If you haven’t seen Gattaca, it’s a near-future world where nearly everyone is genetically engineered. Those few who are not genetically engineered are social outcasts. Genetic testing is in depth, quick, cheap, and easy to do. As a result, everything is based on genes. Potential employers and even romantic partners will collect a dna sample from your hair, spit, fingernails, etc. Then they will pay a small fee to run the sample through a machine, and it will print a summary. This summary will include information about genetic defects like your chances of having heart failure; it even provides information about iq and physical fitness.

This type of genetic screening is already starting to be available. For under a $1000.00, you can buy a genetic testing kit. In fact, both 23andMe and deCODEme, let you can buy multiple kits. These tests work by both telling you which health problems are common among people with with a similar genotype, and by looking for specific genetic defects. There are no testing restrictions, so you could test that hot girl or guy you’ve started dating. While the testing isn’t as in depth as the ones in Gattaca, they do screen for quite a few genetic defects.

The price will continue to drop, and the testing will become more in depth. In a few decades, genetic testing will be very popular. People will test themselves, their children, and anyone they are curious about.

It’s been almost a month now since I’ve posted. I sincerely apologize. Life has been busy, I’ve been too wore out to think and have been undergoing an identity crisis of a “What the fuck should I be doing with my life?” nature.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of life. I used to think the purpose of life was happiness. Happiness is just a bunch of chemicals, and a happy state can be created artificially. Someone who is perfectly happy would not live very long, because desire is necessary for survival. Desire stems from not being perfectly happy.

One could argue that the purpose in life should be to maximize the amount of happiness experienced over a lifetime. This would make longevity important, and would give a reason to be happy without being completely happy. But, it wouldn’t provide a reason for keeping society alive. That would require changing the goal to maximizing society’s happiness. But, why should anyone care whether or not other individuals are happy?

Steve Pavlina wrote a post about how to find your purpose in life. The method he describes is essentially writing down as many possible purposes as you can think of until you write something that strikes a chord. The claim is that it should take about 20 minutes to find your purpose, but that it could take longer.

I tried this method about a year ago. After a couple of hours, I was still purposeless. I wrote it off as being silly and didn’t give it a second thought. Recently, I stumbled across his post again and decided to give it another shot. I wrote possible purposes for 4-5 hours. The next day I analyzed the purposes, and I found one that makes sense to me.

The purpose of life is the survival of consciousness.

I think consciousness gives the universe meaning, rather than thinking the universe gives meaning to consciousness. A chair doesn’t define you. But, your perceptions give the chair a meaning. You perceive its purpose, whether it is soft or hard, beautiful or ugly. This is still true when looking at the sky or even at other planets.

Meaning is an internal property of the observer. No meaning is applied to an object if an object can in no way be perceived. It follows that the existence of meaning requires conscious observers.

Something as complicated as a purpose or goal requires that things have meaning. No consciousness = No meaning = No purpose. This means that if there is a purpose and meaning in the universe, that purpose and meaning requires consciousness.

So the purpose of life? Ty to keep consciousness alive in the present and make it as fit as possible for the future. I think because meaning exists for the thinker, an individual can give life any meaning that can be thought. A meaningless universe sounds boring and undesirable to me, so I think the survival of consciousness is a good purpose.

The survival fitness of consciousness depends on abundance, diversity, adaptability, continuous creation of new conscious beings, and probably a large number of other things.

We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Robert M. Prisig

Chrisitianiy is the most popular religion in the world. In the U.S., over 80% of the population is christian. The majority of Christians
think the world is going to end soon. This poses a large hurdle when trying to make preparations for the future.

We are starting to run into potentially devastating problems, whose solutions require long term planning. Global warming, limited resources, foreign policy, and many if not all of our other needed improvements are adversely affected if you aren’t thinking ahead farther than 50 years.

We are struggling to have a serious discussion about our current problems. How are we going to plan for future dilemmas? One example is the effect of genetic engineering and cloning on our gene pool. Topics like these aren’t discussed enough, and when they are discussed, they usually aren’t taken seriously. This is despite the fact that these are near future problems whose solutions will shape society.

Christianity isn’t just harmful in terms of not thinking long term, it is harmful in shaping our present way of thinking. Many sects of Christianity are actively anti-science. It amazes me that we are still debating evolution. I worked in a lab for about a year, inserting genes into S. Aureus bacteria to figure out which of its proteins aid in uptaking heme. Heme uptake is vital for the survival of many types of bacteria, so stopping heme uptake could be an effective way of fighting infections. I’ve used the primers, ran the gels, and grown the petri dishes. I know that the building blocks of life can be manipulated. I also know that these blocks are inherited and change over time.

There is overwhelming evidence of evolution. Scientists have seen bacteria evolve significant mutations in the lab, and genetic drift is a commonly observed and indisputable phenomena. In fact the more we learn about genetics, the more we see how perfectly it backs up evolution. You would be hard pressed to find a geneticist, biologist, or even a reputable scientist who doesn’t believe in evolution. Our understanding that has stemmed from the theory of evolution is responsible for new medicines and genetic diseases being engineered away. Heck, most of the food we buy at the grocery store has been modified using our understanding of genetics. Yet, a large percent of the population happily reap the benefits of the science, while telling the scientists they are wrong.

The anti-evolution debate is reminiscent of the belief that earth is the center of the universe. In both situations, not accepting the truth is based on ego instead of logic. It makes the earth less special if it is not the center of the universe, even if it makes more sense mathematically. It also makes humans seem less special if we evolved from single-cell life, instead of being the supreme organism, instantaneously created to look the same as god.

I realize that many christians believe in evolution, and some do not believe the world will end soon. But it is the “faith” based thinking which christianity perpetuates that is keeping these beliefs alive. Lots of people are insulted by anti-christian talk. But, it’s time to leave the dark ages. I think tolerance towards christianity is part of the problem. Christian ideas should be weighed on the same scale as all other ideas. The evidence isn’t their, and the group-thinking and anti-science ideals are harmful. The world needs scientists coming up with solutions, not zealots waiting for the end of the world.

My neighbors are from Kazakhstan, they are touring the U.S. for about a year before returning to college in their country. They live in various locations for a couple of months at a time, find jobs, and learn about the area.

Janna(Zhanna) is majoring in political science in Kazakhstan. She said something very interesting the other day.

She said that the U.S. has all the oil that it needs underneath it’s feet, and that it exports large amount of oil. I thought she was wrong. However, after doing some research, I was suprised to find that the U.S. does export very large amounts of oil. In fact, we are one of the world largest exporters. According to cia.gov, we rank in the top 20.

We are playing a game. In this game we bully other countries into selling us their oil for cheap, and then we sell our oil for as much as we can. This results in massive profit for oil companies and crooked politicians.

Her explanation was that the U.S. is trying to be a “Super Country”. We are trying to control everything, and have the best and most of everything.

Next time you go to the gas pump, think about all the oil we are exporting. The price is going up because we are running out of oil. Remember? Which is why exporting what we have is a good idea.

We might not have enough oil to have no imports, but it would definitely lower the price if companies weren’t exporting our oil.

I know this isn’t scifi related, but I think it is important. I think it is something that most people don’t know. It’s certainly something that I didn’t know.

*Update*

I was asked to prove the claim that the U.S. is one of the top 20 exporters: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2176rank.html.

Unfortunately, the most recent data for the U.S. is from 2004.

Iraq only ranks four spots above the U.S., with 1,670,000 barrels exported per day instead of 1,048,000.