Amplify’d from www.prisonplanet.com

Warmist’s Answer to High Food Prices: “Climate Tax” On Milk and Meat.

Haunting The Library Thursday, February 10, 2011

As you no doubt have read in the papers, or seen on the TV news, food prices have recently shot up, leading the warmists to blame global warming, of course. Sensible people point to the insane practice of turning food into biofuels that no one wants. but everyone is feeling the pinch of higher food prices, with the poor especially hard hit by the rise.

So it should come as no surprise then, to read that the warmist’s answer to this is to call for a hefty “climate tax” on all milk, dairy produce, and meat products.

I know, you’re probably rubbing your eyes in disbelief and thinking “Oh come on, not even they would be that crass” but the call has already gone out in the pages of favoured warmist journal, Climate Change. As MSNBC reports:

Many people think with either their wallets or their stomachs. Taking advantage of that can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A tax on meat and milk would likely mean we’d buy less of the foods that contribute to climate change.  And that’s good for the environment, said a study published in the journal Climate Change.

MSNBC. To Fix Global Warming, How About a Meat Tax?

The problem, according to the authors of the study calling for this latest insanity, is that “we don’t pay the full ‘climate-cost’” of the food that we eat, and must be made to do so as part of a program to move us towards a more “climate-smart” diet of beans and vegetables:

Tacking about $82 onto the cost of beef for every “ton of carbon dioxide equivalent” would reduce Europe’s beef consumption by 15 percent. By taxing all meats and milk, Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by about 7 percent, according to the study.

. . . The benefit of a tax is that it doesn’t require new technologies and could be implemented as soon as legislation was passed. Economically encouraging people to change their eating habits would not only be good for the environment, but would free up land for other uses.

Far more food can be produced on land farmed for beans, corn and other crops, than if it was used for cattle pasture or producing animal feed.

MSNBC. To Fix Global Warming, How About a Meat Tax?

So those with plenty of money, of course, or the land to farm their own organic beef and produce their own organic milk, would be fine, but the vast majority of normal people would end up paying a huge “climate-tax” as part of a move to force them to switch to eating more beans and less steak.

I’m beginning to think that even if their worst predictions of climate catastrophe weren’t total BS, it would still be preferable to living in the sort of world these people envisage for us, living off beans and tofu in unheated houses wearing recycled clothes. I think I would rather burn, thank you very much. Or freeze, or whatever the threat of the week is this week. Read more at www.prisonplanet.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.prisonplanet.com

Big Sis Breaks Out “Heightened” Terror Alert As PATRIOT ACT Extension Heads Back To House Floor

Republicans and Democrats attempt to out do each other in quest to finish off freedom

Steve Watson & Paul Joseph Watson Prisonplanet.com Feb 10, 2011

Defeat for the proposed extension of the so called PATRIOT Act in the House Tuesday night made national headlines, yet the extension is set to pass by the end of the week anyway as it is brought back to the floor for another vote. But just in case anyone in Congress reaches the sudden epiphany that they are effectively voting on the Enabling Act,  Big Sis Janet Napolitano has officially notified a congressional panel that the US faces the greatest possibility of a major terror attack since 9/11.

House Republicans wanted to extend three of the PATRIOT Act’s most draconian provisions by a further year. For anyone who values the Constitution and freedom per se, that was bad enough, yet Obama went one better, stunning many in the House by suggesting that the legislation be extended for another THREE years.

A prepared statement issued Tuesday afternoon stated that Obama “would strongly prefer enactment of reauthorizing legislation that would extend these authorities until December 2013.”

Republicans attempted to fast track the extension using an expedited procedure that allowed for just a 40 minute debate and no amendments. However, this failed to pass as under such rules a 2/3rds super majority is required.

Even so, the extension fell short by just 7 votes, making it extremely likely that the bill will pass when it is brought back the floor either today or tomorrow. Under standard rules, only a simple majority will be needed for the extension to pass.

The ACLU describes the three provisions that would be extended under the bill:

Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes the government to obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorism investigation, even if there is no showing that the “thing” pertains to suspected terrorists or terrorist activities. This provision is contrary to traditional notions of search and seizure, which require the government to show reasonable suspicion or probable cause before undertaking an investigation that infringes upon a person’s privacy. Congress must ensure that things collected with this power have a meaningful nexus to suspected terrorist activity or it should be allowed to expire.

Section 206 of the Patriot Act, also known as “roving John Doe wiretap” provision, permits the government to obtain intelligence surveillance orders that identify neither the person nor the facility to be tapped. This provision is contrary to traditional notions of search and seizure, which require government to state with particularity what it seeks to search or seize. Section 206 should be amended to mirror similar and longstanding criminal laws that permit roving wiretaps, but require the naming of a specific target. Otherwise, it should expire.

Section 6001 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, or the so-called “Lone Wolf” provision, permits secret intelligence surveillance of non-US persons who are not affiliated with a foreign organization. Such an authorization, granted only in secret courts is subject to abuse and threatens our longtime understandings of the limits of the government’s investigatory powers within the borders of the United States. This provision has never been used and should be allowed to expire outright.

In addition, Senate Democrats are set to fast track the companion legislation (S. 149) to the House bill, as they seek to bypass the committee process and push the bill straight to the floor.

Unless the likes of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich can attract scores of their peers to change their votes and defect from the party agenda, then the passage of the legislation is assured.

Also noteworthy is the fact that several representatives who ran on a Tea Party platform actually voted FOR the extension to the PATRIOT Act yesterday.

Slate’s Dave Weigel notes that high profile Tea Partyers like Michele Bachmann, Kristi Noem, and Allen West all voted for the extension. “I break this out because there’ll be a temptation to say ‘the Tea Party and its isolationist elements beat the reauthorization,’ and that’s not quite it,” he writes.

In addition, Ryan Hecker, a Houston lawyer and tea-party organizer, told the Wall Street Journal he believes the act has helped curb terrorism and “the movement should remain agnostic.”

This once again highlights the fact that the Tea Party has been almost entirely co-opted by the establishment GOP. It is now a bloated unrecognizable shadow of the Libertarian grassroots movement that was founded on the need to expel such freedom destroying legislation for good.

Tea Party or no Tea Party, Republicans and Democrats alike are working in tandem to destroy what is left of the Constitution.

One reason bipartisan support for reauthorization has grown, according to the Journal, is the perceived threat of homegrown terrorism, seen in the absurd Times Square firecracker and underwear non-bombings last year. Both questionable non-events and other over hyped and completely manufactured threats have led directly to programs such as the “See Something, Say Something” campaign- a literal citizen spy operation overseen by the DHS.

It seems that Big Sis is on the march again, this time to ensure that the PATRIOT Act gets extended.

AFP reports that Janet Napolitano has directly told the congressional Security Committee that the United States is facing “heightened” threats of attacks from extremists. “And in some ways, the threat today may be at its most heightened state since the attacks nearly 10 years ago.” Napolitano is quoted as saying.

She noted that there is “an increased emphasis on recruiting Americans and Westerners to carry out small scale attacks.”

Booga booga, better re-authorize the power to let the federal government keep a track of exactly what library books everyday Americans are checking out. You wouldn’t want to be the elected representative who tips the scales to allow another 9/11 now would you?

We have previously documented how such terror threats have been routinely hyped purely for political purposes.

Never forget that the media and the government have been totally discredited over and over again by their complicity in issuing phony terror alerts designed to manipulate elections and frighten the public into slavish acquiescence.

Just as former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge admitted that DHS would issue fake terror alerts shortly before elections in a bid to influence the outcome during the Bush era, the Obama administration is mimicking the same tactic.

Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show. Read more at www.prisonplanet.com

 

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Gigantic Hole In Our Sun

URGENT WARNING massive hole in our sun Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UbIdxvBWW8&feature=player_embedded#at=100

Amplify’d from ohlundonline.blogspot.com

Gigantic Hole In Our Sun

Et vidi caelum novum et terram novam; primum enim caelum et prima terra abiit, et mare iam non est. (Revelation 21:1) A massive tear has appeared in our sun. Both birds and marine mammals are directed by magnetics. After the gigantic hole opened up in the sun in the beginning of January, charged particles reached our planet. This enormous hole in the sun could explain all the dead birds in for example Arkansas, and all the octopuses washed up dead on the beaches of Portugal. The hole in the sun could also explain all the recent UFO activity close to the sun, and might eventually be connected to the alien base at Mars' south pole. Did aliens make the hole in the sun on purpose to hurt us? Who can tell? In the chain of events, Icelandic scientists say super volcano Bardarbunga now is set to erupt, according to The Telegraph. Pall Einarsson, a professor of geophysics at the University of Iceland, says the area around Bardarbunga is showing signs of increased activity, which provides "good reason to worry". Let us pray the massive hole in the sun, in the corona, and in the magnetosphere, not will have a more devastating effect on Earth than just a few dead birds. "Adhuc semel ego movebo non solum terram sed et caelum", Hebrews 12:26. Read more at ohlundonline.blogspot.com

 

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Germany Uses Eurozone for Her Own Benefit

Amplify’d from www.ktfministry.org

Germany Uses Eurozone for Her Own Benefit · February 10, 2011

Reunited Germany is now the powerhouse of Europe, dictating monetary policy as well as other domestic and foreign policy for the whole European Union.

