https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/801.....nhqgo1_500.jpg

LOL!

Whoops!

Hell yes, Etheras *big thumbs up* <^-^>

The Transhuman revolution is coming. Sadly, I fear it's inevitable. Our technological prowess has progressed far far faster than our intellectual or ethical stats.
We already have technologies that surpass our natural biological parts, and as soon as such things become more readily available, our societies will be divided between "unmodified" and "posthuman".

Yes... where the rich basically become immortal beings with the strength of a gorilla, the beauty of a model, and perceptions of unbelievable acuity. Become a god for 4 easy installments of $1 mil. President's day only, modify one leg and get the other ABSOLUTELY FREE.

(Bit of dark humor there, but... yeah).

But like.. then there's all these other problems. People who don't want to be modified will be discriminated-against. For example, I am an engineer iRL. What if my company says, "We need you to have a mathemetics co-processor installed in your brain. It will make you more productive. We'll pay for it. But if you refuse, we'll replace you with someone who will." And then what happens if someone figures out how to HACK said processor in other people's brains? The whole thing is a very slippery slope. it worries me greatly.

And what's worse is the ethics today of figuring this out. I watched a pro-transhumanist documentary and I felt ILL at what they're doing. This scientist was BEAMING PROUD that he removed a chimp's brain and kept it alive in a jar (as a precursor to someday putting a human brain in a robot), and that he could send stimuli to it via electrodes. I mean... calling doctor Frankenstein. What do you do with the chimp brain, which is still alive and conscious (although probably driven to madness at nonsensical sensory input being jabbed into it). You already took its body. What do you do, throw it in the trash? The whole thing is just monstrous. <:(

On the brain hacking thing.

1. It's unlikely that a calculator in your brain could take control of your body, it would have to be an implant specifically designed to manipulate your motor functions.

2. There are many electronics that truly, seriously, DO NOT NEED AN INTERNET CONNECTION. Unfortunately a lot of companies put them in stuff like voting machines and insulin pumps anyways.

I shouldn't speculate on things that haven't been invented yet, but "hacking" a brain chip doesn't necessarily mean zombie-human puppets. If there's a visual or auditory cortex interface, they could force you to hallucinate. If it does any power management of it own, you could burn it out and maybe kill someone like flipping a switch. But... like I said... not invented yet, so I dunno. :P

And you might be right that it doesn't need an internet connection, but I BET it will have a wireless connection for the simple reason that if you probably don't want someone sawing into your skull every time there's a software update :P

Pop up ads in your BRAIN, man.

Augmented reality illusions will probably be a problem as soon as Google Glass and its knockoffs become mainstream, which I honestly think will be a net good as they will enable the public to keep a closer eye on the government.

The thing about updates is that you could probably have an external USB port (need to charge it somehow) or bluetooth and could download the updates to your PC, which would probably be a phone, tablet or AR glasses by that point.

This piece looks very cool and pretty. ^_^

As for the topic of Transhumanism: I believe myself that there are positives and negatives to this. We have produced technology that can benefit humanity in the long run, but there is also things that we as a species have created that are unnecessary. Now when we as society go way more towards one directing that is when things get dicey. Cyborgization is a prime example of this: I am all for developing technology that can replace and arm or leg, maybe even a heart or other organ, but when your talking going full blown cyborg that is when very strict rules need to come into play. Ghost in the Shell touched on these topics quite a bit. This in my two sense worth. :3

Yeah Ghost in the Shell is very smart... but GitS's questions really have more to do with esoteric/philosophical questions like, "can machines be alive", "can machines be conscious", "can machines have a soul", "how much of you can be removed before you're not a human, and does your soul go with it", and in SoC season1 especially "What is the nature of God (from a robot's perspective)?"

It doesn't really get into Human Revolution's much more grounded, practical questions like... "Transhumanism: Good or Bad?" and "What might be the social and ethical side effects of transhumanism?"

I do agree with you that replacements for injured people makes sense. I though that it won't stop there, and we'll be working on super human parts. I wonder if our future is being the Borg. Borg are really powerful and stuff but ... who would want to be one of them? Not I.

Glad you like the piece. :P

Yeah your right about GitS touching more on the machine with a soul aspect to things. I agree on what you said about the super human parts thing. I get a little scared myself with what might happen if we really pushed for that kinda of technology which more or less we are trying to achieve without fully understanding the "Pandora's Box" we may or may not open. I definitely do not want our species becoming Borg like.

I personally think becoming integrated with technology is the next step.. im all for it.. and up until a few years ago, I hoped I could be one of the developers of it. The thing that changed is that I realized that I hadn't selected a very good path to reach it. A few years ago, when I had just graduated from high school, I was, and still am working with a branch of Human Resources that had promised me up to 8 years of paid-for education.. and I ruined it by choosing to go to our local community college to get a BA.. come to find out, only the first class of the series I wanted was available on a regular basis, and the second one was rarely put on.. and there were something like 3 more classes after that, that they had information about, but apparently never ended up doing due to lack of interest.

While I sympathize with your plight, I can't help being SOMEWHAT glad that you won't be contributing to the transhuman monstrosity. Unfortunately.... I am. I know my software is used for designing robotic prosthesis because I talked to the CEO of a company who is making them.

Strangely enough, he had the same stance I do. Prosthetic limbs for cripples is good. But once they get better than real ones, it will be bad. Its just a can of worms that shouldn't be opened. But we'll open it.

In a sense, medical technology and procedures today can already make you better than a normal person. Tiger Woods has better than 20/20 vision because of corrective laser eye surgery. People are complaining about Oscar "Blade Runner" Pistorius because he doesn't have an extra 20lbs of meat and sinew to carry around with his prosthetic running legs. I overheard a father talking about corrective surgery for his daughter's knees that would actually give her the potential to be a better dancer then a normal person (I don't know how true this is). The various things athletes can afford to do to get an edge on the competition are far from normal and place their abilities and recovery rates above normal humans.

It's a plausible argument that biological 3D printing is going to outpace prosthesis and turn it into an obsolete (or less attractive) field of study once the medical side catches up with the printing technology. It's technologically plausible to replace organs and body parts without the need for anti-rejection drugs by using the recipient's own stem cells. That will, for the most part, curb a lot of demand for prosthetic parts as the majority of people want a flesh arm, not a terminator arm. Of course, what governments, militaries, and large companies do behind closed doors is another matter.

3D printers and "research ink" have already successfully created simple things like blood vessels with a mixture of stem cells and "biological scaffolding" to give form while the cells grow. Organs might not be that far off. The printers themselves aren't even that high on the tech tree. It's basically 2D plotting work and stacking layers, so no true 3D work is involved. The materials science and printing media is the biggest limitation right now. I work in aerospace and "traditional" manufacturing technology is waaay more complex than 3D printers, and much more precise and accurate. Of course, it's going to get it's ass kicked by additive manufacturing in many ways but that's an off-topic discussion.

