[extropy-chat] Dyson on human enhancement

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 pgptag at gmail.com
Tue Nov 2 06:34:21 UTC 2004


The American Enterprise sat down with three of the most fascinating
figures in space science to converse about the heavens, the Earth, and
how the twain might meet. Interview with David Levy, Robert Zubrin and
Freeman Dyson.
Dyson: "The one thing I don't want is to have a cure for death. I'm 80
years old so I can speak freely about death. I think death is a good
idea. We have to have some means of clearing away the old to make room
for the young, and death seems to be a good way of doing that. The
only alternative would be if there was some way of really rejuvenating
people so that you lost all your old cantankerous thoughts and are
really born anew; that would be almost as good as death and new birth.
Apart from that, I think most of what genetic engineering can do for
us is good. I want to see a diversification of life, and we need that,
of course, if we are to go away from this planet. I would like life to
spread in the universe, and to have all these dead, boring places in
the universe come to life with new ecologies and new communities.  If
we could engineer that, it would be great. It might mean that the
human species could also cease to exist as a species, and would
diversify into all kinds of different creatures that would be adapted
to living in different places."
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18294/article_detail.asp



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