As Stratfor, a strategic political analysis and forecasting organization, reports, “there is no doubt that the eurozone is beneficial for Germany. About 43% of all Germany’s exports go to its Eurozone partners. It’s extremely beneficial to be able to tie down its eurozone neighbors into the single currency union, thus making it impossible for them to devalue their domestic currencies and gain a competitive advantage against Germany. Furthermore the current economic crisis is enhancing Germany’s political power because it has afforded Germany the opportunity to force its economic and fiscal reforms on the rest of its eurozone member states.”

These two points, currency control, economic power and policy enforcement, are integral to the German dictatorship of Europe, and to the resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire, which is in progress.

Though the German population doesn’t like the idea of Germany bailing out the weaker nations of Europe, it is the very thing that is giving Germany political control of the European Union and considerable geo-political clout.

God’s word tells us that Germany will one day worship the beast, for “all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him.” But it is Germany that is the catalyst for the whole region of Europe to come under the authority of the Roman Catholic religion. After all, it was the Vatican (along with the United States), that orchestrated the collapse of eastern European communist governments so that Germany could be reunited and rise to power again.

Stratfor Article Read more at www.ktfministry.org

 

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An ancient snake shows some leg

Amplify’d from www.scientificamerican.com

An ancient snake shows some leg

Enlarge Images courtesy of Alexandra Houssaye MORE IMAGES Mars orbiter spots shifty activity on the Red Planet's surface

Snakes are classified by scientists as limbless squamates (an order that also includes lizards). But nearly 100 million years ago relatives of modern snakes undulated through Cretaceous period waters aided by a paddlelike tail and dragging a pair of short, foot-less hind legs. There are few known fossil specimens of these ancient snakes, and only three in which the hind limbs are preserved and visible. In a study published in the January Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology researchers examined a Eupodophis descouensi fossil using synchrotron radiation computed laminography (SRCL). "The uniqueness of the Eupodophis type specimen completely excluded the possibility of invasive investigations," the researchers wrote. SRCL allowed a "virtual exhumation" of bones hidden in the fossil plates, revealing a more complete picture of the snake's anatomy, along with the mechanisms involved in limb regression across evolutionary time. Eupodophis had a simplistic pelvis and straight, slender femurs, the researchers found. Its tibias were stouter and fibulas more bent than those of most reptiles. Remarkably, it had four tarsals (bones at the very base of the foot) and no metatarsals or phalanges. Shrunken limbs and missing digits are likely due to changes in the Hox genes, which determine the development of lower body segments. "Loss of limbs also reduces drag and hence the energetic cost of swimming," the researchers wrote. The elongated, serpentine body that allows land snakes to slither through dense grass also serves aquatic snakes in propelling through water. In both cases legs only get in the way. The new findings could advance the ongoing debate on the phylogenetic status of hind-limbed snakes—whether they are a peculiar sister group or the ur-snake from which all others descend. —Nina Bai Read more at www.scientificamerican.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.wgal.com

