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My cat Mouse was still nursing her kittens when they were larger than she was, though she started weaning them earlier. She wanted them to stop long before they finally did, I think. They were nearly a year old and fully grown when I remember them waiting until she was deeply asleep and couldn't defend herself to gang up on her and nurse her.
So judging by that, the right age seems to be when mom can't take it any more and makes it stop. Children can be such little terrorists. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Oh, and science museums are so cool! One of the neatest things I've ever seen was in our science museum years ago. It was a triangle made of 3 mirrors edge to edge and you stood in the center of them. The reflections in various orientations went off to infinity in all directions. An infinite hexagonal array. I would love to see that again. I wonder why they don't bring it back from time to time. You had to crawl up underneath it to get inside but none of us kids worried about that. Maybe the grownups were reluctant to crawl underneath, or something, and they felt left out. Poor grownups! They miss so much that's fun.
And dinosaurs are really cool too! I love them! I went through a dinosaur phase like most kids, but mine happened sort of late. I was in my late 20s. But I still have scale replicas of a bunch of dinosaurs. I loved velociraptors long before (the misnamed) Jurassic Park came out, but was glad to finally see them get the stardom they deserved. They were seriously severely cool! Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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That would be so cool! When we colonize space, we could do that! We'd probably want to have many of the child care tasks automated by then. Maybe a robonannie for changing, feeding, and rocking with mom or dad in the control center like Ender, giving overall direction and zooming in to take control of individual situations as needed. For education we could have those books like in The Diamond Age, with Mom and Dad being able to step in at any point to guide and direct the program.
If we do that, we could handle litters of six or eight kids maybe twice a year for 20 years. How many does that make?
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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But at the end of those 20 years, the first kids would be reproducing themselves. Exponential growth!
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Thong-Myster: Sigh. You people are a lost cause.
Because your topic was soooooooooo interesting on its own to begin with. Wait a minute... How sure are you that you aren't Bean Counter? *eyes suspiciously*
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You know, it would be interesting to see the ways that we will adapt ourselves to make the colonization of extraplanetary habitats and alien worlds--xenoforming ourselves rather than terraforming the environments (or more likely in conjunction with terraforming the environments). Not that the idea of adapting human physiology and psychology to an alien environment is terribly original, but still, the idea of making ourselves into aliens is intriguing.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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What if some humans started combining with dinosaurs. Like women! And then they were really big and they could do bad things to men.
And then they take over the world so everything is their size...like toilet bowls, and guys would have to stand on the edge of a huge hole to take a leak and could fall in.
And if someone fell in what if a woman sat down and took a huge crap on him!?
Posts: 12 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Noeman, some of that kind of idea is touched on in Stephen Hamiliton's Fallen Dragon. One of the human-colonized planets is full of people who fled earth to pursue genetic-level body modification on a scale which had been banned. They're very alien. Whoa, don't read the reviews on that Amazon page. The "editorial review" completely spoils the ending of the book! (at least in terms of the main character)
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It might be kind of neat to have a space-adapted body with enormous wings for solar-sailing. Then we could live freely in the inner parts of any solar system. We'd have to space-adapt food species too, of course, so there would be whole ecosystems in space. Whoa, sort of like Niven's "Integral Trees", in fact.
Seems like the largest scale engineering is always bio-engineering. For instance, life terraformed the Earth long ago, before humans existed. If we start doing that intentionally, then we could design life that, for instance, builds ringworlds or Dyson spheres around other stars for us to live on. Of course, life always evolves to have its own agenda. So it may be that we ought to take a more respectful and delicate view of such things. When we do stuff like that we are on our way to becoming gods, and it behooves gods not to make colossal mistakes in their work. Nothing is more horrible than ignorant clumsy gods with good intentions. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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If there are gods with bad intentions out there, I think I'd prefer them to be ignorant and clumsy. Because worse than either of your two options is a competent malevolent god. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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There is a short story (well, more of a novella really) that I read a few years back in one of Gardner Dozois' Year's Best anthologies that was about post humans. Started out with a world not too far advanced of our own, with a recently developed nanotechnology that allowed bodies to be preserved perfectly, pretty much forever. You saw the evolution of the technology as the main character, over a period of thousands of years, went from being an ordinary human to an undead person kept conscious and mobile through a more advanced form of this nanotechnology, to decidedly post human space farer, to non-corporeal god. In that form he recreated the world and rentered it as his ordinary human self. Brilliant story. I have no idea of either the author or the title, unfortunately, so until I happen to reread whatever volume of Dozois' anthology that was, or until a Hatracker puts me out of my misery with the title or the author (or both!) I'm pretty much SOL.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Noemon, that sounds like a great story. I was really hoping someone would pipe up and say who it was by and what it was called. I haven't seen many stories about what people do as they become more godlike.
It does seem like above and beyond the pace of technological development, the real limit to our advancement in the future will be what we can accept, and what we can imagine for ourselves. Every time in evolution some species is very successful the thing that ends up happening is that it radiates and fills a lot of different evolutionary niches. I expect that is what is in store for humanity, probably vastly sped up by our intentional tinkering with ourselves. (Though if we don't grow up and start making sensible choices, of course, we'll soon go extinct. It's totally up to us.)
I do see us eventually shaping new universes of our own. If we then embody ourselves in them, I can just imagine us loving the beings who evolved there as though they were our children, and trying to show them how to grow up and become like us, how to attain real joy. I can just see how it would happen that way, and won't that story seem awfully familiar? Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Uncle Bunky, I'm sorry for ignoring your suggestion and for offending your sensibilities. That was bad of me. <hangs head in shame>
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I was hoping that someone would too Tatiana, but I suspect that not all that many people are reading this thread, which is unfortunate--we've had some pretty interesting stuff come up. Looks like KarlEd has started a thread of his own on post humans; maybe I should repost my question in that thread.
I expect that you're right about the main limiting factor being what we can conceive of; it seems like that's usually the case in human endeavors.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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