What do you think the next paradigm-shifting scientific revolution will be? We've had the Copernican Revolution/heliocentrism, the round earth, Einsteinian and quantum physics, as well as less cosmic-scale discoveries that changed people's conceptions of how things operate. Certainly we've not reached the end of the line yet. Let your informed imaginations go--what's next?

Or going at it another way: what do people now conventionally believe is "real" that will be shown to be a misconception?

I have a radical idea--which may be ridiculed, so I'll hold off a bit. I'd like to see ideas freely put forth (as on threads that offer helpful suggestions for a problem) rather than attacks on those ideas.

1: First planet found with extraterrestrial life is Kolob, and it's full of hot alien chicks.
2: The Earth is made of Legos.

Did I pass? Is this on topic?

I have it on good authority.

Perhaps some geriatric PH at the helm watched too many time travel, center-of-the-earth movies. It's hard to tell.

Something having to do with quantum physics. It's getting more popular. There was that movie "what the bleep do we know" or something like that. People have more access to information now. They don't have to take classes to learn about different theories of what reality really is or isn't.

I'd say a "quantum" shift would be that "It's all in our minds." Everything. Everything we 'know' now is a mental mediation, but what if it's not mediating between us and something that is not-us... What if it's a mental creation? The whole universe, macro and micro. Then...what if we are not our minds...but we learned how to control them...

Clarke's "Childhood's End".

We master telepathy and group awareness activities. We instantly teleport our beings, including our physical bodies, at will wherever we wish. Or, we send our conscious awareness anywhere we wish in the so-called space/time continuum, and beyond. Hey Buzz, where ya goin'?

We are no longer limited to the physical planes. We transcend the illusions of birth and death entirely.

And we all dance around ecstatically, to the sweet music of Miranda Cosgrove's smash hit, "It's Rainin' Sunshine"!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L549boDZalk&feature=related



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2011 10:22PM by hello.

First, I have a wacky theory that if you can think of it, it's probably doable in one manner or another. Why? Because there's plenty of things that were once "impossible" that are now everyday occurrences. Also, there are plenty of things that we could *never* have come up with that are now everyday occurrences.

My mom told me about one of her classmates back in the 1930's. He said that space travel would one day be possible. She said that everyone thought he was mad. If you think about it, the time between the Wright brother's first flight and the first moon landing was less than 70 years. What will be accomplished in the next 70 years?

Here are some of my guesses:

1. We take control of our evolution. As we encounter new environments, we will make the necessary adaptations -- *right away*. I predict that there will be a huge learning curve for our species when this happens, with lots of mistakes and moral dilemmas.

2. The Terra-forming of Mars and other off-planet environments. I believe that the process of introducing a breatheable atmosphere to Mars will come shockingly fast -- maybe 50 years from our first planetfall.

3. Deep space travel. The "Warp Drive" of Star Trek will be a reality one day.

4. …likewise, the 3-D virtual reality environment of the Hollowdeck.

5. We will learn to have better control of our conscious thoughts, and this will become part of the regular school curriculum. As we gain control of our thoughts, technology will combine with this by becoming more responsive, and we will direct our communications, reading and research simply by thinking about what we want to do.

Can you imagine if:
There is life on another plant.... (we are not alone)
or--
The resurrection never happened
or--
Mary wasn't a virgin

There goes a whole lot of religions out the window.

ChurchCo Already Says Mary wasn't a virgin;
1 out of 3...

There was a sci-fi story in Analog magazine back in the 1990s that dealt with the premise of someone who was moderately religious and in AA (from which stemmed a lot of his religiosity) being the researcher who received the first undeniable transmission from alien life. He spent the second half of the story agonizing over what it would mean for everyone at his church, his AA group, his wife... and then he erased the transmission, taped over it, left the center, got in his car, and drove off a cliff to make sure he wouldn't ruin everyone's religious beliefs by someday succumbing to the temptation to tell the truth.

It was a true tragedy. I wonder, sometimes, about moderately religious people who work in astronomy and other space-oriented sciences, and think about that story. It worries me.

Man, look what happened when we elected one president... And then of course when you add Mormonism to the equation, you get a new life form, aka Glenn Beck...

My guess is the author on this one is (was?) in recovery, too, and writing can be a perilous undertaking even for well-wrapped individuals. Of course then there was Issac Asimov's "Black Widowers' Club" where the servant is always asking the "stump the panel candidates" if they are a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. See my reply below for a bit more illumination...

If I had to venture a guess, perhaps a new paradigm shift may be that spirituality contributes to human well-being but organized religion doesn't necessarily...

Here's the next scientific breakthrough: the God of the universe, bored and lonely, masturbated to completion, bombarding our young ovum-Earth with his meteorite sperm, thus creating the foundation of life as we know it. The Egyptians (basically) got it right.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2087758,00.html

Wow - I've thought that ever since I was a teenager.

