Could We Build a Weather Machine to Stop Climate Change?

What if we built new bodies that were more resilient to climate?

What if our bodies could withstand thousands of degree of heat? Or absolute zero. Or standing in lava, or at the bottom of the ocean.

What if we had bodies that didn’t need oxygen? Or food (just electricity)?

I believe that there are ethical reasons for preserving the ecosystem, but in terms of sheer survival, going post-biological makes a lot of sense.

Three things.  One, even are most resilient technology is not fully immune to environmental effects.  Two, before such technologies exists, our planet would probably be in such a mess that convincing the masses to go “post-biological would be a very low priority as would be more serious things to worry about.  Three, there are some interesting points that I came across concerning transhumanism in a thread I was a part of. I’ll add them to see what you think.  BTW, the thread was about the implausibility of super-intelligent aliens and some of the stuff that was brought up seemed relivent to the things you say.

“Even the world’s greatest supercomputer is actually beneath even a microbe, as even a microbe has some small level of independence.

To be entirely fair, computers are currently superior to us- in some areas, but inferior in others.

When a computer is running a videogame (for example), or simply displaying an image on a screen, it’s performing a task with extreme ease, that you or I would find excruciatingly difficult.

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  normally only saying things like “because computers are better now than they used to be, this automatically means they’ll [insert wild technological fantasy here] in the future”.

 

Indeed. Techofantasy apparears to be a favourite game of some.

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  And no matter how many computers you enhance your brain with there will always be the potential for someone with a natural, non-enhanced brain to out-think you.

 

Of course, but an entity that has access to more information and can process that information at a faster rate and/or more intently is less likely to be out-thought by a less intelligent entity.

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  (which you could do anyway by accessing databases not connected to your brain)

 

I concur. I’ve never really seen the logic of such implantation of technology. It may seem like the logical evolution of ease-of-use, but the central flaw is that the device in question is now intimately linked to a particular user; rather than being a tool available for potentially anyone to use, it becomes a defining trait of a particular person. Technology is usually an equaliser, something created to bring more power to everyone. Transhumanism, on the other hand, brings power solely to specific persons- persons that have been altered physically, and potentially irreversibly so.

If I had some sort of eclipse-viewing device implanted into my eye, it’d simply be a sad day for anyone else around at the time of the eclipse. But if I had bought some sort of eclipse-viewing tool, I could share it with others, and everyone could have a chance to participate (in addition to me not having to undergo eye surgery and having an iris that looks like welder’s glass).

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  I wonder if it’s possible to increase brain power by simply running on something else. By this I mean if there were hypothetical aliens who abandoned their organic bodies for some sort of machine body that ran on, let’s say, a small fusion power plant, could these aliens be more intelligent than us? Since, you know, they now have a lot more energy to spare on intellect.

 

It would boost their intelligence no more than shutting down all other electricity use in Pretoria would make my computer more powerful.

However, computer hardware does operate faster than the human brain (much faster), so it could be possible for an entity using such hardware to experience subjective time at a far faster rate than we do.

This has its ups and downs, of course- it would likely be excruciatingly boring to do anything other than interact with other such entities. If you experienced time a million times faster, a second would be equal to over 11 days. Just moving somewhere would be incredibly boring, due to simple physical limits of speed- actions that we take for granted would seemingly take subjective weeks or even years to perform. The speed of light would cause even mildly long-distance communications to become troublesome (the ping time from another hemisphere could make light-lag from Mars look positively superluminal).”

 

”  To be entirely fair, computers are currently superior to us- in some areas, but inferior in others.

  When a computer is running a videogame (for example), or simply displaying an image on a screen, it’s performing a task with extreme ease, that you or I would find excruciatingly difficult.

 

That just means they can operate faster. The fact still remains that no matter how impressive a computer’s processing power is, it still can’t actually think.
Parasky’s sensory deprivation example did a good job of highlighting one of the reasons the things a computer does can not be compared to actual thought. Computers only compute information put into them and act according to programming. Brains create information on their own and use it in their own way.

  Akurian452
     

  from the source I mentioned earlier, they say that one of their main goals is to ensure that those technologies are available to everyone. Though I understand your point that such a drastic alteration would be irreversible if you didn’t want it anymore.

 

The thing I don’t get about transhumanism is why anyone would even want to “improve” humans. If those people took some more time to study biology they’d realise that humans are already incredibly impressive organisms. Our intelligence is simply immense (it always bothers me when people try to trivialise sapience and act as if we need to get “smarter” when we are already smarter than all the millions of other species on our planet and presumably equal to any sapient alien race). Our hands give us truly impressive manual dexterity. Though we are not the fastest and strongest creatures, we are actually quite fast and strong compared to many other creatures, and we are actually also one of the best long distance runners. We also have excellent eyesight and hearing (again, while there are some animals that are better than us in these aspects, these don’t represent the majority of life).
Also, I don’t understand why anyone would want to pervert their body with machine parts (unless of course they are using machine parts to replace body parts lost in accidents or something, though this practice may become obsolete once the medical science of regrowing body tissues reaches a high enough level).

I understand that you yourself are not advocating transhumanism. I’m merely pointing out why I feel it is a completely unnecessary concept.”

