[TDoS]

I think your measure of self awareness is a bit severe, but not unreasonable as an argument.

300M years because before the Sun goes Red Giant, it starts emitting high energy EM radiation that will make the surface uninhabitable.  Not just for people, all the way down to bacteria.

I don't use Red Giant because no one knows what the hell that is, and "the Sun is losing 4 million tons a second of mass....WE'RE DOOMED!!!" is more opaque and helps seperate those with at least 80 IQ points from the usual internet denizen. Let alone doomers just repeating whatever another Apocalyptian has spoon fed them. Peak oil, Yellowstone going boom, aliens lurking in the oceans, blue ocean event, the Mayan Calendar, global cooling, The Population Bomb (since converted more recently to Population Reduction) and so on and so forth.   

Relative to Megalodon and all the other creatures it's not just Ego, we ARE different because of the Art, the Science. the Philosophy...all the Thinking things that disappear when the Last of Us dies off.

Nah. That is just species egotism speaking. We be special because I be part of "we". That is more of a "We Be Borg" angle. Art, religion, science, I could just as easily say size, teeth and ferocity. 

All those Billions of Man-Hours spent studying for exams, writing poetry, playing Poker, inventing Iphones just time wasters on the way to extinction.  Why bother even caring about being alive?

A parent could answer that question easily.

It is certainly possible that all we amount to are agents of Entropy, I just find it unlikely.  The Universe is so well organized it seems unlikely to have popped into existence with no Reason and no Plan.  If the Purpose of Living is just to Die, creating a whole Universe with all these neat rules seems like a pretty big waste of time. 

That at its core is the religious argument, all of them suppose the same thing. We arrived for a purpose, as defined by our deity of choice. Humans really don't like the possibility they are just an accident of all the combinations of biological matter coming together in a certain way and arriving at...them. The Universe is a Monte Carlo simulator, and one of the outcomes is us. And megalodon. And plenty of other unimaginable combinations that silly bipeds can't.

Anyhow, I just have a feeling there is a greater purpose, just we haven't been able to figure it out yet.  That's why it's such a bummer we're Extinctifying ourselves so rapidly.  We might have figured it out given another Million years.

RE

Ah, odds are we won't come even that close to megalodons reign as king shit of the world's waters. As folks age they think differently, with "what the fuck was I put here for?" at the top of the list. Seems like you have already defined it for yourself, run around, see stuff, have a good time while times are good, hedonism rocks, etc etc. But your point/question is why religion works. It gives an easy explanation, provides purpose and structure, allows individual humans to walk off into the sunset with hope.

At the end of the day, we humans are naught but stardust. And given enough time, might get to be some small contribution to those 4 million tons a second used to bring visible light to some small part of our Universe.   

[RE]

That was a long way of saying you believe the Universe and Life is Random, but it clearly isn't.  There's a whole bunch of rules we already have elucidated from how many Quarks & Gluons it takes to make up a Proton to how fast light travels to what numbers of Protons and Neutrons are stable together to what nucleic acids code for what proteins to what numbers of appendages an animal will have...and so on.  If the Universe and Life were random, there would be no discernible pattern, but there is.

Religions just posit a purpose, science gives evidence of organization and planning.  It's a black box though, we can observe the effects of the organization, we just can't see inside the box to figure out how or why it's organized in this way.  Sort of like figuring out DNA is a Double Helix, it's too small too actually see the structure.  The way it was figured out was by bouncing Xrays off crystals of a DNA hydrate, which gave a reflection that if you analyze mathematically is characteristic of a helix.  Very neat trick actually, which Rosalind Franklin should have received the Nobel Prize alon with Watson, Crick & Wilkins.  She was the crystalographer.



Anyhow, DNA's structure and how it works is something that was inside the box we didn't know before 1953, now we do.  There's a whole lot more inside the box we still have little clue on, but in a million more years we might have had a shot.  How the brain works to organize thoughts and emotions is pretty much a mystery, besides identifying a few areas in the organ responsible for various tasks.  Better understanding that might have given a clue as to the purpose of the  organization necessary to build it.  Not gonna happen though.

RE

[TDoS]

That was a long way of saying you believe the Universe and Life is Random, but it clearly isn't.

Oh please. While I can count on a vast majority of people knowing nothing about statistics (and even fewer their involvement in the geosciencese), I did not imply random in my siloloqui to have it characterized so simply.

Life is NOT random, it just requires the right combination of circumstances/timing/ingredients, all the basic molecular components of which float around in space until...they no longer float around...and instead form...stuff....and said stuff sometimes becomes life. Or not. Might look random, or sound random, but you should know better. All these independent distributions of stuff...combining in weird ways, life of our type being one outcome, life of another type undoubtedly exists...elsewhere..and at other times. When a systeem as large as our Universe delivers life ONCE, there is no longer random, there is absolute certainty of a given outcome, the only question being the liklihood of occurrence across the unfathomable number of combinations of dead galaxies and current galaxies and galaxies yet to come. In that system, we are proof of certainty, and in that certainty, guarentee its existence. The only question is what are the odds of occurrence. Nothing more random that the odds on a rooullette table, which on any given table are immutable and known.

