I want to go into aerospace engineering and I have really messed up in high school (not going into details) long story short I am definitely not getting into some big name school I am trying to improve but I am beginning to realize how little of an impact I am having. I am not going to stop...
The problem here is that society will not allow that to happen. First robots (even if they are intelligent) will never be given equal rights to that of a human being. Honestly do you expect society to treat the first successful AI (a thinking box maybe or a stationary computer) as a person...
The problem is that if all of society did this then the individual scientist would beb etter off giving up on their career because if they try something odds are it's already been done. Society would need engineers to go above and beyond to provide something new, and programmers would repeatedly...
However you have to realize that not only are we getting further in technological advances, but the rate at which we further in these technologies is getting faster. If you believe in singularity and the possibility of being "downloaded" onto a computer then assume the possibility of this...
Well that's not entirely true. Since dark matter supposedly interacts only through gravity if one had somehow found out how to manipulate gravity and built a containment unit that would also do so then you could possibly collect it. However we aren't exactly at the point at which we can do that.
After that point the urge isn't really there. You have to be motivated. You have to want to learn in order to make discoveries if you are fortunate enough to find something.
For me it's consciousness. I don't know where it comes from (well obviously our brains but why is it there? How did it get there?) and where it goes once we die. I mean it's hard to think that consciousness simply disappears when we die.