Then this is the core of our disagreement, and where our views truly diverge. yes, I very much do believe than human intelligence has broken away from the bonds, to some degree, of it's instinctual nature. The fact that our genes brought us our eventual intelligence is irrelevent - while they may have been totally self-oriented, they've now created altruistic beings that aren't, and can in fact now re-examine and tweak said genes as we speak.

In a more literal sense, we could look at the field of artificial intelligence, where intelligence has quite literally ursurped biology. Computers and robots have no need for genes in order to think.

Our intelligence shatters natural barriers left, right and center. Gravity says we have to stay on the ground? Fuck that. Lungs say we can't go underwater? Fuck that, too. Oxygen dependence says we can't venture outside the atmosphere? Yup, you guessed it - fuck that.

People break away from their instintive desires all the time. They defy self-preservation to save other people from burning buildings, they go on hunger strikes, they spend time blogging when their genes would have them out hunting for mates or prey (or both).

Complex, thinking, intelligent creatures. Where are the examples of bacteria, viral agents, ameobas, etc that choose not to reproduce?

Um... I wasn't really addressing Jules Verne.  I hardly think the fact that one writer guessed correctly about future technology is proof that other science fiction writers are correct about their guesses.

I will take the scientific approach and not believe this until you can demonstrate its truth.

I'm not even going here.  Equating thought with calculation, IMO, is a bit of a leap.

You're obviously not understanding what I'm saying.  I can't think of another way to say it now.  You need to think seriously about what you mean by "natural."  If you haven't given it a precise definition, you should.

Oh, hell.  I can't think of the name of them right now.  Maybe DamnDirtyApe will know what I'm talking about.  There's a single-celled organism that forms colonies when resources get low.  A stalk forms, and a spore drifts off to a new location.  The cells that form the stalk will starve to death, and are doomed to stay where they are.

Also, if you've got evidence that ants think, I know some zoologists who'd like to talk to you.

Hamby, we're already doing it, brother.  The final piece of the puzzle is being worked on for the space elevator.  The tether.  And that technology is already being worked on for a lot more reasons than just the space elevator.  It has immense potential for all kinds of for profit applications.

We are going forward with having a permanently manned moonbases in 20 years.

We gain a lot of shit from the stuff Nasa invents.  True there are a lot of things that are accreditted to Nasa that is not.  However, Nasa has produced a ton of shit that has profitable applications around the world.  We're going.  China's going, Russia is going, Europe is going, America is going.  We're already working on improving our ability.

Whether you like it or not we are already working toward this eventual event.

Now get in the rocket before I have to tie you up, put duct tape on your mouth, and drag you in.

Yeah, yeah.  I get all of this.  I don't doubt that we could come up with the technology to get stuff out of earth's gravity without strapping it to a big bomb.  I only slightly doubt that we could eventually put some kind of profit producing factory on the moon.  I seriously doubt that we could do it on Mars, and I just can't think of any way that this technology has any implications for getting us past the Kuiper Belt.

I don't mean to debate the notion that we can get a few people onto other rocks in this solar system.  I imagine we can.  I'm debating the plausibility of self-sustaining relocation of the human species.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm against space exploration.

Do you know how little use we had of the Interstate Highway System when it was authorized in 1956?  Very little compared to today.  However, once we had it companies started jumping all over ways of making money off of using it like starving wolves.

When we finish developing the carbon nanotubing needed for the final puzzle in the Space Elevator (And it's going to happen whether the Space Elevator is a goal or not), companies are going to scrap to the death over ways to utilize it for profit.  It's going to change the price of moving a pound of material from Earth to lower orbit to a fraction of the previous cost.  C'mon!  You don't think that a lot of companies will shit their pants over the potential when that happens? 

We're going to see an explosion in space applications for profit by private and public entities all over the planet.

And the beautiful thing is, it's all profit driven, Hamby.  And c'mon, you're a business man, if anything will make a person jump it's profit.  This is not an if.  This is a when.  And it's going to be soon.

*blinks*  Oh.

*shrugs*  Then no worries.  Once we have floating, navigational space stations set up in our solar system we have 5 billion years to work on shit before our sun dies.  We might be able to come up with something during that time.

