Sentios wrote:
Oh but why fat people, why not a body builder? He would be heavier and experience a more moderate increase in blood pressure. You've picked an example you found convenient because fat people are clearly unhealthy rather than looking for the 'best example'.
I considered that, and bodybuilders probably would be a better comparison for slight increases in gravity. However, the context for that was a discussion of what humans' ultimate tolerances were. Bodybuilders just don't get heavy enough to correspond to more than a couple gs. Magnus Ver Magnusson, multi-World's Strongest Man, for example, is listed at 287 pounds and 6'3". For someone that tall with a reasonable build, 287 pounds is 2 gs if you're very generous. Therefore, only fat people suffice as models of what greater gs might do.
Sentios wrote:
So your argument is 'violent hunter gathers exist today thus all/the majority of our ancestors were violent hunter gathers' and also that 1 death is means a more violent society than a society with 100s of millions of deaths?
Not really. That extremely violent hunter gatherer societies have existed counters your blanket statement that hunter gatherer societies are peaceful, and that violent societies would kill themselves off. The other articles I linked showed that hunter gatherer societies are generally more violent than other societies on a per capita basis. And per capita is what I would use for comparing the violence of societies.
Consider the modern US vs. the precontact Ache mentioned in the first article I linked. In 2009, the US had a little over 15,000 murders, for about a .005% chance per person per year. The Ache had far fewer, but averaged about a 1% chance per person per year. Which society would you say is more violent?
Sentios wrote:
I might ask how you propose to retro actively create a nature based on events, if such a human nature exists then you should be able raise children and have them kill each other when turned loose. That's all that's occurred, 'lots of wars happened clearly it's in our nature' it couldn't have been caused by religion, patriotism, economics, despotic kings, horrendous atrocities or the like. Nope clearly we just like to go to war spontaneously as is our nature.
I'm not proposing "creating" a nature. I'm proposing that we recognize a nature that's always been there. As it happens, people do raise their children to carry on feuds that have been going on for generations, and
children aren't always nice to each other in the absence of such prodding.
It is in humans' nature to partake in community rituals, support the community in opposition to other communities, perform trade and other economic activities, centralize executive power when possible, and do unpleasant things for the sake of the previous activities. I never said that it's humans' nature to go to war spontaneously for no reason. Rather, people have killed each other throughout history for reasons common throughout history. What of what I've been saying do you disagree with?
Sentios wrote:
The part of this article most relevant to this discussion is the work cited of Douglas Fry, but
"Other "primitive" societies which are often pointed out as violent or warlike -- certain native American or African tribes -- may range from static hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, but are not included in the over 80 nomadic societies Fry has researched." So it seems that that sample, while not completely irrelevant, is not a representative sample of hunter gatherer societies, of which there currently remain far more than 80, many of which do not allow outsiders to visit. If a hunter gatherer society is mobile enough to qualify as nomadic (though that article doesn't explain the definition used, nor those used to define "low" levels of aggression and warfare), it probably means that they
need to move around to get enough food, implying that the carrying capacity of the land is relatively low, implying that other tribes would not be very near, reducing the potential and incentive for external conflict. The inverse is noted in the quote above, that hunter gatherer societies that are less mobile (probably because they can get the food they need locally, implying greater carrying capacity, implying nearer neighbors) have been found to be rather violent.
In "nomadic"' cases, as Fry is said to note in his paper, the society tends to deal with conflict internally through less violent means than societies with external targets of aggression. Note that the article uses Fry's work not to claim that hunter-gatherer societies were on the whole peaceful, but that that
some were peaceful, notably more so than many people thought. This is to support the article's thesis that we are not doomed to have a violent society in the future if we are guided by humanism. Further, regarding your claims of a human nature, even that article says
"Aggression, Fry and Hand admit, is a part of human nature ... perhaps even genetically or neurologically so ..." and an unbiased understanding of this nature is recognized to be necessary if society is to be improved reliably.
Ace of Flames wrote:
Considering it falls up, wouldn't fire be negative mass?
So to travel outside the solar system, we need to set ourselves on fire.
Relative to the air, yes. however, it seems that building a stable wormhole requires something with negative mass relative to empty space. You can get something sort of like that via the Casimir effect, but that's not nearly enough from what I've heard.
zepherin wrote:
But we don't know where any wormholes are we know that quantum entanglement works. And we are doing it on larger and larger scales. We are up to being able to entangle semiconductors, which is a huge step.
Yes, but as currently understood, entanglement cannot transmit information FTL. So far as I know, the only ways to travel from point A to point B faster than light as reckoned by an observer in normal space that are compatible with known physics are some exotic General Relativity spacetime constructs, of which wormholes would probably be the most useful.
