Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part II

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether). Today's retrospective reviews the best of 2004.

In January 2004 I had an amazing 3-way conversation with John Smart & Milan Cirkovic where we discussed the Fermi Paradox, megascale engineering projects and the Singularity.

In March 2004 I co-developed the Panspermia Equation, an attempt to determine how many solar systems the Earth has 'infected' with its bio-ejecta.

Damien Broderick and I debated vegetarianism and personhood back in March 2004.

Peter Pasarro talked to me about AI, the Brain, and Techlepathy in April 2004.

In May 2004 I posted the first draft of my astrosociobiology concept. Compare that version to the one that now resides on Wikipedia.

In September 2004 I blogged about Nick Bostrom's rebuttal to Francis Fukuyama and the claim that transhumanism is the world's most dangerous idea.

Anders Sandberg and I talked about antimatter weapons and the possibility of deliberately engineering NEO impacts.

After watching Contact I felt that building a machine designed by ET was not a very good idea.

In November 2004 we launched the IEET.

I blogged about how we have a very special sun.

After the East Asia tsunami disaster in December 2004 I wrote about our extremely dangerous universe.