Sceptics and consumer rights activists will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic 'pillules' to demonstrate that these 'remedies', prepared according to a long-discredited 18th century ritual, are nothing but sugar pills.
This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.Hacklabs Finland - Yhteisötyöpajat.
It's a bit like asking an ant of 10 million years ago: If humans were created tomorrow, what sort of implications do you think that would have for all the ant colonies?
If you make a donation to the Singularity Institute, you can choose which grant proposal your donation should help to fill. Any time a grant proposal is fully funded, it goes into our “active projects” file: it becomes a project that we have money enough to fund, and that we are publicly committed to funding. (Some of the projects will go forward even without earmarked donations, with money from the general fund — but many won’t, and since our work is limited by how much money we have available to support skilled staff and Visiting Fellows, more money allows more total projects to go forward.)
Any remaining money allocated to partially funded grants on Feb 28 (at the close of the Challenge Campaign) will be returned to the general fund.
Such an interstellar capability isn't going to look much like a "ship". It's going to look more like a DVD balanced on a microwave beam, or a can of beans hanging below a light sail energized by lasers powered by huge orbiting solar power stations. There won't be any biological agencies aboard: just AGIs or something equivalent ported out of a fleshbody's cranium. No hands, only nanotech assemblers. And after a voyage of decades or centuries it's going to have to stop — somehow braking at the other end — then spend more decades farming rocks, slush and sunlight to build ever-bigger physical structures until it can build the equipment with which to phone home.
Commence the comical nightmare of being told that we now possess an "unfair advantage" in wearing prosthetic limbs to run. The scores of amputee sprinters who had competed with the limbs for the previous 13 years—and were still comfortably categorized as "disabled"—were virtually ignored. What is fascinating is the immediate shift in society's regard of a disabled athlete as an "inspiration" (cue the patronizing "awwwww") to a legitimate threat to other athletes ("Uh, what the hell do we do now?").
"In America, we didn't do it until we started regular animal experiments. You need to establish a teaching and training environment. Read the book The Knife Man, about John Hunter, one of the greatest men in your country. The greatest surgeon in London, and they wouldn't even let him lecture in the official facilities. He had to build his own building in his home to teach his students." Darwin feels he has much in common with Hunter, a prophet without honour. "He created disciples, students who went all over the world and took what he taught them. That's what we were trying to do; establish an environment to create a self-perpetuating professionalism."
