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Originally Posted by gorillamom
That's true as well. But I was refering to here in the US specifically. We also have a high infant mortality rate for a Westernized country.
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Because we're blind to poverty within our own country.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jowey
Interesting - wait till we hit Space or even the Oceans.....
But now the socially aware are not breeding as much, yet the poor continue to propagate. Therefore there may be a trend towards regression and aggression - war and then we go again.
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I distinctly recall many people on the Bill Maher boards having a profound dislike of the movie
Chronicals of Riddick, but Jowey does bring up an interesting point about human evolution on other worlds. In
Chronicals of Riddick this future speciation is inferred. Riddick himself is a "Furion," a "native" of the planet
Furia, which apparenly is a rough neighborhood as far as extra-solar boispheres go. The movie's action sequences would have no basis in reality otherwise.
Another character is an "Elemental" of the airvarety in particular. Their brains have become highly attuned and- possibly, it's their minds that allow them to glide without aerofoils and to bend light around herself if there's enough direct light on her [nearly equal to daylight sun]. But most impressive, to me anyway, was their ability to "calculate" and I don't just mean do basic math or probability in their head. I'm make assessments they couldn't possibly have drawn date from.
"Is Riddick dead?"
"I calculate a 73% probability... that Riddick is still alive."
Some of this future evolution
will be artificial I promise you that. The potential capabilities written into our DNA are just too tempting to some people. And since a group of people conforming to a certain ideology would have the opportunity to establish their own world far away from those who disapprove of their beliefs or methods. Here on Earth if you want to genetically engineer a human being or other organisms there's either a lawe forbidding it or a case pending in the courts to challenge such research.
But in a far flung future with limitless real estate just waiting for true pioneers such as was rarely seen on Earth [the Americas already had residence before European arrival] if the society you lived in disapproved of your proposed social structure or synthesized anatomy or physiology they'd simply send you off or you'd choose to split the scene. And the change of return violence diminishes due to the lack of interest or value in waging war across such distances. You won't be fighting for new land, because there'd be countless empty worlds.
So pity the retard dumb enough to think they could unite so many worlds under one rule. A multi-world socio-political structure is pheasable, but not across many solar systems- at leat not for the next few millennia. So if you have the technology to skip town, skip out of this solar system then more power to'ya. And it'd way too much trouble to chase after you, track you down to then wipe you out. This further encourages differentiation of social structures, technological paths unique to each world or system and- eventually/inevitably, still more rapid speciation.
Even for those humans who resist any intentional change will evolve naturally due to the basic fact no two planets will have exactly matching environments. Even with the 70/21 nitrogen/oxygen mix at about one atmosphere at sea level [or equivalent thereto] and nearly one gee doesn't mean all else is equal to Earth. Basic chemistry on that new world will slightly off- at a minimum, radioisotopes will have differing percentages and if it has indigenous life on it humans won't be ecological or biochemically compatible to it. The proteins [assuming those lifeforms have protein incorporated into their nature] won't be anything like those of Earth organisms. This is again due to evolution. Never the same thing twice or, as Christopher Columbus would say, life has more imagination than our dreams.
Hell, give it a million years of human evolution on other worlds and they will be effectively extraterrestrially alien to anything known to humans today.