Homework 14

1:
I believe that if it becomes economical to put colonies on celestial body, our first choice would be the moon due to its close distance and possible presence of water. On the moon you would have to use enclosed self sustained environments such as bio-domes where people would live most likely in very high density homes and work in tight work spaces. As the technology evolves we may find ways to increase our efficiency of the domes, and allow for bigger domes at lower cost allowing for bigger homes, work places, and populations.
However if we went to another planet such as mars, it could be possible in the short term to live in bubbles, but in the long term we could terraform the planet’s atmosphere into one that can sustain human life. Terraforming would most likely take a few centuries or maybe more or less depending on the tech used and the evolution of that tech.
Naturally moving to a new planet is only a temporary fix, if people want to keep on living, they will need to do one of 2 things. The most reasonable method is to control the population’s reproduction to have equal birth and death rates to keep the growth at 0. This is the most efficient method, but people generally want the freedom to populate on their own decision, not of that from the government, so implementing this method it could be difficult. The other method is to constantly terraform new planets, solving our population problem temporarily each planet and moon at a time.


2:
Back to a very broad ethical issue, how immersive should we let our entertainment get? As the technology to directly input images into the mind, and allow the closest thing to physical interaction with a digital world , how will that effect our social skills. The argument can be made today, that although people do interact over the internet in games, chat, and business, how healthy is it?

Currently our interactions over the net cut out all, or almost all body language and most things such as voice. Because of this we miss key pieces of information that allow us to understand the other person. If people use this type of communication more, it could lead to a overall less understanding between society to put it bluntly. In the future the communication technology may allow a person to also record such information as body language and voice may become the main form of communication over text (or a mix of the 2, voice as primary which is then trans-coded into text for archiving) and that would raise the level of communication quality, but since it is all over a digital media, it is possible to manipulate the data. One can bring up endless discussions of how a person may block certain things to remain anonymous or hide certain things that they don't want to communicate, but in the end it leads to the same problem of privacy.

Lets assume we do spend a majority of our life connected over the net, even for our jobs. What would this do to the occasions that we do go out and communicate with people in reality? And our digital worlds become too good, and become more like our fantasy then how will that effect the will to go back into reality. There are already plenty of entertainment related addictions that are not based on drugs, and I believe that for some the net could become even more of an addiction then it is now.

Homework 13

1: although I was not at class the day that everyone was talking about it, from the bit of research I did it seems that toxoplasma gondii is rather normal. It does not seem to be anything too special as it is not a serious threat, or an epidemic of any kind. Although reading about it may give you some ideas about how parasites work and some of the ways they transfer between hosts and their general composition.
The only animals that are seriously effected by this parasite are cats, and although they are rather susceptible to them. Although as much as a third of the human population is infected with this parasitic disease, it does not cause harm in most cases.

2: Perhaps the second biggest entertainment industry besides games would have to be music and movies. Both of these are long lasting forms of entertainment, but they have one major downfall. With music even though someone may be able to think up a song, they may not have the talent to play a instrument in the real world. But using mind interface implants you could give people the ability to just think of a tune and export it in the purest form, right out of the mind. Now with movies/video it can be a bit more complicated to get a clear image of something in your imagination, so perhaps you could use the same recording method, but with filters, or enhancing programs to clear up your mental images for video , giving you the opportunity to create your own good looking movies, assuming you have the talent to come up with good ideas.

Now even with the ability to easily record music and video from the mind, we can all understand even without the technology existing that the world will be flooded with bad music and movies because of this, just as it is somewhat today with independent music. However, in the future I believe that to counter this even bigger problem that we will create filters to filter out what each person does not want to see, and what they do, sort of like a Google search for mind recorded content.

Homework 12

1: if i could have a robot that could do anything at all, i would like one that could clean the house so i could focus on other things without having to worry about that. the reason i would choose this is because it's the most time consuming thing that unpleasant to do.

2:
Robotics is also another interesting field, as the interface to “read our minds” becomes more sophisticated, we could use it to control things remotely such as a robotic body. Take for example a nuclear power plant. It could be beneficial to use remote robotic bodies to handle work in such a potentially hazardous environment rather than having the person go in and do the job manually. Because robots would not suffer from exposure to toxic chemicals and high doses of radiation, they are a prime candidate for a way to improve hazardous jobs. Also besides work place use, remote robotics also has a private use. Say that a family member is half way across the world, and instead of talking over the phone , you can interact with them through a robotic body. Although remote robotics may seem like a good idea from the previous statement, it also can have it's downfalls. The technology will be used by the military as a replacement for humans if it is economical to do so, and this then becomes an ethical problem about “robotic killing machines”.