conscience would be readily available."

Reminds me of a charactor; Lazurus Long. "Time enough For Love", by Robert Heinlin.

Lotus_Darkrose said:

2 Johnny Mnemonic videos linked in one day. That has to be a record on LPF. But anyways, with all the talk of brains, memories, computers this thread has shifted into, I give you Keanu Reeves in "Johnny Mnemonic". In this trailer from 1995, we see Keanu playing the role of the same character he plays in every movie he's in.



I want the weapon at 1:22 haha.

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Gotta love this movie. As well as all other Keanu Reeves movies

It's interesting....

Regarding the idea that we can never make super-human intelligences, I disagree. Once we make a human intelligence, it will start to self-program and beat us to the punch. Whereas we can take a thousand scientists and ten years to come up with some new ideas for intelligence, a computer, being millions of times faster (yet still capable of the same ingenuity as a person, eventually), will be able to self-program itself to become smarter and smarter, much faster than we would be able to do.

Regarding special relativity... being the subject closest to my heart, I think you are wrong here (I may be wrong, though). The idea is that, say, if you were to travel to Alpha Centauri, what, 4 lightyears away, it would be 4 years to everyone that *isn't* moving near the speed of light. However, the travel time that you would experience, minus acceleration, of course, would be something along the lines of 2 days, assuming a travel speed of 99.9999% the speed of light.

The reason being, lightyears is a measured distance that it takes light to travel in a year. It's not that the light experiences a years passage during this time, it's that everyone else experiences a years passage in this time. If we assume that the spaceship is approaching the properties of a photon, then it means that still, everyone else would experience those four years, and you would just experience a shorter and shorter time as you approached the properties of the photon (metaphorically, of course).

Here is one thing to ponder. Finite resources and infinite population growth.

Another point: if consciousness can be uploaded to a computer matrix, and this matrix does network with other conscious entities(assimilated by the borg) then wouldn't this conglomeration be more intelligent than a single entity? Edit: and what would be the consequences of assimilating unintelligent entities ? Would they dumb down the borg.

firelight said:

You make a good point, it's very likely that any new technology we create will just end up being used for the wrong purposes, as it always has in the past. But that's just human nature I suppose.

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Not if technology of the future becomes open source... the open source movement has the possibility of changing this sad truth that has curbed human creativity in the past so much.,
05 What Is The Plan?

anomanas said:

Not if technology of the future becomes open source... the open source movement has the possibility of changing this sad truth that has curbed human creativity in the past so much.,
05 What Is The Plan?

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Organized anarchy? oxymoron
Someone needs to find the creator of "Anonymous" and shoot him in the face. Some things need to be kept secret from the general public.

I apologize for bringing up an old post, but was reading this and found it interesting as I wrote about this subject and attempted to do a similar experiment for my Extended Essay in the IB program. In regards to a previous post, I just thought I would ask a question about the calculations for that special relativity statement by Wolfman:

Wolfman29 said:

It's interesting....
However, the travel time that you would experience, minus acceleration, of course, would be something along the lines of 2 days, assuming a travel speed of 99.9999% the speed of light.

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Wouldn't it be along the lines of about a month as opposed to 2 days? I was just curious because as I read the post I decided to attempt to calculate it myself. For the Lorentz transformation, I got 50 (using .99c for the velocity), and then because it would take 4 years from a non-inertial reference frame, divide that by 50 (the Lorentz transformation) to get 8% of a year (for 365, that would be 29.2 days). I am sorry for bringing this up, but it is just a topic that interests me ever since it became an option topic for my IB physics class. Please feel free to correct any mistakes that I made, reply to this post giving your opinions, or to ignore me completely, any one of the above is fine.

Well, that's why you got 50 instead of 2 days, like I did I assumed .999999c. Time dilation effects don't become exceptional until you get within decimals of a percentage point of c.

Oh, gawd - NOT "time travel" again... arglebargle!

anselm said:

Apparently a new record in data transmission.
Using a single laser to send data in multiple wavelengths.
I didn't quite get how they did that, but it's cool nonetheless.

BBC News - Laser puts record data rate through fibre

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It's a variation of frequency division multiplexing. Just with light instead of radio frequencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-division_multiplexing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-division_multiple_access

chaos913 said:

I apologize for bringing up an old post, but was reading this and found it interesting as I wrote about this subject and attempted to do a similar experiment for my Extended Essay in the IB program. In regards to a previous post, I just thought I would ask a question about the calculations for that special relativity statement by Wolfman:



Wouldn't it be along the lines of about a month as opposed to 2 days? I was just curious because as I read the post I decided to attempt to calculate it myself. For the Lorentz transformation, I got 50 (using .99c for the velocity), and then because it would take 4 years from a non-inertial reference frame, divide that by 50 (the Lorentz transformation) to get 8% of a year (for 365, that would be 29.2 days). I am sorry for bringing this up, but it is just a topic that interests me ever since it became an option topic for my IB physics class. Please feel free to correct any mistakes that I made, reply to this post giving your opinions, or to ignore me completely, any one of the above is fine.

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In 3 years you only make 2 post, and they both have nothing to do with lasers, on a laser hobby forum. You're a very strange person.