X-Message-Number: 25754
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 08:45:21 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #25748 - #25753

Hmmm! Lots of stuff with which I disagree or think is irrelevant to us.

For Mark Plus:

If the price of oil gets too high, we'll use alternative fuels. And
incidentally, there is a at least one company right now mining
oil shales in Canada, and which holds lots of oil shale fields,
which can get oil from the oil shales at a price well under $50 and
even (surprise!) under $80. It's apparently not the only company 
that does this. 

I said before, and will have to repeat, that it's not enough to
claim that the price of oil will go to the stars. If you believe
that a catastrophe is coming because of the rise in the price of
oil, you have to discuss the alternatives and how fast we can
set them up, too.

To Coetzee:

I'm not really surprised by what Hoover found. Some bacteria already
known could resist freezing, and once the temperature was low
enough, could be frozen for thousands of years. That's why cryogenics
is so important to us: if you've been frozen low enough, the problem
of reviving you and making you immortal need not be solved in any
fixed given time --- unlike the situation with current medicine.

It WOULD be nice if we found bacteria-like creatures on Mars or
some other place nearby in the Solar System. If they're completely
independent in structure and chemistry from Earth's bacteria,
they will tell us a lot about just how widely natural life forms
can vary. (If they're too much like Earth bacteria, that would
be a big disappointment, too). Does this tell us anything about
whether or not we'll find more complex lifeforms than bacteria
on planets of other stars? No!

Why not? Because there are a number of ways in which planets might
develop primitive life but never move to more advanced forms.
We see one way when we look at the history of Mars. But geologists
have also found that even for the Earth, some of its features
that helped the evolution of Earth's complex life forms (plate
tectonics and volcanism) will last for a much shorter time 
than the life of the Sun. This means that complex life forms 
(intelligent ones, in particular) have a fixed, limited time
in which to develop. Another interesting point comes from a realization
of just how important our BIG moon is to the Earth's life forms:
it keeps the Earth's axis from changing wildly on a 1 million
year scale. Any life forms on such a planet must be adapted 
to a very wide range of climates, from tropical to polar, if
they are to persist for very long. Yes, bacteria can do that
for sure. I would not be at all surprised if, when we found
habitable planets at other stars, those planets would bear
only simple forms of life, and we would not only colonize
them ourselves with human life forms, but bring along all of
Earth's vegetation and complex life to implant on them with
us: cows, elephants, frogs, snakes, fruit flies, pine trees,
oaks, all of them. 

As for Kelly Moy's message, it's an illustration of what happens
when policies include virtually any message: I guess we'll
find ourselves with empty-headed pornography, too.

           Best wishes and long long life for all,

               Thomas Donaldson

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