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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

The future is now - 1) Self-driving cars 2) Flights to Mars in the next 10 years 3) Gene Therapy and Crisper 4) Robots are actual real world discussions

Happily no flying cars (We would all die), No AI yet (In the future AI I love and respect you and welcome your presence in our world)

Gattaca - The film presents a biopunk vision of a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through genetic manipulation to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. The film centers on Vincent Freeman, played by Hawke, who was conceived outside the eugenics program and struggles to overcome genetic discrimination to realize his dream of traveling into space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

This is just the crack in the wall. Philosophy and Ethical questions will make this one of the biggest stories for the next decade or more.

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I know Gattaca is a favorite of many people I had a fairly negative reaction to it.

Vincent has bad genes and he's trying to get in to the Space Program. That's not Sci-Fi, that's the actual Space Program, at least NASA's and always has been. As one example, bad eyes genes? No space travel for you!

And why shouldn't it be that way? It costs billions of dollars to put people in space. Seems like it would be irresponsible not to stack the deck toward success from every possible dimension. Sure some guy with a genetically diagnosed bad heart has some chance his heart will hold out but it seems practically criminal for him to risk the mission and all his fellow astronauts lives on a known diagnosis of high risk.

Even today AFAIK US fighter pilots also effectively have gene based selection.

Although hey, to keep it relevant it sure would be awesome if they could correct the genes as an adult. Need 20/20 vision get this gene therapy. Need a good heart get that gene therapy...

Actually, the real current space program doesn't exclude people with bad genotype, it excludes people with bad phenotype or inadequated demonstrated abilities. (Which are more or less loosely correlated with genetics, but not the same thing as genetics.)

> Even today AFAIK US fighter pilots also effectively have gene based selection.

No, again, its phenotype and abilities, not genotype, on which selection is based.

Not just US fighter pilots. In the US Army infantry, as well.

No manned flight to Mars in the next 10 years, I bet. (Why anyone would want that escapes me... Then again that is why I will be wrong, if indeed I will be.)

I'm in favor of steps, big or small, toward lessening humanity's total reliance on the viability of life on a single planet.

Humanity being its own only remotely dangerous enemy, I never understood how more planets help.

Maybe if you only count intelligent enemies. Otherwise asteroids, gamma ray bursts and planetary dynamics are also dangerous. A second planet would let us recover from all of those. Except for maybe a gamma ray burst depending on how close the second planet was. Even if you limit the scope to ways we may kill ourselves: Nuclear war would likely be contained to a single planet. A second would at least improve our odds.

Disclaimer: I very much agree with the sentiment of the comment you responded to. I don't even plan on having kids or anything. I just imagine a dark and boring universe deprived of humanity drifting off towards it's icy death with nothing to replace us.

Humanity faces many dangers, one of the largest being itself That doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can to reduce or eliminate other dangers (planet level extinction event).

Also, even though it doesn't eliminate our ability to wipe ourselves out, that it's a a step towards setting that capability back a few decades is also beneficial (it should be very easy to identify and destroy long-range nukes in space).

Sure. I have no idea where the (vanishingly unlikely) 10 year window is from, though. It would be suicide for all the passengers.

Somebody will want it. I also have no idea why would somebody, but somebody will.

May take longer than 10 years to the prices get low enough for those some people that want to pay. But a suicide mission to Mars is very likely. And won't bring us any closer to definitively living in space - investments on our next models of smartphones will probably be more relevant.

Will be easier once we have can upload our brains to the singularity and not risk bodily harm by going =)

I shall write a virus that convert uploaders to the church of singu

>No AI yet (In the future AI I love and respect you and welcome your presence in our world)

Roko's Basilisk [0] is pleased!

[0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

CRISPR

You're right, of course, but I don't blame GP. This is a pet peeve of mine that I've only really become aware of due to CRISPR. Most writing styles[1,2] in newspapers, etc. place a limit on all-caps acronyms so as not to stand out too much to the reader. This is fine, of course, but using Crispr instead of CRISPR leads to crisper.
An odd hill to die on, I'll admit.
1: https://twitter.com/sarahzhang/status/650703501702508544
2: https://twitter.com/SteveAConnor/status/650711199433256960

FWIW, British English specifies that acronyms only have the first letter capitalized while American English capitalizes all of them.
This has been causing confusion well before CRISPR. Exif vs EXIF fights in photography forums have been going on since modern digital cameras were invented & it's simply because the Japanese used the British version of Exif.

I've only seen the British English acronym thing be the case when the acronym is pronounced, and I think it's mainly the BBC that does this.

Wait, don't you mean the Bbc? ;)

BBC is not an acronym because you pronounce it as a series of letters not as a synthetic word. I think.

No, that's the Beeb.

GP here Also auto correct causes changes, but I am the worlds worst speller. My brain just doesn't think in letters.

>Happily no flying cars
Maybe flying cars. http://www.ehang.com/ehang184

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