<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><p id="bloop_customfont" style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial;font-size:13px; margin: 0px; line-height: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(160, 160, 168); font-family: helvetica; ">On 2013 June 23 at 8:43:17 PM, Mike Dougherty (msd001@gmail.com) wrote:</span></p> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Times; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 13px; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Times; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 13px; "><blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 1px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 10px; "><span><div>I wonder, Alan, if you'd sacrifice any amount of your limited<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>resources (time, money, etc) to keep a habitat of neanderthals alive<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>and well in your backyard. Maybe you say you would, at first. Over<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>the course of years, I expect the novelty would wear off. Maybe you<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>could charge admission fees for others to go look at them - and you<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>might have enough profit to make it worth your continued support. But<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>after a while the novelty wears off again.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div></span></blockquote></span></span></div><p>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.).</p></span></span>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.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Times; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 13px; "><div></div></span></span></div></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>(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.)</div><div>-Josh.</div></body></html>