I have lived in the USA since 1986. I am not up on current events in Sweden. I know that policies change quickly there since they are such a small and very politically active population.

Is that a real statistic? Seems to me that maybe half the population are immigrants or descendants of immigrants if you go back a couple of generations.
>> ^chilaxe:

@swedishfriend How's it going in Sweden trying to get the descendants of immigrants to perform at comparable levels to Swedes in school performance? Do you predict the achievement gap closes before the year 2100?

@swedishfriend How's it going in Sweden trying to get the descendants of immigrants to perform at comparable levels to Swedes in school performance? Do you predict the achievement gap closes before the year 2100?

Personal experience with global warming: rolling forward the charts on when fruit trees are flowering and the fruit is ripe.

Also, long term studies are projecting that California will have 50% of the necessary 'chill' for nut trees to be cultivated in 40 years, and 0% by 2100. Billions of dollars of industry shifting to who-knows-what.

@TheGenk @Skeeve @Boise_Lib @gwiz665 @packo @IronDwarf @MaxWilder @westy @BicycleRepairMan @shuac @KnivesOut

Evolution is pseudo-science. It exists in the realm of imagination, and cannot be scientifically verified. At best, evolution science is forensic science, and what has been found not only does not support it, but entirely rules it out. I don't think any of you realize how weak the case for evolution really is. None of them quotes, as far as I know, are from creation scientists btw

No true transitional forms in the fossil record:

Darwins theory proposed that slow change over a great deal of time could evolve one kind of thing into another. Such as reptiles to birds. The theory proposed that we should see in the fossil records billions of these transitional forms, yet we have found none. When the theory was first proposed, darwinists pleaded poverty in the fossil record, claiming the missing links were yet to be found. It was then claimed that the links were missing because conditions conspired against fossilizing them, or that they had been eroded or destroyed in subsequent fossilization.

120 years have gone by since then. We have uncovered an extremely rich fossil record with billions of fossils, a record which has completely failed to produce the expected transitions. It has become obvious that there was no process that could have miraculously destroyed the transitionals yet left the terminal forms intact.

The next theory proposed was "hopeful monster" theory, which states that evolution occurs in large leaps instead of small ones. Some even suggested that a bird could have hatched from a reptile egg. This is against all genetic evidence, and has never been observed.

The complete lack of transitional forms is not even the worst problem for evolution, considering the big gaps between the higher categories, and the systemic absence of transitional forms between families classes orders and phyla.

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"

Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History (and a hardcore evolutionist), in a letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979 admitting no transitional forms exist.

"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

Ronald R. West, PhD (paleoecology and geology) (Assistant Professor of Paleobiology at Kansas State University), "Paleoecology and uniformitarianism". Compass, vol. 45, May 1968, p. 216

"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"

-Charles Darwin

"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

-Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University

Fossil record disputes evolutionary theory:

According to evolutionary theory we should see an evolutionary tree of organisms starting from the least complex to the most complex. Instead, what we do see in the fossil record is the very sudden appearance of fully-formed and fully-functional complex life.

If you examine the fossil record, you see all kinds of complex life suddenly jumping into existence during a period that evolutionists refer to as the "Cambrian explosion".

None of the fossilized life forms found in the "Cambrian period" have any predecessors prior to that time. In essence, the "Cambrian period" represents a "sudden explosion of life" in geological terms.

Evolutionists try to disprove this by stretching it over a period of 50 million years, but they have no transitional fossils to prove that theory before or during.

"The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed"

-Paleontologist George Gaylord

What disturbs evolutionists greatly is that complex life just appears in the fossil record out of nowhere, fully functional and formed.

A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.

-Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki (an evolutionist)

"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative."

-Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker', W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, pp. 229-230

Evolution can't explain the addition of information that turns one kind into another kind

There is no example recorded of functional information being added to any creature, ever.

"The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus)."

Species just don't change. Kind only produces kind:

"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it."

Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University

Not enough bones:

Today the population grows at 2% per year. If we set the population growth rate at just 0.5% per year, then total population reduces to zero at about 4500 years ago. If the first humans lived 1,000,000 years ago, then at this 0.5% growth rate, we would have 10^2100 (ten with 2100 zeroes following it) people right now. If the present population was a result of 1,000,000 years of human history, then several trillion people must have lived and died since the emergence of our species. Where are all the bones? And finally, if the population was sufficiently small until only recently, then how could a correspondingly infinitesimally small number of mutations have evolved the human race?

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum and Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.

Try to debunk this if you can
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tYLHxcqJmoM&feature=PlayList&p=C805D4953D9DEC66&index=0&playnext=1

More fun facts:

There are no records of any human civilization past 4000 BC

"The research in the development of the [radiocarbon] dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historic and prehistoric epochs, respectively. Arnold [a co-worker] and I had our first shock when our advisors informed us that history extended back only for 5,000 years . . You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately; in fact, the earliest historical date that has been established with any degree of certainty is about the time of the First Dynasty of Egypt."—*Willard Libby, Science, March 3, 1961, p. 624.

Prior to a certain point several thousand years ago, there was no trace of man having ever existed. After that point, civilization, writing, language, agriculture, domestication, and all the rest—suddenly exploded into intense activity!

"No more surprising fact has been discovered, by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world. This discovery is the very opposite to that anticipated. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case."—P.J. Wiseman, New Discoveries, in Babylonia, about Genesis (1949 ), p. 28.

Oldest people/language recorded in c. 3000 B.C., and were located in Mesopotamia.

The various radiodating techniques could be so inaccurate that mankind has only been on earth a few thousand years.

"Dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude . . Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand."—*Robert Gannon, "How Old Is It?" Popular Science, November 1979, p. 81.

Moonwalk disproves age of moon:

The moon is constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust particles. Scientists were able to measure the rate at which these particles would accumulate. Using their estimates according to their understanding that the age of the Earth was billions of years, their most conservative estimate predicted a dust layer 54 feet deep. This is why the lander had those huge balloon tires, to be prepared to land on a sea of dust. Neil Armstrong, after saying those famous words, uttered two more which disproved the age of the moon entirely "its solid!". Far from being 54 feet, they found the dust was 3/4 of an inch.

Evolution is a fairy tale that modern civilization has bought, hook line and sinker. Humorously, atheists accuse creationists of beiieving in myths without any evidence..when they place their entire faith in an unproven theory even evolutionists know is fatally flawed and invalid. Evolution is a meta physical belief that requires faith. Period.

Evolution is false, science affirms a divine Creator
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Tracts/big_daddy.htm

Though most of this is undisputable, I'm just getting started..

While I like your argument and your logic, I am forced to point out that the numbers are a bit off.

Toyota earns a profit of around $1700 per vehicle (it's higher for hybrids, lower for others). This means that their 524,160 Tundras will earn about $898,934,400 in profit. The value per worker would be closer to $400,000 than $4 million.

Either way, I agree with you that this is not necessarily fair - someone is making a lot of money with a lot less effort.