Human exitence isn't required for this math to work, the prokaryotes 3.7 billion years ago were sufficient. The only question left is the liklihood of occurrence per unit of whatever. Random....please....there is a distribution describing the occurrence EXACTLY...we just lack the information to know it yet.

Anyhow, DNA's structure and how it works is something that was inside the box we didn't know before 1953, now we do.  There's a whole lot more inside the box we still have little clue on, but in a million more years we might have had a shot.  How the brain works to organize thoughts and emotions is pretty much a mystery, besides identifying a few areas in the organ responsible for various tasks.  Better understanding that might have given a clue as to the purpose of the  organization necessary to build it.  Not gonna happen though
RE

The hubris of us bipeds. We know DNA. We be smartz. The amount we DON'T know yet is likely orders of magnitude beyond what we DO know yet. The Wright Brothers did cooler stuff, but DNA will probably be more useful in the long run. So what? Think it will cure our urge to over-exploit everything we touch? Will it stop people from suffering "us versus them" attitudes? Politicians from deciding the "good" citizens from the "bad" ones based on skin color and nationality?

Based on your understanding of DNA, do you think it has potential to cure humans from doing stupid things before collapse finally shows up and reduces our population enough to qualify as one?

[RE]

Based on your understanding of DNA, do you think it has potential to cure humans from doing stupid things before collapse finally shows up and reduces our population enough to qualify as one?

The only thing DNA does is encode for the various proteins your meat package is composed of and uses in the chemical reactions that drive your metabolic system.  That isn't enough information to understand why humans do stupid things.  We'll need another million years to figure that out, so no, not before collapse finishes.

You repeated my point, which was that what's in the Black Box is far greater than what we have figured out.  DNA, as neat as it is in it's operation doesn't do a damn thing to explain the workings of the human mind.  I don't think that's an impenetrable problem though, given enough time and people as smart as me working on it. lol.

Even if all the planets in the universe that could support life had 8 Billion monkeys typing from the Big Bang until now, one of them would not type out the complete works of Shakespeare at random.  That's an easier problem than randomly starting life.  Gotta have a plan.

RE

[TDoS]

Based on your understanding of DNA, do you think it has potential to cure humans from doing stupid things before collapse finally shows up and reduces our population enough to qualify as one?

The only thing DNA does is encode for the various proteins your meat package is composed of and uses in the chemical reactions that drive your metabolic system.  That isn't enough information to understand why humans do stupid things.  We'll need another million years to figure that out, so no, not before collapse finishes.

Oh, I think behavioral psychologists and whatnot might be all that's needed if they have done some study, hell folks like Jared Diamond can detail humans in the past doing both stupid things and being subject to the consequences of climate change, local resource depletion, famine, plague, all the usual normal stuff.

HISTORIANS in general might be enough, the psychologists for putting the pieces together to figure out the how/when/why.

DNA, as neat as it is in it's operation doesn't do a damn thing to explain the workings of the human mind.

Hence my commentary above.

Even if all the planets in the universe that could support life had 8 Billion monkeys typing from the Big Bang until now, one of them would not type out the complete works of Shakespeare at random.

Of course they could...it just wouldn't be Shakespeare but its alien equivalent. Stop being so species centric, expand your horizons, take a crack at interesting cosmological questions involving not just what life is from a human view but alien life unlike anything human. Alien prokaryotes as it were, except as primitive as humans of now, and they advanced far beyond us, and then died when their star expired. Some are new now, some already became advanced and became extinct, some are as primitive as us, others are like....dinosaurs...except with brains and fingers and stuff. Who knows?

That's an easier problem than randomly starting life.  Gotta have a plan.
RE

God does. If you swing that way. God doesn't place dice with the Universe. Doesn't need to.

[RE]

Not Aliens dimwit, Monkeys.  Or Raccoons.  Or any other creature that could randomly peck at a keyboard with no plan.  If you can't even grasp the analogy, it's pointless to further debate this.

RE

[K-Dog]

The hubris of us bipeds. We know DNA. We be smartz. The amount we DON'T know yet is likely orders of magnitude beyond what we DO know yet. The Wright Brothers did cooler stuff, but DNA will probably be more useful in the long run. So what? Think it will cure our urge to over-exploit everything we touch? Will it stop people from suffering "us versus them" attitudes? Politicians from deciding the "good" citizens from the "bad" ones based on skin color and nationality?

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

True that.