Ask A Genius 403 – The Overturning of Normal Human Life
October 5, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What bases are there for what you call the end of normal human life or a steady erosion of normal human life?
Rick Rosner: We were talking earlier: Is it surprising or weird that we’re at the end to having no alternative to human life? For the last 10,000 years of human life, all that is going to become a minority option in the next 150 years.
More entities, people, augmented people, and other entities will have a vast array of choices of how to exist from moment to moment in the coming centuries. It is weird that we live at the cusp of it.
Even though, we have been living normal human lives for 10,000 years. It is not that great. It is mostly sucky. Especially until recently, as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, the average human lifespans only went to 50 years or less.
Even with our increased longevity, the period in which we’re at optimum physical and mental ability and attractiveness is only about 25 years. Before your early 30s, you are clueless. You are attractive and competent from the mid-20s to mid-40s.
Then the signs of aging start to make you invisible if you’re interested in being attractive to people. That goes away for everybody by age 50. It is a short little run. We are talking about a few decades.
Somebody is really strong if they can lift their body weight. If we fall more than 6 feet, we break. We can’t hold in our heads a string of numbers longer than 12 digits. The 12 digits are only now because everyone as to deal with area code for texting and stuff like that.
The general rule is that it is possible to imagine vast improvements in any area of human performance that you can think of. We will get those improvements. The price of getting those improvements is the blessing and the curse with the way people living being overturned.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 