[ExI] Dealing with transhumanism bashing

[Natasha Vita-More]

Hi everyone,

 

I’m sorry that my initial message became convoluted with responses that are a bit irrational and even disturbing.  So please let’s not do this when I am being serious about a problem that could affect our culture.

 

Anyway, I’m proceeding forward with looking into this Alex Jones guy.  On the Transhumanist Art FB page, someone posted this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded <https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M9YS6hVuxhs#at=128> &v=M9YS6hVuxhs#at=128

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcnTdO47p0Q  

 

 

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Joshua Job
Sent: Sunday, June 23, 2013 9:04 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Dealing with transhumanism bashing

 

On 2013 June 23 at 8:43:17 PM, Mike Dougherty (msd001 at gmail.com) wrote:

I wonder, Alan, if you'd sacrifice any amount of your limited 
resources (time, money, etc) to keep a habitat of neanderthals alive 
and well in your backyard. Maybe you say you would, at first. Over 
the course of years, I expect the novelty would wear off. Maybe you 
could charge admission fees for others to go look at them - and you 
might have enough profit to make it worth your continued support. But 
after a while the novelty wears off again. 

I think the difference though is that, I almost certainly *would* donate 20 dollars to keep a preserve of neanderthals running in perpetuity if it was in some far off place I didn't much care about or effect me in any way (like Indian reservations, etc.).

In the future, keeping the preserve of Earth and surrounding environs running and giving MOSHs everything they could ever want would ever require probably the equivalent in terms of resources. Let's see, giving the Earth all it's radiant solar energy is approximately 10^-9 of the energy output of our star. So for our global economy now, we're talking about ~60 thousand dollars per year if we think that energy will be the only truly scarce resource in the upload future (which is true, basically, as creating material objects is trivial with advanced molecular nanotechnology). Given even modest rates of return like 2% per year, we can say that about three million dollars of startup capital (in today's economy) would support that in perpetuity.

 

It seems completely reasonable that the early uploads could set that up, and that at that point MOSHs would be able to live forever happily without interference from the uploads, and it wouldn't cost the uploads anything at all, ultimately.

 

(Hell, using the energy from hydrogen fusion using hydrogen from the oceans, we could build orbital structures which would be able to run the Earth even without the Sun's resources, rendering the Earth an effectively self-contained ecological preserve, again at little cost ---- planets, after all, are very inefficient places to get basic resources.)

-Josh.

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