GENIUS FORUMS

What awaits the Future of Humanity?

Will man create his own demise, will it be the end of Humanity?

The only survivors of nuclear disaster will be those inhabiting Science stations in space, or underground havens. They will be the ones who begin a new humanity after The Final War.

My poem The Final War can be read under the title The Contemplations of Foresta Gump archived here on the forum. At present, I'm looking into turning this poem into a film.

a nuclear war alone wouldn't be enough to eradicate our entire species, it would have to be a combination of many unfortunate events timed together. A low probability actually.

However, there could be an event(s) that lead to the death of millions or billions of people, but for every member of the species to die off, the odds of that happening are low due to the fact that we have colonized every environment on this planet, and adapted quite well to each one.

I actually happen to believe that our infatuation with "End Times" is a sort of neurosis, a preoccupation used to justify non-action, complacent and destructive behavior.

People say things such as, "I don't have to get my life together, the world is going to end in 2012 anyway"

But I bet those same people had a similar opinion following the start of the year 2000.

can't because of a bunch of mushroom psi

Ryan Rudolph wrote:a nuclear war alone wouldn't be enough to eradicate our entire species, it would have to be a combination of many unfortunate events timed together. A low probability actually.

Yes, a low probability providing man doesn't lose his sensibility by pushing a button and all hell breaks lose--the clock strikes the midnight hour, is a time to fear the loss of man's mind.



However, there could be an event(s) that lead to the death of millions or billions of people, but for every member of the species to die off, the odds of that happening are low due to the fact that we have colonized every environment on this planet, and adapted quite well to each one.

I actually happen to believe that our infatuation with "End Times" is a sort of neurosis, a preoccupation used to justify non-action, complacent and destructive behavior.

That makes sense.

People say things such as, "I don't have to get my life together, the world is going to end in 2012 anyway"

Quit while we can mentality.

But I bet those same people had a similar opinion following the start of the year 2000.

The disaster they thought would happen didn't happen, the computers didn't crash, the gas pumps were ok, credit cards and deficit cards worked, everything electronic worked and didn't short out as expected, everything was just fine.

diss the aster and the alps

__________
1/2 in the bag

alan with a ginsberg

gin and aspergers

____________
1/2 in the bag

.


-mensa-maniac-
The disaster they thought would happen didn't happen,

-tomas-
It is nothing more that a controlled disaster that was made in Western Europe.


-mensa-
the computers didn't crash,

-tomas-
It was nothing more than to skim billions (trillions?) out of the coming stock market crash a couple months later, March 2000, under Bill Clinton's presidency. Al Gore did his part, as he was the inventor of the Internet. The computers were "reset" to work in an independent manner sepatare from private control. The government is our shepherd, get used to it.


-mensa-
the gas pumps were ok,

-tomas-
Yup, Enron and those screwball California government officios helped themselves to higher pump prices.


-mensa-
credit cards and debit cards worked,

-tomas-
The government under Bill Clinton relaxed home lending rules whereas people who couldn't "afford" to buy a home were permitted to with Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae. Our current prez even has a couple of his butt-buddies paddling his sweet, behind in his administration.


-mensa-
everything electronic worked and didn't short out as expected,

-tomas-
Yes, The Government is my Shepherd, I shall not want........


-mensa-
everything was just fine.

-tomas-
Sure, the "All Clear' siren sounds just like it did in 'The Time Machine' starring Rod Taylor.

If it's natural catastrophes you're after, Death From The Skies by Phil Plait is a fun read, it lists some possibilities for the eradication of life on the planet by means of the various little nasties that outer space has floating around in it.

.


-mensa-maniac-
What awaits the Future of Humanity?

-tomas-
Look in your rear-view mirror, dolt.


-mensa-
Will man create his own demise, will it be the end of Humanity?

-tomas-
Consider moving to Red China, capitalism is on the upswing.


-mensa-
The only survivors of nuclear disaster will be those inhabiting Science stations in space, or underground havens.

-tomas-
Why not move to the Moon? The underground havens are where the Gargoyles are awaiting your entry, Canadian bacon is in vogue.


-mensa-
They will be the ones who begin a new humanity after The Final War.

-tomas-
Now lemme guess, where do they get their food and water supplies, then?


