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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spiney" data-source="post: 283712" data-attributes="member: 192438">Lots of people - including me - would very much wish that "Star Trek like" technology were possible, but wishing don't make it so, and ignoring the known laws of physics won't help either! What's needed is to understand the actual real world, as fully as possible, and then see where we might get to ......For 2000 years Aristotle's physics was accepted as "correct". Not because people were more stupid then - they certainly weren't - but there seemed to be very good reasons for this. However, once Galileo had experimentally demonstrated "a new physics", this was very quickly accepted as correct, regardless of what various Church Authorities, etc, said or did.(It's worth pointing out that the earliest telescope astronomers were mostly Jesuit priests!).I'm writing this on a computer, thanks to transistors! Despite what nutters claim, we didn't get transistors from a crashed spaceship! Instead, they only came after years of solid state physics research, ongoing since the 1930s. Of the transistor's discoverers, Brattain had been active in exactly such research for a long time, Bardeen was a theoretical physicist, and Shockley the "team manager". Despite some later aberrent behaviour from Shockley, these 3 disciplines together were needed for the transistor's discovery.Interestingly, almost nobody "foretold" computers. For example, I'm currently reading Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon", written around 1942. A very interesting novel about "humane" eugenics, very topical at that time, what with The Nazis etc (the Star Trek "Sauron supermen" - and the film: Star Trek, 2 Wrath of Kahn - derive directly from this novel!). Heinelin uses terms like "germ plasm", etc, Weissman's terminology, because DNA wouldn't be discovered for another 10 years! However, of course, Heinlein well understood genetics, and consequently his discussions on "humane eugenics" are still very interesting.What's amazing is, also in this novel, scientists have to do lots of complex calculations, but they use comptometers and mechanical differential analysers! Yet, at exactly this time, Atanastoff had partly built the first electronic calculator, and Mauchly and Eckert were designing ENIAC (Colossus was already working in England, but very secretly!).So, the future will be amazing, no doubt, but something we can't possibly predict, so probably nothing like Star Trek!The impossibility of "scientific prediction" has been pointed out by Popper. His reasons why - for example - Marx's "dialectical materialism" is complete rubbish are worth reading. Marx and Engels said lots of interesting things, but this particular idea was rubbish (and we know where it led .....).Similar principles also apply to various metaphysical and occult claims (telepathy, reincarnation, etc). Sceptics like James Randi and Martin Gardner are almost completely and universally misunderstood! Their actual position is, any proof of such claims would be so very important - completely changing our view of the world - that we must be completely damn sure they ARE true, and not just the result of desire and wishful thinking, no matter how sincere!<a href="http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/books/popper_poverty_of_historicism.html" target="_blank">http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/books/popper_poverty_of_historicism.html</a> .<a href="http://nonzero.org/chap14.htm" target="_blank">http://nonzero.org/chap14.htm</a> .</blockquote>

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