X-Message-Number: 8817
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 07:25:49 -0800
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Make Room, Make Room

Colin Martel writes,

>	I am surprised this wasn't mentionned, haven't you all hear statements
>like: "There won't be anyone left on Earth in 200y anyway" or "Human will
>eventually annihilate each other" or "The Earth will be destroyed be then".
>These may be bad excuses, but I suspect a significant number of people
>really believe that. 

Some readers will recall a debate here on cryonet some time back on this
subject. My reading of the upshot, and I'm sure others will disagree, was 
that it's as foolish to believe humanity is not threatened with imminent 
global extinction, along with much of the ecosphere, as it is to believe 
there are not plausible technological solutions of this threat. Regrettably,
both the imminence of the threat, (within 50 years) and the plausibility of
the solutions (resource synthesis technologies, including Drexlerian
nanotech) are largely disregarded in mainstream thought.

Thomas Donaldson made the suggestion, back then, that folk living in
financial and technological bastions, especially the USA, should be able
to survive many gigadeaths of human dieback because they control
most of the resources and have achieved better science and more stable
politics than elsewhere. While I buy this, and it bodes better for 
people contemplating suspension, it doesn't suggest that, last to go,
the US will still go anyway. See "Soylent Green" for a vivid scenario.

Folk who'd like to debate either the prospect of ecological threat or the
prospect of a technological solution to it may enjoy 

http://www.zip.com.au/~pete/uw.html

Peter Merel.
 
--

>BTW, is there a recent list of cryonics related organizations in the
>Cryonet archives. Please email me the number if you happen to know it.

Try http://www.cryonet.org

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