No need for thanks.  I hope you've seen that I'll call anyone on what I think is wrong -- theist, atheist, or otherwise.  As I recall, I asked you for an example of what you believe, and you pointed me to several websites that were incoherent drivel.  If that is not what you believe, I'll take your word for it, but that's not really what I was talking about.  When I say that your philosophy seems incoherent to me, I mean your discussions on information and quantum physics that seem to get you to some kind of awareness on an astronomical scale, and bizarre statements like, "we need to return to philosophy."  I have yet to see you offer a coherent description of anything that could in any meaningful way be called a god or whatever it is you believe in.  In general, I have a hard time understanding what you mean most of the time.  No offense intended.  I'm not trying to be mean.  Your explanations just tend to come from five sides at once, and you don't offer many clear definitions.

Actually, come to think of it, after reading most everything you've written, I have no idea what you believe.

Is there any reason so far why we can't use robots to mine the asteroid belt for the resources we need, bring it back to earth orbit and construct the ships and habitats needed?

A robot with an ion drive would be just fine. If it takes 5 years to do the trip to the belt, mine several tonnes of ore (for example) and come back with it, who cares?

I really think the first thing we should be building in space is the basic factories to manufacture all the parts we need.

I just want to say "ditto" to Theia's entire post. I agree 100%.

(Saves me the trouble of writing out all those points all over again.)

Actually, no.  I wasn't saying that for effect.  I really do find it so incoherent that I don't even know how to talk about it.  Before I'd even know how to ask you a question about it, I'd have to know what you mean by most of the words.

Again, I'm not sure.  If you believe that consciousness is not tied to a physical body and that people's minds are entirely a result of local physical phenomena, it's pretty much impossible that you would have taken the same route as me, as I am a strict materialist, and I believe that consciousness is wholly dependent on being alive, in the biological sense.

I strive to be clear.  Sorry.

My approach right now is to go on the assumption that we have a fundamental communication issue, so I'm reading what you say to others, trying to figure out what you might mean.

I wouldn't use AI as an example of intelligence. So far, our work in AI has not gotten us much closer to the actual goal of intelligence. We've done some pretty cool things -- pattern recognition, neural nets, expert systems, and the like -- but we still have no idea how to build a truly intelligent computer.

So far, our triumph over nature is merely in environment. We are experts at manipulating the environment to our own ends, what with houses and cities and irrigation and the destruction of other species and whatnot. Even with our expertise there, we're still managing to fuck it all up, due to human nature.

So far, our forays into genetics and AI are limited in scope. Genetics has an excuse. It's still a very young science. AI has no such excuse. We've been trying to program intelligence into computers for over 45 years. About its only excuse is that we have no accurate model for our own intelligence. (That may be changing, what with the study of emergence and a larger focus of information theory as an independent field of research.)

Here's the problem:

I tend toward your point of view. I firmly believe we can have self-sustaining colonies on planets in our own solar system. It'll take a long while before they are self-sustaining, but I believe it can be done.

And I'm with Hamby in that it's likely it'll be thousands of years before we can travel to another habitable planet orbiting a neighboring star. The likelihood of us getting there is pretty slim. The technological hurdles aren't the thing holding us back, just as I mentioned that technological issues and questions of resource aren't holding us back in fixing the real problems here on earth.

The core problem is human nature. Even our tiny and friendly disagreement in this thread indicates that intelligent people with strong educational backgrounds and consensus on religion can't agree on much beyond the basics.

Throw in people who are greedy, who game the system, who are willing to exploit others for their own gain, and you have the essential problems of the human condition. Mix that with a little bit of tribalism (America -- love it or leave it!), and you have a nice cocktail for fucked-up-titude.

At least, that's how I see it. As per usual, I could be wrong.

Well, that's probably why it's broken.  What you've just said appears contradictory to your previously stated belief.  To say that there's a subtle difference is to say nothing unless the subtle difference is clearly explained.  (I'm not actually asking for an explanation, just pointing out why I think it's hard for me to understand you.)

