Big Big Question

Another time travel question: You’ve got one time travel trip and a video camera with 5 minutes left on it (you should have planned better). What do you bring back for 2009-ers to view?

You’ve been given the ability to change shape into other living things. What would you do with this power? How do you think this would affect your sense of identity? After all, if you could be literally any living thing, then who are you?

Imagine we had a machine that could convert matter into energy directly. However, with this machine the matter we use would completely disappear.

Is there some abundant resource that our planet could live without? Is there dangerous things we could put into this machine?

What would you put into it?

Two epic guys with lots of respective canon. Both interested in peace. Both vilified by their contemporary powers-that-be.

Somewhat different methods and personal philosophies.

So what would the Christ and the Vigilante be able to get together on? What are the irreconcilables?

Everyone always talks about meeting your past self…but what would you warn/remind your future self about, if you were able to travel forward in time a number of years?

Imagine some economic/ecological/othertypical disaster strikes before we’re properly able to get out of our current petroleum culture. What might the world look like carless? Who would be worst off? Who would manage best? What unexpected effects might we encounter?

note: other things which likewise run on gas may or may not continue operation in this hypothetical, depending entirely on the preference of the answerer. If you want to tell me about a world sans automobiles, but which still has functional air planes, knock yourself out. If you want to assume all modern petroleum fueled transportation is out, that’s awesome, too.

It is the year Eleventy-Billion CE. The last vestiges of humanity have boarded the spaceship that soon will take flight toward what we hope is a habitable star system (Glorb-32, if you’re curious) some 10000 light years away. The ship can only move at half the speed of light, so the journey will take approximately 20 thousand years. Given that we have aboard a library of all human knowledge to date and the means to continually update that knowledge base, what procedures and protocols would you set in place to assure that the future settlers of Planet Glorb have the necessary cultural and intellectual equipment in place to successfully colonize the planet? Remember, they’ve been on the ship for twice as long as recorded human history on Earth. They’ve never set foot on a planet, never tilled a field, never dug a mine, never swam in a river. What methods could be used to make sure that our colonists are ready to leave the womb of the ship and start anew on Planet Glorb?

It occurred to me that if we do find some kind of life on another planet, our first instinct is probably going to be try and communicate with it.

What if it is an animal with the intelligence equivalent of a dolphin, horse, or a cat?

It seems to me we have an extremely long way to go with “communicating” with cats and the like, how in the world can we expect to converse with an equivalent alien being?

Would it behoove us to make more of an effort on human to animal communication?

OK, you’re a mad scientist…scorned by your peers, theories discredited, a disgrace to your field.

Time to take revenge! How do you destroy your enemies, threaten the world, and generally inflict terror in the masses?

If I met my genetic duplicate, would I instantly like him or fear him? What if I was the duplicate?

(Hat tip to robocop is bleeding, who posited this and other questions over in Metatalk recently.)

There’s a well-trod (if not exactly widely accepted) argument for the idea that the world we live in now could be not the real world but a simulation being run by far-flung descendents of what we think of as the modern human race. (Nick Bostrum is probably the foremost figure in this debate; but then there’s this angle on it, too.)

Settling the “if” and assuming that yes, we are in fact running on some post-singularity desktop in the year 3008, what are the hints available to us as simulated denizens in a superbly but not perfectly modeled reality? Where did they goof up? What are the gaps and the glitches in this simulation that should leave us wondering exactly what is going on?

How would our world be different if mankind never developed a concept of clothing — and was, in other words, a naked world?

Not intended to be horndoggy, although I understand it comes across that way and I’m blushing a bit. A throwaway line in TNG: Beyond Honor, by Peter David, prompted the thought. As the author speaking in third person omniscient, David is not exactly subtle in his appreciations of Jeri Ryan’s, er, charms. References are scattered in many areas throughout the book, but one particularly funny reference to it is where he has Seven of Nine musing to a rogue starship pilot about how she doesn’t see a need for clothing, but that Janeway had explained to her how it was needed in non-Borg culture.

After chuckling, I found myself wondering: what if mankind never saw a need for clothing? Putting aside the problems with improbability, the titillation, and the ample opportunities for jokes, seriously, how might the world have evolved differently, given that it’s played such an integral part in our current culture?

(I understand it’s overwhelmingly probable that someone would be consistently finding a need for clothing and would want to create something to cover their body. Assume, I don’t know, that God (or aliens or a supercomputer or a talking black hole or whatever omniscient entity have you) somehow repeatedly removes the idea from the heads of anyone coming up with the concept, so no matter how probable the thought is, it never develops.)

