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passive_fist comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Something's brewing in my brain lately, and I don't know what. I know that it centers around:
-People were probably born during the Crimean War/US Civil War/The Boxer Rebellion who then died of a heart attack in a skyscraper/passenger plane crash/being caught up in, say WWII.
-Accurate descriptions of people from a decade or two ago tend to seem tasteless. (Casual homophobia) Accurate descriptions of people several decades ago seem awful and bizarre. (Hitting your wife, blatant racism) Accurate descriptions of people from centuries ago seem alien in their flat-out implausible awfulness. (Royalty shitting on the floor at Versailles, the Albigensian Crusade, etc...)
-We seem no less shocked now by social changes and technological developments and no less convinced that everything major under the sun has been done and only tweaks and refinements remain than people of past eras did.
I guess what I'm saying is that the Singularity seems a lot more factually supported-ly likely than it otherwise might have been, but we won't realize we're going through it until it's well underway because our perception of such things will also wind up going faster for most of it.
The problem is that human social mores seem to change on the order of 20-40 years which is consistent with the amount of time it takes a new generation of people to take the helm and for the old generation to die out. I have personally seen extreme societal change within my own country of origin, change that happened in only the span of 30 years. In comparison, Western culture over this same time has seemed almost stagnant (despite the fact that it, too, has undergone massive changes such as acceptance of homosexuality).
However, by some estimates, we are already just 20-40 years away from the singularity (2035-2055). This seems like too short a time for human culture to adapt to the massive level that is required. For instance, consider a simple thing like food. Right now, the idea of eating meat that has been grown in a lab seems unsettling and strange to many people. Now consider what future technology will enable, step-by-step:
There is likely to not be a very large span of time between each of these steps.
Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste. Sunlight and feedstock are cheap, people get squicked easily, and stuff that's stuck around for a long time is likely to continue sticking around. You may as well say we'll outgrow a need for fire, language, or tools; indeed, I'd believe any of those over the total abandonment of food.
Fecal implants do seem to have some health benefits.
There are people who do drink their own urine. Spirilina can be grown on urine.
Algae also have the advantage that they are signal cell organism with means that it's easy to introduce new genes into them via DIY-bio efforts.
That means you can easily change the way the stuff tastes and let it produce vitamins and other substances. If you want a cheap source of THC you can transplant the relevant genes needed to produce the THC into an algae and grow it at home in a way that isn't as easily discovered as growing hemp.
You can trade different algae species and get more interesting compounds than THC.
What are fecal implents?
Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.
I think the parent post means fecal transplants which are a way to reseed the gut biota with something hopefully more suitable.
Oh, makes sense. That's not food, though; that's a very easy organ(?) transplant.
You don't transplant the organ but the feces. They get processed in the intestine. Stuff that enters the body to be processed in the intestine is food for some definition of "food".
But once you accept the goal to get feces into the gut, the way is only a detail that's open to change.
By the time that stuff is in the colon -- which is what gets transplanted -- it's not food any more. At least not for humans.
No, I know that the colon is not transplanted; the flora is. Hence the (?). Also, it hopefully doesn't get processed but rather survives to colonize the gut. Further, an enema would probably be far more effective, given its lack of strong acid and pepsin designed to kill the flora.
Sorry, typo. Should be fecal implants or stool transplants.
Sounding appealing is a question of marketing. Plenty of people prefer organic food that grown with feces of animals over food grown with "chemical" fertilizer. They even pay more money for the product.
I also think you underrate the cost of fertilizer for some poor biohacker in Neirobi who has plenty of access to empty bottles. Human urine should also be pretty cheap to buy in third world megacities.
Access to cheap natural gas and oil is also central for the current way of doing agriculture. Without having access to those resources for cheap prices resource reuse might be a bigger deal.
Good point. I doubt that that extends to abandoning food altogether, though.
If there's a causal link here, then it's possible the biggest problem with social change and technological advances would be due to increased longevity, in which case it might not matter how long the time span is... even if there were decades, it wouldn't be enough.
In some sci-fi settings they have rules where people above a certain 'age' can't directly enter politics anymore. Although I'm not sure exactly how effective that would be, since they would still hold power and influence, and human nature seems to be that we allow more power and influence to the elderly than to the young.