This is not the same as transhumanism. Using lasers to improve vision isn't the same as replacing one's eyes with mechanical alternatives. You are still human if you get your knee repaired in a particular way, especially if its your own cells. The "Blade Runner" does not have human feet, he is arguably not a complete human. Right now, there is some argument as to whether his prosthesis give him an advantage. But there will come a day when the advantage of prosthesis will be obvious. THAT is what we are talking about. People sawing off their own legs in order to get ones objectively better than their natural legs. And what happens when you replace almost everything? When you have nothing original except a brain, and even that has all kinds of chips in it? Is that person really still human?

That's the question.

Which would be your definition of transhuman? There is no official definition of what a transhuman is, unfortunately. Because of that, there seem to be many different ideas on where the lines are drawn. I think you're looking more at the "macro level" and a narrower scope of mechanical/cybernetic implants and the associated body horror it implicates , but there's a lot of ground and intermediary technological "micro" steps to cover between fully natural human beings and having cybernetic bodies.

We're on that road now. If we simply focus on drop-in replacement human parts available in cybernetic or bio-genetic flavors and all the squicky body horror it encompasses, then asking the question becomes a moot point because we've overlooked all the small jumps that got us to that destination meanwhile, and technologies outside using non-biological construction materials.

Looking up "transhumanist technologies" and using definitions provided from self-identified transhumanist organization/group/club/funhouse websites, it includes AI, cloud storage for the mind, virtual reality, space colonization, gene therapy, bionics, cryonics, and a bunch of stuff I didn't even consider transhuman. The commonality is using science and technology to transcend the physical and mental limitations of the human body. None of them defined transhumanism as replacing human body parts with cybernetic ones; that's included but only one aspect of the entire movement. The technologies they claim as transhumanism spans emerging technologies in a spectrum of NBIC: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Plastic surgery, in-vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic screening of human embryos for reproduction, performance-enhancing doping, medical implants like pacemakers, bioactive implants, metallic, organ transplants. These are existing baby-step technologies that already put us on the first stretch of the transhumanist road. They strictly fit the condition of exceeding the basic human condition as it was meant to be and while they can be dismissed as "micro transhumanism" and not "macro transhumanism", it's still transhumanism. They're just not as horrific-sounding as scooping out eyeballs and replacing it with a biocybernetic eyeball with a built-in HUD interface, and telephoto zoom, or dropping in a genetically engineered eyeball using code from the mantis shrimp that allows vision extended into IR and UV.

We can look down the road and look at these massive technology jumps and try to apply ethical and philosophical discussions to them, but we're going to overlook all the baby steps we're taking now. I feel all of it is an interesting argument to have, and when you start factoring in economics, society, personal freedoms, regulation, and government, it gets even more murky. The dystopian view is GATTACA, where only the super rich can afford such thing. Another dystopian view is the Brave New World where everything becomes regulated. Then you have the utopian view of transhuman technologies being the ultimate expression of personal freedom and identity, perhaps at the expense of discarding the "human" part.

Trying to define "human" is also another interesting philosophical discussion. It can be muddied with technology, but also ultimately, time. Homo Sapiens emerged about 200,000 years ago. While recorded human history dates back perhaps 10-15kyrs, 200k is still a drop in the geological bucket that spans over 10 billion years. Thinking large scale, if/when humans colonize other planets and solar systems in the galaxy and beyond, Homo Sapiens will cease to exist at some point. We will slowly diverge genetically to adopt to our various environments (using the thought experiment that we wouldn't even touch transhumanist technologies). That would be a "natural biological" evolution driven strictly by the passage of hundreds of thousands, or millions of years of dynastic human presense. Biologically, our future selves would become sterile with Homo Sapiens of today, and perhaps even quite alien! So is the concept of humanity itself tied to our physical bodies as they appear today as-is (which to me, seems rather egocentric) or some greater, nebulous concept, like an enduring spirit for exploration, war, love, curiosity?

I think...no one has an answer, and it always inevitably leads to bigger questions. Where's Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku when you need them?!

Transhumanism is the belief that "improving" the body by incorporating non-human elements is good. Usually they would be talking about non-biological elements. And the purpose of the replacement is to make one's self better than a human being is naturally, as opposed to doing it to repair damage or replace missing parts. That is, they're voluntarily removing their human parts for the sake of removing human constraints - That's transhumanism; Voluntarily removing one's body parts in favor of synthetic parts due to a belief that the human parts are obsolete.

The problem you're struggling with is "When does one cease to be human?" But I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about TranshumanISM - or the belief that a cyborg "human race" is preferable. I'm talking about the movement, not the product.

Some of these other things aren't transhumanist at all, no matter what others say. Remember that correcting problems is not transhumanist. The difference comes down to choice. If you're unable to have a baby, and so you opt for IV Fertilization, that's not transhumanist. Humans are a tool-making species. It is human to make tools to fix problems. If someone gets a gash and they stitch it up with synthetic thread, that's not transhuman. The transhumanist movement might want you to THINK that it is, because it makes them seem less fringe if we believe that "smaller" transhumanist technologies have already been widely accepted, but that's not true. Toolmaking *is* human. Caring about eachother and fixing hurts is human. In fact, I think that if a kid gets a gash and you opt to let him bleed out rather than trying to fix it would be INhuman.

Dentures do not make you a cyborg, nor do replacement hips. These are tools that correct problems with an individual's body. Transhumanism would be to have all of ones teeth ripped out in order to put in like... steel shark teeth that can eat anything. Or take a perfectly good biological leg off because there are new legs on the market that can run 40 MPH.

You seem intent on pegging it to cybernetics. However, would transhumanism also apply to biological superiority? That is, not simply the conceptual idea of engineering "perfect humans " by eliminating defective genes and detrimental mutations that cause suffering, but going beyond the natural human gene pool and engineering superior biological components that also serve the role of making standard human parts obsolete?

If lasik and similar processes can dependably create 10/10 vision and someone with perfect 20/20 vision opts for this procedure, is that technically transhumanist to seek out to improve on something that is not broken? Instead of shark teeth, does replacing perfectly good teeth with titanium implants and ceramic abutments/crowns transhumanist because implant systems make teeth easily replaceable and ceramic is more durable than enamel of teeth? These are arguably small improvements, but improvements nonetheless.

I'm not being flippant or purposely difficult. I've heard the term several times in the past but never gave much thought to it. I saw your discussions on the submission, poked around out of genuine interest and found various transhumanist groups claiming to represent such ideas. I found it incredibly broad and fuzzy. I like accuracy and precision and find it hard to deal with fuzzy concepts. That's why I'm having problems. I can't even define the term, at least based off their own definitions. Your third paragraph is much more precise than the wishy-washy stuff I saw.

Perfect humans are still humans. Once you start adding foreign DNA (like a human with gills or something) THEN its no longer human. But even then, it still doesn't necessarily apply. Once could argue that the gill-man didn't make a conscious decision to be abnormal, he's not a transhumanist. It would only be if the genes were inserted voluntarily by a retrovirus or something.