>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

See, the only problem I have with that is..
How many individuals do you think consistently earn a million based purely on the value they themselves generate?
Say you're an electrical engineer who comes up with a brilliant solution that saves multiple cities thru out California a million dollars a year each.
You went to University. Studied diligently. Paid for all your books out of pocket. Got your masters.
I would agree that you rightly deserve at least a million in compensation.
~~~
Now say, instead of glorious engineer. You were one of the 2100 workers on Toyota's San Antonia, TX assembly line in 2007
Do you think you'd make that same million dollar salary? Mostly like, no.
Tho if you look at the numbers:
That plant made one Tundra per minute starting in 2007. 60x24x7x52= 524160 Tundras
Average MSRP for an '07 Tundra = $32070 x524160= $16,809,811,200 in value.
Let's say the retailers make 5 Million and that half of the 16 Billion is break-even cost for Toyota.
$8,402,405,600/2100= $4,001,145 of suggested value per worker
The average auto worker makes 18 to 30 so we'll say hourly wage is $24.
Times an 8 hour shift 6 times per week. 24x8x313 = $60,096 yearly earnings.
Remember $4 Mill of profit per worker at $60k year compensation means those workers on retained 1.5% of the value they generated.
~~~
That example was one factory. In one industry.
Think of the millions of businesses that aren't so generous as to allot their employees 1.5% of the profits they themselves produce individually.
And then compare that to the number of CEOs of those businesses that pay themselves a million or more, plus bonuses.
And then compare that to the number of self made millionaire that rightfully earn 7 figure salaries.
Considering wages haven't risen much for thirties, I think the majority of those workers have a right to be unhappy.
Sorry for the rambling. It was just my way of putting things in perspective.
>> ^Xax:

Whoa whoa whoa. STEALING? Bullfuckingshit. Of course there are a lot of corrupt motherfuckers out there, but I have no trouble believing that many people make more money than the average bear without being unscrupulous. People who have used their smarts and/or luck to become successful have every single right to write themselves a big fat paycheck. If some snotty piece of shit working under them is unhappy that they're not making as much money, well that's just too fucking bad.

See, the only problem I have with that is..

How many individuals do you think consistently earn a million based purely on the value they themselves generate?

Say you're an electrical engineer who comes up with a brilliant solution that saves multiple cities thru out California a million dollars a year each.

You went to University. Studied diligently. Paid for all your books out of pocket. Got your masters.

I would agree that you rightly deserve at least a million in compensation.
~~~

Now say, instead of glorious engineer. You were one of the 2100 workers on Toyota's San Antonia, TX assembly line in 2007

Do you think you'd make that same million dollar salary? Mostly like, no.

Tho if you look at the numbers:
That plant made one Tundra per minute starting in 2007. 60x24x7x52= 524160 Tundras

Average MSRP for an '07 Tundra = $32070 x524160= $16,809,811,200 in value.

Let's say the retailers make 5 Million and that half of the 16 Billion is break-even cost for Toyota.

$8,402,405,600/2100= $4,001,145 of suggested value per worker

The average auto worker makes 18 to 30 so we'll say hourly wage is $24.
Times an 8 hour shift 6 times per week. 24x8x313 = $60,096 yearly earnings.

Remember $4 Mill of profit per worker at $60k year compensation means those workers on retained 1.5% of the value they generated.
~~~

That example was one factory. In one industry.

Think of the millions of businesses that aren't so generous as to allot their employees 1.5% of the profits they themselves produce individually.

And then compare that to the number of CEOs of those businesses that pay themselves a million or more, plus bonuses.

And then compare that to the number of self made millionaire that rightfully earn 7 figure salaries.

Considering wages haven't risen much for thirties, I think the majority of those workers have a right to be unhappy.

Sorry for the rambling. It was just my way of putting things in perspective.

>> ^Xax:


Whoa whoa whoa. STEALING? Bullfuckingshit. Of course there are a lot of corrupt motherfuckers out there, but I have no trouble believing that many people make more money than the average bear without being unscrupulous. People who have used their smarts and/or luck to become successful have every single right to write themselves a big fat paycheck. If some snotty piece of shit working under them is unhappy that they're not making as much money, well that's just too fucking bad.

>> ^dgandhi:

Since this is an insurance funded project, I tend to think of it in terms of what a similarly funded project with different objectives might accomplish.
Consider the Mprize, which seeks to find ways to extend life. If some non-trivial subset of people bought life insurance with the Mprize as beneficiary we could potentially encourage the funding of the research needed to extend current human life. All the Mprizes research goals will needed to be meet for cryo to work, so why not put that horse before the cart?
To be immortal you simply have to live past the break-even point, where life is being extended as quickly as time is passing. It is entirely feasible that humans will become functionally immortal, but never reach the point where cryo bodies can be reanimated. Even if cryo does become feasible, the probability that current cryo systems will be compatible with real functioning cryo tech approaches 0.
The cryo companies are, effectively, siphoning resources of those interested in life extension into a bet with exceptionally bad odds. Why not bet on reaching the break-even point in your lifetime, instead of sinking resources into something which is extremely likely to have no benefits for anyone?