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  from the source I mentioned earlier, they say that one of their main goals is to ensure that those technologies are available to everyone.

 

That is an idealistic outcome, but hardly anything exceptional- idealistic outcomes predominate in discussions of transhumanism.

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  Well, then you would just have an organism who is as smart as the smartest human.

 

Not necessarily. It should be possible to engineer the emergence of traits in an organism that are not reflected in natural variation.

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  The concept of a being far above any human in intelligence though is still no more than a fantasy that only works if one ignores biological and physical laws.

 

That depends on how the being operates. If a being had a ‘brain’ consisting of advanced computer hardware, it would theoretically be free of the physical limitations posed by neurobiological brains, and could both operate faster and process more information.

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  The fact still remains that no matter how impressive a computer’s processing power is, it still can’t actually think.

 

But that’s like saying a crane isn’t powerful because it can’t pump water. A computer may not be able to do what you do, but it is still extremely capable- just look at what you can achieve by using it.

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  We’re human, but we could be so much more.

 

But we are already so much more. Our technology allows us to do marvelous things. There’s no need to integrate it physically into the human body- there is literally no requirement in any practical technological application that requires implantation or grafting of this sort.

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  And you say “pervert” our bodies, as if by adding to them we are mutilating them.

 

But how is ‘adding’ to the human body any less a subjective term than ‘mutilating’ it? If all of society continuously ‘added’ to themselves, eventually they would ‘add’ so much as to no longer be human. Unless one were to invent a particularly squishy definition of ‘human’, humanity and all it stood for would be extinct- not from an asteroid impact or a super-virus or a war, but from “progress”.

What is so much more advantageous about chopping off our own arm for a cybernetic replacement, when a worn armature or exoskeleton could allow you to complete the same tasks? Why graft gills onto your skin when you can explore the photic zone with a rebreather kit? Why replace your eyes when external sensors can enhance low-light conditions and display the range of the electromagnetic spectrum to you?

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the whole idea stems either from a hunger for superiority, or a kind of misanthropism (in the sense of hating humans in particular, not hating people in general). Transhumanism tries to define “superiority”, “improvement”, “obsoleteness”- that’s all fine and well, when you’re talking about tools (since you can toss your tools away if they fail or do not satisfy you). But now one moves into applying those terms to people, in a world where one’s abilities and limitations are defined by what they are. The purpose of technology is to enhance the human condition, not change it beyond the point of definition.

Granted, a lot of the goals of transhumanism are, at their core, admirable. I just think the means by which they are thought of being achieved are mislead.”

“And you say “pervert” our bodies, as if by adding to them we are mutilating them. Who are you, so high and mighty on your great moral pedestal, that you should judge what I choose to do with my body?

 

Firstly, to fit machine parts into a body, one would often have to cut out bits of ones body. Bits that may well be completely healthy. I’d say its fair to say that cutting out healthy body tissue just so it can be replaced it with machinery counts as a form of mutilation.

Secondly, how does disliking transhumanism automatically equal being “high and mighty” on a “great moral pedestal?” Holding different views to someone is NOT the same as being “high and mighty”.
I frankly don’t care what you choose to do with your body. However, this does not mean I am under any obligation to think merging human bodies with machinery is a wonderful idea. (NOTE: as said earlier, I don’t have a problem with people doing this if they’ve lost body parts. However, I fail to see any need for a healthy fully functional individual with their body parts still intact to stick all this machinery into themselves).

I won’t bother going into detail as to the various reasons I dislike transhumanism, as T.Neo has already pointed out problems with it, and his views on the matter seem about the same (or at least rather similar) to my own.

  Akurian452
     

  Another big goal of transhumanism, which I’m surprised no one mentioned, is achieving functional immortality while retaining the vigor of youth, starting with longevity through genetic engineering. I wonder if anyone has every did a post on the plausibility or implausibility or immortal aliens.

 

Well, it may well be possible to prolong life both through things like healthier living (for instance, the reason we can live a lot longer than people in medieval Europe is because of things like the fact that we don’t toss waste into the streets and water supplies like they did, and the fact that most of us, with the exception of some religious fundamentalists, no longer view medicine as “the work of the Devil”) and through things like clearing free radicals out of the body and elongating telomeres.
However, while we can prolong life, I doubt anyone could ever live forever, no matter how extreme the measures they took were (some of the more extreme transhumanists might suggest putting our brains into machine bodies, but even the best maintained of these would break down eventually. Not to mention that such a state would deprive a person of such pleasures as eating delicious foods, drinking delicious drinks and enjoying the pleasures of sex, and who would want to be deprived of all this for the rest of their prolonged life?).”

“I find the idea of living forever attractive. Mind you, when I say that I really do mean living, rather than existing as some kind of techno-zombie deprived of human experience.”

Getting back to the weather. I could see this system working as a gross control of global temperature, but finer control assumes boundaries that aren’t there. Turning Washington into a desert will have effects on the system that happen outside of Washington.

Aside from the control issue, there is the ethical question of whose weather needs take priority. Does the hay farmer’s need for dry weather trump the soybean farmer’s need for rain?