Off the top of my head:

Developmentally, I think mankind would never have settled in parts of the world that, here, require clothing for protection from the elements. I imagine that a pseudohibernation — a la stocking up on foodstuffs and hiding in shelter with a fire — might enable cold weather survival in some areas, but more likely than not, most of mankind would be centered around temperate climes. I think as a result we’d have a greater problem with overpopulation (comparatively — smaller space) and/or a much smaller civilization. Given that less land would be “habitable,” I imagine there would’ve been many more territorial wars.

Evolutionarily, I don’t know enough about the speed of evolution to know if the lack of clothing would have affected our actual bodies. Were the concept of “survival of the fittest” to have worked its way, I imagine physiological traits that better protect people from the elements would have survived to be passed on to the next generation. I’m thinking body hair, for example, and probably thicker skin would be beneficial as well. (I have this old science fiction anthology that has a story by L. Sprague de Camp from the ’30s about the same idea, except it happens to modern-day culture — well, what modern-day culture was in the ’30s.)

Depending on how protective that thicker skin became, heavy industry, where clothing serves an essential protective function, might not have developed — or perhaps might’ve developed based on a more remote-manipulation kind of basis, to put the employee farther away from harm.

I don’t know if wearable storage would be considered “clothing.” With no pockets, things that offer easily luggable storage capacity such as backpacks, etc. would be very essential to most everyone.

Socially and morally, I imagine things would be significantly different, but I find my imagination fails a bit here. I’m not sure I know precisely in what avenues they’d have changed. There are certain lines of body privacy that, globally, are considered taboo in public. I imagine that some would remain intact, and some wouldn’t, but I’m not sure by what metric you’d even make a guess as to which ones would never have developed and which ones would be the same as “our world.” Same with how social structures might remain the same (I imagine that the concept of the family would be relatively unchanged) and how they might differ.

Would our “standards” for what’s attractive have swung one way or the other? Would bodies be so unstigmatized that attraction would then be based on something different? Or would the constant exposure to them make societal standards for what’s pretty even more demanding?

I’m sure it’d affect about four million other fields. Fun little mental experiment …

AskMe Chatfilter rescue mission:

In case of nuclear holocaust, alien attack, meteor strike, superflu pandemic or other world-wide catastrophe, how might survivors (in a very specific set of circumstances, discussed after the jump) communicate?

Hat tip to kbanas; more preamble/detail in his deleted question if you’re hungry.

As seen on Game Couch this morning (hat tip to Jessamyn):

“Your library has been given a Holodeck by the Bill and Melinda Gates/Daystrom Institute Foundation. Would you limit (filter) what your patrons could do in it? Are there any policies or guidelines you would have in place before it went live?”

Big ol’ What If premise: let’s presume that some affliction — say, a viral pandemic — dooms every human on the planet to permanent blindness within a few months of the spread of the affliction. The complete failure of every human eyeball on the planet, accurately predicted but unstoppable.

Could civilization effectively brace itself for the loss of sight? How would we prepare? What would we have to give up?

So. You have a horde of super computers attacking you. What do you do?

It’s an oldie but a goodie. You can go forward or backward in time just once for a set amount of time. Say one week. What point in time, past or future, would you travel to?

*Please ignore stuff like the possibility of dying at certain points in time, the grandfather paradox, etc.

Take the Earth: orbiting the sun, revolving once every twenty four hours, towing the moon and any number of manmade satellites in orbit.

And then it explodes.  So!  A few questions:

What happens to the debris?  In the short run and in the long run?  What happens to the moon?  And how does the planet get blown up in the first place?  And how blown up does it get, exactly, anyhow?

(Inspired by a classic Ask Metafilter question.)

Extra-terrestrial life! Yes? No? Maybe? Do they exist? Did they ever? Have they been here? Have we met them? Will we ever? Is that a good thing?

Describe your choice of conditional immortality. The assumption here is that you can be killed, but you’ll live forever if no one manages to pull it off. You can have special powers, but you also have some sort of vulnerability.

Inspired by klangklangston’s MetaTalk comments describing his plan “to be a zombie reanimated by a hive of bees, which I could shoot from my hands” and “keep my body living forever as a hollowed husk of entomological evil.”

Which animal species, if suddenly given human-like intelligence, would be most
successful at knocking us off the food chain and taking our place as the
planet’s dominant species?

(Suggested by Terminal Verbosity.)

If the world were to suddenly stop spinning and we all got flung off it into deep space, what would be your favorite way to be saved before the vast frigidity and emptiness of space turned you into a bloated frozen explode-y corpse? Points for originality.

Extra points if you bear in mind the terrific velocity of your trip into space or can convincingly explain why you’d be moving slowly.

(Suggested by shmegegge!)