Reply To: Toshiba's "Micro Nuclear Reactor" – it's not fusion, but it's here now

[jamesr]

I sometimes like to take a memetic viewpoint on topics like this.

We used to be slaves to our genes. For genes to be successful they need to get copied so you get a fairly short life cycle promoting rapid genetic evolution, and adaptability to changing environment.

By contrast the ‘new replicator’, memes, and the memeplexes that form our culture, religions, political systems etc. work on a much faster time scale than genetic evolution, and so became the dominant driving force for change. Making humans very adaptable in a rapidly changing environment.

If memes find advantage by being copied by older people, then they can manipulate vessels they rely on for reproduction (ie humans) to do everything they can to live longer and longer to ensure the memes they hold can be copied to more and more people.

Over time the memeplexes that win out will be those which encourage their human hosts to live long lives and communicate ‘their’ ideas and ideologies to as many other people as possible.

Of course a successful meme does not have to be a moral one, or sensible for us or the planet, it just has to be one that is better at being reproduced than the competing memes of the day.