Topic: Uh, Dracula? I thought that story was made up, actually...

[Pemburu Vampir]

According to my calculations, humanity will either:

• make alien contact by the end of 2012

I really want this to happen.

[Flame]

We can barely get along with each other and you want humanity to try and get along with aliens?

Speaking of meteors, theres supposedly one that will swing by in 2014, and depending on how close it swings, it might actually hit the planet in 2030 or something when it loops around.

[X]

We can barely get along with each other and you want humanity to try and get along with aliens?

The people whom are the most paranoid about aliens are those of Scientology. Everyone else is far more sane and reasonable.

I think there was a laser rifle in Aria of Sorrow, so there's definitely evidence that the world Soma lives in during the 2030s is more advanced than ours in at least some respects...

The laser weapon in AoS was called the Positron rifle. I use it whenever I want to get Sci-Fi on the undead 

[TheouAegis]

The problem with technological advancement conjecture is it's based on the principle that technological evolution is on a exponential trajectory. If man technology took this long to progress to the point it is at and has since been rapidly increasing, it therefore must continue to rapidly increase. This mindset is flawed, though (sorry Stephen Hawking). Nature doesn't exhibit exponential patterns, it exhibits sinusoidal patterns. Now, I'm not suggesting hundreds of thousands of years ago man was more technologically advanced than he was twenty thousand years ago and regressed to the point when the wheel was a technological breakthrough (although that theory has been proposed by some crackpots). What I'm saying is technology may advance to the point where it levels off and then starts to degrade (due to human fear of rapid change as well as capitalism) before building back up, kinda following along a cubic polynomial. Or, as the case may likely be, technological advancement will slow to a near crawl, taking on a shape that I remember seeing in high school and have since forgot what it's called.  And even though they've calculated how many atoms it would take to store a single byte of information (or was it a bit? whatever), they flat out said mankind is nowhere near technologically advanced enough to actually produce an atomic computer on that scale. Remember, in the Star Trek universe, Earth had to become a utopia (and drive whales to extinction) before it could explore the deepest parts of space.

[Flame]

There are many reasons in modern day earth for why Technology has slowed down in it's growth.

[X]

There are many reasons in modern day earth for why Technology has slowed down in it's growth.

I blame the petroleum companies and other greedy corporations that view technological progress as a loss of profit