Correcting genetic limitations still isn't inhuman. Giving someone "better than average vision" isn't strange for human abilities. Just like how we treat people for cystic fibrosis or hemophilia. Trying to correct, and even succeeding at fixing the problems isn't inhuman. But giving a person hawks eyes. for example, would be. Basically... we have an idea of what human is. If you modify a person to have abilities beyond those boundaries they're trans-human. And no - dentures do not make you a cyborg :P

Movements like to be all-inclusive because they want to recruit you. Atheists say "You live your life as if there were no god, therefore you're an atheist." Even if you're a devout Christian. Christians say "You live your life by a moral code and sense of rightness. Therefore you subconsciously believe in God" Even if you're a devout atheist. So of course the transhumanist movement wants you to think that dentures are transhuman, but they're really just trying to sucker you in. There's a wide gap between dentures and being The Borg.

Your arguments are sound. Transhumanism (pro/con/etc) is not something I have really delved into with anyone since it's never really come up in idle conversation before. Therefore I've never really heard any arguments that dug below basic sales pitches to pique interest, which is what you've summarized it as.

Cybernetic enhancement seems to delineate a fairly obvious line between natural and unnatural. The biological aspect of engineering seems to make it a bit more murky. And as you pointed out, if we define transhumanism as the personal choice to push ourselves beyond human limits, then someone who was engineered at/before birth to be that way would not be transhuman in the sense that they picked that life (if that's how we chose to define transhuman). It'd simply be the genetic hand they were dealt.

The entire idea is fascinating to me on many levels. There's no shortage of dystopian sci-fi written on such speculative ideas that reflect these fears, and few utopian ones (I suspect the body horror). I'm very curious how society will react as technology continues to advance. We've always had the fringe vocal minority that protested at progress but at some point, they become real concerns. I'm curious if serious discussion will be had on all the emerging technologies. The only real attempt I've found is the Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance report that's over a decade old, by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

What makes me most curious is what sacrifices humanity might be willing to make if we were to become a dominating space-faring race into the deep future. Space travel takes a damn long time if you're wanting to zoom around any decent distance using plausible conventional technology. Radiation isn't good for you, and being little sacks of meat and water that require gas exchange to survive, we're not very durable or hardy either. I've heard many reasonable arguments that it's cheaper and easier to just send robots all over the place.

It is cheaper and easier to send robots all over the place, but if you're suggesting that we send robot bodies with immortal human brains, I suspect that the human brain will be entirely insane by the time it reaches its destination. A human mind wouldn't do well with a thousand years of no-stimulus or interaction. So transhumanism doesn't actually solve this problem. You are left with the same possibilities as deep-space biological travel:

1. Multi-Generational colony ships
2. Some sort of stasis or hibernation (caveat being: if you're freezing you need to get very close to absolute 0 or people's carbon atoms will deteriorate over long voyages)
3. Very fast ships. Use relativity to your advantage. Using external power (like a sail), that way your fuel source doesn't increase your mass. If you are able to accelerate at 1G for 1 year (objective), you will approach the speed of light. Then you can "teleport" (subjective) anywhere, and 1G for 1 year slowdown. Passengers would experience less than 2 years travel time, but thousands or millions of years could have passed in the outer universe.

I like this last possibility, but there are some serious problems with it. Like... how do you accelerate a ship at 1G for 1 year and then decelerate it without bringing your fuel source? Orbiting is the obvious way. Fling yourself around a star for awhile.... but then you'd have to get super-close to the surface to maintain your orbit at high speed. Also you'd probably mash your crew against the side of the ship from the inertia. So you'd need some kind of inertial dampeners AND amazing heat shields, and even then it might not be possible.

Naw I am not suggesting sticking human brains in a machine. Humans are terrible with dealing with isolation and long-term passage of time. We absolutely agree on that. Even in human-time scale and not vast geological time scale, people go bonkers in solitary confinement, and even that has a degree of interaction with your environment and randomness. I have a hard time planning what I'll be doing on weekends! Sending a ton of self-repairing robotic systems for redundancy and shooting them in all sorts of directions seems fairly cheap, technologically/logistically speaking compared to sending bundles of folks all over in the future.

1) Generational ships introduce interesting problems of how to keep those who are born and die on ships motivated and "on mission". Being born light centuries from some home planet supposedly called Earth and still light centuries from some destination called ASDF123 doesn't seem like a lot of motivation to keep the ship running under massive resource conservation and recycling. Why should such a person care? Seems like a strong-handed element of social engineering would be required to keep something like that going, and each successive generation within some sort of social/idealogical "tolerance" set by the original mission parameters. Stray too far one way or the other and it seems doomed. It also seems, at first glance, quite unfair in that the original mission crew volunteered for this life, but successive generations are born into a forced lifestyle that they had no say in. Their lives essentially are not their own, and the only justification would be for the benefit tens of generations later.

2) Seems promising if we can solve the issue of ice crystals from shredding cell membranes upon "thawing". Unfortunately cryogenics has kind of been hijacked by a lot of transhumanists and I'm not sure what actual scientific state the technology is in and what parts are woowoo pseudoscience. But you're right, we'd have to keep atoms at minimal energy levels. The lowest temperatures we can achieve use laser traps but that's only useful for a handful of atoms in a very controlled environment. I honestly don't know much about the state of cryogenics for people. This does seem like a reasonable and least technologically-pesky/interfering solution.

3) Maxing speed like that is, like you pointed, a severe issue for outside observers, as the passage of time can be ridiculous. t'=1/SQRT(1-n^2/c^2) really becomes a problem once we're hitting really high percentages of c (99%+), where the exponential nature starts approaching the asymptote. Though, for example, if we scale back to around 87% c, passage of time outside is only 200% of that experienced by a passenger. Roughly at 98%, time is only 500% faster outside. That's still reasonable. At 99% its 700% and at 99.9%, 2200%, etc. Of course, law of diminishing returns, assuming we even have the technological ability to push such velocities since the requited energy consumed would be outrageous. I'd be pretty happy at .87c!

Though, solar sails and Bussard ramjets are mathematically sound concepts. They're just...HUGE. Engineering abilities would end up being the limitations of getting such systems to work to avoid ridiculous fuel loads. Until we reach that point, I think we'll be happily refining on Mars and Titan as places to refuel our ships while we play around. Getting out of Earth's atmosphere is already going to put you way ahead since you've just shaved 11.2km/s off your dV budget. Hell, traveling around the local solar system is downright cheap if you're launching off Mars ( 5.0 km/s) and 2.65 km/s for Titan. Just the dV consumed by escaping Earth is enough to travel anywhere in the solar system itself. That assumes the ship even lands, which isn't needed for a refueling point. It makes more sense for a ship to take a parking orbit and having a fuel tug refuel in-orbit, which means you only need dV for your trans(insert objective here) injection, and fuel for getting into orbit and accelerating back, plus maneuvering/correction juice.

I couldn't find dV maps for other planets or the solar system (a shame!), but Mars is pretty cheap if you didn't start on Earth. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe.....System.svg.png

Using large gravitational bodies both to accelerate and decelerate would absolutely work but the mathematics would require incredible precision. I imagine the acceleration part is easy since you'd start at a velocity of your choice and start your increasingly tighter orbits. Finding a way to bleed your speed is more difficult. Slowing the rotation of large bodies that won't miss it a bit would be the most economical thing to do, certainly! Here's to private space enterprise and spreading out elsewhere, and that we can hopefully get our crap together and accomplish this before a catastrophe wipes out civilization!

