X-Message-Number: 18282
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 07:52:49 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #18258 - #18267

Hi everyone!

A short comment on just what the future can do with matter. This bears
on the claim that "in the future you will not need money for purchase
of material objects" --- something to which several people on Cryonet
seem to agree.

NO. NOT AT ALL. What is likely to happen is that simple things will
become so inexpensive that various groups will decide, as altruism,
to provide them to anyone who asks. However there will always be
material objects for which you will have to pay. Perhaps it will be
a starship or a planet, or even a meal which is not made automatically
by a mechanical (?) system but by the efforts of an artist. Not only
that, but as our abilities increase, then the mass-produced meals 
(no matter what their menu) will seem like the kind of food only
the very poor would eat. If you have any taste at all you will go
to something better... The cost of a starship or a planet isn't
so much a matter of dispute: if you even want something requiring
matter, enough matter will make it have a price, even a high one.

What makes something have a cost isn't whether it is material, it
is whether or not we can produce it so cheaply (remember, sometime
the cooking machine would have to be made, too) that we can simply
do it, as an altruistic act for others or for other reasons.

And yes, as time passes the things which will be almost zero in
price will increase. But there will always be something which is
NOT --- even if it becomes something we cannot have now and 
even cannot imagine, like the interdimensional transfer device
or something else, or an entire galaxy of stars. And funny, I
strongly suspect that it is those things that people will 
argue about and work for. 

		Best wishes and long long life,

			Thomas Donaldson

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