Cryo seems like a risky bet if you die tomorrow and want to be brought back to life before the year 2100, but if your time frame is more flexible, it seems like a different picture. It seems hard to imagine in a time when every individual's cheap mobile phone will possess greater information processing power than all of humankind today, that we won't be able to figure out what the structure of cryonic brains was before the cryonic damage occurred.

That being said, the average person born in e.g. 1975 seems to have an excellent chance of living to 2075 if they live a health lifestyle*, and it seems difficult to imagine that stem cells, nanomedicine, etc. won't have changed the face of medicine by that point. Innovation has continued fine even through the current global fiscal bust. Like you, I'm also a big supporter of the Mprize.

*Researchers find in the last 18 years in the US, "the number of people adhering to all 5 healthy habits has decreased from 15% to 8%." http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006231.html
*"Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age."http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html

>> ^Payback:
I wonder if the CEO wants where he lives, and where his children go to school, and what times they go there, to be shared with the pedophiles of his community.


He most certainly would not. For example, this article from CNET got Google CEO Eric Schmidt very upset when they published information about him that they obtained from Google searches.

Allegedly, Schmidt demanded a one year boycott of CNET.

The record for longest human lifespan is currently held by Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

She did that with 20th century technology, and she wasn't even an intellectual or highly motivated.

We've already entered the age of organ regeneration... growing new organs from our own cell... and it's already saving lives. I think it will pass regulatory hurdles and come in to widespread usage within 10 or 20 years.

Genome sequencing is down from $250k a year ago to $5k now (http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006527.html). In 10 or 20 years most people will have their genomes sequenced, and medicine will no longer be a crap shoot.

Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation’s approximately $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but countless patients are being exposed unnecessarily to side effects.

[Conventional] studies tend to be “one size fits all,” with the winning treatment recommended for everybody. Personalized medicine would go beyond that by determining which drug is best for which patient, rather than continuing to treat everyone the same in hopes of benefiting the fortunate few. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/30gene.html?ex=1388379600&en=a3e1de30bab852a6&ei=5124&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook

If you die in 2050, that sounds like a waste, because I think it's highly unlikely I won't live into the 2100s. Imagine where technology will be in 2100.

------------------------------
Re: 'world of criminals'

I think the idea of humans as possessing 'personhood' is a simplistic model. The deeper you dig in the cognitive sciences and the human sciences in general, the more clear it becomes that human thought outputs and behavioral outputs are just the result of deterministic mechanisms. Looking at humans as 'persons' isn't looking at a deep enough level of detail... and it makes us take things 'personally' -- as if the decision agents (in a game theory sense) we're interacting with are 'persons.' Humans want to be good... they just have simplistic, unmotivated brains.

Change the inputs, and the outputs will change. Embryo selection is borderline-practical today, and it's increasingly being used. My prediction is by 2030 5% of births (in wealthy countries) will be using it (for cosmetic and temperament improvements - e.g. reduced addictive behavior, greater motivation, less 'social learners' and more 'infovores'), and by 2060 60% of births will be using it. When those generations reach 25 years old, they'll be starting to influence society, which will be 2055 and 2085, respectively.

However, by 2055, I think we'll have neurotechnology that achieves most of the large goals of neurogenetic change: next-generation neuropharmaceuticals, neuroimplants, and changes to the organization of our neural tissue using stem cells.

I believe the future is humanistic and humanitarian. And the world is incompetent, waiting for us to influence the arc of history.

IMHO, anyway.

What do you think?


------------------------------

In reply to this comment by gorillaman:
I think we're going to miss SENS by at least a generation. The way I treat my body I'm expecting to die around 40.