So... the requirement for a solar sail is sometimes misunderstood. They do not have to be huge, they can be small provided you have a way to focus external energy. For example, if you had a satellite network orbiting a star with high intensity lasers, your solar sail would only have to be the size of the maximum variance of your wavelength * the resolution at range. Or, in other words, as laser technology gets better, the size of your sail would decrease. Of course this implies that you have seeded stars with satellites, but since they can be unmanned, it shouldn't be too onerous.

Using slingshots to accelerate would never get you close enough to C for a relativistic benefit. So you're back to hibernation or multi-generational ships again. Also... you can't have to fuel on board and use relativity to "teleport", since the mass of an object increases with its velocity, there comes a point where there is no fuel with an energy density sufficient to overcome its own mass. That is... say your gasoline gets heavier the faster you go. There will be a speed at which no matter how much gas you burn, it can't move the mass of the truck because the gas is in the truck. There's a diminishing rate of returns until that rate becomes 0. So, to approach C, your craft must use external fuel.

have you played the original Dues Ex?

Deus, and yes I've played them all. There are actually 3: Deus Ex, Invisible War, and Human Revolution. (People always forget that second one 'cuz they say it sucked. I thought it was pretty good, just not as good as the first one)

Our bodies are designed to slowly decay until we simply die. Sometimes without reason.

If you could find replacements that would work better, more efficiently and never break again... what sane reason would exist to turn it down?

Should we settle for what nature has given us, surrender ourselves to our own mortality?

The flesh is the limitation.

As a counterpoint to your assertion: we are designed to get old and die. There are cells in the human body that perform replacement on the parts of their DNA that are damaged (gametes for example). Therefore, evolution (or god or whatever you believe) has deemed it necessary that we die and that the next generation take over.

This makes sense from a biological standpoint. If all beings start out as vulnerable infants, like the Titan Saturn, undying parents could destroy future generations and remain immortal without any reason to share resources. They will remain forever trapped to their own limitations. We see this today in the form of bacteria. The oldest amoeba is still alive. All amoebas are the oldest amoeba.

Point is... without dying to free up resources for the next generation, your species never evolves. You become the amoeba forever trapped as being an amoeba. Unchanging. Going nowhere.

Ooh. I love your reference to Saturn as an example. I agree with all your points, that little bit of writing does not not reflect my views, its the views of a character of mine.

I love transhumanism as a feature of fiction. Both the Dues Ex games as my absolute favourite fictional universes. The power struggles involving Bob Page and the Council of Five were a treat to experience.

It also features heavily in my own written canon, showcasing both the positives and negatives, where although neural implants are incredibly useful and powerful, they can cause severe mental health problems, and one of the main characters abuses augmentation to unnaturally extend her life.

But to keep on track with your original point about Real Life applications, I am fascinated by the potential. Its terrifying. Its amazing. I follow developments closely, and would volunteer myself for testing in a heartbeat if given an opportunity.

Thanks I thought that was pretty clever.

Yes all my comments on this page are OOC too. I have a story somewhere that implies Etheras is also transhuman (transfennec?). Transhumanism might not be the worst thing, if you're one of the ones who gets to lord over everybody else. Provided, of course, that you can keep up with the "arms race" (literally).

Might be like phones. Gotta get that next gen ANDROID or you're just not cool.

What I see is manufactured gods, objectively superior, ruling over all the "lesser creatures". There also becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Without the tech, you can't get a good job to afford the tech that allows you to get the good job (etc et infinitum). The rich may not be permanently rich, but the poor will be permanently poor. I am okay with there being a gap between rich and poor, but I don't think that a society, completely lacking in social mobility, is desirable.

I am a great believer in Corporeal Freedom. The freedom to do what you want with your body, no matter what it is.

The way Iain M Banks talks about transhumanism in his Culture novels show them as just a fact of life, available to all, to the point where NOT having any implants is sometimes considered 'fashionable'.
If you haven't read them, I very much recommend starting with either "Excession" or "Use of Weapons".

And like you say, cybernetics etc can never work in human society until the society itself changes away from the egocentric consumerist hellhole it is today.

I am also a believer in corporal freedom. But that presents a moral quandary... since that implies that one should not be compelled into having modifications that they do not want. But then you have your employer, who understandably wants the most productive workers possible, will favor modified employees. Therefore, you may not really have a choice, once everybody else starts to do it. It will be a revolution, like the information revolution, and the industrial revolution. These made the people who can't use computers obsolete; The businesses that don't use steam/hydro power are obsolete. Now: if you don't wanna hack off your limbs and put chips in your brain: you are obsolete.

As for egocentric consumerism - I am totally a fan of these things. What I am not a fan of is the idea that some humans will become so objectively superior to others that the human race becomes enslaved in a situation where rebellion can't succeed. Humans need the ability to dethrone their leaders, or else they can't hold those leaders accountable. But how do you destroy someone so superior that they're basically a god? Who can put chips in you and track you to thwart "domestic terrorism" or whatever they decide their motivation is?

It could be the end of us, that's all I'm saying.

If you played Human Revolution, you'd notice how discriminated against augmented employees were in the Tai Yong Medical building. They were seen as lesser beings, NEEDING the augmentations to make up for their own shortcomings. So your hypothetical scenario isn't the only outcome.

And this entire second paragraph is the plot to the original Duex Ex. If you haven't played it, you 100% need to.

Either way, we won't know until it happens. But I look forward to it, in a morbidly curious way.

Yes I've played Deus Ex, Invisible War, and Human Revolution. Its been awhile since I played 1 and 2 though.

Good taste in games this Fen right here.

*Screaming* There's a new Deus Ex?!

Yes. Its a port from mobile, I think.

Ahhhh! I just bought it! *vibrates from excitement*

I see you, a thief on the roof. My new satellite link has both infrared and the x-ray spectrum. I see your heart beating. I see you are afraid. - Gunther Hermann, Deus Ex

A machine would not make a mistake. - Anne Navarre, Deus Ex

The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands. The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms. - Morpheus (Echelon 4), Deus Ex

These are but a few examples of m thoughts on the matter, sourced from the original game of course. ;) I personally feel that we are already on teh brink of several developments that will usher in the age of transhumanism within the next twenty years or so. That is of course assuming that our relative technological growths continue onward at their current pace as expected. In any case, human beings are by our very nature flawed creatures and no amount of technological prowess will ever solve that problem. That being said however, the ability to restore the legs of wheelchair bound man, give motor functions back to someone with Parkinson's disease, save the life of a child with a terminal heart condition, and extend our 'natural' lives by untold years seems more than adequate in the long run for the tradeoffs that would have to be made to make that happen. Quite frankly, this is the next step in human evolution and there is relatively little that anyone can do to stop it. I for one cannot wait to see what the future brings. :D

For the record, transhumanism is the VOLUNTARY removal of the "biological constraints" of one's body. Prosthesis are not considered transhuman because all they're doing is repairing damage. It doesn't mean they would prefer the robot legs over having their real fleshy legs. Also, dentured seniors are not posthumans :P

Being in high technology iRL, I can say with assurance that the "age of transhumanism" will not occur within 20 years. Probably not even 50. Its just not very high on the radar of most people. The public's attention is on more short-term marketable things like cheap sustainable energy, self-driving cars, and TVs with pixels so small you can't see them. It will be a long time before a cyborg arm is built that will make people go, "Screw this flesh arm! Take it off!" :P

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/yM5bp

I like the last one. :P To paraphrase native american folklore: Its All-Seeing-Eyes all the day down . :P

That game was brilliant

Sorry for the double comment but

I did every ending on that game. Even have a guide on how to beat the last fight on the hardest difficulty in under a minute. Didnt know they were making another one, now you got my hopes up!! I took weeeks upon weeks just going thriugh that game and reading every single detail ans hacking every computer. Absolutely loved ever minute of it, alot of cool eye opening and fascinatng technological aspects were talked about so openly in that game. I actually have the ending dialogue when you blow up the facility as the intro track on a CD I burned.

