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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dethklok" data-source="post: 6317520" data-attributes="member: 6746469">What is it with you gamers and your overcomplications? Just extend arms from the main rotating body; if you double the radius you double the artificial gravity. That's much simpler than getting two sections with different rotational velocities to interface cleanly with one another. Moving parts in a sealed environment are a bad idea.Mm, yes. This is, by the way, where I think expansion will first occur. Space is a big step; the low hanging fruit is picked first. Not to mention that we still can't make a really good biodome even at 1 atm. So perfecting arctic habitats will come first, then probably subterranean, and then submarine habitats. I think space will probably come after, unless there is an unforeseen economic or religious push to skip some of the other steps. Personality recordings will not be possible for quite some time. I've worked with neuroscientists; a brute-force approach would require not only a complete brain scan, neuron by neuron, but more crucially, knowing the state that each neuron is in. Top-down approaches will probably be more effective for a long time to come, meaning psychometric batteries will remain the tool of choice for personality recording into the foreseeable future.    I don't believe it. This era hasn't got two more scientifically productive centuries in it. Maybe one. You find a way to cope with global warming, peak oil, economic shocks, and strong fertility differentials favoring fundamentalist religious groups (read: non- and anti-scientists) over STEM workers, and then we'll talk about animal uplifts and aquatic whisperjets!2000 years ago; Plato already had it figured out. Now consider the strong sociocultural opposition to such ideas and you'll see (one reason) why I'm skeptical about these projections of scientific advancement into the future. Sometimes science doesn't progress at all - or sometimes, progress isn't even progress in the first place.Thanks.Tough to create AI at all. So far we really don't understand what intelligence really is, or how it originates in the brain to simulate it in the first place. The way computers currently "think" is through brute force calculation without any self awareness or intelligence. Squirrels are smarter. Yes, computers can win at chess, but their effective ability to make sense of things or figure out what's going on is zero. I'm not saying AI cannot be built, but its discovery won't take place during a period of Kuhnian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift" target="_blank">normal science</a>. If so, this means that AI will bring with it challenges and consequences which are difficult for us even to imagine, let alone resolve beforehand.</blockquote>

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