Doesn't it gnaw at you that, living in a world mostly populated by criminals, any good you do will primarily benefit them?

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Gorillaman, we're young enough that we have a decent chance of living to see the fulfillment of SENS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).

Doesn't that make you want to do something with your life that's ingenious and constructive, helping out the common good, instead of just pursuing vendettas?

I see what you're getting at now. I thought that part of his comment was rather childish, but I very much agreed with the rest of it, so I gave him the upvote anyway.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
I was trying to display the hypocrisy in his statement about "best schools" and then using a wikipedia quote. I agree that wikipedia is an EXCELLENT place to start research, but only in browsing their sources will you go far enough beyond wikipedia to not get docked points on a paper at the "best schools" or even community college...

Because wikipedia has a bad rap with the more controversial topics, being that they've had problems with articles changing for someone's personal gain, college staff has pretty much ruled out wikipedia as a valid source of information. At my college anyway. All you need for "valid" research is 1 degree beyond wikipedia.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
>> ^rottenseed:
Anybody who has been to an average school let alone the "best" would know that quoting wikipedia as a source of your argument is a NO-NO.


Why? It's about as accurate as any other encyclopedia and certainly more up to date.

Would it have been better if he said the quote was from orwell.ru?

This idea that Wikipedia is useless is ridiculous. Read it with some skepticism, as you should with any encyclopedia, and check the source citations, which may not be an option with a traditional encyclopedia.

I was trying to display the hypocrisy in his statement about "best schools" and then using a wikipedia quote. I agree that wikipedia is an EXCELLENT place to start research, but only in browsing their sources will you go far enough beyond wikipedia to not get docked points on a paper at the "best schools" or even community college...

Because wikipedia has a bad rap with the more controversial topics, being that they've had problems with articles changing for someone's personal gain, college staff has pretty much ruled out wikipedia as a valid source of information. At my college anyway. All you need for "valid" research is 1 degree beyond wikipedia.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
>> ^rottenseed:
Anybody who has been to an average school let alone the "best" would know that quoting wikipedia as a source of your argument is a NO-NO.


Why? It's about as accurate as any other encyclopedia and certainly more up to date.

Would it have been better if he said the quote was from orwell.ru?

This idea that Wikipedia is useless is ridiculous. Read it with some skepticism, as you should with any encyclopedia, and check the source citations, which may not be an option with a traditional encyclopedia.

>> ^rottenseed:
Anybody who has been to an average school let alone the "best" would know that quoting wikipedia as a source of your argument is a NO-NO.


Why? It's about as accurate as any other encyclopedia and certainly more up to date.

Would it have been better if he said the quote was from orwell.ru?

This idea that Wikipedia is useless is ridiculous. Read it with some skepticism, as you should with any encyclopedia, and check the source citations, which may not be an option with a traditional encyclopedia.

>> ^HenningKO:
Longest eh?
If it's total, aren't they all the same length?


No. Totality ranges in time from eclipse to eclipse. This one happened to be the longest until early 2100s.

Interesting note. VY Canis Majoris is estimated at an upper limit of 2100 times the radius of the Sun. The biggest theoretically possible star would be about 2600 times the radius of the sun.
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/06/what-is-the-biggest-star-in-the-universe/

ALEXA DANNER, ABC News: It's an idea that most of us would rather not face — that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind.

It seems outlandish, extreme — even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen.

Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the "perfect storm" of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.

In order to plan for the worst, we must anticipate it. In that spirit, guided by some of the world's experts, ABC News' "Earth 2100," hosted by Bob Woodruff, will journey through the next century and explore what might be our worst-case scenario.

But no one can predict the future, so how do we address the possibilities that lie ahead? Our solution is Lucy, a fictional character devised by the producers at ABC to guide us through the twists and turns of what the next 100 years could look like. It is through her eyes and experiences that we can truly imagine the experts' worst-case scenario — and be inspired to make changes for the better.