-mensa-
My poem The Final War can be read under the title The Contemplations of Foresta Gump archived here on the forum.

-tomas-
Sweet! How about an autographed copy?


-tomas-
At present, I'm looking into turning this poem into a film.

-mensa-
For starters, how about some clips on Youtube?

PS - Cyber hugs are available after the next war.

Tomas, you really have to stop reading all that US conspiracy junk on the internet. You realize that anybody can write anything and post it.

Al gore invented the internet? give me a break.

Speed of light travel maybe.
Visit by Aliens maybe.
DNA body improvements maybe.
Mercury hitting the Sun maybe.
Floating cars.
Real 3D TV
Nanobots in your blood
some sort of disaster.

.


-Ryan Rudolph-
Tomas, you really have to stop reading all that US conspiracy junk on the internet. You realize that anybody can write anything and post it.

-tomas
Ryan, I don't know what you were at the turn of the decade, but the girlfriend and I expended a sizeable abount of money ensuring our three businesses accepted the new readout.

As far as reading about conspiracies, they are nothing more than controlled events by corporate/government entities. Nothing happens by accident.

I lived and breathed around politicians for about 20 years as a political consultant.

Conspiracies abound about nuclear tests etc. I've witnessed three (3) underground nuclear detonations at Nevada test sites, all in the 1980s. Invited to a fourth, but the girlfriend said enough is enough to a "miniscule" radiation leak at the third test. If the government were to restart nuke testing there, and if invited, I'd go in a heartbeat.


-Ryan-
Al Gore invented the internet? give me a break.

-tomas-
Geez Ryan, a little tongue-in-cheek from another blowhard the likes of Joe Biden ;-) .. Neither of whom has ever had (held down) a private sector job.

Ryan Rudolph wrote: Tomas, You realize that anybody can write anything and post it.

Of course that is a given. My job description as a political consultant was to interview potential candidates, and see if they were upfront, legitimate (perform background checks). I could name names of people that approached our firm and wanting us to run their campaign for big-city mayoral races in (***), aldermen races in (***), governor races wherever. If they didn't get by my initial interview, our firm didn't run (represent) their campaign. Democratic/Republican party affiliation didn't matter, we knew they were bullshit artists, flunkies pushed on the electorate by behind-the-scenes handlers/corporations, of special interests whatever stripe.

I'm pushing 60 Ryan, I been around the block a few times so much that it got a little dizzy after awhile. Lived outside the United States for a combined total of about eight (8) years, been most everywhere but Antarctica, but flown over it scads of times on junkets paid for by the taxpayer/corporate interests/lobbying firms etc.

You were babysat (grew up) on the Internet, not me. I didn't know about the Intranet (as it was called then) till 1974.

What were you doing in 1974? I'd already been assigned to a unit in VietNam, and in a Combat Engineering company that had battlefield tactical nukes.

I've even been inside the King's and Queen's chambers, at the Great Pyramid, twice.

Even natural-delivered three of our children :-)

Read write anything? Of course, but you are still a pleasant read :-)

There seems to be a lot of misconception over the Y2K bug still.

The Y2K bug was always stated quite clearly. Early computer systems had a low finite amount of memory. Around 640k (640,000 bytes roughly, or 5,120,000 bits of information). To preserve memory for running programs, the system clock on these systems was reduced to two digits, which equates to about one byte of information (or 8 bits, or 2 nibbles in hex). In other words, if the date was 1976, only the "76" was stored in memory, the "19" was hard-coded into the BIOS.

By the time the year 2,000 rolled around computers had upwards of a gig of memory. One gig of memory is roughly equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes or 8,589,934,592 bits of information. The shortage of memory for date storage was history, but some of the older systems still held only 2 digits for the date. What would happen at the turn-over to the new century? The date would turn-over to 1900 which would mess up some accounting. But there was never a serious threat of the WORLD ending! Or even of any major loss of social function.

the problem was easily resolved by identifying these systems and patching the BIOS or replacing them. It was funny though, coming from a background in computer technology, to be sitting around my cousin's living room when the clock struck 12:00. Many people cringed in fear of the coming doom. Of course the media blew it out of proportion.

Animus wrote:There seems to be a lot of misconception over the Y2K bug still.