I never told anyone because it's so..... SEXual! :-~

It's always good to know I'm "not the only one."

just popped into existence!!

We will find that we are not idle observers of a shared reality. Our senses and brains cannot help but distort information received from our environment. Additionally, our brains do not "record" information. Every thought we have, every memory and idea, is constructed anew in our minds every time we think of it.
We are active participants in, and sometimes even architects of,
reality itself.

I can envision us going beyond replicating organs. We will eliminate the need to grow animals as beings for food. We instead will grow the various animal muscles (beef, pork, fish, chicken or generic food protein) in vitro for food. It will become barbaric, inefficient, and too expensive to have herds/flocks of animals intended to slaughter.

Eventually it leads to artificially produced bodies you can plop your brain into. Going further, maybe we can duplicate a neuron network and design brains that already have basic information or experiences hard wired.

Maybe you can pick what features from various animals you would like cloned into your custom body.

Or we might find an interesting twist with artificial intelligence: it becomes social and creates religion.

Or we get to test out deflecting an asteroid or meteor on a collision course with Earth.

Or, and this would be so cool....we find all the components to finally solve the ultimate equation for everything.

Or, we create life. This leads to creating brains that hit the level of sophistication that the brain obtains consciousness (brains in jars).

Or we find a cheap way to generate energy that does not have limits, pollutants, waste, or harmful effects.

Back in the box I go where fantasy is just a form of entertainment.

have scared me silly.

If we don't already, we will shortly have human genes implanted in other animals and our basic definition of humanity is about to be challenged down to its very roots.

There is a lot of stuff happening right now under the radar, especially in other countries where ethics doesn't seem to be as big a concern.

And as such cannot be foreseen until they occur?

I'll check with the Wise Ol' Cabbie on that one tomorrow, but I think that observation is a go...

Wow, the serious answers are full of science understanding fail.

Does the recent news about antimatter not count?

what should count? whats the recent news?
i hope you dont mean the weekly world news "article"!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2011 08:52AM by bignevermo.

The good and the bad. The good is that people will no longer suffer or die from disease. The bad is that an already over-populated world will become truly crowded as people who would have died live on.

Parallel universes, time running simultaneously, string theory.

Quantum physics alone, at least the pop version I know, shows us how everything including rock solid objects are great big masses of "nothing".

We will also access and build/create 4th, 5th, and other dimensions.

My pet theory: humans are evolving to become mere brain matter and thought with a few limbs and strange new extremities. Thought will turn out to be, well more than thought, something that could materialize. Yes, like magic.

And finally my dream: the world wide erradication of superstitious belief. To the delight of the Lord God Isaac Asimov, of course.

A 'Star Trek' society - the competition is not for money, everyone's a survivor!

once the ability to tap into the "quantum foam" is actualized, a LOT of "Scientific" assumptions (quoted because the assumers are rather closed-minded about "free energy") will be abandoned, and we will have a paradigm shift.

We are probably just as incapable of anticipating what will happen to our species as a baby inside the womb is capable of anticipating what will happen when it is born.

The baby doesn't even know it's about to be born. All it knows is this dark, warm world it has lived in its entire life that has provided sustenance for it.

McKenna used to point out the similarities between what happens to a baby and a mother to what is happening to our species and home planet.

A baby grows and grows, consumes and consumes, and lives off its mother until it becomes dangerous for the mother to keep the baby inside of her. If the baby were to continue to stay inside the mother she would die.

He would talk about how if a person who had no concept of childbirth were to happen onto a woman giving birth he would most likely assume she was dying: blood is being shed, tears are streaking down her face, she is in pain, she's screaming, something looks terribly wrong with her stomach (possibly a giant tumor). But in reality she's giving birth to new life.

We as a species are growing and growing, consuming and consuming, and eventually we will have to get off this rock in order to save it and ourselves.

I doubt it's as simple as building space ships and heading out to Gliese. I think our next step as a species may be as unimaginable for us as being born is for a baby in the womb.

Of course, we might just go extinct, too. Who knows?

Everything is a simulation run on a computer, including us.

... finally evolve to the point where they understand great sex is more psychological than physical and, as a result, start using condoms.

Timothy

The big shift is happening as we speak. Notions of individual privacy are being eradicated. The riots in London will fuel the already primed idea that Internet anonymity should be abolished. We will increasingly grow homogenous and hive-like. The idea of individual autonomy will go. We will succumb to a centralized State wherein ideas of individuality, autonomy, and privacy will seem like dangerous fairytales from the past that bred disorder and destruction. In other words, Orwell was a hundred years off with his title. Eugenetics will be understood as good public health. And some other stuff, too.

Human

You can't stop the NWO, Max Igan...

I briefly googled Max Igan, but what is NWO?