possible futures

[Terminus]

Wow, now that's a shitty situation
I'm deeply concerned about Your safety! Take good care, man...

[Socrates]

Staying alive, staying alive, ah, ah, ah, ah, staying alllliiivvee....
Took some pictures of the infamous Songhua today from the building I teach in.  They cordoned off half of our university so that people can't get near the river - I'm located on the very bank of the river, and could throw a rock into it from my doorsteps.  Today and for the past few days it looked much wider than it did before, and the ice is gone.  Trying to stay indoors as much as possible.  Everything is, so far, ok.  I guess I won't be trying the Songhua fish (a local delicacy) anytime soon.  
Cheers from Harbin,
Socrates

[Terminus]

Now, I finally know what You're doing. Could You be more specific (privately maybe?) about your position at the University?

[Deckert]

Maybe something related to your language skills Socrates?

CU
Deck

[Socrates]

I'm very simply a common English teacher here in Harbin, trying to learn Mandarin, and making contacts for the future.  There are far too many benefits in China, I think, not to go for at least a year.  The Kung Fu/Tai Chi/Nunchuck lessons are worth the trip themselves.  It was either Iran or China, but considering the socio-political situation in the former country, I chose China.  
Cheers from Harbin,
Socrates

[innate]

Yikes, yikes, and more yikes! Days without water?

(speaking of water, I have just moved to an area mere feet above sea level, so I now encourage everyone not to cause my dystopian future of rising oceans and inundation. )

[Terminus]

Hm, I live a few hundred meters above sea level. Let them glaciers melt

[wetal]

I guess that it is a mistake to think that some natural cataclism killed dinosaurs.The thing is that now I read "Summa Technologiae"and remembered some views that this extinction may be the result of evolution.
They grew smaller and some turned to birds.
  Imagine yourself a situation when you create a huge card castle no matter how patient you are it will finally fall.And next time someone more talented than you will make another but castle.
 I`m driving at that if the system or mechanism becomes too complicated it undergoes a  failure. It means that we don`t notice how slowly disappear,extinct like animals mentioned above.
 You , maybe, know that all the viruses getting into a man`s organism cause mutations, that`s why about 30 percents of our DNA is a work of theirs.              

[innate]

Do you speak here of humans themselves or of humans combined with their cultures and technology?

[Miranda]

When I think of those dinosaurs exhibited in museums...hard to believe that those were  to complicated to live on! Or is size the evolutionary complication you compare with card castles? Like the idea that the castle in the clouds killed the dinosaurs.

But seriously. The idea of a reverse evolution is convincing. Dinosaurs became birds. But shouldn´t there be more traces of their interim phaenotypes?

[Terminus]

That's the main problem - finding the traces. Theoretically, the number of fossils is not strictly corelated with the number of a given population.
This, mainly, is why the hypothesis of a meteor killing dinosaurs is so strong among scientists

[innate]

From all of these scenarios, I was hoping that I would figure out what will happen, but...I don't know. It's likely that the near future will be reasonably similar to the present when viewed from the larger perspective. Bad guys will wreck things and good guys will repair and improve things. Some will struggle for control and others will struggle for freedom. And I think -- I hope -- that we have gained too much understanding for it all  to be lost, hidden, burnt.

[Socrates]

We have, but, alas, the human mind is not a continuum that streches from the early humanoids to the present man - each person must develop him/herself anew every time they're born.  That that is the scary part.  I trust the ones who've developed correctly, but he ones who haven't/will not shall destroy the world with fire and brimstone...(or something to that effect).  
Eternal Don Quixote,
Yours Truly,
Cheers,
Socrates

[innate]

...ice / Is also great / And would suffice.

[Miranda]

Does being cryptic add to pass on existing knowledge or the state of development on the level of learning-everything-over-again individuals? Or is it part of making human contiuums impossible?

Why discussing possible futures in hermetic circles? Or are the bearers of secret knowledge the ones thought to outlive the ice....?