The Y2K bug was always stated quite clearly. Early computer systems had a low finite amount of memory. Around 640k (640,000 bytes roughly, or 5,120,000 bits of information). To preserve memory for running programs, the system clock on these systems was reduced to two digits, which equates to about one byte of information (or 8 bits, or 2 nibbles in hex). In other words, if the date was 1976, only the "76" was stored in memory, the "19" was hard-coded into the BIOS.

By the time the year 2,000 rolled around computers had upwards of a gig of memory. One gig of memory is roughly equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes or 8,589,934,592 bits of information. The shortage of memory for date storage was history, but some of the older systems still held only 2 digits for the date. What would happen at the turn-over to the new century? The date would turn-over to 1900 which would mess up some accounting. But there was never a serious threat of the WORLD ending! Or even of any major loss of social function.

the problem was easily resolved by identifying these systems and patching the BIOS or replacing them. It was funny though, coming from a background in computer technology, to be sitting around my cousin's living room when the clock struck 12:00. Many people cringed in fear of the coming doom. Of course the media blew it out of proportion.

I think that the date never went up to 20, and 19 rolled over to 00, so you get 0000, which could be bad if somebody used any mathematics on the date, or if anything was date dependent. But not many programs are date dependant.

I know you like to think Pincho, but that's now how computers work.

Here is how it does work:

Every digit of a number or letter is stored as a series of 0s and 1s. For simplicity, I'll speak only of decimal encoding. A decimal number is derived from a series of 8 bits (a byte) or what is called an "Octet". Once the decimal number is derived from the octet it is recognized as one of 256 entries on the ASCII table (http://www.asciitable.com/).

For example: an octet of 01010101 is decoded like this.

Taken from left-to-right the bits represent integers; 128/64/32/16/8/4/2/1

So, again from left-to-right, the first bit is off so means nothing, the second bit is on so our decimal number (0) increases by 64 (to 64), the 3rd bit is off so we add nothing, the 4th bit is on so we add 16 (80), the 5th bit is off, the 6th bit is on adding 4 (84), the 7th bit is off and the 8th bit represents 1 (85). So the binary octet 01010101 represents decimal number 85 which corresponds to the letter "U" on the ASCII chart. As the chart illustrates the first 10 numbers (0-9) represent the numbers 0-9. So for the number 7 you would have a binary octet of 00000111.

It does not matter whether you are storing this information on a hard-drive, Random Access Memory or a kind of EEPROM. They are all stored as either 0s or 1s, -5v or +5v, a dip on the HDD platter or not. If the first two digits of the date were stored in a flexible memory system they could be just as dynamic as the latter two digits, and it would only ever take 16 bits of information (2 bytes) to store those numbers whether they are "19" or "20" doesn't matter.

Also if you add up all those numbers 128/64/32/16/8/4/2/1 you get 256 which you will find is a very important number in computers.

2 x 256 is 512 x 2 is 1024

A bit is one binary digit
A byte is 8 binary digits
A kilobyte is 1024 bytes
A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes
A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes

A kilobit is 1024 bits
A megabit is 1024 kilobits
A gigabit is 1024 megabits

Edit: P.S. Binary is a base 2 system. Decimal is base 10. Hexadecimal is base 16. Computers operate in binary. Transistors respond to +5v and not to -5v, there might be some signal loss making the input +3.5v which is interpreted in digital systems as +5v. Analog systems would interpret it as +3.5v and not be able to account for signal loss, which is why digital/binary is used for machine code in computers. The assembly language interprets the machine code into the contents of the ASCII table and top-level languages like C#/C++ operate on-top of the assembly language. This is why programming in C#/C++ and other top-level languages is done with ASCII characters and not binary.

Animus wrote:I know you like to think Pincho, but that's now how computers work.

Here is how it does work:

Every digit of a number or letter is stored as a series of 0s and 1s. For simplicity, I'll speak only of decimal encoding. A decimal number is derived from a series of 8 bits (a byte) or what is called an "Octet". Once the decimal number is derived from the octet it is recognized as one of 256 entries on the ASCII table (http://www.asciitable.com/).

For example: an octet of 01010101 is decoded like this.

