[extropy-chat] Animals

[Rik van Riel]

On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, David Lubkin wrote:

> (a)  Migrate people and industry off-world, and turn the planet into a
> nature preserve

I'd also turn it into a holiday resort.  Unless it has value for
people, it won't be preserved in the long run ...

> (d)  Take species with us to space

Absolutely.  I want cheese, meat and singing birds in orbit, so we
need to take cows and birds with us to space.  Probably pork and
chicken too ... and all the good sushi fish ;)

> (e)  Modify species to suit non-terrestrial planetary environments

Mmmm, maybe later.  Lets move into space first and do the changing
after we run out of matter to build habitats from, or have people
change themselves in order to be able to move between habitats without
having to wait for the bus...

> (f)  Increase species sentience (a la Clifford Simak or Cordwainer Smith)
> (g) Increase sentience of living animals

Dunno about that.  At the moment it seems like 3 cows share 2 minds
and that's probably the best state for them to be considering what
we use them for ...

> (h)  Upload, to transhumanely clear the way for disassembling the planet

I believe in free will and don't want to force people into doing
something like that. I don't think I'd want to do it myself, at
least not until I've lived a long and satisfying corporeal life.

Would be a good thing to do after 80 or 90 years of physical age,
though ... discarding the faulty body and continuing without it.

> (i)  Move to an L-5 style habitat

Count me in.

> (j)  Disassemble the planet without removing or uploading the animals

What a shame.  There's so much other mass in the solar system it
just doesn't make sense to dismantle that one small planet.  The
entertainment value alone exceeds its raw materials value...

> (k)  Leave animalia to their own devices

Maybe, we don't want to endanger the tourists too much though ;)

Rik
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan