The meaning of life

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Number 9 Bus Shelter, Dec 17, 2013.

  1. laura89 Registered Member

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    10
    I think life is a kind of experience and a journey.
    When we first set food in this world, we begin to experience kinds of joys and sorrows.
     
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  3. scorpius a realist Valued Senior Member

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    What the f would humans do on Mars?
    its a DEAD planet...
    theres NO air so you couldnt breathe,and NOTHING to eat or drink either so youd would starve..

    and in a long time to get there your body would deteriorate so bad you coudnt do much anyway,trip to Mars today is one way slow Death suicide mission and anyone considering it is an IDIot..we simply dont have space travel technology to travel those distances safely YET..

    meaning of life is whatever one gives it..
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You can break down water for the oxygen and grow your own food while studying the geology of Mars and investigating the existence of life there. It's not such a waste of time.
     
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  7. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    Poster above is just trolling the entire forum to get his website advertised with his username/memberpic.
     
  8. Mathers2013 Banned Banned

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    The purpose of life is to bring offspring into this world so they too may appreciate 'this.'
     
  9. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    Man will always go where no man has gone before...for many reasons.
    Do you realise the Earth does have a "use by date"?
    When our Sun becomes a WD, Earth will probably not exist. Mars though could very well sustain life, if steps are taken before that scenario eventuates.
    Terraforming has often been spoke of although it would take many thousands of years.
     
  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Fraggle suggests it is to evolve a new organism - society with people as its "cells", but there is little reason to think that would be long-term stable. As Einstein noted: The nuclear bomb changed everything, except the way man thinks. Add cleverly engineered contagious, self reproducing, pathogens and perhaps another 1000 years of society existing is quite optimistic.

    Thus I would say the purpose life, is to avoid dying, until that is a more desirable option than living more.
     
  11. Mathers2013 Banned Banned

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    "The nuclear bomb changed everything..."-Billy T

    Yeah. I've heard without the nuclear bomb computers would not exist!
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Huh??? Ever since the Agricultural Revolution, 12KYA, put an end to the hundred-millennia-long Paleolithic Era (small tribes of hunter-gatherers who regarded other tribes as hated and feared competitors for scarce resources during the frequent lean years) and people began gathering into ever-larger communities where division of labor and economies of scale made life increasingly (although not monotonically) comfortable and prosperous, civilization has endured and advanced. Is twelve thousand years not a long-enough term of stability for you?

    The invention of metal tools, some of which were weapons, during the Bronze Age and especially during the Iron Age, certainly tested that stability, but civilization always won out over the forces of chaos. The pinnacle of technology-as-the-destructor was World War II, whose hallmarks were:
    • An attempt to exterminate an entire ethnic group, which was about 50% successful
    • Killing off 3% of the entire planet's population
    • Deployment of nuclear weapons against civilian populations just to change their attitude about the war. As I have opined more than once on this website, I insist that this act has inspired every terrorist since then. It really is possible to get people to do what you want just by killing a big bunch of them!
    Since then, the number of people killed by government violence (or "war") has been decreasing rather steadily. Furthermore, the Electronic Age has made every human being (almost literally) one click away from every other human being, and we even have translation software to overcome the language obstacles. People are considerably less likely to want to kill people whose names they know and whose family photos they have seen.

    So no, I think you're dead wrong about the future. Gene Roddenberry was probably right: one world government with violence and other crime reduced to the level of individuals and small groups. Right now we're dealing with terrorism, but it kills a lot fewer people than war. Scaling something down isn't as good as eliminating it, but it's sure an improvement! And we do have a few wars flaring up, but nothing to measure up to the Congo Civil War, much less WWII.

    Einstein didn't live to see the Computer Revolution.

    When Neda Agha Soltan was gunned down in Tehran by an agent of the repressive Iranian government, the people around her immediately began spamming cellphone videos of her last breaths. Even though our own shit-for-brains government has been screaming at us for 30 years that the Iranians are our enemies, we wept for her: she was our own friend, daughter, sister, classmate, neighbor. Country-western musicians, the scribes of the most xenophobic segment of the American population, wrote songs about her! Obama knows that if our government actually tries to make good on its threat to attack Iran, no current member of the U.S. government will survive the next election. How dare they bomb the homes of Neda's friends and family?