Humans like to think they're 'above' nature, and will always be trying to make people 'better' for, well... better or worse, and sadly, it always seems like it's the 'worse' part that ends up coming true. There's really way too many of us on this rock already, and everybody's looking for an edge over the next person. I don't honestly think there's going to be anything anyone will be able to do to stop it because it's like Pandora's box. Once it's opened, it can't be put back. Somebody desperate enough will always do anything for money overriding all their senses of morality and ethics. It's much like predicting the end of the world. If and when it ever does come to pass, what could we do, or where could we go to escape it? Nowhere. There's no sense worrying about things we can't control, so, I'm just going to crack open a nice bottle of rum, find a nice sandy beach, and relax while it happens!

Hi!

So... there are not "too many of us on this rock" - in fact, fertility has been reducing as the world becomes richer. We are almost down to natural replacement. The carrying capacity of the earth is now estimated at 12 billion. If current trends persist, the human species will cap at 10 billion, and then reduce naturally. If that's true, there will come a time when we will have to subsidize the natural human population with test-tube children in order to maintain a stable population. People just don't want as many kids as they used-to.

As-for "where to go when it happens"? Mars! We'll be on Mars before the transhumanism revolution. Unfortunately, I expect that it will be MORE popular there, where having superhuman strength and maybe the ability to breathe the Martian atmosphere, or extreme tolerances for cold (etc) would be more useful.

The planet might be able to hold us all, but when aquifers are drying up, particularly the deep water or fossil aquifers in China, India, and here in the US, might mean that there's far too many mouths to fill. Articles like http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150159/ published just last November, and many others like it are popping up and are revealing some rather startling things. With some of these aquifers, the water in them hasn't been to the surface for millions of years. When it's pumped out it's gone for good, and these don't replenish like some of the shallow ones do. Good luck feeding us all if we can't grow anything in most of the major agricultural areas.

Maybe we do make it to Mars before the transhumanism revolution, but it might be more beneficial to at least try to set up permanent settlements on the moon first to see if it's even feasible to try on mars. If we do go for mars, there's really only going to be two short windows a year of making it to or from Mars. In either case, I will probably be far too old or even gone before much of this will come to pass I fear.

I agree that we're doing things we shouldn't, but that's mostly out of convenience rather than necessity. But out of all the food humanity produces, 60% is wasted. It either goes bad in transit or storage, or its just not the economical part of the plant to use, etc etc. When you factor that in, the heartland US alone actually produces enough food to feed the entire planet. The problem is not scarce resources: its logistics. Getting the materials from where they're abundant to where they are needed cost-effectively is a difficult problem. But its not unsolvable.

I don't think permanent settlements on the moon are really practical. Its very inhospitable, and likely to remain that way. At most, a permanent settlement would just be a refueling station to get back and forth to Mars. We will be on Mars soon - mark my words. Watch Elon Musk (my hero), Founder and CEO of SpaceX. He's going to try to launch and land a reusable orbital-velocity rocket March 30 from Cape Canaveral. (probably around 6-7pm EST). If this works, the cost of sending freight to orbit will be reduced 10x. Once you have that, it becomes cheap enough to actually build a comfortable ship in orbit for the 4-6 month trip to Mars. SpaceX has already designed one. Its called the MCT ("Mars Colonial Transporter").

Elon has stated publicly that he wants to retire on Mars. He's 41 or so now, so that means 20-25 years or so? :)

To be honest, Mars is, for all intents and purposes, just as inhospitable to life as the moon but much, much, much farther away. Anyhoo, we just have to wait and see what happens. Hopefully Mr. Musk can pull off everything he wants to do! I hope he can, it would be awesome. I totally agree about the food issues, too. We throw away billions worth every year, and all the veggies and fruits that are aging on shelves need to be canned/frozen/etc and shipped around the world to where it's needed. Hell I'd love to even see grocery stores just give it to the soup kitchens near them for the homless/needy instead of throwing it away. However, not everyone in the world eats the same diets, and then there's the costs, effort, and time to preserve it and transport it all. It's just a losing battle either way. If we produce only as much as we need, we'll run into shortages, and if we produce too much, we don't use it all.

There are a few reasons why Mars is preferable, despite the longer distance. For example...

- Mars has a carbon dioxide atmosphere. Plants can breathe it (pressurized and with some oxygen added). The moon has no atmosphere - It has only cold vacuum.

- Mars has water in the form of ice, so does the moon, but Mars has a lot more of it, and its more ubiquitous, (on the moon its only in some craters especially near the south pole).

- Mars is warmer because it has atmosphere. Near the equator it even hits a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

- Mars has a rotational period of just over 24 hours,

- Mars has more than twice the Moon's gravity (need this to maintain healthy bone density).

In case you're not familiar with Elon... here's a vid of him talking about MCT a little. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TFvCy_x8dc . (This guy's awesome!) ^.^

Sorry for the spam. Here's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csR-Jpk6Jjs

The Moon sucks. Lunar regolith isn't good for much.

Mars is awesome for all the reasons listed above, which is why I'm pissed our Mars programs have been gutted repeatedly in the last three decades. Even NASA's shuttle program sucked. The shuttle was the only portion of the Space Transportation System that survived Congress. Therefore, it started off as a crippled system from the get-go and I'm glad SpaceX and private enterprise has created payload lift systems a magnitude cheaper. We were supposed to keep the Saturn V system alive to lift payloads of 100+ tons at a time into LEO. Instead, we use similar energy to lift a 100 ton shuttle that drops off a 20 ton payload in space, only to have 80 tons come back, then having to rebuild the outside of it for another flight.

It would be like me mailing you a box of cookies via UPS, but it was taped to a cyclist with a bicycle. You'd receive said cookies attached to the bicyclist when the UPS guy dropped it off from his truck, and the bicyclist would ride back home and get a new bike. WHY!?

Hopefully we have a burgeoning space program and colonize several planets and moons before the trans-humanism issue hits hard. Then we can worry about breaking away from Earth and becoming browncoats instead of who gets terminator arms and laser eyeballs.

Mars is further away, but traditional chemical rocket technology is a very mature technology and quite simply, it sucks. There's nothing else you can do with it. Liquid oxygen and hydrogen is the most exothermic chemical reaction we can churn out to break out of our gravity well. Short of hoping for an engineering marvel like a space elevator, chemical rockets are a dead end.

