[extropy-chat] Re: Animals

Christian Weisgerber naddy at mips.inka.de
Thu Feb 12 23:41:30 UTC 2004


Avatar Polymorph <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> The sun's expansion would destroy life on Earth in 500 million years, well
> prior to it turning into a red giant.

It's expected to bloat up into a red giant in five billion years
or so.  What event do you place a mere 500 million years into the
future that would destroy terrestrial life?

> Humans are not "actively selecting" for intelligence in dogs and cats, not
> even in sheepdogs.

Actually, ISTR reading that house cats have substantially less brain
mass than the wildcats they are presumably derived from.  Probably
because being a cute pet purring for food is much simpler than
fending for yourself in the wild.  That's not quite the selection
effect you had in mind, I'm afraid.

http://www.nervenet.org/papers/wildcat.html#Results1

> All animals down to the smallest deserve to be boosted, even if this entails
> integrating human architecture (neural) into them.

I think I first encountered "uplifting" in David Brin's books, and
I never quite understood the desire to uplift other species--much
less the moral obligation you seem to imply.  (In particular, I
found Brin's uplifting of chimpanzees outright silly.  What do you
get when you anthropomorphize a chimp?  A human of course!)

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de



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