Yeah.  No problem at all. 

Actually, kudos to DamnDirtyApe for illustrating a really excellent point with this thread.  It's nice to remember from time to time just how emotionally attached we can get to things that make us feel good.

I was thinking about the colonisation of other planets, or even landing on other life-filled planets. Even if the atmospheric and climatic environment is suitable for life like ourselves, it still wouldn't be suitable for us, nor would it be suitable for the life that exists on that planet for us to land there. The problem is diseases.

When Europeans first settled in America they brought with them European diseases which killed off vast amounts of natives who had no immunity to them. It's likely that diseases on another planet that are harmless to the life on that planet could be extremely dangerous to us, and our diseases to them. Indeed who's to say that two biological populations that evolved from scratch on separate planets could even live together without one killing the other, or them both killing each other. Even if we, and any intelligent species living on that planet both sought peace we would probably still kill each other unintentionally.

The way to do it, is probably to make contact at a distance, and perhaps eventually if an understanding is met, begin some kind of immunisation process before entering their planet. This is unlikely, even if they are human-like in some respects there's no guarantee they would be reasonable or scientific.

While the idea that we could catch a disease from them or the other way around is possible, I consider it highly unlikely.  Europeans coming to the Americas is a bad example.  To the European diseases Native Americans were just humans with little to no resistance.  So a species spreading a disease to other members of the same species is obviously a danger.

However, could you tell me one disease that humans can give to say.....alligators?

There are a lot of things that can spread within a species.

Fewer that can spread among say all the mammals.

Damn fewer that can spread between mammals and reptiles.

Can anything at all disease wise spread between mammals and fish?

Their disease would have evolved to fit the environment of their bodies, not ours.  Our bodies most likely would be an incompatible environment for them to survive.

What if they are silicon based where as we are carbon based?

War of the Worlds was a good flick and all.  But I'm still not buying how the aliens died at the end.

You're largely correct on that point of potential extraterrestrial life, but given how little we actually know about microbial diversity, a pathogen or parasite with equal taste for mammals and reptiles is a distinct possibility which grows more likely with human encroachment.  

As for silicon based life, let's not start with that.  Although silicon does have an identical outer valence shell to carbon, it still doesn't form silicon-silicon double bonds and triple bonds with anything like the frequency of carbon, which shuts down a whole lot of possibilities for life.  Furthermore silicon dioxide precipitates out in aqueous solutions, so your silicon based organisms will find water completely toxic.   

I'll bow to your greater knowledge on this.  I got the idea about silicon based life forms from Carl Sagan.

Really?

The man who did Cosmos?  And liked photo ops in classrooms teaching children about the solar system?  This is news to me.

I find Tyson to be incredibly grating.  I feel almost certain I wouldn't like him in person.

One of my friends used to joke around with the notion of SETI someday just finding a giant blob of grey goo that was ponderous drifting towards Earth.

"Well, we have some good news, and we've got a bit of bad news. The good news is a real stunner: we finally found it! The evidence of extra-terrestrial life elsewhere in the universe!"

"That's great! Err... what's the bad news?"

"...Well, the evidence? It comes in the form of a giant form of microscopic robots that likely ate whoever made them, whatever world they lived on, and probably whatever solar system the world was located in. And they're drifting toward us.

Oh, don't worry - they aren't going to eat us. They cloud's mass is so enormous that in a few days, it's gravitational influence is going to rip Earth out of it's orbit. We'll all be frozen to death by the time the machines actually reach us."

Oooooohhhhhh...

Yeah...

Um...

[/Foot in Mouth OFF]

I understand that there are few diseases that we share with fish or reptiles. But, we have no idea what an extra-terrestrial biological environment could do to us. There could be microbes that are entirely benign to every species of "animal" or "plant" on that planet, that do not affect them. They could be digestion aiding microbes for a space cow, but to us they could be lethal. Let's say we come to a great peace deal with an intelligent species of life, we manage to communicate and strike up trading opportunities, we could still kill each other entirely by accident with our microbial residents. Oops, my gut bacteria just killed Zorg! Damn! Oh no Xew's second brain gongols have made me very ill!