Freeman Dyson lead a team at General Atomics in the mid 50's that developed nuclear pulse technology that was feasible with the technology at the time that would get us anywhere in the solar system in short time. Their calculations pegged upwards of 3% of [i]c[/c] as theoretical maximum velocities given technology of the time (so a week to accel half way, then decel the remainder to get to Mars). Of course, nukes = bad, so Project Orion was cancelled. I suggest digging youtube for some of the scale models using conventional explosives as proof of principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proje....._propulsion%29

We experimented with a highly efficient nuclear thermal rocket motor in the late 60's called NERVA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

Ad Astra is a modern private spaceflight company run by a former NASA astronaut and they're developing an electromagnetic plasma engine that runs on a nuclear core that could do a 4-month trip to Mars, versus the 8+ months it takes with current chemical rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VASIMR

There's lots of exciting stuff around the corner...but Mars has "been around the corner" for three decades already

Hi Stripe,

I think we agree on everything except this: the usefulness of rockets. The efficiency of rockets in terms of payload per launch weight has been increasing steadily, and has accelerated with the contributions of the private space programs. I think we can expect this to increase further. Of course, there is an upper possible limit, but we haven't reached it yet. Also, with rockets there are also economies of scale, so when SpaceX launches the Falcon Heavy, we'll have modern rocket efficiency at large scale (a bit more than 1/2 of Saturn5).

As for using rockets to escape Earth's gravity, Hydrogen isn't really a good option. Simple H2 O2 burn is fairly low-energy, so you need a LOT of H2 to get enough lift to put something into orbit. Rockets are volumetrically constrained because if you increase the cross-section you increase drag. If you increase the height you increase the sheering force on the body of the rocket, which requires reinforcement, which increases the weight, etc etc. H2 is also kinda unstable. That's why rocket fuel usually still has a component of hydrocarbon in it (typically a kerosene derivative, but SpaceX is working on using methane). The bonds of C-H is much higher energy than H-H.

The time conventional rockets would take to get to Mars is really only a factor of the size of the rocket, not "rockets versus nuclear". If you had a large enough conventional rocket, you could make it to Mars in 4 months easily. I think you're assuming a direct launch. I think that would be impractical. What you want to do is build a ship in LEO. Then you can take your time and strap on however many rockets you want, ferrying supplies up to the project using smaller rockets. In fact.... I think this is what SpaceX will do. Elon has spoken of the MCT (Mars Colonial Transport), and that the Grasshopper (reusable Falcon Rocket) project is somehow instrumental to his Mars plans, so it seems like a reasonable assumption to me that they will build a "space cruiser" containing only vacuum engines. In space, you're no longer volumetrically constrained about the cross-section. No air, no drag. :P

Rockets are still ultimately lame when you look at payload efficiencies of roughly 1% because the rocket equation is a futhermucker. The rest has to be fuel and the tin can holding that fuel. That's simply a crap ton of waste. It's also the only real option we have until we start getting into megaengineering projects that could plausibly create incredibly cheap payload lift systems to get resources off of Earth and into LEO.

Clever engineering will squeak out some gains, but there's still a mathematical asymptote we'll hit even with a theoretical 100% maximized, perfect "Carnot rocket". The private sector has definitely been kicking ass though the last decade and I'm very happy to see that. I still fondly remember the early days of the X-Prize and the wide-eyed engineering teams from various startup private spaceflight groups at the time who would host lectures on campus, with their crazy scale models, bad Powerpoint presentations, and boundless energy. Some of the ideas were wacky but the passion was absolutely tangible. SpaceX's Falcon program has definitely increased efficiencies with implementing propellant crossfeed topology so it can fire both boosters with the mainstage on liftoff for maximum thrust, while simultaneously using crossfeed lines to pump booster fuel back into the mainstage tank so when the empty boosters are staged for the separation event, the mainstage still has a full tank of juice.

I am not sure why NASA has never attempted it. It might be because Falcon uses kerosene-oxygen instead of hydrogen-oxygen, or that NASA is always overly conservative on engineering, or the pump technology to move that kind of volume simply didn't exist. Liquid hydrogen-oxygen is still the most energetic fuel by mass even compared to methane-oxygen (by 7%) but methane is much safer and easier to deal with than liquid hydrogen, and much cheaper. I think this is why SpaceX has dropped the payload cost of Falcon by at least an order of magnitude compared to all the NASA shuttle flights. That is a massive operational savings, to say the least. NASA had a government budget so it was able to grab whatever it needed to beat the Soviets during the space race.

Don Pettit, a flight engineer at NASA, write a fantastic article several years ago summarizing why chemical rockets are an obsolete technology, ultimately. He also compares existing propellant technologies and lays down some numbers somewhat in the form of a dV or km/s "budget". It's also amusing because he found a way to work in "Molotov cocktail" in there :p http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/s.....0/tryanny.html

You are absolutely correct that once we can build things in orbit, the limitations of space travel start to become trivial. We don't have to worry about trying to get interplanetary ships off the ground in one piece and survive the harrowing atmospheric ascent. We can build wispy, non-aerodynamic and ugly things in space and hurl our creations into the orbits of other worlds. The problem is we don't right now. Payload lifts are still generally pretty small, so we're only able to build, 20 ton chunks at a time. It's how we cobbled together the ISS and why I was really upset Saturn V was scrubbed in the 70's because we could have built ISS, 100 tons at a time. Once we initially invest in that incredibly expensive infrastructure and adopt the idea of shipyards in orbit, things will get better. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy will be able to do close to 60 ton payloads in one shot to LEO, so hell yeah :D

The argument for "nuclear" isn't simply because it's nuclear, but the specific impulse of those particular rocket motors (VASIMR or NERVA) is MUCH higher than the specific impulse of the motors using traditional chemical propellants. That is, they're much more efficient. NERVA used nuclear power as a thermal source to vastly increase the exhaust gas velocities to increase Isp. It was almost double the efficiency of everything we seen in rocketry, even today. Given you have a known dV budget to complete a mission, you can cut costs massively. Matching velocities of a super efficient nuclear rocket with a lousier chemical rocket by simply scaling up and bolting on more rockets would be exponential in size and cost. It ultimately makes sense to seek out the most efficient rocket motors but "nuclear" scares folks and it draws up irrational fears.

Project Orion in the 60's was a tad different in that it wasn't a nuclear powered rocket motor. It was nothing short of a balls-to-the-wall machine gun shooting nuclear bombs out the ass that detonated behind it, and riding the resultant shockwave, and it had such a ridiculous specific impulse that Freeman Dyson's team calculated it could reach 3-5% the speed of light with conventional technology of the time sticking with a 1g acceleration, and would scale up indefinitely (their models went up to 20km diameter ships!). You were also talking 30-50% payload lifts and even Carl Sagan supported the idea since we'd burn up our nuclear stockpiles by turning it into propellant.

