Editing 2: What is The Portal (section)

=== Old Promises for a New Future ===

''00:03:33''<br>
Now, what is it that this group of people is thinking about? What are they working on? What do they believe? Well in part, many of them are worried about the idea of complacency and excited about the idea of breaking through a portal into a different space. Sometimes that's in an area like [[Convex Hull of Radical Longevity|radical life extension]], where so far, up until the present, almost no one has gotten beyond the biblical age of Moses, set at 120 years by convention.

''00:04:04''<br>
If that's been the hard stop, some people are now dreaming about life expectancies that could go into 200 or 300 years if we could only find access to the right molecular mechanisms. Likewise, in areas like physics, we have the possibility that there are two main dominant theories that are irreconcilable and therefore incomplete.

''00:04:27''<br>
What if we had an ability to bridge those theories and come up with a much more detailed and accurate theory that spanned both the phenomena covered by Einstein's general relativity and the quantum theory known as the standard model? Would there be something to do, something wholly unexpected? We don't know.

''00:04:49''<br>
We also dream of limitless energy. Perhaps fusion technology, or incredible storage devices, would allow us to harness, you know, much greener energy sources. Perhaps we would find [[The Square Root of Capitalism|some way of living in a world of abundance]] in which we could print things, freeing us from drudgery using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and learn to have much more harmonious and fulfilling existences. 

''00:05:13''<br>
Or perhaps this would unleash some sort of economic problem, whereby very few of us would be able to earn a living in this new world and that the abundance that we thought we craved would in fact be a curse in disguise. What I want to do is to talk to you very simply and plainly about the problems that we currently face that almost no one is willing to discuss, and that is that we have a world [[Embedded Growth Obligations|largely built for rapid growth]] in which that kind of broad growth is no longer found easily, simply by looking with better instruments, with more patience, and more detail at the world in which we live. 

''00:05:53''<br>
Let me give you a slightly different picture of where we are as a society, one that you've probably not thought of. Imagine somebody who has graduated from high school, but one, two, three years later hasn't found something else to do with their life and they're hanging around the same high school as fewer and fewer of the students that they once knew continue to attend classes. Effectively, this is getting creepier and creepier, and I think that that's in large measure where we are with the technological revolutions that we have undertaken.

''00:06:26''<br>
At some point it was incredibly cool to figure out how to place a long distance call between continents, but this has become commonplace. Likewise, many of the fantastic things that once got us excited about the release of every new iPhone now has us relatively unexcited about the new suite of apps and features that every new phone promises will be slightly different than the one before.

''00:06:51''<br>
So I think what's important to think about is how optimistic we once were. What did we think we were going to do? I think we thought we were going to be curing diseases. Wouldn't it be great not to have lost anyone in your family from cancer when we declared a war on cancer in the early 1970s? What did we think we were going to be doing with energy? Didn't we think that fusion was around the corner? 

''00:07:14''<br>
If you think about all of the things that we could be doing, we've learned in most of these areas that it is no longer mature to hope, to imagine that somehow we are going to be able to make the future very different than the present. Yes, things will get a little bit better, but are they going to get dramatically better? Are we going to be leading a life in our here, in our now, that would allow a kind of escapist lifestyle that we saw on Star Trek, or even in Star Wars, which came out in the '60s and '70s respectively?