5 Killed In Allentown Natural Gas Explosion

Blast Leveled 2 Homes, Hundreds Were Evacuated

ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- A natural gas explosion rocked an Allentown neighborhood late Wednesday, leveling two houses and spawning fires that burned for hours through an entire row of neighboring homes. Five people were killed. One of the victims was found in a two-story row house in a downtown residential neighborhood that blew up about 10:45 p.m. Wednesday, police Chief Roger MacClean said. A couple in their 70s lived in the home, but the condition of the body prevented positive identification, fire Chief Robert Scheirer said. Crews were initially looking for 6 people, but one person was not home at the time of the explosion. Forty-seven buildings, including 10 businesses, were affected by the explosion and fire. The victims range in age from four months to 79 years old. The coroner is not releasing their names. The blaze was put out early Thursday, delayed by the difficulty of digging through packed layers of snow and ice to a ruptured underground gas line that was feeding the flames, Scheirer said. About 500 to 600 people who were evacuated were allowed to return home. Allentown Explosion, Fire Scene Forty-seven buildings, including 10 businesses, were affected by the explosion and fire. Investigators are looking into whether a natural gas leak caused the explosion. The blast was so powerful that it sent a flat-screen computer monitor sailing into the back of Antonio Arroyo, whose house was on the opposite end of the row from the explosion. "I thought we were under attack," he recalled from a shelter where some 250 people took refuge in the hours after the blast. Arroyo and his wife, Jill, both 43, lost their home in the fire. Antonio said he ran outside and saw that an entire house had been leveled, a fireball now raging in the spot where it once stood. "What I saw, I couldn't believe," said Arroyo, a community volunteer. Barbara Barr This is a view of the area affected by the explosion and fire. He and his wife, a nurse, fled their home with only the clothes on their back. They planned to return at daylight to see what they could salvage. Jill Arroyo broke down sobbing when she recalled her son's athletic memorabilia - likely lost in the blaze - including DVDs of his high school football games. "The DVDs are gone. All his trophies are gone. All gone," she sobbed as her husband comforted her. Tricia Aleski, who lives a few blocks away, said the explosion jangled her nerves. "I was reading a book in the living room and it felt like a giant kicked the house. It all shook. Everything shook," she said. "I checked the stove and everything, (to) make sure everything's off." Jason Soke was watching college basketball when he heard and felt the explosion. It rattled his windows. He went to the third floor and looked out and saw flames and smoke. "Your senses kind of get stunned," he said. "It puts you on edge." Utility: Gas Main Inspected This Week A representative for a utility company said a routine leak-detection check this week found no problems in the area where the natural gas explosion happened. Joe Swope said Reading-based UGI Utilities Inc. inspected the main in that part of Allentown on Tuesday. He said there is no history of leaks for that section of 12-inch cast-iron main, and there were no calls about gas odors before the explosion. Swope said the utility used foam to seal the gas main on both ends of a one-block area at about 3:45 a.m. Thursday. Swope said it took crews some time to cut through reinforced concrete underneath the pavement. LINK: Find Gas Pipelines In Your Community LINK: How Natural Gas Is Transported Read more at www.wgal.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.time.com

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

By Lev Grossman

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away. (See the best inventions of 2010.)

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity. (Comment on this story.)

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

See pictures of cinema's most memorable robots.

From TIME's archives: "Can Machines Think?"

See TIME's special report on gadgets, then and now.

People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there's more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language. (See "Is Technology Making Us Lonelier?")

The Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an "intelligence explosion":

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good's intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that "within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He'd been busy since his appearance on I've Got a Secret. He'd made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology. (See pictures of adorable robots.)

But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence."(See the world's most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.)

In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He's good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I've looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?

Kurzweil's interest in humanity's cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. "Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project," he says. "So it's like skeet shooting — you can't shoot at the target." He knew about Moore's law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It's a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.

As it turned out, Kurzweil's numbers looked a lot like Moore's. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900. (Comment on this story.)

Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.

See TIME's video "Five Worst Inventions."

See the 100 best gadgets of all time.

Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we're not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. "It's not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we're trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it's going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains."

Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today. (See how robotics are changing the future of medicine.)

The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.

Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology. (See TIME's computer covers.)

At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James "the Amazing" Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.

After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.

For example, it's well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger. (Comment on this story.)

Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."

Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father's genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.

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But his goal differs slightly from de Grey's. For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.

It's an idea that's radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailing to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. "There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people," he says. "But the idea of significant changes to human longevity — that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that's the major reason we have religion." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2010.)

Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.

The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet.

Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit. "Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits," he argued, in a talk titled "What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't," "they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. (See how to live 100 years.)

Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Kurzweil admits that there's a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that's impossible to refine away, simply because we don't know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don't have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error. (Comment on this story.)

If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. "It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban," he says. "It wouldn't work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we're counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools."

Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He's tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.

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Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. "Generally speaking," he says, "the core of a disagreement I'll have with a critic is, they'll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don't believe I'm underestimating the challenge. I think they're underestimating the power of exponential growth."

This position doesn't make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's called the Blue Brain project, and it's an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram's team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat's brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you'd then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?) (See portraits of centenarians.)

By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. "When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept," he says. "So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I've tried to push myself to really look."

In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species. (See the costs of living a long life.)

Or it isn't. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

But as for the minor questions, they're already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn't strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits. (Comment on this story.)

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century's answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they'll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney's Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they're dead wrong about the future, they're right about the present. They're taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

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