The straight shot thing was more of a jest which would be trivial with Orion because dV would be so bountiful using that method. Traditional orbital trajectories would require extensive planning to ensure the best flight windows that minimize dV requirements, so you can pack less fuel to get there, and pack less fuel to make up for the packed fuel, and etc. Rocket halfway up Earth's atmosphere, do your gravity-assisted turn, get into your LEO parking orbit, get everything timed, do a burn at periapsis to raise your apoapsis so your orbital trajectory crosses into the sphere of influence of Mars' gravity well and get flung off when you whip around the planet. Do the opposite there, etc. Come up a few m/s shy and you're not going to make it. Yay Tsiolkovsky rocket equation!

So... payload-to-orbit for rockets is more like 3% . For the reusable Falcon (launching Mar 30, if all goes well) it will be back down to 2% because of the heat shielding on the main stage. But the lift capacity is also fiscally constrained. The reason why SaturnV was retired was it was just too 'spensive. The thing you really want to look-at, is cost per kilo to LEO. With a reusable rocket, SpaceX will reduce it to something like $200. At such a price point, you can trade large payloads for numerous flights, and still get the same mass to orbit to build your cruiser.

As you said, H2 might be efficient per unit mass, but it is NOT efficient per volume. You end up with giant heavy unwieldy tanks and also temperature problems (since liquid H2 is so much colder than kerosene). Leading to brittleness, especially for pressure seals. Its just way harder to handle, and also tends to spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen, leading to the possibility of things like tank fires if any oxygen were to get in.

I still maintain that chemical rockets are not obsolete. In fact, I think its the opposite. It is the only thing that can successfully get a colony going on Mars. I have to honestly say here that I think riding nuclear explosions is a terrible idea. I am not a nuclear physicist, but I can't imagine this being anything but unsafe. You would need an incredibly robust ship. The G-force of acceleration would be enormous, and you have a tradeoff - the closer you are to the blast the more threat to your ship and crew, the further you are, the more wasteful the technique is. Also this would scatter bomb housing debris all throughout the solar system, creating hazards for future travelers. Then there's the real limiting factor: the efficiency of cost. I see only efficiency in terms of energy/mass on the link you provided, but mass isn't the only factor (or even a very important one). I mean, why stop at atomics? LHC is creating antihydrogen. Why not just use that? Simple answer: antimatter is the most expensive substance known to man per unit mass. But fissile uranium and plutonium aren't far behind. All three are in "the top 15 most expensive substances" list. Now throw in practicality: sure you could haul hundreds of atom bombs with you to Mars for the return journey, but why would you want to? Methane and oxygen can be produced ON MARS without massive amounts of infrastructure. You can "gas up" pretty easily. Contrast that to an atomic-bomb powered ship, which would need mines, refineries, housing manufacture, explosive manufacture, electronics, (etc) and the practicality of methane becomes obvious.

Modern rockets are cost-effective. They might not get us to other solar systems, but for the inner solar system, they're good enough. And they're cheap enough to be "sustainable".

Yep the reason liquid hydrogen was favored was simply because the risk of ridiculous propellants paled incomparison to achieving space dominance (even though the Soviets beat us in almost every metric except landing man on the Moon itself). 7% gains but with a crapload of risk and additional costs associated with manufacturing, moving, and maintenence of cryogenic hydrogen. Of couse, at the time we had no qualms using hydrazine as a monopropellant in the reaction control systems. The Russians even tried crazier things (because we stole von Braun first!), culimating in the fantastic failure of all their N1 rockets.

The Saturn V program achieved a launch cost of about $1.2B per launch, inflation adjusted versus the Shuttle's $500M per launch (or around $1B if you go off annual budgets). The Saturn costs go up if you take into account R&D and maintenence factors, but it is by no means eclipsed in payload costs. After Skylab, Saturn V was being proposed for launching probes and rovers to Mars as well as a platform for the aforementioned NERVA motor. The Shuttle was never a replacement for Saturn V. It was to compliment Saturn V as part of the Space Transportation System where every line item except the Shuttle was gutted by Nixon and Congress after the successful Apollo series of missions as public support dropped. Of course, 130 tons of payload is a waste if you're lifting a few humans, but great for big things like Skylab or the large proprosed probe(s) (or, we can imagine, ship components for LEO assembly of an interstellar ship)

The entire STS system included a permanent space station at LEO with a 6-12 crew rotation, the Shuttle, a space tug for trajectory changes of payload from LEO to geosynchronous orbit, and the NERVA thermal (not thermo!) nuclear chemical motor tug that could double up as a shuttle and to move gear between various Earth orbits and do translunar/transmartian injections due to it's high specific impulse efficiency. All the items would be modular, and ironically the Constellation and modern Orion programs are revisiting those concepts of modularity and space tugs.

The cost per pound (of course as Americans, we don't publish units in SI -_-) for the Space Shuttle program varies depending on how one compiles it, $500M to $1.5B a flight. It was sold to cost $120/lb in 1972 ($600ish inflation-adjusted) but it was based off amortizing a shitload of R&D costs by way of 50 flights a year, which was horribly unrealistic. What it ended up costing, based on 2011 estimates is roughly $18,000/lb on various missions to LEO.

The shuttle ultimately didn't really cost less. It filled a -different- role and it allowed us to further develop technologies and gain valuable engineering and scientific insight, but I wouldn't call it a fiscal winner (nor was the Saturn V). None of the space programs until private spaceflight have been fiscal successes because they weren't meant to be. It has to be said that the Russian Proton system, which we hitched a ride with several times after retiring the Shuttle cost about $2,300/lb which is admirable. The Saturn V with a capacity of 130 tons works out to roughly $10,000/lb but doesn't factor in any of the R&D and maintenence.

Of course, government programs rarely finish on time or on budget, even big science. At the end of the day, you need to overpromise and undersell the cost, in hopes Congress will give you more money. LLNL's 500TW NIF (which comes to mind) was "only" 5 years late and 400% over budget. We tried the same thing in the early 90's with the 40TeV superconducting supercollider that makes the 14TeV LHC look like a toy, but lost the gamble and Congress yanked the project after digging about a quarter of it's 87km circumfrence.

The genius of the Orion Project (well, Freeman Dyson himself) was it used a shock-absorbing, ablative plate. With the right spring constant, it would be a steady acceleration. Of course, this was also during the Cold War so we had all sorts of crazy studies going on in absolute secrecy. The idea is absolutely viable. It's just...wild and not for the risk-averse because you'd be holding the entire planet as unwilling hostages should something go wrong. However, the idea is you don't just stop somewhere to fuel up and completely disregard delta-V budgeting. Everything is budgeted, you know how many km/s of velocity change you hold in your fuel tanks (admittedly, dV as a concept of how much fuel you have is initially odd, versus the conventional idea of volume) so you wouldn't be flying atomic ships or chemical rockets around hoping you can top off when you hit a rest stop.

You did touch upon why Mars is important (and something many people don't get). You can refuel in-situ versus the Moon's worthless regolith surface. Mars and Titan are the best two hopes for solar system colonization or refueling points for future ventures. SpaceX is the most well-known of the private spaceflight companies out there right now but I'm hoping to see a lot more competition. We do some work for Blue Origin since it's local, and Jeff Bezos has deep pockets :)

In any case, NASA did all the tough work but it's time for private enterprise to get spaceflight costs down to under $1,000/lb because now we have the incentive. Falcon 9 is already under $2,000 which is 10x cheaper than the Shuttle. I'm more interested in Falcon Heavy because I love thinking big :) NASA just left all their shit in space while I think most private companies are going to reuse everything to minimize operational costs and to prevent agitating the space debris issue. In any case it is a fantastic time to be alive, and probably one of the most exciting times in history of mankind itself.

