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The grandpa of one of three armed robber teens shot dead by an AR-15 believes “they did not deserve to die”

As the title suggests, three teenagers decided it would be a really good idea to break into another fellers house while the home owner was sleeping. The robbers had weapons like brass knuckles and knives; the home owner had an AR-15. Guess who won. One of the now-former teenagers grandfathers said this gem;

“What these three boys did was stupid. They knew they could be punished for it but they did not deserve to die. Brass knuckles against an AR-15, come on, who was afraid for their life? There’s got to be a limit to that law. I mean he shot all three of them; there was no need for that.”

Yeah, there was no need for that. His grandson didn’t need to engage in armed burglary. But he did; and a violent death is substantially increased when one decides to engage in petty evil.

Even better; the three had themselves a getaway driver, a 21-year-old woman. A 21-year-old woman who is now being charged with three counts of first degree murder. Ha!

While the gene pool is undeniably better off, there is a sour note to report: the feller who defended himself is reportedly “distressed” for being forced to open fire. This is not unusual, of course. Even in cases when the homicide is not only justifiable but praiseworthy, the act of taking another’s life is something the average human brain has some trouble with. Getting past that and making killing easy requires a sociopathic or psychopathic mind, bad parenting, brainwashing or indoctrination into a “religion of peace” (but then, I repeat myself).

Well, one of the problems, anyway.

Assume for the sake of argument that practical immorality has been attained. Whether by magic, science or science indistinguishable from magic, doesn’t matter. But the end result is that perfectly normal modern Homo Sapiens can get the treatment and become functionally immortal. They’ll be a physically healthy 30-year-old forever, or at least until killed by violence or impressive disease or whatnot. There are no Twilight Zone-esque twists or downsides; you don’t spend eternity in a box or in pain or insane or any such. It’s just honest to goodness proper eternal youth and health. Yay.

Now, there are a lot of well-established problems with that, such as population and cultural stagnation. But here’s the one I’m currently pondering: at what point does the brain run out of space?

There have been people well past 100 who still have pretty good minds and memories, so it seems the brain can handle a century worth of data storage – no doubt with a lot of compression and editing. A century makes sense… humans have not greatly extended the maximum of the human lifespan. Sure, the *average* lifespan has increased vastly; throughout most of history, making it past 40 would be a notable achievement. But there have always been old folks… Plato, for example, was about 80 when he died. But since 100 is approximately as old as humans get, there’d be no good reason for the brain to have more capacity than that; it’d be simply wasted capacity, and no reason why it might have evolved. If there is excess capacity that gets used for other purposes earlier in life, then as that brain-space becomes converted into storage space, capabilities used earlier will be lost.

So. Once humans are made immortal, at some point their ability to keep recording new memories is going to become a bit problematic. It seems unlikely that recording will simply stop. Instead, I imagine that at least initially, older memories will become fuzzy as they get compressed and overwritten, a process that’ll be slow and perhaps will go by unnoticed for a good long while. And then one day someone will ask the immortal about their childhood, and the immortal will realize that it’s all gone. Or perhaps after enough time the memories just start piling up into an uncorrelated mishmash, eventually turning the brain into a non-functional mess.

What to do here? I’ve seen some statisticians claim that if humans could avoid death by the effect of aging and the more common diseases, human lifespans might average anywhere from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of years before the effects of accidents and such wipe them out. Even at the lower end, that means perhaps dozens of lifetimes of memories that will be simply lost. One approach might be to simply say “screw it” and let it ride. I’m *guessing* that some forms of memory will remain… you won’t forget how to speak your native language or do basic math, or forget how to walk or tie your space-shoes, because these will be memories that are constantly being refreshed. But friends and family, entire careers, might simply fade away to nothing. Joe Schmoe at age 400 might remember absolutely nothing at all about his life until around the age 320. The fact that he was President Of Earth at age 52, and spent his years from 124 to 197 in prison for a string of cannibalistic homicides and was a leading colonizer of Alpha Centauri from 244 to 297, might be completely unknown to him. Or perhaps those facts might be known to him in the same way that someone today might know the facts about the life of Abe Lincoln… he read about them in a book or saw a documentary, but the facts don’t have any particular meaning to the immortal. It was just some other guy, all those years ago. And this possibility raises further ponderables. Let’s say that Joe Schmoe was a major war criminal at age 263. Oversaw the slaughter of thousands, destroyed whole civilizations, talked loudly in theaters. But it’s not until he’s 700 years old that he’s finally caught. But his very last memory of his time as Head Honcho of the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Boulder faded into oblivion nearly 300 years ago. He’s been two completely different people since then. Is he still That Guy? Is he responsible, in a legal or ethical sense?

Another approach might be to record memories on some form of backup drive. A hundred years from now, chances are good that something you could stick in your head would be capable of recording a brains worth of data. But once you’ve accumulated a millennium of experiences… how the hell will a person sort it all out? And of course, if memories can be recorded artificially, they can be manipulated. Erased, tweaked, twisted. Transferred from one person to another. Heck, color-reversed, fade corrected, the hue and saturation jacked up and the volume turned down. And what will *that* do to people? We all have memories we’d love to ditch. Imagine having centuries worth of mistakes you’d just as soon not have, and the ability to delete them. Santayana might have something to say about that.

Principal suspends half of Pennsylvania high school after rash of unexcused absences

Go on. Try to convince yourself that you disagree with the Principal here. According to whom: “If you’re not in class, all you’re here to do then is to wreak havoc upon the school and disrupt the work that we are trying to do here.”

BAM!

According to the article, this is one of those Bad Schools that’s clearly the end result of decades of spectacular governmental abuse.

Even better, the school superintendent backed up the Principal, and point out the direct opposite of crazy: “In order for us to get different results, we have to do something different. We can’t do the same ol’ same ol’ and then complain about it when we’re getting the same ol’ results.”

Star Trek: Discovery: Rainn Wilson to Play Intergalactic Criminal Harry Mudd

I can *kinda* see that working. But in order for a new Harcourt Fenton Mudd to really work like the original, you’d think that the whole world he inhabits would have to be much like the original, and everything that’s come out so far seems to indicate that the people producing and designing the show either ignored TOS or never actually watched it.

NASA Spends 72 Cents of Every SLS Dollar On Overhead Costs, Says Report

Yikes. Assuming the SLS flies on schedule, $43 billion will have been spent on it, the Ares I and the Orion capsule. Of course, if it *doesn’t* fly on schedule, or gets cancelled, $43 billion will have still been spent on it. That’s about half the cost of the *entire* Apollo program, without having actually landed a man on the moon… or even funded the development of an actual lunar lander.

Of the $19 billion so far spent directly on SLS, only $7 billion (“only,” he said, chuckling sadly, imagining what he could do with a tenth of that) has gone to the companies that are actually making stuff.

Whether you like the idea of HLLVs in general, or like the SLS in particular, the costs and inefficiencies involved are really kinda obscene. And in the age of SpaceX and Falcon 9… kinda indefensible.