On 18 Jun., 08:00, "jmsa...{at}aol.com"  wrote:

Now the serious one.

> The main emphasis is on advanced technology.  If someone who can do
> the math were to look down the road a million years and see what
> advances might be there, based on what we know now, what would that
> look like?


In fact this is a very very hard question.

Trying to think back to the age of the Crusades, to the time
of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and King Richard the Lionheart
willing to look ahead the level of scientific civilization
"only" one thousand years, I'm a bit desperate to figure any
idea over such a huge period in question.

But perhaps it'll all happen the other way.

Scenario no.1:
--------------
It might be science has yet reached its point of culmination and even
giant effort/investments in basic research would get only some more
subatomic particles with less meaning - nothing else (especially no
FTL,
no antigrav, no timetravel, etc.).
Two words: finis scientiae.

Concerning such a scenario - if there will exist an intelligent
species
even in a million years, it perhaps should be monkishly (not
monkey ;-),
rule-based, religious, stable, static.

Scenario no.2:
--------------
I personally hope and believe that scenario no.1 won't come true.
That - even scientific progress will pause sometimes - there will
be unexpected unpredictable scientific breakthroughs.

Therefore some thoughts about the million-year-question:

- I don't believe that biological species can give up their
material basis evolving to immaterial beeings.

- Longevity is a primary goal of living beeings and will proceed
in incorporating more and more technical and biological implants.
Leading to a non-biological evolution of intelligent species.

- Very Speculative but fascinating: if the physical world-view
would expand the Einsteinian space-time about new dimensions that
eventually intelligent species would give the techncal ability to
use "Hyperspace". Finally allowing FTL-transportation in the
fourthdimensional space-time.
Much more scientific progress needed than string-theory ;-)


Places to visit:
----------------

1. Particle Physics:
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL):  about Fusion
enegry and more
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (RNL): Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider to probe the Quark-Gluon-Plasma
- Fermilab, Chikago: Tevatron to probe antimatter (antiproton)
- CERN, Geneva, Switzerland: new Hadron Collider to simulate
NearBigBang-Physics
- University Vienna, Austria: Prof. Zeilinger: experimental
quantum teleportation; photon entanglement
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-gedanken-experimenter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Zeilinger


2. Genetics:
- Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, Maryland and La Jolla,
California.:
Human Genom Project (Sequencing DNA)


3. Astronautics (some not mentioned before):
- International Astronautical Federation, Paris, France:
http://www.iafastro.com/
-Mars Society: Mars related Science; goal: manned mars mission;
Terraforming Mars
http://www.marssociety.org/portal
- British Interplanetary Society, London, UK:
http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/


hth
Stefan


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