[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 03:28:53PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote:

> No. Just with death. Not the photogenic cataclysms of science fiction, but
> the dreary, banal death of real life.

We need to be able to maintain a smoothly-running civilization
in order to afford R&D which will directly fuel into increasing
destructive capacities of small groups.

I do not think we're doing a very good job of maintaining even 
overall R&D.
 
> Fretting about imaginary catastrophes produces good feelings. Focusing
> (directly or indirectly) on the things that are killing people in real life
> has a chance of actually producing good results. If we on this list are
> going to pride ourselves on being more rational than the average for the
> population, let's back that up by taking the second option.

Advanced medicine, while being expensive, cannot prevent people from
dying of old age. Our only other option is cryonics. Long-term,
gerontology, and longer-term nanotechnology, as well as AI.

I do not see how we on this list can influence resource allocation
on any of the above. For me personally, I decided to spend some of
my time organizing local cryonics. The last time we tried this (a
decade ago) it fizzled. We might have a better chance this time.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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