When/if they find cure for aging disease people will have choices to take
the cure. You will have the option to age and expire and let others face
the future.
Don
On Tue, 14 Feb 1995, Patrick O'Neil wrote:
>>> On Tue, 14 Feb 1995, Peter Merel wrote:
>> > If you gentlemen would like to read Eric Drexler's books, "Engines of
> > Creation" and "Unbounding the Future" then you might start to bring
> > your speculations into the nineties. Drexler's no snake-oil merchant;
> > he's a professor at MIT and the instigator and leading light of the
> > Nanotechnology movement.
> >
> > Drexler's ideas suggest a future of boundless wealth, opportunity and
> > adventure, not for a few billion, but for trillions. Drexler's science
>> I know of his fantasies. Be that as it may, I would prefer that you move
> to another planet if you wish to live shoulder to shoulder with trillions
> of people. I don't know about you (you may be a Republican ;) ), but I
> really do like to go out for hikes, and on camping trips, etc, and I like
> the fact that this can be done without ever seeing another person, nor
> any houses, nor any cars, etc. I rather like forests, plains, deserts, and
> so forth. I would just as soon engineer a virus strain that is aerosol
> transmissible, perhaps a hemmorhagic flu, in order to correct the
> population bomb downward towards the 2 to 3 billion mark than live in
> utter muck with trillions. If I wanted to live in the heart of New York
> City I'd move there tomorrow. With trillions of people about, the entire
> surface of the planet would be New York City. No thanks, I like the rural
> life just fine, thank you. Little robots are not the Golden Grail of
> happiness and luxury.
>> In any case, forget about futurist babble. In the 20s and 30s, it was
> predicted, quite seriously, that by the 70s EVERYBODY would have their own
> airplane or some version of an aircar. Futurists are notorious for being
> bad shots. OK, give us the nanomachines, with limits, but keep your
> trillions in Drexler's own fevered imagination. Note: being the spawn of
> MIT doesn't prevent one from being a fool nor a fruitcake. There are also
> real good computer geeks out there from CalTech and the like who would
> practically like to marry their hardware too, or would equate "cybersex"
> to the real thing. Does the fact that they can write good code or design
> a good calculating chip mean that their views on what life should be are
> the ones everyone should want? Yeah, right.
>>>