    If the proxies in our unofficial 51st state (Israel) do it, that will probably, finally, be the end of our support for that regime.

    Computers were already being designed and tested before Hiroshima. The principles had been elaborated several decades earlier. The computer was an inevitable artifact of the Electronic Revolution, whose beginning is generally identified as the 1830s, when the first commercial telegraph became reliably operational.

    Telecommunication + computers naturally resulted in the internet.
     
  13. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Yes Fraggle technology and knowledge in general have done wonderful things reflected in greater productivity (more leisure time) and better health for longer life expectancies with more pleasure and less drudgery required to feed and cloth us. I expect that to continue, with some minor down turns mainly due to bad government decisions for many decades.

    My concern was about 1000 years. The internet will probably tell how to geneticly engineer new life forms, and tailor them to do evermore of food and fiber production in a 100 years or less.

    However, the world will not be free of smart mad men, I fear. One may use the explosion of knowledge perversely to kill all human life with his engineered contagious self replicating pathogen etc. or in other ways I can not even imagine. To paraphase Marx:

    Knowledge disseminated by the internet, contains with in it (soon) the seeds of it own destruction is my fear.

    "Soon" may be only a few hundred years. Without even trying to man, helped by Darwinian selection, has created "super pathogens" - what if one were to try?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 17, 2014
  14. Trooper Secular Sanity Valued Senior Member

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    Let’s keep in mind, though, that cultural influence is not the same thing as natural selection. Unless, of course, you're one of those who happens to believe in group selection, are you?
     
  15. heytogi Registered Member

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    What is the meaning of life for you bus 99

    Human knowledge comes from human observation, experimentation, and
    rational analysis (the scientific method), personality comes from "biological
    organism transacting in a social and cultural context."

    People determine human purpose without supernatural influence; it is

    the human personality (general sense) that is the purpose of a human
    being's life.

    Religion are those ideologies which explain life in terms of an
    implicit purpose not defined by humans (mostly supernatural and not
    proven scientificly)

    But then again "What is the meaning of life?", "What is the meaning in asking?
     
  16. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    5,134
    Know everything, and leave your mark on the world. Know your positive emotions like hope, and happiness. Know what makes you happy like good people, and ice cream. Try being one of the guys, hang out with an old friend. Hope can be found in many lights.
     
  17. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Why does life have to have a meaning?
     
  18. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    I think life has meaning when your moral. Life gives meaning.
     
  19. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Why?
     
  20. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    Well there's always reason to do good things for your friends and neighbors.
     
  21. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    You value morality, it may give you some intrinsic reward, it may motivate you, but does that make it the meaning or the reason for the existence of life? What motivates us as individuals may add value to our individual lives. But is it the meaning, the intent of life? What motivates an amoeba? Is it the next meal? Then from the perspective of the amoeba, the purpose of life is to find the next meal.
     
    Last edited: Feb 13, 2014
  22. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Hey, Joe.

    Why does life have to have a meaning? Because people are insecure and need some assurances to shore up the illusions they've built all around them. For the ones fortunate to build lasting friendships, and a thriving family, and develop all of the emotional bonds that come with that, the mere notion that life has no meaning tends to rattle the dream.

    Better, I think, are the folks who are able to thrive together with the idea that life has no meaning. Life (organisms really) has only one purpose, which is to perpetuate itself. And even that's not a purpose, but the outcome of a colossal Monte Carlo simulation in which enough trials were conducted to produce this nucleon, this compound, this membrane, this DNA, etc. They were utterly purposeless trials which are the natural result of so many permutations on the ways things can turn out based on so many particles spread out over such an expanse.

    None of us are immune from illusion, but enough of us are fortunate to spot the worst ones and cull them out before they mess with our minds. Believing life has meaning is the first step toward buying into superstition. It pretty much delineates two classes of human beings: the deluded and the seriously deluded.
     
  23. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I think you might be correct. The horrible truth is life may have no meaning, at least not a meaning that humans can currently comprehend.
     

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