S
SANS CEILING HYPOTHESIS:
There are no upper limit to what sufficiently advanced intelligent life
can do (as opposed to the view that there are fundamental limits set
by physical law).[Paul Hughes]
SANTA MACHINE: See genie.
SAPPER MEME: An offensive (as opposed
to benign or defensive) meme, intelligently-designed
to infect a host, reduce the host's memetic immunity, and prepare the
host for infection. [Keith Elis, April 1998]
SCHEME:
A meme-complex. (Douglas Hofstadter)
SENTIENCE
QUOTIENT : In the article "Xenopsychology" by Robert Freitas
in Analog of April 1984 there is an interesting index called "Sentience
quotient". It is based on: The sentience of an intelligence is roughly
directly related to the amount of data it can process per unit time
and inversely to the overall mass needed to do that processing. This
would be something like baud/kilograms. And since that would rapidly
turn into a real big number, base 10 logs are used. The "least
sentient" would be one bit over the lifetime of the universe massing
the entire known universe, or about -70. The "most sentient" is claimed
to be +50. Homo sapiens are around +13, a Cray I is +9, a venus flytrap
is a peak of +1 with plants generally -2.
SHIH: "Shih was the opposite of facts
and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight
and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist
chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses
textures of knowledge - various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories
- to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of
knowledge - this was shih." [David Zindell, The Broken God
1993]
SINGULARITY: The postulated point or
short period in our future when our self-guided evolutionary development
accelerates enormously (powered by nanotechnology,
neuroscience, AI, and perhaps uploading)
so that nothing beyond that time can reliably be conceived. See also
the Singularity Page. [Vernor Vinge,
1986]
SINGULARITARIAN:
One who advocates the idea that technological progress will cause a
singularity in human history. (cf. Singularity in Extropy #7.) [Mark
Plus, August 1991]
SKY
HOOK: A long, very strong, cable in orbit around a planet which
rotates around its center of mass in such a way that when one end is
closest to the ground, its relative velocity is almost zero. It would
function as a kind of space elevator; shuttle craft would anchor to
the end and then be lifted into orbit where they would be released.
It is closely related to the idea of a beanstalk.
[Originally described by Y Artsutanov in 1969. The name was propbably
coined by Hans Moravec in Moravec, Hans, "A Non-Synchronous Orbital
Skyhoo k," Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, Vol. 25,
No. 4, October-December 1977, pp 307-322 ]
SOCIOTYPE:
1. The social expression of a memotype, as the body of an organism is
the physical expression (phenotype) of the gene (genotype). Hence, the
Protestant Church is one sociotype of the Bible's memotype. 2. A class
of similar social organisations. (Glenn M. Grant)
SPACE
FOUNTAIN: A vertical stream of magnetically accelerated pellets
reaching out into space, where a station held aloft by its momentum
reverses the direction and directs it towards a receiver on the ground.
Essentially a simpler version of a Lofstrom
loop. [I'm not sure who originated the idea, judging from Robert
Forward's Indistinguishable from Magic it was a collaborative
effor t. A paper about the idea can be found in Hyde, Roderick A., "Earthbreak:
Earth to Space Transportation," Defense Science 2003+ Vol.
4, No. 4, 1985, pp 78-92 ]
SPIKE, THE: Another term for the singularity,
suggested by Damien Broderick since the growth curves look almost like
a spike as it is approached. [Damien Broderick, The Spike 1997]
SPOCK MEME: The idea that transhumans
will evolve to the point there they will have no need for emotion or
love. This is unlikely since emotions are important for cognition; a
more likely development is refined emotions with less evolutionary baggage.
[QueeneMUSE@aol.com July 1996]
SOLID
STATE CIVILIZATION: A posthuman
or alien civilization where most people have no physical bodies and
exist as information inside computers.
SMART-FACED:
The condition resulting from social use of cognition-enhancing drugs:
"Let's get smart-faced." [Russell
E. Whitaker, December 1991]
SPONTANEOUS
VOLUNTARISM: A fully free society, with a totally free market
and no institutionalized coercion. [Max More, 1989]
STAR LIFTING: To remove material from
a star for industrial use or for stellar
husbandry. Possible methods would involve increasing its rotation
until material began to drift off the equator or squeezing it using
intense magnetic fields from particle accelerators. [ Dave Criswell]
STELLAR HUSBANDRY: To control
the evolution and properties of stars, especially to stabilize them,
prolong their lifetimes, manipulate the stellar wind, lift off useful
material or create new stars. Typical methods would be star
lifting or mixing the stellar core with envelope material to make
hydrogen burning last longer. [ Dave Criswell]
STEWARD: Someone who wants to manage the
world as a precious resource, as opposed to extropians
who want to let an evolution-like process change it (it should be noted
that the term extropian used in this definition doesn't necessarily
cover all people calling themselves extropians). The stewards and extropians
represent divergent philosophies of change: stewards think about what
is already there, while extropians think about how things can or will
evolve. [Jaron
Lanier, SPIN
Magazine november 1991]
STRONG AI POSTULATE: The assumption
that an intelligent machine can be built, at least in principle. Some
versions of the postulate are more narrow, and say that intelligence
is computable on Turing machines (i.e. the mind is a program). This
essentially means that intelligence is only dependent on pattern, not
its material basis.
STRONG CONVERGENCE HYPOTHESIS:
All sufficiently advanced cultures converge towards the same state.
A rival hypothesis is the divergent
track hypothesis. See also HPLD. [Nicholas
Boström 1996, Predictions
from Philosophy?]
SUSPENDED ANIMATION: This term
refers to the ability to start and stop, at will, a biological system
(usually a person) through some physical means (usually the use of cold
temperatures). Suspended animation does not currently exist.
SYNTHESPIAN: An artificial actor, for
example a 3D model animated by motion capture from a real actor or a
computer program.
Transhuman Page