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.