Everyone is hurrah for SpaceX because they're media darlings. They do a good job of publicizing and transparency. Some of the others like Blue Origin is very secretive and Orbital Sciences just doesn't have the same media acumen as SpaceX has. They're very good about saying ambitious things, and then doing it live on Streaming video. They also have the best tech (that we've seen, anyway. Blue Origin might have some surprises up their sleeves, while SpaceX is very open about what they want to do and how they intend to do it), and the most ambitious goals.

I'm more interested in the reusable falcon than the heavy, because if you can reduce the cost to orbit by a factor of 10, the volume per cost of the falcon9 1.1 will be a lot less than the heavy lifter. More small launches might be better than few large launches. Or at the very least, the reusable 9 might give them some insight into how to make a reusable heavy.... which would be awesome.

SpaceX is fantastic at keeping themselves in the public eye, but it's hard to know how many fans they have outside private space flight enthusiasts and science/tech fans :) I don't know how much the general public knows about them despite Elon having promoted the idea of private spaceflight for decades. Now that they're doing lifting for NASA instead of NASA hitching a ride on Protons, maybe they'll slowly get more general public press time and interest. Unfortunately the public is a fickle beast to please, but SpaceX isn't dependent on making budget pitches to tech/science-ignorant members of Congress for funding.

NASA can go back to doing neat pure science stuff. I was excited when they launched LADEE late last year for an actual reasonable cost using a Minotaur (basically a reworked, 5-stage ICBM) and a ridiculously stingy dV budget that was super efficient because they used the Oberth effect with three perigee prograde burns around Earth before it entered the Moon's sphere of influence (the Minotaur V had insufficient dV for a traditional translunar injection). Took a month, but no humans on board so time wasn't a factor :)

Blue Origin is doing interesting things. I have a friend who works there as well but hurrah for NDAs. He can only vaguely tease me about things. The stuff we've done for them isn't very technical, so most of their cool stuff is done in-house. I've still yet to swing by their facilities, and I'm curious if they have general public tours (would be damn neat). Bigelow Aerospace is another interesting one that picked up some canceled NASA ISS tech and ran with it, doing some work alongside Boeing. They seem incredibly ambitious with their creation of modular living habitats that are inflatable, and I think their Genesis I has been in orbit for damn near 10 years. It's definitely cool to see private enterprise focusing on habitats as well.

I agree the Falcon 9 will be much more useful for most things, because not everything needs to be a huge 60+ ton payload, but if we're going to move onto the idea of doing modular assembly of ships in orbit, big chunks seem more robust and require less assembly. I've simply always been a fan of BIG things if we're doing big projects. ISS could have been done quicker if we weren't limited to assembling it with 10-20t modules, but at the same time, some of the smaller nations wouldn't be able to afford a much larger module to contribute.

SpaceX is also making use of awesome manufacturing technology, like friction-stir welding (which is badass as hell) and by commercializing it, it ends up cheaper and finds more applications!

Ah so you haven't heard NASA's plan for the robot satellite components yet. They are building components that are robots with tiny thrusters. You kinda just get them to orbit, they chat with eachother, find out how to assemble, and put themselves together. It makes a lot of sense because then to do repairs you just have to get the right piece into the general area of the target and it will fix itself. Or if a satellite is being decommissioned but there are still useful parts, you could stick 'em onto another satellite. :P

The idea is... maybe we don't need heavies as much as we thought. Or if you have a couple extra KG spare capacity, throw a new optics sensor or canada arm in there. :P

O__o no that slipped my radar. That's definitely the most economical way to do things, both from a manufacturing and human standpoint. If we can make machines replace basic spacewalking missions, it makes much more sense than risking humans up there to do menial assembly and repair tasks. Being able to reuse a percentage of satellites that have served their purpose rather than deorbiting the entire thing for a burn-up re-entry makes a lot more sense.

Is there a program, concept, or project name? My Google-fu is weak today and all I found was this write-up http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/sp.....komendera.html

What I heard of was called "space cubes" which are these modular components that they're making. They're not doing like... full canada arms yet. Just optics and laser communication components as a PoC

Etheras, also thanks for the opportunity for me to stupidly nerd out I love tech discussions!

They cut corners with the ending in my opinion but at least it had glimpses of grand effective elements.

Cut corners at the end of Human Revolution or The Fall?

Human Revolution.

A room where you pick an ending and have a well written, but ultimately very blunt description of what Jensen feels is to come isn't a proper ending. It's a youtube playlist.

Then again, actually finishing a narrative, writing a proper ending and allowing said ending to complement the constructed narrative seems too high a challenge for today's video game developers, still latched to a time when it wasn't necessary.

Sorry, I go off on tangents.

Yeah... I agree. The final choice all resulted in the same video with some minor tweaks and a different voiceover. That was a little disappointing. :/ But the 3-choice ending "thing" kind-of originated with Deus Ex (the first one). They sort-of had to do it. :P

Even better though was Invisible War (Deus Ex2) which had 4 endings. The standard 3, but a 4th super-secret ending that's not presented as an option, but that you can do anyway. :P

For changing storylines, Mass Effect still did it the best, but ... once again... the end left you with the standard Deus Ex "Choose DoorA DoorB or DoorC" :P

I think that... if they want pre-rendered video endings, that limits what they can do. So that's why it comes down to "the choice" for games with branching stories. For linear stories, obviously, its a bit easier because you can have a linear ending.

It's one hardcore game when looking it up. I'm a sucker for games like that.

Well, its a complicated matter, yet i think it will be no good.
First the implants would be only avalible for the rich and the powerful, this will make the existing breach between classes even more greater. Not only that they will live better and have all the money but they will be even physically (and probably mentally) superior due the implants, and even if the normal people can buy implants, the richs ones will be always better. They will be always above of you.

Other problem is what the people would do with that implants, knowing that they can best others with it. How far the people will go to get what they want having this power?

The most disturbing thing is that the implants will be used sooner or later for war, what will make it more terrifying and relentless than actually is. Even more, a country with the technology could submit other that doesnt has it easily.

Maybe im too pessimistic, but i think it will bring more evil than good, we are not responsible enough to use
that power wisely.

OH MY GOSH!!!

(What?)

http://youtu.be/Y414Q7vVgYU

I'm afraid it's happening and scientists are scared of saying something important that I found out.

And this topic is a bit late

Myths lol

?

The illuminonsense lol xD that stuff is so fake but nice pic anyways :)

So... its based on a video game ... :P The illuminati is in the video game.

Ohhh my bad sorry lol never heard of that game :P

The game is called Deus Ex. Its... sort-of a big deal. Especially when Human Revolution came out. Its on most major platforms

bro bro bro to manny words to me looked at oh yeaaaaah THE LUMINATII FUUUUU