Taken from left-to-right the bits represent integers; 128/64/32/16/8/4/2/1

So, again from left-to-right, the first bit is off so means nothing, the second bit is on so our decimal number (0) increases by 64 (to 64), the 3rd bit is off so we add nothing, the 4th bit is on so we add 16 (80), the 5th bit is off, the 6th bit is on adding 4 (84), the 7th bit is off and the 8th bit represents 1 (85). So the binary octet 01010101 represents decimal number 85 which corresponds to the letter "U" on the ASCII chart. As the chart illustrates the first 10 numbers (0-9) represent the numbers 0-9. So for the number 7 you would have a binary octet of 00000111.

It does not matter whether you are storing this information on a hard-drive, Random Access Memory or a kind of EEPROM. They are all stored as either 0s or 1s, -5v or +5v, a dip on the HDD platter or not. If the first two digits of the date were stored in a flexible memory system they could be just as dynamic as the latter two digits, and it would only ever take 16 bits of information (2 bytes) to store those numbers whether they are "19" or "20" doesn't matter.

I'm a computer programmer, and it doesn't matter how the numbers are stored, they are converted to a different language, and the language converts the date to 0000, and maths that use division cannot divide 0000, and will crash. Now I had a Visual Basic program running on that date, and it would have gone worng if I hadn't have corrected it a couple of days before.

Pincho Paxton wrote:I'm a computer programmer, and it doesn't matter how the numbers are stored, they are converted to a different language, and the language converts the date to 0000, and maths that use division cannot divide 0000, and will crash. Now I had a Visual Basic program running on that date, and it would have gone wrong if I hadn't have corrected it a couple of days before.

Thanks, this is how it was explained to me back then. Computers and how/why they function the way they do is all Greek to me.

When you die, may a black hole swallow you in one fell swoop and transport you wherever you chose to go and at whatever light-speed you so desire.

PS - May the force be with you.

PPS - Live long and prosper.

PPPS - Cruise control is optional, and at no extra expense to the user.

Pincho Paxton wrote:I'm a computer programmer, and it doesn't matter how the numbers are stored, they are converted to a different language, and the language converts the date to 0000, and maths that use division cannot divide 0000, and will crash. Now I had a Visual Basic program running on that date, and it would have gone worng if I hadn't have corrected it a couple of days before.

As a developer you don't handle the date directly. You use a function like GetSystemTime() to grab the time from the system itself. Now, if you strip off the date and your program only recognizes the last two digits, that's just a dumb program. Besides that Pincho, everything you program is interpreted as 0s and 1s by the CPU, and is stored as 0s and 1s on the storage medium.

Animus wrote:

Pincho Paxton wrote:I'm a computer programmer, and it doesn't matter how the numbers are stored, they are converted to a different language, and the language converts the date to 0000, and maths that use division cannot divide 0000, and will crash. Now I had a Visual Basic program running on that date, and it would have gone worng if I hadn't have corrected it a couple of days before.

As a developer you don't handle the date directly. You use a function like GetSystemTime() to grab the time from the system itself. Now, if you strip off the date and your program only recognizes the last two digits, that's just a dumb program. Besides that Pincho, everything you program is interpreted as 0s and 1s by the CPU, and is stored as 0s and 1s on the storage medium.

I was analysing the date to get the day of the week, my program was for the Lottery, and had to only display Wednesday, and Saturday, and skip all the other days of the week. and I wasn't stripping it. It is common to use the abbreviated 00, in fact it was the default.

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http://humanknowledge.net/SocialScience ... eline.html


http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html ... velopments


http://holtz.org/

Animus,

I have a question for you: it is a compute related question. I have wondered for some time how transistors actually do the work of software. You seem to have very detailed technical knowledge, which I'm not all that interested in.

I'm more interested in a larger wider theory that sums up how it works. For instance: I know there are billions of transistors within a processor, and the transistors somehow take the requests from software. However, I cannot imagine how a physical structure that carries electrical current down logical pathways is able to perform complex software driven tasks. I cannot imagine how the electrical activity at the physical hardware level translates into the OS doing something at the software level. Any clarification on this issue would be great, if you can provide any. Thanks.

Ryan, are you familiar with the concept of the Turing machine? It's a great place to start if you want to understand the basics of how computers work without getting into the technical details.